The Ridge
Page 4
“Is he alive?” Audrey asked.
“I don’t know.”
She walked closer, knelt in the wet gravel beside him, and peered inside the car. The roof had been crushed down to the headrest, both airbags had deployed, and the inside of the car was a cloudburst of broken plastic, glass, and fabric. The airbags had left a chalky dust in the air, the smell faintly like gunpowder. Pinned between the steering wheel and the remains of the passenger seat, which had been shoved toward him, was the deputy’s crumpled body. Audrey was just about to speak into the phone again, just about to say that the man looked to be dead, when he moved his head and focused his eyes on hers.
She almost screamed. It was stunning to see him move. She jerked upright and stumbled backward as the operator said, “Ma’am, what do you see?”
“He’s… um… he’s moving,” Audrey said, watching in astonishment as the deputy blinked, narrowed his eyes, and frowned at her and Wes as if he didn’t know what they were doing there and didn’t like seeing them. “He’s alive. I don’t know how, but he’s alive.”
The operator was busy telling her not to try to move him until the paramedics arrived when the deputy reached out of the broken window and placed one white palm on the gravel, dug his fingers in, and tried to pull himself clear.
“Tell him not to move,” Audrey said, but Wes was already leaning forward to help.
“Give a hand,” he shouted to Dustin, who had been one of David’s favorite students and was always capable around the preserve but now stood pale-faced and motionless. Dustin responded to the order, though, leaned down and helped support the deputy’s weight while Wes pulled a pocket knife free, opened the blade, and hacked through the seatbelt, whispering to the deputy to take it easy, not to rush. The whole time the guy was reaching from the wreckage with that one free arm, pulling at the mud and gravel, as if determined to claw out from within the car that should have been his coffin. Wes and Dustin caught him by the shoulders and lifted and then, somehow, he was out of the police car and on his back, breathing and alert.
Audrey hung up the phone. “What happened?” she asked Dustin.
“I think he missed the turn or something. All I know is one second I heard the siren and then the next he was in the trees.”
Dustin’s face looked bloodless, and he was weaving on his feet. She said, “Do you need to sit down?”
“Maybe, yeah.” He fell heavily on his ass in the road, pushing thick dark hair back from his forehead, his chest heaving. “I’ve never seen anything like that.”
“Help’s coming,” she said, patting Dustin’s shoulder. “And it looks as if he’s okay. I can’t believe he’s moving. How is he moving?”
There was blood on the deputy’s face, coming from his nose and his lips, and a crisscrossing of scratches over his forehead and left cheek, but those were the only evident injuries. He was a young, fit man, lean and long, with sandy hair and blue eyes. Being young and fit didn’t allow for escaping an accident like that unscathed, though. He was charmed by unnatural good luck, too, it seemed.
“Lucky,” Audrey said softly, thinking that her husband had died out here in a fall. One misplaced step, one slip, one life extinguished. This deputy had driven into the trees at top speed, demolished the car all around him, and survived.
Don’t think about it like that, she told herself. Stop that. Be grateful.
There was a murmur from the deputy. Audrey looked down again, then saw that his eyes were open and locked on hers.
“You okay?” she said. “You with us? You with us?”
Water dripped out of Wes’s short gray beard and off the brim of his baseball cap as he knelt over the wounded man. Beyond, in the preserve, no more than a hundred feet away, the cats had pressed close to the fences, intrigued. One of the lions gave a low roar, and that got the deputy’s attention. He swung his head up and around to face the cats, and Audrey winced when he moved his neck, sure that his spine had to be at risk. They’d been telling her to keep him still, that he would need a backboard.
“Please don’t move,” she said, and then, seeing how intently he was looking at her cats, she added, “They’re locked up. They won’t hurt you.”
She turned to Dustin. “Go try to calm them, please. The last thing we need is the cats going crazy right now.”
