The Ridge

by Michael Koryta

  Wesley nodded. The potential for disaster was high indeed if you put jumpy, armed men into these woods in the dark and told them to keep a sharp eye out for a black cat of astonishing speed.

  “So I’ll give you the night to try to let him settle down and slip back in,” Kimble said. “See if you can bait him, see if you can trap him, or get him with that tranquilizer rifle. Whatever. But I’m only giving you until tomorrow. If he’s not back by morning, we’re going to have to bring other people out here. The state wildlife agency might be able to help.”

  Sure, Wesley thought, that cat was out here for years and they just laughed at anyone who claimed to have seen him. I bet they’ll be a swell help.

  They left the river as night fell and climbed back to the road and met Audrey and the other deputy, Shipley. Then Kimble explained his decision to them.

  “One night, take your best approach, and see what happens,” he said. “I’ll come out here at eight tomorrow. If the cat is still missing, we’re going to have to make an announcement and bring some people in.”

  “The more activity, the more—”

  “He’s right, Audrey,” Wesley said, interrupting her and earning a scathing look. “You don’t want problems developing. We may need to get some help.”

  Behind them, one of the tigers struck at the fencing, a metallic ripple pulsing out from the impact point, and they all turned and stared. It was Kino, and when he saw that he had their attention, he leaned his head back and roared, fierce and furious.

  “This is what I’m worried about,” Audrey said. “If strangers are making them act like this, then—”

  “It isn’t the strangers,” Wesley said. “You know that. You’ve seen them around people for years now.”

  “What is it, then?” the young deputy said.

  “They don’t like this spot at night,” he said. “And if you stick around long enough, you might see it get a whole lot worse.”

  Audrey threw up her hands in disgust. “Stop,” she said.

  “I’d like to hear what he thinks,” the young deputy began, and Audrey shook her head, and then they were all interrupted by a sudden glow of white light. All four of them looked upward instinctively, but Wyatt French’s lighthouse remained dark, and then there was the crunch of gravel and they realized a car was coming down the lane. They watched it approach, a Honda SUV, and when it got all the way up to them, the driver put down the window.

  “Hi, Mrs. Clark. Hi, Kimble.” He was a lean older guy with short gray hair and sharp eyes, and though he was speaking to the people gathered by his car, he was watching the cats, who were making hostile circles around their enclosures, swinging their big heads from side to side. He looked familiar, but Wesley couldn’t place him.

  “Why are you back, Darmus?” Kimble said, and then Wesley remembered. This was the reporter. He’d written about the preserve a few times—including the day Wesley got Ira.

  Darmus said, “I just wanted to see the place in the dark.”

  “You just wanted to see the place in the dark,” Kimble echoed.

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, hang on a minute, will you?”

  He turned back to Audrey and Wesley and said, “One night. Figure out what you want to try to get him back, but you’ve only got one night to do it. Shipley, you willing to stay on and assist?”

  The deputy’s brow knitted and his blue eyes drifted from Kimble and down to the road. “All due respect, sir, I’d like to head home.”

  This seemed to stun Kimble. He said, “Shipley, I think they could use—”

  “We’re fine,” Audrey said. “Between Wes and me, we’ll be fine.”

  Kimble gave a slow nod, but Wesley could see he was disappointed in his deputy. “All right. Go on and get some rest, Shipley. I know it’s been a long day and you’re still recovering.”

  Shipley, flushed with embarrassment, said, “I can come back out at sunup. See what we have.”

  “Sure,” Kimble said, and turned back to the car. “Now, Darmus, I’m going to give you a choice, based on that stunt you pulled with the notebook yesterday. I can arrest you, or you can buy me a drink and we can talk. Right now, I could use a drink. Which will it be?”

  “You know, I just noticed that I gave you the wrong pages,” the gray-haired reporter said, his face suddenly full of Tom Sawyer innocence. “Silly mistake. I’ll be happy to—”

  “Oh, give it a rest,” Kimble said. “We’re going to talk. It can be an official talk pretty easily. I don’t think you want that option.”

