The Ridge

“Can we get Ira back?” Audrey asked.

“Ira’s gone, I’d say. I’ll put a trap out there, but the way he took off didn’t seem to indicate he had plans for a return.”

“I still can’t believe he did that. What scared him so much? He was terrified.”

“Audrey? Go on home. Get some sleep. I’ll make sure the cats are safe.”

“Maybe I should stay here tonight instead of you.”

“Why?”

“Well, we’ve never seen anything like this before!”

“And you’re more qualified to deal with that than I am?”

“I’m not saying that. But it’s my preserve, my responsibility, so…”

“Audrey.” Wes shook his head.

“It’s my responsibility,” she repeated.

“No,” he said mildly. “It is not. When you and David hired me, you made me the preserve manager, and one of the stipulations was that I live on site. I believe it is my responsibility. I take that seriously. Now, it’s been a long day. Hard on everyone. The cats, you, me.”

“I know.”

“So let’s not get to tangling with each other, okay? Let’s not do that.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’ll be here tonight, and I’ll make sure everything is fine,” he said. “Like I always have, Audrey. Every night since I’ve worked for you.”

“I know you will, Wes. I’m sorry for being bitchy about what you told the police. I’m just… I guess I’m just scared of what will come next.”

He looked away from her and out at the rows of glittering eyes in the night and said, “That seems to be a consensus.”

16

ROY SAT IN A BACK CORNER BOOTH at Roman’s Tavern and waited for Kimble with a mixture of apprehension and curiosity. The chief deputy’s insistence on talking with him was interesting, because it suggested that more than a lecture was at hand. If anger was driving Kimble, they wouldn’t have recessed to a local pub. There was a reason that this conversation was happening outside the sheriff’s department, and Roy had a feeling that reason was named Jacqueline Mathis.

He’d been waiting for about ten minutes when Kimble stepped inside with a folder in his hands. He paused and scanned the room and then nodded when Roy lifted a finger to catch his attention. Most of the bars in downtown Whitman were avoided like the plague by locals unless it was summer, winter, or spring break. Roman’s, on the other hand, had managed to create a perfect delineation over the years—the kids went upstairs, where the bartenders offered specials on terrible shots and massive speakers loomed in every corner, and anybody over thirty stayed downstairs, tucked into scarred wooden booths or on backless stools at a small, shadowed bar. Now, in the heart of winter break and on a weeknight, the place was nearly empty. Kimble sat down across from Roy, and when the waitress asked what he’d like, he said, “A glass of… um, just a Budweiser. Thanks.”

She left, and Roy said, “So are you going to arrest me?”

“Don’t laugh, old-timer. I could. You were tampering with a crime scene.”

“Technically, I think I was just observing it.”

Kimble said, “You’ve spent some time on those names, haven’t you?”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because if you went through the effort of swiping them from the lighthouse, then you’d check them out. So? What did you find?”

Roy hesitated. The waitress returned with their drinks, and he took a long swallow of his beer and said, “You weren’t down there tonight because of names on a map, Kimble. What’s up?”

“Unrelated matter.”

“Really? Blade Ridge is a hotspot for local law enforcement needs?”

Kimble looked at him with an expression that was torn between resentment and resignation, then tugged his department baseball cap off and ran a hand through his sandy hair. Emotion didn’t often show on Kimble’s face, but tonight the weariness had leaked through.

“One of the cats got out,” he said.

“There’s a tiger loose out there?”

“Cougar,” Kimble said, and sighed. He accepted the beer that was dropped on the table, then lifted the cold glass to his forehead as if it were a scalding summer day and not a December night. “The black one.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“I look like I’m laughing? Frigging thing jumped right over a fourteen-foot fence, with one of my deputies watching.”

“I remember when they caught that cat,” Roy said. “I’d written probably ten stories over the years about black panther sightings around here, and ignored maybe a hundred more tips. Then word got out that they’d caught one, and I didn’t believe it, but I went out to check. Ended up putting the picture of it front page and above the fold. Wire services ran it all over the country. Made CNN and even the BBC.”

“Good as you are at this sort of game, Mr. Darmus,” Kimble said, “I’ve played a few of them myself, and I haven’t forgotten that I’m not here to give you information. It’s the other way around. Tell me—what did you find in that lighthouse?”

“Nothing but the names on the maps.”

“And you checked them out?”

Roy gave a hesitant nod. “In the newspaper’s morgue, yeah.”

“What did you find?”

“All accident victims. Is there some connection? Surely is. They all died close to Blade Ridge. But it’s too haphazard to make any sense. Fourteen people have died in the general area. Some on the road, some in the woods, some in the river. If that had happened last year, okay, it’s indicative of a problem. Or even in the last decade. But it ranges from David Clark’s fall off the trestle to people being killed by their horses in 1927. Fourteen deaths sounds like a lot until you spread it out over eighty or ninety years.”

“Why was he using maps? Any ideas?”

“I would have to see them again to be sure, but my suspicion is that he was charting the locations of the deaths.”

Kimble nodded. “You said you wanted to see the place in the dark. Why?”

“Everyone who died out there died in the dark.”

“At night?”

“That’s right.”

Kimble frowned. “It’s a spooky place at night, I’ll admit that. Shit, my best deputy is gun-shy about it. Now, maybe that’s the cougar, I don’t know.” Kimble took a drink of his beer, seeming not to enjoy the taste, and said, “What did Wyatt tell you about me and Jacqueline Mathis?”

Now came the real reason for this meeting. Kimble’s anger at the mention of her name in the lighthouse ran deep. Interesting.

“Not much,” Roy said, “and that’s the truth. He started out by raving about what the mountains could tell me if they could talk. Then he made the remark about my folks. Now, a lot of years have passed, but still…”

“It upset you.”

“Of course it did. When he started complimenting the bravery of their decision, and how hard it must have been, with the child at home, I was getting a little hot under the collar, yes. He hung up before I could really get going on that, though. Now as for you? All he said about you was that he hoped we’d work together on telling the story.”

“What story?”

“His, I suppose. The one the mountain could tell if it could talk? Hell, I don’t know. But he said he was counting on the two of us, and then he told me that you make drives up to see Jacqueline Mathis.”

Kimble tried to hide the bristle with another swallow of beer. It didn’t work; his eyes had gone cold and angry. Roy said, “Why did that matter to him? Any idea?”

“I don’t even understand how he knew about it,” Kimble said. “It’s nobody’s damn business. I go up there because… because there’s nobody else who will. She’s alone, Mr. Darmus. And yes, she shot me, but it was because of that bastard husband and a lot of confusion. If that prick hadn’t been beating her up, there would never have been a gun in her hands, and when I came in she was still in shock and he was still breathing and it was…”

“What?” Roy said.

“It was pitch black,” Kimble said thoughtfully. “There’d been a bad storm that night. Power was out all over the county. I remember that when I pulled into the driveway I could still hear thunder on the other side of the mountains.”

“Maybe that’s why Wyatt latched on to her story, then,” Roy said. “The man had one hell of an interest in darkness. Does it make sense? Of course not. Does a lighthouse in the woods make sense, though?”

Kimble gave a nod of acknowledgment, and then seemed to hesitate. He finally said, “Listen, Mr. Darmus—”

“Would you please call me Roy? Or better yet, just Darmus? I’ve worked around police for forty years, and when I start hearing politeness come out of their mouths, I know I’m getting old.”

Kimble smiled. “All right, Darmus. You muckraking son of a bitch.”

Roy laughed. “There you go, there you go.”

Kimble turned serious again and said, “I wanted to apologize for the way I ran you out of there yesterday. My temper got away from me.”

“Not a problem,” Roy said. “You know what’s funny, though? Both of our tempers got away from us that day. Why? Because Wyatt French knew just what buttons to push. Telling me that my parents made a brave decision on the day they died in an accident, that was a sharp call. Cruel, maybe, but sharp. It got a reaction. And then he poked you pretty good with Jacqueline Mathis.”

“He sure did. Wonder why?”

“Well, he seemed to want our attention. He got it, didn’t he? We’re sitting down together now, talking about him and the artifacts he left behind, instead of just moving on through the night minding our own affairs.”

After a long pause, Kimble picked up the folder he’d brought in with him and slid it over the table.

“Speaking of the artifacts he left behind—these are copies of the photographs he had on the walls.”

Roy opened the folder, saw the browning images, most featuring lanky men with harsh expressions and tools in their hands. With a few exceptions, they all seemed to be from the distant past, and from a specific group of men. Laborers on some unknown project.

“Why does he have so many labeled NO?” Roy asked.

“I haven’t the faintest idea. Most of them are that way, but there are ten with names. I’ve made the list there.”

“I see it.” Roy was scanning the names.

“Any chance you could help me figure out who they were, exactly? I know what three of them did. I don’t need any more information on O’Patrick, Estes, or… Mathis.”

Roy looked up and met his eyes. “All right. I’ll see what I can do. What did you find on O’Patrick and Estes?”

“No connection to Blade Ridge.”

There was more there. Roy frowned and said, “Come on, Kimble.”

Kimble sighed. “They both killed people. In different ways, in different decades, in different places. I don’t know how in the hell Wyatt discovered them, or why he kept their pictures, but that’s the story.”

“And Jacqueline,” Roy said. “So of the ten here, you already know that three were murderers.”

“That’s right.”

“If these other seven prove to—”

“If they prove to be, I won’t be surprised. Murder seemed to fascinate Wyatt. I’m trying to understand why. You can help me by telling me about them.”

“Why do you care, Kimble? It was a suicide.”

Kimble drained the rest of his beer.

“Wasn’t it?” Roy said, the first time any other possibility had crossed through his mind. He’d seen the corpse, had seen the gun in the dead man’s lap. But guns could be placed in a way to suggest suicide. Kimble would be well aware of the forensic response to the scene by now, and maybe there was something in it that Roy hadn’t anticipated.

“He did a lot of talking about how I would investigate this,” Kimble said slowly. “When he called me that morning, he kept talking about the differences between suicide and homicide. Made the outright suggestion that someone could be compelled to kill himself by another, and then it shouldn’t be considered a suicide at all.”

Roy was astonished. He said, “You think somebody else is involved in this?”

“I have no idea. But it’s my job to find out. And listen—you had an inordinate amount of time alone at that scene before I reached you. Would have been shorter, but Shipley flipped his cruiser.”

Roy held up his hands, palms out. “I didn’t tamper.”

Kimble gave him a measured stare, then said, “You’d understand why I might be skeptical of that, considering the stunt you pulled with the notepad.”

“I was walking around that crazy place and saw the names of my own parents written on one of those maps. Forgive me for a bit of curiosity.”

“I understand curiosity. I also understand that I gave you a direct order, asked you to turn over the notes you’d taken, and you gave me a handful of blank pages, then chose that time to mention Jacqueline and take my mind away. Not a bad play on your part, and it’s my fault for falling for it, but if you came across other things of interest in that place, I need to know.”

“All I left with was the names.”

“You didn’t find any cameras?”

“Cameras?”

“That’s right.”

“No, I did not.”

“A question of timing that I need answered: when you busted the bulb, that tripped the breakers and knocked out the power, right?”

“Yeah. I flipped the breakers back so I could see my way around to stop the bleeding.” He held up his bandaged hand.

“All right. How long was the power out?”

“Hell, I don’t know. Ten minutes? I’m not certain.”

“You heard the sirens, then heard the wreck. That’s what you told me yesterday. Correct?”

“Correct. I was going to go down to check it out, but your dispatcher was emphatic that I remain where I was.”

Kimble mulled on that, staring at the wood paneling above Roy’s head, and then refocused his gaze and said, “So when the wreck took place, when you heard the sounds of it, was any light on?”

It was a puzzling question. Roy thought about it, wanting to be sure he had it right, and then shook his head.

“Power was out. I went back in after I heard the accident. Found the electrical panel, flipped the breakers.”

Kimble was silent. Roy tilted his head and said, “Why does that matter?”

“Maybe it doesn’t. My deputy, though… he isn’t the sort who’d just shoot off a road and into the trees.”

“I thought the same of my father. It happens.”

“Quite often, out there.”

Roy waved a hand at the waitress, signaling for another beer. Kimble shook her off, his empty bottle already pushed to the side.

“Shipley—that’s the deputy who was in the wreck, the one who was there with me today—swears he saw a man in the road. Then some kind of blue light. You never left the lighthouse after you called in the body?”

“No.”

“What about the light? He had a spotlight in there, too. You use that, thinking it was a flashlight, maybe?”

“No. I didn’t see any spotlight. All I did was flip the breakers back on so I could see my way around the downstairs. I made sure not to touch the switch that fed the main light, either.”

Kimble nodded, then tapped the folder between them. “Let me know what you get. You’ll have better luck than me. All that local history, it’s your bailiwick.”

“Hell, it seems somebody read my column.”

“Everyone makes mistakes.”

Roy grinned. “So I get to help an investigation, eh?”

“You get to look up some history, that’s all. You can probably find that sort of information a lot faster than I can.”

“Reassuring news to the locals who rely on your protection, I’m sure. I’ll do what I can. Though I don’t know what the gain could be.”

“Let me worry about the gain. And keep it quiet, okay? Otherwise I might be inspired to remember your behavior at the crime scene in a different light.”

“The threats begin. Didn’t your mother ever teach you that you catch more flies with honey?”

“My mother liked cop shows,” Kimble said, and then he slid out of the booth and walked away. When he pushed open the door Roy could see the dark night beyond, and the twinkling Christmas lights strung from the courthouse and out to the light poles across the street, a cheerful white glow against the blackness. Then the door swung shut, and he was gone.

Roy looked down at the folder Kimble had left, opened it, and stared at the century-old pictures, marred by the single scrawled word.

No.

No.

No.

It seemed as if Wyatt French had been looking for someone.

17

THE DECEMBER NIGHT WAS cloudless and cold, the rain replaced by a steady, biting wind, but Kimble ignored his car and walked from the tavern back to the sheriff’s department, breathing deeply of the frigid air, hoping it would clear his head.

It didn’t.

There were too many questions. There was also the cause of death, as reported by the coroner: suicide. Case closed.

So let it go, he told himself. Get back to work on things that can help the living.

But he wanted to know about Jacqueline. How French had known her, and why she mattered to him. It would be hard for him to move forward with that question unanswered, and Wyatt was long past his question-answering days. Jacqueline Mathis, however, was not.

He took up the phone, dialed the Kentucky state women’s prison, identified himself, and asked for a check on Jacqueline’s visitation logs. Had she ever been visited by a Wyatt French?

It took a few keystrokes before the voice on the other end of the line had an answer.

“Yes, sir. He came by in late October.”

“This October?”

“Affirmative. October thirtieth.”

Six weeks before he put the gun barrel in his mouth.

“Any other visits?” Kimble asked.

“Negative. He was a one-shot guest. Don’t see too many of those except for lawyers or journalists.”

“He was neither,” Kimble said, and then he thanked the man and hung up the phone feeling far worse than he had before. What had taken an elderly, suicidal alcoholic to visit Jacqueline Mathis? And what had they discussed?

Wyatt French couldn’t tell him anymore. Jacqueline still could.

It was just past two in the morning when the cougar screamed.

Wesley slept with his bedroom window cracked, even on the harshest nights of winter, so he could hear what was happening with the cats. He knew any species by sound, but guessing the individual cat was next to impossible. Then it came again, a keening pitch he’d heard before but only in the mountains of the West, where such cats roamed wild and always had, and he knew the precise animal.

Ira.

Wesley swung out of the bed and onto his feet, reaching for the flashlight and rifle that he had placed at hand before going to sleep tonight. With Ira loose, it seemed prudent. He’d never use the gun unless he had no other alternative, but the black cat was the kind that could put you in that situation swiftly.

By the time he reached the door the other cats were into the fray, roars echoing through the woods. Ira had sounded the first alarm, but now the rest had joined the chorus.

He came back after all, Wesley thought, amazed. Maybe he actually went into that trap.