He went off to try to make peace with animals who were already restless from new surroundings and unnatural activity, and Audrey knelt beside Wes, watching the deputy.
“I hit him,” the deputy said.
“What?”
“Tried to miss, but he was right there, and I was going so fast… I tried to miss, I promise you that I did.”
“You didn’t hit anyone. Everyone is fine.”
That seemed distressing to him. He moved his head again, searching the dark woods, and this time his face split into an odd smile, blood on his teeth.
“He made it?”
“You didn’t hit anyone,” Audrey repeated, feeling ill at ease now. Maybe he hadn’t been so unscathed after all. A concussion was likely. Maybe something worse, bleeding on the brain, who knew?
“Light’s out,” the deputy said, staring over her shoulder. Audrey turned and looked up to the hilltop where the lighthouse stood against the weaving bare branches. It was dark, for the first time all day.
“We’ve got an ambulance on the way,” she said. “Just stay down. Please don’t move around. They’ll be here soon.”
“Where were you headed, bud?” Wes asked. “Is something wrong with the cats? Did you get a call about them?”
Blood was dribbling down the deputy’s chin as he shook his head.
“There’s a dead man in the lighthouse,” he said.
6
TEN MINUTES ON DUTY, running on frayed nerves and no sleep, and Kimble had a corpse call. He’d poured a cup of coffee but hadn’t taken a sip yet when he heard the news. Gunshot victim, they said.
“Active shooter?” he asked.
Probable suicide, he was told.
“We know the vic’s name?”
French, they said. Wyatt French. Maybe he remembered—
“Yes,” Kimble said. “I remember Wyatt French.”
He felt cold guilt in the pit of his stomach. All those questions, all that talk about suicide. Why hadn’t he sent someone to check? He’d hoped Wyatt was just drunk, the way he usually was. That last joke, too, the threat that he might just decide to live forever—it had suggested that he wasn’t in too dismal a state of mind. Hadn’t it?
Kimble swallowed some coffee for warmth, kept his face impassive, and, after a moment’s pause, asked that they send Nathan Shipley. He didn’t want to go out there himself, not after the morning call, and Shipley, though young, was one of Kimble’s favorite deputies, quiet and calm and tough. He’d seen worse than a suicide, and he’d be fine out there in charge of the scene.
They dispatched Shipley, only to come back for Kimble a moment later, just as he’d settled behind his desk.
It seemed Kimble’s presence had been requested at the scene.
“By Shipley?”
By the victim, he was told. There was a letter on the front door, asking that for purposes of investigation the case be handed to Kevin W. Kimble. Dispatch thought he’d like to know that.
First the predawn call to his private number, now a letter on the door? What did Wyatt French want from Kimble?
He pulled on a baseball cap and went back out into the rain, tired and confused and wondering what else he could have said, should have said.
What he should have done.
Roy stood outside the lighthouse as darkness gathered and the rain pounded down on him and blood dripped off his palm and into the grass. He felt a tingle in his elbow. That wasn’t good. He’d probably cut right through the nerves in his hand.
Explaining this to the police was going to be a treat. Tell them that a man was dead and Roy’s own blood just happened to be splattered all over the scene? Somehow he had a feeling tha
t wouldn’t go over too smoothly.
Where in the hell were the cops, though? He’d heard a siren that sounded as if it were just below him, but then it had stopped.
The pain in his hand had ebbed away to a dull ache, but he was continuing to drip blood all over his pants. He considered taking off his shirt and wrapping it around the wound, but then he looked through the open door into Wyatt French’s strange living quarters and saw the dishtowels hanging from the stove. It wasn’t as if Wyatt would miss them.
He stepped back inside, feeling an uneasy sensation the moment he reentered, knowing damn well now what waited at the top of those steps. His first stop was the sink, where he ran warm water over his hand until the pain ratcheted up a few levels, and then he switched it to cold, hoping to numb things down. The water mixed with the blood and swirled down the sink. He felt lightheaded watching it, so he looked away and took one of the dishtowels from the stove, soaked it in cold water, and then wrapped it tightly around his palm.
