The Ridge (9 page)

The most recent call was, of course, the last—the
Sawyer County Sentinel,
where he’d reached Roy Darmus. Before that, Wyatt had called Kimble. The previous eight calls had all gone to the same number, and when Kimble ran the reverse search, it returned to the office of a Dr. Kaleb Mitchell in Whitman.

Kimble frowned. That was a lot of calls. He picked up his own phone, dialed, and got the receptionist. After he identified himself and said that he was investigating a death, he had Dr. Mitchell on the line pretty quickly.

“Of course you’ll need a subpoena for medical records,” the doctor said before Kimble could even get warmed up.

“I’m well aware of that. But before you get too worried about protecting your patient’s rights, understand that your patient is dead. He committed suicide yesterday, Dr. Mitchell.”

“Oh, my.”

“Yes. I’m not interested in his medical records, I’m trying to investigate the circumstances of his death. There are some questions around it, and I’d appreciate your help.”

“Within proper limits, of course.”

“Do you know if there’s anyone I should contact on this matter? It doesn’t appear that he has any family. Are you aware of any?”

“There is no one,” Dr. Mitchell said with quick confidence. “I just had that discussion with him. He told me he was very much on his own.”

“You just had this discussion.”

“That’s right. You want to know if there was a medical reason that might have motivated him, don’t you?”

“I’m curious, yes.”

“Absolutely. In fact, I’m sorry to say that I’m not surprised to hear this news. Mr. French was dying, deputy. He had liver cancer.”

Kimble felt an odd sense of relief. It was a sad situation, certainly, but this brought a clarity that had not been there before.

“I see,” he said. “That’s very helpful. You’d informed him of this recently?”

“Last week. The prognosis was not good. Very grim. He did not seek regular medical treatment, and I believe he lived in a fashion that was quite abusive to the liver. Quite abusive.”

“You’re correct.”

“I was worried about him, frankly. Beyond the illness, I mean. I don’t mind telling you that I’m a little relieved to hear that the situation is what it is. I know that sounds terrible, but—”

“You were afraid he might be a threat to someone besides himself?”

The doctor hesitated. “Yes, that’s exactly it.”

“Why?”

“I’ve given a number of terminal diagnoses over the years, deputy. It’s always sad, and the reactions are always varied. Mr. French’s stands out, though. He asked the standard question—how much time. I told him specialists would be more certain, but it was likely that he was down to six months to a year. He responded by telling me that if he had only six months, then that meant someone else had less time. His words, I believe, were, ‘If my clock’s winding down, then somebody else’s is spinning faster. I can’t leave this world without settling that.’ I asked him what he meant by that, and he declined to elaborate. I don’t mind telling you that it was… somewhat chilling. I had the distinct impression that he meant it as a threat. Not to me. But to someone.”

The sense of understanding and relief that Kimble had just felt was fading. He said, “I appreciate your telling me that. It
could be quite important, doctor. It could be more important than you know.”

The doctor’s voice changed, a note of alarm in it now. “I thought you said it was a suicide, and that was all.”

“I know it was a suicide,” Kimble said. “And I hope that was all.”

T
HE DOCTOR HAD PUT FIVE STITCHES
in one incision on Roy’s palm and six in the other, given him some pain pills, and sent him on his way. When he woke the next morning his hand throbbed dully, and he washed another round of pain pills down with coffee and then stared out at the street, looking at his neighbors’ front porches and thinking that it was the first time in more than a century that they’d awakened on any day but Christmas and found no newspaper to greet them.

He did not know what he should be doing with his day. Everyone else at the paper had completed résumé and cover-letter tasks months ago, and most of them had jobs. That wasn’t an option for Roy. At sixty, he was hardly the commodity a newspaper wanted to add to the staff, but he didn’t want to leave his home anyhow. The newspaper buyout had been larger than most, though it was hardly something to shout about from the rooftops. If he lived with a miser’s eye, he’d be fine. But finances weren’t his concern. Identity was. For almost forty years he’d been Sawyer County’s storyteller. It was a role he cherished, and now it was gone. His own name felt hollow to him if not part of a byline.

He had one story left, though, one final assignment issued. Wyatt French had asked him to tell it, but Roy’s interest was not in Wyatt French. It was in his parents and all those names that had joined theirs on the maps in the lighthouse.

One more day at the paper. One more story to work on. He didn’t mind the sound of that at all. He drove to the office as he always had, cutting through the Whitman College campus, beautiful brick and limestone buildings that stretched out where once the mining company houses had been. Mines had built the town, back in the late 1800s. First it had been coal, and then timber, and then there wasn’t anything left to take and the town went back to sleep for a time. Roger Whitman, son of one of the early coal and timber barons, went the Carnegie route in his later years, dispensing his fortune to various philanthropic causes, and one of them—the college—had inadvertently saved the town. Whitman College had grown into a prestigious school, known for liberal arts and environmental sciences, for high academic standards and higher tuition rates. The environmental sciences bit was ironic to anyone who knew the local history. Nobody had pillaged the land with greater ferocity than the Whitman family.

Roy’s great-grandfather had worked for the timber companies, his grandfather had risen to a position as vice president of one of the town’s only banks, his father had gone to law school at Vanderbilt and spurned top-dollar offers to practice family law in his hometown. At fourteen, Roy had been certain he would be the first Darmus to leave the hills.

It was easy to be certain of things at fourteen.

His own house was two blocks past the courthouse and one block from the sheriff’s department, prime location for a reporter. Originally the newspaper offices had been downtown, too, but they’d moved in the 1970s for more space, a larger press,
and more loading docks, unaware of the digital death headed their way.

