The Ridge

by Michael Koryta

  “There is nothing about you,” he’d told her, “that suggests you are anything but capable. But something else you are, when you go back in that house? You’re alone, Mrs. Mathis. You’re alone.”

  She’d put her hand on his arm, held his eyes, and said, “I’m becoming more aware of that every day, deputy.”

  Then she’d turned and walked inside. That was his first trip to the Mathis house.

  Two weeks later he’d seen her at the Bakehouse, a café three blocks from the department. He liked to walk up there in the morning, clear his head, see the town. The coffee shop looked out on the courthouse where in the spring the lawn was lined with flowering trees, and sipping a coffee nice and slow at a sidewalk table could turn a potentially bad day into a good one, sometimes.

  She was stepping in as he was stepping out on that particular Friday, and there had been an awkward moment of recognition. She smiled, said, “Hello, officer,” and he told her she didn’t have to call him that. She asked what she was supposed to call him then, and he said that his name was Kevin Kimble but most folks called him Kimble.

  “I’ll call you Kevin, if you don’t mind,” she said.

  He didn’t mind.

  He sat at his table outside and she sat inside, and when she left she waved at him and softly said, “Thank you for your compassion, by the way. It helped.”

  Routine took over, and he began his speech again, the one urging her to come down the street with him and make a formal complaint. She held up a hand to stop him and said, “It’s a beautiful morning.”

  After a pause, he nodded and acknowledged that it was.

  “Today I just want to enjoy that. Okay?”

  He told her that it was okay. Told himself not to watch her walk down the street. He was full of useless advice that morning, it seemed.

  It wasn’t long before he determined that her trips to the Bakehouse were consistently Friday mornings. The encounters became weekly, and they lengthened, but not by much. Five minutes, ten, maybe fifteen. Small talk. Weather and town news, mostly. He didn’t ask after her home life. Then one Friday she wore a sleeveless dress, and he saw the bruise on her upper arm. The dress, he thought, worn when the mark could have been covered so easily by a sleeve, was defiance. Or a call for help. Or something torn between the two.

  They spoke again, and he looked at the bruise pointedly, and then he asked her if she was all right. She sipped her coffee, steam rising across her face, and did not answer. That was when Kimble wrote his cell-phone number down and slid it across the table to her and said, like some foolish gunslinger in a black-and-white cowboy picture, “You need help handling anything, I’m one ring away.”

  How ridiculous. How unprofessional.

  How he hoped she would call.

  And then one night she did.

  Kimble was still sitting there on Wyatt French’s bed when his radio squawked, calling him out of the past and into the present with one of the stranger reports he’d heard in his time policing: a cougar was loose.

  Shipley met him at the gates, and his face was pale.

  “Son of a bitch jumped right out,” he said. “One try, right over the top. If I hadn’t been watching it, I wouldn’t have believed it.”

  “All right,” Kimble said. “Put your damn gun away.”

  Shipley looked at him, hesitated, and holstered his sidearm. He kept his palm on it, though.

  “If you’d seen the way that thing could move,” he said, “you’d want yours out, too.”

  Kimble moved away from him and over to Audrey Clark and a wiry, gray-haired man named Wesley Harrington, who held odd-looking weapons in each hand.

  “What in the hell are those?”

  “Air rifles. Shoot tranquilizer darts.”

  “Can you hit him with it?”

  “Sure,” Harrington said. “If he’s five feet away.”

  Kimble looked at Audrey Clark and said, “This is going to be a problem, isn’t it?”

  Clark, who was tall and good-looking but too thin—she’d lost a lot of weight since her husband died, it seemed—said, “Not if it’s handled right.”

  “And how would that be?”

  “Quietly,” she said, and then, when he frowned, “I mean that honestly. That’s not concern for my reputation, that’s concern for getting him back. If you bring twenty people out here with guns and send them into the woods, we won’t have a chance.”

