The Ridge

about madness and not fear the consequences.

Kimble had been firm, though. He wanted to meet at the Bakehouse.

When he came through the door, Roy was taken aback by just how exhausted he looked. The chief deputy had always walked with a touch of a limp after the shooting, and stood with a posture that suggested more years than he had, but today you could have said he was fifty and no one would have blinked.

“I’ve got a story,” Roy said. “But it’s not one you’re going to want to hear, and the source is hardly reliable. It’s not just more than a century old, it was also left to us by an insane man. I don’t even know that it is going to be worth hearing.”

Kimble said, “It’ll be worth hearing. And maybe we shouldn’t judge the man’s sanity just yet.”

It was an odd thing for him to say, this man who was so painfully practical that extracting colorful quotes from him for a newspaper story had been almost impossible. Roy shrugged, said, “Okay,” and then he told him the story.

When he was through, Kimble didn’t respond right away. He sipped his coffee and looked over the notes Roy had taken in the archives, studied the pictures Wyatt had already found there, and did not speak.

“Like I told you,” Roy said, “this is probably wasting time that you can’t afford to waste. It’s a good chiller, I’ll grant that, but the idea that it has anything to do with what’s—”

“I think he was looking for Vesey,” Kimble said. “All those pictures labeled NO? I think you’re right. He must have been looking for Vesey.”

Roy sighed, lowered his voice, and said, “I hit on the same idea. Then I hit on one that’s even more absurd. I was wondering why he was content to write the names of the dead on the walls, but he used photographs for the murderers. It almost suggested that… that he had seen them, somehow. That what he was looking for was visual confirmation.”

“I believe that’s correct.”

Roy stared at him. “The story I just told you was about dead men building a bridge, Kimble. Are you being this calm about it because you’re waiting for someone to come take me away to a padded cell, or is there something I don’t understand?”

Kimble was staring out to the patio, where in warm weather the sidewalk tables were popular. Now they’d been put away for the season, and a trace of snow was beginning to gather where they’d once stood.

“There are lots of things we don’t understand,” he said. “And I’m tired of it, Darmus. I can’t bear it anymore. I’ve got an idea that might help me understand it, and it might also cost me my job by the time things are done. I think it probably will. If things go well, then my badge may be all that I lose.”

“What in the world are you talking about, Kimble?”

“There’s a ghost out there,” Kimble said, turning back to him. “Or the devil? Some combination of the two? I don’t know how to explain him, but this Vesey sounds just right. Now you’ve told me the stories you found. Let me tell you the ones I’ve found.”

He told them, while Roy’s coffee went cold and people milled around them, laughing and talking and complaining about last-minute holiday shopping and long car trips to see family in far-off places. Roy listened as the most dogmatic cop in the county spoke of specters with blue torches and bargaining that led to murder and invisible beams of light that had protected Blade Ridge for many years. He told all of this, and Roy listened, and he believed.

The time when he could not believe had passed.

“If I’m crazy,” Kimble said, watching him carefully, “at least I’ve got company. I appreciate that.”

Then Kimble told him his intention to take Jacqueline Mathis to the ridge, and Roy found himself shaking his head.

“Too dangerous for you, Kimble. Even if Grayling approved it, if something goes wrong out there and you’re left with this explanation, you’re done.”

“I know it,” Kimble said simply. “I’ve thought on that a great deal, trust me. But let me show you the other side of that coin. If I don’t take her out there, and I don’t do anything about it, and a hundred years from now someone is still adding names to that list Wyatt started… well, which would you rather have? Your parents died out there.”

Yes, they had. And if Kimble was to be believed, they had died by making the right choice. Roy thought back to Wyatt’s words in that final phone call, those that had incensed him so deeply: The decisions that they both made. Very brave. Very strong. And knowing what they were saying goodbye to, with a child at home, it must have been so difficult.

He’d thought Wyatt was suggesting that they’d killed themselves. Instead, he was suggesting that they hadn’t been willing to preserve their own lives at the cost of another’s.

“That’s why Wyatt killed himself,” Roy said. “He had to take a life. He chose his own.”

“It seems that way.”

“When he got his diagnosis, he would have known that just waiting to die wasn’t an option for him. Maybe he could feel that? I think that he could.” Roy recalled the man’s panicked breathing on that final phone call, recalled how he’d said that he was becoming afraid of what he could do in the dark, and nodded. “Whatever was pulling on him, it was tugging harder at the end.”

“You see what I’m saying?” Kimble said, his voice mournful but determined. “Which is worse, Darmus?”

“The second option,” Roy said, and then, just as Kimble started to nod, he said, “But that’s assuming you could do something about whatever is out there. There’s absolutely nothing to suggest that you can.”

“Jacqueline thought she could help.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. But she can see them, Darmus. She can see them, and I can’t. I can’t fight something I can’t see.”

“I don’t know that you can fight dead men, either,” Roy said. “Maybe you can fight them, but win? How do you defeat the dead, Kimble?”

The chief deputy was silent for a very long time, and then he said, “I need to know what she sees. If there’s nothing that can be done, she’ll know it. If there is something… maybe she’ll know that, too.”

“Why would she if Wyatt didn’t? He figured out that the light helped, and he figured out the history of the place. He did everything that could be done and still nothing worked.”

“He also called on us,” Kimble said, “and I don’t think he did that just for his legacy. The man had hope.”

“Again I’ll ask—what suggests that Jacqueline can understand them any better than Wyatt did?”

“Because,” Kimble said, “she’s already settled her debt. He hadn’t.”

Roy pushed back from the table and let out a deep breath.

“It’s one hell of a risk,” he said.

“I understand that. I also think the time has come to be willing to take one. Something needs to be done. We can’t allow it to continue. For more than a century now, good people have lost their lives to that place or because of it. That has to end. It has to.”

Roy said, “You must be capable of believing in great evil to push it this far, Kimble.”

“I suspect,” Kimble said, “I’ve already brushed closer to it than most.”

Roy took a sip of his coffee before remembering that it had already chilled, then pushed it aside.

“Tell me the part about Jacqueline, please. The part you don’t want to tell. I can ride with you either way. I already am. But I’d like to know. Not judge. Just know.”

“You already know all of that.”

“I don’t mean the details of what she did,” Roy said. “I mean the reason you can’t treat it like a cop.”

He’d expected an argument. Resistance, defensiveness, even outright anger like the man had shown before. The walls Kimble had built and guarded so carefully, though, seemed to have deteriorated rapidly in the past few days.

Kimble turned his eyes back to that empty patio, where the wind was swirling snow.

“I had feelings for her,” he said. “In a way I never had for a woman before, never will again. Used to