The Ridge

was a predecessor to the Sentinel. Very old. Back when the town was still in mining-camp days.”

Robin nodded. “The Whitman Company Chronicle. Your Sentinel was a rival and eventually the last one standing. They took issue with the controlled voice during some labor disputes. For a while there were two newspapers. The Whitman Company Chronicle became the Whitman Chronicle to hide the obvious ties, as if they could be hidden, but within a few years the Sentinel had rendered it irrelevant.”

“That’s what I recalled. You do have the Chronicle on microfilm?”

“A lot of them. Some have been lost to history, I think, but we’ve got most of them.” She frowned at the photographs he had in the open folder. “Who are you looking for?”

“Just names.”

“Why are so many labeled NO?”

That one hung him up for a second, because he didn’t understand the truth well enough to lie about it.

“I guess I wasn’t the only person who didn’t know who they were,” he said finally.

“Okay. So you just want to match pictures? That’s going to take a while. Maybe a very long while.”

“I’ve got four names, too. Just no dates.”

“Do you know who they were? What they were involved with?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“How did you get the names, then?”

Roy thought for a second and then smiled sadly. “It was a hot tip.”

She gave him a curious look but didn’t push it. “Well, give me the names and I’ll see what I can find. We’ve got pretty good indexing of the company records, so if they had anything to do with the Whitmans, I should be able to generate something.”

The family archives were housed in a private, locked room at the rear of the library. You couldn’t spend time there without supervision, and you couldn’t check anything out. There was a reason: this collection held the most precious recorded elements of the town’s history. Robin unlocked the door and led Roy into the room, which featured glass cabinets displaying certain historical relics, one long and ornate reading table, and, everywhere you looked, the austere faces of Whitman family members watching from portraits and photographs along the walls. It was not unlike being in Wyatt’s lighthouse.

“I’ll get you the microfilm and let you start where you like,” Robin said. “Then I can run a search on those names you have. It’s a shame you don’t have a clearer starting point in time. Are there no indications in the photographs?”

“Well, it’s a work crew of some sort,” Roy said. “Not miners, either. Looks like they’re timber men, probably. Or builders.”

He set the folder down on the table and rifled through the photographs, pulling out a few as indications. “See, there’s a group of men holding a timber saw, and here we’ve got—”

“Oh,” Robin said, “they’re building the trestle.”

Roy turned away from the pictures and looked at her. She smiled in perfect confidence.

“The one that’s still standing. The wooden one, out west of town?”

“At Blade Ridge.”

“That’s right.”

He looked back down at a photograph of men holding a large log over their shoulders and said, “How in the hell can you be so sure?”

She laughed. “I’m not clairvoyant. I’ve already been through this routine once. Someone else was researching the trestle itself, and we went through a lot of those old company papers.”

“Wyatt French?”

She nodded, indifferent, neither surprised that he knew about this nor sharing the troubled sensations that Roy was feeling.

“That’s right. He owned most of the property at one time. He was very interested in the history.”

He certainly seemed to be, Roy thought, and then he said, “Well, that can cut some time down. Maybe I should start with the trestle. I think that makes a lot of sense.”

“It’s a sad story,” she said, moving toward a row of locked cabinets at the back of the room.

“I know that the mines didn’t pan out for the company.”

“I mean the trestle itself,” she said over her shoulder, unlocking a drawer and running her index finger over canisters of microfilm. “A lot of people died while it was being built.”

“Died how?”

“Sickness, first. Murder, later.” She withdrew two canisters and said, “This should do it. Should give you a start.”

“Sickness, first,” Roy echoed, “murder, later?”

“That’s right. There was some hostility between the company and the laborers. The Whitmans tried to force sick men to work to get their bridge done on time. They got it done, but there was a bit of uprising toward the end. You know, one of the stories that were all too common out here.”

Labor disputes turned violent were perhaps all too common in eastern Kentucky’s history, but Roy had a feeling that the Blade Ridge story might prove to be a little more unique.

“I might be wrong,” Robin said, feeding one of the microfilm reels into the reader in the corner of the room, “but I think if you start with the end of 1888 and go through the beginning of 1889 you’ll get a clear idea of it. But who knows if that’s even what you want. I can try some other—”

“Let me start there. That sounds right. Thank you.”

“Of course. We’re short-staffed because the students are gone, so if I can leave you to it, that would be a help. Just let me know what else you need.”

“That’s fine,” Roy said. He wanted to be alone to read this.

She left the room, and he sat down and snapped on the projector and saw an image of a 124-year-old newspaper. She’d started him in September, and he flipped through the pages quickly, looking for news of the trestle. The style of journalism was opinion stated as fact, and the stories themselves were focused on either braggadocio about the company’s successes or the mundane day-to-day of the mining town life. A local minister missing a service because of illness was front-page news. Obituaries were given prime placement as well, and the phrasing used to describe the deaths was colorful, to say the least. “The Reaper Calls upon Reginald Holmes,” one headline read.

The dominant figure of the news in Whitman in 1888 was the town’s namesake, Frederick Whitman Jr. His mining investments were just getting under way. In an early October issue, Roy found a match of one of his own photographs. Five men standing with a timber saw, smiles all around. The article announced that work on the trestle over the Marshall River was coming along nicely and would be finished, as promised to investors, by the new year. The next picture featured the bridge’s Boston-bred designer, Alfred H. Tremley, a stern and bespectacled man who seemed quite pleased with the idea that the camera was preserving his image.

Roy had gotten all the way to late October before he saw another article that gave him pause.

“Trestle Work Lags as Fever Strikes,” announced a boldface headline. Three days later came the report of a death, and a week after that the news that the construction crew had been quarantined in camps beside the river, no longer allowed to return home. The decision, according to Frederick Whitman Jr., was made to safeguard the health of the townspeople. A short notation at the end of the article indicated that work at the trestle continued, and Whitman remained wedded to his promise of completion by year’s end.

After the quarantine, the company newspaper stopped reporting on the condition of the crew but continued to follow the trestle itself. On December 19, it was noted that only three bents—Roy understood those to be the bridge supports—had gone up in the past two weeks, and the writer predicted that the opening of the mines by 1889 was in jeopardy.

The next mention was on December 27, when it was observed—with clear astonishment—that all of the bents were in place and work had begun on the rails. On New Year’s Eve, the entire front page was devoted to the trestle, which was completed as promised. Amidst the proud remarks, a brief comment on the illness: