The Ridge

by Michael Koryta

  Robin nodded. “The Whitman Company Chronicle. Your Sentinel was a rival and eventually the last one standing. They took issue with the controlled voice during some labor disputes. For a while there were two newspapers. The Whitman Company Chronicle became the Whitman Chronicle to hide the obvious ties, as if they could be hidden, but within a few years the Sentinel had rendered it irrelevant.”

  “That’s what I recalled. You do have the Chronicle on microfilm?”

  “A lot of them. Some have been lost to history, I think, but we’ve got most of them.” She frowned at the photographs he had in the open folder. “Who are you looking for?”

  “Just names.”

  “Why are so many labeled NO?”

  That one hung him up for a second, because he didn’t understand the truth well enough to lie about it.

  “I guess I wasn’t the only person who didn’t know who they were,” he said finally.

  “Okay. So you just want to match pictures? That’s going to take a while. Maybe a very long while.”

  “I’ve got four names, too. Just no dates.”

  “Do you know who they were? What they were involved with?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “How did you get the names, then?”

  Roy thought for a second and then smiled sadly. “It was a hot tip.”

  She gave him a curious look but didn’t push it. “Well, give me the names and I’ll see what I can find. We’ve got pretty good indexing of the company records, so if they had anything to do with the Whitmans, I should be able to generate something.”

  The family archives were housed in a private, locked room at the rear of the library. You couldn’t spend time there without supervision, and you couldn’t check anything out. There was a reason: this collection held the most precious recorded elements of the town’s history. Robin unlocked the door and led Roy into the room, which featured glass cabinets displaying certain historical relics, one long and ornate reading table, and, everywhere you looked, the austere faces of Whitman family members watching from portraits and photographs along the walls. It was not unlike being in Wyatt’s lighthouse.

  “I’ll get you the microfilm and let you start where you like,” Robin said. “Then I can run a search on those names you have. It’s a shame you don’t have a clearer starting point in time. Are there no indications in the photographs?”

  “Well, it’s a work crew of some sort,” Roy said. “Not miners, either. Looks like they’re timber men, probably. Or builders.”

  He set the folder down on the table and rifled through the photographs, pulling out a few as indications. “See, there’s a group of men holding a timber saw, and here we’ve got—”

  “Oh,” Robin said, “they’re building the trestle.”

  Roy turned away from the pictures and looked at her. She smiled in perfect confidence.

  “The one that’s still standing. The wooden one, out west of town?”

  “At Blade Ridge.”

  “That’s right.”

  He looked back down at a photograph of men holding a large log over their shoulders and said, “How in the hell can you be so sure?”

  She laughed. “I’m not clairvoyant. I’ve already been through this routine once. Someone else was researching the trestle itself, and we went through a lot of those old company papers.”

  “Wyatt French?”

  She nodded, indifferent, neither surprised that he knew about this nor sharing the troubled sensations that Roy was feeling.

  “That’s right. He owned most of the property at one time. He was very interested in the history.”

  He certainly seemed to be, Roy thought, and then he said, “Well, that can cut some time down. Maybe I should start with the trestle. I think that makes a lot of sense.”

  “It’s a sad story,” she said, moving toward a row of locked cabinets at the back of the room.

  “I know that the mines didn’t pan out for the company.”

  “I mean the trestle itself,” she said over her shoulder, unlocking a drawer and running her index finger over canisters of microfilm. “A lot of people died while it was being built.”

  “Died how?”

  “Sickness, first. Murder, later.” She withdrew two canisters and said, “This should do it. Should give you a start.”

  “Sickness, first,” Roy echoed, “murder, later?”

  “That’s right. There was some hostility between the company and the laborers. The Whitmans tried to force sick men to work to get their bridge done on time. They got it done, but there was a bit of uprising toward the end. You know, one of the stories that were all too common out here.”

  Labor disputes turned violent were perhaps all too common in eastern Kentucky’s history, but Roy had a feeling that the Blade Ridge story might prove to be a little more unique.

  “I might be wrong,” Robin said, feeding one of the microfilm reels into the reader in the corner of the room, “but I think if you start with the end of 1888 and go through the beginning of 1889 you’ll get a clear idea of it. But who knows if that’s even what you want. I can try some other—”

  “Let me start there. That sounds right. Thank you.”

  “Of course. We’re short-staffed because the students are gone, so if I can leave you to it, that would be a help. Just let me know what else you need.”

  “That’s fine,” Roy said. He wanted to be alone to read this.

  She left the room, and he sat down and snapped on the projector and saw an image of a 124-year-old newspaper. She’d started him in September, and he flipped through the pages quickly, looking for news of the trestle. The style of journalism was opinion stated as fact, and the stories themselves were focused on either braggadocio about the company’s successes or the mundane day-to-day of the mining town life. A local minister missing a service because of illness was front-page news. Obituaries were given prime placement as well, and the phrasing used to describe the deaths was colorful, to say the least. “The Reaper Calls upon Reginald Holmes,” one headline read.