He came out of the trailer barefoot, wearing nothing but the old gym shorts he’d slept in. The gravel bit into his feet but he ran ahead anyhow, ran in the direction of the trap he’d constructed for the cougar, out near the overgrown tracks that ran through the woods south of the preserve. The cat was still screaming, and Wesley didn’t like that. There should be no way it could have gotten injured in the trap, but it was screaming all the same, and—

The gunshot brought him to a stunned halt.

A rifle had just been fired. There was no mistaking it.

Shooting at the cats, he thought, and there was wild, black rage in him. If someone is shooting at my cats, I will kill him, and I won’t need a gun to do it.

Another shot, closer, and for the first time Wesley recognized the possibility that he was the target. The bullet had passed close, just over his left shoulder. He turned the flashlight off, and as the world returned to darkness there was the crack of yet another gunshot and the anguished bellow of one of the tigers just behind him.

A hit. The son of a bitch had hit one of the cats.

Wesley got back to his feet, screaming, and ran toward the tree line. He got past the occupied cages and opened fire blindly into the woods. He knew that there were no cats in his line, and that was his only concern. There were only three cartridges in the huge Remington Model 798 that he held, and he put all three of them into the trees. When the last shot had been fired, he could hear the sound of someone running through the woods, crashing through the timber. Wesley could not pursue, though—a cat had been shot.

He found the flashlight where he’d dropped it in the gravel and turned it back on and searched the darkness for the wounded animal.

It was Kino. The tiger was trying to fight through the fence, trying to escape this place of rescue that had suddenly turned dangerous on him. In the pale white glow of the flashlight beam Wesley could see a wound bubbling with blood. The tiger’s left shoulder was broken, so he could not stand without keeping his right foreleg on the ground, which left him attempting to chew through the fence instead of using his paws.

“Kino, buddy, relax,” Wesley said. His voice was shaking. “You got to relax, buddy, I can fix this, I can fix this.”

But could he? The bullet had penetrated deeply. That the tiger was still up at all was astonishing.

“We’ll fix this,” Wesley said again, and then he set the empty rifle down beside the fence and ran back to the trailer, his bare feet leaving streaks of blood on the gravel.

Inside the trailer, he fumbled a ketamine-filled syringe onto one of the six-foot poles they used to tranquilize the cats. Tranquilizing a wounded animal could be deadly, but he’d have to do it to have any hope of stopping the bleeding and addressing the wound. If he could get the bleeding stopped, he could call for a veterinarian—there was one in Whitman who helped them regularly—and maybe Kino could be saved.

He considered making the call now, getting the vet on his way, but decided that the loss of time was too dangerous. The first priority had to be getting the cat down and the bleeding stopped.

They had a dart rifle but he trusted the pole syringes more, particularly in the dark, and the cat was close to the fence. He’d be able to reach him.

Back outside he ran, the pole in one hand and the flashlight in the other. All around cats were roaring or growling or hissing. Somewhere out there in the darkness, Ira was loose.

Who would have done this? Wesley thought. What sick, evil son of a whore would have done this?

When he reached Kino’s cage, he saw with dismay that the cat had returned to the center of his enclosure. He was still trying to stand. Each time he tried the left leg collapsed and he dropped drunkenly into the dirt.

Wesley looked at the pole in his hand and back at the cat inside, now far from the fence. He’d have to go in. It was that or return for the dart rifle, but that would waste more time and—

Kino tried to rise again, and this time he let out an agonized cry, and that made Wesley’s decision. There was no time. He opened the combination lock on the gate—every lock in the facility had the same combination, set to Audrey and David’s wedding anniversary date—and removed the chain. Kino, thankfully, was so antisocial that he had his own enclosure, leaving no other cats to deal with.

“Easy, buddy,” he called, and then he removed the cap from the syringe, opened the gate, and stepped inside, his breath fogging in the cold night air.

The tiger roared. Tried to roar. The powerful sound died into a rasp and blood ran out of his mouth and onto his muzzle. Wesley Harrington, more than four decades devoted to these beautiful cats, felt the black rage again.

I will find whoever did this and tear his heart from his chest, kill him with my hands…

“Easy, Kino,” he murmured. “Easy.”

He was close now, about five feet away. Within range of the pole, but it would be a stretch, and he didn’t want to be off-balance. Another step, then. Two more. He needed to get this in where it would count, and he knew this cat and the cat knew him and there would be no problem with this, no problem at—

He’d just pressed the syringe to Kino’s rib cage when the tiger lunged. It was difficult for the cat—obscenely difficult, considering that Wesley had carefully approached from his left side, his wounded side, knowing that if the tiger did make aggressive movements, it would be harder for him to go left than right.

It was hard. His left foreleg twisted uselessly, shattered bone rolling in the shoulder socket, fresh blood pouring free, as he pushed off the ground entirely with his hind legs. For one second they were facing each other, the tiger’s lips peeled back to expose massive, bloodstained teeth and enraged eyes that glittered in the flashlight glow. Wesley saw the right paw rising, saw it coming, and even in the second before it hit him he was more dazzled than terrified. What an incredible show of power. This cat was dying, but he had risen up one last time, risen bold and brave and—

The impact caught him in the chest and threw him back toward the fence. The pole syringe and flashlight fell from his hands and he felt searing warmth and then he was down on his back and the dark trees wove overhead in the endless breeze, tendrils of fog drifting through the fences and out into the woods.

It had not been a full-strength blow. Far from it. A tiger did not need to use full strength, or even half strength, to kill a man.

Wesley got his chin onto his chest and looked down and saw the source of the terrible warmth that engulfed him. Kino had torn him open. In one swift strike, the cat had laid Wesley open from midchest to abdomen. The blood pulsed and pooled around him and he was glad that it was dark and he couldn’t see the wound any better.

Should’ve used the gun, he thought stupidly. Not even the dart gun—the real one. Should’ve just ended his misery. Because that cat is dying, and he is scared, and he knows that it was a human that did it.

Kino was up again, moving again. Coming toward Wesley. He let out a bellow, and Wesley, who knew more about cats than he did about people, understood. The cat was not coming to finish the job. The cat was sorry.

“I know,” Wesley said, or tried to say, but his tongue was leaden in his mouth and his jaw seemed locked. “Not you, Kino. Not your fault. You were scared. We were both scared.”

The cat’s noise had changed, shifting from the roars of agony and fear to the softer chuffing, the sound of friendship, of love, and Wesley could see that Kino was trying to reach him. Not to strike again, not to do harm. The tiger didn’t want to kill him, never had. It was scared, that was all, and an animal of such tremendous size and strength could kill quite accidentally when it was scared.

Kino fell again. The white on his muzzle was stained dark with blood. He tried to stand and couldn’t. Wesley said, “Not your fault, Kino. Not your fault.”

Still the cat tried to rise. Wesley dug his fingers into the grass and the dirt and dragged himself. Parts of him seemed to be trailing behind, but he did not look back. The tiger had gotten so close; all Wesley had to do was close the gap.

He reached him and got his hand up, laid it on the side of the cat’s massive head. The tiger chuffed again, softer, and nuzzled against the hand. Wesley tried to scratch his ears, but it was hard to make his fingers work.

The tiger turned from him then, faced the woods, and growled. Wesley looked in the same direction, and that was when he saw the blue light. It flickered through the darkness, a thin blue flame that seemed to move on its own, a dancing orb in the black night.

“Who’s there?” Wesley tried to call, but he didn’t have much voice anymore.

The blue light came on toward him, and Kino growled again, and now he had support, every cat in the preserve joining the chorus, standing at attention. Across from Kino’s cage, illuminated in the moonlight, Wesley could see that two of the white tigers were on their hind legs, forepaws resting against the fence, snarling into the night. The blue light retreated, flickering in and out of the trees.

That’s him, Wesley thought. That’s the bastard who did this. If I had the rifle right now I could get him. I could hit him from here, so long as he kept holding that light.

But the rifle was outside the cage, and Wesley wasn’t going anywhere. The man with the light wasn’t coming on, though, and after a time Wesley realized that he was scared of the cats.

Kino seemed to know it, too, and though he growled again, he lowered his head, dropped his chin onto Wesley’s thigh. His large eyes regarded Wesley sorrowfully.

“Not your fault, Kino,” Wesley said. “He did it to me, not you. It was his fault. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

The cat’s head lolled down onto the ground but his eyes were still open, his breath coming in anguished gasps.

“I’ll be fine,” Wesley told him. “Don’t you worry about me. I’ll be fine.”

Take him first, he prayed silently, take this cat first, because he will understand when I am gone, and I do not want him to know that he killed me, because that will hurt him. So take him first, and Lord, take him soon.

“You’re a good cat,” he said from deep in his throat, his lips thick, impossible to move. “You’re a good boy.”

Then he couldn’t even try to talk anymore, and they lay there together in the dirt, Wesley keeping his hand against the tiger’s fur and leaning his head against the same deadly paw that had struck him in the darkness. Out in the woods, the blue light continued to glow, but it came no closer. The wind blew cold and constant, but Wesley was warm there in his own blood and against the tiger’s fur. He was warm enough.

Kino died first. Wesley Harrington’s final thoughts were of thanks.

18

KIMBLE HAD BEEN POLICING IN Sawyer County for twenty-one years now, and in that time he thought he’d seen about every manner of death. Homicides, suicides, car wrecks, electrocutions, fires—you name it, he’d seen it.

Except for a man killed by a tiger.

Somehow, he blamed Wyatt French. He’d been on the highway for ten minutes, headed for the women’s prison, when the call came. There was an uneasy moment when the ring of the phone inside the darkened car as the countryside slid soundlessly past created a sense of déjà vu so strong he was certain that he’d look down and find the call was coming from Wyatt again.

Instead, it was his dispatcher, but as she detailed the scene and its location it felt as if it had all developed at Wyatt’s hand anyhow. Kimble found out that two deputies were already en route. Pete Wolverton, a veteran, always a good man in a messy situation, and Nathan Shipley, who’d been close to the preserve already, making his own morning drive to go back out and see if they’d had any luck trapping the black cat. Apparently they had not.

Kimble said that he’d be there as soon as he could, and then he turned around and put on his lights and drove back toward the mountains.

You can put another one on the board, Kimble thought. One more dead man at Blade Ridge, Wyatt. I’ll add him to your maps.

The glass at the top of the lighthouse glittered in early-morning sun when he arrived. The wind was still and there were birds singing in the trees and one ambitious woodpecker at work somewhere up the hill. Cold, with that December chill, but beautiful. It seemed like a spot where you’d want to stop and spend some time, right up until you noticed the crime-scene tape.

When Kimble arrived, he learned that he’d beaten Audrey Clark to the scene, and he was glad of that. The fewer civilians around, the better, for his first look, and right now he had only one: the kid who’d discovered the body. His name was Dustin Hall, and though he said he was twenty-four, he looked about fourteen. With thick dark hair that needed a cut and glasses with bent frames, he had the appearance of someone likely to need rescue from the inside of a gym locker. The kid was still worked up, crying and blubbering, and though Pete Wolverton was hardly known for his soothing qualities, Kimble asked him to calm the witness down so he could look over the death scene without distraction.

“I’ll show it to you, chief,” Nathan Shipley said. They’d just gone far enough to fall out of earshot of Wolverton and Hall when Shipley looked at Kimble and added, under his breath, “Do you believe this? I was worried about the one who got out. Harrington was killed by one who stayed in, though.”

“I wish I’d posted someone out here last night,” Kimble said. “I should have.”

Shipley fell silent then, probably remembering the way he’d turned down Kimble’s request.

“There’s something wrong with this place,” he said. “I really think that—”

“Just show me the scene, Shipley.”

The way Shipley told it, the kid, Dustin Hall, had arrived for the morning feedings, found himself alone on the property, and gone in search of Harrington, who was always up and at work by the time Hall arrived. He first checked the trailer, found it empty but with the door open, and then ventured into the preserve. He found Harrington inside one of the cages, torn damn near in half, with a dead tiger at his side.

It was an ugly scene. The first thing Kimble thought of was a corpse from a pit-bull killing many years ago. That dog had to put in some time and effort to finish the job. The tiger, it appeared, had needed one swipe.

He went into the cage and crouched down and looked at both bodies. The tiger had been shot just behind the shoulder. There was a high-caliber rifle in the dead man’s hand, his stiff fingers still on the trigger guard.

“That thing on the pole, it’s a syringe,” Shipley was saying. “Looks like he was trying to drug the cat when he came in, but he had the rifle with him just in case, you know?”

Kimble didn’t say anything, his eyes following the blood trail back from the dead man. It seemed he’d dragged himself about ten feet after suffering the wound. Toward the cat instead of toward the gate. That was damned curious. Why would he have tried to close the gap?

“Tell you something, these damned cats are killing machines,” Shipley said. “When we were out here last night, I thought, Someone is going to get hurt. That’s just what I thought. And then this poor bastard gets killed. I don’t understand why anyone is allowed to have animals like this outside a zoo. It’s a dangerous place, and that’s not even counting the—”

“Shipley?” Kimble said. “Shut up for a minute, all right? Just shut up.”

He was looking at the dead man’s eyes as if they might tell him something. It was odd, the way the victim had fallen. Curled up against the cat, almost, but there was no way the killing wound could have been inflicted from that angle. So had the cat tried to come over and finish the job and then fallen dead almost exactly as he reached the man? It didn’t make sense. Unless the poor son of a bitch had been coming toward the cat in the end.

“I’m guessing Mr. Harrington didn’t have any luck with the missing cougar before he found his way here,” Kimble said.

“No. It appears he set up a trap out by the old railroad tracks, but it hasn’t been touched. That’s not good, because this guy was the only person who was able to get him in a cage to begin with.”

“No,” Kimble said, looking back down at the body. “Not good.”

Audrey was usually at the preserve no later than eight, but today she’d been delayed by a call from her sister, who’d awoken at three in the morning from a terrible nightmare, one that was hard to recall in detail but somehow left the overwhelming sense that it was time for Audrey to give up the preserve.

This wasn’t a new sentiment, but it was a new delivery, and one that incensed Audrey. Her older sister had been campaigning for her to abandon the rescue center from nearly the moment the minister had finished David’s eulogy. While Audrey understood and appreciated her concern, she didn’t need any hysterical talk of prophetic nightmares. Not now, not the way things had been going the past few days. It was too much, and she told Ellen that in no uncertain terms. She was committed to the preserve, and if Ellen would shut the hell up about it and support her instead of arguing with her, it would be great.

Afterward, standing in the shower trying to purge the argument with hot water and deep breaths, she felt bad in the way you could only when you understood the place someone was coming from. Ellen had always had a bossy streak, yes, but being in charge wasn’t the issue here. Loving her sister was. Audrey leaned her head against the cool tile of the shower as the room filled with steam and thought of her family, all of them living their practical, ordered lives in Louisville while their once most practical and ordered member, Audrey, drove to the middle of nowhere each morning to feed chunks of bloody meat to cats with paws the size of her head.

Maybe they were entitled to their concern.

She stepped out of the shower and wrapped a towel around her body, which was so thin, too thin. For a time after David’s death she’d been able to con herself into the idea that losing a few pounds was never a bad thing. No creature alive was more predisposed to fall for that con than a woman, after all. It was when five pounds turned to fifteen and then to twenty that she knew it needed to be dealt with. She’d used fatigue as an excuse for a lack of appetite, but fatigue didn’t keep you from avoiding the dinner table. Memories of sharing that table with your late husband did.

She’d been doing better lately, though. Five pounds back in the last month. All you needed to know about appetite you could learn from a lion.

She was thinking that, and smiling, when the phone rang again. She almost ignored it, certain that it would be Ellen again, perhaps calling to apologize, perhaps not. Then she gave in just enough to check the caller ID and saw that it wasn’t Ellen but Dustin Hall.

She picked up, and thirty seconds later, that snapping dismissal of her sister’s nightmare seemed a dangerous thing.

Wesley Harrington was dead.

Wes had been killed by one of the cats.

She made the drive to the preserve in a horrible déjà vu daze. Back to Blade Ridge Road, back to a place where a good man lay dead in his own blood.

