The Ridge

by Michael Koryta

  He did not know what he should be doing with his day. Everyone else at the paper had completed résumé and cover-letter tasks months ago, and most of them had jobs. That wasn’t an option for Roy. At sixty, he was hardly the commodity a newspaper wanted to add to the staff, but he didn’t want to leave his home anyhow. The newspaper buyout had been larger than most, though it was hardly something to shout about from the rooftops. If he lived with a miser’s eye, he’d be fine. But finances weren’t his concern. Identity was. For almost forty years he’d been Sawyer County’s storyteller. It was a role he cherished, and now it was gone. His own name felt hollow to him if not part of a byline.

  He had one story left, though, one final assignment issued. Wyatt French had asked him to tell it, but Roy’s interest was not in Wyatt French. It was in his parents and all those names that had joined theirs on the maps in the lighthouse.

  One more day at the paper. One more story to work on. He didn’t mind the sound of that at all. He drove to the office as he always had, cutting through the Whitman College campus, beautiful brick and limestone buildings that stretched out where once the mining company houses had been. Mines had built the town, back in the late 1800s. First it had been coal, and then timber, and then there wasn’t anything left to take and the town went back to sleep for a time. Roger Whitman, son of one of the early coal and timber barons, went the Carnegie route in his later years, dispensing his fortune to various philanthropic causes, and one of them—the college—had inadvertently saved the town. Whitman College had grown into a prestigious school, known for liberal arts and environmental sciences, for high academic standards and higher tuition rates. The environmental sciences bit was ironic to anyone who knew the local history. Nobody had pillaged the land with greater ferocity than the Whitman family.

  Roy’s great-grandfather had worked for the timber companies, his grandfather had risen to a position as vice president of one of the town’s only banks, his father had gone to law school at Vanderbilt and spurned top-dollar offers to practice family law in his hometown. At fourteen, Roy had been certain he would be the first Darmus to leave the hills.

  It was easy to be certain of things at fourteen.

  His own house was two blocks past the courthouse and one block from the sheriff’s department, prime location for a reporter. Originally the newspaper offices had been downtown, too, but they’d moved in the 1970s for more space, a larger press, and more loading docks, unaware of the digital death headed their way.

  His keycard was still active, and he went through the employee door and headed for the morgue with his list of names and dates from Wyatt French’s lighthouse. Most of the names went beyond the computer days and would require poring over the dusty bound volumes down in the newspaper’s morgue.

  He wanted caffeine but the coffeepot upstairs was gone for good, so he walked through the pressroom, with its smells of metal and oil and newsprint, and to the break room, where for decades the pressmen had gathered in the wee hours of the morning. He fed a dollar into the vending machine and came away with a Diet Coke, then turned around and ran smack into Rex Schaub, the building’s maintenance supervisor. Rex gave him a cockeyed smile.

  “What are you doing here?” His eyes dropped to Roy’s bandaged hand and he added, “And what the hell happened?”

  “Cut myself on a lightbulb.”

  “Damn. Hey, you know the difference between a lightbulb and a pregnant girlfriend?”

  “What?”

  “You can unscrew the lightbulb.”

  Roy stared at him.

  “Get it?” Rex said. “If you knock your girlfriend up, you can’t—”

  “Brilliant,” Roy said. “Who said that, Ben Franklin? Or is that Twain?”

  Rex grinned. “Look, what are you doing here? Building is closed.”

  “Need to do a few archive searches.”

  Rex’s smile was slipping away. “Roy… the building is closed. I’m not trying to be a dick about it, but nobody is supposed to be in here except the clean-out crew. I should have deactivated all the keycards by now, but I haven’t gotten around to it. The owners gave me real clear instructions, though, that nobody—”

  “The owners can kiss my ass,” Roy snapped. “I’ve spent more than forty years in this building, making money for them. If I want another day in this place, I’m going to take it.”

  Rex, who’d had a gig as a maintenance supervisor for an apartment complex in place within a week of the Sentinel’s closing announcement, dropped his gaze to the reel of cable in his hands.