  Darmus grinned. “Kimble, you look parched. Could I interest you in a beverage?”

  Kimble didn’t smile as he said, “Roman’s, twenty minutes.”

  Darmus put his vehicle into reverse and began the awkward trick of turning around on the narrow road and Kimble returned his attention to Audrey and Wesley.

  “You’re on your own, guys. Make something good happen. If you need help, call for it fast.” He looked at the cats beyond and said, “Good luck.”

  Then they left, too, Kimble and Shipley, the latter driving away from the preserve as if he were fleeing, and it was just Audrey and Wesley in the dark.

  They stood in silence until the cars were gone, and then Audrey turned to him and spread her hands.

  “What is the matter with you? The sheriff already doesn’t like us, and you’re acting as if—”

  “Audrey,” he said, “I’m not acting any way. I’m not pretending. You haven’t been out here at night before. Things got a little…”

  “A little what?”

  “Nothing,” he said, because he realized that if he told her the story, she’d want to be out here herself. She’d want to see it with her own eyes. That didn’t seem like a good idea. If that light—and the feline response to it—was going to continue, then Wes wanted some time to watch it and consider it, alone.

  “It’s just a change for them,” Wes said. “They’re stressed. You’ve moved before, Audrey. Didn’t you feel any stress? Well, imagine being picked up and moved, no consultation, no understanding. How would you react?”

  “They were fine until that damned cougar—”

  “No, they weren’t,” he said.

  “What?”

  He sighed. “They get agitated at night. Sorry I bothered you by bringing it up in front of the police. But they were pretty wild last night.”

  “They seemed fine this morning.”

  “I’m sure they’re adjusting,” Wes said. He was thinking about the blue light and looking at Lily. Lily was a gorgeous white tiger. Lily was also blind. She’d been rescued from a traveling animal show where she’d been kept in a tiny cage and fed dog food. Now she was almost four hundred pounds of beauty, but the terrible care of her youth had left her blind. If the blue light came back in the night, Wes wanted to see if Lily reacted to it. If she did… if she did, it would tell him something. Not what he was hoping, but what he feared.

  “Can we get Ira back?” Audrey asked.

  “Ira’s gone, I’d say. I’ll put a trap out there, but the way he took off didn’t seem to indicate he had plans for a return.”

  “I still can’t believe he did that. What scared him so much? He was terrified.”

  “Audrey? Go on home. Get some sleep. I’ll make sure the cats are safe.”

  “Maybe I should stay here tonight instead of you.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, we’ve never seen anything like this before!”

  “And you’re more qualified to deal with that than I am?”

  “I’m not saying that. But it’s my preserve, my responsibility, so…”

  “Audrey.” Wes shook his head.

  “It’s my responsibility,” she repeated.

  “No,” he said mildly. “It is not. When you and David hired me, you made me the preserve manager, and one of the stipulations was that I live on site. I believe it is my responsibility. I take that seriously. Now, it’s been a long day. Hard on everyone. The cats, yo
u, me.”

  “I know.”

  “So let’s not get to tangling with each other, okay? Let’s not do that.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’ll be here tonight, and I’ll make sure everything is fine,” he said. “Like I always have, Audrey. Every night since I’ve worked for you.”

  “I know you will, Wes. I’m sorry for being bitchy about what you told the police. I’m just… I guess I’m just scared of what will come next.”

  He looked away from her and out at the rows of glittering eyes in the night and said, “That seems to be a consensus.”

  16

  ROY SAT IN A BACK CORNER BOOTH at Roman’s Tavern and waited for Kimble with a mixture of apprehension and curiosity. The chief deputy’s insistence on talking with him was interesting, because it suggested that more than a lecture was at hand. If anger was driving Kimble, they wouldn’t have recessed to a local pub. There was a reason that this conversation was happening outside the sheriff’s department, and Roy had a feeling that reason was named Jacqueline Mathis.

