The Ridge(34)

He could remember her so well, the way she looked when she would step through the door with golden light behind her, putting a raven’s shine on her dark hair. Friday mornings. She never missed one. Once Kimble found out, neither did he.

Those encounters began after their first meeting, when Kimble was dispatched to the house after a neighbor called in a domestic dispute between Jacqueline and her husband. When Kimble got there, Brian Mathis came out to meet him, told him everything was fine. Kimble said he’d like to talk to the man’s wife. Mathis argued. Kimble was readying to explain that it was an argument he could make to a judge if he preferred when Jacqueline stepped out of the house. Kimble sent Brian Mathis back inside so he could talk to her alone, and he’d seen the dark look the man gave his wife as he passed. Kimble stood with her in the fading sun of a cold evening and watched the way she moved, so gingerly, one arm close to her ribs, and listened as she told him the neighbors must have been confused, there was no problem.

It wasn’t the first interview of that sort he’d conducted.

When he’d asked her if she was hurt, if her husband had struck her, she gave him a wan smile and said simply that there was no problem that required his assistance, though she appreciated the offer. He was explaining that she needed to be honest with him if there’d been any violence when she interrupted to tell him that she wasn’t the sort of woman he was expecting her to be, cowed and frightened and unwilling to report a husband who’d just post bond and come back home to finish the job.

“I appreciate what you’re telling me,” she said. “But I’m fully capable of handling this situation.”

The look in her eyes then, so firm, so strong, was different indeed from what he was used to in these situations. And it had worried him.

“There is nothing about you,” he’d told her, “that suggests you are anything but capable. But something else you are, when you go back in that house? You’re alone, Mrs. Mathis. You’re alone.”

She’d put her hand on his arm, held his eyes, and said, “I’m becoming more aware of that every day, deputy.”

Then she’d turned and walked inside. That was his first trip to the Mathis house.

Two weeks later he’d seen her at the Bakehouse, a café three blocks from the department. He liked to walk up there in the morning, clear his head, see the town. The coffee shop looked out on the courthouse where in the spring the lawn was lined with flowering trees, and sipping a coffee nice and slow at a sidewalk table could turn a potentially bad day into a good one, sometimes.

She was stepping in as he was stepping out on that particular Friday, and there had been an awkward moment of recognition. She smiled, said, “Hello, officer,” and he told her she didn’t have to call him that. She asked what she was supposed to call him then, and he said that his name was Kevin Kimble but most folks called him Kimble.

“I’ll call you Kevin, if you don’t mind,” she said.

He didn’t mind.

He sat at his table outside and she sat inside, and when she left she waved at him and softly said, “Thank you for your compassion, by the way. It helped.”

Routine took over, and he began his speech again, the one urging her to come down the street with him and make a formal complaint. She held up a hand to stop him and said, “It’s a beautiful morning.”

After a pause, he nodded and acknowledged that it was.

“Today I just want to enjoy that. Okay?”

He told her that it was okay. Told himself not to watch her walk down the street. He was full of useless advice that morning, it seemed.

It wasn’t long before he determined that her trips to the Bakehouse were consistently Friday mornings. The encounters became weekly, and they lengthened, but not by much. Five minutes, ten, maybe fifteen. Small talk. Weather and town news, mostly. He didn’t ask after her home life. Then one Friday she wore a sleeveless dress, and he saw the bruise on her upper arm. The dress, he thought, worn when the mark could have been covered so easily by a sleeve, was defiance. Or a call for help. Or something torn between the two.

They spoke again, and he looked at the bruise pointedly, and then he asked her if she was all right. She sipped her coffee, steam rising across her face, and did not answer. That was when Kimble wrote his cell-phone number down and slid it across the table to her and said, like some foolish gunslinger in a black-and-white cowboy picture, “You need help handling anything, I’m one ring away.”

How ridiculous. How unprofessional.

How he hoped she would call.

And then one night she did.

Kimble was still sitting there on Wyatt French’s bed when his radio squawked, calling him out of the past and into the present with one of the stranger reports he’d heard in his time policing: a cougar was loose.