The Ridge (34 page)

“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.”

A
UDREY 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.