The Ridge Read online

  “What? Where?” He was embarrassed by the evident concern—check that, evident fear—in his voice. He liked to know where she was. He needed to know.

  “It’s a thrift shop,” she said. “Some little store just down the road. I don’t care where or what, though—it’s not in this place! I’ve made the petition three times. They finally approved it.”

  “Why did they now?”

  “Because I’m so charming,” she said, and laughed. He waited, and she said, “Oh, take off the cop eyes, Kevin.”

  She sat up straight now, dropped her voice into a low, formal tone.

  “They approved me, officer, because I’ve shown myself to be nonthreatening and of sound mind and character.”

  He stared at her, rubbing one hand over his jaw. It wasn’t an abnormal decision, not at this stage of her incarceration. They’d be readying her for release, assuming she made parole. She would make parole—there had been no problems and many were sympathetic to her—but that was still a year away. He had thought he had another year to get used to the idea of her being free. Why hadn’t he thought of work release?

  “So you’re happy,” he said finally, just to say something.

  She laughed. “Of course I’m happy. You think I’d prefer to stay in here?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Probably not. Master of the understatement.” She shook her head, then said, “I’ll be working the mornings, though. That will change my visitation hours. I hope that wouldn’t stop you, if you had to visit later in the day? I’ve always wondered if you’re ashamed of me after the sun comes up.”

  “No, Jacqueline. It’s just… well, you know, it’s a long drive. If I come early, I beat the traffic.”

  “The Sawyer County traffic,” she said. “Yes, that area around the courthouse gets pretty gridlocked for about two minutes each morning. Particularly now, with the students home for the holidays? Why, you might have to sit through one entire red light.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “You don’t like the idea,” she said. “Do you? Me being out of here, even for a few hours.”

  “That’s not true,” he said, and maybe it wasn’t. Maybe he liked the idea an awful lot.

  “Well, I like it,” she said. “Out of these walls, out of these clothes. Do you know how long it’s been since I wore something other than this?”

  She grasped her orange shirt between her thumb and index finger and tugged it away from her body. He got a glimpse of her collarbone and below it smooth, flawless skin.

  “You could drop by there sometime,” she said. “You know—see me on the outside.” She shifted her tone to a theatrical whisper and capped it off with a wink. He could feel his dick begin to stiffen, performing against his will, his own body laughing at him. He got to his feet abruptly, making his arousal evident.

  “Kevin?”

  “I’ve got to get started back,” he said. “It’s a long drive. Too long.”

  “Why are you leaving so early? Did I say something—”

  “Be safe,” he said, the same thing he always said, and walked to the door, using his hand to adjust himself within his pants, not wanting the attendant CO to see that development.

  “I thought you would be happy for me. I thought if there was one person in the world who’d be happy for me, it would be you.”

  “I am happy for you, Jacqueline. Goodbye.”

  By the time the guards opened the door, he had his police eyes back.

  It had been a long drive for a short visit. That was how it went with her. He could never stay too long.

  Be careful with her, Wyatt French had told him.

  Yeah, buddy. Listen to the old drunk. Watch your ass, Kimble.

  Be very careful with her.

  3

  THE SAWYER COUNTY SENTINEL WAS at 122 years and counting when they shut it down. Peak circulation, 33,589. On the last day, they printed 10,000 copies. That was a bump, too, operating with an expectation that the locals would want their piece of history, so the Sentinel printed extras to make certain they could shake an ash out of the urn for everybody who wanted one.

  The staff—nineteen members strong at the end, down from forty-eight at the start of Roy Darmus’s career—blew the corks off a few bottles of champagne at five that afternoon and passed glasses around the newsroom and cried. Every last one of them. The editors, the reporters, the pressmen. Even J. D. Henry, the college intern, couldn’t help it. He’d been with them all of two months, but there he was leaning on a desk and sipping champagne he wasn’t old enough to drink legally and wiping tears from his eyes. Because they were a family, damn it, and it was a business that had spanned more than a century and told the stories of a community day by day and year by year longer than anyone alive could remember, and now it was gone. Who could be part of that and not cry?

