The Ridge

haven’t gotten around to it. The owners gave me real clear instructions, though, that nobody—”

“The owners can kiss my ass,” Roy snapped. “I’ve spent more than forty years in this building, making money for them. If I want another day in this place, I’m going to take it.”

Rex, who’d had a gig as a maintenance supervisor for an apartment complex in place within a week of the Sentinel’s closing announcement, dropped his gaze to the reel of cable in his hands.

“Okay, Roy,” he said. “I get you. Do what you need to do.”

“Thanks,” Roy said, and walked past him, bristling with anger that had less to do with Rex and more to do with the way they were dismantling the office. He’d known it was going to happen, of course, but seeing it, watching all the artifacts of the newspaper that had been his life scooped up and put into boxes, hit him harder than he’d imagined it would.

The owners said, the owners said… The owners could go straight to hell. It was more his paper than theirs. He’d spent more waking hours in this building than any other place on earth. Hell, maybe more hours period. He worked long and late and never minded because he loved telling the stories. And those stories, the ones that were developing across Sawyer County at this very moment? What would become of them? Why didn’t anyone think that loss mattered?

He opened the door to the morgue and slipped inside, back into that narrow room that smelled of dust and old paper. A hundred and twenty-four years of stories.

He was pretty sure some of them had mattered.

The morgue was where he’d gotten his professional start—an irony never lost on him—putting together that local-lore column. He’d kept it going over the years, which drove the editors nuts, because it seemed he always vanished into the archives at the exact moment they came looking for him with a shitty assignment. It got to the point where “If you’re looking for Darmus, he’s in the morgue” was a running joke.

There were microfilm readers, but Roy hated using those. You lost the tactile sense of history that the bound volumes exuded, wide, massive books that had to weigh fifteen or twenty pounds. You could stand in the middle of the morgue and see the ebb and flow of the industry—the date ranges getting progressively smaller as the newspaper economy boomed and the Sentinel added pages and ad circulars, delivering a doorstopper each morning and double that on Sunday. Then the date ranges widened and the papers shrank in more recent years, as declining revenue triggered page cuts.

He had every name in red ink from Wyatt’s maps. The photographs he hadn’t managed to study before Kimble shut him down. Most of them hadn’t borne names, anyhow. He’d recognized one face—Jacqueline Mathis— and remembered another from her name—Becky Stapp—but it seemed as if ninety percent were anonymous faces from the past. That left him with the red-ink names, and after finding his parents among them, he was awfully curious about the others.

While his initial plan had been to work forward from the oldest date to the newest, he found himself going directly to the January–March 1965 volume. He’d seen the January 9, 1965, paper a thousand times, had stared at it for countless hours, but it had been several years since his last look. Too many years? You didn’t want to drown in grief, but you needed to remember the dead, too.

He dropped the bound volume onto the old, scarred desk—it had been the editor’s desk during World War II —opened it, and flipped through the pages until a familiar headline and photograph caught his eye. A single car smashed into the trees amidst a fine dusting of snow. They’d been predicting a big one, but it had never hit. Just a little freezing rain, an inch of powder, and two dead in a one-car accident. Minor storm. Minor.

Roy ran the back of his hand over his mouth, adjusted the light over the desk, and began to read.

Two people were killed Saturday night in a single-vehicle crash on Blade Ridge Road in the southwestern reaches of Sawyer County.

Joseph Darmus, 41, and his wife Lillian Darmus, 40, of Whitman, were killed when their 1957 Chevrolet sedan apparently skidded on black ice west of the junction of County Road 200 and Blade Ridge Road, sending the vehicle into a stand of walnut trees. The accident occurred at approximately 8:45

P.M

. There were no witnesses. Joseph Darmus was killed on impact, according to police, while Lillian was transported to Sawyer County Hospital and died of massive head trauma a short time later. The couple was driving home from a Whitman Junior High School basketball game in Chambers. Their son, 14-year-old Roy Darmus, was on the bus with his teammates when the accident occurred.

That was the end of the first article. Simple, straightforward reporting, written late in the night, pushing deadline. Roy flipped to the next day’s edition to read the follow-up piece, which had altered his life when it appeared, guiding him into this very building.

It led with a quote from Roy about his father: “He was a real good driver. He always said he was going to be the one to teach me how to drive in the snow, because it was dangerous and he didn’t want anything bad to happen to me.”

Even now, decades removed, Roy felt something thicken in his throat. He looked away from the article. He didn’t need to read it again. He could recite it if he wished.

Time to get back to the task, back to the story. He knew his parents had died on Blade Ridge Road, but what had sparked Wyatt’s interest in the others?

He returned to the morgue shelves to find out, began hauling down bound volume after bound volume, and after hours at it he had no more sense of the truth than when he’d begun.

There were connections between the names on Wyatt French’s maps—some of them, at least—but the parts simply did not fit together to make a whole. Roy had expected something more coherent, even from a mind as admittedly disconnected as Wyatt’s. All the time the old man had spent laboring over the odd list suggested at a linkage that did not appear—at least to Roy’s eyes—to exist.

At first he thought it was simple: they were victims of car accidents at Blade Ridge. Several others besides his parents qualified for that category.

That idea, though, vanished as soon as he tracked down one of the names, Sam Fielding, and discovered that he’d been a high-voltage repairman, electrocuted while attempting to repair downed lines in a summer storm.

That fatality had occurred near Blade Ridge, in the woods west of County Road 200, which was close enough to count, but the nature of the death blew the car-wreck theory out of the water.

So then Roy shifted, thinking that the man had been looking for any deaths, period, in his strange little pocket of the mountains. Fielding’s case wasn’t unique. In several circumstances, Wyatt had noted deaths that had occurred near Blade Ridge Road. Emphasis on near. Because, as Roy discovered as he went deeper into the county’s history, pulling down volumes that billowed out dust when opened, the pages so stiff and yellowed that you had to turn them with infinite care or the paper would flake into pieces, the accidental deaths were certainly not limited to the road. In 1978, two boys died when they fell from the railroad trestle. In 1975, one woman drowned in a canoeing trip on the Marshall River with a friend. In 1958, a Marine who’d seen tours in Korea and the South Pacific shot himself in the head while deer hunting. That one could have been suicide—newspapers always had masked such stories in ambiguity—but Roy doubted it. In 1922, two men and a woman were trampled to death when a strange and violent panic took hold of their horses.

All of those names—they were the red-ink names—could be linked by two factors: death and proximity to Blade Ridge. The manner of death, though, those tales of trestle falls and stampeding horses and electrocutions, turned any legitimate concern about the road’s safety into a bizarre raving about… what? Some sort of cursed ground? A karmic disaster zone?

“What did they mean to you, Wyatt?” he mumbled, staring at the two lists, deciding that he’d wasted enough time on this endeavor. “Why did they matter?”

It would be impossible to say. And, Roy reminded himself, the old man had been losing his mind there toward the end. Yesterday’s ravings were a clear indication of that.

I’m getting scared of the dark. I’m getting scared of what I could do in the dark.

Roy was halfway to the morgue door when that thought slipped into his mind, and when it did, he stopped walking and turned to look at the rows of old newspaper volumes as if they’d just told him something.

Hell, maybe they had.