The dizziness was still with him. He blinked and took a few deep breaths and stared around. When he’d first entered, his focus had been on finding Wyatt, but now he had a chance to register the room itself. Wyatt had never finished the walls—two-by-fours climbed like latticework, pink insulation showing between them, no drywall pinning them in. His focus, it seemed, had been on speed as he built. He wanted to get to the top and get that light going. The same one he’d asked Roy to keep on before he’d eaten his gun. The same one Roy had promptly shattered.
Like it matters, he told himself. Like the crazy thing really matters.
He stepped farther into the room, looking at the maps Wyatt had pinned to the exposed wall studs. There were a lot of them, names written across in red ink. Beside the maps, and all around the room, photographs were held in place with thumbtacks. Ancient pictures, sepia-tinted relics of another time, men with old-fashioned mustaches and women standing beside cars with wide running boards. Roy stepped closer, saw that each photograph was labeled. A few with names, but most—almost all of them, it seemed—with one scrawled word: NO.
It was eerie, standing here in the darkened room, a dead man upstairs and all of these faces from times gone by watching him. He shot a glance at the door, wondering again about the police.
One picture caught his eye—more recent, a color shot, and the woman in it was breathtaking. He crossed the room and stared into her crystal eyes and realized he was looking at the booking photograph of Jacqueline Mathis.
What in the hell went on in that man’s head? Roy thought. What was he looking for?
He wanted to see it all better now, but it was dark inside and the light switch by the door did no good. He thought of the popping sound he’d heard when he broke the bulb, that harsh snap. He’d taken the power out. Question was whether it was a blown fuse or a circuit breaker.
The positive side of Wyatt’s sparse home was that it was hard for anything to hide. Roy found the electrical panel easily enough—its metal door stood just over the head of the narrow cot Wyatt had used for a bed, almost as if he’d wanted it as close by as possible while he slept. Roy opened the door and saw that several of the breakers had snapped down. He reset them, and when he tried the light switch at the door again, it worked.
He wandered, studying the old photographs and the maps with the names in red ink, wondering what they meant, wondering what had happened to the police car down below and whether he should head out and take a look, wondering if he’d seriously damaged his hand, wondering why the dead man upstairs had pulled the trigger and why, above all else, he’d had to call Roy before he did it.
To keep the light on. And you broke it. Somewhere, his ghost is shaking his head at you now, Darmus.
His mind was like that, uneasy and adrift, until his eyes focused on a map tacked up just above the small kitchen table. The year was 1965, and there were two names written in red: Joseph Darmus; Lillian Darmus.
The blood seeping from his palm no longer felt warm as it met the damp towel.
It was then that Roy understood the significance of the names written in red ink.
Red was for the dead.
7
THERE WAS A TOUCH OF ICE in the rain by the time Kimble got to Blade Ridge, just enough to sting even as it soaked him. He was hardly the first responder: there was a volunteer fire unit and an ambulance already there, along with what remained of one of the department’s cars. It wasn’t much. Kimble, who’d heard the radio traffic as he neared the scene, knew that Shipley had wrecked but was awake and uninjured. He hadn’t been expecting so much damage.
He paused at the accident scene, watching as they strapped one of his best deputies into a backboard, then went over and put his hand in Shipley’s and squeezed it.
“You all right, brother? You coming back to fight another day with us?”
“Fine,” Shipley said. “Just fine.” But he was clearly shaken by the wreck, his typically cool blue eyes darting all around, taking in the cats on one side of the road and the lighthouse on the other. Bad wrecks were terrifying things, and one in a place like this? Had to be distressing, to say the least.
“Thought there was somebody here,” Shipley told him. “Right in the road. He didn’t move out of my way, so I swerved.”
