The Ridge

The bridge is a testament to endurance, completed despite the fever that infected the crew. Sixteen men were lost.

It seemed an impossibly short mention for all those lost lives, but Roy understood. The Chronicle was a mouthpiece, nothing more. The reality of the way that bridge had been pushed toward completion despite the ravages of illness was probably quite unflattering to the company. It was in the midst of this era that the Sentinel had been born, and the significance of its name became all the more clear. It was a targeted move to balance the forces of the company. One paper identified itself as the chronicle of the town’s new power structure; the next chose the watchdog approach.

And now they’re all gone, Roy thought. What happens when you remove the watchdog from the grounds?

Frederick Whitman Jr. had been the company voice in the Chronicle until December of 1888. By the time the bridge was completed, however, he’d been replaced as spokesman by his younger brother, Roger, who closed out 1888 by boasting that the family had done exactly as promised, spanning the river with rails by year’s end, and plans were made to christen the trestle on New Year’s Day. Roger Whitman was quoted as saying he looked forward to crossing his bridge.

Roy loaded another canister of microfilm, feeling the familiar and beloved tingle of adrenaline that he’d enjoyed so often while working on a story, and was rewarded almost immediately by the first big news of 1889: true to his word, Roger Whitman had crossed his bridge.

Once.

On January 1, Whitman and fifteen assorted executives and investors piled into a single boxcar to celebrate “a glorious new year for the company, the community, and the country.” The locomotive crossed the Marshall River, cleared the trestle, and derailed upon reaching Blade Ridge, where an obstruction had been placed over the tracks. At that point, four men emerged from the woods and opened fire. By the time it was done, eleven of the men aboard the train had been killed. Roger Whitman survived.

Four men were arrested for the sabotage and murder: John Hamlin, Fred Mortimer, Henry Bates, and Bernard Snell.

But Wyatt already had those names; they were new only to Roy. The question of whom he’d been searching for in all those photographs remained. Why had so many been dismissed with a NO?

Investigators of the day had been looking for a man named Silas Vesey, based on an anonymous tip. The arrested men refused to comment on Vesey and said they acted alone. All four, the Sentinel reported, had been involved in the construction of the trestle, believed that the Whitmans had caused death by forcing sick men to work, and readily confessed to their crimes. They hid neither guilt nor motive, and one, Mortimer, explained that Roger Whitman was never intended to be the target of the bullets.

“We wanted him to live with the price,” Mortimer said. “To see our faces, and to remember who we were and what he’d done. The blood we took is on his hands. It won’t end here.”

Whitman had no response.

Justice was swift. In February the four men were found guilty of murder, and in March they were hanged. A hundred operatives from the Pinkerton detective agency joined local police to enforce order on the night of execution. They feared a riot, particularly after Mortimer’s ominous pledge that the vengeance had not reached its end. Nothing happened, though. Nooses drew tight, lungs emptied, hearts stopped, and the violent controversy at Blade Ridge began its move from breaking news to historical footnote.

Missing from the execution and the trial was Frederick Whitman Jr. It seemed very odd—he had, after all, been the dominant voice in the early stages of the trestle’s construction—but some explanation was offered in a piece that followed the executions. The Chronicle reported that the endeavor at Blade Ridge had put “a powerful strain upon Frederick, and the stress has been temporarily damaging to his well-being. He is in a sanctuary for restoration, and the family and company look forward to his return.”

The jargon was delicate, but it would have been clear enough to anyone who read it at the time, and it still was. On the day that four of his former employees dangled lifeless at the end of their hanging ropes, Frederick Whitman Jr. had been in an asylum.

31

NATHAN SHIPLEY STILL LIVED in the rambling farmhouse that had once belonged to the grandparents who raised him after his father was killed. His mother—nineteen when she had Nathan, twenty when she left town—had been a beautiful girl with a softness for sweet talk and malt liquor, a combination that had brought down many a beautiful girl before. She’d left Sawyer County without a word the same year Ed Shipley returned home from the Marines and joined up with the sheriff’s department. No one had heard of her since. The story was common knowledge in the sheriff’s department, where the Shipley name had long represented two things: courage and tragedy.

Kimble pulled into the driveway, shut off the engine, and sat for a time, looking at the house. After a few minutes, the door cracked open and Nathan peered out, having heard his visitor arriving, and then Kimble could delay the talk no longer. He did the oddest thing as he left the car—he blessed himself. Kimble had not been in a church for many a Sunday, and even when he had attended he had never been the sort for such gestures, but still he found himself doing it.

“Hey, there, chief,” Nathan said as Kimble approached. “I just heard.”

There was a hitch in Kimble’s stride then, but Shipley was watching, so he came on anyhow, no longer sure of how the conversation was going to go. He’d planned to come out here and break the news himself, felt as if in so doing he would be able to read the man well, to gauge whether he was really breaking any news at all.

“Who called you?”

“Troy.”

Damn it. Kimble could have asked him to keep a lid on the news at least for a little while.

But could he really have? No. Because to ask that such a thing be kept from Shipley would be to disclose his suspicion of Shipley, and then he would need some grounds, and what he had so far, well, it wasn’t the sort of thing that would play well with the sheriff. With anyone.

“We haven’t lost a man in the line of duty since your father,” Kimble said. He was standing on the porch, just past the front steps, hadn’t closed the distance or approached the door. His hand hung close to his hip.

“I know it. And if we made that shift change a couple hours later?” Shipley ran a hand over his face, had his eyes screened from sight when he said, “Then it’s like father, like son, chief. And you know the damned thing about it? Would’ve both been due to cats.”

It took Kimble a moment to understand that, but then he realized it was true. Ed Shipley had run into that fire looking for a cat that he misunderstood to be a person. He’d never run back out.

“Mind if we have a seat?” Kimble said.

“Come on in.”

“If it’s all the same, let’s sit outside. I like to watch the fog come off those hills. You have one hell of a view for it.”

Shipley gave him a curious look, it being a chill December morning with the threat of snow in the air, but he nodded. “Aren’t many better views in the county,” he said. “Maybe Wyatt’s lighthouse.”

The reference froze Kimble up. When Shipley said, “Come on in, best view is from the back porch,” Kimble couldn’t say a word, just followed him into the house, which was clean enough but smelled of trapped grime and the ancient sweat of people long departed, the sort of odors you could never clear out of an old home with a mop and Lysol. The place was outfitted the way you’d expect an eighty-year-old’s home to be, but as far as Kimble understood, Shipley had been alone in it for nearly a decade now. The television set in the living room was one of those bulky things mounted into a heavy wooden cabinet, had to be twenty years old at least, and the screen was covered with a thick film of dust.

They went out to the back porch, which did indeed offer a fine view of the distant mountaintops covered in their trademark smoky fog.