  He’d been waiting for about ten minutes when Kimble stepped inside with a folder in his hands. He paused and scanned the room and then nodded when Roy lifted a finger to catch his attention. Most of the bars in downtown Whitman were avoided like the plague by locals unless it was summer, winter, or spring break. Roman’s, on the other hand, had managed to create a perfect delineation over the years—the kids went upstairs, where the bartenders offered specials on terrible shots and massive speakers loomed in every corner, and anybody over thirty stayed downstairs, tucked into scarred wooden booths or on backless stools at a small, shadowed bar. Now, in the heart of winter break and on a weeknight, the place was nearly empty. Kimble sat down across from Roy, and when the waitress asked what he’d like, he said, “A glass of… um, just a Budweiser. Thanks.”

  She left, and Roy said, “So are you going to arrest me?”

  “Don’t laugh, old-timer. I could. You were tampering with a crime scene.”

  “Technically, I think I was just observing it.”

  Kimble said, “You’ve spent some time on those names, haven’t you?”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Because if you went through the effort of swiping them from the lighthouse, then you’d check them out. So? What did you find?”

  Roy hesitated. The waitress returned with their drinks, and he took a long swallow of his beer and said, “You weren’t down there tonight because of names on a map, Kimble. What’s up?”

  “Unrelated matter.”

  “Really? Blade Ridge is a hotspot for local law enforcement needs?”

  Kimble looked at him with an expression that was torn between resentment and resignation, then tugged his department baseball cap off and ran a hand through his sandy hair. Emotion didn’t often show on Kimble’s face, but tonight the weariness had leaked through.

  “One of the cats got out,” he said.

  “There’s a tiger loose out there?”

  “Cougar,” Kimble said, and sighed. He accepted the beer that was dropped on the table, then lifted the cold glass to his forehead as if it were a scalding summer day and not a December night. “The black one.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “I look like I’m laughing? Frigging thing jumped right over a fourteen-foot fence, with one of my deputies watching.”

  “I remember when they caught that cat,” Roy said. “I’d written probably ten stories over the years about black panther sightings around here, and ignored maybe a hundred more tips. Then word got out that they’d caught one, and I didn’t believe it, but I went out to check. Ended up putting the picture of it front page and above the fold. Wire services ran it all over the country. Made CNN and even the BBC.”

  “Good as you are at this sort of game, Mr. Darmus,” Kimble said, “I’ve played a few of them myself, and I haven’t forgotten that I’m not here to give you information. It’s the other way around. Tell me—what did you find in that lighthouse?”

  “Nothing but the names on the maps.”

  “And you checked them out?”

  Roy gave a hesitant nod. “In the newspaper’s morgue, yeah.”

  “What did you find?”

  “All accident victims. Is there some connection? Surely is. They all died close to Blade Ridge. But it’s too haphazard to make any sense. Fourteen people have died in the general area. Some on the road, some in the woods, some in the river. If that had happened last year, okay, it’s indicative of a problem. Or even in the last decade. But it ranges from David Clark’s fall off the trestle to people being killed by their horses in 1927. Fourteen deaths sounds like a lot until you spread it out over eighty or ninety years.”

  “Why was he using maps? Any ideas?”

  “I would have to see them again to be sure, but my suspicion is that he was charting the locations of the deaths.”

  Kimble nodded. “You said you wanted to see the place in the dark. Why?”

  “Everyone who died out there died in the dark.”

  “At night?”

  “That’s right.”

  Kimble frowned. “It’s a spooky place at night, I’ll admit that. Shit, my best deputy is gun-shy about it. Now, maybe that’s the cougar, I don’t know.” Kimble took a drink of his beer, seeming not to enjoy the taste, and said, “What did Wyatt tell you about me and Jacqueline Mathis?”

  Now came the real reason for this meeting. Kimble’s anger at the mention of her name in the lighthouse ran deep. Interesting.