His keycard was still active, and he went through the employee door and headed for the morgue with his list of names and dates from Wyatt French’s lighthouse. Most of the names went beyond the computer days and would require poring over the dusty bound volumes down in the newspaper’s morgue.

He wanted caffeine but the coffeepot upstairs was gone for good, so he walked through the pressroom, with its smells of metal and oil and newsprint, and to the break room, where for decades the pressmen had gathered in the wee hours of the morning. He fed a dollar into the vending machine and came away with a Diet Coke, then turned around and ran smack into Rex Schaub, the building’s maintenance supervisor. Rex gave him a cockeyed smile.

“What are you doing here?” His eyes dropped to Roy’s bandaged hand and he added, “And what the hell happened?”

“Cut myself on a lightbulb.”

“Damn. Hey, you know the difference between a lightbulb and a pregnant girlfriend?”

“What?”

“You
can
unscrew the lightbulb.”

Roy stared at him.

“Get it?” Rex said. “If you knock your girlfriend up, you can’t—”

“Brilliant,” Roy said. “Who said that, Ben Franklin? Or is that Twain?”

Rex grinned. “Look, what are you doing here? Building is closed.”

“Need to do a few archive searches.”

Rex’s smile was slipping away. “Roy… the building is closed. I’m not trying to be a dick about it, but nobody is supposed to be
in here except the clean-out crew. I should have deactivated all the keycards by now, but I haven’t gotten around to it. The owners gave me real clear instructions, though, that nobody—”

“The owners can kiss my ass,” Roy snapped. “I’ve spent more than forty years in this building, making money for them. If I want another day in this place, I’m going to take it.”

Rex, who’d had a gig as a maintenance supervisor for an apartment complex in place within a week of the
Sentinel
’s closing announcement, dropped his gaze to the reel of cable in his hands.

“Okay, Roy,” he said. “I get you. Do what you need to do.”

“Thanks,” Roy said, and walked past him, bristling with anger that had less to do with Rex and more to do with the way they were dismantling the office. He’d known it was going to happen, of course, but seeing it, watching all the artifacts of the newspaper that had been his life scooped up and put into boxes, hit him harder than he’d imagined it would.

The owners said, the owners said…
The owners could go straight to hell. It was more his paper than theirs. He’d spent more waking hours in this building than any other place on earth. Hell, maybe more hours period. He worked long and late and never minded because he loved telling the stories. And those stories, the ones that were developing across Sawyer County at this very moment? What would become of them? Why didn’t anyone think that loss mattered?

He opened the door to the morgue and slipped inside, back into that narrow room that smelled of dust and old paper. A hundred and twenty-four years of stories.

He was pretty sure some of them had mattered.

The morgue was where he’d gotten his professional start—an irony never lost on him—putting together that local-lore column. He’d kept it going over the years, which drove the editors nuts, because it seemed he always vanished into the archives at the exact moment they came looking for him with a shitty assignment.
It got to the point where “If you’re looking for Darmus, he’s in the morgue” was a running joke.

There were microfilm readers, but Roy hated using those. You lost the tactile sense of history that the bound volumes exuded, wide, massive books that had to weigh fifteen or twenty pounds. You could stand in the middle of the morgue and see the ebb and flow of the industry—the date ranges getting progressively smaller as the newspaper economy boomed and the
Sentinel
added pages and ad circulars, delivering a doorstopper each morning and double that on Sunday. Then the date ranges widened and the papers shrank in more recent years, as declining revenue triggered page cuts.

He had every name in red ink from Wyatt’s maps. The photographs he hadn’t managed to study before Kimble shut him down. Most of them hadn’t borne names, anyhow. He’d recognized one face—Jacqueline Mathis—and remembered another from her name—Becky Stapp—but it seemed as if ninety percent were anonymous faces from the past. That left him with the red-ink names, and after finding his parents among them, he was awfully curious about the others.

While his initial plan had been to work forward from the oldest date to the newest, he found himself going directly to the January–March 1965 volume. He’d seen the January 9, 1965, paper a thousand times, had stared at it for countless hours, but it had been several years since his last look. Too many years? You didn’t want to drown in grief, but you needed to remember the dead, too.

He dropped the bound volume onto the old, scarred desk—it had been the editor’s desk during World War II—opened it, and flipped through the pages until a familiar headline and photograph caught his eye. A single car smashed into the trees amidst a fine dusting of snow. They’d been predicting a big one, but it had never hit. Just a little freezing rain, an inch of powder, and two dead in a one-car accident. Minor storm. Minor.

Roy ran the back of his hand over his mouth, adjusted the light over the desk, and began to read.

Two people were killed Saturday night in a single-vehicle crash on Blade Ridge Road in the southwestern reaches of Sawyer County.

Joseph Darmus, 41, and his wife Lillian Darmus, 40, of Whitman, were killed when their 1957 Chevrolet sedan apparently skidded on black ice west of the junction of County Road 200 and Blade Ridge Road, sending the vehicle into a stand of walnut trees. The accident occurred at approximately 8:45
P.M
. There were no witnesses. Joseph Darmus was killed on impact, according to police, while Lillian was transported to Sawyer County Hospital and died of massive head trauma a short time later. The couple was driving home from a Whitman Junior High School basketball game in Chambers. Their son, 14-year-old Roy Darmus, was on the bus with his teammates when the accident occurred.

That was the end of the first article. Simple, straightforward reporting, written late in the night, pushing deadline. Roy flipped to the next day’s edition to read the follow-up piece, which had altered his life when it appeared, guiding him into this very building.

It led with a quote from Roy about his father:
“He was a real good driver. He always said he was going to be the one to teach me how to drive in the snow, because it was dangerous and he didn’t want anything bad to happen to me.”