The Ridge

Roy scanned through one tedious letter after another detailing the prospects in the mountains that would soon be home to a town and a university bearing the family name, afraid to miss any reference to Blade Ridge. By the early 1880s, most of the letters preserved in the university’s collection were in the pen of Frederick Jr. and not his father, who was clearly in ill health. Some were from his mother, others from Roger, the younger brother, who was serving the company from its Boston headquarters, but the core of the family’s story in this time was told by Frederick Jr., who in 1882 had assumed the role of company president.

The first reference to the potential of the mines along the Marshall River appeared in 1887, and by a year later excitement over them was evident in Frederick’s letters. His exasperation at the success of rivals in West Virginia was clear, and he deemed the holdings along the Marshall to be capable of triple the yield of any competitors. “Blade Ridge, the locals call it,” wrote Frederick, “the name earned by the way the stone cliffs glimmer like a knife’s edge in the right moonlight.”

In the spring of 1888, he wrote to Roger demanding that he secure one Alfred H. Tremley for design and supervision of a railroad bridge that would allow coal to be removed from the hills by the beginning of the next year. Roger responded with good news—Tremley had agreed to their price and was headed west.

For a moment, Roy considered that Tremley might have been the source of Wyatt’s continuing search. But Tremley’s photograph had appeared in the newspapers, and Wyatt hadn’t selected it.

For several months, the exchanges between the Whitman brothers were buoyant, filled with predictions of great wealth. Then came November, and a letter from Frederick that was a good deal bleaker: “David Watson awoke in the night shivering and soaked in sweat, and by dawn he was unable to stand, lying huddled in blankets while the others left camp. Our physician warns of a possible contagion, which we cannot afford at our current pace. Hopefully, he is wrong.”

“He wasn’t wrong,” Roy muttered. “It was contagious, Frederick, old boy.”

Future letters confirmed the diagnosis. The illness was spreading, and with it dissatisfaction among the workers, whom Frederick feared would abandon the project entirely. His younger, brasher brother responded with firm words, suggesting that the crew be quarantined along the river and saying that work could not cease, as the company’s investors had been guaranteed functioning mines by the new year.

Correspondence quickly took on a grim tone—Watson had perished, and a second and third man succumbed soon after. The camp doctor told Frederick Whitman Jr. that he would have to hope the fever didn’t spread through the crew.

Hope, that winter, did not seem a powerful tool. By the first week of December, seven men were dead. Frederick Whitman Jr., while holding the men to quarantine at the work site, made his own camp across the river, telling his brother that he feared “sharing in the conditions of the men.”

In other words, he wanted to crack the whip from a safe distance.

Roger wrote to his brother to suggest the threat of jailing all workers who did not hold to the letter of their contract: “They were hired to build a bridge, and a bridge they shall build.”

Frederick responded with caution.

“Our deadline may no longer be attainable, as I’ve been tremendously disappointed in our physician’s abilities to handle the epidemic,” he wrote. “The locals are an astoundingly superstitious people, given to beliefs in conjuring, charms, and the handling of snakes. I had long refused such foolishness be permitted in the camp, but as it seems to give them some comfort, I’ve since allowed the practices despite my disapproval. Well, today, brother, my disapproval has grown. A gentleman by the name of Mr. Silas Vesey arrived on foot at the camp several nights ago. He is an odd man, and I distrusted him immediately. He is clean in appearance and yet carries a quality of purest revulsion in a manner that I cannot properly articulate. There is an odor to him, almost that of cooling ashes, and he speaks in a voice that somehow distresses the soul. He told me that he understood we had health troubles, and that he was capable of offering assistance. I told him that our finest doctor was unable to handle the problem, and I doubted he could do any more. Mr. Vesey responded that he was quite certain he could assist those men who were willing. I was unsettled by the man and sent him away. He made camp not far from us, though, and I wish he would return to whatever forsaken hollow from which he came.”

Soon there was another letter about Vesey, who apparently had not left his camp but stayed within range, tending to a small bonfire and watching the progress—or lack thereof—on the trestle.

“Our foreman, Mr. Mortimer, is among the gravely ill. Yesterday I saw him nearly out of his head with fever, and I feared that when the men lost their leader, our hope would perish with him. Last evening, I observed as he rose, wrapped in blankets, and went to see Vesey. I was troubled by it, but the man appears nigh his end, and I wished to make no move to stop him.

“Mr. Mortimer returned after many hours in a state of remarkable good health. I was so astonished, watching him work today, that I inquired. He has encouraged me to consider Vesey’s offer, believing firmly that the man is capable of healing, and while I do not, it is worth noting that these people are deeply superstitious and perhaps others would respond to Vesey as did Mr. Mortimer.”

Roger’s response was swift and firm: “Allow them any fool’s cure they desire so long as it encourages them to work.”

Reading the letter more than 120 years later, Roy Darmus felt a chill ride up his spine.

That’s who Wyatt was looking for, he thought, a picture of Silas Vesey. If he was starting with pictures, that meant he could see people out there—lots of them. And if he never named Vesey, then he never found a photograph.

That wasn’t impossible to believe. Photographs of people from that era were scarce. But then of course there were other possibilities, the folktale kind about those whose image couldn’t be captured by a camera at all…

Roy found himself staring back at the ancient photographs that Wyatt had collected. The Blade Ridge dead were just names on maps in Wyatt’s lighthouse. The murderers, though? They were names on pictures.

He could see them, Roy thought.

He returned uneasily to the letters, discovering without much surprise that Frederick had taken his brother’s advice and gone to meet with Silas Vesey, who still lingered along the ridge.

“I told him that the delays were unacceptable, and that if he was capable of aiding the sick, I bid him to do so. He asked if I wished him to see that the men were bound to the bridge. I responded that if he was, indeed, capable of healing, that is exactly what I wished. His response was most unusual. He put forth a smile that chilled me more than the wind and the snow and what he told me made no sense at all. He said that it might be far easier for him to bind the most gravely ill of the men to the bridge. I denounced the claim as preposterous, but Vesey said that he could heal only the willing, and sometimes desperate men were more willing. At that moment, I had a distinct and abiding sense of fear, and wished deeply that I had not made the trip to see him at all. He seemed to sense my doubt, and told me that he could promise the bridge shall be completed, and said that I was fortunate because he was the only man in the region who could see to such a thing. There are others capable, he said, but none in these mountains. I said I had no time to send for anyone else, and he told me that if I wished the crew bound to the bridge, then he would need to be of them. I was not surprised that he should try to extort a wage, but I said not a dime would pass into his palm until I saw proof of his abilities. He then told me that dollars were not his concern, that he simply wanted me to know that once he agreed to help, he’d be required to remain with the crew for a long while, and then asked whether I believed Blade Ridge will be a prosperous and well-traveled region for years to come. I assured him that it will be, though the idea of his wishing to linger among us did not appeal in the slightest. I wished no dealings with him at all, but I know well that our time is short and our investors impatient, and so I sent him on to try. I doubt he will be of help despite his assurances, and I look forward to the day of his departure.”

The next letter was a great deal shorter, and far more optimistic.

“I have counted more men working on the bridge each morning than the day before. There is an odd quality to watching them work—never have I seen a more silent group of men—but the construction is sound.”

Then came his final letter, written on Christmas Eve 1888, and Roy read it with astonishment.

“My concerns about Mr. Vesey have been growing immensely, and last evening I endeavored to put them at ease by observing the men in the night. Their silence during the day, which is when I typically visit, has unnerved me, and well it should. Our bridge, brother, is a creation of an evil I have never believed possible. The nails are being driven by dead men. At night, Vesey visits the sick with a torch in hand. Sometimes he moves on, and the next morning those men have passed. But on two occasions last evening, I watched with my own eyes as he lowered the torch to a dying man. The flames turned to coldest blue, and then the man rose. I watched this happen, Roger. There is no mistaking what I saw.”

It was the last letter Frederick Whitman Jr. wrote, or at least the last that the family had preserved. Roy flipped through several pages of business-related correspondence with frustration, hoping for more, and finally hit upon an exchange from May 1890, between Roger, by then located in Sawyer County, and his wife, who was still in Boston. It was the first mention of his older brother.

“We are moving him again, and I maintain hope that the plagues of his mind will soon abate. I’ve heard numerous accounts of the miraculous restorative powers of the mineral springs of French Lick and West Baden, Indiana, and have been assured that time spent at rest amidst those healing waters may well be what my brother requires.”

The next appearance of Frederick Whitman Jr. in the college archives was his obituary, published in 1892. It said that Frederick, an ill man, had perished in Indiana. The formal language of the time did not succeed in entirely obscuring the fact that he had died by his own hand.

33

THE HONORABLE DOUG GRAYLING, Sawyer County Circuit Court judge, was presiding over his morning docket when Kimble arrived, so Kimble waited in his office, pretending to flip through an Outdoor Life magazine so he didn’t have to make conversation with the judge’s clerk and explain the purpose of his visit. The issue he picked up included a feature detailing mountain lion attacks in Montana and California. Just what he wanted to read about today.

When Grayling finally wrapped up his docket, it was nearly eleven in the morning, and Kimble had an ache down low along his spine from sitting so long.

“Kimble, hey there.”

He stood and shook the judge’s hand. “Hello, Doug. You have a minute?”

“Of course.”

They walked into his private office, and the judge sat behind his desk, let out a soft groan, and said, “It would be nice if assholes took the holidays off, wouldn’t it, Kimble? If people said, Hey, let’s take the month of December and not be pricks to one another, not get arrested, not get charged, not be arraigned. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

“It would. You’ll have a tough time convincing them of the merits of the plan, though.”

“Agreed,” Grayling said. “What can I do for you?”

Kimble took a deep breath, looked at the judge who’d sentenced Jacqueline Mathis to ten years, and asked for an order on jailer to be issued. It was a simple bit of legalese granting the sheriff’s department temporary custody of an inmate. Usually this was done for court proceedings of some kind, when the inmate was required to travel for a hearing. Today Kimble requested it for purposes of investigation, and Grayling went silent.

“She’s in a minimum-security facility,” Kimble said, “and she’s recently been approved for work release. There’s no reason we can’t borrow her for a few hours.”

“No reason we can’t, okay. But I need to hear the reason we should.”

Kimble gave him the pitch: active investigation and a delicate one. Based on evidence found in Wyatt French’s lighthouse, he said, it was possible that a series of accidents that had occurred over the years at Blade Ridge might have been initiated.

“Initiated?” Grayling said. “What in the hell does that mean? Caused by French?”

Kimble had expected this jump, and while he felt a pang of guilt at allowing the misconception to flourish, he figured Wyatt would have approved. He’d wanted Kimble to pursue the truth, not polish his reputation.

“Possibly. There have been many deaths out there, Doug, and survivor accounts are uncomfortably similar. People report the accident being initiated by a man in the road.”

“You think he was causing car accidents by running out in the road?”

“I don’t think it’s anywhere near that simple. But he kept track of the dead, and of the survivors. I’ll tell you this in total honesty: I’ve never been more disturbed by discovery of evidence than I am by what I found in that lighthouse.”

“Homicide investigation,” Grayling echoed. “That’s what you’re saying?”

“Absolutely.”

“The man is dead. We can’t prosecute.”

“That does not remove the need for answers,” Kimble said, “and there’s the distinct possibility—probability, actually—that he was not working alone. One of our deputies died last night, Pete Wolverton, and that demands—”

“I’ve heard. I understood that he was killed by a cougar.”

“Autopsy results are pending, Doug, but I just got off the phone with the medical examiner. He says those results will confirm what I suspected when I saw the body last night—the cougar might have found Pete, but it did not kill him.”

“You’re saying that Pete Wolverton was murdered last night.”

“Yes. I think that’s what happened. I may be wrong, and I hope to be. But I don’t think that I am, and neither does the ME.”

“Tell me again why we need Jacqueline Mathis released for this?”

“She’s one of the survivors who reported activity on the road.”

“Well, interview her then. Get a statement.”

“I have. That’s why I’m here. I want her to walk me through it. I can’t overstate the importance of seeing the way she recreates the scene, Doug. I simply cannot overstate that.”

“You have a distinctly personal relationship with that woman, Kimble.”

“No, sir, I do not.”

“She shot you. That constitutes a—”

“I am well aware of who she is and what she did,” Kimble said. “I’m asking for a little latitude here.”

“It’s not my job to give you latitude, it’s my job to uphold the law.”

“That’s both of our jobs,” Kimble said. “How long have we worked together, Doug? How many cases? You know me, and you know my word. I’m asking you to let that count for something.”

“Always has, always will. But I’ve got to understand how she can help!”

“Her recollection of the scene is special.”

“Special.”

“Yes.” Kimble leaned forward and said, “Doug? I have never worked another case that feels as threatening to the people of Sawyer County as this one. Never.”

Grayling looked at him with alarm. “Car accidents that were really homicides. We’re actually talking about this. Based on evidence you found in a lighthouse.”

“We’re actually talking about it, yes. And I need her at the scene. It’s critical.”

“Someone else should handle her testimony.”

“It’s my investigation. And that was my deputy who died last night. I’m not turning it over to anyone else, Doug. You have a problem with that, you can call the sheriff himself. Troy will approve it.”

The Honorable Doug Grayling swore under his breath and ran both hands through hair that glistened with dye that left it an impossibly radiant shade of black.

“She shot you,” he said.

“I recall that, yes.”

“And you want me to issue an order on jailer to turn her over to you.”

“Twenty-four-hour release. This thing is big, Doug. It’s worth it. No, check that—demands it. I have to know what she can recreate at that scene.”

Grayling pushed back from his desk and stared at him for a long time. Kimble, who understood the value of silence, let him stare and didn’t press.

“I can’t give her to you alone,” Grayling said finally. “Not with your personal history. And I need a female officer there. Is that clear?”

“Diane Mooney will be with me,” Kimble said, and it was the second time he’d ever lied to a judge. The first time had also been with Grayling, only Kimble had been on the witness stand then. Not so much a lie back then as an omission. The prosecutor hadn’t asked specifically if, after the supposedly accidental shot that had dropped Kimble to the farmhouse floor, Jacqueline Mathis had leaned down, smiling, and pressed the muzzle of his own gun to his forehead.

“Do me a favor on this,” Kimble said. “Do the people of your county a favor on this. Keep it quiet, all right? You give me twenty-four hours and I hope to have the answers for you. You might not like them, or even believe them, but I intend to have them.”

“I’ll issue it. But I don’t like the way it feels.”

“Neither do I,” Kimble told him, and it felt good to speak the truth again.

34

ROY SAT IN A BOOTH at the Bakehouse, wondering why Kimble would possibly want to meet to discuss something so dark, so wildly implausible yet thoroughly documented, in a brightly lit coffee shop. It felt like a discussion for a dim and private room, where even whispers wouldn’t be overheard, where two men could talk about madness and not fear the consequences.

Kimble had been firm, though. He wanted to meet at the Bakehouse.

When he came through the door, Roy was taken aback by just how exhausted he looked. The chief deputy had always walked with a touch of a limp after the shooting, and stood with a posture that suggested more years than he had, but today you could have said he was fifty and no one would have blinked.

“I’ve got a story,” Roy said. “But it’s not one you’re going to want to hear, and the source is hardly reliable. It’s not just more than a century old, it was also left to us by an insane man. I don’t even know that it is going to be worth hearing.”

Kimble said, “It’ll be worth hearing. And maybe we shouldn’t judge the man’s sanity just yet.”

It was an odd thing for him to say, this man who was so painfully practical that extracting colorful quotes from him for a newspaper story had been almost impossible. Roy shrugged, said, “Okay,” and then he told him the story.

When he was through, Kimble didn’t respond right away. He sipped his coffee and looked over the notes Roy had taken in the archives, studied the pictures Wyatt had already found there, and did not speak.

“Like I told you,” Roy said, “this is probably wasting time that you can’t afford to waste. It’s a good chiller, I’ll grant that, but the idea that it has anything to do with what’s—”

“I think he was looking for Vesey,” Kimble said. “All those pictures labeled NO? I think you’re right. He must have been looking for Vesey.”

Roy sighed, lowered his voice, and said, “I hit on the same idea. Then I hit on one that’s even more absurd. I was wondering why he was content to write the names of the dead on the walls, but he used photographs for the murderers. It almost suggested that… that he had seen them, somehow. That what he was looking for was visual confirmation.”

“I believe that’s correct.”

Roy stared at him. “The story I just told you was about dead men building a bridge, Kimble. Are you being this calm about it because you’re waiting for someone to come take me away to a padded cell, or is there something I don’t understand?”

Kimble was staring out to the patio, where in warm weather the sidewalk tables were popular. Now they’d been put away for the season, and a trace of snow was beginning to gather where they’d once stood.

“There are lots of things we don’t understand,” he said. “And I’m tired of it, Darmus. I can’t bear it anymore. I’ve got an idea that might help me understand it, and it might also cost me my job by the time things are done. I think it probably will. If things go well, then my badge may be all that I lose.”

“What in the world are you talking about, Kimble?”

“There’s a ghost out there,” Kimble said, turning back to him. “Or the devil? Some combination of the two? I don’t know how to explain him, but this Vesey sounds just right. Now you’ve told me the stories you found. Let me tell you the ones I’ve found.”

He told them, while Roy’s coffee went cold and people milled around them, laughing and talking and complaining about last-minute holiday shopping and long car trips to see family in far-off places. Roy listened as the most dogmatic cop in the county spoke of specters with blue torches and bargaining that led to murder and invisible beams of light that had protected Blade Ridge for many years. He told all of this, and Roy listened, and he believed.

The time when he could not believe had passed.

“If I’m crazy,” Kimble said, watching him carefully, “at least I’ve got company. I appreciate that.”

Then Kimble told him his intention to take Jacqueline Mathis to the ridge, and Roy found himself shaking his head.

“Too dangerous for you, Kimble. Even if Grayling approved it, if something goes wrong out there and you’re left with this explanation, you’re done.”

