The Ridge(23)

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.