The police were there when she arrived. Two cars, an ambulance, and somebody’s pickup truck. She asked to see Wesley, demanded it, but they said nobody but police and his family could see him.

“I am his family!”

It wasn’t true, though. The cats were his family.

There were three deputies standing around watching her, and two of them were the pair who’d been on hand yesterday. Kimble and Shipley. Shipley, who’d been so nervous around the cats, who’d worried about being out in the woods when the sun went down, seemed calmer today, his blue eyes meeting her gaze without difficulty. The new one was a balding guy with sharp eyes who looked as if he wanted to arrest everyone now and sort it out later. Or not. He introduced himself as Pete Wolverton.

“What happened?” she said. “What happened?”

“One of the cats got him.”

“Ira,” she said.

“Is Ira the name of a tiger?” Wolverton asked.

She blinked, refocused. “No. Wait, what? He was killed by a tiger?”

“It was Kino,” Dustin called, face pale, eyes ringed by dark, puffy bags. “It was Kino, Audrey.”

“He went in the cage with Kino in the middle of the night?” she said.

Kimble stepped forward then, took her gently by the arm, and guided her from the others. They walked along until they came to Jafar’s cage. The leopard rose at the sight of her and jogged over, just as he always did. Waited with his face close to the fence, wanting her to reach in and scratch his ears, just as she always did. This time she hesitated.

“Seems like something happened in the middle of the night,” Kimble was saying in a gentle voice. “He went into the cage with a syringe.”

Jafar growled, and Kimble pivoted away from the cage and moved his hand toward his gun.

“He just wants attention,” Audrey said, and then she reached in and scratched Jafar’s head, the big cat preening, delighted. Kimble watched apprehensively, and she had a feeling he was thinking about what he’d just seen in Kino’s cage. She was imagining it herself.

“He went in the cage barefoot,” Kimble said. “Seems to imply there was some sort of chaos or problem.”

Audrey slipped her hand back through the fencing, remembering the way Wes had talked about the place being different at night, remembering the way she’d chastised him for his dire warnings. She leaned against the fence, feeling sick, and Jafar reached up and braced his front legs on the fence so that he was standing with his head close to hers. He licked her ear.

“He was barefoot?” Audrey said. Wes always had his boots on. She would have sworn he slept in boots.

“Yes. And he entered the cage with a rifle and some sort of a pole with a needle on it. A syringe.”

Something had gone wrong. The cat had been sick, or injured. That would have explained the rush into the night. If something had been wrong with Kino, that would explain everything.

“Was the tiger hurt?”

“Beyond the gunshot wound?”

She closed her eyes, and he said, “Sorry. I know they’re very important to you. Beyond the gunshot wound, I see no sign of injury. Now, I’m not a vet. Obviously, the syringe suggests something was wrong with the cat. What it was, I can’t say. There’s no obvious injury, though. Could he have wanted to sedate the animal just from a behavioral standpoint?”

“Behavioral?” Audrey felt Jafar’s rough tongue on her neck, then opened her eyes and moved away from the fence.

“Yeah. If it was, you know, acting up. Really going wild, for whatever reason. Might he have tried to sedate it then?”

“Wes hated to sedate cats except under extraordinary circumstances.”

“Well,” Kimble said, “it seems there must have been something extraordinary going on last night. I’ve got to warn you, Mrs. Clark—I think you’re likely to have some trouble over this.”

“Trouble?”

His face was grave, but he nodded. “It’s an accidental death. We’ll be clear on that. I’m in charge of the report, and I promise you that we will be clear on that. But you have to take the long view—you’ve got a man dead on this property, killed by one of your cats, and you’ve got another cat missing. People are going to react to that situation. You’re going to need to be ready.”

She stared at him, hearing the words and processing them but unable to attach any real meaning. All she could think of was Wes, running barefoot into the night with a rifle and a pole syringe. What had gone wrong?

“When I say be ready,” Kimble continued, “I mean not just for the public reaction, but for a lot of tough questions. One of the toughest: will you be able to deal with the missing cougar?”

“That will be a tough question,” she agreed, her voice numb and distant. Kimble looked at her and shook his head, unhappy.

“Is there someone you can go to for help? Do you know anyone who specializes in this sort of animal?”

“Yes,” she said. “Wesley Harrington.”

Kimble didn’t say anything. She looked away from him and up at the mountains and felt her mouth go dry and chalky. She tried to remember the trick she’d devised for herself to get through the hardest days: imagining her emotions being carefully folded and placed into a tight box and tucked away in some never-opened closet, the way she’d handled all of David’s clothes after the funeral.

Strength, she told herself, you’ve got to show strength. Go out and find that damn cat, bring him back, and then you can grieve for Wes. Grieve for Kino. Grieve for David again, hell, grieve for yourself. You’re entitled to that. But first you have to find that cat.

“Mrs. Clark?” Kimble said. “Is there anyone who can help? Anyone who knows about these cats?”

She looked him straight in the eye. “That would be me.”

Kimble regarded her with no quality of judgment. “Can you find him?”

No, she thought. She was picturing the sleek black cat, so silent, so strange. No, they could not find Ira. That was even more implausible, somehow, than the idea that Wesley had been killed by Kino.

“We’ll have to,” she said.

19

ROY WAS LOST IN THOUGHT when he approached the employee entrance of the Sentinel that morning. A harsh electronic buzz finally shattered those distractions and brought him into the moment. He had just waved his keycard in front of the receiver. No green light, no soft chime of acceptance. Instead, the loud buzz and a flashing red light.

He passed the card over the receiver a second time, even though he knew.

Rex Schaub had deactivated his keycard. Shut him down. The Sentinel office doors would not open for him again.

He stepped back and stared up at the silent limestone building, his home for so many years, and then, as if he simply could not understand, he reached out and tried again, and again.

Red light.

Red light.

He could hear banging near the other side of the building, and after circling around, he saw that the loading dock doors were up. The crew was hauling out office furniture and piling it inside a pair of large panel vans that had been backed up to the docks. Rex Schaub was supervising, but Roy didn’t recognize anyone else. Those who were gutting his home were nameless, faceless sorts. Roy hated them on principle, but he appreciated this much: they’d left the loading dock open. He waited until they deposited a load in the truck and returned to the building, and then he followed, slipping into the pressroom, the massive machinery taking shape from shadows. He had no idea what a press like this was worth. It had been a big deal when they’d added it because the thing could print color pages on the inside, a first in the Sentinel’s history. Was there even a market for such equipment, or did it go to scrap now?

Your entire life, headed for scrap, Roy thought. Not even the dusty pages remain for you—you’ll never make it that far. The day of the dusty pages is done.

He stopped at the door to the morgue, realizing that this might be it for him. The last time in the building, the last perusal of all those pages of newsprint. Thanks to Kimble—and Wyatt—he had one last assignment, one last Sawyer County story to tell. But when he left the newspaper today… well, that might be it. The clean-out crew would work its way down to the morgue eventually. The building would soon enough be a hollowed-out corpse, and then the property would be sold, the structure torn down or converted into something else, and all that would remain of the Sawyer County Sentinel was the impact of the stories it had told.

He sat down with his notebook, where he’d written the names from Wyatt’s photographs in a column. He’d start with those, the known quantities being far easier to trace, and then deal with the mysterious old photographs, trying to put names where Wyatt had put only NO. That would not be an easy task.

Kimble had told him the names were likely to belong to murderers, which meant they were likely to be in the old index—murder in Sawyer County generally qualified as big news. Tracing some of the older cases back might be tricky, but the more recent ones should move quickly enough. He didn’t need to know any more about Jacqueline Mathis, and Kimble had already found out the significance of Ryan O’Patrick and Adam Estes.

Roy frowned as he looked at the list. Estes. That name snagged on something in his brain, troubled him for no reason that he could articulate.

Adam Estes. Where had he just seen that? It was down here, in the morgue. He was sure of that. But the only reading he’d done here was confirming Wyatt’s list of accident victims.

“The drowned girl,” he said. That’s where he’d seen it. While reading about a red-ink name, Jenna Jerden. In 1975, Jerden had drowned in a canoeing accident in the Marshall River, trying to clear the swift eddies around the trestle in the dark. She hadn’t been alone. Her boyfriend had survived. Adam Estes.

He found the right volume, tracked down the story, and there it was. While Jerden had drowned among the rocks and dark water, her boyfriend had made it to shore, then gone for help. It was a long run to the nearest phone from Blade Ridge in 1975, though, and the help that finally came arrived far too late. The Sentinel commended the man on his futile efforts, while including a police quote that reprimanded the couple for attempting to canoe the unfamiliar and often dangerous river in the dark. The survivor was Adam Estes, thirty-three, of Whitman.

In 1975, Adam Estes had survived an accident at Blade Ridge that claimed another life.

In 1976, he’d killed a man.

“They can’t all be like that,” Roy said. There was no way.

It was noon by the time Kimble left the cat preserve. The scene had been processed, the body removed, the photographs taken. When he spoke to the coroner, the man said, “Damned unlucky spot these past few days, isn’t it?”

It sure was, Kimble agreed. It sure was.

He then said that in addition to the confirmed cause of death for Wesley Harrington, he would need an examination conducted on the tiger.

The coroner said “You want us to do what?”

Kimble explained it again, patiently. It didn’t appear that the bullet had come out of the cat. There was an entry wound but no exit wound, as if the shoulder bone had stopped it. He wanted the bullet.

Just due diligence, he said.

But he was thinking about more than due diligence. He was thinking about the size of the entry wound and about the range from which Wesley Harrington would have fired his high-caliber rifle. They did not match his expectation. Kimble found it patently obvious who had killed the man—the tiger. But he wasn’t so sure about who had killed the tiger.

He didn’t like the situation at the cat preserve at all, and when he left Shipley and Wolverton at the scene, he had private instructions for them that went beyond what he’d told Audrey Clark their purpose was, hunting for the missing cougar. While they were searching for signs of the cat, he also wanted them searching for signs of a human. Particularly, he said, shell casings.

“You think someone else shot that cat?” Shipley said. “The rifle was in that man’s hand. The brass was right there inside the gate.”

“I know it was. And when the coroner gives me the bullet and we find out that it came from his gun, we can close the case. Until we have that confirmation, though? It’s an active investigation, Shipley. Treat it like one.”

He left them then, resumed the drive he’d been trying to make seven hours earlier, and now there was even more on his mind than there had been then, and all of it was bad, and all of it went back to Blade Ridge.

It was the first time Kimble had ever visited her in the afternoon, but Jacqueline Mathis showed no trace of surprise.

“We’ve got to stop bumping into each other like this,” she said, smiling. The line seemed to hurt her, though, and he understood. It was what she’d said one Friday morning at the Bakehouse, when it had become far too clear that their accidental encounters were anything but accidental. What she’d said on a bright spring morning when she was a free woman, living in a beautiful old farmhouse with a view of the mountains, young and gorgeous and far from any idea of prison.

“I’m not visiting,” he said. “I’m working.”

“Working?”

“That’s right. I’ve got some questions. It worked out that I was coming by, otherwise I’d have just made a phone call, but I figured…”

He let the lies stop there. Kimble tried hard to be as honest as any man born to sin could be, but he’d told his share of lies, enough to know that they were pointless when neither you nor the recipient believed them.

“But I figured I’d rather talk in person,” he finished.

“I’m always glad to see you. And the way you left the other day… well, I felt bad about it. It was as if you didn’t like the idea that I’m going to get back out.”

I’m going to get back out. Yes, she was. He stared at her and felt an ache along his back, down near the scar.

“You said you had questions?” she prompted when the silence had gone on too long and sat too heavy in the room.

“Yeah,” he said. “Just a few. I doubt you’ll be able to help, but I had to try. I’m working a suicide, trying to find someone to come forward and deal with the dead man’s property, and I’m not finding anyone. Your name was written down in his things.”

“Who was it?”

“His name was Wyatt French.”

She gave it a few seconds. Shook her head.

“I don’t know anyone by that name.”

Kimble said, “I honestly don’t remember you lying to me before.”

She closed her eyes and let out a deep breath. “You’re playing games with the truth yourself.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Really? You already know that he came to see me. You didn’t want to admit that, though, so you waited to see if I’d tell you. But I’m the only liar?”

He thought that over and nodded. “Fine. We’re both lying. We haven’t done that before, have we? Even in the worst of it, Jacqueline, have you ever lied to me?”

“No.”

“Then let’s hold that pattern. Yes, I know that Wyatt visited you a couple of months ago. Now he’s dead. I’d like to know what you talked about.”

She said, “No, you would not.”

He frowned. “Jacqueline? What’s the story?”

She looked more uncomfortable than he’d ever seen her, more shaken.

“He’s dead?”

“That’s right. Shot himself in the mouth.”

She closed her eyes again.

Kimble leaned forward. “Please, Jacqueline. I want to know why he came to see you. Why he had your picture up in his damned lighthouse. Why he—”

“He had my picture up?” Now her eyes were open again.

“That’s right. Along with dozens of others. Many of whom… many of whom I didn’t recognize.”

A lie again. No, just a change of the truth he’d been about to tell. At the last instant he’d decided not to tell her that she’d shared wall space with photographs of other killers.

“He killed himself,” she said. The words came out slowly, as if she were carefully considering the idea.

“It appears that way, yes.”

She shook her head. “Sad.”

“Why did he come here, Jacqueline? How did you know him?”

She thought about it, frowning. While she thought, she wet her lips. He watched her tongue glide out, tracing the curve of her lips, and then, when she answered his question, he wanted to tell her not to be in such a hurry. Think more, he wanted to say, let me watch you just a little longer. Let me just sit here and be with you and not have to talk, not have to think, not have to remember how close you came to murdering me. I do not want to think about that. I want to remember you the way you were the first day, when you would never have shot me, and I would certainly have shot him for you.

But she didn’t need to think any longer; she had her answer.

“He wanted to apologize to me.”

“For what?”

“For the fact that his lighthouse was not functioning on a night in June of 2005.”

Kimble tilted his head back and raised his eyebrows. “You’re serious.”

“Absolutely.”

“Why did he think this mattered to you?”

Another long pause. She reached up and pushed her hair back over her ears, carefully, one elegant hand moving at a time, and then she fastened her blue-eyed gaze on his and said, “I tried to kill myself that night.”

Kimble didn’t have a response. Couldn’t begin to muster one. He sat and stared at her as she watched him with detached sadness.

“I’ve never told anyone that, Kevin. Not a soul.”

June 2005. It would have been around the same time the abuse began, around the time Kimble had first gone out to the house, first met her.

“What happened?” he said.

“There’d been a… debate at home,” she said. “You remember the kind. I left and went for a drive. There was no destination. It was just a drive, the kind you make when you need to be moving, Kevin, moving fast. Ever taken that kind of a drive?”

“Once or twice.”

“Then you understand. There’s a curve out there, on the county road. It seems like you shouldn’t take it, but you have to. Go straight and you’re off the pavement and on the dead end. There’s a sign, but it was late at night, and I missed it.”

“Okay.” She’d been on Blade Ridge then, sailing right past Wyatt’s lighthouse.

“The road ends in the trees.”

“I know the spot.”

“Well, I hit the dead end, and I stopped. It was sunset. Not quite dark yet. A very beautiful sunset, in fact. The eastern face of the rocks was all lit up red, and the water had this beautiful shimmer. I could see the lighthouse up there, and it was so surreal. Beautiful but misplaced, you know? I got out of the car to look at it. I was all alone, and the sun was going down, and the insects were coming to life. Cicadas humming all around. There’s a bridge out there, an old railroad bridge?”

“The trestle. Yes.”

“I could see it through the trees. And I decided to walk out on it. There’s a fence that is supposed to guard it, I guess, but that was pretty well torn down. You can slip through it easily enough. I could, at least.”

His mouth was very dry, and he wanted to touch her. Wanted to take her hand, pat her arm, something. Instead he folded his own hands together, squeezed them tight.

“I walked out onto the bridge as the sun dipped down and everything gave over to night. It was one of the most beautiful sunsets I’ve ever seen. The lighthouse was there against the trees and the rocks, but then it got dark, and I couldn’t see it anymore. Then it was just me on the bridge.”