“I know it,” Kimble said simply. “I’ve thought on that a great deal, trust me. But let me show you the other side of that coin. If I don’t take her out there, and I don’t do anything about it, and a hundred years from now someone is still adding names to that list Wyatt started… well, which would you rather have? Your parents died out there.”

Yes, they had. And if Kimble was to be believed, they had died by making the right choice. Roy thought back to Wyatt’s words in that final phone call, those that had incensed him so deeply: The decisions that they both made. Very brave. Very strong. And knowing what they were saying goodbye to, with a child at home, it must have been so difficult.

He’d thought Wyatt was suggesting that they’d killed themselves. Instead, he was suggesting that they hadn’t been willing to preserve their own lives at the cost of another’s.

“That’s why Wyatt killed himself,” Roy said. “He had to take a life. He chose his own.”

“It seems that way.”

“When he got his diagnosis, he would have known that just waiting to die wasn’t an option for him. Maybe he could feel that? I think that he could.” Roy recalled the man’s panicked breathing on that final phone call, recalled how he’d said that he was becoming afraid of what he could do in the dark, and nodded. “Whatever was pulling on him, it was tugging harder at the end.”

“You see what I’m saying?” Kimble said, his voice mournful but determined. “Which is worse, Darmus?”

“The second option,” Roy said, and then, just as Kimble started to nod, he said, “But that’s assuming you could do something about whatever is out there. There’s absolutely nothing to suggest that you can.”

“Jacqueline thought she could help.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. But she can see them, Darmus. She can see them, and I can’t. I can’t fight something I can’t see.”

“I don’t know that you can fight dead men, either,” Roy said. “Maybe you can fight them, but win? How do you defeat the dead, Kimble?”

The chief deputy was silent for a very long time, and then he said, “I need to know what she sees. If there’s nothing that can be done, she’ll know it. If there is something… maybe she’ll know that, too.”

“Why would she if Wyatt didn’t? He figured out that the light helped, and he figured out the history of the place. He did everything that could be done and still nothing worked.”

“He also called on us,” Kimble said, “and I don’t think he did that just for his legacy. The man had hope.”

“Again I’ll ask—what suggests that Jacqueline can understand them any better than Wyatt did?”

“Because,” Kimble said, “she’s already settled her debt. He hadn’t.”

Roy pushed back from the table and let out a deep breath.

“It’s one hell of a risk,” he said.

“I understand that. I also think the time has come to be willing to take one. Something needs to be done. We can’t allow it to continue. For more than a century now, good people have lost their lives to that place or because of it. That has to end. It has to.”

Roy said, “You must be capable of believing in great evil to push it this far, Kimble.”

“I suspect,” Kimble said, “I’ve already brushed closer to it than most.”

Roy took a sip of his coffee before remembering that it had already chilled, then pushed it aside.

“Tell me the part about Jacqueline, please. The part you don’t want to tell. I can ride with you either way. I already am. But I’d like to know. Not judge. Just know.”

“You already know all of that.”

“I don’t mean the details of what she did,” Roy said. “I mean the reason you can’t treat it like a cop.”

He’d expected an argument. Resistance, defensiveness, even outright anger like the man had shown before. The walls Kimble had built and guarded so carefully, though, seemed to have deteriorated rapidly in the past few days.

Kimble turned his eyes back to that empty patio, where the wind was swirling snow.

“I had feelings for her,” he said. “In a way I never had for a woman before, never will again. Used to daydream about the day she would leave that son of a bitch. A part of me was living for it. I didn’t count on the way she’d leave him, right? Didn’t count on that.”

“You were in love with her before she shot you?”

Kimble nodded.

“Was there… were you having an affair?”

“No. I was just waiting. I knew the day would come, had to come. Even that was bad enough, though. I was waiting out the end of an abusive marriage. When I think about it like that, I hate myself, Darmus. This morning I was thinking about Audrey Clark. You’ve seen her, right?”

“Yes.”

“She’s everything you could possibly desire in a woman,” Kimble said. “Bright, beautiful, and brave as hell. As strong as anyone I’ve ever seen. I think about her, and I ask myself, why can’t I be in love with her? Why can’t I sit in this coffee shop and hope that she walks in?”

He sighed, and his voice softened. “I just can’t. I think about a woman in a cell instead. I’d like to fix that about myself, but it is beyond me.”

“You really don’t think Jacqueline belongs in prison?” Roy asked.

“The night she shot me, she was not herself. Okay? That’s the clearest I can say it. You should have seen her that night. Because she was evil. Then the life went out of her husband, just as she put the gun to my forehead, and… and she was back. So now I’d say, you should have seen her that night. Because she was worthy of love, worthy of dying for, worthy of anything I could give.” He spread his hands. “They’re both true. Now you try living with that. Try treating that like you’re a cop.”

“You can’t decide which she is?”

“I couldn’t reconcile how she was both. I went to see the woman every month, and I always left thinking how damned egregious it is that she’s in that prison. But then I remembered the way she was that night, I remembered the fact that she smiled while she put a gun to my forehead, and I… I just didn’t know.”

Roy had covered the trial of Jacqueline Mathis. He had listened to Kimble’s testimony, he had read every document. There had never been a mention of a gun put to his forehead. Only a bullet in the back, supposedly fired in error, supposedly aimed at her abusive husband. He knew that Kimble had not made a mistake in what he’d just said, though. You didn’t forget something like that. So that meant he’d chosen to forget it on the witness stand.

“She wasn’t herself,” Kimble said. “When I say that, I don’t mean that her mood changed. I don’t mean that she was in shock. I mean that for a while there, the woman who is Jacqueline Mathis became something else. Then that woman came back. Put down the gun and apologized as I lay there on the floor in the blood—mine and her husband’s—and it was like watching a… a soul slip back where it belonged.”

He coughed, shook his head. “I know how that sounds. I know what you probably think of it.”

Roy said, “Don’t worry about how it sounds. I just needed to hear it.”

“I could never come to peace with that night, and she couldn’t help me. Claimed she couldn’t remember a thing. But now I hear the stories from O’Patrick, and I see all the work you’ve done, and I can believe her. For the first time, I can explain it. When I walked through that door, she was just… blackness. Evil. But her husband was still breathing at that time. And when he was gone? She came back. I can believe all these stories now, because I saw it.”

They sat together in silence, and eventually Roy nodded.

“Thank you,” he said. “I wanted to know. And hearing it helps me believe a little more, myself. I’d still say you’re taking one hell of a risk taking her out there by yourself.”

“I know it.” Kimble met Roy’s eyes and said, “Do you ever wonder why you’re along on this ride?”

“Because it’s a hard story to sell, and I was already involved.”

“Exactly. Wyatt called you out there, and you were willing to consider it longer than most, to follow it into stranger places and darker corners than most, and that’s because it’s personal to you. Well, it’s surely personal to me, too. He didn’t pick us by mistake.”

“No. I don’t think the man’s approach was anything close to haphazard.”

“All right. We’re agreed on that. You asked me to tell you the truth, and I’ve done it. I’ve told you what I intend to do, and what really happened with her that night. You’ve heard my soul emptied out, and you’ve got the chance to walk away. I won’t blame you.”

Roy waited. Kimble watched him for a while, then gave a short nod, satisfied.

“I’ve got something else to ask of you,” he said. “And please, Darmus, be careful. This one is riskier than reading old papers.”

“What is it?”

“I’m worried about Shipley.”

“I know that.”

“Well, I can’t very well put a surveillance detail on him. I start asking for that on one of my own deputies, say that he’s suspected in the murder of another, and I’m going to have to defend my reasoning in ways that I simply can’t right now. I can’t do it. But I also can’t have him showing up at the ridge when I’m there with Jacqueline. I want you to watch his house and call me if he leaves. That’s it. Don’t move, don’t engage him, don’t do a damn thing but call me. If he leaves his house tonight, I will need to know.”

“All right.”

“I don’t want to ask that of you,” Kimble said. “Bringing a civilian into a murder investigation… well, you can add that to the pile of reasons I might lose my badge. But there’s no one else I can ask.”

“I’ll do it, Kimble. Not a problem.”

“There’s an old gas station just up the road from his house. Empty for years, old Esso station. He’ll have to come by it to head into town, or toward the ridge. The only way he wouldn’t pass by is if he’s headed north, and I’m not worried about him heading north. If you see him pass by, he’ll be doing forty miles an hour, and he won’t notice you. If that happens, just pick up the phone and dial. Nothing else.”

“Okay. But Kimble? If you believe what you told me about Jacqueline and O’Patrick and all the others… he’s not going to kill again. If he did kill, he’s satisfied his debt. None of the others in the Blade Ridge history have killed again. Bound by balance, that’s what you told me. Shipley is balanced now.”

“Right,” Kimble said. “The difference? If he did kill Pete, right now he’s getting away with it. The others were all arrested at the scene when they came back around from their trances. Shipley came back around alone in the dark woods. That means he might not understand why he killed, but he understands that he did.”

Kimble put his arms on the table and leaned close. “If all that is true, Darmus, then he might want to keep improving his chances of getting away with it. Why wouldn’t he? And the only evidence and witnesses are at Blade Ridge. Audrey Clark is at Blade Ridge. If Shipley did this, and he’s thinking about ways to clean it up… well, I just worry that he might head that way.”

“But you’re getting ready to drive in the opposite direction.”

“Yeah,” Kimble said. “Because I can’t see in the dark. But I think I know someone who can. At least out there.”

35

THE DAY WORE ON, snow fell in scattered flurries, and police came and went steadily.

No one found any trace of Ira.

At noon, while Audrey and Dustin took their first break of the day, with not even a third of the cats fed yet and many of them growing annoyed with the delay, a pickup truck rolled up with four dogs in cages.

“I’d better see about this,” Audrey said.

The dogs belonged to a man named Dick Mitchell, a wiry old-timer with a Mark Twain mustache, a scoped rifle, and a large pistol on his belt.

“I’ve come to catch the cat,” he said. “I reckon you’re not too happy about it, but when the police call, I’ve found it wise to pick up the phone. Got me out of a speeding ticket or two along the way.”

She watched the dogs ranging about in the kennels, pressing their noses to the gates and staring out at her cats. Jafar emerged from his long, dark quarters, where he’d spent most of the day tucked back in the straw, bothered by the constant stream of traffic, and began to pace restlessly. Immediately one of the dogs let out a baying howl, and that triggered a response of roars.

“I thought the sheriff was trying traps,” Audrey said.

“He’s doing that, too. Somewhere along the way, he heard the best bet was Big Dick Mitchell. He heard right.”

Big Dick Mitchell hefted his rifle and took an experimental sighting, aiming it down the road. Audrey thought of Ira’s beautiful, sleek body, and somehow, even after the terror she’d felt only hours earlier, she was sad for him.

Just get the hell out of here, Ira, she thought. Hit those hills running and don’t stop. This isn’t the place for you. For anyone.

“Get your dogs out of sight of my cats quick,” she said. “I’ve got enough headaches today without this.”

“Plott hounds,” Dick Mitchell announced proudly, opening the first of the kennel doors. “They’ve yet to run a mountain lion, but they’ll catch on quick. They’ll catch on.”

“If you want to take them back home tonight,” Audrey said, “you’d better hope they don’t catch on.”

He gave her an odd look. “That nasty of a boy, is he?”

“He was fine until he came here,” she said, realizing that she sounded more like Wes with each passing day, and then she left and returned to her cats.

Kimble had once been a churchgoing man, and though he was no longer, he found himself in the parking lot of the one he’d once attended, detouring in there instead of heading for the highway and all that waited down the road. He sat alone in the parking lot with the engine running and thought about what Roy Darmus had said.

You must be able to believe in a great evil.

Yes, he was able to do that. He’d seen lesser evils—greed, anger, lust—too often and for too long not to believe there could be something beyond the crimes for which his department had specific names and charges. He was part of a justice system that was designed to quantify evil. There was something missing in that, to be sure.

He’d seen true evil in his time—mothers who killed their own babies, sons who killed their own mothers. The years in this job could erode your faith in good people just as the wind and water eroded the mountains. He fought it every day, but he wondered if there was a breaking point. How many child abuse cases could a man work, how many murders, how many rapes and assaults? How long could you go until you folded up under it? It was a question he thought most police considered on the bad nights. He remembered Diane Mooney asking it of him once, when they’d arrested a man who’d fractured his stepdaughter’s skull with a wine bottle because she was using up the minutes on his cell phone. Diane had asked him as they’d walked out of the jail and into a spring evening so beautiful it hurt, the air alive with fragrant blooms and driven by a gentle, kind breeze, and he remembered what he’d told her: You keep your head down, and you remember that people need you and that it’s a privilege to answer the call.

He thought he’d believed it back then. On that night? Yes, he’d believed it. That was a vivid memory. Such a beautiful night. He could still remember the smell of the flowers and the feel of the wind. He could still remember the way blood had filled that girl’s eye socket.

Kimble wasn’t certain what he thought of God. He knew that he should be certain—everyone of his years was supposed to have their beliefs in order by now. I’m a Baptist, I’m a Catholic, I’m an atheist, I’m an agnostic, I’m a believer in the Church of the Weeping Willow Tree, Fourth Circle, Second Cabinet. You were supposed to know where you lined up.

Kimble did not.

He knew this: there were times when he’d prayed to God and times when he’d cursed Him. On the latter occasions, he chastised whatever higher power there might be for having blind eyes and deaf ears.

You have bound us, Kimble imagined saying, to an evil world. Where’s the love in that?

And in that scenario, God always answered, Temporarily bound you, yes. Now, during your time in that evil world, did you do anything to help?

For that, Kevin Kimble would have an answer, firm as steel: Yes.

It was the only thing he would ever be able to answer firmly about this world. He’d tried to help it. He had fought evil, and how many people could say that?

He thought now of Jacqueline Mathis, behind razor-wire fencing and concrete blocks and iron bars and countless locks. Did she belong there? Was she good, or was she evil?

Kimble touched his forehead with the back of his hand. Sweat. Thirty degrees outside, and he was sweating.

If you do this, he thought, it will be just the two of you in this car. You don’t have to put her in the back; she could sit right at your side, where you could reach out and touch her. Or she could reach out and touch you.

Why was he doing this? The answer lay both through the windshield ahead of him and in the mirror behind him. It was in the people who made up the place he called home. Whitman was a beautiful town, and, thanks to its distance from any interstate, a well-kept secret. Nestled among the Appalachian foothills and surrounded by deep forests and surging rivers, it drew people who wanted to get away. Kimble, born and raised here, often considered turning into one of those very people but heading in the opposite direction, packing his things and getting out.

But to where? And to what?

He’d never been an extrovert, but there was a time when he’d been at least somewhat social. That time had ended with the shooting. A version of Kevin Kimble had died with Jacqueline’s bullet. The one left behind valued privacy above all else. He’d spent his career walking into the dark shadows of private lives to help prevent harm, or to correct harm already done. Then suddenly people were walking into the dark shadows of his own life. There was the arrest, the trial, the sentencing. Kimble was a popular media target during that time—the committed cop who nearly died in the line of duty, then rose to defend the very woman who’d put the bullet in him. Lots of attention had come his way in those days.

He’d never stopped retreating from it.

He had attended this church until the shooting. His mother had raised him there, and he kept going long after her death. Then came Jacqueline’s bullet, and the next time Kimble entered the building, they prayed for him during the service. Aloud and before the entire congregation, they prayed for him.

He never went back. Sometimes he ran into some people from church and felt a need to explain but couldn’t. Communication was a strength for him, until it came to communicating something about himself. Then he was utterly inept. He could not tell them how uneasy it had made him to be the personal target of pleas to God. He understood that it had been meant with the best intentions.

All the same, he’d never been back.

He hadn’t been much of anywhere in the past few years. Not in a way that mattered. He’d been the work, and the work had been him, and all the rest was detached and hidden and married to something he couldn’t explain and deeply feared. Something that, it seemed, began at Blade Ridge.

He was tired of letting it own him, and tired of letting it take its slow, steady blood toll from his town.

He would stand for it no longer.

He said a silent prayer then, first for himself and then, spontaneously, another one for his mother, many years departed. Then he started the car and drove off to get Jacqueline Mathis.

Roy had the address for Nathan Shipley’s house and clear instructions from Kimble: do not engage, do not so much as turn your headlights on if he passes. Just call.

He’d driven past the house, a sprawling but dilapidated place nestled in a high valley with a stunning view of the mountains beyond, and then he’d circled back and found the ancient gas station that Kimble had told him about.

Shipley’s truck was still in the driveway of his home, and there were lights on inside. So far he was following the chief deputy’s instructions and not wandering.

Roy settled into his car, looked at the fading sun, and hoped that Kimble knew what in the hell he was doing.

At sundown the sheriff’s deputies came by to tell Audrey they’d had no luck with the cougar hunt.

“He hasn’t touched the bait,” said the cold female officer named Diane, who seemed to hold Audrey personally responsible for her colleague’s death. She was the most intimidating of all of them, harsher even than the sheriff. Audrey couldn’t help but be impressed by her. She certainly had the look of a woman who did not take any shit from her male colleagues. Or, for that matter, from anyone.

“I didn’t think he would,” Audrey said. Technically, Ira should have been interested. He should be hungry by now, having grown accustomed to a steady diet that required no hunting, and the presence of massive pieces of bloody, butchered meat scattered along the river should have appealed to him. She just knew somehow that he would not fall for the trick.

The watcher, David had said, and then named him Ira.

He would be watching now, she was certain. Maybe from the rocks, maybe from the upper branches of a tree, maybe from some unremembered crevice of the old mines themselves, over on the other side of the river. Wherever he was, he would be watching, and he would not easily be fooled.

“I’m guessing the man with the dogs didn’t have any better luck,” she said.

“He hasn’t yet. The dogs can’t seem to pick up his scent.”

