The Ridge (4 page)

Kimble was the chief deputy, a man who’d taken a bullet in the back a few years ago and still returned to the job. He was, anyone in the county would probably agree, the man you’d want on a difficult case.

But what was Wyatt’s case?

Roy knocked. Nothing. He cupped his hands and shouted Wyatt’s name. The rain was streaming down his neck and under his shirt collar to his spine. He tried the knob, then swore when it turned.

Unlocked. Shit. Why couldn’t it have been locked? Why were the doors you knew you shouldn’t open always the ones that were unlocked?

He pushed the door open and peered into the darkness. The living quarters seemed larger than they should have, but they still weren’t much to speak of. There was a small bed in one corner, a desk beside it, some shelves, a kitchen table in the middle of the room. Refrigerator and range and sink. A bathroom blocked off by an old-fashioned accordion-style door.

“Wyatt? Mr. French? It’s Roy Darmus.”

By now he’d given up on getting an answer. He stepped into the room, and in the nickel-colored light of the rainy afternoon he could see that the walls were lined with maps. Topographic maps of Sawyer County. As he walked farther in, he saw that each map had a different year written on it in bold black marker: 1966, 1958, 1984…

Across the room was another door, also closed. This would lead to the lighthouse steps. Maybe this one would be locked. That would be nice.

It wasn’t. Opened outward and revealed the base of the spiral stairs that curled up and away. Roy began to climb, one hand on the railing.

“Wyatt?” he called.

There were more steps than he’d have thought. He climbed for a long time, into progressive darkness, and then finally the top showed itself in a gray glare of daylight.

By then Roy didn’t need to go any farther. The smell assured him of that—warm, fresh copper tinged the air.

He steadied himself and climbed on and at the top step his head finally broke the surface and he found himself staring at the light itself. There was one oversized bulb surrounded by a series of strange, mirror-like lenses, the light within flashing, and arranged beneath it were four odd fixtures with red lenses
angled toward the cardinal directions. Roy could see no light coming from those, though.

Electrocuted himself,
Roy thought.
He was doing something to the light, trying to repair it or change it, and he electrocuted himself.

That thought lasted only until he pushed all the way up onto the lighthouse platform, turned to the right, and looked directly into Wyatt French’s dead face.

He’d shot himself in the mouth, and if Roy had made a full circle around the lighthouse he would have been able to see the blood and brain tissue that was still wet on the glass. There was a gaping, grotesque hole in the center of French’s face, and his long gray hair was clotted with blood. A handgun lay on his lap.

All of this Roy saw in a half-second flash, and then he turned away, turned too fast. His feet were still on the top step, and one of them slid off and his balance was gone. He fell sideways and put out a hand to steady himself, but he was dropping too fast, and knew before he hit it that he was going directly into the light. He heard a pop and felt immediate, scorching pain just before the blood began to flow. He’d landed with his palm out and his weight driving down and that was all it took for the glass lenses to shatter and bite.

“Son of a
bitch,
” he said, lifting his hand free, blood dripping onto the floor and splattering his jeans. He’d punctured not only the lenses but the bulb; the light had given a frightening spark at the moment of impact and then gone dark. Everything had; the lighthouse was soaked in shadow now.

He turned and stumbled down the stairs, grabbing at the railing with his good hand.

O
F COURSE IT RAINED.
Fate wouldn’t have it any other way. Audrey Clark was moving massive, uneasy cats and it poured rain. Absolutely ideal.

She’d had a vision of this day, and it wasn’t rain that spoiled that. No, rain would have been fine—she could picture David leaning down to kiss her, laughing, his wet blond hair plastered to his skull, water drops on his glasses, all of it still a pleasure to him, in charge of everything and enjoying every moment. They’d spent their first afternoon together in these Kentucky hills, when Audrey’s law firm was tasked with drawing up the endowment that would fund the cat rescue center and David had capitalized on her interest—ostensibly in the rescue center, but also in him—to show her exactly what he intended to build in Sawyer County. At the time it had been fascinating, admirable, and romantic.