One of the paramedics caught Kimble’s eye with a little hand motion, then shook his head. There’d been no one in the road. Kimble turned his attention back to Shipley, thinking that he didn’t like the look of the man’s face and eyes now, and when the paramedics told him they had to get on the road, he wasn’t disappointed. He wanted Shipley out of here.
“Make sure he gets a full round of concussion tests,” Kimble said. “He seems out of it.”
“We’ve got good doctors waiting.”
He nodded. “You take care, Nathan,” he called as they slid the deputy into the ambulance. “I’ll be in touch soon.”
Shipley didn’t respond before they swung the doors shut.
Kimble paused briefly at the wreck scene, where a tow truck was arriving, but he didn’t want to get caught in the mill of taking statements about the accident when his interest was in the lighthouse. Another car was responding to the wreck, and he’d let them deal with it. For now, he needed to focus on Wyatt French.
The entire drive out here the phone conversation had played on repeat in his mind, growing darker and more disturbing with each recalled word. He should have done more than just offer up the suicide toll-free line. If he’d done that much, then he’d clearly heard enough to be concerned, and he shouldn’t have settled for so little effort. But there’d been that odd remark about Jacqueline… the knowledge, first of all, that he’d been on his way to see her, and then the warning to be careful with her. After that, he hadn’t wanted to call anyone about Wyatt French. Hadn’t wanted to think about Wyatt French.
How did he know that? he thought as he drove up the steep, slippery drive. How did an unemployed alcoholic know that I was going to see Jacqueline?
He parked outside the fence, and when he got out of the cruiser he saw Roy Darmus, the newspaper reporter, standing in the yard on the other side of the fence. This was the true first responder, the man who’d found the body.
“Interesting that the gate is locked but you’re on the other side, Darmus.”
“I climbed over. Be glad I did, and not some kids. He’s a mess.”
“Yeah?” Kimble studied the padlock, then returned to the cruiser, rooted in the trunk, and came out with a pair of bolt cutters. The gate would need to be opened at some point, and Kimble’s back didn’t make climbing fences any easy task. He snipped through the chain that held the padlock, then swung open the gate.
Below them, the trees were lit with flashing lights from the accident. Darmus, a guy of middling size with salt-and-pepper hair and perpetually intense eyes, waved a hand in their direction.
“What happened down there? I was going to go check, but they’d told me to stay here until someone showed up. Took a while.”
“There are always stories left. I just don’t have a place to tell them at the moment.”
“You think that qualifies as an answer?”
“I was closing up shop at the office today when I got a call from him,” Darmus said. “From Wyatt French. I’d written about the lighthouse when he first built it. I took it at face value, quoted him accurately, didn’t make a joke of it. He said he was building it because the place was dangerous, and I just put that in and let it sit there. I got a lot of eye rolls for that story, but I guess Wyatt appreciated the way I treated it. Him. He started calling me with tips, time to time. Once in a while there was actually some decent information. Most of the time there wasn’t. But today… today he was just frightening. Talking in riddles, breathing hard, saying that he was scared of himself, of what he could do. I wasn’t sure if he was suicidal or homicidal or just drunk. I drove out to see.”
“You wanted to see if he was homicidal?”
“I wanted to see if anyone needed to be worried about him. The answer, clearly, is no. Not anymore.”
“What time was this?”
“Maybe an hour ago.”
So Wyatt had still been alive, and working the phones, long after he’d called Kimble. He’d seen it through almost another day. Hadn’t been willing to let the sun go down, though, hadn’t seen it through another night.
“He talked about my parents,” Darmus said. “I didn’t exactly appreciate that. Then I walk in there and I see he’s got their names on a map. He’s got a lot of names on maps, a lot of old photographs.”
Kimble frowned. “Your parents?”
Darmus nodded, and the usually friendly eyes had a hard sheen to them now. “Yes. The old tosspot suggested that they killed themselves out here. Wanted me to know how brave they were, making a decision like that and leaving a child behind.”