  “Not much,” Roy said, “and that’s the truth. He started out by raving about what the mountains could tell me if they could talk. Then he made the remark about my folks. Now, a lot of years have passed, but still…”

  “It upset you.”

  “Of course it did. When he started complimenting the bravery of their decision, and how hard it must have been, with the child at home, I was getting a little hot under the collar, yes. He hung up before I could really get going on that, though. Now as for you? All he said about you was that he hoped we’d work together on telling the story.”

  “What story?”

  “His, I suppose. The one the mountain could tell if it could talk? Hell, I don’t know. But he said he was counting on the two of us, and then he told me that you make drives up to see Jacqueline Mathis.”

  Kimble tried to hide the bristle with another swallow of beer. It didn’t work; his eyes had gone cold and angry. Roy said, “Why did that matter to him? Any idea?”

  “I don’t even understand how he knew about it,” Kimble said. “It’s nobody’s damn business. I go up there because… because there’s nobody else who will. She’s alone, Mr. Darmus. And yes, she shot me, but it was because of that bastard husband and a lot of confusion. If that prick hadn’t been beating her up, there would never have been a gun in her hands, and when I came in she was still in shock and he was still breathing and it was…”

  “What?” Roy said.

  “It was pitch black,” Kimble said thoughtfully. “There’d been a bad storm that night. Power was out all over the county. I remember that when I pulled into the driveway I could still hear thunder on the other side of the mountains.”

  “Maybe that’s why Wyatt latched on to her story, then,” Roy said. “The man had one hell of an interest in darkness. Does it make sense? Of course not. Does a lighthouse in the woods make sense, though?”

  Kimble gave a nod of acknowledgment, and then seemed to hesitate. He finally said, “Listen, Mr. Darmus—”

  “Would you please call me Roy? Or better yet, just Darmus? I’ve worked around police for forty years, and when I start hearing politeness come out of their mouths, I know I’m getting old.”

  Kimble smiled. “All right, Darmus. You muckraking son of a bitch.”

  Roy laughed. “There you go, there you go.”

  Kimble turned serious again and said, “I wanted to apologize for the way I ran you out of there yesterday. My temper got away from
me.”

  “Not a problem,” Roy said. “You know what’s funny, though? Both of our tempers got away from us that day. Why? Because Wyatt French knew just what buttons to push. Telling me that my parents made a brave decision on the day they died in an accident, that was a sharp call. Cruel, maybe, but sharp. It got a reaction. And then he poked you pretty good with Jacqueline Mathis.”

  “He sure did. Wonder why?”

  “Well, he seemed to want our attention. He got it, didn’t he? We’re sitting down together now, talking about him and the artifacts he left behind, instead of just moving on through the night minding our own affairs.”

  After a long pause, Kimble picked up the folder he’d brought in with him and slid it over the table.

  “Speaking of the artifacts he left behind—these are copies of the photographs he had on the walls.”

  Roy opened the folder, saw the browning images, most featuring lanky men with harsh expressions and tools in their hands. With a few exceptions, they all seemed to be from the distant past, and from a specific group of men. Laborers on some unknown project.

  “Why does he have so many labeled NO?” Roy asked.

  “I haven’t the faintest idea. Most of them are that way, but there are ten with names. I’ve made the list there.”

  “I see it.” Roy was scanning the names.

  “Any chance you could help me figure out who they were, exactly? I know what three of them did. I don’t need any more information on O’Patrick, Estes, or… Mathis.”

  Roy looked up and met his eyes. “All right. I’ll see what I can do. What did you find on O’Patrick and Estes?”

  “No connection to Blade Ridge.”

  There was more there. Roy frowned and said, “Come on, Kimble.”

  Kimble sighed. “They both killed people. In different ways, in different decades, in different places. I don’t know how in the hell Wyatt discovered them, or why he kept their pictures, but that’s the story.”

  “And Jacqueline,” Roy said. “So of the ten here, you already know that three were murderers.”

  “That’s right.”

  “If these other seven prove to—”