so firm… said they were your cats and you weren’t going to let that change, and I respected that. So the plans I had, well, they’ve been long dead, Audrey.”
She’d had one rule for the call—don’t cry. It didn’t take long to determine that was a foolish rule. She couldn’t have cried if she wanted to. Her voice had all the emotion of stainless steel as she told Joe about Wesley, and the cop named Wolverton, and Ira.
“They’re looking for a way to get rid of us, Joe. The villagers coming with their pitchforks and torches. But I’ve been thinking about it all night, and I won’t fight them. This place… this isn’t a good home for these cats.”
“I see,” Joe said. “So you’re asking me—”
“I’m auctioning off my heart,” she said. “And you get an early bid.”
“Excuse me?”
With that the stainless steel melted, and she thought
“They need homes,” she said finally, when she could speak. “David brought them here so they’d have good homes. You said you could do it once, and I’m asking you to say it again. We have funding. There’s an endowment. Financially, they’d be cared for. I just need someone to actually
He was silent.
“Will you do it?” she said. “Will you take them?”
“There are sixty of them,” he said slowly.
“Sixty-five. We had sixty-seven, but Kino is dead and Ira is gone.”
“That’s a lot of cats.”
“We have a strong endowment. The financial support is there.”
“I’m glad to hear it, but finances aren’t the only concern. I’ve got the acreage for them, but I don’t have the enclosures built. That takes time.”
“I know it does. But when the sheriff comes back here, I’d like to be able to tell him I have a transition plan.”
“Well, you can tell him that, I guess. I’ll need to build, and I’ll need to hire more staff. I can’t take sixty-five in addition to the cats we already have without making some changes. But here’s the more important question. With Wesley gone, can you hold out long enough for me to get this thing in motion?”
She stared out at the trees surging in the wind across the top of the ridge.
“I hope so.”
By the time Dustin Hall arrived, the police were gone, and it was just Audrey and the cats. She met him when he pulled through the gates, and the first words out of his mouth were, “What’s the matter?”
“I look that good, eh?”
He didn’t smile. The wind blew her hair across her face and she pushed it back with one hand and said, “Ira killed a police officer last night, Dustin. The sheriff has promised to shut us down. Plenty of things are the matter.”
Dustin got out of his battered Honda and went to her and hugged her. She accepted it, but the embrace was awkward and stiff, doing little to warm either of them.
“I’ve called Joe Taft,” she said.
“He’s coming down to help?”
“He’s coming down to take them, eventually.”
Dustin looked more stunned at this news than he had been about Ira’s killing.
“Take them?”
“I don’t see another choice,” Audrey said. “I can’t run it alone. Together, we’ll be able to feed them today. Working hard, we’ll be able to handle the feedings. But long term, Dustin? I just don’t see another choice.”
He took his glasses off and rubbed them clean with his shirttail, looking out at the lions, who were massing near the fences.
“They’re hungry now,” he said. “I guess we’d better get to work.”
He walked past her and toward the barn, and Audrey watched him go and felt a crushing sense of failure. Dustin had been one of David’s proteges, a student who fell deeply in love with the rescue center and its mission and its cats. He was disappointed in her, just as David would have been. But what else could she do?
She saw Lily, the blind white tiger, sitting upright and looking directly at her. The cat couldn’t see a thing, but still Audrey felt as if she were being watched. And judged.
“I’m sorry,” she told the tiger. And then, more softly, “David, I’m
Robin, the librarian, smiled when Roy came out to her desk.
“Get what you need?”
“A start on it,” he said. “I’d like to know a little more about Frederick.”
“Most of what we have begins with Roger.”
“Frederick is my interest. He seems to have disappeared from the family pretty abruptly.”
“A suicide, you know.”
“I did not. I just saw that one day he was a prominent spokesman for the family and the company, and the next he was being, um, restored?”
Robin nodded. “Unsuccessfully. As I recall, he really came off the rails.”
“Can I read about this somewhere?”
“We have correspondence between the two brothers. That’s the closest you’ll get. The family didn’t disclose much about Frederick after his instability began. He was the dark secret then, I guess. Always in sanitariums of one sort or another, but rarely mentioned. I’ve had students pull the letters before for research work on the family, but I don’t recall anything else.” She led the way back into the family archives, used a big set of keys to open locked drawers at the far end of the room, and withdrew several binders.
“Those are photocopies of the family correspondence from the era you’re interested in. I can’t let you handle the originals, I’m afraid.”
“As long as they’re legible, they’ll do just fine.”
She nodded and left and then it was just him in the large, empty room with many generations of Whitmans gazing over his shoulder from sepia-tinted photographs. He opened the first binder and set to work.
There were letters from Frederick Sr. to his son during the Civil War. The Whitmans, originally of Boston, had sided with the North, and Frederick Jr. was a West Point graduate who’d left the war with the rank of lieutenant, then abandoned the army to take over his role as obvious successor to the Whitman Company’s throne. Always involved in land acquisition, going back as far as the fur-trading days in the upper Midwest, the company focused after the Civil War on timber and ore. Coal, specifically. The Whitmans saw the railroads for exactly what they were—the key to the industrial future of not just the nation but the world—and they wanted in early.
Roy scanned through one tedious letter after another detailing the prospects in the mountains that would soon be home to a town and a university bearing the family name, afraid to miss any reference to Blade Ridge. By the early 1880s, most of the letters preserved in the university’s collection were in the pen of Frederick Jr. and not his father, who was clearly in ill health. Some were from his mother, others from Roger, the younger brother, who was serving the company from its Boston headquarters, but the core of the family’s story in this time was told by Frederick Jr., who in 1882 had assumed the role of company president.
The first reference to the potential of the mines along the Marshall River appeared in 1887, and by a year later excitement over them was evident in Frederick’s letters. His exasperation at the success of rivals in West Virginia was clear, and he deemed the holdings along the Marshall to be capable of triple the yield of any competitors. “Blade Ridge, the locals call it,” wrote Frederick, “the name earned by the way the stone cliffs glimmer like a knife’s edge in the right moonlight.”
In the spring of 1888, he wrote to Roger demanding that he secure one Alfred H. Tremley for design and supervision of a railroad bridge that would allow coal to be removed from the hills by the beginning of the next year. Roger responded with good news—Tremley had agreed to their price and was headed west.
For a moment, Roy considered that Tremley might have been the source of Wyatt’s continuing search. But
