The Ridge (18 page)

Afterward, standing in the shower trying to purge the argument with hot water and deep breaths, she felt bad in the way you could only when you understood the place someone was
coming from. Ellen had always had a bossy streak, yes, but being in charge wasn’t the issue here. Loving her sister was. Audrey leaned her head against the cool tile of the shower as the room filled with steam and thought of her family, all of them living their practical, ordered lives in Louisville while their once most practical and ordered member, Audrey, drove to the middle of nowhere each morning to feed chunks of bloody meat to cats with paws the size of her head.

Maybe they were entitled to their concern.

She stepped out of the shower and wrapped a towel around her body, which was so thin, too thin. For a time after David’s death she’d been able to con herself into the idea that losing a few pounds was never a bad thing. No creature alive was more predisposed to fall for that con than a woman, after all. It was when five pounds turned to fifteen and then to twenty that she knew it needed to be dealt with. She’d used fatigue as an excuse for a lack of appetite, but fatigue didn’t keep you from avoiding the dinner table. Memories of sharing that table with your late husband did.

She’d been doing better lately, though. Five pounds back in the last month. All you needed to know about appetite you could learn from a lion.

She was thinking that, and smiling, when the phone rang again. She almost ignored it, certain that it would be Ellen again, perhaps calling to apologize, perhaps not. Then she gave in just enough to check the caller ID and saw that it wasn’t Ellen but Dustin Hall.

She picked up, and thirty seconds later, that snapping dismissal of her sister’s nightmare seemed a dangerous thing.

Wesley Harrington was dead.

Wes had been killed by one of the cats.

She made the drive to the preserve in a horrible déjà vu daze.
Back to Blade Ridge Road, back to a place where a good man lay dead in his own blood.

The police were there when she arrived. Two cars, an ambulance, and somebody’s pickup truck. She asked to see Wesley, demanded it, but they said nobody but police and his family could see him.

“I
am
his family!”

It wasn’t true, though. The cats were his family.

There were three deputies standing around watching her, and two of them were the pair who’d been on hand yesterday. Kimble and Shipley. Shipley, who’d been so nervous around the cats, who’d worried about being out in the woods when the sun went down, seemed calmer today, his blue eyes meeting her gaze without difficulty. The new one was a balding guy with sharp eyes who looked as if he wanted to arrest everyone now and sort it out later. Or not. He introduced himself as Pete Wolverton.

“What happened?” she said. “What happened?”

“One of the cats got him.”

“Ira,” she said.

“Is Ira the name of a tiger?” Wolverton asked.

She blinked, refocused. “No. Wait, what? He was killed by a tiger?”

“It was Kino,” Dustin called, face pale, eyes ringed by dark, puffy bags. “It was Kino, Audrey.”

“He went in the cage with Kino in the middle of the night?” she said.

Kimble stepped forward then, took her gently by the arm, and guided her from the others. They walked along until they came to Jafar’s cage. The leopard rose at the sight of her and jogged over, just as he always did. Waited with his face close to the fence, wanting her to reach in and scratch his ears, just as
she
always did. This time she hesitated.

“Seems like something happened in the middle of the night,” Kimble was saying in a gentle voice. “He went into the cage with a syringe.”

Jafar growled, and Kimble pivoted away from the cage and moved his hand toward his gun.

“He just wants attention,” Audrey said, and then she reached in and scratched Jafar’s head, the big cat preening, delighted. Kimble watched apprehensively, and she had a feeling he was thinking about what he’d just seen in Kino’s cage. She was imagining it herself.

“He went in the cage barefoot,” Kimble said. “Seems to imply there was some sort of chaos or problem.”

Audrey slipped her hand back through the fencing, remembering the way Wes had talked about the place being different at night, remembering the way she’d chastised him for his dire warnings. She leaned against the fence, feeling sick, and Jafar reached up and braced his front legs on the fence so that he was standing with his head close to hers. He licked her ear.

“He was
barefoot?
” Audrey said. Wes always had his boots on. She would have sworn he slept in boots.

“Yes. And he entered the cage with a rifle and some sort of a pole with a needle on it. A syringe.”

Something had gone wrong. The cat had been sick, or injured. That would have explained the rush into the night. If something had been wrong with Kino, that would explain everything.

“Was the tiger hurt?”

“Beyond the gunshot wound?”

She closed her eyes, and he said, “Sorry. I know they’re very important to you. Beyond the gunshot wound, I see no sign of injury. Now, I’m not a vet. Obviously, the syringe suggests
something
was wrong with the cat. What it was, I can’t say. There’s no obvious injury, though. Could he have wanted to sedate the animal just from a behavioral standpoint?”

“Behavioral?” Audrey felt Jafar’s rough tongue on her neck, then opened her eyes and moved away from the fence.

“Yeah. If it was, you know, acting up. Really going wild, for whatever reason. Might he have tried to sedate it then?”

“Wes
hated
to sedate cats except under extraordinary circumstances.”

“Well,” Kimble said, “it seems there must have been something extraordinary going on last night. I’ve got to warn you, Mrs. Clark—I think you’re likely to have some trouble over this.”

“Trouble?”

His face was grave, but he nodded. “It’s an accidental death. We’ll be clear on that. I’m in charge of the report, and I
promise
you that we will be clear on that. But you have to take the long view—you’ve got a man dead on this property, killed by one of your cats, and you’ve got another cat missing. People are going to react to that situation. You’re going to need to be ready.”

She stared at him, hearing the words and processing them but unable to attach any real meaning. All she could think of was Wes, running barefoot into the night with a rifle and a pole syringe. What had gone wrong?

