The Ridge(25)

That idea, though, vanished as soon as he tracked down one of the names, Sam Fielding, and discovered that he’d been a high-voltage repairman, electrocuted while attempting to repair downed lines in a summer storm.

That fatality had occurred near Blade Ridge, in the woods west of County Road 200, which was close enough to count, but the nature of the death blew the car-wreck theory out of the water.

So then Roy shifted, thinking that the man had been looking for any deaths, period, in his strange little pocket of the mountains. Fielding’s case wasn’t unique. In several circumstances, Wyatt had noted deaths that had occurred near Blade Ridge Road. Emphasis on near. Because, as Roy discovered as he went deeper into the county’s history, pulling down volumes that billowed out dust when opened, the pages so stiff and yellowed that you had to turn them with infinite care or the paper would flake into pieces, the accidental deaths were certainly not limited to the road. In 1978, two boys died when they fell from the railroad trestle. In 1975, one woman drowned in a canoeing trip on the Marshall River with a friend. In 1958, a Marine who’d seen tours in Korea and the South Pacific shot himself in the head while deer hunting. That one could have been suicide—newspapers always had masked such stories in ambiguity—but Roy doubted it. In 1922, two men and a woman were trampled to death when a strange and violent panic took hold of their horses.

All of those names—they were the red-ink names—could be linked by two factors: death and proximity to Blade Ridge. The manner of death, though, those tales of trestle falls and stampeding horses and electrocutions, turned any legitimate concern about the road’s safety into a bizarre raving about… what? Some sort of cursed ground? A karmic disaster zone?

“What did they mean to you, Wyatt?” he mumbled, staring at the two lists, deciding that he’d wasted enough time on this endeavor. “Why did they matter?”

It would be impossible to say. And, Roy reminded himself, the old man had been losing his mind there toward the end. Yesterday’s ravings were a clear indication of that.

I’m getting scared of the dark. I’m getting scared of what I could do in the dark.

Roy was halfway to the morgue door when that thought slipped into his mind, and when it did, he stopped walking and turned to look at the rows of old newspaper volumes as if they’d just told him something.

Hell, maybe they had.

He’d been looking for parallels, the same as Wyatt ostensibly had. For connective tissue between the names, and coming up empty.

Except for one thing. They’d all taken place at night. Without exception. Every fatality Wyatt had recorded from Blade Ridge’s lengthy history had occurred when it was…

“Dark,” Roy said aloud.





12


KIMBLE WANTED TO FOCUS ON Wyatt French, but the sheriff interrupted him in midmorning by entering with Nathan Shipley and saying they needed to have a talk about the accident.

Shipley’s cruiser was beyond any hope, so far gone that they just had it towed directly to the salvage yard where the sensitive equipment could be removed, not even bothering with a body shop. Shipley himself, however, had emerged from the terrible wreck with a few minor abrasions and bruises.

“Sore,” he told Kimble and the sheriff when he sat down. “I’m sore as hell, but considering… well, it really could have been bad.”

“I saw the car, son,” Sheriff Troy Black said. “Bad isn’t the word. Damn good thing I always see that this department has quality insurance.”

The implication being that they might operate without insurance if not for his savvy management. Kimble rolled his eyes, and Shipley saw it and cracked a small smile. The department was of a unanimous opinion on “Sheriff Troy,” as he insisted on being called. He excelled at politicking, handled the department’s public face well enough, but when it came to actual casework he’d gone past the point of being a broad-assed desk jockey and become an almost laughable figurehead. He insisted on wearing custom-made, chocolate-brown cowboy hats with his badge affixed to the crown, he was a partner in a horse farm that had yet to produce anything better than a dead-last finisher in a small-time race, he talked like he’d just fallen off a hay wagon, and everyone in the department knew damn well that when it came to investigative work, Kimble ran the show. That was fine by Kimble—he had autonomy within the department, and he also had Troy out there doing all the work that Kimble would never have been any good at. Kimble didn’t have to deal with the mayor’s office or the county council or campaigns or oversee the jail. The system in place in Sawyer County worked well; Troy glad-handed his way around town, keeping the public satisfied, and Kimble and his team got the policing done.