Again Audrey felt no surprise.

“You’ll try again tomorrow, I assume,” she said.

“Oh, yes. We’ll keep at it until we get him. Tomorrow the folks from the USDA will be down, too. They’re going to inspect—”

“They just did inspect. Right before we began to move. They said it was one of the highest-quality facilities in the country.”

“They want to inspect and see exactly how the cat escaped,” Diane Mooney said, as if Audrey hadn’t spoken. “So we will deal with all of that tomorrow. But I don’t want any of my people out here at night. Not after what’s been happening.” For the first time, the woman’s coldness seemed to abate, and she said, “I don’t think you should be here either.”

Audrey took a deep breath and shook her head. “I don’t particularly want to be, to tell you the truth. But I have to be. You see all of them?”

She waved her hand back at the cats.

“They can’t be left alone,” Diane Mooney said.

“No, they can’t. So Dustin and I, we’ll be here.”

“Call for help if you need it,” Diane said. “If you see him, or hear him, or just if anything seems wrong, call us, Mrs. Clark. Don’t try to handle things on your own. You got very lucky last night. I don’t want to see you press that again.”

Audrey nodded. “I don’t intend to.”

36

IT WAS NOT YET DARK when Kimble got stiffly out of his car—his back had been killing him all day—and walked into the prison with his order-on-jailer paperwork. They’d already gotten a call from the judge, so they were aware of the order and prepared to see him, but all the same he could feel the curiosity as he spoke with the supervising CO, a guy named John who’d seen Kimble come and go on many visits.

“There were supposed to be two of you. A female, correct?”

There were always supposed to be two, and you always tried to avoid pairing a female inmate alone with a single male officer. Kimble said, “We’re good,” meeting the man’s gaze with a flat stare and eventually receiving the shrug he knew he would receive. The procedural burden was on his department. If anything went wrong, Sawyer County would pay the price.

It took about ten minutes for them to bring her out, and she showed no trace of surprise. That was expected; she always gave off the air of having fully anticipated all developments. It had worked against her during the trial. One juror admitted that they had found her calm reactions to testimony disturbing.

The CO nodded at the handcuffs on Kimble’s belt.

“You want to use those?”

“She’s fine,” Kimble said.

The CO shrugged again. Jacqueline was a minimum-security inmate and Kimble was police. They expected he could handle her. He hoped they were right.

“Let’s go,” he told her, voice cool, indifferent. This was for the benefit of the CO. Let them see nothing but professionalism. Jacqueline Mathis stepped forward—physically free, technically still in custody. Kimble’s custody. As of this moment, she was his and his alone. He led the way to the door, held it open as Jacqueline stepped through. She walked at his side out to the car—he was in the cruiser now, this being official sheriff’s department business, though the sheriff knew nothing about it—and he felt an absurd desire to go around and open the passenger door for her, chivalrous, as if they were on a date. Instead, he opened the rear driver’s side door and she slid into the backseat, separated from him by a metal grate. Fences had held her from him for a while now.

She said, “We’re going to Blade Ridge, aren’t we?”

They were through the gates now and driving toward the highway. Kimble said, “They tell you that?” even though he knew they couldn’t have, because they didn’t know.

“I made a guess.” Her voice was so soft, so gentle. “It’s the right one, though, isn’t it?”

Kimble flicked his eyes at the mirror, then back to the road. “Yeah. A lot of people have died out there, Jacqueline. A whole hell of a lot. And the people who didn’t die…”

“What?”

“They’ve had problems,” he said.

He drove them up the ramp and onto the highway, pulling in behind a semi that was headed westbound.

“Problems like mine?”

“Problems like yours.”

“What are you hoping for from me, Kevin? What am I supposed to provide?”

“I want to know what you see,” he said.

“And you think I will see something? Still?”

“Yes,” he said. “There’s a folder back there. Pictures inside.”

She picked it up, opened it, began to sift through.

“Do you recognize any of them?”

“I’m supposed to recognize someone from photographs this old?”

“I thought you might.”

She looked up, and when he looked in the mirror he could see her eyes narrow.

“You think one of them is him,” she said.

“I don’t know. Wyatt French had the pictures. You were among them. So were the others like you. And then there are many that I don’t understand. I hoped you might.”

She fell silent for a time as she went through them one by one.

“No,” she said. “None of them are him.”

“You’d actually remember?”

“Kevin,” she said, “it’s not a face that you forget.”

“I think I know who he was,” Kimble said. “Who he claimed to be, at least, what he called himself. Silas Vesey. Does that mean anything to you?”

“No. How did you find the name?”

He told her about it as he drove, told her about all the work Roy Darmus had done, the story of the trestle and the fever and the man who’d wandered out of the hills with breath that smelled like cold ashes and said that he might be able to bind people to the bridge as Whitman had wanted, but that it would be far easier to do so with the sick and desperate men.

“Do you believe that story?” he asked her.

“It’s the truth,” she said simply. He looked at her in the mirror again, saw her sitting in the backseat staring out the window like a child on a car trip.

“You can’t be so sure of that.”

She turned to face him. “I think I can. I’ve been one of them. The desperate. I’ve seen him. Kevin, that story is the truth.”

It was full night by the time they reached Sawyer County, and Kimble was driving with caution, the roads slick with a light dusting of snow. There was more on the way tonight, the forecasters said. He stared out into the moonlit countryside of this place he’d known so well for his entire life and suddenly felt as if he did not know it at all, the beauty of rocky peaks and wooded hollows shifting on him, developing a constant, whispering menace.

They rounded the curves of County Road 200 and then turned onto Blade Ridge Road. Kimble had called Audrey Clark to tell her that he’d be making a patrol and not to be alarmed if she saw a police car—it would just be him, passing through. He didn’t want to have to stop at the preserve and allow her the chance to see him with Jacqueline.

As they drove down the rutted gravel track the lighthouse came into view, and Jacqueline turned to stare at it.

“Dark again,” she said.

Not completely, Kimble thought. With any luck, not completely. If Wyatt knew what he was doing with those infrared lamps, it only looks dark to us.

They passed by the gates to the preserve, and Jacqueline said, “Are those lions?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think this is such a good place for cats like those.”

“That seems to be a growing sentiment,” he said. They went on past the preserve and all the way to the end of the road, where the gravel ended in trees. Kimble brought the car to a stop and turned out the lights.

“Here we are.”

“Yes.” She was quiet, subdued. He looked at her in the mirror and saw that she was watching the dark trees with apprehension.

“You don’t have to,” he said. “I can take you back and—”

“I have to, Kevin. You need me to. Don’t deny that.”

He shut the engine off, left the car, and opened her door. She stepped out and wrapped her arms around herself, and he realized for the first time that she had no jacket. He took off his own and held it out, and she gave him a faint smile.

“Thank you.”

When she turned and slipped into it, first one arm and then the other, her hair was close to his face and he could smell her, feel her back brushing against his chest.

“Such a gentleman,” she said. “Will you still hold my coat for me on the second date, or does it fade quickly?”

He opened his mouth but didn’t get out a response. His tongue was wooden, his throat tight. She zipped up his jacket and smiled at him. He couldn’t see the orange of the prison uniform now. Couldn’t see anything but the fine lines of her face in the moonlight and the dark hair cascading over his coat.

“A romantic walk in the woods, is that the plan, sir?” she said.

“Sure,” he said. His voice was unsteady.

Jacqueline looked at the outline of the mountains in the moonlit night, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath.

“Years,” she said. “It has been years since I stood anywhere and felt free.”

He didn’t answer. She stood with her eyes shut and one snowflake fell into her hair. He reached out, without thinking, to brush it away. When she opened her eyes and took his arm, he stiffened. She kept her hold on his arm and tugged gently. He took a step forward, and she came in to meet him, leaned up, and kissed him. When her lips touched his, Kimble’s legs trembled. The presence of her weakened him. Gloriously.

She shot you.

He stepped back, almost stumbling, said, “Jacqueline we’re here to—”

“I know what we’re here to do,” she said. “I know that better than you do, Kevin. But I needed that moment. I’m sorry.”

He said, “Thank you.” It wasn’t what he should have said, but it was all that came out.

She smiled again, smiled in that way that slid right through him.

Just like the bullet, Kimble? Does it slide through you just like the bullet?

“All those visits,” she said. “All that faith. Thank you, Kevin.”

It was silent, and he looked up at the trees and the path that led into blackness. “Maybe we shouldn’t go out there.”

She let out a breath, looked over her shoulder, and said, “It’s why you brought me here. You want to know what I see, right? Well, let’s have a look.”

“All right,” he said, and he could still taste her on his lips as he followed her into the darkness.

37

WHEN SHE HEARD THE SOUND of a car approaching, Audrey went to the window and peered out. A moment later it came into view, and she saw the now far-too-familiar sheriff’s decal on the side, the light bar on top.

“Kimble,” she said, and felt relieved. She liked Kimble. Trusted him.

Behind her Dustin Hall peered over her shoulder.

“He’s not getting out, is he?” he said.

“I don’t know. He told me he would be making some patrols tonight. That was all.”

“Well, after last night, I hope he’s not intending to walk around alone.”

“I know,” she said. Dustin’s presence had been Kimble’s idea, but Audrey was beginning to think it was a bad one. As competent as he’d been during the day, he was jittery at night. Then again, maybe he was just picking that up from her. She’d been pacing nonstop, making regular trips to the window, matching the restless behavior of the cats. They were peaceful tonight, though—no roars, no rattling of fences, no stretching upright and craning to see into the darkness.

Please, let it stay that way, she thought. One night of peace. That’s all I’m asking for.

But of course it was not. She would need more than one night. It would take time, Joe Taft had said. How much time, she wasn’t sure. But it would be much more than one night.

When it was done, though? When whatever amount of time Joe needed had passed and the cats she’d devoted the past several years of her life to were gone? What then?

Back to the legal world. She’d been thrilled to get away from it. The idea of returning to Lexington or Louisville and working in an office every day, drawing up wills and endowments and business mergers and handling corporate disputes, felt so wrong. She could go somewhere else entirely, of course, pass the bar in a new state and find a new city and get involved with a new kind of practice.

That didn’t seem any more appealing, though. Her life had become these cats. She didn’t want to lose that. Part of aging was adapting, was acceptance that all the planning in the world didn’t stand a chance against the fickle winds of fate, but hadn’t she adapted enough lately? Did she have to turn her back on the preserve that held her heart?

Dustin said, “What are you thinking about, Audrey?”

He was wearing his Whitman College sweatshirt and looked impossibly young. She was not inclined to tell him the truth. That all the best-laid plans of youth could be shattered in a slip-and-fall, a single misplaced step in the night, and the life you thought was promised to you would begin to vanish until the very memory of your plans seemed ludicrous.

“I’m thinking,” she said, “that I could use a glass of wine.”

“That’s the best idea I’ve heard all day.”

“Are you even old enough to drink?”

He smiled. “I’m twenty-four, Audrey.”

Of course. He was a graduate student, working toward his doctorate in biology, just as David once had. Audrey was only nine years older than he was. How was that possible?

“Well, then, we’ll have a drink,” she said.

She went into the kitchen, trying not to concentrate on the fact that Kimble’s car had not returned up the road, that he was indeed making his night patrol on foot in the woods.

Surveillance looked a hell of a lot more exciting in the movies. This was no stunning revelation, but the understanding of just how tedious it was came as a painful surprise to Roy.

He’d been parked in the abandoned gas station parking lot for hours now, his back and legs stiffening as he stared out at a dark country road where few cars passed at all. At first he’d been worried about missing Shipley’s truck because of traffic. Now he was worried about missing Shipley’s truck because of falling asleep.

He made a pass down the road just to see how things looked at the home, found no sign of activity, and returned to his position. Within ten minutes, he wanted to make another pass. It was hard to just sit in the dark and stare at nothing.

He ran the Honda’s engine for a while, keeping the lights off, to let the heater fill the car with warm air again, then used the radio to get a little rock ’n’ roll going to help him wake up. He wished he’d thought to bring a thermos of coffee. Rookie mistake.

The heater pushed the chill from the car, but the warm air made him drowsier. He leaned back in the seat, yawned, and fought the heavy eyelids.

He hoped Kimble was making progress.

38

THEY WALKED IN SILENCE, and Kimble kept his hand on his gun, well aware of the black cat. The woods were quiet, but did that mean anything? He’d seen enough of these cats now to know that when so inclined, they could move with all the advance warning of a gust of wind.

When they reached the edge of the trestle, fog draped around them and the moonlight painted the steep stone cliffs a sparkling white. He stood beside Jacqueline, cold now that he’d given her his jacket, and watched her face as she swiveled her head slowly, taking it all in.

“Do you see anything?”

She didn’t answer, just took a few hesitant steps forward, then ducked and slipped through the torn-up stretch of chain link that had once—many years and many vandals before—kept people from reaching the trestle.

“I’d like to go out onto the bridge.”

He didn’t particularly like that idea, not after the tale Darmus had recounted earlier today—those last nails were driven by dead men—but he didn’t argue. Just followed her, one hand on his gun.

They walked out ten paces, the old boards creaking beneath their feet.

“All right,” he said, and his voice seemed too loud. “Stop here. Let’s have a look.”

He turned and stared off to the south, following the river’s path. This is madness, he thought. You’ll lose your badge for it and you should; no one who would do a thing like this has any right to a badge, has any right—

Jacqueline said, “You’re looking the wrong way.”

She’d been at his side just a blink ago, had moved away in swift silence. She was five paces from him and at the other side of the bridge, facing north, looking into the rocks below the trestle. Kimble watched her stare out into the darkness and the mist and he felt afraid in a way he never had before. Or at least in a way that he hadn’t been in years. Not since he was down on the farmhouse floor with his blood all around him and she was moving in the shadows.

“What do you see?” he said.

She shifted, arching her back as if for a better view, watching that spot in the rocks like a fan in the nosebleed seats of a football stadium craning to see the action. Kimble followed the path of her stare, tried to see something, anything, and could not. He still hadn’t taken his hand from his gun.

“Jacqueline, what do you—”

“They’re nothing to you,” she said. Her voice was a whisper.

He glanced up the tracks in the direction from which they’d come, thinking of the cruiser, thinking that he wanted to run for it, slam the door and punch down the locks and speed away from this place, from her. Instead he said, “No. So tell me about them.”

“They’re at the fire,” she said simply.

There was no fire. Kimble was aging fast, but not so fast that he was capable of missing a campfire on a dark night.

“Keep going,” he said.

“You don’t see it. But they see you. They see us. They’re all around the fire.”

“More than one? I thought there was only one.”

“No,” she said. “There are several.”

She was staring, entranced, into the blackness. Kimble thought of the man with the blue light, the torch that Ryan O’Patrick and Nathan Shipley had reported causing their accidents, that Audrey Clark had seen just the night before, and said, “Why can’t I see that blue flame? Others can.”

“I think he shows it when he wants to,” she said. “You never see him until you’re dying. Until that point, all he will show you is his light. It’s a lure, a distraction, a false guide. Right now, I don’t think he wants to be seen. I feel like there’s something holding him down there.”

Kimble looked up at the lighthouse and thought, I’ll be damned, it does work. Wyatt’s infrared lights are enough. Vesey needs total darkness to wander the ridge, and he doesn’t have it.

“If all of that is true,” he said, “then why can you still see them?”

“Because I belong with them now.”

Just as Wyatt had told O’Patrick.

She was quiet, watching whatever scene was playing out below, and Kimble was growing frustrated, scared and frustrated, because he could not see a thing.

“What can I do about them?” he said. “There’s got to be something.”

“There’s only one you’ve got to worry about. I don’t know what you can do. I can only tell you what he wants.”

“What’s that?”

“Blood,” she said. And then, turning to him, her face white, her dark eyes stark against the pale skin, “Right now? He wants you.”

A breeze rode off the ridge and across the river and fanned her hair out, and Kimble looked into her face and wrapped his hand tight around his gun.

“Does he?”

She nodded.

“I need to know,” he said slowly, “what to do. Do you understand that? I need to put an end to this.”

“I don’t know how.”

“You can figure it out, Jacqueline. You can put an end to this.” He was sliding his index finger back and forth along the side of the trigger, a sensory reminder: I can end her, I can end her, I am protected because I can end her.

“I don’t think that’s an option.”

“Who are the others?” he said.

When she spoke again, her voice was very small. “They’re the ones from the pictures,” she said. “And Wyatt French.”

“You can see Wyatt French?”

She nodded. “I can see them all. They’re all down there with him. All the ones like me.”

“You’re sure,” he said.

“I’m sure.”

For a while it was silent. The wind pushed down off the peaks and rustled the trees along the ridge and wormed the cold of the night into Kimble.

“The one who called himself Silas Vesey is the problem,” he said.

“He didn’t call himself anything with me. The one I saw, though? The man who made me the offer? Yes, he’s there. He’s watching.”

The words put a ripple through Kimble. Watching. Somewhere out there in the dark a man unseen by Kimble was watching. A man who’d caused death for more than a century, a man who’d put the blackness into Jacqueline, who’d then put a bullet into Kimble.

“Does he know you?” he said. “Remember you?”

“Yes.”

“Still want my blood?”

She didn’t answer.

“Jacqueline,” he said, and now his finger was racing alongside the trigger, “I’m not going to stand here in the dark with you forever. I can’t. You’ve got to tell me something that helps.”

“And what would that be?” she said. She wasn’t even glancing at him, was totally focused on whatever patch of shadow was home to the nocturnal activity.

“How do I know? Just answer my damn questions.”

“I have been,” she said.

“So there’s no fixing them—that’s what you’re telling me?”

There was a long silence. It was so cold that Kimble could see his breath, but there were beads of sweat along his spine and across his brow. Just when he’d given up on any hope of an answer, just when he was ready to say, Okay, enough is enough, let’s put an end to this circus and get you back behind bars where you belong, she spoke again.