  When the champagne was gone, they’d all moved on to Roman’s Tavern, had burgers and onion rings and pitchers of beer and told stories that had been told a hundred times before, treating each one like new material.

  Sometime around midnight, as awkward silences were becoming more common than bursts of laughter, J. D. Henry commented on how strange it had been to look around the place and see all those empty desks.

  “Weren’t all empty,” Donita Hadley said. She’d been writing obits for thirty years, and if there was anyone who wouldn’t miss the details of a death, it was Donita. “Roy’s got his work cut out for him yet.”

  How in the hell she’d known that, Roy couldn’t say. He’d taken everything off the cubicle walls and cleared the surface of his desk, but he hadn’t touched the drawers. Perhaps she’d opened them, snooping around. But somehow he knew that wasn’t the case. Donita, she just understood.

  “Really?” J.D. asked, the kid showing innocent surprise as he stared at Roy, everyone else suddenly finding other places for their eyes. They knew what the intern didn’t; this was a loss for them all, but a touch more personal for Roy. He’d grown up at the paper. Literally. Had started drifting in as a kid, shoving stories onto the editor’s desk. After his parents were killed in a car accident and he’d gone to live with his grandmother, the staff essentially adopted him. His first paid job was culling the morgue files for a column called “Local Lore,” two-sentence recollections of the headline stories that had run twenty-five, fifty, and seventy-five years earlier. He worked his way through college at the paper, took a full-time job immediately after graduating, and never left. There were those who’d been around longer, but nobody had spent a greater percentage of life inside the Sentinel’s newsroom than Roy Darmus.

  “Why haven’t you cleared out yet?” J.D. asked.

  “Lot of shit in those drawers,” Roy mumbled. “Been procrastinating. You know me, always past deadline.”

  The truth was, he had to be alone for it. Not just alone—he had to be the last man standing. Captain of the sinking ship.

  That seemed to satisfy everyone except Donita. Her eyes stayed on him for a long moment, and then Roy suggested they have another round, and the response was a collective hemming and hawing. The night had gone on too long for most now—they were an older crowd, J.D. excepted, and it had been a draining day. People began to reach for wallets, but Mike Webb, the editor, insisted he was putting it on the company tab, saying that if the owners didn’t like it, they could shut the place down.

  That joke landed as smoothly as a buffalo coming off a balance beam, but hell, at least the drinks were free.

  Everyone walked down the steps and out into the night. December, the town aglow with Christmas lights, air biting with cold wind driven out of the Appalachian foothills, the season, quite appropriately, of death. The course had been charted nine years earlier, when a newspaper that had been family-owned since its creation sold out to a national chain. The cuts began almost immediately—first pages, then staff. There had been talk of a Web-only product for a time, but this rural Kentucky community wasn’t viewed as a potential profit center, despite more than
a century of profit, and eventually the terminal diagnosis was issued.

  Outside of Roman’s, the last of the crew shared hugs and handshakes and went off to their cars and the rest of their lives, promising to keep in touch in the way kids did at graduations, firmly and incorrectly believing it would actually happen.

  That was supposed to be the last of it, the final rites administered, but Roy was back the next afternoon. He preferred to shut it down in private. It was home in a way your office never really should be, and that afternoon, when he went in alone, the building was so silent it made him feel unsteady. Newsrooms were never quiet, were always filled with a humming, delightful energy, sometimes chaotic, sometimes somber, but always present.

  Today, it had all the energy of a crypt.

  He had five drawers to empty—three in the desk, two in the file cabinet. It was very much like sorting through a loved one’s belongings after a funeral.