  “Not the way he moves,” Shipley muttered. “Could bring a battalion out here, and they still wouldn’t get him.”

  Kimble shot him a harsh look and then turned back to Audrey Clark.

  “That’s a very dangerous animal,” he said. “We can’t just have it running around wild.”

  “I could point out that he was running around wild to begin with,” she said, “but that’s a waste of time. I want him back, too. More than you do. But I’m telling you, the more people, and the more noise, the worse our chances. The commotion will scare him.”

  “What are you suggesting, then?”

  “I think he’ll come back when he’s hungry,” she said, and Kimble sighed at that, the notion of letting a two-hundred-pound cougar grow hungry not one that appealed to him as a solution. “We’re his home. He’ll come back.”

  “Not here,” Harrington said, and they all looked at him in surprise. He gave an apologetic glance at Audrey Clark and then said, “It’s just… he had a pretty hostile reaction to this place. I don’t know that he’ll come back. In the old preserve, I might have agreed. But not here. Maybe he’s heading back to the old place.”

  Audrey Clark looked as if she wanted to strangle him. Kimble said, “You’re proposing that we go after him, then?”

  Harrington nodded. “Ought to try, at least. I doubt we’ll have much luck, but we ought to try.” He looked up at the gray sky. “And we’ve got a short window to do it. Once it gets full dark… that won’t be a good time to be in the woods with him.”

  “Right,” Kimble said, thinking of a black cat moving in the darkness and suppressing a shiver. “We’ll want to hurry.”

  “Make better time at it if we split up,” Harrington said. “Two by two. Work along the river, maybe, out in the open. See what we can see. I’ll take Audrey and—”

  “Hang on there,” Kimble said, thinking that they had two police on hand and two civilians. “You and I will go down to the river together. Nathan, you hang fairly close, all right? You and Mrs. Clark can check the perimeter, but don’t get far.”

  Having the damned cat out was bad enough; the last thing he needed was someone to be hurt by it. Harrington had the look of capability about him, and Audrey Clark appeared more shaken. He didn’t need her wandering off into the woods at dusk.

  “Let’s go,” he told Harrington, and they set off down the road and for the river as the sun settled in the west, Kimble thinking that he was really beginning to hate this place.

  15

  AUDREY’S THOUGHTS WERE NOT even on Ira as she and Deputy Shipley walked out of the preserve and toward the abandoned, overgrown railroad tracks that formed its southern border. They were on Wes.

  She couldn’t believe the way he was behaving, the things he was saying. The preserve had its share of opponents, people who didn’t understand the need and knew only fear of animals that would never harm them even if they had the chance to do so, and the county sheriff was among them. Now Wes was spouting off about the place as if it were dangerous, and to the sheriff’s deputies, no less.

  “Hey,” Shipley said, bringing her out of her angry fog. “Why don’t we go right, not left?”

  She’d instinctively started to follow the tracks to the left.

  “More open view at the river,” he continued. “We’ll go have a look and then come on back. Like Kimble said, no need to get too far into these woods.”

  “Fine.” She had a tranquilizer gun in her hands, and now she looked into the trees and refocused on Ira. Was he still out there? Had he hung close by, as she predicted,
or had he simply fled? And which option was preferable?

  They turned around and headed toward the river, stepping over jutting timbers and stretches of iron that had once brought trains to these hills in search of fortune. With fortune never found, all that remained were the scraps of what had been laid in its pursuit, covered now by dead grass and brush and, in some cases, even trees. The legacy of the Whitman Company’s efforts at Blade Ridge was becoming obscured by the very nature that it had tried to conquer. Audrey held the air rifle in her hands and swiveled her head left to right, left to right, but something deep within her whispered that it wasn’t worth the effort—Ira was gone, and would not return.

