“Why are you watching me?”
Roy considered the gain in a lie, and couldn’t find it.
“Kimble asked me to.”
“He doesn’t trust me. He came out here this morning, and it was obvious.” Shipley paced, rubbed a hand across his face, and then said, “Holy shit, what am I doing? What in the hell am I doing?”
Roy was silent. He’d been more focused on the gun than the man, but now that it wasn’t pressed against his stomach, he looked at Nathan Shipley’s face. It was haggard, weary. It was frightened.
“I’m not going to shoot you,” Shipley said.
“That’s good to hear.”
“I just don’t know what’s happening. What I’m doing, what I should be doing. I don’t know anymore. I said that Kimble doesn’t trust me? Well, you know what, man? I don’t trust myself. I don’t. That’s the problem. I’m seeing things, and I can’t get them out my head. My mind isn’t right. People are dying out there, Pete died out there, and then Kimble comes out to my home and it was like he thought I did it, like he thought I was some sort of evil…”
The words were streaming from him, and he was still pacing, the gun hanging idly at his side.
“There’s a bad history to that place,” Roy said, trying to choose his words carefully. “I think Kimble is just worried for you.”
“Well, he ought to be. Because I’m telling you, I have never been more certain of anything in my life than what I saw the night of my wreck out there, but what I saw was impossible.”
“It might not be,” Roy said, keeping his tone relaxed, thinking that if he could be soothing and understanding, then maybe, just maybe, he might walk out of here alive.
“What the hell do you know about it?”
“I know that other people have had the same experience. Have received the same offer. You might not have imagined as much as you—”
“Offer?” Shipley stared at him.
“I mean, other people have seen the man in the road. Kimble’s been documenting it. I’ve been helping.”
“That kid? Somebody else saw that kid?”
“I’m talking about the man with the torch. That’s what you saw, isn’t it?”
“I saw a torch, yes. A blue flame. There are others? Other people have seen this?”
“Yes. But they describe him differently. I think most of them see a man. Most of the people who have seen him are dead now, though, and what they saw, I’m not sure. So maybe others saw a child—”
“When I say kid,” Nathan Shipley said, “I mean the one who works with those cats.”
The gun in Shipley’s hand was no longer Roy’s focus. “What?”
“That accident,” Shipley said. “I am telling you, as honest as I’ve ever spoken in my life, I hit that kid. Not somebody else, not some ghost. I hit him, and I did not imagine it. He walked right into the middle of the road. He was just staring off at something, didn’t pay any attention to my car at all, and when he moved, I swerved the wrong way. I hit him. I know that I did. I saw it, I felt it.”
Roy said, “You walked away from that wreck. Unhurt.”
“I walked away awfully damn sore, and awfully lucky. But that kid, Dustin Hall? He should have been dead.”
Roy stared at him, thinking that he’d covered a lot of bad accidents, had taken a lot of photographs of cars that did exactly what a good car was supposed to do in a wreck—absorb the beating for you. Save you.
“But you talked about the blue flame,” he said. “Kimble told me that.”
“Yeah. The way it happened… the way I know it happened, not the way I remember it, but the way I know it did, was that I hit that kid as he stood in the middle of the road staring off like somebody in a trance. You would have to be deaf and blind to just stand there like that, but he did. And I hit him. Going fast, I hit him. He popped up in the air, and I could see him going across the windshield, and then I was in the trees.”
Shipley wiped a hand over his mouth and shook his head. His eyes were wild.
“When I got my bearings back, the first thing I saw was that blue flame. It was over in the woods, just where his body should have been, just where he was flying when he went past the windshield. And then… then he was up. By the time the other people, Audrey Clark and Harrington, by the time they got there, the kid was up. I was woozy as hell, I will admit that, but I will not admit that I am capable of imagining something like that.”
Shipley turned, and the gun swung toward Roy, who winced. “Sorry, sorry. Look, you want the gun gone, it’s gone.”
He set the weapon down on the coffee table between them. “I’m going to lose my job,” he said. “I know that. But I’d rather lose that than my damn mind.”
“You hit Dustin Hall?” Roy said. “And when you saw the blue flame, it was with Dustin Hall? The flame wasn’t with you, it was with him?”
“Yeah. And I’ll tell you something else—that kid knows what happened to him. He’s the reason I can’t convince myself that it was a hallucination or a dream or whatever. Maybe I could have, if not for him. But when I went back out there, the morning Harrington died? It was just me and Dustin Hall at first. Before Pete got there, it was just the two of us, and he knew what had happened, he knew that I’d run him down. I’m sure of it. But what was I supposed to tell Kimble? Or anyone else? Say, Hey, this kid, he rose from the dead the other day, and now I think he’s lying about it. I’m supposed to say that?”
“Yes,” Roy said. “You’re going to need to say that. To Kimble.”
“I could save us both the time and put the handcuffs on myself.”
Roy shook his head. “You don’t understand, Shipley. Kimble will believe what you just said, because it’s true. He knows somebody escaped death out there. He just thought it was you.”
“What?”
