“That is exactly how I am talking, yes. Now if you would please bring me your cell phones and car keys. Both of you.”
She and Dustin stared at each other. Kimble made a small gesture with the gun and said, “Please. Nobody’s going to be hurt. I just need time.”
She went past him to the kitchen counter and found her cell phone, then took her keys out of the drawer. He accepted them with a polite “thank you” and then put them in his pocket. Dustin got warily to his feet and did the same.
“You thinking burning a bridge down is going to affect him?” Dustin said.
Him. Audrey was surprised by both the choice of word and by the manner in which he’d said it. There was very real curiosity in his voice.
“I hope so, son. I’m going to give it a try.”
“Why would it?”
“Because he’s bound to it,” Kimble said, and Audrey felt as if she couldn’t possibly have woken up and walked down the hall, that this was far too detached from reality to actually be happening in front of her, this blood-soaked policeman discussing ghosts in her living room.
“Why would fire bother him?”
“Light does,” Kimble said.
Audrey said, “You sound like Wyatt French.” She remembered Wyatt and all of his strange proclamations and dark warnings about this property, his insistence that if they had not tampered with his light, her husband would not have died. Kimble had asked after that yesterday. He’d come in here after seeing the corpse of one of his own friends, and he had asked her about the lighthouse. He believed in whatever Wyatt had believed in.
“It helped,” he told her. “Still is helping. There are infrared lamps going up there right now, and have you seen that torch tonight?”
She shook her head.
“It holds him down,” Kimble said. “Chases him back into the shadows. Well, I’m going to burn him out of them.”
He took a deep breath, his broad chest filling, and said, “Now I’ve got another favor to ask. Then I’ll let you be alone for a while, and when I’m done, you get your keys and your phones back and I will give you the gun and let you call the police.”
She didn’t know what to say. Just stared at him.
“What do you need?”
“I noticed you drive gas-powered carts around here, when you haul things for the cats.”
She nodded.
“Where do you store your gasoline?”
“In the barn. We’ve got several cans.”
“I’d like them, please.”
“I’ll help you,” Dustin said suddenly, and they both turned and looked at him.
Kimble shook his head. “No. You don’t need any of the trouble I’m bringing around, not any form of it. There might be a lot.”
“I’ll help you get the gasoline down there,” he said. “Then you do what you want. You’re going to need help with the gasoline if you want to move quickly.”
Kimble thought about it, then nodded. “Fine. Show me.”
44
THERE WAS A STEADY but soundless wind that made the leafless trees sway in a gentle, hypnotic motion, and the moon was high and nearly full, snowflakes spitting against the windshield, as Nathan Shipley drove Roy along the winding roads that led west to Blade Ridge.
“I knew I wasn’t crazy,” Shipley said. “I knew I saw that kid, but how do you
“Not to an ordinary audience,” Roy said as they sped away from sparkling Christmas lights on the edge of town and into the darkness beyond. “But at this point, Kimble and I are not the ordinary audience.”
“There have been ten others? Ten like him?”
“At least.”
“And they not only healed up, but they killed people. You really believe that.”
“It’s not a matter of belief. It’s a matter of reality,” Roy said. “The easy question is how nobody noticed. But those accidents, those deaths, those killings, they were spread out over decades. Years would pass between them.”
“Of course,” Shipley said. “Think about it—that place is as isolated a pocket of the world as you’ll find east of the Mississippi. It doesn’t get a lot of traffic.”
“That probably disappoints him,” Roy said.
“Who?”
“Vesey. The ghost. The devil. Whatever he is. He came when the bridge was going up and prospects were high at Blade Ridge. The mines went belly-up fast, though. Poor yield. Then time and money moved everything to other places, and Blade Ridge was left empty and forgotten.”
They hit a four-way intersection, and Shipley banged the right turn, Roy slid against the door, and then they were on County Road 200, almost there.
Audrey led Kimble to the storage barn where the carts and two tractors were kept. The gasoline for them was stacked neatly on fresh shelves that still smelled of sawdust, Wesley’s final bit of handiwork before the new preserve had opened.
“Those four are gasoline,” she said. “The other two are for the chainsaw, and they’re a mixture of gas and oil.”
“It’ll all burn,” Kimble said, and then he began to load the cans into one of the carts. Four twelve-gallon cans and two five-gallon. Fifty-eight gallons of fuel in all, and although it seemed the wrong question, Audrey asked if he actually thought it could do the job.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve seen house fires started with a lot less. But that thing hasn’t stood for more than a century by accident. It’s strong.”
“I hope it works,” Audrey said, and she saw Kimble look at her in surprise.
“Do you?”
She gazed back at him, looking beyond the bloodstain on his cheek and into his eyes, and nodded.
“I don’t know if I believe what you’ve said, but I believe something is wrong here. And it took my husband. So yes, I hope it works.”
“I’ll do my best,” Kimble said. “And you do yours. Give me time enough to get it started. That’s all I ask.”
He looked at Dustin. “I’m going to go down there and soak those old planks in this gasoline, and when every drop is out, I’ll put a match to it. By the time that happens, I want you both gone.”
Dustin nodded. He hadn’t spoken since they left the trailer. He was oddly self-possessed, though, exhibiting none of the fear that the situation seemed to dictate. He was braver than Audrey had thought he would be, but how did you ever know? How could you anticipate a situation that called for true bravery?
“What about my cats?” she said.
“What about them?”
“You’re starting a fire. What if it gets into the woods and comes toward my cats?”
Kimble shook his head. “There’s a good stretch of rock between that trestle and the woods. Even with a strong wind blowing, it couldn’t make the woods.”
He waved the gun at Dustin. “Sit down.”
Dustin sat on the passenger side of the little cart. Kimble turned to Audrey and offered a bloodstained hand.