At that time, there’d been no cat shit on the grounds.

Her vision of the day had died with her husband in the rocks along the Marshall River six months earlier. He’d fallen forty-six feet while scouting the new home for the rescue center one evening,
and although the police told her that David had died instantly, Audrey was still falling.

They’d gotten started at daybreak, the third day of moving cats and, with any luck, the last. At her side were four volunteers and the rescue center’s only two paid staff members: Dustin Hall, a former student of David’s, and Wesley Harrington, the preserve’s manager and cat guru. She had just one transport vehicle, a large panel truck that could hold as many as eight cages at once. Getting those eight cages filled, though, took time and effort. Cats, large or small, are not fond of doing anything that hasn’t been granted their express written consent. Transportation in a cage generally does not qualify.

So it became a battle of wills, with one caveat: the humans could cheat.

They started with simple coaxing. True to the cliché, the cats were curious, if nothing else. Sometimes that curiosity would be enough to lead them to inspect the transport cage. The moment they entered, Wes or Audrey would drop the guillotine gate behind them. If curiosity and coaxing didn’t work, they’d stoop to the first of the cheating tactics: food baiting. Many of the reluctant animals could be lured into the cage when the right treat was offered—
Small children work well,
Wes had told her dryly—and then the gate would drop.

If the first two techniques didn’t work, then they’d stoop to the ultimate cheat and use tranquilizers. Wes was adamantly opposed to that. He’d been involved in cat recoveries all over the country, and on two occasions he’d seen animals lost because of mishandled drugging. His stance on sedation was that it had to be the last measure.

After five years of working with these cats, Audrey hadn’t thought they’d need to sedate any of them for the relocation, but as the day wore on she found herself in favor of the idea with
Kino, one of the male tigers, and not just because Kino sprayed her three times in the morning alone.

The big tiger was full of bad attitude on a good day, and this was not a good day. Watching all the chaos, watching his peers being loaded into cages and driven away, Kino was quite pissed off. Audrey had always made fun of the way he stalked the fence, giant shoulders rolling, giant ass swaying, a surly stare on everyone.

We need to get you a leather jacket,
she’d told him once.
You can wear it with the collar up.

He’d sprayed her almost immediately after that bit of mockery, and the plans for the leather jacket had swiftly become a promise for a tiger-skin rug for her living room.

Today he was playing the role of an antagonist, roaring and banging against the fences and trying to get the other cats worked up.

“There is
no
way we get his angry ass into a truck without sedation,” she said.

“We’ll get him, and we’re not sedating him,” Wes answered firmly. He loved all of the cats, but Audrey knew well that Kino was his favorite, simply because Kino was the most challenging.

So they worked around Kino all morning and afternoon, and it was on the last load of the day that they finally got the big tiger into the transport cage. Drug-free, as Wes had promised. In the end it came down to Wes’s ingenious suggestion of totally ignoring the animal. He circled around Kino’s enclosure, talking to the other tigers, reaching out here and there to scratch along their jaws or in some cases allowing them to nuzzle his face and lick his cheek. By the time he made his third pass, Kino was bellowing for attention. Wes ignored him completely. Ten minutes later, the tiger marched sullenly into his transport cage. When they dropped the gate behind him, Wes knelt beside the cage and leaned close. Kino growled. Wes said, “Yeah, I know,” and held his ground, and a few seconds later the tiger’s sound shifted
to the chuffing noise that signified pleasure and Wes was scratching behind one of his ears.

“I can’t believe you got him in that cage without tranquilizers,” Audrey said, and she meant it. She was better around these cats than most people, and David had been far better than she, but Wes was something else entirely. The cats accepted him in a way that they wouldn’t anyone else, and his innate understanding of them was extraordinary.

You’re always worried about whether you can trust them,
he told her once.
If you worry more about making it clear that they can trust
you,
you’ll be amazed at the difference.

