The Ridge (24 page)

“Why?”

“
Why?
Because whoever was out there all those years ago still is. He’s not a boy who just wanders on. I don’t guess that he can. Wyatt told me that much. Something else Wyatt told me—once you belong to him, you can see him. Always. And, my friend, I do not
ever
want to see that man again.”

“Wyatt could always see this… ghost?”

“That’s right. He said the lighthouse kept him pinned down there under the trestle. Couldn’t wander the ridge. But he’s out there. And when you owe him a debt, he sees that it’s paid. I spent twenty years in a cell for settling accounts.”

“I’ve got a friend who wrecked his car out there,” Kimble said. “Wrecked it bad, walked away unhurt. He talked about seeing a man in the road. Talked about a light after his accident. I’m starting to think I should be worried about him.”

“Buddy,” Ryan O’Patrick said, “you should be
real
worried about him.”

“Well, then what can I
do?
”

“Wyatt found the only two solutions that there are,” O’Patrick said. “You can tell your boy to keep himself away from people at night. That seems to work for a time, if you believed Wyatt, and I do. He’d put some study in.”

“There’s no way Wyatt kept himself alone at night for twenty years.”

“No? Think about it—you ever see Wyatt French in town at night?”

He actually had not, Kimble realized. Wyatt was a daytime drunk. That was one of the reasons he stood out.

“That worked for him for long enough, I guess,” O’Patrick said. “But you can’t hide from the promise you’ve made. That’s what Wyatt was bound to find out. There is no hiding from
what’s in yourself. The closer he got to the end of his time, the stronger that pull was going to be. I expect he was feeling that.”

“You said there were two solutions.”

“Sure. The second one is a bullet in the brain. You promised to take a life. You didn’t promise whose it would be.”

T
HE WAITER HAD JUST PLACED
a thick steak and a fresh beer in front of Roy Darmus, and when his phone rang, he didn’t have much interest in answering it. The number was unfamiliar, and though he’d made a practice of answering every call during his reporting days, whatever news this might carry wasn’t going to roll out of the
Sentinel
’s presses. He ignored it, cut off a wedge of New York strip, and looked out the window at the town square, where a few stray snow flurries were drifting down from that web of Christmas lights that fanned out from the courthouse lawn.

Going to be a strange Christmas,
he thought.
What does someone do on a holiday if he’s not working?

Roy had always worked Christmas Day. Nobody else wanted to—they wanted to be with their families. Having no kids waiting at home, Roy had been happy enough to take double-time pay and maintain his own tradition, working at the news desk. This year, though, he’d have to find something to do.

There had been a time when family looked like a possibility. He’d gotten married when he was thirty, to a beautiful blonde
named Sarah. She was fresh out of graduate school in Lexington and filled with journalistic ambition, and theirs had been a newsroom romance.

In the end, though, Sarah’s talent and ambition outgrew him, and he didn’t fault her for it. They’d always talked of leaving together, going to New York or Los Angeles or, hell, leaving the country, working on a book together. To Roy, those had been idle fantasies. To Sarah, they’d been plans. He realized when they separated how dangerous it was to allow someone to think you had a shared concept of the future when in fact you didn’t.

When she got the job in London, she’d been certain he’d go with her. Everyone had been. Except Roy.

He’d told her that Sawyer County was home. She was astonished. What about all those big stories they were going to tell, the ones that mattered?

He said he found plenty that mattered right here in the mountains.

She took it as a rejection of her—he didn’t have any family, and how could anyone possibly be so attached to a town, so rooted to a spot in the earth? He didn’t know how it was possible, he just knew that it was true, and that he was grateful for it. This place was home.

He was thinking of the way she could dance, how gracefully she moved, and trying to remember when the last time he had danced was when the phone rang again. Same unknown number. This time he answered.

“Hello?”

“Darmus?”

It was Kevin Kimble. Only he didn’t sound so good. Roy swallowed his steak, took a sip of beer, and said, “You’ve been thinking on that list.”

“I’ve been doing more than thinking. I just interviewed O’Patrick.”

Roy pushed back from the table. “What did he tell you?”

“It’s a story to be told in person, no doubt about that. But listen—you were talking about those old pictures. And about the names that went back so far you couldn’t find them in the newspapers.”

“Yes.”

“That idea you had, something in the college newspaper, or—”

“The Whitman Company paper. The college has the archives.”

“Well, if you think there’s something there, please try to find it.”

“All right,” Roy said, watching his reflection in the window, snow flurries swirling beneath the orbs of the street lamps outside, and then, “Kimble, what are you expecting me to find?”

“I’m not sure,” Kimble said. “But it might involve a fire. A torch. A lantern. I don’t know, some kind of light.”

Roy couldn’t get any words out in response to that.

“Can you look?” Kimble said. He sounded plaintive. No, it went beyond that. He sounded desperate.

“Yes,” Roy said. “I can look.”

The cats were stirring, growls and sharp roars splintering what had been a quiet night. It had taken Audrey hours to fall asleep, and she fought against consciousness now, clinging to soft, sweet darkness, but the sounds didn’t relent, and eventually her eyelids dragged up despite her desires. It was dim in the trailer, with only the light from one corner floor lamp. Audrey squeezed her eyes shut again, still not fully awake, but then a new sound registered: rattling metal.

They were going at the fences.

This time her eyelids snapped open, and now sleep was far from her. She sat up abruptly, a blanket sliding from her shoulders
onto the floor. There was no mistaking the sound—fences all over the preserve were rattling, rippling, and the cats continued to roar.