She lifted one finger and slowly, carefully, wiped a tear away from her left eye. She didn’t comment on it, and neither did he.

“It had been a very bad night,” she said, and her voice was softer, huskier. “I sat out there and thought about what I had to go home to, and what could ever be done about it, and… and I just wanted to sit there and hold on to the night a little longer. That was all I wanted. To keep that June night going for as long as I could.”

She stopped talking. No more tears came, but her breaths were shallow and unsteady. He didn’t speak, didn’t move. Just gave her time.

“I don’t know how long I was there,” she said. “The moon came up and I watched its reflection in the water for a long time. And then there was another light there. The moon on the water, it went to blue. The strangest blue light I’d ever seen. Then the blue was moving, up onto the rocks, this flame that had just crawled right out of the water. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. And I felt, I don’t know the word… beckoned by it. Called. I… I decided that I wanted to try it.”

She didn’t specify what the it was, and she didn’t need to. Now it was Kimble’s turn to close his eyes.

“It’s not as high as it looks,” she said. “I thought it would be high enough. It wasn’t. The fall was very fast, and I had imagined it would be peaceful, but it was too quick to be peaceful. I don’t remember fear. I just remember knowing that it was too fast, that I’d counted on more time and wasn’t going to get it.”

She took a long, deep breath, chest filling, her breasts swelling against the faded prison uniform, and said, “There are rocks under the water in that spot. Not too far below. I hit one of them.”

Kimble looked away. He couldn’t help it. He couldn’t stand to think of her like that, falling from that bridge into the dark and the rocks.

“It was Wyatt who found me,” she said. “Late in the night.”

“You didn’t go to the hospital,” Kimble said. “Or at least he didn’t call the police for you.”

If he had, there should have been a record. There was no record.

“No,” she said. “We didn’t call the police, and I didn’t go to the hospital. He brought me up, and I got into my car and drove home. He tried to stop me from that, but I didn’t listen. That was the last time I saw him until his visit five weeks ago.”

Kimble said, “Wait a second. You said you landed on a rock.”

“Yes.”

“How did you just drive home, then? Weren’t you hurt?”

She looked away from him. “I guess I was lucky.”

“Lucky?”

“Doesn’t feel like it now.” She waved her hand around the room. “Not after years in here. But I guess I was lucky.”

There was something in her eyes that he wasn’t familiar with, couldn’t read, and he waited for more, but no words came. She just watched him with a detachment he’d never seen from her before.

“Jacqueline? Is that all there is to the story?”

She held her silence for a long beat, then nodded. “Yes.”

He matched her nod, but it was difficult. Just as they’d discussed when he sat down, there had always been a relationship of trust, no matter how bizarre that seemed. In all these years, all these visits, in every encounter they’d ever had, even from before the trial, even when she was refusing to tell him a damn thing about her husband’s violence, she’d never lied to him. Until now. How could you feel so betrayed knowing that a woman who’d once shot you in the back had now lied to you? The logic didn’t track, but emotions often didn’t choose to follow logic. This lesson Jacqueline Mathis had ingrained deeply in Kimble.

“So when he came here,” Kimble said, “he came to apologize?”

“That’s right. The lighthouse had been off that night. It seems Wyatt had done some drinking the previous night. He was arrested. You can verify that easily enough. By the time he got out and made his way home, it was dark, but the light wasn’t on. He went up and got it going and then he saw me.”

“So he wanted to apologize that he didn’t have the light going?”

“Yes,” she said. “I guess he thought it would have helped. He seems to understand the place very well. Much better than I do. He said if I spent time there, I’d understand it better myself.”

“Well, I’ve been out there. I don’t understand a damn thing.”

She said, “Take me there, then.”

“What?”

“That might help. If Wyatt was right, I’ll be able to understand what you can’t.”

“Jacqueline, I can’t take you anywhere. You’re in prison.”

“I’m aware of that. But you’re a police officer. You can get me out there.”

The thought of it was alluring and frightening. The two of them, outside these walls and alone together. No guards.

He said, “I don’t think that’s an option.”

“Then I don’t know what to tell you,” she said.

He leaned forward, braced his forearms on his knees, and looked her in the eyes. It was not an easy thing for him. Meeting her eyes had a way of tightening his lungs, a way of shrinking the walls around him, making doors seem impossibly far away.

“Please,” he said, “tell me what you’re holding back.”

“Kevin, I would like to make parole. Do you understand that?”

“Of course.”

“Do you know how much my chances will be hurt if I begin telling stories that make me sound like a lunatic?”

“It’s you and me in this room. Not your parole board.”

“They’ll ask your opinion.”

“So did the prosecutor,” he said.

She knew well what that meant. She remembered the details he’d chosen to forget during her trial. Some of them, at least. Others—I’m sorry, I don’t remember—she either did not remember or had been lying about for year after year.

“I’ve earned this from you, damn it,” he said, thinking of the months of physical therapy, the nights of insomnia, the constant ache in his back that lived within him like a draft in an old house. “This much I have earned.”

She winced, then nodded. “Fine. That’s fair enough. You want to hear the story? Wonderful. It’s a ghost story.”

“A ghost story.”

“That’s right. Still want to hear it, or shall I save us both the embarrassment?”

When he didn’t answer, she said, “You asked me how I wasn’t hurt, landing on a rock like that. I was hurt badly. I was dying when he came for me.”

“Wyatt?”

She shook her head. “Oh, no, Kevin. Not Wyatt. Not anyone you’re going to be able to find and interview. There will be no testimony from him, there will be no fingerprints. Still want me to go on?”

No, he thought, so vehemently that he almost spoke it aloud. He had the sense that if he let her go on like this, then it would all come crashing down, every hope that he’d held, that he’d somehow patched together through overstretched threads of logic and thick ropes of fantasy.

“Go on,” he said.

20

HE WAITED. She looked at him with an uncomfortable level of poignancy, as if she knew she might not see him again and wanted to preserve the moment, a woman watching her lover board a troopship and head off to war. Or ordering him aboard the ship. True to form with Jacqueline Mathis, he was never quite sure of her role.

“You’ve been there,” she said.

“The lighthouse? Yeah.”

“What about the rest of the area? The ridge, the woods, the trestle. Have you walked around there at all?”

“Just yesterday. Looking for a cat.”

“A cat?”

“Not the kind in the Friskies commercials, Jacqueline. A black panther. But yes, I’ve seen the place.”

She nodded. “You can picture the base of the trestle. It would be on the… eastern shore, I think. Closest to the road.”

“I can picture it.”

“There’s a fire down there,” she told him calmly.

He raised his eyebrows. “There was a fire?”

“There is a fire. I haven’t seen it in a while—I’ve been otherwise engaged for a few years, you know—but I can’t imagine that it’s gone, either. It had been burning for a long time when I saw it, and I think it will burn for a long time to come.”

“I don’t follow this.”

“Of course you don’t. That’s why I tried not to tell you. You had to have it your way, though, and so now I’ll tell you and live with the response, I guess. There is a fire on the rocks below the trestle. When Wyatt made his visit, it was still burning. I can almost assure you that it still is now.”

Kimble had passed under the trestle with Wesley Harrington at his side the previous evening. There had been nothing there.

He said, “Okay. A fire.”

“Already you’re giving up on me,” she said. “I can see it in your face.”

“No, I’m not. But you should know that I was just down there, and I didn’t see a fire. Neither did the man I was with. So unless we both have really bad eyes…”

“You wouldn’t be able to see it,” she said. “Not yet. And I hope you never can.”

Her face was grim.

“The first time I saw it, Kevin, I was in the water and the rocks. I was dying. Make no mistake about it—I wasn’t just in pain, I was dying. And I knew then that I didn’t want to die. More than anything in the world, I didn’t want to die. The river was pulling me downstream, but I got hung up in the rocks and then I could see the fire. It burns blue, and there are people all around it. One man stepped away from it, took one of the sticks out of the fire, and held it like a torch.”

Please, stop, Kimble thought, trying to hold her eyes, trying not to betray the sickness. He needed her to be sane. He needed her not to belong in this place, but with every word she was validating the orange uniform.

“He waded out to me, just glided through the water, holding that blue torch. Told me that I was dying, and made me an offer.”

“An offer?”

“That’s right. He told me that I was dying, and I knew that I was. He told me that he could enable me to walk away, and I knew that he could.”

“This man healed you.”

“I didn’t say healed.”

“Then what did he do?”

“He bargained, Kevin. And I accepted.”

He looked at her, not really wanting to hear the answer, and said, “What did he want in exchange?”

“I think you know that.”

“No, I don’t, Jacqueline.”

“What I promised him,” she said, “I provided him.”

He was silent.

“You don’t just walk away from the devil,” she said. “Not for free.”

21

IRA MELTED INTO THE HILLS and did not surface. While Audrey and Dustin worked together to complete the day’s feedings and clean the cages, the two deputies who remained at the preserve took their weapons into the woods, armed with binoculars and, in one case, a rifle scope, and searched for some sign.

They didn’t come up with any.

Dustin, who hadn’t seemed to have recovered his strength after finding Wes that morning, who looked unsteady with every step, watched the police in the woods and told Audrey they were up to something.

“What? They’re looking for the cat.”

He shook his head. “No. They’re going along the fence line right now, Audrey. Watch them.”

She lowered the wheelbarrow full of raw meat—they kept it frozen, then thawed it each evening so it would be ready to go in the morning—and studied the police as Dustin was. They did seem to be walking along the edge of the fence, looking in instead of looking out.

“They don’t expect to find Ira hiding against the fence,” Dustin said. “So what are they doing?”

Looking for breaches, Audrey thought. They were looking for some indication of poor security, something that could potentially allow a cat to escape. Something that could potentially provide the sheriff with the ammunition that Kimble had hinted he would want. Well, that was ridiculous. The preserve was secure, and she knew it.

“Let them do their job,” she said. “We’ll do ours. Look at Lily. That girl is hungry.”

The blind white Siberian tiger was trotting back and forth in her cage, looking like a kitten with too much energy. She could hear them and smell the food; she knew it was close, she just couldn’t see it.

They fed Lily, then moved on to the next enclosure, which held two cougars. They were siblings. At one time the cougars on the preserve had fascinated visitors. Then Ira came along, and the standard variety was no longer of interest. People like the unique specimens, even when they know nothing about the basics.

But the two cougars Audrey and Dustin were feeding now were plenty unique. They were two of five cats that had been rescued from what Wes had deemed the worst conditions he’d ever encountered. The cats were at a facility licensed by the USDA for breeding purposes, which was an idea that David and Audrey abhorred—the cats were not supposed to be pets, and most of them wouldn’t be suffering if some jackass hadn’t decided he wanted a cougar or a lion for a pet.

The place was in Georgia, and all of the cats needed rescue. The owner simply told authorities that he’d “gotten in a little over his head.” Being in over his head meant forgetting to feed the animals, apparently. The cats were housed in filthy, small cages with no food or water in reach. Every bone in their bodies showed beneath matted fur. Often taking strange cats could be a challenge, even requiring sedation. In this case, the only thing that was needed to lure the animals out and into the transport cages was a bucket of clean water.

Cody, one of the cougars, was in such bad shape that he required two weeks of antibiotics just to stabilize enough so the vet could remove several infected teeth. He now had a hilariously crooked smile, which he showed often, and his ribs were no longer pushing against his flesh. His brother, Otto, had suffered frostbite so severe that his ears were mangled shreds.

Audrey looked at the two cats, healthy and happy and eager for food, and said, “Let the sheriff’s department try its worst. I run one of the best facilities in the country, and I’m not closing it. The escape was not due to our facility. It was due to a cat that is something strange. Our fence height exceeds the minimum. If he jumped over it without help… well, good for Ira. But we couldn’t stop it.”

“They say those black cats are supposed to be witches,” Dustin said. “I remember reading about it with David.”

She looked at him and sighed. “Helpful, Dustin. I’ll just call the old witch defense into play. When they’re burning me at the stake, remember that it was your suggestion.”

They were cleaning one portion of the cougar enclosure while the cats were isolated with their meat in another sector. Audrey always worked this way in the preserve. David and Wes would sometimes go in the enclosures, but Audrey never did. Dustin was watching the police, and Audrey looked up, too. One of them—Wolverton—appeared to have found something. He called to Shipley, who walked on slowly, carefully—every move Shipley made out here seemed cautious—and knelt beside his comrade. They turned something over in their hands, whispering.

“What did you find there?” Audrey called, walking toward them. A plastic bag appeared, the item went into it, and then the bag disappeared into Wolverton’s pocket.

“Don’t worry about it, Mrs. Clark. Nothing here.”

She frowned and turned back to Dustin. His pale face was grim. “They found something, all right.”

“What?”

“I think it was a shell.”

She stared at him. “From Wesley’s gun?”

“Maybe.” He didn’t look at her when he said it, though.

“Dustin,” she said, “do you think someone else shot my tiger?”

He still didn’t meet her eyes, just took his rake and returned to work.

“We’ll see what the police think,” he said.

Kimble had left Jacqueline abruptly, thanking her for her time like some door-to-door salesman who’d struck out badly but had to keep the false smile until he was out of sight. She hadn’t even responded, just watched sadly as he stood up to go.

“You wanted to know the truth,” she said as the CO opened the door for him.

Yes, he had. And the truth was that several years of his life had vanished into a fantasy image of a woman who belonged in the state hospital, not the prison.

He picked up his phone as soon as he got into the car, began to make calls about work, real work, determined not only to make up for lost time but to force his mind away from her and back into the world of real problems that needed real solutions. Back into his world.

His first call was to the department’s evidence tech, to see whether the medical examiners had come through on Kimble’s request and retrieved the bullet from the tiger.

They had.

“Looks like a .223,” the tech told him. “We can of course do more specific ballistics if you need them, but I can tell you the caliber right now. That mean anything to you?”

It meant plenty.

The gun in Wesley Harrington’s hand on the night of his death did not fire .223 cartridges.

Kimble thanked them, hung up, and called Shipley.

“You still out there?”

“Yes, sir. No sign of the cat. Everything’s been peaceful.”

“Listen, I just got a match back on the bullet that killed the cat. It wasn’t fired from Harrington’s gun.”

Silence.

“We’re looking at a very different scene now,” Kimble said, “and it is important that we handle it right. This thing is not what it appears to be. Harrington did not shoot that cat. If anything, he probably went in there because the cat had been shot, and that makes it a crime scene, and a serious one.”

“I understand.”

“Good. Well, without alarming Mrs. Clark—I’ll deal with that when we have to—I want you and Pete to begin looking aggressively for signs of—”

“Pete found a spent casing.”

“What?”

“Not too far back from the fence line, toward the old railroad tracks.”

“Is it a .223?”

“My opinion? Yes. Probably fired from an AR-15 or, more likely, one of the clones, the cheap knockoffs.”

This was serious. This was very serious. Someone had gone down there and shot at the cats, which was a major crime on its own terms, but it had also led to the death of Wesley Harrington. You’d probably have to call it involuntary manslaughter…

Unless it was involuntary cat slaughter, he thought. Just because the cat was hit doesn’t mean the cat was the target. Shooting in the dark like that, it would be tough to hit a man. And in that place, any bullet that sailed by would have a good chance of finding a five-hundred-pound feline. In which case, Kimble, you could be looking at attempted murder.

“All right,” he said, when he realized the pause had gone on too long. “Listen—I want somebody on security out there tonight.”

“Here. At night?”

“Yes, Shipley, what the hell is the problem? You act like you’re scared of the dark out there. Been talking to Wyatt French?” Kimble’s frustration had been massing since he walked out of the prison, away from Jacqueline’s story, and now Shipley was catching it.

“I’m not scared to be out here,” he said in a clipped voice. “You just tell me the hours.”

“Break it up into shifts. You work until midnight, then let Pete take it. Sound fair enough? I know you’ve been going all day. You want it changed, or you want some relief, then—”

“I’ll do it.”

“Thanks, Shipley,” he said, trying to ease off. “They know you out there now, and I think that will help.”

“What am I supposed to tell them?”

“Tell them I’ve asked that someone remain on duty in case the cougar comes back. Put all the weight of it on that black cat, okay? Why not use the creepy bastard, since we’ve got him?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Keep a sharp eye out there. It’s a damn strange place.”

“It certainly is,” Shipley said.

Kimble hung up and started the engine, ready to get back on the road, back home, ready to get moving through a life that he’d been treading water in since a summer night five years earlier. It was time.

He drove fast on his way out, but there was a coal train coming through and he couldn’t beat it, caught the intersection just as the gate lowered, pinning him impatiently in place, engine idling, unable to rid the prison from his rearview mirror.

22

THE POLICE TOLD AUDREY they would keep a man on the grounds overnight. It was the young deputy, Shipley, who informed them, and Dustin Hall shook his head as if he wasn’t happy with the news. Shipley caught the gesture and fell silent, staring Dustin down. There was something remarkably cold in the stare.

Audrey said, “It’s fine. It’s great. I appreciate the gesture. If you see the cat, please come for me first, though. Don’t just open fire.”

“If it’s possible to alert you, we will,” Shipley said. “Our safety will be first, the cat’s will be second. You have to understand that.”

“What did you find out there?” Dustin asked.

“Find?” Shipley raised his eyebrows.

“Yeah. You put something in a bag. Was it a bullet?”

Shipley looked at him for a long time, then back to Audrey, and smiled. “Didn’t know you’d hired one of the Hardy Boys. He’ll be good to have around.”

She didn’t think it was an appropriate time to joke, and said as much. The smile bled off Nathan Shipley’s face and his blue eyes went cold again and he said, “Absolutely right. Someone was killed here last night. I don’t find that amusing. I’m of course in no position to reveal details of police work to Mr. Hall here. Chief Deputy Kimble can decide what he wants to share, and when. In the meantime, we’ll be here for your protection.”

She thanked him, and he went off to his vehicle, slid behind the wheel, and picked up the radio unit.

Dustin Hall, who was suddenly her most experienced staff member, told Audrey that he would replace Wesley on the property. To say that he was a brave kid was an understatement—this morning he’d discovered a good friend’s body, and tonight he was already trying to step in to fill the void. She couldn’t let him stay there, though.

“Go back home and get some sleep,” she said. “I’ll need you early, and need you strong. Okay?”

He frowned, watching Shipley. “I’d just as soon stay out here, Audrey. I feel like that’s where the need is.”

“Dustin? I know what I’m doing with the cats. I’ve got a police officer on the grounds all night, protecting me. Nothing’s going to happen.”

“All right.”

“We’ll stick it out,” she told Dustin. “We’ll be fine.”

Strong words. It was good to be bold, but it was dangerous, too. She was well aware of the truth: the only thing that had kept the preserve going was Wesley Harrington. Without him, she was in over her head and sinking fast.

“Sure,” Dustin said. “And you get some sleep, too. You need it.”

But around them the cats were all awake as the sun began to set, stalking the perimeters of their enclosures, eyes glittering, tails swishing, and Audrey had the feeling that sleep wasn’t permitted at Blade Ridge.

Kimble stopped by the department to pick up the reports that waited for him from the morning’s death scene and then went home, poured a glass of red wine, and sat on his couch. He drank wine only when he was at home. When he socialized, which was rare, he stuck to beer—a country cop drinking wine always seemed to draw attention, and Kimble preferred to float in the background—but he loved the taste of a full-bodied red, loved the hard-to-pronounce names on the labels, loved the sound of a cork leaving the bottle. These were all things that made him think romantic notions, and it had been a long time since Kimble had been with a woman. Sometimes—many times—he’d catch himself wondering if Jacqueline drank red wine. He was almost certain she did.

He sipped a glass of blended Chilean red, purchased at an organic food store near the college that stocked wines from all over the world and was a place in which Kimble was unlikely to bump into a colleague or acquaintance. He opened the report from Wesley Harrington’s death scene and tried to steer his mind away from a brown-haired woman in an orange jumpsuit.

She probably likes champagne, too. That seems right. The sparkle.

He blinked, fought to focus. He would write the formal incident report himself, but it would be heavily dependent on supplemental reports from Shipley and Wolverton, who’d both arrived on scene ahead of Kimble. Tonight he had only Wolverton’s account available, because Shipley was still on duty. Still out at the ridge. Pete had taken the time to provide a clipped account of the scene, and Kimble read it with no expectation of new information. But he grew curious as he reviewed Pete’s brief account of his interview with Dustin Hall, the Whitman student who’d discovered the body. Mr. Hall first noted that there was blood in the cage, Wolverton had written. He then moved closer, observed that the cat was not moving and that a rifle was visible. At that point Mr. Hall entered the cage, discovered the victim’s body behind that of the cat, determined Harrington to be deceased, and called for help.

It went on for a few paragraphs after that, but all Kimble needed was contained in that initial account of the witness statement.

In order, Hall recounted seeing blood, a rifle, Harrington.

Kimble had been in the cage. Had approached just as Hall must have that morning, and he had seen blood first, yes, but he had not been able to see the rifle until he saw Harrington. Hall’s recollection of the man’s corpse was correct—it had been blocked from sight by the cat’s body. But the rifle had been in the dead man’s hand.

At least when Kimble saw it.

Perhaps there’d been two rifles on the scene, which meant maybe this wasn’t going to be such a pain in the ass after all; maybe the dead man had brought two guns out with him, and the killing shot had been fired with the first, not the second. Simple.

But why would he have used two rifles? Why not just reload? How had he even managed to approach the cage carrying two rifles, a syringe on a pole, and a flashlight? It was a ludicrous scenario, would have required “Send in the Clowns” playing in the background and Harrington riding a unicycle to make it believable.

So maybe the kid had been confused. Rattled. Said the wrong thing, that was all, meant to say he spotted the rifle in Harrington’s hand but misspoke due to the pressure of the moment. He’d certainly been shaken up.

Wolverton’s supplemental report contained contact information for Dustin Hall, including phone numbers for both a dorm room and a cell. Kimble called the dorm first, got nothing, and then the cell. The kid answered, and sounded nervous from the moment Kimble identified himself.

“We don’t have a problem,” Kimble said, although that was perhaps untrue. “I’m just trying to finalize the report and need to clear up a discrepancy. You have a minute, I’d appreciate your help on that.”

The kid agreed, but none of the trepidation left his voice.

Kimble pitched his question then, asked him to recall what he’d seen and when he’d seen it.

“Go slow and think clearly,” he said. “I need to know the order of things.”

Dustin went slowly and clearly, and he recounted everything exactly as he had with Wolverton.

“All right,” Kimble said, and then, gently, “I’m wondering about that rifle, son. I was there, inside the cage. We’ve got photographs. You can’t see the gun from the angle you describe. It was hidden by the cat.”

“Not when I got there.” He was firm.

“You’re telling me that there was a gun—”

“You might want to ask your deputy about this,” Dustin Hall said.

Kimble fell silent for a moment, then said, “Was there a problem with Deputy Wolverton?”

“Not him. The other guy.”

“Deputy Shipley. What was the problem with him?”

“I’m not saying there was a problem,” the kid said. He was very uneasy. “It’s just… look, he was there after me, right? Maybe things got moved around.”

“Got moved around?”

The kid went silent, and the silence went on too long, and when he spoke again, he sounded like a chess player regretting his last move, knowing damn well where it had placed him.

“Probably not. Maybe I just remember it all wrong. I was nervous.”

Kimble was certain that the kid wanted only to end the conversation, certain that his recollections had not been skewed by nerves.

“Mr. Hall,” Kimble said. “Dustin, buddy? Tell me what you’re not wanting to say. Tell me now, when it’s not a problem. I need to hear it.”

There was a pause, and then a rush of words.

“You need to talk to your deputy, not me. He made me go out of sight of the cage first thing. Like his priority was being alone there. And that guy, he was… look, I don’t know how else to say it, he was scaring me. There’s something wrong with him. He wanted to talk about his car accident. Was asking me all these questions that were so fucking—pardon my language—so weird. Asking me why I had lied about being in the road, but I wasn’t in the road. Sir, all I know is that I was scared of him. He didn’t seem right, and he was looking at me in a, well, in a hostile way, I guess. That’s the best word. Hostile.”

“I see,” Kimble said. “Son, let me ask you one more question, and I want to assure you that the answer will stay between the two of us.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you think Deputy Shipley moved that rifle?”

“Sir? I know he did.”

23

IT WAS PROBABLY BAD PRACTICE to drop in on police uninvited, but Kevin Kimble hadn’t returned the messages Roy had left at his office, and he needed to talk to him about what he’d found during his day in the newspaper morgue.

He needed to talk with someone.

The chief deputy lived in a modest brick ranch home five miles outside of town. Kimble didn’t go to the trouble of hanging Christmas lights as his neighbors did, but there was a wreath on the door, a concession to the season without the time investment. Roy pulled in, looked at the list he’d compiled, and shook his head.

Yes, he needed to talk with someone.

Wyatt French had collected a slice of Sawyer County history that bordered on the impossible. He’d found six murderers scattered over eighty years who all shared one thing: an accident at Blade Ridge.

Well, five of them did. Jacqueline Mathis was the rogue, but maybe Kimble would know something about that. Regardless, it was an unbelievable pattern. And a disturbing one.

Kimble answered the door almost immediately, as if he’d heard the car come in, and he wasn’t happy to see Roy.

“There are telephones, you know, Mr. Darmus.”

“You don’t answer yours. And I didn’t have your home number.”

“But you had the address?”

“I found it, yes. Listen, I’m sorry to bother you, but I’ve got something you need to look at. Please.”

Kimble sighed but let him in. The house was sparsely furnished but incredibly clean for a bachelor’s home. Roy had been divorced for twenty years now, and he knew well the condition of the average bachelor’s home: he lived in one.

“I’m in the middle of work,” Kimble said. “Real work. One of the cats killed its keeper. All those things we talked about last night, I can’t worry about them until I’ve got that situation—”

“Take a look at this,” Roy said, and handed him a piece of paper. It was a neat, morbid time line:

Jacqueline Mathis, killed husband, 2006

Ryan O’Patrick, killed boss, 1982

Adam Estes, killed financial adviser, 1976

Becky Stapp, killed husband, 1948

Timothy Osgood, killed sister, 1931

Ralph Hill, killed business partner, 1927

“Okay,” Kimble said. “That’s about what we figured. Wyatt had an unhealthy hobby. Liked to read about—”

“Now look at this one,” Roy said, feeling like a magician preparing a dubious audience for his trick, and handed Kimble a new sheet of paper.

Ryan O’Patrick, April 12, 1982

Adam Estes, July 17, 1975

Becky Stapp, January 12, 1948

Timothy Osgood, October 31, 1931

Ralph Hill, May 15, 1927

“Are these the dates of the killings? No, Estes doesn’t line up,” Kimble said.

“These are the dates of accidents they had at Blade Ridge. Every one of them.”

Kimble looked up at him. “Accidents?”

“I’m positive. I spent all day tracking them down, and I didn’t believe it myself. These people are separated by decades, but they’re held together by two things: killing and Blade Ridge. Every single one of them survived an accident out there before they did their killing. Becky Stapp was thrown from a horse. Then she put a kitchen knife in her husband’s spine. Adam Estes almost drowned. Then he shot his investment guy. Ryan O’Patrick put a Camaro into the trees, then came back and beat his boss to death with a wrench. The exception is Jacqueline Mathis. Not a recorded incident. Do you know of any connection between her and Blade Ridge?”

“No.”

Roy had been interviewing people for more than forty years and had heard plenty of lies. He looked at Kimble now and knew without question that he’d just heard another.

Why? he thought. Why would he lie about that?

“Okay,” he said. “Well, then she’s the one exception. All of the others survived accidents at Blade Ridge, then went on to kill.”

Kimble was looking at him, but his eyes seemed to be receding.

“It’s bizarre,” he offered finally.

Roy gave a short, humorless laugh. “You’re awfully adept with the understatement, Kimble. It is bizarre.”

“Well, what do you have to say about it? You have some sort of explanation?”

“No, I don’t. And I’m still missing four of them. There are four other men named in those pictures. John Hamlin, Fred Mortimer, Henry Bates, and Bernard Snell. I can’t find anything in the newspapers about them. I think they go back too far. Those pictures are ancient.”

“Well, French found them somewhere.”

“I don’t know where. They’re definitely…”

He stopped talking, and Kimble said, “What?”

“They’re microfilm printouts,” Roy said slowly. “But not from the Sentinel. I’ve been trying to think of what else he could have gone through that was on microfilm and local. The college has archives of the Whitman Company. They kept a newspaper of their own. The Sentinel actually spun out of it, I think. A free paper instead of a company mouthpiece, that sort of thing. But maybe those names are from the company newspaper.”

“Great,” Kimble said, not sounding interested in the slightest, still looking at that list of dates.

“If they are,” Roy said, “then whatever happened with them happened a hell of a long time ago.”

Kimble was moving back toward the front door. “Listen, I’ve got work to do, Mr. Darmus. I appreciate the time you’ve put into this, but—”

“Kimble, are you just pushing that aside and saying—”

“I don’t know what I’m going to say!”

Kimble’s voice had risen to a shout. It was just like the day at the lighthouse. The chief deputy was mild-mannered until you found the right nerve. Before, that nerve had been Jacqueline Mathis. Roy figured it was again, but he didn’t understand why.

“I’m just… just trying to process a whole hell of a lot right now, okay?” Kimble said. “I’m trying to get my head around all of it.”

Roy nodded. “Sure. I’m not there yet myself. I don’t know what it means, but you do have to admit that those connections are… rather extraordinary.”

“Yes,” Kimble said. “They are.”

“One of them is alive,” Roy said.

Kimble stopped. “What?”

“Everyone on that list is dead except for Ryan O’Patrick. And Jacqueline Mathis, of course, but she didn’t have an accident at the ridge that I can find. O’Patrick did. He lives in Modesto.” He extended another piece of paper, this one with an address on it. “Just in case you want to talk to him.”

Kimble took the paper.

Roy went back to his car, and for the first time in his life felt relieved that his parents had died in their accident at Blade Ridge.

What if they’d survived?

It was an idea he’d considered so often, with such hopefulness, wondering how things might have been different if he’d had a family beyond the age of fourteen. Now it entered his mind again and he suppressed a shiver.

What if they’d survived?

24

AUDREY WAS MAKING THE ROUNDS, flashlight in one hand, pole syringe in the other, when the deputy stepped out of the woods and made her scream.

“What are you doing?” she said. She’d spun the syringe around, ready to lunge. “I almost put you into a coma. And you almost put me into a coffin.”

He was wearing a jacket with the hood up, shielding his face in shadow, his breath leaving wisps of vapor. He looked from her to the syringe and smiled.

“That’s for the cougar?”

“In case,” she said, feeling suddenly defensive. She realized how awkward her motion with the long pole had been, how ineffective she would have been if she’d needed to use it. Against an animal like Ira, all sleek speed and fast-twitch power? No—if he sprang on her from the darkness, she wouldn’t have a chance.

“What are you doing out here?” she said again, stepping back from Shipley.

“Kimble told you. I’m the night watch.”

“I thought you were supposed to be here in case anything happened, not creeping around the woods.”

“Sorry.”

He had turned from her and was facing one of the enclosures. Home to five lions, it was one of the largest spaces in the preserve. It was rare that you could get so many to socialize well; often there was an attitude problem that led to fights. These lions, though, got along just fine. They were all on their perches now—six, eight, twelve feet in the air, their strange eyes fractured reflections in the beam of her flashlight.

“I don’t know how you do it,” Shipley said.

“What?”

“Live out here with them. At night.”

“They’re harmless,” she said, though the truth was she hadn’t lived out here with them at night. She’d spent many evenings at the old preserve, but she always went home to sleep. This was new, and yes, a little frightening. She’d been lost in thoughts of Wes when she bumped into the deputy, thinking of how it had been for him in those last moments, wondering what had gone through his mind when he realized that his favorite cat had brought an end to his life. She hoped it had been so swift that no thoughts had come at all, but that was hard to believe. He’d bled out in the cage. That took time.