“I don’t think,” she said, “that he has much range.”

“What?”

“You’re not going to fix him. If that’s what you’re hoping, I’m afraid you’re out of luck. No man with a gun is going to fix him, Kevin. No man is going to do anything to him, period. He isn’t bound by any of the things you want him to be bound by, not even time. But I think the place matters.”

“The place.”

“That’s right. He wouldn’t have found me if I hadn’t passed this way. He needs people to pass this way.”

“I understand that. He also needs the darkness. The lighthouse has hampered him. For years, it has. But there’s got to be more I can do.”

“You can guide some people away, maybe. That might be all.”

You can guide some people away. Instead, he’d brought one here. He’d brought her here.

She’s close, though, he thought, damn it, she is close, she’s seeing this place and understanding it.

“He’s got a weakness,” he said. “He has to, Jacqueline.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“I do. Find it. Please.”

She was silent for a long time, and then she said, “In the story you told me, he promised to bind people to the trestle. Right? First came the fever, and then came Vesey, and then the bridge.”

“Yes.”

“Well,” she said, “you could burn it down. See if he goes with it.”

“I can’t burn down a bridge, Jacqueline. And he likes fire.”

“He likes his own fire. It’s very different from ours.” She shifted, looked back at him, and said, “We need to go.”

“No.”

“Yes.” She stepped away, toward him, and in that moment he remembered her in the dark living room, and he lifted the gun and leveled it at her throat.

“Stand where you are.”

She looked at the gun as if amused by it and said, “Scared of me, Kevin?”

“No.”

“Here? You should be.”

He didn’t say anything. He was trying hard not to let the gun tremble in his hand, trying damn hard. It looked steady. He was pretty certain it was steady, pretty certain that—

She lifted her hand, and he said, “Jacqueline, no,” and then she reached out and cupped the back of his wrist, gently.

Shoot! a voice screamed from within him, the voice of the long-departed version of him that carried no gunshot scars and did not believe in ghosts. Do it now, shoot!

Jacqueline applied pressure, soft but firm, pushing his hand down, and he let her. The gun swung away from her throat and down until it was pointing at the tracks. She stepped in to fill the void between them, her body meeting his, the curve of her right breast resting on his bicep, her thigh pressed against his. Her face was upturned, lips and eyes dark against her skin. For a moment, he thought she might kiss him again.

She didn’t.

“I think we’d better leave.”

He couldn’t speak. His mouth was as useless as his trigger finger.

“You’re strong,” she whispered, and he could feel the warmth of her breath on his neck. “But Kevin? He’s not weak.”

“He doesn’t like the lighthouse,” Kimble said.

“Then we should go there,” she said. “Fast.”

39

AUDREY WAS IN THE BEDROOM, trying to get some sleep but not optimistic about the possibilities, when she saw the headlights coming east. Kimble was back in the car.

She put her hands to her temples, closed her eyes, and let out a long, relieved breath.

She didn’t need to worry about him anymore. He was back in the car, and no one was in the woods tonight.

Down the hall it was silent, Dustin, hopefully, asleep on the couch, getting some rest for another day that would be long and arduous with just the two of them.

Can you hold out? Joe Taft had asked.

She wished he hadn’t phrased it like that. As if she were under siege.

Are you not, Audrey? What would you call it?

She opened her eyes again, well aware that sleep would not come. Outside the bedroom window, the cats were quiet and the trees were dark. Once they would have been lit by that constant, pulsing glow. Now you had to remind yourself that the lighthouse was there.

As they neared the lighthouse, Jacqueline stared in fascination, bending down so she could see the top, where glass glittered in moonlight. She was in the passenger seat now—Kimble saw no point to putting her in the back this far along in the journey—and she leaned across him to get a better view, her hair falling forward and brushing his arm, her hand on his leg.

“It’s the strangest thing I’ve ever seen,” she said. “He had to have cleared so many of these trees to build it.”

“He cleared the trees to build his home. The lighthouse came later.”

“I want to go in,” she said. “I want to see it.”

“We will.”

He shut off the lights and they stepped out of the car and went to the gate. She waited, arms folded across her chest against the cold, looking so small in his jacket. He opened the gate and let her through and then they went up the path, footsteps crunching on the thin layer of snow, and a moment later he had the lighthouse door open and they were inside.

She gazed around as he shut the door behind them, locked it, and turned on his flashlight.

“Larger room than what I’m used to,” she said. “But I wouldn’t want to live in it, either.”

She made a slow circle, studying the thumbtacks in the walls. “What did he have up here?”

“Maps and photographs. The names on the maps belonged to people who died out here. The photographs belonged to people who didn’t. People like you.”

“People like me,” she echoed. She twisted and looked back at him, her face split between shadow and light, just as it had been that night in the farmhouse. He didn’t say anything, and after a moment she turned away again.

“Can we go up?”

“Sure,” Kimble said, and he opened the door that led to the wooden staircase, then waited so that she could go first, and handed her the flashlight. He didn’t want her standing behind him.

They reached the top and stepped up into the glass shell. A lion roared somewhere below, and the sound jarred Kimble, as it always did. Ahead of them the moon glowed, and Jacqueline turned away immediately, toward the west, where the spiderwebbed glass that had received Wyatt’s suicide round created a jagged sparkle against the flashlight beam. She stepped closer, reached out, and traced the shattered glass with her fingertip.

“Careful,” Kimble said. She smiled, as if his warning were amusing, and then lifted her head, looking off across the treetops and over the ridge to where the night fog clung stubbornly to the trestle.

“Can you see them even from here?” Kimble asked, but she didn’t answer. He watched her stand there and stare off at the horizon with her finger on the shattered glass and he realized that Wyatt had been facing away from the trestle when he pulled the trigger. He would have been facing away from whatever demons he saw there.

Jacqueline clicked the flashlight off.

As the darkness draped them, Kimble reached for his gun.

She said, “Relax, Kevin.”

He hesitated, then he slipped the weapon from the holster anyhow. She turned, searched his face in the shadows, and then looked down at the gun in his hand. It seemed to disappoint her, but she returned her attention to the trestle.

“Can you see them from here?” he said again.

“Yes. I can see the fire, at least. It’s too far to make out the faces. I’m glad of that. It’s hard to have to see their faces. Wyatt’s especially. I’d met him. I knew him. When he was alive, I knew him, and to see him now… it’s awful.”

She was not lying. Kimble realized that and knew that the rest of his life would never be the same, that you could not stand in the presence of someone who saw these things and then go on about your business as if nothing had changed. He didn’t know how life would go from here, but he knew that it would be different.

Jacqueline turned and studied the main light, saw that it was broken.

“I don’t understand why he would have broken it,” she said. “It seemed to matter so much to him that he’d leave a light on.”

“He didn’t break it. The person who found the body did.”

“What about those lamps below? Do they work?”

Kimble looked down at the infrared lights, doing their invisible toil, and said, “No, they don’t.” The lie came without much thought, but he knew why he’d said it, the same reason he had drawn his gun: he still couldn’t trust her completely. He wanted to, but he couldn’t.

Or shouldn’t.

“Turn the light back on,” he said.

The flashlight clicked on, and he could see her again, and he thought that if she’d left the light on when she’d asked him about the infrared lamps, he might not have lied. When he could see her, he could trust her. When they were alone in the dark, though?

Then it wasn’t so easy.

“He apologized to me,” she said, and shook her head in amazement. “Wyatt French. He came all the way to the prison and apologized as if everything could have been stopped if he’d gotten back here and turned on the light.”

“Maybe it could have,” Kimble said, and they looked at each other in silence, considering just what that might have been like.

“Can we go back down? I don’t like to see them, Kevin.”

“We can go back down.”

He followed her down the steps and out into the living quarters. She panned the flashlight beam around the bare walls, lined with their thumbtacks, and said, “This is where he had my picture?”

“Yes. Yours and the others.”

She crossed the small room, sat down on Wyatt French’s bed, and began to cry.

“Jacqueline,” Kimble said, walking toward her, gun in hand. “What—”

“They’re all there with him now. Everyone who accepted his help is trapped with him now, and I will be, too.”

No, he wanted to tell her, of course you won’t be, but what did he know about this? He saw no ghosts in the dark, he’d made no pact in the light of a cold blue flame, he’d killed no one in a black trance.

He reached out to her with his left hand, the one that did not have the gun in it, and wiped tears from her cheek. She reached up and took his hand and held it against her face.

“I’ll be there,” she said softly. “I don’t know when, but I’ll be there. You’re going to take me back to jail now, and in time I’ll get out, but where I’m headed, Kevin? It’s no better. It’s worse.”

He knelt in front of her, looked into her eyes, and said, “There’s got to be something, Jacqueline. We’ll find it. I will find it.”

She gave him a sad smile, tears in her eyes, and said, “Sure, Kevin.”

It was quiet again then, and she tilted her head and kissed his hand. He tried to reach for her, tried to embrace her, but the hand she did not have hold of was occupied with the gun. She looked up at him.

“Put it down, Kevin.”

He hesitated.

“You’re going to take me back,” she said. “I know that you will. It’s the right thing, and you always do the right things. But does it have to be now?”

She slid her hand up the inside of his leg. “Does it have to be now?”

“No,” he whispered. It did not have to be. And even if it did, he didn’t want it to be.

He set the gun on the floor, leaned forward, and met her lips with his. She grasped the back of his head with both hands and pulled him down onto the bed. It was a small bed, narrow, and he rolled awkwardly onto his back, while she moved with total grace until she was on top of him and astride him, their lips still together. She broke the kiss and sat upright, looking down at him. Then, slowly, she unzipped his department-issue jacket and slipped out of it. Beneath that was the prison shirt. She pulled that off, too, and now he couldn’t just lie there and watch her anymore. He pulled her down to him and kissed her face, her throat, her breasts, thinking that it was nothing like he’d imagined it would be.

It was better.

His phone began to ring. Jacqueline moved her lips to his ear and her hand to his belt buckle and said, “Let’s not take any calls for a few minutes, all right? Haven’t the two of us earned at least a few minutes by now?”

He thought that they had.

They took more than a few minutes. When it was done, Kimble lay in the dark with Jacqueline Mathis pressed against him, her skin warm on his, and he thought that he had never been crazy—this was where he belonged. With her. He’d known it when he saw her, somehow, as if the universe had whispered a secret truth in his ear, and now he could feel the confirmation of it in every breath she took, her breasts pressed to his side, swelling warm against him with each inhalation. He reached out and laid a hand gently against the back of her head, stroked her hair as she twisted, nestling against him, and thought, It will not be that long. Her parole is not far away. She will be back with me if I am patient, and I have been patient for so long, I certainly can be again. For this feeling, this moment, I can be as patient as any man alive.

“Kevin?” Her voice was soft.

“Yes.”

“There’s nothing to do about him. The ghost at the fire. There’s nothing to do.”

“There will be something. I’ll find it.”

She did not respond to that. They lay in the dark and he found himself counting her breaths against his neck.

Have to leave, he thought, have to take her back, this has to end, and you know nothing more than before.

“Do you believe that taking the trestle down would help?” he asked.

“In this spot,” she said. “But Vesey? He was there before the trestle, Kevin. He’ll be there after it’s gone.”

The wind buffeted the lighthouse, and up the stairs there was the whisper of sleet striking the glass, the night’s snowfall beginning in earnest.

“I’m cold,” Jacqueline said. “I want your jacket.”

“Right. Sure.” Kimble wasn’t cold at all, not here with her.

When she spoke again, her voice was muffled as she turned away from him, found the jacket, and slipped her arms into it.

“I understand how I can stay away from that fire.”

“How?”

She zipped the jacket up, and then the old bed creaked as she leaned forward, searching for the rest of her clothes.

“It won’t be something you’ll like,” she said, turning back to him, leaning down, and kissing his throat. Her lips were so warm. “And I’m sorry.”

“What do you mean, Jacqueline?”

The gun, when she pressed it to his throat where her lips had been a heartbeat earlier, was very cold.

“Just what I said, Kevin. That I’m sorry.”

40

TWO THINGS BECAME READILY APPARENT to Roy as he woke with a jerk and a muffled shout, rising as if from a nightmare: he was no detective, and he was getting old.

His task had been so damn simple. Watch the road and call Kimble if he saw Nathan Shipley’s truck leave. It required two eyeballs and consciousness. He hadn’t been able to offer both.

The clock said he’d dozed for only ten minutes, but ten minutes was more than enough time for someone to have driven past.

“Shit,” he whispered, looking up the dark road and seeing no glimmer of taillights, wondering what had woken him other than the uncomfortable sense that something bad was happening, something was going very wrong, very fast.

Guilt, nothing more. His body had wanted sleep; his mind had been lecturing him for taking it. That was all.

Still, the bad feeling lingered.

Go check, he told himself. Just take a drive down there and make sure his truck is still in the driveway.

It was. The same lights were on in the same rooms, and the truck was parked in the same place and at the same angle. Fog hung in the trees that ringed the yard, and beyond it the mountains were no longer visible and the moon hung mostly obscured by cloud.

All was as it should be.

Except for that feeling.

Call him, Roy thought. Call Kimble and just check in, let him know that everything is good out here, and make sure that it’s good out there, too.

But Kimble had told him not to call unless Shipley was on the move.

Back to the old Esso station he went. He’d just pulled in, backing up so that he had a clear view of the road, when he saw headlights approaching from the direction of Nathan Shipley’s home.

It couldn’t be him. Just someone else passing by in the night, nothing to worry about.

The headlights were set high, though, and as they came near he saw the squared-off grille of a truck not unlike Shipley’s at all. It came closer, moving fast, and Roy reached to turn off his own headlights, had just flicked them off when he realized how stupid that was, because they’d surely been visible already, and then he did the only possible thing that was stupider still, and turned them back on.

Brilliant, Darmus. Your only job is to sit here and not be noticed and you flash your damned headlights? Should have asked Kimble for a siren or an air horn to help you sneak around. Quick, set off the car alarm!

The truck blew by him then, as he sat there in the empty gas station parking lot with his headlights aimed directly ahead, and he saw the blue side of Nathan Shipley’s pickup truck and caught a glimpse of the deputy’s face as he turned a curious eye toward Roy’s car. Then the truck was gone, and not slowing.

Nathan Shipley was on the move.

Roy reached for his phone and couldn’t find it, felt momentary panic as he patted empty pockets before remembering that he’d carefully placed it in the center console to be reached quickly.

How do people do this every day? he thought as he dialed. It sounds so simple. And I’m not even required to follow the guy…

Kimble’s phone rang. And rang. And went to voicemail.

“Damn it!” Roy shouted, and then he called back and got the same response, and now he was faced with a decision. Did he just sit there and let time pass? Or did he follow? The road ahead was a long, winding path toward the highway or town. Shipley wouldn’t turn off it for a while. Roy could catch up.

“Go for it,” he decided, and he dropped the phone into the console and put the car into gear, pulling out of the lot and onto the road. If he drove hard and fast he could catch up, and then, if Kimble would just answer the damn phone, he’d be able to tell him—

He’d made it a quarter of a mile down the road when he saw the truck pulled off on the shoulder, its lights off, sitting in shadows. He registered that first, and then he saw the man standing in the middle of the road, holding a badge up with one hand and a gun with the other.

Roy put on the brakes and rolled to a stop. For one wild moment he considered pounding the gas instead, driving around the deputy or, hell, right over him. Anything seemed preferable. But he was a rational man even on an irrational night, and he trusted in his ability to bullshit. Shipley didn’t know him. Roy would give him some song and dance about car trouble and then be on his way.

As Shipley approached, though, there was something in his face that suggested bullshit might not work. The gun was not being held casually. His finger was on the trigger.

Roy slipped his hand down to the console, punched redial on his phone, and then turned it over so the illuminated screen was hidden. If Kimble picked up, great. If he didn’t, at least he’d get to hear a voicemail preserving whatever was about to happen.

Shipley rapped on the window with his knuckles, and Roy slid it down.

“Why are you standing in the road?” Roy said, trying to look indignant, the concerned citizen, the intrepid reporter, the man who was not scared of police because he trusted police.

Shipley leaned in, his face lit by the glow from the instrument panel, and said, “I would like to know why you’re watching my house.”

“What? Who are you?”

Shipley smiled. His face was very pale in the glow, and his eyes were hooded. He brought the gun up and laid it on the doorframe, pointed right at Roy’s head.

“Slide over,” he said.

“I’m not doing that. I have no idea what you’re—”

“You’ve driven past three times,” Shipley said. “And you’re parked at an empty gas station. You’re not out here to look at the stars, pal. You’re watching me, and not very well.”

He tilted the gun so that Roy could see how tightly he had his index finger wrapped around the trigger.

“Slide over,” he said again.

Roy looked into the barrel of that gun, and then he unfastened his seatbelt and climbed over to the passenger seat. He was very careful not to hit the cell phone.

Shipley popped opened the door and got behind the wheel. There were no other cars on the road.

“We’re going to take a ride back to my house and talk,” Shipley said, and then he lowered his gaze, just for a moment, and looked at the phone. It lay upside down on the console, but there was a thin band of light around it. Shipley kept the gun pointed at Roy’s head while he reached for the phone with his free hand, picked it up, and turned it over.

Connected, the display said. Kimble, the display said.

“Kevin Kimble,” Shipley said. “I’ll be damned.” He put the phone to his ear, listened for a moment, and smiled.

“Voicemail. That’s what you’re leaving? Not a bad try. Not bad at all.” He pressed the pound key, and now Roy could hear the faint, tinny voice giving a series of options.

“To delete your message and record again, press seven.”

Shipley pressed seven, then disconnected the call.

41

JACQUELINE,” KIMBLE SAID, the muzzle of his own gun sliding over his Adam’s apple, “don’t do this. Whatever it is you’re thinking, don’t do it.”

She slid off him carefully, her thighs gliding over his, the gun never wavering. She knelt, fumbled along the floor in the darkness, and then Kimble heard a metallic clatter and knew what she was after. Handcuffs.

