The Ridge (20 page)

“Jacqueline, I can’t
take
you anywhere. You’re in prison.”

“I’m aware of that. But you’re a police officer. You can get me out there.”

The thought of it was alluring and frightening. The two of them, outside these walls and alone together. No guards.

He said, “I don’t think that’s an option.”

“Then I don’t know what to tell you,” she said.

He leaned forward, braced his forearms on his knees, and looked her in the eyes. It was not an easy thing for him. Meeting her eyes had a way of tightening his lungs, a way of shrinking the walls around him, making doors seem impossibly far away.

“Please,” he said, “tell me what you’re holding back.”

“Kevin, I would like to make parole. Do you understand that?”

“Of course.”

“Do you know how much my chances will be hurt if I begin telling stories that make me sound like a lunatic?”

“It’s you and me in this room. Not your parole board.”

“They’ll ask your opinion.”

“So did the prosecutor,” he said.

She knew well what that meant. She remembered the details he’d chosen to forget during her trial. Some of them, at least. Others—
I’m sorry, I don’t remember—
she either did not remember or had been lying about for year after year.

“I’ve earned this from you, damn it,” he said, thinking of the months of physical therapy, the nights of insomnia, the constant ache in his back that lived within him like a draft in an old house. “This much I have
earned
.”

She winced, then nodded. “Fine. That’s fair enough. You want to hear the story? Wonderful. It’s a ghost story.”

“A ghost story.”

“That’s right. Still want to hear it, or shall I save us both the embarrassment?”

When he didn’t answer, she said, “You asked me how I wasn’t hurt, landing on a rock like that. I was hurt badly. I was dying when he came for me.”

“Wyatt?”

She shook her head. “Oh, no, Kevin. Not Wyatt. Not anyone you’re going to be able to find and interview. There will be no testimony from him, there will be no fingerprints. Still want me to go on?”

No,
he thought, so vehemently that he almost spoke it aloud. He had the sense that if he let her go on like this, then it would all come crashing down, every hope that he’d held, that he’d somehow patched together through overstretched threads of logic and thick ropes of fantasy.

“Go on,” he said.

H
E WAITED
. She looked at him with an uncomfortable level of poignancy, as if she knew she might not see him again and wanted to preserve the moment, a woman watching her lover board a troopship and head off to war. Or ordering him aboard the ship. True to form with Jacqueline Mathis, he was never quite sure of her role.

“You’ve been there,” she said.

“The lighthouse? Yeah.”

“What about the rest of the area? The ridge, the woods, the trestle. Have you walked around there at all?”

“Just yesterday. Looking for a cat.”

“A
cat?
”

“Not the kind in the Friskies commercials, Jacqueline. A black panther. But yes, I’ve seen the place.”

She nodded. “You can picture the base of the trestle. It would be on the… eastern shore, I think. Closest to the road.”

“I can picture it.”

“There’s a fire down there,” she told him calmly.

He raised his eyebrows. “There was a fire?”

“There
is
a fire. I haven’t seen it in a while—I’ve been otherwise engaged for a few years, you know—but I can’t imagine that it’s gone, either. It had been burning for a long time when I saw it, and I think it will burn for a long time to come.”

“I don’t follow this.”

“Of course you don’t. That’s why I tried not to tell you. You had to have it your way, though, and so now I’ll tell you and live with the response, I guess. There is a fire on the rocks below the trestle. When Wyatt made his visit, it was still burning. I can almost assure you that it still is now.”

Kimble had passed under the trestle with Wesley Harrington at his side the previous evening. There had been nothing there.

He said, “Okay. A fire.”

“Already you’re giving up on me,” she said. “I can see it in your face.”

“No, I’m not. But you should know that I was just down there, and I didn’t see a fire. Neither did the man I was with. So unless we both have really bad eyes…”

“You wouldn’t be able to see it,” she said. “Not yet. And I hope you never can.”

Her face was grim.

“The first time I saw it, Kevin, I was in the water and the rocks. I was dying. Make no mistake about it—I wasn’t just in pain, I was
dying
. And I knew then that I didn’t want to die. More than anything in the world, I didn’t want to die. The river was pulling me downstream, but I got hung up in the rocks and then I could see the fire. It burns blue, and there are people all around it. One man stepped away from it, took one of the sticks out of the fire, and held it like a torch.”

Please, stop,
Kimble thought, trying to hold her eyes, trying not to betray the sickness. He needed her to be sane. He needed her not to belong in this place, but with every word she was validating the orange uniform.

“He waded out to me, just glided through the water, holding that blue torch. Told me that I was dying, and made me an offer.”

“An offer?”

“That’s right. He told me that I was dying, and I knew that I was. He told me that he could enable me to walk away, and I knew that he could.”

“This man healed you.”

“I didn’t say healed.”

“Then what did he do?”

“He bargained, Kevin. And I accepted.”

He looked at her, not really wanting to hear the answer, and said, “What did he want in exchange?”

“I think you know that.”

“No, I don’t, Jacqueline.”

“What I promised him,” she said, “I provided him.”

He was silent.

“You don’t just walk away from the devil,” she said. “Not for free.”

I
RA MELTED INTO THE HILLS
and did not surface. While Audrey and Dustin worked together to complete the day’s feedings and clean the cages, the two deputies who remained at the preserve took their weapons into the woods, armed with binoculars and, in one case, a rifle scope, and searched for some sign.