  The deputy, Shipley, had gone on ahead of her, expanding his lead with long-legged strides. She saw that the young man was tapping his gun with his fingers. Every second step, there he went—tap, tap, tap. He seemed to be humming softly, too, the sound trapped in his throat. It was the sort of thing people did to convince themselves they weren’t scared when in fact they were terrified. After David’s death, Audrey had found herself doing the same sort of thing: I’m scared of what my future holds, alone in this house, so I’ll hum a song and that casualness will somehow prove my confidence.

  Shipley was scared, she realized, and then, recalling the moment of Ira’s escape, she didn’t blame him, not one bit. Many visitors—most visitors, maybe—were scared of the cats at first, no matter how indifferent they tried to seem. The animals were incredible predators; there was no denying that. When people came out to see them for the first time, they were dazzled, impressed, and often afraid. Because no human stood a chance against those cats. Not without a gun in hand, at least.

  Tap, tap, tap, went Shipley’s fingers against his weapon.

  He had seen a cat in pure, wild aggression, too. In a way Audrey herself had never seen one before. The tigers had fights, the lions would roar with killer’s rage, but never in her time on the preserve had she seen anything like that. And the leap that he’d made… it was impossible to believe, even after watching it happen. He hadn’t laid his paws on the fence and scrambled to get over, he’d just cleared it with room to spare. Fourteen feet high, and he’d not even required a running start.

  “He’s never been aggressive before,” she said. “What you saw back there… I don’t know how to explain it, but it was an anomaly.”

  “I’m sure that it was,” Shipley said, and his voice was steady, but his head was shifting rapidly from side to side, tracking every shadow, his hand never drifting from his gun. She had the sudden, perverse urge to tell him that Ira could climb trees, could be poised on a branch right now, ready to spring down from above. She could tell him that the cat’s field of vision overlapped like a pair of binoculars, and that he could see six times better in the dark than a human could. David had named him well—Ira was Hebrew for watcher, and the black cat was the definitive watcher, the perfect predator. Fast and strong and blessed with extraordinary vision and sense of smell.

  “This is what you do?” the deputy said.

  She looked up. “Huh?”

  “This is… your life. This is what you do.” He waved a hand back at the tall fences, from which the occasional roar echoed through the trees.

  “That’s right.”

  “Why?” he said, and he sounded genuinely curious. “Why those cats?”

  “Because I love them,” she said, but she suspected she knew what he was thinking about—the way she’d reacted when Ira jumped versus the way Wes had reacted. Wes had been poised; Audrey had been terrified. So was she lying right now? She cared for the cats, certainly, believed in the importance of the rescue center’s mission, but did she love them? Could you possibly have love in a relationship before you had trust? She didn’t think so. Then different words—infatuation, obsession, enchantment—might apply, but without trust? No, love was a long step to take ahead of faith.

  “They’re good with people,” she said hollowly. “Really.”

  The deputy stopped walking, looked at her uneasily, ran a hand over his mouth, and then said, “Maybe we should go back now.”

  “We just started—”

  “Let’s go back while there’s still daylight,” he said, and then he turned and led the way again. This time, those long strides were even faster. Audrey stumbled along trying to keep up, thinking, First Wes, and now even the police? Am I the only one who’s not scared of the dark out here?

  Blade Ridge Road died out in abrupt fashion, no circular dead end that would allow wayward drivers to turn around with ease, just a narrowing of the gravel track until it came right up to the line of shagbark hickories that ran along the top of the ridge. They were tall trees now, seeming to belong to the rest of the forest, but Wesley knew that they’d been cleared once. Probably there wasn’t a tree between this lane and the trestle that was more than eighty years old. That was a good age for most trees, but not out here in the forested hills of eastern Kentucky. With the exception of that small stretch that had been cleared to make way for mining operations that never produced a fruitful yield, the trees at Blade Ridge went back centuries. They’d provided shelter for many cougars in their time, and then white men with guns came along, and though the trees still stood, the cats did not.

  Or so it had been thought. Then Ira arrived, slinking out of the hills with nothing attached to him but legends and myths, and now there was Ira back in the woods again, exiting the very way he’d come in, heavy with the feel of magic.