  “Okay, Roy,” he said. “I get you. Do what you need to do.”

  “Thanks,” Roy said, and walked past him, bristling with anger that had less to do with Rex and more to do with the way they were dismantling the office. He’d known it was going to happen, of course, but seeing it, watching all the artifacts of the newspaper that had been his life scooped up and put into boxes, hit him harder than he’d imagined it would.

  The owners said, the owners said… The owners could go straight to hell. It was more his paper than theirs. He’d spent more waking hours in this building than any other place on earth. Hell, maybe more hours period. He worked long and late and never minded because he loved telling the stories. And those stories, the ones that were developing across Sawyer County at this very moment? What would become of them? Why didn’t anyone think that loss mattered?

  He opened the door to the morgue and slipped inside, back into that narrow room that smelled of dust and old paper. A hundred and twenty-four years of stories.

  He was pretty sure some of them had mattered.

  The morgue was where he’d gotten his professional start—an irony never lost on him—putting together that local-lore column. He’d kept it going over the years, which drove the editors nuts, because it seemed he always vanished into the archives at the exact moment they came looking for him with a shitty assignment. It got to the point where “If you’re looking for Darmus, he’s in the morgue” was a running joke.

  There were microfilm readers, but Roy hated using those. You lost the tactile sense of history that the bound volumes exuded, wide, massive books that had to weigh fifteen or twenty pounds. You could stand in the middle of the morgue and see the ebb and flow of the industry—the date ranges getting progressively smaller as the newspaper economy boomed and the Sentinel added pages and ad circulars, delivering a doorstopper each morning and double that on Sunday. Then the date ranges widened and the papers shrank in more recent years, as declining revenue triggered page cuts.

  He had every name in red ink from Wyatt’s maps. The photographs he hadn’t managed to study before Kimble shut him down. Most of them hadn’t borne names, anyhow. He’d recognized one face—Jacqueline Mathis—and remembered another from her name—Becky Stapp—but it seemed as if ninety percent were anonymous faces from the past. That left him with the red-ink names, and after finding his parents among them, he was awfully curious about the others.

  While his initial plan had been to work forward from the oldest date to the newest, he found himself going directly to the January–March 1965 volume. He’d seen the January 9, 1965, paper a thousand times, had stared at it for countless hours, but it had been several years since his last look. Too many years? You didn’t want to drown in grief, but you needed to remember the dead, too.

  He dropped the bound volume onto the old, scarred desk—it had been the editor’s desk during World War II—opened it, and flipped through the pages until a familiar headline and photograph caught his eye. A single car smashed into the trees amidst a fine dusting of snow. They’d been predicting a big one, but it had never hit. Just a little freezing rain, an inch of powder, and two dead in a one-car accident. Minor storm. Minor.

  Roy ran the back of his hand over his mouth, adjusted the light over the desk, and began to read.

  Two people were killed Saturday night in a single-vehicle crash on Blade Ridge Road in the southwestern reaches of Sawyer County.

  Jose
ph Darmus, 41, and his wife Lillian Darmus, 40, of Whitman, were killed when their 1957 Chevrolet sedan apparently skidded on black ice west of the junction of County Road 200 and Blade Ridge Road, sending the vehicle into a stand of walnut trees. The accident occurred at approximately 8:45

  P.M

  . There were no witnesses. Joseph Darmus was killed on impact, according to police, while Lillian was transported to Sawyer County Hospital and died of massive head trauma a short time later. The couple was driving home from a Whitman Junior High School basketball game in Chambers. Their son, 14-year-old Roy Darmus, was on the bus with his teammates when the accident occurred.

  That was the end of the first article. Simple, straightforward reporting, written late in the night, pushing deadline. Roy flipped to the next day’s edition to read the follow-up piece, which had altered his life when it appeared, guiding him into this very building.

  It led with a quote from Roy about his father: “He was a real good driver. He always said he was going to be the one to teach me how to drive in the snow, because it was dangerous and he didn’t want anything bad to happen to me.”

