The Ridge(24)

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.”

Even now, decades removed, Roy felt something thicken in his throat. He looked away from the article. He didn’t need to read it again. He could recite it if he wished.

Time to get back to the task, back to the story. He knew his parents had died on Blade Ridge Road, but what had sparked Wyatt’s interest in the others?

He returned to the morgue shelves to find out, began hauling down bound volume after bound volume, and after hours at it he had no more sense of the truth than when he’d begun.

There were connections between the names on Wyatt French’s maps—some of them, at least—but the parts simply did not fit together to make a whole. Roy had expected something more coherent, even from a mind as admittedly disconnected as Wyatt’s. All the time the old man had spent laboring over the odd list suggested at a linkage that did not appear—at least to Roy’s eyes—to exist.

At first he thought it was simple: they were victims of car accidents at Blade Ridge. Several others besides his parents qualified for that category.