“I don’t know what you’re—”
“You do, though,” he said. “You do. You’ve seen it out there. That man with the blue torch. I’m going to try to put an end to him.”
Audrey remembered the blue flame, drawing her into the night woods, drawing her toward a dead man in the dark.
“You sound like you’re talking about a ghost,” she said.
“Don’t I?” Kimble cleared his throat, gave his head a little shake, as if he’d wandered from the moment and had to bring himself back around, and then said, “There’s no landline here. But I’ll need your cell phones.”
“Why?”
He gave her a pained look. “Please, Mrs. Clark. Audrey. I don’t want to be here any more than you want me to be. But I’ve got to make sure I have enough time to do what I need to do.”
“What is that?”
“Burn that trestle down,” he said. “That trestle and all that lives with it. I’m taking it down.”
He was serious. There was a rust-colored streak of blood over his cheek and above it his eyes were red and swollen, but the dark irises betrayed no trace of anything but grim determination.
“Why?” she said. “Why would you burn that bridge?”
“To keep people from dying. Or killing. Or maybe it won’t do a damned thing, but it will do this much—nobody will be able to walk across it anymore. I don’t think that’s as small a difference as most people might.”
“That’s where my husband died,” she said.
“I know. It’s where quite a few people have died. It’s a dangerous place.”
He said it not in the way you’d talk about someplace where you need to be careful to avoid a slip and fall, but in the way you’d talk about a dark street with snipers on every rooftop, where all the care in the world might not help you if you made the mistake of entering it.
“You’re talking as if it’s evil,” Audrey said.
“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.”