“No,” he said, and he started to sit up, but she rose swiftly and pressed the gun to his heart.

“Kevin,” she said, “I shot you once before. Do you really think I won’t do it now?”

He was more frightened by the emptiness in her voice than he was by the gun. More defeated by the realization that those few moments in which she’d lain silent and warm against his side had been a lie, a fantasy. A dead dream.

“You can stop now,” he said. “You can put that gun down and this can go away. You’ve seen me put things like this away before.”

She shook her head. “I can’t let that happen. Not now that I’ve seen that fire, Kevin. You don’t understand, because you can’t see it. You don’t belong to it. That’s my future.”

“It doesn’t have to be.”

“Yes, it does,” she said, and when she straightened, his handcuffs and cell phone were in her hand. “I’ve seen them. Wyatt French and everyone whose picture you showed me. I don’t have to join them, though.”

“Exactly. We will find a—”

“He was telling me to kill you,” she said.

She stood in the dark, and the faint shaft of moonlight that bled through the glass dome of the lighthouse and down the stairs pooled at her feet but climbed no higher. The rest of her, every line and every curve, existed only in silhouette, like a false promise.

“He wanted you,” she said. “He wanted me to kill you. Do you know what that tells me, Kevin?”

He didn’t answer.

“I was given a lifetime back,” she said, “but I had to trade for it, didn’t I? What he wants, it’s not so simple as a soul. He wants workers, Kevin. He said that he’s bound by balance. A life for a life. Once you agree to it, you can’t run from it. Everyone’s learned that. But balance doesn’t vanish. You can keep adjusting the scales to maintain it. If I take another life for him, I’ll buy more time before I have to join him. And another still. If I continue to? Well, I think then I could be like him. Eternal.”

Kimble remembered what Wyatt French had told Roy Darmus on his final phone call. He wanted people to know that if he’d wanted to go on, he could have. That he didn’t have to die.

“You can’t kill more people,” he told Jacqueline. “It’s not in you. What happened before… I was there. I saw it. You were lost that night, Jacqueline, there was nothing left of the woman you are. Then you came back.”

She ignored him, walked to Wyatt French’s desk, laid Kimble’s phone down on it, and then smashed it repeatedly with the gun. While she was breaking his phone he moved, and she spun immediately, but he’d not come closer, only gone farther away. He slid back from her in the bed, bumped into the wall.

“Stop moving, please.”

He stopped, now pinned against the wall, but he could get his hand down to the other side of the bed, to the place where Wyatt French had built his strange emergency shelf to hold a gun, a knife, and a two-million-candlepower infrared spotlight.

The gun was gone. The knife wasn’t.

“I will take you away from here,” he said. “From him.”

“You can’t take me far enough. I’ll be returned to him in the end.”

Her voice was empty, but he saw that she was crying. Tears traced the lines of her face, shadow on shadow, before falling to the floor, plinking down like drops of blood.

“It’s just like the story you told me of how it all started. He was not lying. It’s easier for him to work on desperate people. After what I’ve seen tonight? They don’t come any more desperate.”

She swept the broken pieces of his cell phone off the desk and onto the floor, then said, “You didn’t bring a radio, did you? I can’t find one. Just in the car?”

“What are you going to do, Jacqueline?”

She stepped closer, and now he could see her better, her face a sculpted white glow in the blackness, her body slim and small beneath the bulk of his jacket. She said, “What did you feel, when we were together?”

“Home,” he said.

“You could join me.”

“Join you? Jacqueline, you’ve got to stop talking, you’ve got to stop, please, just—”

“If I shoot you now,” she said, “he will come for you. You’ll have a choice. And if you make the same one I did… we can leave here together. In a way that does not need to end.”

Kimble dropped his hand down to the shelf. His fingers crawled over the wood—there was the flashlight and there was the strop for the knife and there was, yes, there was the blade. He followed it down to the Teflon handle.

“You can’t see them,” Jacqueline said. “If you could, you would understand what I have to do. He gave me life back once in exchange for taking another. He’ll do it again. He wanted you tonight, Kevin. He’ll want others. That’s the idea, you know. He’s bound to the ridge, and he can’t carry his evil into the world. We have to do that for him.”

She knelt beside the bed, leaned forward, and touched his bare chest with the muzzle of the gun.

“Tell me I can do it,” she said. “Then he will come for you, just as he did for me, and you can make the same choice, and we can go on. Together.”

“Killing people.”

“You could help me with that. You know how to get away with it. And we could pick the right ones. We could kill the people who deserve to die, we could turn it into something good, and there would be no end to us, there would be no—”

“Stop,” he said. “Please, Jacqueline, I can’t hear it.”

The stream of words came to an abrupt end, and when she spoke again her voice was low and measured.

“I need you to make the right choice,” she said. “Will you do that?”

For a moment he was silent as the snow pattered on the glass of the lighthouse above them and Jacqueline Mathis watched him in the moonlight, and then he nodded.

“Yes,” he said.

“Truly, Kevin?”

“Truly, Jacqueline.” He reached out gently with his right hand and pushed her hair back from her face, used his thumb to clear the last traces of moisture away from beneath her eyes.

She smiled. “I’m so glad,” she said.

“I know,” Kimble said, and dropped his right hand down to the gun as he swung his left out with Wyatt French’s knife in it and buried the blade in her back.

She let out a sound of soft and terrible anguish, a moan that wanted to build into a scream but couldn’t. The knife had entered just under her left shoulder blade. Blood seeped from the wound and flowed hot across his hand. Kimble had been trying to get the gun from her as he swung the knife, or at least get it pointed away from him, but he didn’t succeed at either task. She’d anticipated that attempt; she had not anticipated the knife. She’d cleared the gun from his grasp, though, and it was pointed at his face and her finger was on the trigger and his life was a few pounds of pressure away from an end, but she did not squeeze.

The moan came again, more pain evident now, and she tried to rise. The blade slid free from her body and his hand and fell to the floor as blood streamed down his jacket and ran over the backs of her slim, bare legs. As he watched the pain rise through her he looked at the gun and said, “Go ahead,” and he meant it.

She opened her fingers and let the gun fall, looked him in the eyes with impossible sadness, and whispered, “You know what you’ve done to me.”

“I’m so sorry,” he said.

“You know,” she began again, but she couldn’t get all the words out this time. She shuddered and fell forward, fell against him, her face against his neck, and he reached out and caught her and held her.

“I’m scared of him,” she whispered.

“You don’t belong to him, Jacqueline. You don’t.”

He felt each of her last breaths. She lay against him just as she had before, in the one moment when everything had felt perfect.

“I’m sorry,” he told her again, but there was no point to it now. Her warm breaths against his neck had ceased.

Kimble pressed his face into her hair and wept.

42

NATHAN SHIPLEY DROVE with his left hand and kept the barrel of his gun pressed into Roy’s stomach with his right. Roy looked at the gun and thought of what he could do to escape, the movements he could make. Then he thought of how fast a trigger could be pulled.

He made no movements as Shipley drove them back to his home.

“Get out,” Shipley said. His voice was unsteady. “Get out and walk inside.”

Roy climbed out of the car and went through the yard and up the creaking steps of the porch. The doorknob turned in his hand, unlocked. He pushed it open and went in and Shipley followed.

“Sit down,” Shipley barked, and Roy obeyed, sitting on an ancient and dusty couch. “Who the hell are you?”

“Roy Darmus. I worked for the newspaper.” It was absurdly formal, but one of the things Roy was finding he believed deeply was that you should keep men with guns happy.

“Why are you watching me?”

Roy considered the gain in a lie, and couldn’t find it.

“Kimble asked me to.”

“He doesn’t trust me. He came out here this morning, and it was obvious.” Shipley paced, rubbed a hand across his face, and then said, “Holy shit, what am I doing? What in the hell am I doing?”

Roy was silent. He’d been more focused on the gun than the man, but now that it wasn’t pressed against his stomach, he looked at Nathan Shipley’s face. It was haggard, weary. It was frightened.

“I’m not going to shoot you,” Shipley said.

“That’s good to hear.”

“I just don’t know what’s happening. What I’m doing, what I should be doing. I don’t know anymore. I said that Kimble doesn’t trust me? Well, you know what, man? I don’t trust myself. I don’t. That’s the problem. I’m seeing things, and I can’t get them out my head. My mind isn’t right. People are dying out there, Pete died out there, and then Kimble comes out to my home and it was like he thought I did it, like he thought I was some sort of evil…”

The words were streaming from him, and he was still pacing, the gun hanging idly at his side.

“There’s a bad history to that place,” Roy said, trying to choose his words carefully. “I think Kimble is just worried for you.”

“Well, he ought to be. Because I’m telling you, I have never been more certain of anything in my life than what I saw the night of my wreck out there, but what I saw was impossible.”

“It might not be,” Roy said, keeping his tone relaxed, thinking that if he could be soothing and understanding, then maybe, just maybe, he might walk out of here alive.

“What the hell do you know about it?”

“I know that other people have had the same experience. Have received the same offer. You might not have imagined as much as you—”

“Offer?” Shipley stared at him.

“I mean, other people have seen the man in the road. Kimble’s been documenting it. I’ve been helping.”

“That kid? Somebody else saw that kid?”

“I’m talking about the man with the torch. That’s what you saw, isn’t it?”

“I saw a torch, yes. A blue flame. There are others? Other people have seen this?”

“Yes. But they describe him differently. I think most of them see a man. Most of the people who have seen him are dead now, though, and what they saw, I’m not sure. So maybe others saw a child—”

“When I say kid,” Nathan Shipley said, “I mean the one who works with those cats.”

The gun in Shipley’s hand was no longer Roy’s focus. “What?”

“That accident,” Shipley said. “I am telling you, as honest as I’ve ever spoken in my life, I hit that kid. Not somebody else, not some ghost. I hit him, and I did not imagine it. He walked right into the middle of the road. He was just staring off at something, didn’t pay any attention to my car at all, and when he moved, I swerved the wrong way. I hit him. I know that I did. I saw it, I felt it.”

Roy said, “You walked away from that wreck. Unhurt.”

“I walked away awfully damn sore, and awfully lucky. But that kid, Dustin Hall? He should have been dead.”

Roy stared at him, thinking that he’d covered a lot of bad accidents, had taken a lot of photographs of cars that did exactly what a good car was supposed to do in a wreck—absorb the beating for you. Save you.

“But you talked about the blue flame,” he said. “Kimble told me that.”

“Yeah. The way it happened… the way I know it happened, not the way I remember it, but the way I know it did, was that I hit that kid as he stood in the middle of the road staring off like somebody in a trance. You would have to be deaf and blind to just stand there like that, but he did. And I hit him. Going fast, I hit him. He popped up in the air, and I could see him going across the windshield, and then I was in the trees.”

Shipley wiped a hand over his mouth and shook his head. His eyes were wild.

“When I got my bearings back, the first thing I saw was that blue flame. It was over in the woods, just where his body should have been, just where he was flying when he went past the windshield. And then… then he was up. By the time the other people, Audrey Clark and Harrington, by the time they got there, the kid was up. I was woozy as hell, I will admit that, but I will not admit that I am capable of imagining something like that.”

Shipley turned, and the gun swung toward Roy, who winced. “Sorry, sorry. Look, you want the gun gone, it’s gone.”

He set the weapon down on the coffee table between them. “I’m going to lose my job,” he said. “I know that. But I’d rather lose that than my damn mind.”

“You hit Dustin Hall?” Roy said. “And when you saw the blue flame, it was with Dustin Hall? The flame wasn’t with you, it was with him?”

“Yeah. And I’ll tell you something else—that kid knows what happened to him. He’s the reason I can’t convince myself that it was a hallucination or a dream or whatever. Maybe I could have, if not for him. But when I went back out there, the morning Harrington died? It was just me and Dustin Hall at first. Before Pete got there, it was just the two of us, and he knew what had happened, he knew that I’d run him down. I’m sure of it. But what was I supposed to tell Kimble? Or anyone else? Say, Hey, this kid, he rose from the dead the other day, and now I think he’s lying about it. I’m supposed to say that?”

“Yes,” Roy said. “You’re going to need to say that. To Kimble.”

“I could save us both the time and put the handcuffs on myself.”

Roy shook his head. “You don’t understand, Shipley. Kimble will believe what you just said, because it’s true. He knows somebody escaped death out there. He just thought it was you.”

“What?”

“Why do you think Kimble asked me to follow you, instead of a cop? He’s chasing stories that most people don’t believe are possible, just like you. He’s out there at the ridge now, I think. I’m not sure. I can’t get him on the phone.”

“What’s he doing out there?”

Roy was feeling the gravity of the mistake now, sensing all that it could mean, and there was no time to explain that to Shipley.

“We need to find Kimble,” he said. “And we need to talk to Audrey Clark. Isn’t Dustin Hall staying out there with her now?”

“Yes.”

“That’s not good,” Roy said. “That could be very, very bad. Will you let me call Kimble again? Please. This is serious.”

Shipley thought about it, looked once at the gun, as if that were an option worthy of further consideration, and then gave a broken man’s sigh and nodded.

“Call him, man. I need to understand what the hell is the matter with that place. What’s out there.”

He reached in his pocket and withdrew Roy’s cell phone and tossed it to him. Roy missed it—his hands were shaking. He picked it up off the couch and dialed and got Kimble’s voicemail again.

“Damn you, Kimble,” he said. “You told me my only job tonight was to call. Well, then yours should be to answer.”

Shipley said, “You want me to contact dispatch? See if they can raise him?”

Roy thought about what Kimble was doing tonight, thought about Jacqueline Mathis and how swiftly this could end the man’s career, and he shook his head.

“No. But we should call Audrey Clark. She needs to know that she should be careful with Hall.”

“They’re together in a trailer,” Shipley said. “You want to call her and tell her she should be afraid of the guy and think he’s not going to notice? He’s not going to pick up on that vibe?”

It was a damn good point. Roy swore, looked at the phone and then back up at Shipley.

“We’ve got to go out there, then. Will you do that?”

Shipley looked sick at the prospect, but he nodded.

43

AUDREY WAS STILL AWAKE when the headlights came back on at the top of the hill, and while she was relieved once again, she was also concerned. Kimble had been up there for so long. Too long.

The lights arced away, the car leaving the lighthouse and heading back downhill, and then she lost sight of them.

Out in the living room, Dustin called for her. “Audrey? The police are here.”

Kimble had pulled in to see them in the middle of the night? Why? Audrey stood up and slipped into her shoes. She’d slept—or tried to sleep—in her clothes, afraid or almost expecting something just like this, another call out into the darkness. By the time she got down the hall, Dustin was standing with the door open, and he said, “What the hell?” Before she could ask him anything, before she could even register the sound of alarm in his voice, Kevin Kimble had pushed inside. His gun was in his hand, pointing straight at her.

And there was blood all over him.

It was on the hand that held the gun, his uniform shirt, his shoes. He wasn’t wearing a jacket; his hair was tangled. His eyes looked fevered.

“What happened?” Audrey said, and only as she watched his face did a new option begin to form in her mind—that whatever had caused this bloodshed had happened not to him but because of him. He didn’t look right, didn’t have the reassuring demeanor he’d always exhibited before.

“I’ll be going to jail soon,” he said. His voice was dull. “But before that happens, I’ve got something I’d like to do, and I’m afraid you might not understand. I’m sorry about that.”

Audrey was looking at the blood, so much blood, all over his clothes, and she put a hand to her mouth and took a step away from him. Dustin actually went toward him, as if he might wrestle the big man to the floor, but Kimble lifted the gun and leveled it at his forehead.

“Son? You’re not standing in front of a man of reason. You’d do well to remember that. I will not hurt you if I can help it, but helping it isn’t easy for me right now.”

Dustin seemed to believe him. He backed away, sat on the couch.

Audrey said, “What are you doing? What happened?”

Kimble lowered the gun after giving Dustin a careful study. “I’m going to try to put an end to it, Mrs. Clark. This place. I doubt it will work, but I’m going to try it, and then I’m going to go to jail.”

“I don’t know what you’re—”

“You do, though,” he said. “You do. You’ve seen it out there. That man with the blue torch. I’m going to try to put an end to him.”

Audrey remembered the blue flame, drawing her into the night woods, drawing her toward a dead man in the dark.

“You sound like you’re talking about a ghost,” she said.

“Don’t I?” Kimble cleared his throat, gave his head a little shake, as if he’d wandered from the moment and had to bring himself back around, and then said, “There’s no landline here. But I’ll need your cell phones.”

“Why?”

He gave her a pained look. “Please, Mrs. Clark. Audrey. I don’t want to be here any more than you want me to be. But I’ve got to make sure I have enough time to do what I need to do.”

“What is that?”

“Burn that trestle down,” he said. “That trestle and all that lives with it. I’m taking it down.”

He was serious. There was a rust-colored streak of blood over his cheek and above it his eyes were red and swollen, but the dark irises betrayed no trace of anything but grim determination.

“Why?” she said. “Why would you burn that bridge?”

“To keep people from dying. Or killing. Or maybe it won’t do a damned thing, but it will do this much—nobody will be able to walk across it anymore. I don’t think that’s as small a difference as most people might.”

“That’s where my husband died,” she said.

“I know. It’s where quite a few people have died. It’s a dangerous place.”

He said it not in the way you’d talk about someplace where you need to be careful to avoid a slip and fall, but in the way you’d talk about a dark street with snipers on every rooftop, where all the care in the world might not help you if you made the mistake of entering it.

“You’re talking as if it’s evil,” Audrey said.

“That is exactly how I am talking, yes. Now if you would please bring me your cell phones and car keys. Both of you.”

She and Dustin stared at each other. Kimble made a small gesture with the gun and said, “Please. Nobody’s going to be hurt. I just need time.”