  Even now, decades removed, Roy felt something thicken in his throat. He looked away from the article. He didn’t need to read it again. He could recite it if he wished.

  Time to get back to the task, back to the story. He knew his parents had died on Blade Ridge Road, but what had sparked Wyatt’s interest in the others?

  He returned to the morgue shelves to find out, began hauling down bound volume after bound volume, and after hours at it he had no more sense of the truth than when he’d begun.

  There were connections between the names on Wyatt French’s maps—some of them, at least—but the parts simply did not fit together to make a whole. Roy had expected something more coherent, even from a mind as admittedly disconnected as Wyatt’s. All the time the old man had spent laboring over the odd list suggested at a linkage that did not appear—at least to Roy’s eyes—to exist.

  At first he thought it was simple: they were victims of car accidents at Blade Ridge. Several others besides his parents qualified for that category.

  That idea, though, vanished as soon as he tracked down one of the names, Sam Fielding, and discovered that he’d been a high-voltage repairman, electrocuted while attempting to repair downed lines in a summer storm.

  That fatality had occurred near Blade Ridge, in the woods west of County Road 200, which was close enough to count, but the nature of the death blew the car-wreck theory out of the water.

  So then Roy shifted, thinking that the man had been looking for any deaths, period, in his strange little pocket of the mountains. Fielding’s case wasn’t unique. In several circumstances, Wyatt had noted deaths that had occurred near Blade Ridge Road. Emphasis on near. Because, as Roy discovered as he went deeper into the county’s history, pulling down volumes that billowed out dust when opened, the pages so stiff and yellowed that you had to turn them with infinite care or the paper would flake into pieces, the accidental deaths were certainly not limited to the road. In 1978, two boys died when they fell from the railroad trestle. In 1975, one woman drowned in a canoeing trip on the Marshall River with a friend. In 1958, a Marine who’d seen tours in Korea and the South Pacific shot himself in the head while deer hunting. That one could have been suicide—newspapers always had masked such stories in ambiguity—but Roy doubted it. In 1922, two men and a woman were trampled to death when a strange and violent panic took hold of their horses.

  All of those names—they were the red-ink names—could be linked by two factors: death and proximity to Blade Ridge. The manner of death, though, those tales of trestle falls and stampeding horses and electrocutions, turned any legitimate concern about the road’s safety into a bizarre raving about… what? Some sort of cursed ground? A karmic disaster zone?

  “What did they mean to you, Wyatt?” he mumbled, staring at the two lists, deciding that he’d wasted enough time on this endeavor. “Why did they matter?”

  It would be impossible to say. And, Roy reminded himself, the old man had been losing his mind there toward the end. Yesterday’s ravings were a clear indication of that.

  I’m getting scared of the dark. I’m getting scared of what I could do in the dark.

  Roy was halfway to the morgue door when that thought slipped into his mind, and when it did, he stopped walking and turned to look at the rows of old newspaper volumes as if they’d just told him something.

  Hell, maybe they had.

  He’d been looking for parallels, the same as Wyatt ostensibly had. For connective tissue between the names, and coming up empty.

  Except for one thing. They’d all taken place at night. Without exception. Every fatality Wyatt had recorded from Blade Ridge’s lengthy history had occurred when it was…

  “Dark,” Roy said aloud.

  12

  KIMBLE WANTED TO FOCUS ON Wyatt French, but the sheriff interrupted him in midmorning by entering with Nathan Shipley and saying they needed to have a talk about the accident.

  Shipley’s cruiser was beyond any hope, so far gone that they just had it towed directly to the salvage yard where the sensitive equipment could be removed, not even bothering with a body shop. Shipley himself, however, had emerged from the terrible wreck with a few minor abrasions and bruises.

  “Sore,” he told Kimble and the sheriff when he sat down. “I’m sore as hell, but considering… well, it really could have been bad.”

  “I saw the car, son,” Sheriff Troy Black said. “Bad isn’t the word. Damn good thing I always see that this department has quality insurance.”

