The Ridge (28 page)

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.

N
ATHAN 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.

“Sun’s hardly up,” Shipley said. “But it’s never too early to toast a comrade, is it?”

“I suppose it never is.”

Shipley nodded, went inside, and returned with a bottle of Jim Beam. “To Pete Wolverton,” he said, and took a pull. His hand was trembling. His face was pale and his blue eyes rimmed with dark circles. Kimble thought,
He looks like he hasn’t slept in days,
but then realized that he himself couldn’t look much better. Hell, Shipley
hadn’t
slept much in days.

Shipley passed the bottle to Kimble.

“To Pete,” Kimble said, and then he tasted the bourbon and found it an unsatisfactory substitute for the morning’s coffee. His stomach roiled, but maybe that wasn’t because of the whiskey. Maybe that was because of what he was thinking of Shipley, who stood there in his jeans and sweatshirt with somber face, looking every bit the same young man in whom Kimble would have once entrusted the future of the entire department. Now he was looking at him as a murder suspect.

Bound by balance,
Ryan O’Patrick had said. Anyone who bargained at Blade Ridge was required to take a life. And Wesley Harrington would have settled no debts for Nathan Shipley. In the end the cat got him, not the bullets. If Shipley had fired the bullets, they had cleared no debts for him. The ghost with the torch, Kimble believed, was not interested in the blood of animals.

They sat on cold plastic chairs as the breeze blew down off the peaks with frosty teeth, and Kimble said, “Tell me about last night, would you?”

Shipley blew out a long breath and said, “It wasn’t a fun one.”

“Excuse me?”

“I don’t like it out there, chief. Don’t hardly feel like myself.”

“Explain that.”

“Ever since the accident,” Shipley said. “I just don’t care to be back out there. Get odd memories. You were right about things getting stuck in my head. So I just don’t care much for the place. As for the cougar? If he was out there, I didn’t know it.”

“Why don’t you care for the place?”

“Same things I told you before. What I remember compared to what I was told happened, you know? What I remember, it—”

“Feels vivid?” Kimble said. “Real clear, but you still know it couldn’t have happened that way? Don’t trust your own memory, your own mind?”

“Exactly,” Shipley said, and he jutted his chin, looking at Kimble with a hard, thoughtful stare. “Pretty good summary, chief.”

He couldn’t have killed one of our own,
Kimble thought.
There’s no way he could not have put a knife to Pete Wolverton’s throat.

But so many of the ridge survivors
had
killed one of their own. Friends, husbands, business partners, bosses. When that blackness rose up, it seemed decision-making and control were not possible. Shipley wouldn’t have known what he was doing. If O’Patrick and Jacqueline were to be believed, he wouldn’t have recalled a thing but blackness until he was done, like some sort of eclipse of the soul. He would know that he’d done it, though. He would know that by now.

“You saw Pete at, what, midnight?” Kimble asked.

“Ten till. He came out early. You know Pete.”

“Sure. And you hadn’t seen anything on your shift that was cause for concern? No sign of the cat or… or of anything else?”

Shipley looked away from him, out where the fog was rising in wraiths and then fading into the gray sky of a cold, bleak day.

Kimble said, “Nathan? What did you see?”

“Nothing of that black panther. But I hung pretty tight to the preserve, too. I’ll tell you something, if you watch those cats enough? They’re unsettled. It’s a strange thing, but I feel like they get it. They don’t like the place either. They understand some things about it. That could be bad.”

“Bad for who?”

Shipley’s eyes shifted back to Kimble. “Anyone who’s out there.”

There was a long pause, Kimble considering the various tracks that he could pursue, considering how many of his cards to show. In the end, he decided to hold them tight for now. He would need more facts and better understanding before he’d chance confronting Shipley with the knowledge that he’d been gathering about the bloody history of Blade Ridge.

“So when Pete came on shift, it was ten till midnight, and you spoke?” he said, returning to the procedural realm, his supposed reason for being here.

“Just a quick update. Told him things were cool, and then I bailed. Got home, went to bed.”

“Yeah? You look awfully tired.”

“I haven’t been sleeping all that well. Not since the accident.”

“How you feeling, though?”

“Lucky. Damned lucky. You saw the car, and now you see me.” Shipley waved both hands over his chest, indicating the specimen of unscathed strength that had crawled out of that demolished cruiser.

“Yes,” Kimble said very softly. “I saw it, and now I see you.”

For a time it was quiet, and then Kimble said, “You’re scheduled today?”

“Yes. Was expecting to be back at the preserve, though. That was what you’d told me.”

“Not anymore. Property is closed. And I’d like you to take the day off.”

Shipley’s eyes hardened briefly. One flicker, then gone. “Why?”

“I might need you,” Kimble said. “As I work through this thing with the cat, I might need you. I want you handy.”

“I’ve got a cell phone and a radio. I can be handy from anywhere.”

“I know it. All the same, just stick tight to the house, get some rest, okay?”

Shipley cocked his head. “Chief, is there something else on your mind?”

“Yeah,” Kimble said. “Pete Wolverton. I was out there, Shipley. I saw him. He’ll stay on my mind for a while. Now, I’d like you to hang close by and wait until you hear from me today. I may be needing you.”

“All right. Just say the word.”

“Appreciate it, son.” Kimble got to his feet, and when Shipley extended his hand, he didn’t want to take it. He did, though, feeling a ripple of displeasure at the touch, and then he followed Shipley back into the old farmhouse and toward the front door. He made sure to keep the younger man in front of him. They were halfway to the door when Kimble pulled up, listening. He could hear water moving through the old pipes, then a hiss and churning in a nearby room.

“Damn, kid,” he said, “you don’t waste time before starting your laundry in the morning, do you?”

Shipley smiled. “Most times it’s a pile halfway to the ceiling. I just needed the uniform washed.”

Kimble got a smile out to match. It wasn’t easy.

A
S THE MORNING WIND PICKED UP
and a few stray snowflakes drifted down off the ridge, Audrey called Joe Taft in Center Point, Indiana. Joe had been David’s inspiration. His facility in rural Indiana was the nation’s largest, and he’d rescued cats of every species. Joe was the man the federal agencies called on for help seizing cats from terrible situations and was the only man David had ever admitted might be better with cats than Wesley Harrington.

He’d also been the only man who had offered to take the cats off her hands when David died.

“I thought you’d just relocated all of them, Audrey,” Joe said when she asked if his offer still stood.

“That’s right.”

“It’s not working out?”

Audrey looked out to the woods where she’d seen one of her cats crouched over a blood-soaked body and said, “No. It’s not working out.”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Joe said. “When we talked before, I had some options for you, but you were 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
I’ll be damned—I
can
cry.
The tears fell soundlessly down her cheeks, and on the other end of the line Joe Taft waited as if he understood.