“They don’t seem to like me,” Shipley said. “Growl when I walk by.”

“Lions are the least people-friendly of the big cats. There are exceptions, of course, but as a rule they aren’t like the tigers. Many of the tigers actually want attention. The lions are more wary, and you’re a stranger.”

“You ever go in the cages with them?”

It was an innocent enough question, but she folded her arms across her chest and looked away, as if he’d said something lewd.

“No,” she finally said. “I don’t, personally. But they’re fine with people. Wes used to go in with them. And my husband.”

“You just don’t trust them the same way?”

She turned back to him, thinking that he’d isolated the exact reason she was doomed to lose these cats. To care for them properly, you had to trust them. She’d always had people to do that for her. David and Wesley. Their faith had been so big that she didn’t need to test her own. Now they were gone. The fences between her and the cats remained, but there was no one left to cross over them for her.

“I trust them,” she said softly. She could isolate them in different portions of the enclosures for cleanings and feedings, but now that Wes was gone, there would come a time when they would need her. Something would go wrong, and they would need someone to enter the cages with them.

“You really think this is the right spot for them?”

“There aren’t any zoos that will take them, if that’s what you mean. And yes, in every single circumstance, we are providing a better life for these animals than they had before.”

“That’s not what I mean. I’m talking about this spot. Don’t you feel it?”

“Feel what?” She was taken aback.

He spread his hands, the black-gloved fingers casting shadows. “There’s something different out here, Mrs. Clark. You’re telling me you can’t feel it?”

What she was feeling was an intense desire to be back inside the trailer, with the door locked. She moved the pole syringe so that it was pointed at him, then was embarrassed when he looked down at it, well aware of the motion.

“Sorry,” he said. “That’s just what you don’t need to hear, I’m sure. All I’m saying is… there’s something strange in this place. And I think the cats feel it. I’m pretty sure about that.”

He left her then, walked back into the night woods, his hand tapping along the stock of his gun.

25

KIMBLE SAT WITH HIS FOOT on the brake, staring at the mailbox—O’Patrick, R.—and the trailer and five-bay garage beyond. A man was standing in one of the open garage bays, smoking a cigar, and Kimble pulled into the drive, parked, and stepped out of the cruiser. Ryan O’Patrick had been paroled after serving twenty years for murder, and he’d returned to Sawyer County, moving to Modesto, which was home to the county’s consolidated rural high school. O’Patrick lived in a trailer directly across the street from Hefron High, and according to Roy Darmus ran a cash-only mechanic’s shop and was apparently capable of fixing anything that ailed a car, boat, tractor, or other engine-reliant item. He’d always been handy with a wrench, it seemed. Just got a little too handy one day, upside his boss’s skull.

Kimble got out of the car and walked up to the garage. A radio was on, tuned to a sports talk station, and beside it a small space heater blew warm air over the concrete floor.

“You Ryan O’Patrick?”

“I got a feeling,” O’Patrick said, studying the police car, “that I’m not going to enjoy this visit.”

He had the look of someone who’d been jailed for a long time. A posture that made him seem bigger than he was, eyes that were somehow both challenging and resigned. He was heavier than in his old booking photographs, with an extra layer of chin partially obscured by a short graying beard. Kimble saw an open tall-boy of Old Style sitting on top of a toolbox at his side.

“Well,” O’Patrick said, blowing smoke at Kimble’s face, “what do you need, deputy? If anything in these cars is stolen, I don’t know about it, and I don’t care to know. I just fix them.”

“Not here about a car. Here to ask you about Blade Ridge.”

Ryan O’Patrick drew smoke in and never released it. After a long silence, he said, “Say that again?”

“Blade Ridge. You had an accident out there back in—”

“I know damn well when I had my accident and where it was. What I’d like to know is why you’re interested.”

“Some other people have died out there,” Kimble said. “Bad accidents. Like yours.”

O’Patrick reached out and clicked off the radio, the sports talk vanishing.

“I’m investigating them,” Kimble said. “And I’d like to know what you remember about your own.”

“Wrecked a car. Shit happens. I was young, I liked to drive fast. Burned a Camaro along the road and it got away from me.”

He looked at his boots while he told this story. Kimble nodded, leaned against the garage door frame, and said, “Figured as much. Long stretch of gravel road like that, isolated place? You were dragging, weren’t you? Seeing just what the car could handle, just what you could handle.”

“Sure. That’s what I was doing.”

Kimble waited for him to look up. When he finally did, Kimble said, “So when did Wyatt French come by? Last few weeks, or longer?”

O’Patrick’s face tightened. “Who?”

There was a moment of silence, and then Kimble said, “He’s dead now. We found his body up at the top of his lighthouse.”

When Ryan O’Patrick sighed, he seemed to lose something more than air.

“Fuck,” he said.

“So you knew him.”

“Yeah, I knew him. Or he knew me, more like it. Kept coming around, trying to get me to talk about something that… that just shouldn’t be spoken of.”

“It needs to be spoken of,” Kimble said.

“You and Wyatt should have gotten together, then.”

“A little late for that. I’ve got you, though. Tell me about the wreck.”

Ryan O’Patrick stared out of the garage and over at the football field across the street, where a group of boys in Hefron High Wrestling shirts were running the bleachers, their feet pounding off the aluminum as they sprinted beneath the harsh lights. They were bright lights, glaring, and most people wouldn’t have wanted to live so close. Kimble noticed that Ryan O’Patrick didn’t have curtains in his trailer. Every window was exposed to the stadium lights.

“The gauges went,” he said, and his voice was soft. “Speedometer, tach, everything. Just went flat. Don’t know why it happened. Electrical short of some kind. I got to staring at them and took my eyes off the road, that’s all. Poor driving, nothing else.”

Kimble said, “Really?”

“Yeah, really. Sorry you wasted the trip, bud. Might have just picked up a phone instead, saved yourself the—”

“You’ve told two versions of it now,” Kimble said, “and neither one is the truth.”

“You know what I find interesting?” O’Patrick said.

“What’s that?”

“You know who I am. I can see it all over your face. You know that I did twenty years for killing a man.”

Kimble nodded.

“And you know what else? The questions you’re asking? They’re about a lot more than a car wreck. Tell me if I’m lying.”

Kimble was silent. Ryan O’Patrick gave a dark smile and then bent to a mini-fridge tucked under a nearby shelf. He pulled out another tall-boy and extended it to Kimble with a question in his eyes. Kimble accepted it.

“You want to hear it?” O’Patrick said. “I’ll tell it this once. Never again.”

“That’s all I’m asking.”

O’Patrick nodded, moved to a stool, and popped the top on his beer. He took a long pull and said, “I was always a bit of a hell-raiser. I’ve got a temper like a damned light switch. People used to call me that, in fact.”

Kimble raised an eyebrow, and O’Patrick said, “Well, if they didn’t, they should have. Because I could snap pretty fast. Had my share of fights. So when I killed Joe, everyone said, Ah, Ryan’s temper got away from him. But that’s bullshit. Or maybe it isn’t. The point is that I don’t remember killing Joe. I stuck to that story all the way through trial and rode it on into prison. It wasn’t a lie. That moment? It’s nothing but blackness.”

Every time Kimble had seen her, Jacqueline had offered the same line: I’m sorry, I don’t remember. She never wavered.

Kimble said, “Tell me about the ridge, please. About your accident. Describe it as best as you can remember it.”

“Brother, I can describe it fine. I just don’t like to. Now, the accident itself? Simple. I was watching the blue light. Watching so close I couldn’t have hit the brakes if I wanted to.”

“The blue light?”

“You heard me. Thing was floating through the trees, glowing. A blue flame. I couldn’t mix you a paint to match, not even a pearl coat. You ever heard of Saint Elmo’s fire? Shit that shows up on a ship’s mast out in the middle of the ocean?”

Kimble nodded, thinking of Jacqueline’s recollections of her suicide attempt and feeling sick.

“I expect that’s the closest thing to it,” O’Patrick said.

“The sight of it was enough to make you wreck?”

“You say that like it’s hard to believe! Let’s get you out driving in the dark, pal. Let’s give you the wheel, take it up to fifty, sixty, seventy miles an hour, and then let that light float your way. I’d like to see how good your reflexes are then.”

Kimble held up his hands. “All right,” he said. “I’m not arguing. I’m asking. What happened after you crashed?”

O’Patrick paused, and Kimble let him.

“What I remember,” he said eventually, his voice the most unsteady it had been, “was the man who came for me.”

It was clear he wasn’t talking about paramedics.

“He came down off the ridge and out of the woods. A blue torch in his hand. Cold flame. I was hurt bad, and at first I was glad to see him, because I knew I needed help. But then he came on down the road and I didn’t even call out for help, because, well… he wasn’t the sort of man you called out to. I could sense that much. So he kind of circled, studying me. And I remember being afraid that he would…” His voice broke and he covered it up with a long pull on the beer. “That he would take me,” he finished.

Kimble was quiet. Ryan O’Patrick fumbled a cigar out of his shirt pocket, then put it back without lighting it.

“I could see my face in the mirror,” he said. “Could see how busted up I was. My nose was laid over to one side, and the skin was torn right off my jaw. I could see my teeth and my jawbone, and blood was just pouring out.”

He reached up and touched unmarked skin with his fingertips.

“I saw that and I knew that I was dying,” he said, and his voice was one Kimble had heard before, when he had talked to witnesses of terrible crimes. Or, more often, survivors of them. There was always weight behind the words of someone who’d passed near the mortal precipice.

“The man with the torch, he knelt down, taking his time, relaxed as could be. I can’t remember much of his face, just that firelight. He was shadows and cold flame to me, nothing else. He asked if I wanted help. And I had the sense that… even if he could help, it wasn’t the sort of help you wanted to accept. You know? That it came with a price.”

Kimble’s breathing and heart rate had slowed in the way they always did in high-pressure interviews, times when he had to will himself not to press. He was listening to O’Patrick but hearing Jacqueline Mathis.

“You asked for his help?” he said finally, after he realized O’Patrick was staring at him, waiting for a response.

“I did. It wasn’t something I wanted to do, but I didn’t want to die out there, either.”

“And what did he do for you?”

O’Patrick gave him a long stare, then said, “The EMT who put me in the ambulance took a look at my car and called me the luckiest son of a bitch he’d ever seen.”

Kimble was thinking of Shipley’s car, the way he’d walked into the department the next day and announced that he was a little sore, that was all.

“In that moment, though,” Kimble said, “what did he do?”

O’Patrick breathed in until his chest swelled, then steadied himself and said, “He said he could heal me, but only if I was willing. He said that he couldn’t reach me if I wasn’t, and that I needed to understand that he was bound by balance. That was the phrase, I’ll never forget it. Bound by balance. And I knew what he meant by it, I won’t lie about that. But I still said yes. Then he dipped that torch down to me. That’s the last of it I remember until the EMT was there.”

For a long time it was silent in the garage. Out at the high school the bleachers rattled, rattled, rattled.

“This happened in ’82,” Kimble said. “This happened before Wyatt put up his lighthouse.”

“Yeah.”

Something that had been absent fell into place in Kimble’s brain, and he said, “Wyatt had an accident out there, too, didn’t he?”

“He did.”

“When?”

“I’m not certain. Not long before he set to building the lighthouse. And before you ask, yes, he saw the man with the torch, and he made his bargain. Only difference is, when I shook it off like it was a bad dream, Wyatt believed in it. I guess because he was out there all the time. You go back to that place once you’ve made your bargain, you can see them. That’s what he told me.”

“So he lived with that every night?”

O’Patrick shuddered. “I can’t imagine, man. I can’t imagine.”

“Why didn’t he leave?”

“I suppose because he knew you can’t run from something that’s in you. So he set to work fighting against what was in him, but once you’ve made that bargain, it ain’t something you can fight. By the time he found me, Wyatt was understanding that much.”

“What was the lighthouse supposed to do?”

“The question, deputy, is what does it do? Everyone laughed at that thing. When I heard about it, you better believe I wasn’t laughing, just because of where it stood. Anything that went on at that place… well, I’d just as soon have nothing to do with it. But I damn sure knew better than to find it funny. Now, you ask me what it was supposed to do? I’ll tell you what it did—kept people from going my way.”

“You mean murder?” Kimble said. “That’s what you’re telling me? That some ghost light in the woods out there made you commit murder?”

“You don’t like the sound of it, huh? Well, maybe you understand why I’d rather not tell the tale. Maybe you understand that. And if you’re so damned brave, buddy, so sure that I’m wrong, then you go on and enjoy yourself at Blade Ridge. Pitch a tent and spend the night.”

“Easy,” Kimble said. “I’m not trying to offend, I’m just telling you that—”

“That it sounds foolish as a campfire story.”

Kimble didn’t answer.

“You wanted to know what the point of the lighthouse was,” O’Patrick said, the heat in his voice fading to dull embers. “Well, I’ll let you answer that yourself. You consider how many problems there’s been at the ridge since that light went up. You chew on that.”

There had been some problems at the ridge since it went up. David Clark died. Jacqueline Mathis survived. But of course the light had been out for Jacqueline. Wyatt had come to apologize to her for that reason. And then there was Shipley… whose accident came after Darmus broke the light and shut off the power.

“You thought it was a dream,” Kimble said. “A hallucination.”

“Hell, yes. Most vivid dream I’ve ever had, but once they got me away from there… well, it was easier to push it to the corner of my mind then. I remembered what had happened, but away from the ridge, out in the real world and daylight, it seemed impossible. So I told myself that it was. Then along comes that night with Joe, and I wake out of a damned trance with a wrench in my hand and his blood all over me, and you’d better believe I remembered it then.”

“You’re saying it’s a trade. You got your life back but promised to take another one?”

“That’s what I’m saying. When he told me he was bound by balance, I knew what was being offered, and I accepted. Days would pass when I’d think about it and get the cold shivers, but I’d tell myself two things. The first was that I’d imagined it. The second was that I could always be in control. Well, I bet wrong on both counts.”

Kimble sat down on an overturned bucket by the door. The strength had left his legs. Left his mind. He leaned back against the wall and stared at Ryan O’Patrick.

“You believe me,” O’Patrick said. “That’s a mighty surprising thing. I wasn’t one for telling the tale, and I surely never expected to have anyone believe me. Not unless they’d gone the same way.”

“I’ve already heard it once today,” Kimble said. “I didn’t do such a good job of believing it then. Now it’s getting easier.”

O’Patrick nodded and lifted the beer to his lips, then realized the can was already empty and tossed it. They both watched it roll across the concrete floor.

“What are you trying to do?” he asked.

“Fix the problem,” Kimble said.

O’Patrick laughed. “Fix the problem?”

Kimble set the beer down, unable even to go through the motions of drinking it anymore. His stomach was unsettled, and his hands weren’t all that steady either. He said, “I want you to go out there with me. I want you to tell me what you see.”

O’Patrick shook his head. “No.”

“Please,” Kimble said. “I’m just asking for—”

“Not a chance, deputy. I’m not going back to that place. You’ll need a warrant and a strong pair of cuffs to get that.”

“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.”

26

THE 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.

She saw the sparkle of his eyes first. Emerald, like pieces of an old bottle made of green glass. Then the rest of him took shape—hunched shoulders, coiled muscles, stiff tail. She was trying to say his name when she saw something pale beneath his front paws, and then the breath went out of her.

He was standing on a body.

One limp white palm extended out into the leaves. That was what had caught her attention. The rest was nearly camouflage, the brown uniform of the sheriff’s department. He was facedown in the brush, and the blood that pooled around his throat looked so black that it seemed a part of the cougar, an extension of his fur.

Audrey screamed. Everything in her brain told her not to, told her that the cat would spring at the slightest provocation, but everything in your brain could fail you at the sight of something like this, and so she screamed despite herself.

The cat snarled, snapped forward, and lashed out with a paw. He didn’t leave, though. He was protecting the kill.

Audrey turned and ran into the night, ran gracelessly and pointlessly, knowing that he would bring her down from behind and end her out here in the cold woods.