  The dominant figure of the news in Whitman in 1888 was the town’s namesake, Frederick Whitman Jr. His mining investments were just getting under way. In an early October issue, Roy found a match of one of his own photographs. Five men standing with a timber saw, smiles all around. The article announced that work on the trestle over the Marshall River was coming along nicely and would be finished, as promised to investors, by the new year. The next picture featured the bridge’s Boston-bred designer, Alfred H. Tremley, a stern and bespectacled man who seemed quite pleased with the idea that the camera was preserving his image.

  Roy had gotten all the way to late October before he saw another article that gave him pause.

  “Trestle Work Lags as Fever Strikes,” announced a boldface headline. Three days later came the report of a death, and a week after that the news that the construction crew had been quarantined in camps beside the river, no longer allowed to return home. The decision, according to Frederick Whitman Jr., was made to safeguard the health of the townspeople. A short notation at the end of the article indicated that work at the trestle continued, and Whitman remained wedded to his promise of completion by year’s end.

  After the quarantine, the company newspaper stopped reporting on the condition of the crew but continued to follow the trestle itself. On December 19, it was noted that only three bents—Roy understood those to be the bridge supports—had gone up in the past two weeks, and the writer predicted that the opening of the mines by 1889 was in jeopardy.

  The next mention was on December 27, when it was observed—with clear astonishment—that all of the bents were in place and work had begun on the rails. On New Year’s Eve, the entire front page was devoted to the trestle, which was completed as promised. Amidst the proud remarks, a brief comment on the illness:

  The bridge is a testament to endurance, completed despite the fever that infected the crew. Sixteen men were lost.

  It seemed an impossibly shor
t mention for all those lost lives, but Roy understood. The Chronicle was a mouthpiece, nothing more. The reality of the way that bridge had been pushed toward completion despite the ravages of illness was probably quite unflattering to the company. It was in the midst of this era that the Sentinel had been born, and the significance of its name became all the more clear. It was a targeted move to balance the forces of the company. One paper identified itself as the chronicle of the town’s new power structure; the next chose the watchdog approach.

  And now they’re all gone, Roy thought. What happens when you remove the watchdog from the grounds?

  Frederick Whitman Jr. had been the company voice in the Chronicle until December of 1888. By the time the bridge was completed, however, he’d been replaced as spokesman by his younger brother, Roger, who closed out 1888 by boasting that the family had done exactly as promised, spanning the river with rails by year’s end, and plans were made to christen the trestle on New Year’s Day. Roger Whitman was quoted as saying he looked forward to crossing his bridge.

  Roy loaded another canister of microfilm, feeling the familiar and beloved tingle of adrenaline that he’d enjoyed so often while working on a story, and was rewarded almost immediately by the first big news of 1889: true to his word, Roger Whitman had crossed his bridge.

  Once.

  On January 1, Whitman and fifteen assorted executives and investors piled into a single boxcar to celebrate “a glorious new year for the company, the community, and the country.” The locomotive crossed the Marshall River, cleared the trestle, and derailed upon reaching Blade Ridge, where an obstruction had been placed over the tracks. At that point, four men emerged from the woods and opened fire. By the time it was done, eleven of the men aboard the train had been killed. Roger Whitman survived.

  Four men were arrested for the sabotage and murder: John Hamlin, Fred Mortimer, Henry Bates, and Bernard Snell.

  But Wyatt already had those names; they were new only to Roy. The question of whom he’d been searching for in all those photographs remained. Why had so many been dismissed with a NO?

  Investigators of the day had been looking for a man named Silas Vesey, based on an anonymous tip. The arrested men refused to comment on Vesey and said they acted alone. All four, the Sentinel reported, had been involved in the construction of the trestle, believed that the Whitmans had caused death by forcing sick men to work, and readily confessed to their crimes. They hid neither guilt nor motive, and one, Mortimer, explained that Roger Whitman was never intended to be the target of the bullets.

  “We wanted him to live with the price,” Mortimer said. “To see our faces, and to remember who we were and what he’d done. The blood we took is on his hands. It won’t end here.”

  Whitman had no response.

  Justice was swift. In February the four men were found guilty of murder, and in March they were hanged. A hundred operatives from the Pinkerton detective agency joined local police to enforce order on the night of execution. They feared a riot, particularly after Mortimer’s ominous pledge that the vengeance had not reached its end. Nothing happened, though. Nooses drew tight, lungs emptied, hearts stopped, and the violent controversy at Blade Ridge began its move from breaking news to historical footnote.

  Missing from the execution and the trial was Frederick Whitman Jr. It seemed very odd—he had, after all, been the dominant voice in the early stages of the trestle’s construction—but some explanation was offered in a piece that followed the executions. The Chronicle reported that the endeavor at Blade Ridge had put “a powerful strain upon Frederick, and the stress has been temporarily damaging to his well-being. He is in a sanctuary for restoration, and the family and company look forward to his return.”

  The jargon was delicate, but it would have been clear enough to anyone who read it at the time, and it still was. On the day that four of his former employees dangled lifeless at the end of their hanging ropes, Frederick Whitman Jr. had been in an asylum.