“Why do you think Kimble asked me to follow you, instead of a cop? He’s chasing stories that most people don’t believe are possible, just like you. He’s out there at the ridge now, I think. I’m not sure. I can’t get him on the phone.”
“What’s he doing out there?”
Roy was feeling the gravity of the mistake now, sensing all that it could mean, and there was no time to explain that to Shipley.
“We need to find Kimble,” he said. “And we need to talk to Audrey Clark. Isn’t Dustin Hall staying out there with her now?”
“Yes.”
“That’s not good,” Roy said. “That could be very, very bad. Will you let me call Kimble again? Please. This is serious.”
Shipley thought about it, looked once at the gun, as if that were an option worthy of further consideration, and then gave a broken man’s sigh and nodded.
“Call him, man. I need to understand what the hell is the matter with that place. What’s out there.”
He reached in his pocket and withdrew Roy’s cell phone and tossed it to him. Roy missed it—his hands were shaking. He picked it up off the couch and dialed and got Kimble’s voicemail again.
“Damn you, Kimble,” he said. “You told me my only job tonight was to call. Well, then yours should be to answer.”
Shipley said, “You want me to contact dispatch? See if they can raise him?”
Roy thought about what Kimble was doing tonight, thought about Jacqueline Mathis and how swiftly this could end the man’s career, and he shook his head.
“No. But we should call Audrey Clark. She needs to know that she should be careful with Hall.”
“They’re together in a trailer,” Shipley said. “You want to call her and tell her she should be afraid of the guy and think he’s not going to notice? He’s not going to pick up on that vibe?”
It was a damn good point. Roy swore, looked at the phone and then back up at Shipley.
“We’ve got to go out there, then. Will you do that?”
Shipley looked sick at the prospect, but he nodded.
43
AUDREY WAS STILL AWAKE when the headlights came back on at the top of the hill, and
while she was relieved once again, she was also concerned. Kimble had been up there for so long. Too long.
The lights arced away, the car leaving the lighthouse and heading back downhill, and then she lost sight of them.
Out in the living room, Dustin called for her. “Audrey? The police are here.”
Kimble had pulled in to see them in the middle of the night? Why? Audrey stood up and slipped into her shoes. She’d slept—or tried to sleep—in her clothes, afraid or almost expecting something just like this, another call out into the darkness. By the time she got down the hall, Dustin was standing with the door open, and he said, “What the hell?” Before she could ask him anything, before she could even register the sound of alarm in his voice, Kevin Kimble had pushed inside. His gun was in his hand, pointing straight at her.
And there was blood all over him.
It was on the hand that held the gun, his uniform shirt, his shoes. He wasn’t wearing a jacket; his hair was tangled. His eyes looked fevered.
“What happened?” Audrey said, and only as she watched his face did a new option begin to form in her mind—that whatever had caused this bloodshed had happened not to him but because of him. He didn’t look right, didn’t have the reassuring demeanor he’d always exhibited before.
“I’ll be going to jail soon,” he said. His voice was dull. “But before that happens, I’ve got something I’d like to do, and I’m afraid you might not understand. I’m sorry about that.”
Audrey was looking at the blood, so much blood, all over his clothes, and she put a hand to her mouth and took a step away from him. Dustin actually went toward him, as if he might wrestle the big man to the floor, but Kimble lifted the gun and leveled it at his forehead.
“Son? You’re not standing in front of a man of reason. You’d do well to remember that. I will not hurt you if I can help it, but helping it isn’t easy for me right now.”
Dustin seemed to believe him. He backed away, sat on the couch.
Audrey said, “What are you doing? What happened?”
Kimble lowered the gun after giving Dustin a careful study. “I’m going to try to put an end to it, Mrs. Clark. This place. I doubt it will work, but I’m going to try it, and then I’m going to go to jail.”
“I don’t know what you’re—”
“You do, though,” he said. “You do. You’ve seen it out there. That man with the blue torch. I’m going to try to put an end to him.”
Audrey remembered the blue flame, drawing her into the night woods, drawing her toward a dead man in the dark.
“You sound like you’re talking about a ghost,” she said.
“Don’t I?” Kimble cleared his throat, gave his head a little shake, as if he’d wandered from the moment and had to bring himself back around, and then said, “There’s no landline here. But I’ll need your cell phones.”
“Why?”
He gave her a pained look. “Please, Mrs. Clark. Audrey. I don’t want to be here any more than you want me to be. But I’ve got to make sure I have enough time to do what I need to do.”
“What is that?”
“Burn that trestle down,” he said. “That trestle and all that lives with it. I’m taking it down.”
He was serious. There was a rust-colored streak of blood over his cheek and above it his eyes were red and swollen, but the dark irises betrayed no trace of anything but grim determination.
“Why?” she said. “Why would you burn that bridge?”
“To keep people from dying. Or killing. Or maybe it won’t do a damned thing, but it will do this much—nobody will be able to walk across it anymore. I don’t think that’s as small a difference as most people might.”
“That’s where my husband died,” she said.
“I know. It’s where quite a few people have died. It’s a dangerous place.”
He said it not in the way you’d talk about someplace where you need to be careful to avoid a slip and fall, but in the way you’d talk about a dark street with snipers on every rooftop, where all the care in the world might not help you if you made the mistake of entering it.