They’re trying to get out,
she thought.
Please, no, don’t let them get out…

She stood and jammed her feet into the boots that lay beside the couch, then pulled on a jacket and ran down the hall and jerked open the door.

“Stop it!” she shouted. “Stop!”

Her first answer was a resounding roar from one of the male lions, a sound so powerful she took a step back, actually considering shutting the door. Then she saw them, though, and the initial fear faded to fascination.

They weren’t lunging at the fences, trying to tear through them, as she’d feared. They were simply standing against them, up on their hind legs, bracing their front paws against the fences.

Every single one.

“What are you doing?” she whispered, as if expecting an answer. The sounds she had heard were more than sixty pairs of paws landing against chain link, every cat rising. For what?

She found herself wishing for David. She wanted him to see this. To tell her what it meant. David or Wes, someone who understood these animals better than she did, that was what she needed.

The voice she was hearing, though, didn’t belong to David or Wes but to her sister. That morning phone call after the nightmare, Ellen telling her to abandon the preserve, near hysteria in her voice.

Audrey watched the cats and felt the flush of adrenaline that had caught her when she heard them banging against the fences fade out to a cold, damp fear.

One thing you should always remember when you’re out here at night,
David had told her years ago,
is that they can see in the dark
six times better than a human. Think about that—
six times better.
So if they seem focused on something you don’t see, pay attention.

She’d laughed and told him that half the cats passed time by staring intently at nothing even in the daylight.

You’re the one who thinks they’re staring at nothing,
he’d said, none of his usual humor evident.
Maybe you’re wrong.

She stepped outside hesitantly, taking a flashlight with her, and called for the police officer.

“Hello? Deputy Shipley?”

Silence except for the cats. She looked at her watch and saw that it was past two. Shipley would be gone. Who was the other one? Wolverton.

“Deputy Wolverton? Can you come here, please?”

She was out in the preserve now, and in the cage at her side Larkin gave a low growl. The lynx was
literally
at her side, too, not at her feet where she belonged but stretched out to full length, bringing her head level with Audrey’s waist. Audrey stared at the cat, called for Wolverton again, and received no answer.

Some security,
she thought, trying to mask fear as bitterness.
They were supposed to be here to help me, not scare the shit out of me.

She took a step farther out and was just ready to shout for him again when she saw the blue light.

It was well into the woods, back where the ground gave way to steep stone walls, and it looked like some sort of flame. She watched it spark and flicker, then looked back and realized that every single cat was watching the light.

Call for help,
she thought, but she didn’t move. She couldn’t take her eyes away from it. That cold, dancing glow was enchanting.

Numbing.

Jafar erupted with a harsh snarl then, and the sound jarred her back into the moment. She swung the flashlight around and fastened the beam on the spotted leopard.

“Easy,” she said. “Chill out, buddy.”

He looked at her but did not drop down to all fours. None of them did.

She swung the flashlight back out into the woods, toward the blue flame.

“Hello?”

There was no answer.

Has to be the police,
she thought.
He’s got some sort of special flashlight.

That wasn’t a flashlight, though. It was a flame.

There was no smoke in the air. No smoke, no crackle of fire, just that unmistakable flame.

She moved toward it despite herself, swinging the flashlight around, the beam tracing the trees and fences, catching eerie reflections when it hit on the eyes of the various cats that were watching her.

Go back inside,
she told herself.
Go back inside.

But she couldn’t. If something was wrong, she needed to know. The police were gone, and the cats were anxious, and there was one person left to deal with it: her.

The wind blew along in a sudden gust that had brittle edges of December cold. Above her, branches knocked hollowly off one another, and one tree emitted a long, whining creak that seemed directed at her, seemed plaintive.

The blue light was moving toward her.

She stood where she was, and the cats fell silent but did not change position, every one of them watching the woods.

I want your eyes,
she thought.
Just for a minute. Let me see in the dark like you, just for long enough to know what’s out there.

But all she could see was the silhouetted trees and the glimmering blue flame.

“Who’s there?” she called, and then she began to walk toward it, her own flashlight now a moving glow. The blue light seemed
to have stopped between the crest of the ridge and the edge of the preserve. She wouldn’t go far. Just out past the cages, far enough to see, far enough to be heard. It was Wolverton, had to be. He just couldn’t hear her. With those gusts of northern wind pushing the trees and the cats roaring, it would be hard to hear her.

And hard to see a flashlight, Audrey? He can’t see a flashlight?

Maybe he was being silent for a reason. Maybe he was pursuing the source of that blue light himself, and the last thing he wanted was for her to come bumbling along, shouting and shining a flashlight and—

When the cat growled on her left, she wasn’t immediately concerned. She was used to walking past growling animals, had just come out in the darkness to be greeted by a lion’s roar. It registered slowly—far too slowly—that she was past the enclosures, and no cats were on her left.

No cats
should
be on her left.

She stopped walking, a sense of inevitable disaster descending over her, a soldier hearing the click of a land mine at his feet.

Ira
.

There was another growl, a deep, warning note, and it was very near. The blue light ahead of her was forgotten now, irrelevant. All that mattered was this sound at her side and how to respond.

Move slowly,
she told herself.
You have to move slowly.
She swung the flashlight to her left, the beam gliding over the trees like headlights coming around a curve, and found the black cat no more than ten feet away.