She went past him to the kitchen counter and found her cell phone, then took her keys out of the drawer. He accepted them with a polite “thank you” and then put them in his pocket. Dustin got warily to his feet and did the same.

“You thinking burning a bridge down is going to affect him?” Dustin said.

Him. Audrey was surprised by both the choice of word and by the manner in which he’d said it. There was very real curiosity in his voice.

“I hope so, son. I’m going to give it a try.”

“Why would it?”

“Because he’s bound to it,” Kimble said, and Audrey felt as if she couldn’t possibly have woken up and walked down the hall, that this was far too detached from reality to actually be happening in front of her, this blood-soaked policeman discussing ghosts in her living room.

“Why would fire bother him?”

“Light does,” Kimble said.

Audrey said, “You sound like Wyatt French.” She remembered Wyatt and all of his strange proclamations and dark warnings about this property, his insistence that if they had not tampered with his light, her husband would not have died. Kimble had asked after that yesterday. He’d come in here after seeing the corpse of one of his own friends, and he had asked her about the lighthouse. He believed in whatever Wyatt had believed in.

“It helped,” he told her. “Still is helping. There are infrared lamps going up there right now, and have you seen that torch tonight?”

She shook her head.

“It holds him down,” Kimble said. “Chases him back into the shadows. Well, I’m going to burn him out of them.”

He took a deep breath, his broad chest filling, and said, “Now I’ve got another favor to ask. Then I’ll let you be alone for a while, and when I’m done, you get your keys and your phones back and I will give you the gun and let you call the police.”

She didn’t know what to say. Just stared at him.

“What do you need?”

“I noticed you drive gas-powered carts around here, when you haul things for the cats.”

She nodded.

“Where do you store your gasoline?”

“In the barn. We’ve got several cans.”

“I’d like them, please.”

“I’ll help you,” Dustin said suddenly, and they both turned and looked at him.

Kimble shook his head. “No. You don’t need any of the trouble I’m bringing around, not any form of it. There might be a lot.”

“I’ll help you get the gasoline down there,” he said. “Then you do what you want. You’re going to need help with the gasoline if you want to move quickly.”

Kimble thought about it, then nodded. “Fine. Show me.”

44

THERE WAS A STEADY but soundless wind that made the leafless trees sway in a gentle, hypnotic motion, and the moon was high and nearly full, snowflakes spitting against the windshield, as Nathan Shipley drove Roy along the winding roads that led west to Blade Ridge.

“I knew I wasn’t crazy,” Shipley said. “I knew I saw that kid, but how do you say something like that? How do you point to a living, breathing, uninjured human being and tell someone that you are positive he should be dead? I couldn’t say that.”

“Not to an ordinary audience,” Roy said as they sped away from sparkling Christmas lights on the edge of town and into the darkness beyond. “But at this point, Kimble and I are not the ordinary audience.”

“There have been ten others? Ten like him?”

“At least.”

“And they not only healed up, but they killed people. You really believe that.”

“It’s not a matter of belief. It’s a matter of reality,” Roy said. “The easy question is how nobody noticed. But those accidents, those deaths, those killings, they were spread out over decades. Years would pass between them.”

“Of course,” Shipley said. “Think about it—that place is as isolated a pocket of the world as you’ll find east of the Mississippi. It doesn’t get a lot of traffic.”

“That probably disappoints him,” Roy said.

“Who?”

“Vesey. The ghost. The devil. Whatever he is. He came when the bridge was going up and prospects were high at Blade Ridge. The mines went belly-up fast, though. Poor yield. Then time and money moved everything to other places, and Blade Ridge was left empty and forgotten.”

They hit a four-way intersection, and Shipley banged the right turn, Roy slid against the door, and then they were on County Road 200, almost there.

Audrey led Kimble to the storage barn where the carts and two tractors were kept. The gasoline for them was stacked neatly on fresh shelves that still smelled of sawdust, Wesley’s final bit of handiwork before the new preserve had opened.

“Those four are gasoline,” she said. “The other two are for the chainsaw, and they’re a mixture of gas and oil.”

“It’ll all burn,” Kimble said, and then he began to load the cans into one of the carts. Four twelve-gallon cans and two five-gallon. Fifty-eight gallons of fuel in all, and although it seemed the wrong question, Audrey asked if he actually thought it could do the job.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve seen house fires started with a lot less. But that thing hasn’t stood for more than a century by accident. It’s strong.”

“I hope it works,” Audrey said, and she saw Kimble look at her in surprise.

“Do you?”

She gazed back at him, looking beyond the bloodstain on his cheek and into his eyes, and nodded.

“I don’t know if I believe what you’ve said, but I believe something is wrong here. And it took my husband. So yes, I hope it works.”

“I’ll do my best,” Kimble said. “And you do yours. Give me time enough to get it started. That’s all I ask.”

He looked at Dustin. “I’m going to go down there and soak those old planks in this gasoline, and when every drop is out, I’ll put a match to it. By the time that happens, I want you both gone.”

Dustin nodded. He hadn’t spoken since they left the trailer. He was oddly self-possessed, though, exhibiting none of the fear that the situation seemed to dictate. He was braver than Audrey had thought he would be, but how did you ever know? How could you anticipate a situation that called for true bravery?

“What about my cats?” she said.

“What about them?”

“You’re starting a fire. What if it gets into the woods and comes toward my cats?”

Kimble shook his head. “There’s a good stretch of rock between that trestle and the woods. Even with a strong wind blowing, it couldn’t make the woods.”

He waved the gun at Dustin. “Sit down.”

Dustin sat on the passenger side of the little cart. Kimble turned to Audrey and offered a bloodstained hand.

“Good luck,” he said.

“You, too.”

He got behind the wheel then, and the little motor bubbled to life, and then they were out of the barn and driving off into the night, down toward the trestle. Dustin didn’t even look back at her.

Audrey stood alone for a moment. Around her the cats were on the move, gathering near the fences, watching with curiosity. A lion roared, one tiger responded, and then it was quiet again. Snow was falling steadily. Audrey watched the tiny headlights of the cart move toward the trestle, and then, after a hesitation, she followed.

Kimble parked the cart just outside of the torn-down fencing, turned to Dustin Hall, and looked him over. The kid gazed back with a blank face, oddly unbothered. You had to have some nerve to work around those cats, though, and after everything that had happened this week, with the deaths and the escaped cougar and the kid’s dealings with Shipley, maybe he was getting a little desensitized.

“You ready to help?” Kimble said.

“Sure.”

“Come on, then.”

They got out of the cart and Kimble took a gas can in his left hand, keeping the gun in his right. Dustin Hall picked up a can in each hand.

“Give me a moment,” Kimble said. “When I call for you, come on out.”

He ducked through the fencing and went out onto the trestle. He went to the spot where he’d stood with Jacqueline, and then he dropped to one knee and stared into the shadows where the foundation bracings met the rocks and water below. Where she’d seen the ghost, and seen her fate.

There was nothing.

Kimble touched the weathered planks with his palm—built by dead men—and remembered the way she’d kissed him back up at the car, remembered the feel of her on top of him in the dark lighthouse, remembered that she’d had the gun pointed at his face and her finger around the trigger in the end and had not pulled it.

You know what you’ve done… I’m scared of him.

“All right, friend,” Kimble whispered, staring down at this demon who would not show himself. “We’ll see how you like a little heat. I’m going to set your fucking house on fire.”

He stood up again, called for Dustin Hall, and began to pour gasoline over the boards. He was very careful to see that the old wood drank it up and that as little as possible fell to the water below. He didn’t want to waste a drop.

They worked swiftly and in concert, no sounds but their footsteps echoing on the boards and the gasoline splashing. Snow fell around them but the wind had lain down and it was a quiet night. Kimble worked on the western end of the trestle, Dustin Hall on the eastern, closest to the preserve, as instructed. Kimble wasn’t sure they had enough fuel, and he thought that it would be better if he could get the fire going on both ends and let it work toward the middle. If even one end collapsed, the rest of the trestle would come down.

When his cans were empty, he discarded them and walked back across the trestle, gun in hand, to join Hall.

“It’s all gone?”

“Yes.”

Kimble bent and picked up one of the cans, turned it upside down and shook it. Only a few drops flew out.

“All right,” Kimble said, feeling the matches in his pocket. “You need to get the hell out of here. Go on up with Audrey. I’ll come up when I’ve seen that it’s burning.”

Dustin Hall didn’t move. He was looking at the lighthouse.

“You say there are infrared lights in that thing? On right now?”

“Yes.”

“And it bothers him.”

Him. The word snagged on Kimble’s ear, and he realized Hall had used it earlier. Not in an informal, pronoun sort of way, either, but with a personal touch to it. As if he were speaking of someone he knew.

“I think it does,” Kimble said slowly, and it occurred to him now that he hadn’t had time to follow up with Hall about the allegation that Shipley had moved the rifle in the cage.

The kid turned back to him, snowflakes melting on his glasses, and said, “That’s good to know,” just before he slammed into Kimble with a lowered shoulder.

Kimble stumbled backward, his first instinct to lift the gun, his second that lifting the gun was no concern, balance was the only concern, and he was losing his fast. He reached for something to catch him, but there was nothing but snow and darkness.

45

AUDREY WAS STANDING IN the trees at the crest of the ridge, snow speckling her hair, the wind stinging her face, and the night had taken on a magical surrealism to her—she was a part of this but not, detached from it all, those sounds of footsteps and splashing gasoline on the bridge couldn’t belong to her world, they represented something far too strange, and the silent snow only contributed.

Then Dustin slammed into Kimble and the deputy was off the bridge and pinwheeling through darkness and Audrey’s scream shattered the dreamlike feel of the night and grounded her in reality once more.

For an instant, she started toward Dustin. She was horrified but did not blame him yet; her initial response was to think that he had done what he believed was right, acting out of fear of Kimble, acting in self-defense, even in defense of her. It was Dustin’s response to the man’s death that brought her to a stunned halt.

He showed no outward emotion, neither fear nor horror, as he knelt on the edge of the trestle and looked down to where the chief deputy had fallen into the same black water and jagged rocks that had claimed Audrey’s husband, and though he surely knew she was there from her scream, he paid her no mind.

Not at first.

At first he simply stared into the darkness, then nodded his head and, as he straightened, lifted his right hand and snapped off a crisp salute.

Audrey felt the first creeping knowledge then, tendrils of memory and understanding seeping through, too fast and too vague to be grasped firmly, but strong enough for her brain to accept them and merge them into one central, critical point: Dustin was dangerous.

Even to her.

He brushed dirt and snow from his jeans casually, in no rush, and then finally pivoted toward her, searching for the place where he’d heard the scream. He found her, and then, still at a calm, measured pace, began to walk off the trestle and through the snow. Coming for her.

It was his pace and his silence that extinguished any remaining doubt, and she began to back away, not running yet, because she didn’t want to turn her back on him, didn’t want to lose sight of him even for an instant. It was only when she began to move that he broke the silence.

“Audrey, come down here.”

His voice did not belong to the competent but socially awkward young man who’d helped her handle the cats for so long. It seemed to come from another man entirely, the voice dark and demanding and with a quality of patient threat to it, like an interrogator who wanted to make it clear that he would play the game but for only a while, and then God help you if you hadn’t satisfied his questions.

She continued to backpedal. The rocks were slick with snow and she slipped once and almost went down, and for the first time she looked away from him, conscious of how close to the edge of the ridge she was, how treacherous the footing. The trees were just ten paces away, and beyond them the fences, and in the moonlight and snow she could make out only the white tigers and the eyes of a handful of others. Kimble had fallen from the bridge with her car keys and her cell phone in his pockets; it was now just her and the night woods and Dustin Hall.

And the cats.

“Audrey,” he said again, and the threat in his voice was clearer now, his stride widening. “Come down here now.”

“You shot Kino,” she said. The thought had just entered her mind, and with it some shred of hope that she was making a mistake, that he was not really menacing, because Dustin would never have killed one of the cats.

“To be fair,” he said, “I was aiming at Wes.”

“Why?”

“Because I had to kill someone, and he was handy. Just like you are.”

Now she did run.

As soon as she turned her back and began to flee, she heard his boots slapping off the planks of the trestle and then a rattle as he pushed through the fencing and she knew that he was pursuing—fast.

She was faster, though. She’d run cross-country in high school, had pounded out many road miles in the days before David’s death, the days when there was time for such things, and she knew she could stay ahead of him, could keep going until she made the trailer, and then she could lock herself inside and find a knife and…

But she wasn’t faster than he was. When she glanced back over her shoulder she was astonished and terrified to see how quickly he was closing the gap, and how craftily. Instead of running directly after her, he was angling to his left, understanding exactly where she was headed and determined to head her off.

He could, too. He could beat her to the trailer.

With her first option removed, she did what panicked quarry generally does and redirected without purpose, simply heading in the opposite direction.

She reached the fences, heard a roar from one of the lions—fast-moving animals excited the cats, always, they incited the predatory response—and kept angling to the right.

Behind her, Dustin called, “Stop running, Audrey. Stop it, now.”

He was nearing the trailer, and once he saw that he’d succeeded in flushing her away from it, he would begin direct pursuit. Understanding that she could neither find protection nor outrun him, she made the final decision of panicked quarry: she had to hide.

She stumbled along between the enclosures, ducking and moving slower now, watching as Dustin turned away from the trailer and followed. For the first time she paused, knowing that the next choice would be critical, critical in the way a choice can be only when it might be your last.

Where to hide?

She dropped to all fours and began to crawl, but he was upright and moving quickly and would find her easily enough. Wherever she picked had to be close. She could not make the road, and to push deeper in the woods seemed hopeless, because she knew of no hiding spot and would make noise searching for one.

Dustin had paused, too. He looked in her direction but clearly could not see her, and then he walked to the trailer, opened the door, and stepped inside. For a moment she just crouched in the darkness and took deep, gasping breaths, watching him and thinking that perhaps the chase was done, perhaps he had other things on his mind.

Then the door opened again, and she saw the beam of the powerful flashlight, and she knew that the chase was hardly done.

To her right was one of the largest enclosures, home to three male lions. It was wide open and exposed space. To her left…

She saw Jafar’s golden eyes, the leopard pacing, unsettled, and then she saw the shadowed shape of his house. He’d emerged from it, straw stuck to his paws, to see what the chaos was about, and the shelter was empty now. Empty and dark and within reach.

“Audrey!” Dustin’s voice was a shout, furious, and she took one look at the flashlight beam—it was pointed the wrong way, he was expecting she’d moved toward the road when he had gone inside—and then she knew that she was out of options.

She crawled to the gate and worked the combination lock. She had two numbers in when the beam swung her way, and she dropped and pressed flat, knowing that it would find her. Jafar came to the fence, curious, and the beam passed over him instead and moved on. She lay in the snow and watched the path of the light and realized that Dustin was looking everywhere but in the cages.

Because Audrey wouldn’t go in the cages. She never had before, and he knew that. Everyone at the preserve did. It was the unspoken but shared understanding they all had as to why she could never manage the place on her own: she didn’t trust the cats.

She lifted her head, looked at Jafar’s eyes, and whispered, “Let me in, please. I love you, buddy. Now don’t hurt me.”

The cat gave a low growl and flattened his ears.

Tension, she told herself, he senses your tension and doesn’t like it. That’s all, Audrey. That’s all.

The flashlight beam passed close again, and she could wait no longer. When it was gone and she was in darkness, she lifted her hand and finished the combination. She did not need to fear the noise of the chain rattling; the lions behind her were roaring at full volume, and when that was happening, you could do about anything short of shooting off a cannon and not be heard. She pulled the gate open and crawled inside, and Jafar came trotting up with three loping bounds, then stopped with his back arched and tail stiff.

She almost tried to open the gate and run again, thinking that Dustin was surely going to be no worse a fate than this, but then memory whispered at her.

Playing, she thought, watching his stance, the way he was exposing his side, inviting her to chase. He’s trying to play with you.

Audrey pulled the gate shut and clicked the lock back in place and then crawled for the animal’s house. The cat stalked alongside her, and she felt the tears sliding down her cheeks. She was shaking now and would not look at him, could not, as if to meet his eyes would be to engage him in hostility.

The opening to his house was tight and narrow. She crawled in, cold straw bristling against her palms, and behind her the leopard gave a growl.

It was his territory, and she was invading it.

“Please,” she whispered. “Please, please, please.”

He did not strike at her as she entered. She banged her head on the plywood ceiling and then ducked lower and crawled on through the straw, crawled until she reached the bend in the wall that indicated it was making the L-turn, and then she could see the opening on the other side. There, farthest away from either end and impossible to spot unless you were inside the enclosure, she stopped moving. Her breath was coming in sobs now, and she tried to quiet them. It was a good hiding place, as long as she was quiet. A good hiding place, as long as the cat allowed it to be.

Out in the preserve, Dustin was still shouting her name, but that was good. That meant Dustin didn’t know where she was.

She heard another growl, turned back to her left, and saw a pair of golden eyes at the entrance to the shelter.

Jafar.

He knew where she was.

46

JACQUELINE HADN’T BEEN WRONG in her recollection—the only thing Kimble registered about the fall was that it was far too fast.

Then he registered the pain, and all else was gone.

He struck the surface of the frigid water awkwardly and plunged deeply into it, but not deep enough. An upright, jagged stone caught him in the ribs and drove the breath from his lungs, and then another drilled into his shoulder and the side of his neck, radiant pain spreading through him as he scrambled wildly at the frigid blackness, sure now that he was dying and that it would be just as he’d always feared death would be: dark and alone.

When he broke the surface a wide, flat rock caught his body and held it, and for a moment there was nothing but the agony and the cold water and the night. Then there came a light, thin and blue and cold, and the world spread out from the light, and once more he could see.

Silas Vesey was coming for him.