  31

  NATHAN SHIPLEY STILL LIVED in the rambling farmhouse that had once belonged to the grandparents who raised him after his father was killed. His mother—nineteen when she had Nathan, twenty when she left town—had been a beautiful girl with a softness for sweet talk and malt liquor, a combination that had brought down many a beautiful girl before. She’d left Sawyer County without a word the same year Ed Shipley returned home from the Marines and joined up with the sheriff’s department. No one had heard of her since. The story was common knowledge in the sheriff’s department, where the Shipley name had long represented two things: courage and tragedy.

  Kimble pulled into the driveway, shut off the engine, and sat for a time, looking at the house. After a few minutes, the door cracked open and Nathan peered out, having heard his visitor arriving, and then Kimble could delay the talk no longer. He did the oddest thing as he left the car—he blessed himself. Kimble had not been in a church for many a Sunday, and even when he had attended he had never been the sort for such gestures, but still he found himself doing it.

  “Hey, there, chief,” Nathan said as Kimble approached. “I just heard.”

  There was a hitch in Kimble’s stride then, but Shipley was watching, so he came on anyhow, no longer sure of how the conversation was going to go. He’d planned to come out here and break the news himself, felt as if in so doing he would be able to read the man well, to gauge whether he was really breaking any news at all.

  “Who called you?”

  “Troy.”

  Damn it. Kimble could have asked him to keep a lid on the news at least for a little while.

  But could he really have? No. Because to ask that such a thing be kept from Shipley would be to disclose his suspicion of Shipley, and then he would need some grounds, and what he had so far, well, it wasn’t the sort of thing that would play well with the sheriff. With anyone.

  “We haven’t lost a man in the line of duty since your father,” Kimble said. He was standing on the porch, just past the front steps, hadn’t closed the distance or approached the door. His hand hung close to his hip.

  “I know it. And if we made that shift change a couple hours later?” Shipley ran a hand over his face, had his eyes screened from sight when he said, “Then it’s like father, like son, chief. And you know the damned thing about it? Would’ve both been due to cats.”

  It took Kimble a moment to understand that, but then he realized it was true. Ed Shipley had run into that fire looking for a cat that he misunderstood to be a person. He’d never run back out.

  “Mind if we have a seat?” Kimble said.

  “Come on in.”

  “If it’s all the same, let’s sit outside. I like to watch the fog come off those hills. You have one hell of a view for it.”

  Shipley gave him a curious look, it being a chill December morning with the threat of snow in the air, but he nodded. “Aren’t many better views in the county,” he said. “Maybe Wyatt’s lighthouse.”

  The reference froze Kimble up. When Shipley said, “Come on in, best view is from the back porch,” Kimble couldn’t say a word, just followed him into the house, which was clean enough but smelled of trapped grime and the ancient sweat of people long departed, the sort of odors you could never clear out of an old home with a mop and Lysol. The place was outfitted the way you’d expect an eighty-year-old’s home to be, but as far as Kimble understood, Shipley had been alone in it for nearly a decade now. The television set in the living room was one of those bulky things mounted into a heavy wooden cabinet, had to be twenty years old at least, and the screen was covered with a thick film of dust.

  They went out to the back porch, which did indeed offer a fine view of the distant mountaintops covered in their trademark smoky fog.

  “Sun’s hardly up,” Shipley said. “But it’s never too early to toast a comrade, is it?”

  “I suppose it never is.”

  Shipley nodded, went inside, and returned with a bottle of Jim Beam. “To Pete Wolverton,” he said, and took
a pull. His hand was trembling. His face was pale and his blue eyes rimmed with dark circles. Kimble thought, He looks like he hasn’t slept in days, but then realized that he himself couldn’t look much better. Hell, Shipley hadn’t slept much in days.

  Shipley passed the bottle to Kimble.

  “To Pete,” Kimble said, and then he tasted the bourbon and found it an unsatisfactory substitute for the morning’s coffee. His stomach roiled, but maybe that wasn’t because of the whiskey. Maybe that was because of what he was thinking of Shipley, who stood there in his jeans and sweatshirt with somber face, looking every bit the same young man in whom Kimble would have once entrusted the future of the entire department. Now he was looking at him as a murder suspect.

  Bound by balance, Ryan O’Patrick had said. Anyone who bargained at Blade Ridge was required to take a life. And Wesley Harrington would have settled no debts for Nathan Shipley. In the end the cat got him, not the bullets. If Shipley had fired the bullets, they had cleared no debts for him. The ghost with the torch, Kimble believed, was not interested in the blood of animals.

  They sat on cold plastic chairs as the breeze blew down off the peaks with frosty teeth, and Kimble said, “Tell me about last night, would you?”

  Shipley blew out a long breath and said, “It wasn’t a fun one.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I don’t like it out there, chief. Don’t hardly feel like myself.”

  “Explain that.”

  “Ever since the accident,” Shipley said. “I just don’t care to be back out there. Get odd memories. You were right about things getting stuck in my head. So I just don’t care much for the place. As for the cougar? If he was out there, I didn’t know it.”

  “Why don’t you care for the place?”

  “Same things I told you before. What I remember compared to what I was told happened, you know? What I remember, it—”