There had been a time when family looked like a possibility. He’d gotten married when he was thirty, to a beautiful blonde named Sarah. She was fresh out of graduate school in Lexington and filled with journalistic ambition, and theirs had been a newsroom romance.
In the end, though, Sarah’s talent and ambition outgrew him, and he didn’t fault her for it. They’d always talked of leaving together, going to New York or Los Angeles or, hell, leaving the country, working on a book together. To Roy, those had been idle fantasies. To Sarah, they’d been plans. He realized when they separated how dangerous it was to allow someone to think you had a shared concept of the future when in fact you didn’t.
When she got the job in London, she’d been certain he’d go with her. Everyone had been. Except Roy.
He’d told her that Sawyer County was home. She was astonished. What about all those big stories they were going to tell, the ones that mattered?
He said he found plenty that mattered right here in the mountains.
She took it as a rejection of her—he didn’t have any family, and how could anyone possibly be so attached to a town, so rooted to a spot in the earth? He didn’t know how it was possible, he just knew that it was true, and that he was grateful for it. This place was home.
He was thinking of the way she could dance, how gracefully she moved, and trying to remember when the last time he had danced was when the phone rang again. Same unknown number. This time he answered.
“Hello?”
“Darmus?”
It was Kevin Kimble. Only he didn’t sound so good. Roy swallowed his steak, took a sip of beer, and said, “You’ve been thinking on that list.”
“I’ve been doing more than thinking. I just interviewed O’Patrick.”
Roy pushed back from the table. “What did he tell you?”
“It’s a story to be told in person, no doubt about that. But listen—you were talking about those old pictures. And about the names that went back so far you couldn’t find them in the newspapers.”
“Yes.”
“That idea you had, something in the college newspaper, or—”
“The Whitman Company paper. The college has the archives.”
“Well, if you think there’s something there, please try to find it.”
“All right,” Roy said, watching his reflection in the window, snow flurries swirling beneath the orbs of the street lamps outside, and then, “Kimble, what are you expecting me to find?”
“I’m not sure,” Kimble said. “But it might involve a fire. A torch. A lantern. I don’t know, some kind of light.”
Roy couldn’t get any words out in response to that.
“Can you look?” Kimble said. He sounded plaintive. No, it went beyond that. He sounded desperate.
“Yes,” Roy said. “I can look.”
The cats were stirring, growls and sharp roars splintering what had been a quiet night. It had taken Audrey hours to fall asleep, and she fought against consciousness now, clinging to soft, sweet darkness, but the sounds didn’t relent, and eventually her eyelids dragged up despite her desires. It was dim in the trailer, with only the light from one corner floor lamp. Audrey squeezed her eyes shut again, still not fully awake, but then a new sound registered: rattling metal.
They were going at the fences.
This time her eyelids snapped open, and now sleep was far from her. She sat up abruptly, a blanket sliding from her shoulders onto the floor. There was no mistaking the sound—fences all over the preserve were rattling, rippling, and the cats continued to roar.
They’re trying to get out, she thought. Please, no, don’t let them get out…
She stood and jammed her feet into the boots that lay beside the couch, then pulled on a jacket and ran down the hall and jerked open the door.
“Stop it!” she shouted. “Stop!”
Her first answer was a resounding roar from one of the male lions, a sound so powerful she took a step back, actually considering shutting the door. Then she saw them, though, and the initial fear faded to fascination.
They weren’t lunging at the fences, trying to tear through them, as she’d feared. They were simply standing against them, up on their hind legs, bracing their front paws against the fences.
Every single one.
“What are you doing?” she whispered, as if expecting an answer. The sounds she had heard were more than sixty pairs of paws landing against chain link, every cat rising. For what?
She found herself wishing for David. She wanted him to see this. To tell her what it meant. David or Wes, someone who understood these animals better than she did, that was what she needed.
The voice she was hearing, though, didn’t belong to David or Wes but to her sister. That morning phone call after the nightmare, Ellen telling her to abandon the preserve, near hysteria in her voice.