“When I say be ready,” Kimble continued, “I mean not just for the public reaction, but for a lot of tough questions. One of the toughest: will you be able to deal with the missing cougar?”

“That will be a tough question,” she agreed, her voice numb and distant. Kimble looked at her and shook his head, unhappy.

“Is there someone you can go to for help? Do you know anyone who specializes in this sort of animal?”

“Yes,” she said. “Wesley Harrington.”

Kimble didn’t say anything. She looked away from him and up at the mountains and felt her mouth go dry and chalky. She tried to remember the trick she’d devised for herself to get through the hardest days: imagining her emotions being carefully folded
and placed into a tight box and tucked away in some never-opened closet, the way she’d handled all of David’s clothes after the funeral.

Strength,
she told herself,
you’ve got to show strength. Go out and find that damn cat, bring him back, and then you can grieve for Wes. Grieve for Kino. Grieve for David again, hell, grieve for yourself. You’re entitled to that. But first you have to find that cat.

“Mrs. Clark?” Kimble said. “Is there anyone who can help? Anyone who knows about these cats?”

She looked him straight in the eye. “That would be me.”

Kimble regarded her with no quality of judgment. “Can you find him?”

No,
she thought. She was picturing the sleek black cat, so silent, so strange. No, they could not find Ira. That was even more implausible, somehow, than the idea that Wesley had been killed by Kino.

“We’ll have to,” she said.

R
OY WAS LOST IN THOUGHT
when he approached the employee entrance of the
Sentinel
that morning. A harsh electronic buzz finally shattered those distractions and brought him into the moment. He had just waved his keycard in front of the receiver. No green light, no soft chime of acceptance. Instead, the loud buzz and a flashing red light.

He passed the card over the receiver a second time, even though he knew.

Rex Schaub had deactivated his keycard. Shut him down. The
Sentinel
office doors would not open for him again.

He stepped back and stared up at the silent limestone building, his home for so many years, and then, as if he simply could not understand, he reached out and tried again, and again.

Red light.

Red light.

He could hear banging near the other side of the building, and after circling around, he saw that the loading dock doors were up. The crew was hauling out office furniture and piling it inside a pair of large panel vans that had been backed up to the
docks. Rex Schaub was supervising, but Roy didn’t recognize anyone else. Those who were gutting his home were nameless, faceless sorts. Roy hated them on principle, but he appreciated this much: they’d left the loading dock open. He waited until they deposited a load in the truck and returned to the building, and then he followed, slipping into the pressroom, the massive machinery taking shape from shadows. He had no idea what a press like this was worth. It had been a big deal when they’d added it because the thing could print color pages on the inside, a first in the
Sentinel
’s history. Was there even a market for such equipment, or did it go to scrap now?

Your entire life, headed for scrap,
Roy thought.
Not even the dusty pages remain for you—you’ll never make it that far. The day of the dusty pages is done.

He stopped at the door to the morgue, realizing that this might be it for him. The last time in the building, the last perusal of all those pages of newsprint. Thanks to Kimble—and Wyatt—he had one last assignment, one last Sawyer County story to tell. But when he left the newspaper today… well, that might be it. The clean-out crew would work its way down to the morgue eventually. The building would soon enough be a hollowed-out corpse, and then the property would be sold, the structure torn down or converted into something else, and all that would remain of the
Sawyer County Sentinel
was the impact of the stories it had told.

He sat down with his notebook, where he’d written the names from Wyatt’s photographs in a column. He’d start with those, the known quantities being far easier to trace, and then deal with the mysterious old photographs, trying to put names where Wyatt had put only
NO
. That would not be an easy task.

Kimble had told him the names were likely to belong to murderers, which meant they were likely to be in the old index—murder in Sawyer County generally qualified as big news.
Tracing some of the older cases back might be tricky, but the more recent ones should move quickly enough. He didn’t need to know any more about Jacqueline Mathis, and Kimble had already found out the significance of Ryan O’Patrick and Adam Estes.

Roy frowned as he looked at the list. Estes. That name snagged on something in his brain, troubled him for no reason that he could articulate.

Adam Estes. Where had he just seen that? It was down here, in the morgue. He was sure of that. But the only reading he’d done here was confirming Wyatt’s list of accident victims.

“The drowned girl,” he said. That’s where he’d seen it. While reading about a red-ink name, Jenna Jerden. In 1975, Jerden had drowned in a canoeing accident in the Marshall River, trying to clear the swift eddies around the trestle in the dark. She hadn’t been alone. Her boyfriend had survived. Adam Estes.

He found the right volume, tracked down the story, and there it was. While Jerden had drowned among the rocks and dark water, her boyfriend had made it to shore, then gone for help. It was a long run to the nearest phone from Blade Ridge in 1975, though, and the help that finally came arrived far too late. The
Sentinel
commended the man on his futile efforts, while including a police quote that reprimanded the couple for attempting to canoe the unfamiliar and often dangerous river in the dark. The survivor was Adam Estes, thirty-three, of Whitman.

In 1975, Adam Estes had survived an accident at Blade Ridge that claimed another life.

In 1976, he’d killed a man.

“They can’t all be like that,” Roy said. There was no way.

It was noon by the time Kimble left the cat preserve. The scene had been processed, the body removed, the photographs taken.
When he spoke to the coroner, the man said, “Damned unlucky spot these past few days, isn’t it?”

It sure was, Kimble agreed. It sure was.

He then said that in addition to the confirmed cause of death for Wesley Harrington, he would need an examination conducted on the tiger.

The coroner said “You want us to do
what?
”