The Ridge (8 page)

He remembered wishing she’d just squeeze the trigger. Just finish it, not draw it out in such a way. But the smile turned to a frown and then she’d leaned toward him. Leaned toward him
and down, her hair swinging from her face and close to his own, and it had been almost as if she were going to kiss him. The motion that gentle, that intimate.

Until the muzzle touched his skin.

She’d pressed the gun directly to his forehead, and her finger was tight on the trigger, and out in the driveway the lights on his cruiser flashed on the two of them there on the floor and in the blood, and she kept blinking against the glare. When the red caught her face the blink turned to a wince, and she took a sharp, harsh inhalation, as if struck by a sudden pain. Looked back at him, and the lights flashed again, and again, and she suddenly removed the gun and crawled backward, into the darkness. Then there was another car in the driveway and Kimble got the words out.

“Put it down.”

So she did. She laid his weapon on the floor and said, in a confused voice, as if she had just stepped into the room and interrupted his attempt at a quiet death, “I’m sorry. I just don’t know—” and right then the backup deputy turned the cruiser’s spotlight on, piercing the front window with an explosion of light. Jacqueline Mathis lifted her hands and covered her face, and Kimble realized he might live, and then he fainted.

Now he looked at her photograph and felt lightheaded again.

“What were you doing up here, Wyatt?” Kimble muttered, and around him the lighthouse creaked against the force of a strengthening winter wind.

T
HE CATS ALERTED WESLEY
to the blue light that was not a light at all.

When they turned out in unified fury on the night after Wyatt French died at the top of his lighthouse, it was the first time Wesley had seen anything of the kind. And Wesley Harrington had spent forty-five of his fifty-seven years around cats. He’d been born in Wyoming in a place so far out in the mountains that there would be weeks at a time when he was unable to make it to school because the roads were impassable due to snow. His father had a sixth-grade education with books and a doctorate as a woodsman. He hunted, fished, and trapped, all for two things: food and money. There was only one exception to that approach: mountain lions.

Wesley went along on his first lion hunt when he was twelve. Some folks called them cougars, some mountain lions, others pumas, but in the Wyoming mountains there were just “lions.” There was, as Wesley’s father regularly explained to him by the fire that provided the sole heat source in their cabin, nothing finer than hunting lions. They were the only animal in America
that could truly outthink a man. Oh, bears and deer and wolves had their instincts, but lions were
crafty.

They were also, he often said, the only American animal that would stalk a man. He’d heard that polar bears would do such a thing, but there were no polar bears in the lower forty-eight. Lions would stalk, though. He’d seen it done, and heard tell of many other occasions. They were faster, more agile, more deadly, and far smarter than any other creature, and for those reasons a lion hunt had nothing to do with food or money and everything to do with the thrill of battle.

Those hunts outlasted almost all of Wesley’s childhood memories. The frigid air, the deep snow, the howling sounds the wind made as it worked through the mountains. An expanse of wilderness completely empty except for Wesley and his dad and the three Plott hounds. They’d find a track, measure it, estimate the size of the cat, and then they’d be off, off through some of the most unforgiving terrain in the area, because the cat’s first instinct when dogs were at its heels was not, contrary to popular belief, to tree. Cats were too smart for that. So first they’d run, and they would run toward territory that favored them. A mountain lion could cover twenty miles or more in a day.

Some of the locals had calling stands, and they’d sit up in the trees and call for the big cats, and sometimes it worked. Bill Harrington had no patience for such approaches. Lion hunts were supposed to be
chases.

When Wesley was fifteen, he and his father had the greatest hunt of both their lives, scrambling through crusted snow and treacherous canyons, the hounds hoarse-voiced and with torn, bloody pads on their feet. They watched the lion—a massive cat, a true trophy—swim a frigid river to escape them and then, just as twilight was settling, they treed it on a rocky ledge. Bill Harrington gave his son a chance.