He didn’t, though. He never moved, but even after Audrey fell onto her knees in the trailer, with the door closed behind her, she still had her hands up by her neck as if to protect her throat when he sprang.

27

WHEN THE PHONE RANG at three A.M., Kimble knew it would be bad in the way that you always knew a call at that hour would be bad, but he hadn’t imagined it could be like this. He hadn’t imagined that whatever had happened had happened out there.

His first, groggy thought upon hearing that one of his own was down at Blade Ridge was a perverse, horrible hopefulness.

Maybe it’s Shipley. Maybe whatever madness exists out there is feeding on its own.

It wasn’t Shipley, though. It was Pete Wolverton.

He hung up the phone, pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, and cursed himself. All he’d heard about that place tonight, and still he hadn’t called them off. He’d considered it, but then the thought of Audrey Clark had changed his mind. She wasn’t going to abandon her cats, and he hadn’t wanted to leave her alone out there.

“I’m sorry, Pete,” he whispered. “Damn it, I’m so sorry.”

Then he got up, dressed, put on his gun, and went to make amends.

The scene was bright when he arrived, four cars already there, three from his department and one from the state police, all with flashers going. Spotlights were shining in the woods where Pete Wolverton had died, brightening the night so that the evidence techs could take their photographs.

Kimble got out of his car, feeling wearier than he ever had in his life, and went to talk to Diane Mooney, who was in charge of the scene.

“Where’s Audrey Clark?” he said. Around them the cats milled, bothered by all the lights and activity.

“Inside. She’s shaken up pretty bad.”

“She saw it happen?”

“Essentially. She found Pete with that fucking cat still on top of him.”

The venom in Diane’s voice was something Kimble had never heard from her. She wasn’t facing him, was instead looking out at the preserve, where dozens of massive cats stared back at her.

“Be a pro,” Kimble said, gentle but firm.

“I’m trying, chief. But that was Pete out there. That was Pete.”

“I know it. You talked to Shipley?”

“No. Why?”

“He was here until midnight, when Pete relieved him. I want him…” He hesitated, about to say that he wanted Shipley out to tell them what he’d seen, but now thinking that he didn’t want Shipley out here at all. “We need to know if he saw or heard anything during his shift,” he said. “But I’ll run him down tomorrow. We don’t need him at the scene. We got enough people out here as it is, and since they were working together on this, it might hit him harder than any of us.”

“I don’t think there’s a sliding scale on the way this one hits.”

Kimble nodded. “Was it you who interviewed Audrey Clark?”

“Yes. We’ll need to take another run at her, though. She wasn’t making a whole lot of sense.”

“How so?”

“Well, she’s hysterical, for one thing. But when she does talk, she claims that all those damned cats were dancing around on their hind legs, that someone with a blue torch guided her to the body, that—”

“Hang on. Hang on. A blue torch?”

“Like I said, she’s hysterical. Talking nonsense.”

Kimble looked up at the lighthouse and wet his lips. “Right. You’ve seen the body? You’ve seen Pete?”

She nodded.

“Any chance he wasn’t killed by the cougar?”

“Sure,” Diane said. “If there’s a wolf on the loose.”

He followed Diane through the woods and out to the place where Pete Wolverton lay in the wet leaves. A ring of spotlights had been set up around him as if a film crew were readying for a shoot, and yellow tape was strung between the trees. Everyone was hushed. Death scenes were always grim places, but this was different. This was one of their own.

Kimble ducked under the tape, approached the body of his friend of fifteen years, and dropped into a crouch. He felt something thick in the back of his throat and tight behind the eyes, drew in air through clenched teeth and then let it out slowly.

“No sign of the cat?” he said.

“None,” Diane answered. “With all these people around, he won’t show himself again. But when it was just Pete out here alone… he showed himself then, didn’t he?”

Kimble looked up at her, and she turned away. It had been Kimble’s decision to run a one-man rotation in these woods, and his deputies would not forget that. He wouldn’t either.

He cupped his hands to shield his eyes from the glare of the lights and focused on Pete’s body. There were tears in his uniform across the back, some blood showing through them, but not much. Obvious claw marks, but not the killing wound. He’d bled out from the throat.

“You ready to turn him over?” Kimble asked the lead evidence tech, who was with the state police, a topnotch guy. He’d rolled out fast. That was the way it went when a police officer was killed.

“Yeah. Waiting on you.”

“All right. Let’s turn him.”

Two of the technicians reached out with gloved hands and gently, with utmost care, rolled Pete Wolverton’s body over. The head didn’t roll in sync with the rest of him—there wasn’t much muscle left tethering skull to torso.

Someone whispered an oath, someone else a prayer. Kimble slid closer.

Pete’s throat had been laid wide open, and the cords of muscle showed white against the dark blood, which had spilled in enormous quantity, saturating Pete’s uniform shirt and all of the leaves around him. Kimble brought a hand up to his face and squeezed the flesh between his eyes with his thumb and index finger. He squeezed long and hard, concentrating on the pressure. Nobody spoke.

When he took his hand down again, he looked right at the wound. Not at Pete’s face, not at his eyes, not at the blood-soaked uniform that bound him in brotherhood to the men and women here. Just at the wound.

It was a very straight incision. An end-to-end slash that had cut remarkably deep, severing not just the arteries but the strong cartilage of the throat that people referred to as the windpipe.

Kimble said, “We think a claw did that?”

For a moment it was silent. Then the head evidence tech, from the state police, who was closest to the body, said, “Well, if it had used its teeth, everything would be torn. Chewed up. So that slash, yeah, that must have been a claw.”

“It’s very clean.”

Above him, Diane said, “There are claw marks all over his back, too.”

“I saw them. Not nearly so clean. Not very deep at all.”

Everyone was staring at him now. The evidence technician looked thoughtful. He turned back to the wound and said, “It is very clean.”

Diane said, “What are you thinking, chief?”

“I’m thinking that I’ve seen six people whose throats were cut with knives,” Kimble said. “One cut with a sword, one with an ax, one with a barbecue fork. I’ve never seen anyone’s throat opened up by a cat. I don’t know what it looks like.”

“Like that,” she said, her voice unsteady. The evidence technician, though, was meeting Kimble’s eyes, and there was a glimmer of understanding and agreement there.

“Autopsy will tell us, won’t it?” Kimble said, speaking to him.

“Yeah. We’ll be able to tell.”

“Tell what?” Diane said.

Kimble straightened, dusting leaves from his jeans. “Whether the cougar killed him,” he said, “or found him.”

28

THE IMAGE AUDREY COULD NOT get out of her mind was a Valium bottle. There was one at home, in the medicine cabinet, a prescription she’d filled in the weeks after David’s death. The pills had carried her through the funeral, through the softly spoken sympathies and the offers of help and the sight of him in the casket, but then she’d tucked them in a far corner of the medicine cabinet. Not because they didn’t help, but because she didn’t want to have to rely on that kind of help for too long.

Now she wanted that kind of help again. Wanted to take a handful of them, wanted the world to go cloudlike, soft and distant. Very distant.

She’d spoken to two different police officers, one woman who was harsh, almost accusatory, and one older man who hadn’t said much at all, just kept telling her to get comfortable, as if he were the awkward host of the world’s worst party. She’d gotten the tears and the trembling under control and was just beginning to feel some strength return when the sheriff himself stepped through the door. He wore his Stetson with the badge affixed to the crown, as if he’d just ridden in from Tombstone, and he looked at her with undisguised fury.

“Mrs. Clark,” he said, “I intend to let my department handle this investigation in the standard fashion. It’s not my job to interview you, and I won’t, though I’m damned tempted. I’m here for two reasons. The most important is out of respect for my deputy, who’s being zipped into a body bag right now. The other? I want you to know that this property is going to be closed.”

“What does that mean?” Audrey said. “Closed?”

“It means I will see this place shut down and your cats gone.”

She stared at him. In her hands was a cup of tea the other officer had insisted on making for her. He was looking at the floor now.

“I’ve tolerated this circus when I shouldn’t have,” the sheriff said. “I’ll carry that guilt for a long time, believe me. But in the last two days, two men have died because of your damned cats. If you think I won’t respond to that—”

“Someone shot Kino,” she said. “Your own officers found a bullet. They didn’t want to talk to me about it, but I know what it means. Someone came out here and shot one of my cats, and my best friend left in this world died trying to help. I know you just lost one of your own, and I’m sorry. But you need to remember that I’ve lost one of mine, too!”

Her voice was shaking, and the sheriff looked at her without a trace of emotion. When he spoke again, his voice was flat.

“It’s my understanding that the USDA handles your permitting.”

“That’s right,” she said. “And the permits are in order. They approved the new facility before—”

“They’ll be coming back out,” he said. “Along with some folks from the state wildlife agency. Along with whoever the hell else I need. I’ll find whoever it takes, and I’ll come with them.”

The door opened again, and another cop stepped through. She recognized this one. Kimble. The sheriff glanced at him, then turned back to Audrey.

“You can’t shut it down,” she said. “There are more than sixty cats who need—”

“I have no interest in the needs of your cats. I have interest in the public safety of Sawyer County. You have every right to object, and I’m sure you will. I’m just telling you the score. Don’t say you were blindsided. I intend to get these cats out of my county.”

She didn’t respond.

“As for the missing cat,” he continued, “I intend to find it. I’m having poisoned bait traps placed along the riverbed right now.”

“You can’t poison—”

He held up a hand. “You lost him, Mrs. Clark. You couldn’t handle him. When he was on your property, he was yours to care for. When he’s loose? He’s mine. I’m not worried about the cat’s health. I’m worried about the public’s.”

“Good luck getting him,” she said softly, and he flushed with rage, was halfway to a blustering response when she said, “No—I mean it. Good luck.”

He stared at her, then turned away. Said something low to Kimble and banged open the door and went outside.

“He’s hurting,” Kimble said, crossing the room to sit beside her. “We all are.”

“I understand that.”

“He’s also not wrong. Things are getting out of hand here. Do you have anyone you can contact, Mrs. Clark? Anyone who can come out here and lend some… some expertise? Experience?”

“Joe Taft,” she said. Joe owned an enormous rescue center in Indiana, the model for her own facility. Joe was as good with cats as anyone other than Wesley Harrington.

“How soon can he get here?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, find out. And in the meantime, who can you have here that you trust? Really trust.”

My husband, she thought. Wes, she thought. Gone, and gone. She blinked back tears and said, “Dustin Hall is the only person qualified. Dustin and I can keep things going alone. It won’t be easy, but we can do it. I have volunteers who usually help, but right now… right now it’s probably a bad idea to have too many people out here.”

“I won’t disagree,” Kimble said, and then looked up at the older deputy and said, “Rick, can we have a minute?”

The deputy nodded and left and then it was just the two of them. Kimble waited until the door was closed, then said, “I’d like to hear about the blue light.”

She stared at him. When she’d told the story the first time, all she’d seen was loathing and pity from the listeners. Why tell it again, to another person who wouldn’t believe her?

“I thought I saw one,” she muttered, and was ready to leave it at that until he spoke.

“Was it a torch? A flame?”

She set the tea down. “Yes. It was a flame. Not just a light, but a flame. How did you know?”

He didn’t answer that, just asked another question.

“You thought it led you to the body, is that correct?”

“Not exactly. I saw it and was walking toward it. I wanted to see who it was. I hadn’t made it far before I heard Ira.”

Kimble nodded. “You didn’t see the cat attack him, though. Or hear anything that sounded like that?”

“No. I was asleep. I woke up because the cats got agitated. I came outside and they were all standing up against the fences. Watching something. Watching that light.”

“When you saw the cougar, Pete was already dead.”

“I think so. There was so much blood. And he didn’t move. Yes, he was dead.”

“Was the cat showing interest in the body?”

“Interest?”

He nodded.

“Ira was just… standing over it. On it. The way they do when they’re protecting a kill.”

“All right.” Kimble reached out and touched her leg gently. “I’m sorry for your loss, too. It’s easy for us to forget about that, tonight. Please understand.”

“I do.”

He stood up. “I’ll be handling the investigation. Both of the investigations. If you need anything, ask for me directly, would you?”

“Yes.”

“I think it’s very important that you get someone out here,” he said. “Right now there are police all over. But when they leave, you’re alone?”

“I’m fine.”

“When they leave, you’re alone?” he repeated. He looked extremely concerned at the idea.

“Yes,” she said.

“And you can’t leave, yourself,” he said, almost as if he were thinking aloud. “You can’t leave the cats.”

“Someone has to be with them. At this point, I’m it.”

He nodded sadly. “All right. Who can you call to be with you? Someone you trust. A friend, family. I’m asking you, please, not to be here alone.”

His voice was so grave that it frightened her. She said, “I’ll call Dustin in the morning. He can be here with me.”

“Please do.”

He went to the door, then stopped with his hand on the knob and stared out the window. He was looking, she realized, up at the hill across the road, where the lighthouse stood in darkness.

“You had some altercations with Wyatt French, didn’t you?”

“Altercations?”

“Disputes. I know he was arrested for disrupting a meeting about this place.”

“That’s right.”

“Did he ever make it clear why he didn’t want you here?”

She frowned. Why in the world were they talking about Wyatt French?

“He couldn’t make anything clear. When he wasn’t drunk, he was crazy.”

“Sure. But what did he offer? What reasoning?”

“He said it was a dangerous spot,” she said. “That was about it. When we complained about the light, he wasn’t very happy. Then David died, and he wrote me a letter proving his point.”

Kimble turned. “A letter?”

“It was a Hallmark sympathy card, came in with all the others. Just not so sympathetic. He said how sorry he was, but then said that we’d brought it on ourselves. How very kind, don’t you think?”

Kimble looked thoughtful. He said, “When you complained about the light, he had to change it, didn’t he? Reduce the brightness.”

“Yes. It was terrible before that. These blinding flashes.”

“When your husband died… where in the process was that?”

“What do you mean, process? Why are we even talking about this?”

“I’m just trying to understand which light was up then. The old or the new.”

“Neither of them.”

He looked at her in an odd way. “Neither?”

She shook her head. “That was when he was changing to the dimmer lamp. I guess it required wiring changes, because he wanted us to pay for that. We declined. For a few days there, it was dark. He didn’t waste much time, though.”

“No,” he said in a detached voice. “He went as fast as he could.”

29

THE SHERIFF WAS WAITING for Kimble outside. He’d taken the Stetson off and was rubbing his eyes. When Kimble came down the steps, he put the hat back on. Kimble could see that his hand was wet with tears.

“Pete Wolverton,” Troy said, “was one of the best we had.”

“None better.”

“Long time with us, too. Lot of good years. Lot of good work.”

Kimble nodded.

“Nobody’s called Julie,” Troy said. Julie was Wolverton’s wife. They had two children, both teenagers, and Pete was one of those dads who liked to show you pictures of the kids.

“I’ll go see her,” Kimble said.

“No. That’s my job.” Troy took a deep breath, spat, and shook his head. “I was hard on that woman in there, and maybe I ought not to have been. I’m standing out here looking at these cats and thinking that she’s all alone with them.”

“She is now,” Kimble said. “Lost her husband a few months back. Lost her friend, who was the man who kept this place going, yesterday. She’s hanging in there and taking punches the likes of which we never have. Or I never have, at least. Be a worthy thing to remember.”

Troy nodded. “I know it. I came out here, I was just feeling sick, you know? Empty sick, the useless kind. And I got worked up telling myself that I wouldn’t be useless. I’d answer for him somehow. The only idea I had was to clear them out of here, every last one of them, and thought that would be worth something. I still think that it is.”

“I don’t,” Kimble said.

Troy looked at him with surprise.

“They’ve had this preserve going for a long time,” Kimble said. “Never an incident. Not until they came here.”

“Been a lot of incidents since.”

“There have been. I intend to find a way to handle it, Troy. I do. But let’s not allow ourselves to blame the wrong party. I was with her most of the morning. That’s a brave woman.”