  The first thing to go into the recycling bin was his tips folder. He flipped it open and saw notes jotted on scraps of paper and backs of menus and napkins: Brandon Tyler taught his blind brother to throw a tomahawk; astronomy club planning event for lunar eclipse; Evelyn Scott won national cookie recipe competition…

  And so on. Stories of local people and local interest. He looked at them now, feeling sorrow because their forum was gone. Determined not to wallow in that sorrow, Roy went through the crank file next, knowing it would demand a smile. It was in the bottom right-hand desk drawer, a good five inches thick, jammed with letters. He opened it up and began to read through them, and, as he’d hoped, couldn’t help but smile. There was the savage critique of his story judgment from a woman who wanted to let the public know that she and her husband had caught the exact same smallmouth bass on the exact same day, and just what was the matter with him that he didn’t think people would be interested in that? There was the collection of letters from a group of neighbors who had recorded sightings of a sasquatch—well, it was probably a sasquatch but potentially a wolf capable of walking on its hind legs, which was twice as alarming, didn’t he think? There was a note from a woman who was certain her neighbor was breaking into her house to use her Jacuzzi and asserted that she had the pubic hair to prove it, and the allegation that the mayor had been sighted in Maloney Park in carnal embrace with a sheep.

  He remembered them all, remembered sharing them with Donita or Laura or Stewart and sharing laughs. There would be no more crank letters here, there would be no more laughs. The smile gone from his face, he set the folder on top of his desk with a sigh and walked all the way into the break room in search of coffee, pulling up short when he saw the pot was gone. Right. He turned on his heel, and had just settled back down at his desk when the phone rang.

  It was startlingly loud in the empty newsroom, which was going dark as the stormy day faded to night. Roy picked it up and said hello.

  “Mr. Darmus. This is Wyatt French.”

  “Oh. Hot-tip time?”

  Old Wyatt was a well-known figure to those in the newsroom and those in the liquor business. He didn’t appear to intersect with much else, just booze and bizarre news. Roy had written about the old man’s lighthouse once, and apparently Wyatt had appreciated the tenor of the piece, because he’d taken to calling every so often with what he referred to as “hot tips.” They generally involved police misconduct or local bars that served watered-down bourbon. Lately the calls had been focused on the pending relocation of an exotic-cat rescue center to his isolated stretch of the woods. Wyatt did not approve of the facility, at least not across from his home. Today he’d either missed the fact that the newspaper was no longer in business or he was too drunk to remember.

  “Mr. Darmus, I wanted to tell you… wanted to ask that you…”

  “Buddy, we’re out of the tip business, I’m afraid,” Roy said, smiling, but then the smile faded when he heard French’s ragged breathing.

  “It will be very important to keep the light on when I’m gone,” Wyatt French said. “Very important.”

  “You’re leaving?”

  “I’d like to say otherwise, Mr. Darmus. I would so dearly like to say otherwise.”

  Roy frowned. “Wyatt, what’s wrong?”

  “You were right about this place, you know. You just didn’t look far enough. Didn’t look hard enough. I don’t blame you. There’s more to it than I can explain, and more than a sane man would pause to hear. I’m not one who would be heard, anyhow. The mountain could tell it, if it could talk.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Of course you don’t. You haven’t got the faintest notion what I’m talking about. I did more than most, though. I fought it.”

  “Let’s slow down,” Roy said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “If I felt I could make a soul believe me, I might stay around to try. The longer I stay, though, the greater the risk. I’m getting scared of the dark coming. I’m getting scared of what I could do in the dark.”

  The rant faded back to ragged inhalations. The breathing of a panicked man. Roy’s frown deepened.

  “Wyatt, do you need help out there?”

  “Oh, yes. Help is needed out here. For me? Sure. For you? Absolutely. I tried to provide it. I did what I could. You tell them that. You tell them that Wyatt French did what he could—for them. For everyone.”

  “I’m not following, and you sound—”

  “They should have listened to me about those damned cats. You know how many people will come out here now? Do you have any idea what that might mean?”

  “No,” Roy said. “I do not. Explain it to me.”