That was the first and last cat Wesley ever shot.

It was while they were preparing the body for transport back home that they found the cubs. The lion had led them on a merry chase away from the den at first—a wise instinct, carrying the threat away from those she loved—but in the end she’d decided to go back, maybe hoping to take refuge, maybe thinking she needed to stand and fight, but more likely confident that she’d lost the dogs in the river.

She hadn’t.

There were two cubs in the den, and Bill Harrington told Wesley that they would not survive on their own and should be put down fast and painlessly. Wesley, feeling tremendous shame, had refused, and Bill had relented. They took the cubs back down and called the state to come get them. That same night a screaming blizzard blew in, and it was four days before someone with the state arrived to inspect the cubs. By then one had died in Wesley’s arms; the other was alive. He’d bottle-fed it, slept with it, never left it. Those four days shaped a life.

He never hunted cats again. He tracked them, but with only a camera in his hands. After high school he worked with a group in California that studied the cougar populations. From that he met a woman who was headed to Africa to work with lions. He spent two years there. Then it was South America for jaguars, then back to the States to work for the USDA as an investigator on cases where tigers were being raised and slaughtered for their pelts, then on to one private preserve, then to another and another.

He’d spent far more time around cougars, lions, tigers, cheetahs, and ocelots than he had around people. The only people he knew well, in fact, were cat people. Big cats were his world, his life. He knew them well.

And he knew this: the cats at Audrey Clark’s rescue preserve did not like their new grounds.

Wesley lived at the preserve. He’d joined them years earlier, when David was getting it started, and he’d expected it would be
a temporary gig. But they were wonderful people, the Clarks, and their mission—providing rescue, then homes and safety and pleasure, for abused exotic cats—was one he believed in deeply. So Wes had stayed, living on the grounds in a well-equipped trailer and surrounded by cats that he loved as family, happy both because he knew he was needed and because he liked the idea of the planned expansion at Blade Ridge.

Liked it until tonight, at least, when a cacophony of roars, hisses, and screams broke out just as he was about to get some sleep.

He’d never heard them all join in like this. Sometimes the tigers would excite the lions and most of those groups would get to roaring—a sound that seemed to make the very earth upon which you stood tremble—but as Wesley grabbed a flashlight and stepped out of the trailer, they were
all
going. He could even hear the low hisses from Tina, a serval, the smallest of African cats, whose cage was very close to the trailer door. He shone his light down at her and saw that she was standing with her back arched and tail stiff, staring away from him, out toward the road. Out toward the lighthouse. But it was dark and nobody had come down the road, so what in the hell…

He saw it then. A strange blue light was working its way around the face of the lighthouse. Every cat in the preserve was staring it down, and they usually didn’t give a damn about light.

“Hello?” Wesley shouted. He wasn’t a large man, but working with cats for years had taught him how to use a mighty large voice when he needed it. “Who’s there?”

No response came, and the light didn’t stop moving. It just bobbed around the outside of the lighthouse, and Wesley stared at it in fascination. The thing was no ordinary light, and that went beyond the blue color. It had the flickering, undulating motion of a flame. Yes, that’s exactly what it looked like—a blue torch.

It drifted around the hilltop and disappeared and for a moment Wes relaxed. Then he noticed that the cats had not.
Every single animal was upright and pressed to the fence, watching and snarling. Wes stared at them, truly at a loss, and then looked back just in time to see the blue light reappear at the top of the lighthouse.

“Son of a bitch,” he whispered. Whoever was out there had gotten inside. But Wyatt French was dead, the police had told him that, and he knew for a fact that the last officer on the scene had left hours before.

The torch reflected off the glass and filled the lighthouse with an ethereal blue glow. Wesley suddenly felt both exposed and frightened, and he clicked his own flashlight off and stepped back into the shadows, close to Tina’s cage, the serval still making those low, warning hisses.