  Wesley was trying to remember if he’d ever heard a story that even resembled the one which people would now be telling about his own cat. He gave up early, knowing that he wouldn’t find solace in shared sorrow. This escape was unique. What the cat did was almost preternatural. If Ira had somehow climbed the fence, Wesley would be stunned but able to fathom it. If Ira had somehow leaped from the top of the perch, Wesley might have been able to blame his angles, chastise himself for not creating a wider perimeter out from the top platform. Or if the son of a bitch had at least taken a running start…

  But he hadn’t. No, he just leaped out, and Wesley knew in that moment that he could have done so at any time. He’d come to the preserve of his own accord, and now he’d left it. He was not likely to return.

  Wesley and Kimble left the road and pushed through the hickories and walnut trees and began working their way down the slope to the water’s edge. There was a narrow trail of sorts here, and they made the walk in silence, stepping carefully, their footing often lost to shadow as the sun faded.

  “You don’t think he’s coming back,” Kimble said finally. They had reached the riverbank and stood with guns in hand, looking into the darkening woods.

  Wesley was silent.

  “Tell me the truth,” Kimble said. “I’ve got to deal with this, and I want to do it right. For you guys, too. Not just to cover my own ass. I realize this might cause you problems, but I’ve got to deal with it right. Tell me what you think.”

  Wesley looked at him, this tall, broad-shouldered cop who walked with bad posture, canting a little to the left at all times, as though something pained him, and said, “I don’t think he’s coming back, no. Not so long as we’re here.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I don’t think he likes the place.”

  “You’ll forgive me if I say that sounds a little wild.”

  You want to hear something that sounds wild, Wesley thought. I could tell you about the ghost light that passed through here.

  He just shrugged, though. Kimble sighed and rubbed his face with one large hand, then walked to the north, splashing in puddles as he tried to step from rock to rock.

  Not so nimble, Kimble, Wesley thought, and he wanted to laugh, but had the sense that if he got going he might not stop. Darkness was coming, and Ira was out, and while he didn’t know what those things meant, he had an idea that it wasn’t good.

  “I’ll give her the night,” Kimble said finally, stopping and turning back to him. “I can see some log
ic to what she’s saying, that the cat would come back only if he felt safe. Is someone going to be here all night?”

  “Yes. I am.”

  “Just you?”

  “Just me,” Wesley said, and for the first time in his life that idea unsettled him. He tried to cover it by spitting into the river and scanning the low-hanging trees on the other side as if he were searching for the cat.

  “Audrey doesn’t stay with them?”

  “No. That’s a good thing, too. Audrey, she’s never quite developed the trust you need with the cats.”

  “Seemed pretty comfortable to me.”

  “More comfortable than most, of course. She’s great with them so long as there’s a fence between her and the cats. But she won’t go into the cages.”

  “Doesn’t seem like a mistake to me.”

  “If you run this place,” Wesley said, “there are times when you’re going to have to go into the cages. It happens.”

  “You’re saying she can’t handle it without her husband?”

  “She can handle it,” Wesley said. “She’s got me. If she didn’t? Well, then she’d either need to find some faith with the cats or… or find somebody else who does, I guess. But don’t worry about how she’ll hold up to this. Audrey, she’s got steel in her that you can’t see right off. She doesn’t even see it sometimes. But it’s there.”

  “All right. Well, my understanding is that you trapped this cougar once. Can you get him again?”

  Wes didn’t tell him that idea was false. Ira had chosen to join them. He had gone into the trap, yes, but he’d never engaged it. Just sat there and waited for Wesley to do it by hand, daring him, challenging his courage as if it were a test that must be passed before he’d allow himself to be confined.

  Only you were never really confined, Ira, were you?

  “I know what I don’t want,” Kimble continued, “and that’s a bunch of people out here in the dark with guns. My people, or, God forbid, civilians. The potential for a good result in that scenario isn’t high, and the potential for a bad one?”