“You’re talking as if it’s evil,” Audrey said.
“That is exactly how I am talking, yes. Now if you would please bring me your cell phones and car keys. Both of you.”
She and Dustin stared at each other. Kimble made a small gesture with the gun and said, “Please. Nobody’s going to be hurt. I just need time.”
She went past him to the kitchen counter and found her cell phone, then took her keys out of the drawer. He accepted them with a polite “thank you” and then put them in his pocket. Dustin got warily to his feet and did the same.
“You thinking burning a bridge down is going to affect him?” Dustin said.
Him. Audrey was surprised by both the choice of word and by the manner in which he’d said it. There was very real curiosity in his voice.
“I hope so, son. I’m going to give it a try.”
“Why would it?”
“Because he’s bound to it,” Kimble said, and Audrey felt as if she couldn’t possibly have woken up and walked down the hall, that this was far too detached from reality to actually be happening in front of her, this blood-soaked policeman discussing ghosts in her living room.
“Why would fire bother him?”
“Light does,” Kimble said.
Audrey said, “You sound like Wyatt French.” She remembered Wyatt and all of his strange proclamations and dark warnings about this property, his insistence that if they had not tampered with his light, her husband would not have died. Kimble had asked after that yesterday. He’d come in here after seeing the corpse of one of his own friends, and he had asked her about the lighthouse. He believed in whatever Wyatt had believed in.
“It helped,” he told her. “Still is helping. There are infrared lamps going up there right now, and have you seen that torch tonight?”
She shook her head.
“It holds him down,” Kimble said. “Chases him back into the shadows. Well, I’m going to burn him out of them.”
He took a deep breath, his broad chest filling, and said, “Now I’ve got another favor to ask. Then I’ll let you be alone for a while, and when I’m done, you get your keys and your phones back and I will give you the gun and let you call the police.”
She didn’t know what to say. Just stared at him.
“What do you need?”
“I noticed you drive gas-powered carts around here, when you haul things for the cats.”
She nodded.
“Where do you store your gasoline?”
“In the barn. We’ve got several cans.”
“I’d like them, please.”
“I’ll help you,” Dustin said suddenly, and they both turned and looked at him.
Kimble shook his head. “No. You don’t need any of the trouble I’m bringing around, not any form of it. There might be a lot.”
“I’ll help you get the gasoline down there,” he said. “Then you do what you want. You’re going to need help with the gasoline if you want to move quickly.”
Kimble thought about it, then nodded. “Fine. Show me.”
44
THERE WAS A STEADY but soundless wind that made the leafless trees sway in a gentle, hypnotic motion, and the moon was high and nearly full, snowflakes spitting against the windshield, as Nathan Shipley drove Roy along the winding roads that led west to Blade Ridge.
“I knew I wasn’t crazy,” Shipley said. “I knew I saw that kid, but how do you say something like that? How do you point to a living, breathing, uninjured human being and tell someone that you are positive he should be dead? I couldn’t say that.”
“Not to an ordinary audience,” Roy said as they sped away from sparkling Christmas lights on the edge of town and into the darkness beyond. “But at this point, Kimble and I are not the ordinary audience.”
“There have been ten others? Ten like him?”
“At least.”
“A
nd they not only healed up, but they killed people. You really believe that.”
“It’s not a matter of belief. It’s a matter of reality,” Roy said. “The easy question is how nobody noticed. But those accidents, those deaths, those killings, they were spread out over decades. Years would pass between them.”
“Of course,” Shipley said. “Think about it—that place is as isolated a pocket of the world as you’ll find east of the Mississippi. It doesn’t get a lot of traffic.”
“That probably disappoints him,” Roy said.
“Who?”
“Vesey. The ghost. The devil. Whatever he is. He came when the bridge was going up and prospects were high at Blade Ridge. The mines went belly-up fast, though. Poor yield. Then time and money moved everything to other places, and Blade Ridge was left empty and forgotten.”
They hit a four-way intersection, and Shipley banged the right turn, Roy slid against the door, and then they were on County Road 200, almost there.
Audrey led Kimble to the storage barn where the carts and two tractors were kept. The gasoline for them was stacked neatly on fresh shelves that still smelled of sawdust, Wesley’s final bit of handiwork before the new preserve had opened.
“Those four are gasoline,” she said. “The other two are for the chainsaw, and they’re a mixture of gas and oil.”
“It’ll all burn,” Kimble said, and then he began to load the cans into one of the carts. Four twelve-gallon cans and two five-gallon. Fifty-eight gallons of fuel in all, and although it seemed the wrong question, Audrey asked if he actually thought it could do the job.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve seen house fires started with a lot less. But that thing hasn’t stood for more than a century by accident. It’s strong.”
“I hope it works,” Audrey said, and she saw Kimble look at her in surprise.
“Do you?”
She gazed back at him, looking beyond the bloodstain on his cheek and into his eyes, and nodded.
“I don’t know if I believe what you’ve said, but I believe something is wrong here. And it took my husband. So yes, I hope it works.”
The Ridge Page 27
