The Ridge (29 page)

“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
provide
the care. I can’t do it, Joe. I tried, and I can’t.”

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 protégés, 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
sorry
.”

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 Tremley’s photograph had appeared in the newspapers, and Wyatt hadn’t selected it.

For several months, the exchanges between the Whitman brothers were buoyant, filled with predictions of great wealth. Then came November, and a letter from Frederick that was a good deal bleaker: “David Watson awoke in the night shivering and soaked in sweat, and by dawn he was unable to stand, lying huddled in blankets while the others left camp. Our physician warns of a possible contagion, which we cannot afford at our current pace. Hopefully, he is wrong.”

“He wasn’t wrong,” Roy muttered. “It was contagious, Frederick, old boy.”

Future letters confirmed the diagnosis. The illness was spreading, and with it dissatisfaction among the workers, whom Frederick feared would abandon the project entirely. His younger, brasher brother responded with firm words, suggesting that the crew be quarantined along the river and saying that work could not cease, as the company’s investors had been guaranteed functioning mines by the new year.

Correspondence quickly took on a grim tone—Watson had perished, and a second and third man succumbed soon after. The camp doctor told Frederick Whitman Jr. that he would have to hope the fever didn’t spread through the crew.

Hope, that winter, did not seem a powerful tool. By the first week of December, seven men were dead. Frederick Whitman Jr., while holding the men to quarantine at the work site, made his own camp across the river, telling his brother that he feared “sharing in the conditions of the men.”

In other words, he wanted to crack the whip from a safe distance.

Roger wrote to his brother to suggest the threat of jailing all workers who did not hold to the letter of their contract: “They were hired to build a bridge, and a bridge they shall build.”

Frederick responded with caution.

“Our deadline may no longer be attainable, as I’ve been tremendously disappointed in our physician’s abilities to handle the epidemic,” he wrote. “The locals are an astoundingly superstitious people, given to beliefs in conjuring, charms, and the handling of snakes. I had long refused such foolishness be permitted in the camp, but as it seems to give them some comfort, I’ve since allowed the practices despite my disapproval. Well, today, brother, my disapproval has grown. A gentleman by the name of Mr. Silas Vesey arrived on foot at the camp several nights ago. He is an odd man, and I distrusted him immediately. He is clean in appearance and yet carries a quality of purest revulsion in a
manner that I cannot properly articulate. There is an odor to him, almost that of cooling ashes, and he speaks in a voice that somehow distresses the soul. He told me that he understood we had health troubles, and that he was capable of offering assistance. I told him that our finest doctor was unable to handle the problem, and I doubted he could do any more. Mr. Vesey responded that he was quite certain he could assist those men who were willing. I was unsettled by the man and sent him away. He made camp not far from us, though, and I wish he would return to whatever forsaken hollow from which he came.”

Soon there was another letter about Vesey, who apparently had not left his camp but stayed within range, tending to a small bonfire and watching the progress—or lack thereof—on the trestle.

“Our foreman, Mr. Mortimer, is among the gravely ill. Yesterday I saw him nearly out of his head with fever, and I feared that when the men lost their leader, our hope would perish with him. Last evening, I observed as he rose, wrapped in blankets, and went to see Vesey. I was troubled by it, but the man appears nigh his end, and I wished to make no move to stop him.

“Mr. Mortimer returned after many hours in a state of remarkable good health. I was so astonished, watching him work today, that I inquired. He has encouraged me to consider Vesey’s offer, believing firmly that the man is capable of healing, and while I do not, it is worth noting that these people are deeply superstitious and perhaps others would respond to Vesey as did Mr. Mortimer.”

Roger’s response was swift and firm: “Allow them any fool’s cure they desire so long as it encourages them to work.”

Reading the letter more than 120 years later, Roy Darmus felt a chill ride up his spine.

That’s who Wyatt was looking for,
he thought,
a picture of Silas
Vesey. If he was starting with pictures, that meant he could see people out there—lots of them. And if he never named Vesey, then he never found a photograph.

That wasn’t impossible to believe. Photographs of people from that era were scarce. But then of course there were other possibilities, the folktale kind about those whose image couldn’t be captured by a camera at all…

Roy found himself staring back at the ancient photographs that Wyatt had collected. The Blade Ridge dead were just names on maps in Wyatt’s lighthouse. The murderers, though? They were names on pictures.

He could see them,
Roy thought.

He returned uneasily to the letters, discovering without much surprise that Frederick had taken his brother’s advice and gone to meet with Silas Vesey, who still lingered along the ridge.

“I told him that the delays were unacceptable, and that if he was capable of aiding the sick, I bid him to do so. He asked if I wished him to see that the men were bound to the bridge. I responded that if he was, indeed, capable of healing, that is exactly what I wished. His response was most unusual. He put forth a smile that chilled me more than the wind and the snow and what he told me made no sense at all. He said that it might be far easier for him to bind the most gravely ill of the men to the bridge. I denounced the claim as preposterous, but Vesey said that he could heal only the willing, and sometimes desperate men were more willing. At that moment, I had a distinct and abiding sense of fear, and wished deeply that I had not made the trip to see him at all. He seemed to sense my doubt, and told me that he could promise the bridge shall be completed, and said that I was fortunate because he was the only man in the region who could see to such a thing. There are others capable, he said, but none in these mountains. I said I had no time to send for
anyone else, and he told me that if I wished the crew bound to the bridge, then he would need to be of them. I was not surprised that he should try to extort a wage, but I said not a dime would pass into his palm until I saw proof of his abilities. He then told me that dollars were not his concern, that he simply wanted me to know that once he agreed to help, he’d be required to remain with the crew for a long while, and then asked whether I believed Blade Ridge will be a prosperous and well-traveled region for years to come. I assured him that it will be, though the idea of his wishing to linger among us did not appeal in the slightest. I wished no dealings with him at all, but I know well that our time is short and our investors impatient, and so I sent him on to try. I doubt he will be of help despite his assurances, and I look forward to the day of his departure.”