After a time the blue light vanished again, then appeared outside the lighthouse, and the cats went wild. The roar of a tiger could always make a newcomer tremble, but Wesley couldn’t remember the last time the sounds had made
him
uneasy. The cats were enraged, and it was at this blue light.

Do something,
he told himself.

But what? Chase down the source? That didn’t seem like such a good idea. Because that light… there was something strange about it.

He was still standing there debating when the light vanished over the crest of the ridge, and the cats began to fall silent and settle back down. Some—Kino in particular—continued to pace and voice displeasure, but the unified response was done.

“What was that, Kino?” Wesley said, walking out into the preserve, where his favorite tiger was placed in a central location. “What was that, buddy?”

The tiger continued his restless patrolling. Wesley watched him, then looked back at Tina, the always-docile serval, who’d risen in such aggressiveness, and found himself recalling all of the legends that said cats could sense spirits.

And a man just died up there,
he thought.
The lighthouse keeper himself. Maybe he intends to remain on duty after all.

“Stop it,” he said, and while he directed the harsh command at Kino, it was intended for himself. He didn’t need to indulge such foolish thoughts. The cats, who had never united in aggression like this before, were simply responding to the new grounds, to unhappiness with the change, to…

“To that light,” he whispered.

And whoever carried it.

I
T APPEARED THAT WYATT FRENCH
had died intestate, no family or guardian in line to step up and handle the proceedings. That made it the county’s problem. If no will or heir was found, the dead man’s property would go up for auction. That one, Kimble wanted to see. Who in the hell would bid on a lighthouse in the woods?

In the course of working the phones that morning, he was beginning to develop a picture of Wyatt French. French had been an extraordinarily gifted carpenter, one of the finest in the area, and in his youth seemed destined for good things. When a big parcel of land at Blade Ridge—holdings of the Whitman Company for generations, back to the mining days—was released for sale, Wyatt mortgaged himself up to the ears to acquire it, intending, apparently, to develop it into a neighborhood of log homes that would embrace the region’s beauty.

Not a single log had ever been laid.

Times got tougher, Wyatt’s drinking habit worsened, and the grand plan faded from his conversation. Eventually he put a trailer on the choicest grounds of his property, telling friends—
or, by that point, bartenders—that he’d soon replace it with the first of his custom log homes.

Instead he’d replaced it with a lighthouse.

By then his alcoholism was a crippling thing, and no contractor in the area would hire him, no matter his skills. Too much risk. He made a living through odd jobs and people with great patience—if you could wait for him long enough, he did fine work—and lived a solitary, bourbon-soaked existence out in his lighthouse. When the bank finally went after him, he’d lost the rest of his land and declared bankruptcy. All they let him keep was the ground on which he’d built his bizarre home. The rest sat untouched for a few years—it was so far from everything that no developer was interested—and then David and Audrey Clark came along and purchased it from the bank that had held it for so long.

Now they were moving in, and Wyatt was dead by his own hand.

Kimble had been working the phones for a full hour, trying to track down next of kin, when three plastic bags were delivered to him: the items that had been removed from Wyatt French’s pockets by the medical examiner.

There was a wallet, a cell phone, and a pocket knife. Kimble set the knife aside and started with the wallet. There wasn’t much to study: eleven dollars in cash, an ancient set of business cards that identified Wyatt as a “skilled tradesman,” and a driver’s license that had been revoked years earlier. When Wyatt came to town, he walked or hitchhiked. He did not come to town often.

Kimble put the wallet back in the plastic evidence bag, then turned his attention to the cell phone. It would be the only phone—no landline had ever been extended to Blade Ridge. Wyatt could have requested one when he moved out there, though it probably would have required a substantial payment, but he never did. The cell was a cheap thing, the sort you could pick up at a gas
station or drugstore with cash and no contract. It held a log of calls, though. Kimble scrolled through, wincing a bit as he saw his own number, and then put the others into a computer search, looking for matches.