He held the blue torch high, and though he waded through the water to reach Kimble, it did not appear to part for him or drag against him. He was of it, and it was of him, so no conflict existed. He just drifted on through the dark water until he was at Kimble’s side. He wore dark trousers and an ancient, faded work shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and in the flickering blue light of the torch his face was lit clearly. He had dark hair and a sharply cut, sweeping mustache, and his eyes were sunken but powerful, penetrating. The flesh of his face seemed to drink in the blue light and spread it through his skin like a cobalt sunburn.

He knelt in the water beside Kimble and rested the butt of his torch on the flat rock just inches beneath the surface, and then he gazed at Kimble and smiled. When he spoke, his voice was clear but hollow and with an odd hint of echo, like something rising up from the bottom of the deepest well.

“You’re badly hurt, sir,” he said. Not a sympathetic observation but a delighted one. He passed the torch over Kimble’s body, and Kimble turned his eyes down and saw his own ribs, blue-white and dripping blood, the ends sheared roughly, like something cut with a dull saw. He found he could not move his head or neck, only his eyes.

“Grievous,” the man said, this devil who had once called himself Vesey.

Kimble didn’t speak. He was looking past Vesey, to where a blue bonfire burned, and saw familiar faces all around. Empty faces, haunted eyes. They watched him with sorrowful resignation, and he saw Wyatt French and then Jacqueline.

He wanted to cry out for her, but she was staring right at him, and there was nothing in the gaze. Just an infinite emptiness.

Silas Vesey moved, blocking Kimble’s view, his shadow spreading over the rocks, blue light enshrouding him.

“You will soon perish,” Vesey said. “There’s no doubt. I’m familiar with the ills of men, sir, and your condition is not one that shall heal itself.”

Vesey rocked back on his heels, still smiling, his lips a deeper shade of blue than his face, his eyes coal black and starkly contrasting with the ethereal glow.

“Your afflictions can be healed, though you may not believe it at this moment. I am possessed of a certain level of help that may be offered, and I am prepared to offer it. Should you so desire. Help of such a nature does not come without cost. I’m bound by balance, you see. If you wish to be healed, you shall be bound by balance as well. My kind is unable to restore life. Only able to balance it. Are you in understanding of this situation?”

Kimble tried to move his hand, but his arm was not responsive. He was aware that the fluid leaking along the side of his face was too warm to be the river water. Blood, and the source seemed to be his ear.

“The choice is yours,” Silas Vesey said.

Kimble flicked his eyes from that terrible pale blue face to his own ribs, watched his blood drip from shards of bone to be swept away in black water.

“Your time is fading. I’ll have to hear an answer soon. I cannot extend your time without that answer.”

When Kimble parted his lips, he could hardly make a sound, but the whispered word seemed to be enough.

Yes.

Vesey came closer, sliding through the water without disrupting it by so much as a ripple.

“I understand you are accepting the offer as presented,” he said. “You wish to be healed, and you will be called upon to uphold your required portion of the bargain. This is correct?”

Yes.

Vesey’s smile widened, the deep blue lips curling up, black teeth beneath, and then he nodded, leaned forward, and lowered the torch toward Kimble’s face. Kimble watched the sapphire sparks descend and expected that excruciating pain would follow, but it did not.

Instead, blackness flapped toward him like a visible wind, and then all was gone.

47

THE LEOPARD WAS SITTING WITH his haunches on the ground and his forepaws inside the shelter, regarding Audrey through primal eyes.

“I’m just visiting, honey,” she whispered. “Don’t be mad. Please, do not be mad.”

There was a rustle in the straw, and his spotted face vanished from the moonlight but the yellow eyes advanced. He was coming toward her. Audrey let out a low, strangled sob.

He’s your favorite, she told herself, you touch him, you let him touch you, and if he ever wanted to hurt you he could have a million times by now.

But there’d been a fence between them. Always.

Jafar came on through the dark, and then she could see his eyes looming just before hers, could smell his snow-dampened fur. The leopard made a soft but deep growl, almost like a purr, and then he reached for her face with his. His mouth was open, and his breath smelled of meat and blood. Every one of her muscles went warm and liquid, and for a moment fainting seemed a very real possibility.

He thumped her shoulder with his head, and she bit back a scream. He made a displeased sound, thumped her a second time, and she whispered, “Okay, baby. Okay.”

She reached out with a trembling hand and touched his muzzle. There was snow melting on his fur and held in crystals on the long whiskers. If he decided to strike, from this distance, and with her unable to move…

The leopard extended his muzzle as she caressed it, then nudged the side of her face. She could feel the smooth fur on her cheek, the bristling whiskers against her neck. His head was enormous. Her fingers slid lightly down the span of his massive jaws, and she thought of all the times she’d seen them close around a piece of bloody meat, the tremendous power as his teeth snapped and shredded flesh that was far tougher than her own.

“Good boy. You’re my baby, aren’t you? I love you, buddy. I love you.”

He licked her neck, then along her jaw. His tongue was warm and rough and beyond it were canine teeth as long as her index finger. One bite was all it would take. One bite.

He made the low growl again.

That’s a friendly sound, Audrey. He is happy to see you. He is happy.

“Thank you, honey. Oh, thank you.” She felt able to breathe for the first time since he’d entered, and when he nudged her again, rubbing the top of his head against her shoulder, she got her hand high enough to scratch behind his ears. That was as brave as she had ever allowed herself to be before, from behind the fence. Now, the two of them alone in the dark, the big cat was just as content.

I’m okay. I am okay. He will not hurt me, and Dustin will not find me, and as long as I stay in here I am okay.

That was when the flashlight beam passed close by, illuminating the inside of the leopard’s enclosure.

“Audrey, get the fuck out here,” said a voice that had once belonged to a young man she had kidded about his resemblance to the boy in the Harry Potter movies, a man who once seemed as harmless as anyone she’d ever met but who now spoke from a place of unyielding blackness. He told her to get out with such confidence that she was sure he knew where she was, almost felt an impulse to respond. Then he continued talking, and she realized from the sound that he’d turned away, was speaking in another direction, still seeking.

“You don’t understand this place. You don’t understand how special it is. What I can be here. What you can be. Kimble, even. He doesn’t have to die. That’s up to him. I doubt he will make the right choice. What he cannot be allowed to do, though, is burn that bridge.”

He paused, searching for her in the night, and then continued.

“You’re thinking about Wes. You’re blaming me. Well, Wes didn’t have to die, either, Audrey. I watched it happen. The cats are what kept him away, and if he’d been able to get there, then Wes might be with us now. It was going to be up to him, but the cats prevented that chance. Don’t worry—I won’t let that happen to you. I’ll bring you to him. When you see the torch yourself, you will understand. When he touches you with that flame, you will understand.”

Silence. She had stopped moving, but her hand still rested on Jafar’s ears, the fur beginning to bristle, the leopard unappreciative of Dustin’s tone.

“Where did you go, you stupid bitch?” Dustin called, impatience returning. “You wouldn’t have gone into the cages. You’re not brave enough for that, no, you’re still scared of them, your own damn cats. Or did you get brave tonight?”

He was passing through the fences close to her, and he began dragging the handle of the flashlight across them, metal on metal, a loud rattling sound. Jafar heard it and growled in Audrey’s face. Peeled his lips back and even in the dark they were so close that she could see those teeth, the ones that tore through meat so easily.

“Calm down, honey,” she whispered, barely audible. “Calm down.”

Dustin banged against another fence, this one closer, and the leopard growled again. The next fence he hit belonged to the leopard’s enclosure. He was at the gate.

“Were you brave enough to go in with your favorite?” he said, voice lower and musing, as if he found the idea plausible. She was glad she’d fastened the lock.

But the snow, she realized, my tracks are in the snow, he will see those.

She’d been crawling, though. Not leaving footprints. Just a messy trail through the very same snow that Jafar had trampled over himself.

The flashlight beam caught the corner of the cat’s shelter. Dustin was trying to angle it so that he could see inside. The light caught the back half of the cat, illuminating the long tail and spotted hindquarters, but not finding Audrey. She’d gone far enough back that it could not reach her.

Dustin banged on the fence again, and Jafar let out the loudest and angriest growl yet. Audrey lifted her hand to her mouth and bit down on the side of it.

“Where are you, Jafar? Come out here. Come out and see me.”

The shelter was too narrow to allow the cat to turn around, but he was angry about the noise, and Audrey could sense that he wanted out. When he moved toward her, she felt a rush of fear, his massive paws and their deadly claws brushing over her thighs. He was pressed against her for a moment, the length of him sliding by, and then he slunk around the corner and emerged through the other end of the little house, outside again, snarling.

“Hiding out?” Dustin said. “Scared, big boy?”

There was another rattle against the fence, but this one was different from the others. Not done just to make noise. He was, Audrey realized with rising panic, working with the lock. Opening the gate.

Coming in, she thought wildly. How does he know I’m here? How does he know?

Then Dustin spoke again, and she realized that he was not coming in at all. He had a very different idea, one that reduced her temporary terror but replaced it swiftly with another one.

“Come on out,” Dustin said. “I’ll tell you something—they don’t like you down at that fire. They don’t like any of you. So step on out, Jafar, and get the hell away from our ridge.”

Our ridge.

“You need to go,” Dustin said, “and the lighthouse needs to go. Then things will be back to the way he prefers them.”

Audrey heard the sound of the gate being pushed open, and then the flashlight moved away and Dustin was at another gate, another lock.

He was opening them all. He was releasing the cats.

48

THEY BANGED OFF THE PAVED county road and onto the gravel of Blade Ridge so hard and fast that the back end of the truck jitterbugged to the left, and Roy reached out and put a hand on Shipley’s arm.

“Slow down, damn it. You forget what happened to you out here before?”

“All right.”

Shipley let off the accelerator and they slowed to what, after the pace of their wild ride, seemed like a tractor’s crawl. Roy stared ahead, thinking of blue torches dancing through the woods, thinking of his parents out here on a wintry night just like this. He wondered how soon they realized they’d missed the turn. Early, he suspected. His father would have realized it early. And he would have continued on down the road because he was looking for a safe place to turn his beloved small-block V-8 Chevy around. Or because he’d been following the blue light, enraptured, as so many seemed to be.

“If we don’t see Kimble’s car,” Roy asked, “do we still go in? Do we try to talk to Audrey Clark?”

“I want her away from that kid,” Shipley said, and then he pounded the brake all the way to the floor, the truck sliding to a stop in the snow and the gravel, and said, “Holy shit.”

There was a lion standing in the road. Majestic and with a full mane, his enormous head swung toward them, studying them, eyes aglitter in the headlight beams.

“They’re out,” Shipley whispered. “Why are they out?”

Roy had no answer. It couldn’t be good, though.

A shadow moved ahead and to the left, and they both turned toward it. Visible for an instant, then receding, was the orange-and-black-striped side of a tiger.

“Mr. Darmus,” Shipley said, “you want to tell me what in the hell we’re supposed to do about this?”

“Call for help,” Roy said. “It’s too late to be worried about protecting Kimble. Maybe too late to worry about Audrey Clark. We’re going to need a lot of people out here.”

“Yeah,” Shipley said softly, foot still on the brake, his eyes still locked onto those of the lion, which had not turned away. The animal lifted its head and roared then, a sustained bellow that made the steel and fiberglass shell around them seem suddenly insubstantial.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Roy said. “I’m afraid it’s too late for them. It’s not for us.”

Before Shipley could agree or disagree, a figure appeared at the far end of the road, walking out of the trees near Wyatt’s lighthouse, down toward the gates of the preserve. For a moment, Roy thought of Vesey, and wondered where his torch was.

Then he recognized him, almost simultaneously with Shipley.

It was Kevin Kimble.

He’d remained in the water for a few moments, until he was certain that what he was most aware of was the cold and not the pain. There was no pain. The ghost was gone and the blue light was gone but he knew that they were not really departed, that they remained very close.

At the top of the ridge, it occurred to him that he had not been aware that he had started to climb. Had not been aware of leaving the water. His body was whole and healed; he felt stronger, in fact, than he had in many years, stronger than he had since the day his back was pierced by a nine-millimeter bullet.

It’s true, he thought numbly, it is all true, every word I have been told about this place is true.

He was bothered by the way he had been compelled to move, the way he had emerged from the rocks and climbed to the top without decision or conscious thought, a man on the move with destination and motivation unknown.

He needs you gone, Kimble realized. It’s just as Jacqueline said—his evil is bound to the ridge. He doesn’t want to hold you here, not until you’ve done your work. You have to carry his torch for him into the places where he cannot go.

And the torch was in him now. It would travel with him for all of his days.

That was just fine. Kimble would not feel the weight of the burden long. He had promised balance, he had promised to take a life, and he intended to very soon.

He’d returned to kill Dustin Hall.

There was a shotgun in his cruiser, and his cruiser remained at the lighthouse. He walked through the trees, staying well to the north of the road, away from the preserve, reminding himself to walk in the path that was illuminated by the invisible beams from the lighthouse, reminding himself that if he recalled the lessons of the dead, he could see this night through to dawn. Down below, he could see a flashlight beam and hear Hall shouting, and he thought of Audrey Clark and knew that he had to hurry. He was able to hurry now; running was not a problem for Kimble, not now, not after that single whispered word of consent.

You’ll make the right decision? Jacqueline had asked.

Yes, he had. It would be the right decision, because he would kill Hall, his debt immediately satisfied, and then he would retreat from this place for many years—the courts would see to that—and when it was all done, when his days were passed, he would of course have to return here. Bound to the fire. He knew that and it saddened him but he could not think of it now, because there was work to be done, because he had to focus on running up that slippery, snow-covered slope and toward the beacon that Wyatt French had built so many years ago.

The rest of his days were not a concern, it was the rest of this night that mattered. He would use evil against itself, and in that was some level of victory, the most Kimble could yet be granted. If he was damned to that fire, so be it. Because he would be damned with her, and that felt right, that felt a long time coming. He could still remember the feel of her lips, he could still remember her blood, so hot, cascading over his hand as he worked the blade into her, seeking the heart. They’d damned one another, indeed. He’d returned her here, to the one place to which she could not be returned, and then he’d killed her. Now he would never leave.

Bound by balance.

He reached the cruiser, pulled open the door, and found the shotgun clipped in its customary position. Removed it and swung the door shut and turned back to where the flashlight beam was passing through the trees below.

Debts to be settled.

He ran down the driveway, which was too steep for running in the ice and the snow and the dark, but he did not stumble, he did not fall. When he reached the base of the hill he paused, isolating the position of the flashlight and knowing that he had to go quietly now.

Then, suddenly, the flashlight was gone. For an instant Kimble was puzzled, and then he, too, heard the engine and saw the headlights.

Someone was coming.

When the vehicle came to a stop, Kimble stepped out of the trees and began to move toward it, his finger resting on the shotgun’s trigger, and what he saw painted against the headlights brought him to an abrupt halt.

The lions were loose.

Audrey heard the engine and then Dustin fell silent and his flashlight was extinguished. When he spoke again, his voice was low and soft.

“Visitors. I should probably greet them, don’t you think, Lily, old girl? Wouldn’t do to be impolite.”

He’d been talking to the cats consistently as he tried to urge them from their cages. He seemed to have given up on his pursuit of Audrey or the idea that she could even hear his voice; his attention had gone instead to the cats and their release. She knew from his words of approval and their sounds that a few of them had accepted the coaxing and ventured into the night. Now she heard his footsteps crunch through the snow and understood that he was moving toward the road.

She could stay here, secure in her dark hole, hiding and waiting, but whoever had come down the road did not know what those approaching footsteps carried with them. There was a tranquilizer rifle in the trailer, and while you had to be close to use it, it would be better to try than to stay here cowering in the darkness and let him destroy whatever help had arrived, let him take more blood for the ridge.

Audrey had facilitated enough blood for the ridge.

She waited until his footsteps were inaudible, and then she slipped out of the shelter, bits of straw hanging in her hair, and peered into the night. Across from her, in the silent snow, Lily, the blind white tiger, sat on her haunches, staring at nothing.

Only Audrey knew better than to think that. The cat’s other senses more than compensated for the lack of vision; so long as Lily was watching the road, that meant Dustin was in that direction.

The trailer was not far off. She could make it. He would be occupied with the car, which appeared to be stopped in the middle of the road, and even if he heard her or saw her, he would have to make a decision. Whatever choice he made, someone would have a chance to adjust to it. She needed to force him toward that moment of decision.

There was a flourish of motion to her left, and she turned to see Jafar cross the enclosure in rapid bounds, pulling directly up to her. The terror she might have felt just minutes before was gone, though. She had lain with him in the dark and emerged unscathed on the other side, and now her fear had turned to faith. She rose to one knee, took the leopard’s head in both hands, and kissed his nose.

“Thank you, baby. Thank you.”

Then she got to her feet, went to the gate, and stepped through. In the distance, illuminated by the glow of the headlights, she could see one of her tigers stepping hesitantly through a yawning gate and into freedom.

Hurry, Audrey, she told herself as she began to run.

If she’d ever moved faster, she could not remember the occasion. She ran expecting blows or bullets, but none came, and she neither saw Dustin nor heard him. The trailer door was cracked open; he had not bothered to close it behind him as he came out with the flashlight. She hit the door at full speed, slammed it shut, locked it, and turned to the small closet where they had kept the tranquilizer rifle since Wesley’s death.

The door was open, and the closet was empty.

Of course, she thought stupidly. Even Dustin wouldn’t have been setting them loose if he didn’t have some sort of weapon.

She turned to the window, and that was when she saw Kevin Kimble in the road near the gates and, moving just behind him, a silhouette that looked like a man.

Roy said, “He’s going to shoot the lion,” as Kimble walked slowly forward, a shotgun in his hands.

“No, he’s not,” Shipley said. “He just wants to know who the hell we are.”

He picked up his own gun then, a semiautomatic handgun, and reached for the door handle.

“Wait,” Roy said. “He doesn’t trust you. Not yet.”

Shipley stopped, looked back at him, and nodded. “Right. You tell him.”

