The Ridge(27)

“And when I came back around, when I could see again, there was a light,” Shipley continued, not content to dismiss his irrational memory.

“That lighthouse was right above,” Kimble said. “Would have been flashing like crazy.”

Except it wouldn’t have been, he realized. Because Shipley responded to the call from Darmus, and Darmus broke the light before he called. So it would have been darkness.

“Not the lighthouse,” Shipley said. “This was like a blue torch. That’s exactly what it was like.”

“A blue torch.” Kimble stared at him. “This is why I’m worried about concussions.”

Shipley forced a laugh.

“Guess I’ve got a creative imagination when I’m unconscious.”

“Be glad you imagined the worst and got the best.”

“Yes, sir.” Shipley pointed at the desk, where Kimble had spread out a full set of photocopies of the pictures and maps he’d pulled off the walls of Wyatt’s lighthouse. The originals were locked away. “What’s all that?”

“That,” Kimble said with a sigh, “is the disturbing collection left behind by your ten-zero.”

“The guy in the lighthouse?”

“Wyatt French, yes.”

Shipley picked up a few of the photographs, studied them. “Who are they?”

“I have no idea.”

“Strange hobby.”

“Strange man,” Kimble agreed. “You good, Shipley?”

“I’m fine.”

“All right. Go home and take some aspirin.”

“I was thinking I might run out to Blade Ridge first.”

“What?”

“I’d just… I’d like to look around.”

Kimble said, “You think it’ll help you clear your head, okay. But don’t get carried away worrying about it, Shipley. I don’t need a deputy who’s jittery behind the wheel, and the more you think about a disaster that didn’t even happen, the better the chance of nerves catching up with you.”

Shipley shook his head. “Of course not. I’m no superstitious sort, chief. You know that.”

Kimble did know that. If Shipley were a superstitious man, he probably wouldn’t have gone after this job. His father, Ed Shipley, a former Marine, had been in the department, too, had died in action in the summer of Kimble’s rookie year. Nathan Shipley had been twelve at the time.

Sixteen years ago, Kimble thought, watching Ed Shipley’s son walk out of the office. They pass by fast, no question about it.

Ed Shipley had beaten the fire department to the scene of a trailer fire because his car was a mile away when the call came. After he arrived, the hysterical family told him there was still someone inside. Marlon’s inside, Marlon’s inside, Marlon didn’t come out. Marlon turned out to be a cat. Ed Shipley, former U.S. Marine, hadn’t understood, and he went charging in after Marlon and never came back out. A day later the cat turned up at a neighbor’s house. Had probably been the first creature in the house to escape the inferno.

No, if Nathan Shipley had pursued this line of work, he wasn’t the sort who believed in jinxes. Wyatt French, on the other hand? He’d believed in something damn strange, and Kimble could not get a handle on it.

He flipped through the photo collection, all those ancient, sepia-tinted images of men with axes or picks or saws in hand. There were dozens of them, and across almost every one Wyatt had written the word NO in large bold print. Ten pictures had names, and computer searching had provided answers about just three of them.

In 1966, a Whitman restaurateur and local golf champion named Adam Estes had shot and killed his financial adviser. In 1979, an auto mechanic named Ryan O’Patrick had beaten his boss to death with a wrench. And in 2006… in 2006, Jacqueline Mathis had happened.

Wyatt kept photographs of all three in his home.

The seven other people who were named—Becky Stapp, Timothy Osgood, Ralph Hill, Henry Bates, Fred Mortimer, John Hamlin, and Bernard Snell—had left no mark on the department computer system or the Internet, but that wasn’t surprising. Their photographs were very old.

Kimble ran through them again, shaking his head, then locked them in his desk drawer and went down to the jail.

A three-story concrete structure built just behind the sheriff’s department, the Sawyer County Jail had been home to Wyatt French on several occasions, though never for more than a night. Kimble didn’t have any questions for the corrections team about Wyatt, though. He had questions about their lights.

Just inside the jail, past the booking area and behind darkly tinted glass, was the control center. Here the security of the facility was monitored around the clock, with banks of computers and television screens ringing the room. Tyler Abel, a longtime road deputy who’d eventually moved into a position as the jail commander and answered directly to Troy, was sitting in the control center today.