The Ridge

“What was the lighthouse supposed to do?”

“The question, deputy, is what does it do? Everyone laughed at that thing. When I heard about it, you better believe I wasn’t laughing, just because of where it stood. Anything that went on at that place… well, I’d just as soon have nothing to do with it. But I damn sure knew better than to find it funny. Now, you ask me what it was supposed to do? I’ll tell you what it did—kept people from going my way.”

“You mean murder?” Kimble said. “That’s what you’re telling me? That some ghost light in the woods out there made you commit murder?”

“You don’t like the sound of it, huh? Well, maybe you understand why I’d rather not tell the tale. Maybe you understand that. And if you’re so damned brave, buddy, so sure that I’m wrong, then you go on and enjoy yourself at Blade Ridge. Pitch a tent and spend the night.”

“Easy,” Kimble said. “I’m not trying to offend, I’m just telling you that—”

“That it sounds foolish as a campfire story.”

Kimble didn’t answer.

“You wanted to know what the point of the lighthouse was,” O’Patrick said, the heat in his voice fading to dull embers. “Well, I’ll let you answer that yourself. You consider how many problems there’s been at the ridge since that light went up. You chew on that.”

There had been some problems at the ridge since it went up. David Clark died. Jacqueline Mathis survived. But of course the light had been out for Jacqueline. Wyatt had come to apologize to her for that reason. And then there was Shipley… whose accident came after Darmus broke the light and shut off the power.

“You thought it was a dream,” Kimble said. “A hallucination.”

“Hell, yes. Most vivid dream I’ve ever had, but once they got me away from there… well, it was easier to push it to the corner of my mind then. I remembered what had happened, but away from the ridge, out in the real world and daylight, it seemed impossible. So I told myself that it was. Then along comes that night with Joe, and I wake out of a damned trance with a wrench in my hand and his blood all over me, and you’d better believe I remembered it then.”

“You’re saying it’s a trade. You got your life back but promised to take another one?”

“That’s what I’m saying. When he told me he was bound by balance, I knew what was being offered, and I accepted. Days would pass when I’d think about it and get the cold shivers, but I’d tell myself two things. The first was that I’d imagined it. The second was that I could always be in control. Well, I bet wrong on both counts.”

Kimble sat down on an overturned bucket by the door. The strength had left his legs. Left his mind. He leaned back against the wall and stared at Ryan O’Patrick.

“You believe me,” O’Patrick said. “That’s a mighty surprising thing. I wasn’t one for telling the tale, and I surely never expected to have anyone believe me. Not unless they’d gone the same way.”

“I’ve already heard it once today,” Kimble said. “I didn’t do such a good job of believing it then. Now it’s getting easier.”

O’Patrick nodded and lifted the beer to his lips, then realized the can was already empty and tossed it. They both watched it roll across the concrete floor.

“What are you trying to do?” he asked.

“Fix the problem,” Kimble said.

O’Patrick laughed. “Fix the problem?”

Kimble set the beer down, unable even to go through the motions of drinking it anymore. His stomach was unsettled, and his hands weren’t all that steady either. He said, “I want you to go out there with me. I want you to tell me what you see.”

O’Patrick shook his head. “No.”

“Please,” Kimble said. “I’m just asking for—”

“Not a chance, deputy. I’m not going back to that place. You’ll need a warrant and a strong pair of cuffs to get that.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because whoever was out there all those years ago still is. He’s not a boy who just wanders on. I don’t guess that he can. Wyatt told me that much. Something else Wyatt told me—once you belong to him, you can see him. Always. And, my friend, I do not ever want to see that man again.”

“Wyatt could always see this… ghost?”

“That’s right. He said the lighthouse kept him pinned down there under the trestle. Couldn’t wander the ridge. But he’s out there. And when you owe him a debt, he sees that it’s paid. I spent twenty years in a cell for settling accounts.”

“I’ve got a friend who wrecked his car out there,” Kimble said. “Wrecked it bad, walked away unhurt. He talked about seeing a man in the road. Talked about a light after his accident. I’m starting to think I should be worried about him.”

“Buddy,” Ryan O’Patrick said, “you should be real worried about him.”

“Well, then what can I do?”

“Wyatt found the only two solutions that there are,” O’Patrick said. “You can tell your boy to keep himself away from people at night. That seems to work for a time, if you believed Wyatt, and I do. He’d put some study in.”

“There’s no way Wyatt kept himself alone at night for twenty years.”

“No? Think about it—you ever see Wyatt French in town at night?”

He actually had not, Kimble realized. Wyatt was a daytime drunk. That was one of the reasons he stood out.

“That worked for him for long enough, I guess,” O’Patrick said. “But you can’t hide from the promise you’ve made. That’s what Wyatt was bound to find out. There is no hiding from what’s in yourself. The closer he got to the end of his time, the stronger that pull was going to be. I expect he was feeling that.”

“You said there were two solutions.”

“Sure. The second one is a bullet in the brain. You promised to take a life. You didn’t promise whose it would be.”

26

THE WAITER HAD JUST PLACED a thick steak and a fresh beer in front of Roy Darmus, and when his phone rang, he didn’t have much interest in answering it. The number was unfamiliar, and though he’d made a practice of answering every call during his reporting days, whatever news this might carry wasn’t going to roll out of the Sentinel’s presses. He ignored it, cut off a wedge of New York strip, and looked out the window at the town square, where a few stray snow flurries were drifting down from that web of Christmas lights that fanned out from the courthouse lawn.

Going to be a strange Christmas, he thought. What does someone do on a holiday if he’s not working?

Roy had always worked Christmas Day. Nobody else wanted to—they wanted to be with their families. Having no kids waiting at home, Roy had been happy enough to take double-time pay and maintain his own tradition, working at the news desk. This year, though, he’d have to find something to do.

There had been a time when family looked like a possibility. He’d gotten married when he was thirty, to a beautiful blonde named Sarah. She was fresh out of graduate school in Lexington and filled with journalistic ambition, and theirs had been a newsroom romance.

In the end, though, Sarah’s talent and ambition outgrew him, and he didn’t fault her for it. They’d always talked of leaving together, going to New York or Los Angeles or, hell, leaving the country, working on a book together. To Roy, those had been idle fantasies. To Sarah, they’d been plans. He realized when they separated how dangerous it was to allow someone to think you had a shared concept of the future when in fact you didn’t.

When she got the job in London, she’d been certain he’d go with her. Everyone had been. Except Roy.

He’d told her that Sawyer County was home. She was astonished. What about all those big stories they were going to tell, the ones that mattered?

He said he found plenty that mattered right here in the mountains.