Roy opened the passenger door and climbed out as a gust of wind blew snow and ice pellets against him.

“Kimble!” he shouted. “I’m with Shipley. He’s safe.”

Kimble hesitated, didn’t answer. The lion had pivoted to face them when Roy yelled, and the wind gusted again, harder this time, and swung the door shut.

Shit, Roy thought as the lion started forward at a trot. Roy fumbled frantically for the door handle, jerked it open, and slammed himself back into the seat. By the time he’d turned around, the big cat was at a stop again, watching them like an uncertain security guard trying to assess their credentials from a distance.

“Drive,” he told Shipley. “I’m not getting out again. Not with the cats loose.”

Shipley proceeded forward, and the lion roared again, the sound so furious that Roy actually lifted his hands as if he might ward it off. Shipley kept his speed steady, though, and as they approached, the lion moved away, distrusting the vehicle. It circled behind them and stepped into the shadows, and then it was just Kimble in the beam of the headlights. Roy looked to his right, saw no sign of any of the cats, and put down the window. He leaned his head out.

“Kimble! Shipley is safe! You don’t need to worry about—”

Beside him, Shipley said, “Son of a bitch, there he is,” and banged open the door. When Dustin Hall rushed out of the trees and into the road, armed with a strange-looking rifle, he was behind Kimble and very close. Kimble spun to meet him, but Shipley had already fired. The sound of the gunshot echoed, and Roy watched as Dustin Hall crumpled at the road’s edge.

Standing beside the open door, gun still extended, Shipley said, “Let’s see if we can keep him down this time.”

49

KIMBLE APPROACHED THE BODY slowly, the shotgun cold in his hands, and he hoped for some sign of life. One last gasp, something. He had to be the one to end it.

He had to be.

There were no last gasps coming from Dustin Hall. Shipley’s shot had caught him just behind his left eye and the bullet had blown through his brain, and Kimble knew with one look that he’d been dead before he’d fallen into the snow. All the same he knelt and put his hand in front of Hall’s mouth, waited for breath, found none. Touched his neck and then his wrist, searching for a pulse.

Nothing.

Shipley and Darmus were standing above him now, and Kimble looked up to see Audrey Clark approaching. A lion, out of its cage, free, moved beside her in the night, and she saw it but did not stop.

“I got him,” Shipley said.

“Yes,” Kimble answered softly. “You got him.”

They were all together then, everyone understanding a piece and no one the whole, and they looked at each other in silence before Audrey Clark said, “You were dead. He pushed you… you were dead.”

Kimble looked up and met her eyes. “Yes.”

Silence again, but only momentarily, because Audrey Clark said, “Ira.”

Roy Darmus murmured an oath and moved for the truck but then decided it was too late, and Kimble turned his head and saw the black cougar advancing through the blowing snow, slinking along without making a sound. The cat stopped not five paces from him, and Kimble moved slowly to turn the shotgun toward him.

“No,” Audrey said. “Don’t. He wants to see the body.”

Kimble couldn’t process that, had shifted his finger to the trigger, when she said, “Just as he did with your deputy.”

He thought about that, thought about the way she’d described her last sighting of the cougar, the black cat standing atop Wolverton as the life bled out of him and the blue torch stayed at bay, and he finally understood.

“Like the lighthouse,” he said. “The cats are like the lighthouse.”

Except this one, which may have been something more than the lighthouse. Kimble rose and moved backward. They all did. The cougar waited until they had cleared enough room, and then he slunk forward, his head swaying side to side, his green eyes impossibly bright. He reached the body and paused, then circled it. He paid the living no mind at all now; his focus was on the dead.

The cat studied the corpse, and then he raised his head and looked toward the ridge.

“There won’t be anyone coming for him,” Kimble told the cat. “The lights are on.”

The black cat watched the ridge for a long time, and then he moved on through the snow and into the night.

Nathan Shipley said, “Did I just see that?”

“Yeah,” Kimble said. “You saw it.” He turned to Audrey Clark. “You were right.”

“Dustin knew it,” she said. “And Dustin could—”

Darmus said, “The cats are out, Kimble. The cats are out. There is a lion right behind us. Look.”

“That’s just Woodrow,” Audrey Clark said. “He won’t hurt you.”

“There are others.”

“Not many. He didn’t manage to let many of them out. I can get them back in.”

There was no waver to her voice. Kimble looked at her and he believed her.

“Well, let’s do that,” he said. “Quickly.”

She didn’t move. “I saw you fall,” she said. “Now here you are.”

“Yes,” Kimble said, and he saw from their faces that they all understood. He pointed at Dustin Hall’s body. “I came back for him.”

Shipley said, “But I got him.”

Kimble worked his tongue around his mouth, which had suddenly gone very dry, and drew in a breath that didn’t come easy.

“I know.”

50

SHE MOVED WITH AN astounding grace and confidence, talking to the cats, coaxing, at times touching them. She had Shipley follow with the tranquilizer rifle, but he did not need to use it. Kimble took Darmus to check the rest of the gates and secure the ones Hall had opened before being disturbed. In four of the enclosures, the gates were open, inviting the cats to freedom, but they had remained inside.

“It’s home,” Darmus said. “I guess they trust it more than they do these woods.”

They were right to do that, Kimble knew.

It took her twenty minutes to escort back inside the five cats—one lion, three tigers, and an ocelot—that had left their enclosures. There was something different in the way she moved with them from what Kimble had seen in her before. Something had changed, but he did not know what. They spoke little until it was done. The three men were afraid of the cats; the one woman, who was not afraid, was focused on them, worried for the safety of the animals.

“I’m not going to leave you,” she told the enormous lion, the one she’d called Woodrow, as she guided him toward the open gate. “If you leave, I’ll go, too. I promise you that.”

The lion wandered along with that on-my-own-time pace exhibited by cats everywhere from the jungle to apartment living rooms, and finally stepped within the fence, and Audrey Clark shut and locked the gate behind him.

With the preserve secured again, the cats behind their fences and Wyatt’s lighthouse casting its beams into the shadows, they walked together to the trailer and went inside, and then it was just the four of them, the four of them and the impossible truths of the night.

“We should hear it,” Kimble said. “From each other first.”

They told it. Inside the trailer, huddled in the living room, as the night pushed on toward dawn and the snow continued to fall, three accounts were shared, three accounts believed. They were well beyond the point of doubt with one another.

Kimble listened, and waited. He stood in front of the window, where the infrared beams would be working on him. He could not see them, of course, but he knew that they were there and he took comfort in that. Took comfort in the work they could do both for him and for the others, operating unseen but also unrelenting.

Roy Darmus was the one who finally turned to him and said, “Where is Jacqueline Mathis?”

“Dead,” Kimble said. “I killed her.”

He realized there were tears in his eyes then. No one spoke as he pushed them away with the back of his hand, and no one spoke as he told them his own account.

“Now it’s in me,” he said. “Just as it was with all the others. I won’t be able to control it. To hold it at bay. That’s been proven for so long. Too long.”

“There will be a way,” Darmus said.

Kimble held his eyes and didn’t speak, and after a time the reporter looked away.

“I just saw him coming at you,” Shipley said, his voice barely above a whisper. “I didn’t know, I just shot, and—”

“Of course, Shipley. You did the right thing. I might not have gotten him anyhow, and then where would we be?”

But he would have gotten him.

“You were going to burn the trestle,” Audrey Clark said. “You said it would work. You were sure of it.”

“I wasn’t sure of anything,” Kimble said. “But it was the only thing she told me that seemed to have a chance.”

They were quiet again, and Kimble cleared his throat and said, “We’ve got to call it in, you know. I killed a woman. I can’t stand here forever.”

“Your debt is settled,” Darmus said. “You already took a life. Jacqueline’s.”

“I don’t think Silas Vesey is one for crediting accounts,” Kimble said.

Audrey Clark looked at him and said, “You told me you weren’t worried about adding a few more years for burning that trestle down. Are you now?”

“No.”

“There’s a way,” Darmus said again. “We’ll find it. We were getting close. Wyatt was getting close. What did you tell me? He kept himself away from others in the dark. Kept himself alone with his lights. You could—”

“Sure,” Kimble said. “There might be a way. But you’ll have to find it, because I’ll be in prison. The rest of you should not be. As it stands now, you won’t be. Grant me this much, though—I don’t want to go to prison knowing that I left that trestle standing. I won’t.”

They made their way to the trestle as a group, Kimble walking out front. He’d already told Shipley not to hesitate to fire.

“I might feel something,” he said. “And if I do…”

Shipley nodded.

They hung back while Kimble walked out onto the bridge. Dawn was close but hadn’t broken yet, and the snow still fell from a black sky. The moon was behind the clouds now, out of sight as it receded to make way for the sun.

Kimble stepped onto the boards, his boots echoing hollowly against them, the smell of gasoline strong in the air. He stopped when he saw the fire.

It was tucked just beneath the easternmost upright of the trestle, and the base had to be fifteen feet in diameter. The flames were blue. They rose up and flapped at the trestle like waves on an angry sea, and milling around it were all those familiar faces. They’d stared at Kimble from ancient photographs, most of them.

Not all of them.

He looked down at Wyatt French, the old man’s face painted with flickering blue light, and then at Jacqueline, and he dropped to his knees on the bridge. She was watching him, though the blue flames would wave across her face and hide her from sight at times, only to ebb back and reveal her again.

Nathan Shipley said, “Chief?”

Kimble tore his eyes away from Jacqueline Mathis, looked back at the three who waited for him among the living, and got to his feet.

“See anything?” Darmus asked uneasily.

Kimble nodded. He couldn’t speak, not right then. He walked off the bridge and back to them, and then he asked Audrey Clark for the matches. She looked at Darmus, and then at Shipley, and neither of them spoke.

“I’ve got to try it,” Kimble said. “Anybody want to argue that?”

No one did. She passed him a book of matches, and Kimble thanked her.

“Well,” he said, “I’ll give it a shot, huh?”

“It will work,” Audrey Clark said. Roy Darmus nodded, and Shipley didn’t say anything at all. His face was pale.

“I’m sorry, chief,” he said.

“Shipley, that’s why you were there. Why you will always need to be there, in moments like that—to hear the right call and make the right shot. I’m sorry I doubted you. It was… it was a difficult thing, getting an understanding of this place.”

He put out his hand, and Shipley shook it. Then Kimble turned to Audrey Clark and said, “You’re something special, you know. The way you handled those cats…”

“I love them,” she said.

“I know it.”

Darmus said, “It may work, Kimble. It may work. And if it doesn’t? We can find something that will.”

“I know that,” Kimble said.

There was a pause, and then he said, “All right. I’d like you all to go up the hill a bit, get higher than I am. I don’t know what these flames will do.”

They listened, starting uphill, and Kimble turned from them at first, then looked back.

“Darmus?”

The reporter turned back to him, waiting.

“When you tell it,” Kimble said, “tell it right, okay? Tell it the way it happened, not the way people will want to hear it. Tell it the way it happened.”

Roy Darmus stared at him for a moment and then nodded. “I will, Kimble,” he said.

Kimble left them then and went back out onto the bridge. Crossed the length of it, not daring to look back at the fire, where faces of his own kind gathered over more than a century waited and watched. He got to the place on the western side of the trestle where he had emptied the gasoline, and then he removed the pack of matches from his pocket, folded it backward, tore a match free, and struck it.

The glow was small but warm and bright, and he cupped one hand to shield it from the wind and then he passed it to the planks that had once been handled by fevered men who were fading fast. It sparked, hesitated, then absorbed the glow. Began to burn, and he blew on it gently, and that fanned the small flame out and grew it and then it caught the first of the gasoline and went up fast and hot. He stepped away, backpedaling, heading toward the safety of the eastern shore, where the living waited for him with hopes, however faint.

“It’s going,” Audrey Clark said, and Roy nodded, watching as Kimble backed slowly toward the darkness, the fire riding the lines of fuel toward the rocky cliffs on the opposite shore, the crackle of flames audible now, the smell of smoke in the air.

“It will work,” Shipley said. “It will work.”

Roy didn’t answer.

Kimble got to the center of the bridge, still moving backward slowly, and then he turned and faced them. Held up a hand and waved, and Audrey and Shipley matched the gesture.

Roy held up his own hand and whispered, “Good luck, Kimble. Good luck, and God bless.”

When Kimble knelt on the eastern side of the bridge and struck another match, Shipley said, “What’s he doing? He’s going to trap himself. He’s going to—”

Shipley started forward then, and Roy grabbed his arm and held. The deputy was young and strong, but Roy knew that this hold mattered, and he did not let go, not even when Shipley had dragged them both to the ground and they lay in the snow and watched as the flames rose high at the eastern edge of the bridge and roared toward Kimble, who was backing up again, into the middle of the trestle, fire coming at him from both ends now, whipped by the wind and strengthening quickly.

“Why’s he doing that?” Audrey cried. “Why isn’t he trying to run?”

“Because,” Roy said, “this may work, but he’s not sure. He wants to be sure. He needs to be.”

Kimble retreated to the center of the bridge and watched his fire. Only when he was satisfied that it was going well enough did he chance a look back down to Vesey’s blaze, where the cold blue flames licked at the darkness, waiting for him.

You’ll get me, he thought, but you will not get anyone else. I’ll hand myself over before I hand you anyone else.

The ghost with the torch left the blue fire. He walked away from his blaze and stood looking up at Kimble, and there was abject disappointment to his posture, but no resignation. Then he turned and headed north along the river.

He’s leaving, Kimble realized with amazement. He is not done, but he is leaving. There will be another spot for him, and another fire. But not here.

Above the ghost, a shadow ran along the top of the ridge, tracking the blue torch.

It was the black cat. Following.

But not with him, Kimble thought. No, the cat was not a friend. He was keeping watch on him, and somehow Kimble knew that it was very good that the cat had found him. The reasons were beyond him in that moment as the fire encroached, but he understood that Silas Vesey was leaving and that it was good that the black cat trailed him.

It was important that something trailed him, and kept watch.

Kimble turned back to the cold fire then, back to what waited for him, and saw that the ghosts were all leaving. They were climbing the rocks.

For a moment, he feared for those he’d left behind, those who waited on the hilltop unaware of what was coming toward them. Then he saw that the first of the ghosts—was it Mortimer? Hamlin? one of the ancients—had detoured to the right immediately, was running for the trestle.

Coming for me, Kimble thought, and then he saw the ghost enter the flames, saw a brilliant shower of red sparks, and then there was nothing.

I’ve released them.

The next ghost entered, another shower of red sparked high and vanished, and Kimble’s excitement grew. He remembered, finally, to call out to those he’d left behind.

“It’s done here!” he yelled. “I’ve put an end to it here!”

He couldn’t see the group he’d left on the hill, though, not now, with the flames so tall. The firelight was brilliant, the night a thing forgotten. He shouted to them again, as loud as he could, and he hoped it was loud enough. He hoped that they’d heard, and that they would understand the significance of that last word.

He wanted very badly for them to know.

The fire was near him at both ends now, and one of the trestle supports broke free. It shattered with a crack and then one of the massive timbers on the trestle’s eastern edge began easing away from the bridge, as if it hated to let go, and swung down in a ribbon of golden light and met the river with a splash.

The ghosts continued their entrance—exit, Kimble thought, deliriously happy, exit—and as he was pushed farther back into the center and the trestle continued to give way around him, he saw Wyatt French coming, and he wanted to laugh, wanted to shout his thanks, but the lighthouse keeper was already gone into the warm sparks, and then there was only one left, at the top of the ridge and heading his way.

“Jacqueline,” Kimble said as she stepped toward him, “I’m here.”

He went forward to meet her.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There was a time when I felt eternally bound to The Ridge myself, and I’m deeply grateful to those who cast guiding lights along the path for me (no blue torches in this group): Christine, Tom Bernardo, Vanessa Kehren, David Hale Smith.

For Michael Pietsch, I haven’t the proper words of thanks. Michael, the importance of your insight, patience, faith, and unbreakable, irreplaceable enthusiasm cannot be overstated. Thanks for having confidence to spare on the days when I ran dry.

The rescue center portrayed in this book is based on a far more fascinating reality, the Exotic Feline Rescue Center founded by Joe Taft. Joe’s willingness to share his time, expertise, and perspective with me enabled this story to exist, and his mission is deserving of our attention and support.

Every writer jokes about someday killing off his editor in a book. I’ve now done it! Felt pretty good, I have to say. But in all seriousness, I’m forever indebted to Pete Wolverton, who read my first manuscript when there was no earthly incentive to do so, then took a chance, and taught me so much about the craft through our five books together. Always, always grateful, Pete.

Josh Ritter and Joe Pug, both wildly gifted artists, graciously allowed me to use their lyrics in the book.

To Marlowe, thanks for the insight into the complex feline mind, not to mention the help with choreography. To Riley… well, you punch the time clock every day, if nothing else.

And now the list of people I’d like to thank in detail but who would take out red pens and begin cutting pages if I tried: David Young, Heather Fain, Terry Adams, Sabrina Callahan, Nicole Dewey, Amanda Tobier, Tracy Williams, Robert Pepin, Louise Thurtell, Nick Sayers, Renee Senogles, Anne Clarke, Heather Rizzo, Luisa Frontino, Miriam Parker, and everyone else involved in making the books a reality.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michael Koryta is the author of seven previous novels, including Envy the Night, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for best mystery/thriller, and the Lincoln Perry series, which has earned nominations for the Edgar, Shamus, and Quill awards and won the Great Lakes Book Award. His work has been translated into twenty languages. A former private investigator and newspaper reporter, Koryta lives in Bloomington, Indiana, and St. Petersburg, Florida.

ALSO BY MICHAEL KORYTA

The Cypress House

So Cold the River

The Silent Hour

Envy the Night

A Welcome Grave

Sorrow’s Anthem

Tonight I Said Goodbye

Copyright

Copyright © 2011 by Michael Koryta

All rights reserved.