“I don’t blame her, Kimble. It might have sounded as such, but I don’t blame her. I blame that damned cat. And while I don’t like any of them here, the one that’s free is the one we’re going to need to deal with first. Going to need to find that cat and kill it. That’s the only thing. I’m thinking poison bait traps. Spread ’em out all along the river down there.”

“And what if somebody’s dog gets into them, or, hell, a kid?”

“A kid’s going to eat a bloody piece of raw meat? Any kid that does that is one I’d put on the scorecard as points in our favor. Won’t have to arrest him for some fucked-up shit ten years from now.”

Kimble couldn’t help but smile at that.

“We’ll figure out a way to get him,” he said. “But even if the cat did kill Pete, you’ve got to remember that it was recently a wild animal and still has a hunter’s blood. Not much Audrey Clark, or anyone else, can do about that.”

Troy tilted his head and stared at Kimble. “Did I hear you say if?”

Kimble glanced to his left, where the crime-scene lights glared in the woods, and said, “Troy, I’ve seen the body. I’d wager my last dime that when the medical examiner is done, he’ll say Pete’s throat was cut.”

Neither of them spoke for a long time. When Troy finally broke the silence, he said, “She saw the cat with him, Kimble. She saw it.”

“After Pete was dead. She did not see it bring him down.”

“You’re telling me you think someone came out here and cut his throat tonight. You’re serious.”

“I am. We’ll see what the autopsy says. The tiger that was shot out here yesterday? That was not a case of the property manager trying to put down a wild cat. Someone else took that shot.”

“I know that, Kimble. I read your report, and Mrs. Clark was in there carrying on about it just a minute ago. I understand it’s a crime. But there’s a damned big difference between someone taking a pot shot at a tiger and someone cutting a policeman’s throat.”

Kimble took a breath, looked Troy in the eye, and said, “I’m going to ask you for some leeway on this.”

“What do you mean, Kimble?”

“Give me twenty-four hours on my own with it. No reports, nobody riding with me, no meetings. Just give me a day of space to work.”

“If you’ve got notions on who did this,” Troy said, “I need to hear them.”

“Twenty-four hours,” Kimble repeated. “You give me that, sir, and I’ll give you every notion I’ve got. If you don’t like them, and you probably won’t… well, we’ll deal with that then. But let me run with it, sir.”

Troy looked at him for a long time, and then he said, “We’ve been working together for too damn long, Kimble, for you to call me sir.”

“I know it. But this just feels a little different, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” Troy said. “It sure as shit does.”

They walked together back to Troy’s car, and Kimble put out his hand and squeezed the sheriff’s shoulder and wished him luck. There was nothing false in the gesture. They had their differences, in demeanor and approach, but Kimble did not envy the man the trip he was about to make to see Julie Wolverton, and he was proud of him for making it.

When the sheriff was gone, Kimble waited until they removed Pete’s body. He stood with head bowed as they carried it past, and then, when the others were either gone down the road or back in the woods, he got into his own car and drove across the gravel and up the winding lane until he reached the top of the hill and the lighthouse rose like a menacing specter in the night, white paint and glass picking up the pale moon glow and holding the tower stark against the night sky. Kimble parked outside the fence and left the car running, the headlights aimed at the front of the building, then found the keys to the property. He stepped out of the car and unlocked the gate and went up the path to the lighthouse, opened the door, and stepped inside the cold room. The walls were bare wood now, unadorned by the maps and photographs. All that remained was the thumbtacks, which protruded in all directions, tilting like gravestones in a forgotten cemetery.

“Okay,” Kimble said. “I’ve heard enough and seen enough to give it a shot, Wyatt. I’ll give it a shot.”

He crossed to the bed, leaned over it, and opened the electrical panel. There was a series of metallic snaps as he flipped the breakers. No lights came on, but he heard a hum.

He closed the panel door, looked at the words that covered it, those song lyrics:

And the sky’s so cold and clear

The stars might stick you where you stand

And you’re only glad it’s dark

’Cause you might see the Master’s hand…

He turned away, then used the flashlight to find his way up the stairs. There he dropped to one knee, reached out, and laid a palm over the lens of the infrared lamps. Warm. They were back on, casting their invisible beams into the woods.

He straightened, turned off the flashlight, and looked at the fractured glass panel left from the killing bullet. He thought of a line he’d read long ago: It was no accident that most people who committed suicide with a gun chose to shoot themselves in the head and not the heart. It was there that they were plagued, haunted, tormented.

He stared out at the dark hills through the wide glass panes, thinking of all the stories he’d heard today. Even in the night, you could see the outline of the railroad trestle, spindly silhouettes over a river that shimmered beneath the moon.

Twenty-four hours, he’d told the sheriff, and then he’d share his thoughts. They were thoughts that might well cost him his badge. What he was coming to believe was likely impossible to prove.

But he’d be damned if he wouldn’t try.

30

THE WHITMAN COLLEGE LIBRARY was open until Christmas Eve, but with classes already out of session for the semester there was hardly a student or faculty member to prowl the shelves. Roy met the librarian at the door as she unlocked the building, and his presence gave her a start. It was well past dawn but barely light, the sun hidden by layers of leaden clouds. They were predicting snow, the season’s first chance of accumulation.

Roy was vaguely acquainted with the librarian who greeted him—her name was Robin and she’d helped him out with a few bits of research over the years—and that was both reassuring and a little troubling. She’d be good to him, he knew, but she might also have questions that he wasn’t prepared to answer.

She led with a question, in fact. As Roy showed her the photographs and explained that he was hoping to find the source, she asked immediately what he was working on, now that the newspaper was closed.

“Looking for that next step,” he said. “You know, maybe a book or something.”

“I think that would be just great,” Robin said in the tone of voice you used when a toddler announced his intention to learn to fly a plane. Or, in Roy’s experience, when damn near anyone announced their intention to write a book. “We’d hate to lose you from town, you know.”

“I don’t think it’s in me to leave, even if I wanted to. Still stories to tell, too. I suppose I’ll turn into an old man sitting on a liar’s bench, passing my news along that way.”

“You could start a blog,” she said cheerfully and seriously, and the word stirred bile in Roy’s stomach.

“I could,” he said. “Now, it looks to me like these are microfilm printouts. But they aren’t from my paper.” Even now, he couldn’t get that out of his system. My paper. “I was thinking that there was a predecessor to the Sentinel. Very old. Back when the town was still in mining-camp days.”

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 short 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—”

“Feels vivid?” Kimble said. “Real clear, but you still know it couldn’t have happened that way? Don’t trust your own memory, your own mind?”

“Exactly,” Shipley said, and he jutted his chin, looking at Kimble with a hard, thoughtful stare. “Pretty good summary, chief.”

He couldn’t have killed one of our own, Kimble thought. There’s no way he could not have put a knife to Pete Wolverton’s throat.

But so many of the ridge survivors had killed one of their own. Friends, husbands, business partners, bosses. When that blackness rose up, it seemed decision-making and control were not possible. Shipley wouldn’t have known what he was doing. If O’Patrick and Jacqueline were to be believed, he wouldn’t have recalled a thing but blackness until he was done, like some sort of eclipse of the soul. He would know that he’d done it, though. He would know that by now.

“You saw Pete at, what, midnight?” Kimble asked.

“Ten till. He came out early. You know Pete.”

“Sure. And you hadn’t seen anything on your shift that was cause for concern? No sign of the cat or… or of anything else?”

Shipley looked away from him, out where the fog was rising in wraiths and then fading into the gray sky of a cold, bleak day.

Kimble said, “Nathan? What did you see?”

“Nothing of that black panther. But I hung pretty tight to the preserve, too. I’ll tell you something, if you watch those cats enough? They’re unsettled. It’s a strange thing, but I feel like they get it. They don’t like the place either. They understand some things about it. That could be bad.”

“Bad for who?”

Shipley’s eyes shifted back to Kimble. “Anyone who’s out there.”

There was a long pause, Kimble considering the various tracks that he could pursue, considering how many of his cards to show. In the end, he decided to hold them tight for now. He would need more facts and better understanding before he’d chance confronting Shipley with the knowledge that he’d been gathering about the bloody history of Blade Ridge.

“So when Pete came on shift, it was ten till midnight, and you spoke?” he said, returning to the procedural realm, his supposed reason for being here.

“Just a quick update. Told him things were cool, and then I bailed. Got home, went to bed.”

“Yeah? You look awfully tired.”

“I haven’t been sleeping all that well. Not since the accident.”

“How you feeling, though?”

“Lucky. Damned lucky. You saw the car, and now you see me.” Shipley waved both hands over his chest, indicating the specimen of unscathed strength that had crawled out of that demolished cruiser.

“Yes,” Kimble said very softly. “I saw it, and now I see you.”

For a time it was quiet, and then Kimble said, “You’re scheduled today?”

“Yes. Was expecting to be back at the preserve, though. That was what you’d told me.”

“Not anymore. Property is closed. And I’d like you to take the day off.”

Shipley’s eyes hardened briefly. One flicker, then gone. “Why?”

“I might need you,” Kimble said. “As I work through this thing with the cat, I might need you. I want you handy.”

“I’ve got a cell phone and a radio. I can be handy from anywhere.”

“I know it. All the same, just stick tight to the house, get some rest, okay?”

Shipley cocked his head. “Chief, is there something else on your mind?”

“Yeah,” Kimble said. “Pete Wolverton. I was out there, Shipley. I saw him. He’ll stay on my mind for a while. Now, I’d like you to hang close by and wait until you hear from me today. I may be needing you.”

“All right. Just say the word.”

“Appreciate it, son.” Kimble got to his feet, and when Shipley extended his hand, he didn’t want to take it. He did, though, feeling a ripple of displeasure at the touch, and then he followed Shipley back into the old farmhouse and toward the front door. He made sure to keep the younger man in front of him. They were halfway to the door when Kimble pulled up, listening. He could hear water moving through the old pipes, then a hiss and churning in a nearby room.

“Damn, kid,” he said, “you don’t waste time before starting your laundry in the morning, do you?”

Shipley smiled. “Most times it’s a pile halfway to the ceiling. I just needed the uniform washed.”

Kimble got a smile out to match. It wasn’t easy.

32

AS THE MORNING WIND PICKED UP and a few stray snowflakes drifted down off the ridge, Audrey called Joe Taft in Center Point, Indiana. Joe had been David’s inspiration. His facility in rural Indiana was the nation’s largest, and he’d rescued cats of every species. Joe was the man the federal agencies called on for help seizing cats from terrible situations and was the only man David had ever admitted might be better with cats than Wesley Harrington.

He’d also been the only man who had offered to take the cats off her hands when David died.

“I thought you’d just relocated all of them, Audrey,” Joe said when she asked if his offer still stood.

“That’s right.”

“It’s not working out?”

Audrey looked out to the woods where she’d seen one of her cats crouched over a blood-soaked body and said, “No. It’s not working out.”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Joe said. “When we talked before, I had some options for you, but you were so firm… said they were your cats and you weren’t going to let that change, and I respected that. So the plans I had, well, they’ve been long dead, Audrey.”

She’d had one rule for the call—don’t cry. It didn’t take long to determine that was a foolish rule. She couldn’t have cried if she wanted to. Her voice had all the emotion of stainless steel as she told Joe about Wesley, and the cop named Wolverton, and Ira.

“They’re looking for a way to get rid of us, Joe. The villagers coming with their pitchforks and torches. But I’ve been thinking about it all night, and I won’t fight them. This place… this isn’t a good home for these cats.”

“I see,” Joe said. “So you’re asking me—”

“I’m auctioning off my heart,” she said. “And you get an early bid.”

“Excuse me?”

With that the stainless steel melted, and she thought I’ll be damned—I can cry. The tears fell soundlessly down her cheeks, and on the other end of the line Joe Taft waited as if he understood.

“They need homes,” she said finally, when she could speak. “David brought them here so they’d have good homes. You said you could do it once, and I’m asking you to say it again. We have funding. There’s an endowment. Financially, they’d be cared for. I just need someone to actually provide the care. I can’t do it, Joe. I tried, and I can’t.”

He was silent.

“Will you do it?” she said. “Will you take them?”

“There are sixty of them,” he said slowly.

“Sixty-five. We had sixty-seven, but Kino is dead and Ira is gone.”

“That’s a lot of cats.”

“We have a strong endowment. The financial support is there.”

“I’m glad to hear it, but finances aren’t the only concern. I’ve got the acreage for them, but I don’t have the enclosures built. That takes time.”

“I know it does. But when the sheriff comes back here, I’d like to be able to tell him I have a transition plan.”

“Well, you can tell him that, I guess. I’ll need to build, and I’ll need to hire more staff. I can’t take sixty-five in addition to the cats we already have without making some changes. But here’s the more important question. With Wesley gone, can you hold out long enough for me to get this thing in motion?”

She stared out at the trees surging in the wind across the top of the ridge.

“I hope so.”

By the time Dustin Hall arrived, the police were gone, and it was just Audrey and the cats. She met him when he pulled through the gates, and the first words out of his mouth were, “What’s the matter?”

“I look that good, eh?”

He didn’t smile. The wind blew her hair across her face and she pushed it back with one hand and said, “Ira killed a police officer last night, Dustin. The sheriff has promised to shut us down. Plenty of things are the matter.”

Dustin got out of his battered Honda and went to her and hugged her. She accepted it, but the embrace was awkward and stiff, doing little to warm either of them.

“I’ve called Joe Taft,” she said.

“He’s coming down to help?”

“He’s coming down to take them, eventually.”

Dustin looked more stunned at this news than he had been about Ira’s killing.

“Take them?”

“I don’t see another choice,” Audrey said. “I can’t run it alone. Together, we’ll be able to feed them today. Working hard, we’ll be able to handle the feedings. But long term, Dustin? I just don’t see another choice.”

He took his glasses off and rubbed them clean with his shirttail, looking out at the lions, who were massing near the fences.

“They’re hungry now,” he said. “I guess we’d better get to work.”

He walked past her and toward the barn, and Audrey watched him go and felt a crushing sense of failure. Dustin had been one of David’s protégés, a student who fell deeply in love with the rescue center and its mission and its cats. He was disappointed in her, just as David would have been. But what else could she do?

She saw Lily, the blind white tiger, sitting upright and looking directly at her. The cat couldn’t see a thing, but still Audrey felt as if she were being watched. And judged.

“I’m sorry,” she told the tiger. And then, more softly, “David, I’m sorry.”

Robin, the librarian, smiled when Roy came out to her desk.

“Get what you need?”

“A start on it,” he said. “I’d like to know a little more about Frederick.”

“Most of what we have begins with Roger.”

“Frederick is my interest. He seems to have disappeared from the family pretty abruptly.”

“A suicide, you know.”

“I did not. I just saw that one day he was a prominent spokesman for the family and the company, and the next he was being, um, restored?”

Robin nodded. “Unsuccessfully. As I recall, he really came off the rails.”

“Can I read about this somewhere?”

“We have correspondence between the two brothers. That’s the closest you’ll get. The family didn’t disclose much about Frederick after his instability began. He was the dark secret then, I guess. Always in sanitariums of one sort or another, but rarely mentioned. I’ve had students pull the letters before for research work on the family, but I don’t recall anything else.” She led the way back into the family archives, used a big set of keys to open locked drawers at the far end of the room, and withdrew several binders.

“Those are photocopies of the family correspondence from the era you’re interested in. I can’t let you handle the originals, I’m afraid.”

“As long as they’re legible, they’ll do just fine.”

She nodded and left and then it was just him in the large, empty room with many generations of Whitmans gazing over his shoulder from sepia-tinted photographs. He opened the first binder and set to work.

There were letters from Frederick Sr. to his son during the Civil War. The Whitmans, originally of Boston, had sided with the North, and Frederick Jr. was a West Point graduate who’d left the war with the rank of lieutenant, then abandoned the army to take over his role as obvious successor to the Whitman Company’s throne. Always involved in land acquisition, going back as far as the fur-trading days in the upper Midwest, the company focused after the Civil War on timber and ore. Coal, specifically. The Whitmans saw the railroads for exactly what they were—the key to the industrial future of not just the nation but the world—and they wanted in early.