  The implication being that they might operate without insurance if not for his savvy management. Kimble rolled his eyes, and Shipley saw it and cracked a small smile. The department was of a unanimous opinion on “Sheriff Troy,” as he insisted on being called. He excelled at politicking, handled the department’s public face well enough, but when it came to actual casework he’d gone past the point of being a broad-assed desk jockey and become an almost laughable figurehead. He insisted on wearing custom-made, chocolate-brown cowboy hats with his badge affixed to the crown, he was a partner in a horse farm that had yet to produce anything better than a dead-last finisher in a small-time race, he talked like he’d just fallen off a hay wagon, and everyone in the department knew damn well that when it came to investigative work, Kimble ran the show. That was fine by Kimble—he had autonomy within the department, and he also had Troy out there doing all the work that Kimble would never have been any good at. Kimble didn’t have to deal with the mayor’s office or the county council or campaigns or oversee the jail. The system in place in Sawyer County worked well; Troy glad-handed his way around town, keeping the public satisfied, and Kimble and his team got the policing done.

  “Yes, son, it was a mighty bad wreck,” Troy continued. “That cruiser is totaled, you know. Less than a year old.”

  “Like you said, it’s a good thing we have quality insurance,” Nathan agreed, and now it was Kimble’s turn to hide a grin.

  “It surely is. My understanding is that you were well aware that the ten-zero was a probable suicide, that there was no shootin’ or stabbin’ in progress. My understanding is also that you were driving like Barney Oldfield when you flipped that car.”

  Kimble had not the faintest idea who Barney Oldfield was, and it was clear that Shipley didn’t either, but they both kept quiet. Troy let his young deputy muse on things for a moment and then said, “Just need you to get the lead out of that foot, kid. But we also need to talk about your report.”

  “My report.”

  “That’s right. I just read through it. Seems to me we could have had one hell of a problem on our hands. You say you almost hit someone out there?”

  Shipley’s face went uncertain. He parted his lips, closed them again, then tilted his head and said, “I thought there was someone in the road, sir. I was positive that there was a man in the road. I was running lights and siren and coming
fast, as you said, maybe too fast, but I saw this guy in the rain and I swerved and…” He spread his hands. “That’s all. A mistake, I guess. Thought I saw something in the road. Tried to swerve to adjust.”

  Troy looked puzzled. “So there wasn’t anyone? I was of the impression that you damn near killed a man.”

  “So was I,” Shipley said. “But everyone else seems to disagree.”

  Troy turned to Kimble. “You were out there.”

  “Quite a bit later, but yes.”

  “Is he right? Were the witnesses in agreement that he just plowed the car into the trees?”

  “There was only one witness, a young guy who works out there. I think he heard more than he actually saw, though. It’s quite certain that Shipley didn’t hit anybody, and as for the circumstances of the wreck, there’s nobody to say what happened except him.”

  “Well, that’s a load off. I looked at that report and was thinking lawsuit. You remember that college professor asshole who sued us two years ago?”

  The college professor asshole had been T-boned by a deputy doing eighty miles per hour through a residential neighborhood in response to a possible burglary in progress that turned out to be a man trying to get into his own home after locking the keys inside. Kimble found it a fair enough complaint, but it would hardly do to share that sentiment with the sheriff. He just nodded.

  “I don’t think we’ve got anything to worry about.”

  “That’s good to hear. Tell you what, Shipley. You take a day off, all right?”

  “I’m good to work.”

  “Not until tomorrow. Make sure there are no lingering effects. With the pictures I saw of that cruiser, there sure as hell might be.”

  “Yes, sir. I’m sorry about the car.”

  Troy nodded, then stood and looked at Kimble. “You got that suicide report wrapped yet?”

  “Clearing up the details.”

  “Good man. I’m not disappointed that we can shut that frigging lighthouse down for good. Had enough of a hassle over it when the cat people started to complain. Tell you what, crazy runs in the water out there. You got a lighthouse in the woods, and sixty damn lions right across the street? Would have been nice if they’d all crossed the river and ended up in Jasper County, you ask me.”