  “Take a closer look,” Wyatt said. “That’s all I ask. If you and Kimble both do that much, then maybe—”

  “Kevin Kimble? With the sheriff’s department?”

  “He’s gone to see her, you know.”

  “Gone to see who?”

  “Jacqueline Mathis. The woman who shot him, and he drives up there every month to pay a visit. He doesn’t ask the right questions.”

  “What should he be asking?”

  Wyatt went silent for a moment, and when he spoke again he’d gotten the harried pace under control.

  “I want you to try to tell this story,” he said. “You’re the right one for it. You and Kimble. And somebody needs to tell it. I hope you will.”

  “I would if I could, Wyatt. But they’ve closed the paper.”

  “It’s not a newspaper story, Mr. Darmus. But so many of the ones that really need to be told aren’t, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “I tried to tell the ones that mattered.”

  “You really did, Mr. Darmus. You really did. And this one needs to be told, for you particularly. I think you need to know the character your parents showed.”

  Roy felt his breathing slow. His parents had died in a car accident on Blade Ridge Road, very near Wyatt’s lighthouse.

  “What do you know about my parents?”

  “The decisions that they both made. Very brave. Very strong. And knowing what they were saying goodbye to, with a child at home, it must have been so difficult. You can be very proud of them.”

  “Damn it, Wyatt, I don’t appreciate you talking about—”

  “When you write the story,” Wyatt said, “please make something clear. I didn’t have to die. I could go on as long as I want.”

  He hung up. Roy stared at the receiver in astonishment. Disconnected, then dialed the number that had appeared on the caller ID. It went right to voicemail. Roy hung up.

  I didn’t have to die.

  “Oh, shit,” he said, and then he took his car keys, left his boxes on the desk, and left the building.

  4

  BLADE RIDGE ROAD LAY in the western reaches of the county, a twenty-minute drive from Whitman, though Roy did it in fifteen as dusk fell over the wooded countryside. It wasn’t so much of a road—just a rutted gravel lane that broke away from County Road 200 in the foothills that had once been home to coal-mining country,
making a straight line toward the Marshall River, which marked Sawyer County’s western border. County Road 200 bent sharply to the left at this point, but if you missed that curve and continued straight, you’d end up on Blade Ridge, which would deliver you to the realization that you’d made a mistake and then to a sudden wall of trees.

  For some people—Roy’s parents among them—it was a very bad mistake. The narrow, twisting lane was treacherous, particularly in the winter, particularly in the dark. When Roy’s parents died, the county was inspired to replace the original dead-end sign with two larger ones and add a warning that traffic was for residents only. Not that there were many of them. Just a lighthouse, where once a trailer had stood. And, now, a cat zoo.

  Thinking about his parents made him tighten his hands on the steering wheel. What had the old boozehound been trying to imply—that they’d driven off into the woods intentionally, a joint suicide?

  And knowing what they were saying goodbye to, with a child at home, it must have been so difficult.

  “Bullshit,” Roy said aloud, his voice hot with anger. His parents had been dead for forty-six years, but even that wasn’t enough time to provide a buffer against the emotions that swelled at the suggestion that they might have left him on purpose.

  They were coming home from my basketball game in Jasper County, and they were looking for a shortcut and took the wrong turn. I’ve known that for decades, Wyatt, you prick. Don’t you dare poison my memories of them, don’t you dare.

  Ahead of the spot where the gravel road reached its end, directly across from the fresh fencing and cages that had now been built into the woods to house a rescue center for tigers, cougars, lions, and leopards, there was a track that cut off to the right. This was the driveway to Wyatt French’s lighthouse. It came in from the north side at a harsh angle and began to climb immediately. Roy made the turn, loose gravel sliding under the tires, and heard the pitch of the Pilot’s engine turn harsh as it strained up the incline. It was like driving through a tunnel because the trees hung so dense and so close to the road. Then it broke to a crest and there were a few gaps that allowed you to see between the mountains and out to the Marshall River and an ancient railroad trestle.