They didn’t come up with any.

Dustin, who hadn’t seemed to have recovered his strength after finding Wes that morning, who looked unsteady with every step, watched the police in the woods and told Audrey they were up to something.

“What? They’re looking for the cat.”

He shook his head. “No. They’re going along the fence line right now, Audrey. Watch them.”

She lowered the wheelbarrow full of raw meat—they kept it frozen, then thawed it each evening so it would be ready to go in the morning—and studied the police as Dustin was. They did seem to be walking along the edge of the fence, looking in instead of looking out.

“They don’t expect to find Ira hiding against the fence,” Dustin said. “So what are they doing?”

Looking for breaches,
Audrey thought. They were looking for some indication of poor security, something that could potentially allow a cat to escape. Something that could potentially provide the sheriff with the ammunition that Kimble had hinted he would want. Well, that was ridiculous. The preserve was secure, and she knew it.

“Let them do their job,” she said. “We’ll do ours. Look at Lily. That girl is
hungry
.”

The blind white Siberian tiger was trotting back and forth in her cage, looking like a kitten with too much energy. She could hear them and smell the food; she knew it was close, she just couldn’t see it.

They fed Lily, then moved on to the next enclosure, which held two cougars. They were siblings. At one time the cougars on the preserve had fascinated visitors. Then Ira came along, and the standard variety was no longer of interest. People like the unique specimens, even when they know nothing about the basics.

But the two cougars Audrey and Dustin were feeding now were
plenty
unique. They were two of five cats that had been rescued from what Wes had deemed the worst conditions he’d ever encountered. The cats were at a facility licensed by the USDA for breeding purposes, which was an idea that David and Audrey abhorred—the cats were not supposed to be pets, and most of them wouldn’t be suffering if some jackass hadn’t decided he wanted a cougar or a lion for a pet.

The place was in Georgia, and all of the cats needed rescue. The owner simply told authorities that he’d “gotten in a little over his head.” Being in over his head meant forgetting to feed the animals, apparently. The cats were housed in filthy, small cages with no food or water in reach. Every bone in their bodies
showed beneath matted fur. Often taking strange cats could be a challenge, even requiring sedation. In this case, the only thing that was needed to lure the animals out and into the transport cages was a bucket of clean water.

Cody, one of the cougars, was in such bad shape that he required two weeks of antibiotics just to stabilize enough so the vet could remove several infected teeth. He now had a hilariously crooked smile, which he showed often, and his ribs were no longer pushing against his flesh. His brother, Otto, had suffered frostbite so severe that his ears were mangled shreds.

Audrey looked at the two cats, healthy and happy and eager for food, and said, “Let the sheriff’s department try its worst. I run one of the best facilities in the country, and I’m not closing it. The
escape
was not due to our facility. It was due to a cat that is something strange. Our fence height exceeds the minimum. If he jumped over it without help… well, good for Ira. But we couldn’t stop it.”

“They say those black cats are supposed to be witches,” Dustin said. “I remember reading about it with David.”

She looked at him and sighed. “Helpful, Dustin. I’ll just call the old witch defense into play. When they’re burning me at the stake, remember that it was your suggestion.”

They were cleaning one portion of the cougar enclosure while the cats were isolated with their meat in another sector. Audrey always worked this way in the preserve. David and Wes would sometimes go in the enclosures, but Audrey never did. Dustin was watching the police, and Audrey looked up, too. One of them—Wolverton—appeared to have found something. He called to Shipley, who walked on slowly, carefully—every move Shipley made out here seemed cautious—and knelt beside his comrade. They turned something over in their hands, whispering.

“What did you find there?” Audrey called, walking toward them. A plastic bag appeared, the item went into it, and then the bag disappeared into Wolverton’s pocket.

“Don’t worry about it, Mrs. Clark. Nothing here.”

She frowned and turned back to Dustin. His pale face was grim. “They found something, all right.”

“What?”

“I think it was a shell.”

She stared at him. “From Wesley’s gun?”

“Maybe.” He didn’t look at her when he said it, though.

“Dustin,” she said, “do you think someone else shot my tiger?”

He still didn’t meet her eyes, just took his rake and returned to work.

“We’ll see what the police think,” he said.

Kimble had left Jacqueline abruptly, thanking her for her time like some door-to-door salesman who’d struck out badly but had to keep the false smile until he was out of sight. She hadn’t even responded, just watched sadly as he stood up to go.

“You wanted to know the truth,” she said as the CO opened the door for him.

Yes, he had. And the truth was that several years of his life had vanished into a fantasy image of a woman who belonged in the state hospital, not the prison.

He picked up his phone as soon as he got into the car, began to make calls about work,
real
work, determined not only to make up for lost time but to force his mind away from her and back into the world of real problems that needed real solutions. Back into his world.

His first call was to the department’s evidence tech, to see whether the medical examiners had come through on Kimble’s request and retrieved the bullet from the tiger.

They had.

“Looks like a .223,” the tech told him. “We can of course do more specific ballistics if you need them, but I can tell you the caliber right now. That mean anything to you?”

It meant plenty.

The gun in Wesley Harrington’s hand on the night of his death did not fire .223 cartridges.

Kimble thanked them, hung up, and called Shipley.

“You still out there?”

“Yes, sir. No sign of the cat. Everything’s been peaceful.”

“Listen, I just got a match back on the bullet that killed the cat. It wasn’t fired from Harrington’s gun.”