Those lines or variations of them were constant from Wes, who spoke little except to explain things about the cats to Audrey, or, more aptly, to explain what she was failing to grasp about them. She rode an emotional pendulum between appreciation and irritation. At one moment there would be recognition that without him she could not run the preserve; in the next, deep frustration that without him she could not run the preserve.

“Kino, he’s all talk,” Wes said now, and then they used a forklift to put the cages onto the truck. Every time one was in the air, Audrey held her breath. She was envisioning disaster—a dropped cage, a broken door, a four-hundred-pound tiger on the loose—but Wes was calm and confident and that helped. The cages were loaded without incident, and then they were on the road, bound west across the county for Blade Ridge.

“Not many left,” she told Wes as they raced the rapidly fading daylight. “I hoped we would get them all, but that was pretty ambitious. Tomorrow will be easy, though. One load of lions, and then Ira.”

Ira was the preserve’s prize, a black cougar, the only such creature in captivity in the world, a cat so rare that many experts still refused to believe he wasn’t the product of crossbreeding.

“Hope you’re right,” Wes said, and she felt that she was. Despite
the rain and the hard work and the weight of David’s absence, she felt good. She knew also that her husband would be pleased if he could watch the cats gathering at their new home. The land on Blade Ridge Road had been his dream option. Originally part of an enormous tract belonging to one of the town’s old mining families, it was so rugged that little had changed with the property in the past hundred years. It was far from any residential development and large enough for them to have plenty of room to grow, also isolated enough for the cats to have little in the way of human distraction.

Little, that was, except for the psychotic who lived across the road. Their only neighbor—the only resident on the entire stretch of gravel road, in fact—was a local drunk who had, long before David and Audrey acquired their property, made the decision to replace his trailer home with a lighthouse.

A real one. On a wooded hilltop, in the middle of nowhere.

She’d had a bad feeling the first time she saw it, only worsening when friends around town commented on their neighbor’s propensity for drink and odd behavior. There was something indescribably eerie about watching the light paint the treetops with its pulsing, relentless golden flashes. She urged David to make a formal complaint. He found it amusing; she found it alarming.

It will bother the cats,
she’d said.
Can you imagine how Jafar will react to that thing? It’s so damn bright.

Jafar, a leopard, was one of David and Audrey’s personal favorites, a sleek, beautiful animal with the personality of an affectionate if mischievous housecat, and in the end it had probably been Jafar’s desire, not Audrey’s, that tipped the scale. David called the sheriff and said the lighthouse was too bright. It turned out he wasn’t wrong—a permit was required for so bright a light. Wyatt French had responded formally at first, taking down his megawatt lamps and replacing them with something
that—barely—satisfied the permit standards for light pollution or air traffic control or whoever made such decisions.

For a time it had looked as if he was just an eccentric, peaceful enough. Then came the county council meetings to discuss the rescue center’s relocation, and Wyatt French arrived intoxicated and angry and raving grim prophecies of doom. By the time the police finally escorted him from the room, then arrested him, Audrey was looking at David with
I told you so
eyes. They didn’t have an eccentric neighbor, they had an enemy.

And a cruel one, Audrey learned after David’s death. A card from Wyatt French had arrived amidst all the others, but his message was anything but heartwarming. He expressed his sorrow for her loss, yes, but then he added a few lines suggesting that David had done it to himself, and that if they had not forced him to tamper with the lighthouse, her husband would have been safe from harm.

Audrey had ripped the card into breath-mint-sized shreds, slowly and methodically, while her older sister watched in astonishment. That was the last contact she’d had with Wyatt French, who had yet to come down the hill and visit his new neighbors. He surely would soon enough, though, and that expectation just added to the strange light’s malevolence. It had been flashing today even after the sun rose, and continued; with each load of cats they brought, the storm-darkened skies glittered with flashes that found her eyes and crawled behind them and took hostile refuge in her mind, leaving her with an unfocused anger.