The Ridge

but still showing blood.

“How’d that happen?”

“Wyatt doesn’t look good. Looks pretty ghastly, in fact. When I saw him, it scared me. I fell and put my hand through the bulb.”

“The wound serious?”

“Not too bad. But I’m glad that you ended up here, because—”

“Because you broke the law by trespassing and then proceeded to bleed all over the death scene?”

“The door was open.”

“And the gate?”

Darmus was silent. Kimble said, “All right, let me go on up and have a look. There’s an ambulance on the way. They can look at your hand. If he’s as you say, isn’t going to be much need to hurry him out of here, is there?”

“No,” Darmus said. “There surely isn’t. But you didn’t let me finish. I called for you because, well… Wyatt French did, too. There’s a note on the door.”

“So I’ve been told.”

“What do you know about him?”

“Less than you, I expect,” Kimble said. “But he sent for you, too. Sent for both of us. And you know what that tells me?”

“What?”

“That even crazy men can read the papers.”

Kimble left Darmus standing in the rain and walked to the lighthouse. He stopped at the door and studied the note. A simple, oddly polite request to contact him for purposes of investigation. He read it, remembering the hiss of the tires on the pavement and the look of the fog in his headlights as he’d answered Wyatt’s questions that morning.

Do you pursue the root causes of a suicide in the same manner that you would a homicide?

Kimble had told him that he pursued the truth. Always.

Now, in the freezing rain outside the dead man’s door, Kimble turned back to Darmus.

“I suppose I should wait for someone else now,” he said. “I’m probably a suspect, what with my name stamped on the damn door. And he called me this morning, too. Probably said about the same things he did with you. Maybe he called half the town, I don’t know. But since my deputy just flipped a cruiser on his way here, and I’m the only officer on scene, I guess I’ll count on Wyatt having taken himself out of this life nice and simply and leaving me no trouble. Did he do that much for me?”

“He did it thoroughly,” Darmus said. “That much I can assure you.”

Kimble went in. The room was small but functional, with unfinished walls and bare-bones furnishings, the look and feel of a hunting cabin except that the walls were lined with maps and old photographs. He gave them a brief glance, then turned to his left and walked up the steps. He didn’t cover his mouth or nose, just climbed to the top, high enough to see all that he needed to see. Wyatt’s unkempt gray beard was matted with blood, and his eyes—he’d always had good-natured eyes, you could tell even when he was drunk and you were putting him in handcuffs that he wasn’t likely to take a poke at you—were locked in a death stare, facing east, away from the fog-shrouded river and toward the high peaks.

“I’m sorry,” Kimble told the corpse softly.

Now what if, Wyatt had said, the suicide victim wasn’t entirely willing.

What had been going on in this man’s life? So far as Kimble knew, his life was an empty one. There was never anyone who showed up to post his bond, never anyone who waited for him outside the jail when they kicked him loose on another public intox charge. He’d just been the sort who drifted along alone except for the booze, and you couldn’t help but feel sorry for such people, particularly when they weren’t hostile and when they didn’t stand to do much harm to anyone except themselves.

“Damn it,” Kimble said, and then he stepped away and went back down the stairs. He needed to get Darmus out of here, and the coroner on the way. It was time to begin processing the death scene, and he would, as he’d promised Wyatt, pursue the truth.

When he came back downstairs, he found that Darmus had stepped inside.

“Hit the road, Darmus. I’ll call you when I need to get an official statement. Go get that hand checked out, okay?”

“You see the other lamps he’s got in there?” Darmus said. “Those things pointed in every direction below the main light?”

“I did.”

“What in the hell are they?”

“Infrared illuminators. Security camera lights. But I’ve yet to see the cameras, so why he installed them, I have no damn idea.” Kimble looked at the steps and shook his head. “A lighthouse. Who builds something like that in the mountains? Though you can see the river from the top.”

“Right,” Darmus said. “I’m sure it has prevented dozens of shipwrecks down there. Why, I can’t recall the last time I had to report on a ship foundering at Blade Ridge. Any chance you can issue a posthumous medal of valor to him?”

The reporter was still plenty angry. His final exchange with Wyatt French had gotten under his skin, and that was understandable. It was a hell of a thing to hear suggested of your own parents.

Kimble moved around the room, looking at the old photographs and maps, but then he heard a scribbling sound behind him and turned to see that Darmus had a reporter’s pad out and a pencil in his hand.

“What are you doing? Don’t write any of that shit down. This isn’t a public scene. And there’s not even a newspaper anymore.”

“Did you look at these maps?” Darmus said, as if he hadn’t spoken. “It’s like he was charting accidents, but there’s no way there have been this many accidents out here.”

“Give me that,” Kimble said.

Darmus stopped scribbling and looked up.

“The list,” Kimble said. “You can’t walk out of here with it. This is an investigation, not a sporting event, Darmus. Give me whatever you’ve written.”

There was something deeply wrong with reporters. A corpse was sitting upstairs, and Darmus had willingly come back inside and was now taking notes?

“Come on,” Kimble said, and stretched out his hand. Darmus sighed, tore a handful of pages free, folded them, and passed them over.

“You see whose picture he has on the wall?” he said, tapping on one with his pen. “Maybe there is a reason he called both of us. My parents, and her.”

Her. Kimble followed the tip of Darmus’s pen and saw that it was pointing at a color photograph of Jacqueline Mathis. Her name was written beneath it.

For a moment Kimble just stared, but he saw Darmus watching him and was unsettled by it, felt as if he were suddenly exposed. “What did I just tell you? I’ve got a death scene to deal with. Get out of here.”

“Wyatt told me about you making those visits up to see her,” Darmus said.

“Why in the hell were you talking about that?” Kimble snapped.

“I don’t even know. He just told me that you went to see her every month. I was having trouble following the—”

“Well, it’s none of anybody’s damned business. I tell you, there’s some good things about that paper being shut down, too. Tough that you lost your job, but you know what? There are some things people do in private that should stay private. Now listen to what I told you and get the hell out of here.”

Darmus looked at him curiously, then nodded and turned and walked out into the dark and the blowing rain. Kimble watched until the car’s taillights had vanished down the hill, wishing he’d been alone up here, wishing he’d been the first to find the body. He looked down at the folded pages in his hand, torn from the reporter’s notebook, and unfolded them.

Blank. Every one.