The Ridge

“Right,” Kimble said, thinking of a black cat moving in the darkness and suppressing a shiver. “We’ll want to hurry.”

“Make better time at it if we split up,” Harrington said. “Two by two. Work along the river, maybe, out in the open. See what we can see. I’ll take Audrey and—”

“Hang on there,” Kimble said, thinking that they had two police on hand and two civilians. “You and I will go down to the river together. Nathan, you hang fairly close, all right? You and Mrs. Clark can check the perimeter, but don’t get far.”

Having the damned cat out was bad enough; the last thing he needed was someone to be hurt by it. Harrington had the look of capability about him, and Audrey Clark appeared more shaken. He didn’t need her wandering off into the woods at dusk.

“Let’s go,” he told Harrington, and they set off down the road and for the river as the sun settled in the west, Kimble thinking that he was really beginning to hate this place.

15

AUDREY’S THOUGHTS WERE NOT even on Ira as she and Deputy Shipley walked out of the preserve and toward the abandoned, overgrown railroad tracks that formed its southern border. They were on Wes.

She couldn’t believe the way he was behaving, the things he was saying. The preserve had its share of opponents, people who didn’t understand the need and knew only fear of animals that would never harm them even if they had the chance to do so, and the county sheriff was among them. Now Wes was spouting off about the place as if it were dangerous, and to the sheriff’s deputies, no less.

“Hey,” Shipley said, bringing her out of her angry fog. “Why don’t we go right, not left?”

She’d instinctively started to follow the tracks to the left.

“More open view at the river,” he continued. “We’ll go have a look and then come on back. Like Kimble said, no need to get too far into these woods.”

“Fine.” She had a tranquilizer gun in her hands, and now she looked into the trees and refocused on Ira. Was he still out there? Had he hung close by, as she predicted, or had he simply fled? And which option was preferable?

They turned around and headed toward the river, stepping over jutting timbers and stretches of iron that had once brought trains to these hills in search of fortune. With fortune never found, all that remained were the scraps of what had been laid in its pursuit, covered now by dead grass and brush and, in some cases, even trees. The legacy of the Whitman Company’s efforts at Blade Ridge was becoming obscured by the very nature that it had tried to conquer. Audrey held the air rifle in her hands and swiveled her head left to right, left to right, but something deep within her whispered that it wasn’t worth the effort—Ira was gone, and would not return.

The deputy, Shipley, had gone on ahead of her, expanding his lead with long-legged strides. She saw that the young man was tapping his gun with his fingers. Every second step, there he went—tap, tap, tap. He seemed to be humming softly, too, the sound trapped in his throat. It was the sort of thing people did to convince themselves they weren’t scared when in fact they were terrified. After David’s death, Audrey had found herself doing the same sort of thing: I’m scared of what my future holds, alone in this house, so I’ll hum a song and that casualness will somehow prove my confidence.

Shipley was scared, she realized, and then, recalling the moment of Ira’s escape, she didn’t blame him, not one bit. Many visitors—most visitors, maybe—were scared of the cats at first, no matter how indifferent they tried to seem. The animals were incredible predators; there was no denying that. When people came out to see them for the first time, they were dazzled, impressed, and often afraid. Because no human stood a chance against those cats. Not without a gun in hand, at least.

Tap, tap, tap, went Shipley’s fingers against his weapon.

He had seen a cat in pure, wild aggression, too. In a way Audrey herself had never seen one before. The tigers had fights, the lions would roar with killer’s rage, but never in her time on the preserve had she seen anything like that. And the leap that he’d made… it was impossible to believe, even after watching it happen. He hadn’t laid his paws on the fence and scrambled to get over, he’d just cleared it with room to spare. Fourteen feet high, and he’d not even required a running start.

“He’s never been aggressive before,” she said. “What you saw back there… I don’t know how to explain it, but it was an anomaly.”

“I’m sure that it was,” Shipley said, and his voice was steady, but his head was shifting rapidly from side to side, tracking every shadow, his hand never drifting from his gun. She had the sudden, perverse urge to tell him that Ira could climb trees, could be poised on a branch right now, ready to spring down from above. She could tell him that the cat’s field of vision overlapped like a pair of binoculars, and that he could see six times better in the dark than a human could. David had named him well—Ira was Hebrew for watcher, and the black cat was the definitive watcher, the perfect predator. Fast and strong and blessed with extraordinary vision and sense of smell.

“This is what you do?” the deputy said.

She looked up. “Huh?”

“This is… your life. This is what you do.” He waved a hand back at the tall fences, from which the occasional roar echoed through the trees.

“That’s right.”

“Why?” he said, and he sounded genuinely curious. “Why those cats?”

“Because I love them,” she said, but she suspected she knew what he was thinking about—the way she’d reacted when Ira jumped versus the way Wes had reacted. Wes had been poised; Audrey had been terrified. So was she lying right now? She cared for the cats, certainly, believed in the importance of the rescue center’s mission, but did she love them? Could you possibly have love in a relationship before you had trust? She didn’t think so. Then different words—infatuation, obsession, enchantment—might apply, but without trust? No, love was a long step to take ahead of faith.

“They’re good with people,” she said hollowly. “Really.”

The deputy stopped walking, looked at her uneasily, ran a hand over his mouth, and then said, “Maybe we should go back now.”

“We just started—”

“Let’s go back while there’s still daylight,” he said, and then he turned and led the way again. This time, those long strides were even faster. Audrey stumbled along trying to keep up, thinking, First Wes, and now even the police? Am I the only one who’s not scared of the dark out here?

Blade Ridge Road died out in abrupt fashion, no circular dead end that would allow wayward drivers to turn around with ease, just a narrowing of the gravel track until it came right up to the line of shagbark hickories that ran along the top of the ridge. They were tall trees now, seeming to belong to the rest of the forest, but Wesley knew that they’d been cleared once. Probably there wasn’t a tree between this lane and the trestle that was more than eighty years old. That was a good age for most trees, but not out here in the forested hills of eastern Kentucky. With the exception of that small stretch that had been cleared to make way for mining operations that never produced a fruitful yield, the trees at Blade Ridge went back centuries. They’d provided shelter for many cougars in their time, and then white men with guns came along, and though the trees still stood, the cats did not.

Or so it had been thought. Then Ira arrived, slinking out of the hills with nothing attached to him but legends and myths, and now there was Ira back in the woods again, exiting the very way he’d come in, heavy with the feel of magic.

Wesley was trying to remember if he’d ever heard a story that even resembled the one which people would now be telling about his own cat. He gave up early, knowing that he wouldn’t find solace in shared sorrow. This escape was unique. What the cat did was almost preternatural. If Ira had somehow climbed the fence, Wesley would be stunned but able to fathom it. If Ira had somehow leaped from the top of the perch, Wesley might have been able to blame his angles, chastise himself for not creating a wider perimeter out from the top platform. Or if the son of a bitch had at least taken a running start…