“I’ll issue it. But I don’t like the way it feels.”
“Neither do I,” Kimble told him, and it felt good to speak the truth again.
34
ROY SAT IN A BOOTH at the Bakehouse, wondering why Kimble would possibly want to meet to discuss something so dark, so wildly implausible yet thoroughly documented, in a brightly lit coffee shop. It felt like a discussion for a dim and private room, where even whispers wouldn’t be overheard, where two men could talk about madness and not fear the consequences.
Kimble had been firm, though. He wanted to meet at the Bakehouse.
When he came through the door, Roy was taken aback by just how exhausted he looked. The chief deputy had always walked with a touch of a limp after the shooting, and stood with a posture that suggested more years than he had, but today you could have said he was fifty and no one would have blinked.
“I’ve got a story,” Roy said. “But it’s not one you’re going to want to hear, and the source is hardly reliable. It’s not just more than a century old, it was also left to us by an insane man. I don’t even know that it is going to be worth hearing.”
Kimble said, “It’ll be worth hearing. And maybe we shouldn’t judge the man’s sanity just yet.”
It was an odd thing for him to say, this man who was so painfully practical that extracting colorful quotes from him for a newspaper story had been almost impossible. Roy shrugged, said, “Okay,” and then he told him the story.
When he was through, Kimble didn’t respond right away. He sipped his coffee and looked over the notes Roy had taken in the archives, studied the pictures Wyatt had already found there, and did not speak.
“Like I told you,” Roy said, “this is probably wasting time that you can’t afford to waste. It’s a good chiller, I’ll grant that, but the idea that it has anything to do with what’s—”
“I think he was looking for Vesey,” Kimble said. “All those pictures labeled NO? I think you’re right. He must have been looking for Vesey.”
Roy sighed, lowered his voice, and said, “I hit on the same idea. Then I hit on one that’s even more absurd. I was wondering why he was content to write the names of the dead on the walls, but he used photographs for the murderers. It almost suggested that… that he had seen them, somehow. That what he was looking for was visual confirmation.”
“I believe that’s correct.”
Roy stared at him. “The story I just told you was about dead men building a bridge, Kimble. Are you being this calm about it because you’re waiting for someone to come take me away to a padded cell, or is there something I don’t understand?”
Kimble was staring out to the patio, where in warm weather the sidewalk tables were popular. Now they’d been put away for the season, and a trace of snow was beginning to gather where they’d once stood.
“There are lots of things we don’t understand,” he said. “And I’m tired of it, Darmus. I can’t bear it anymore. I’ve got an idea that might help me understand it, and it might also cost me my job by the time things are done. I think it probably will. If things go well, then my badge may be all that I lose.”
“What in the world are you talking about, Kimble?”
“There’s a ghost out there,” Kimble said, turning back to him. “Or the devil? Some combination of the two? I don’t know how to explain him, but this Vesey sounds just right. Now you’ve told me the stories you found. Let me tell you the ones I’ve found.”
He told them, while Roy’s coffee went cold and people milled around them, laughing and talking and complaining about last-minute holiday shopping and long car trips to see family in far-off places. Roy listened as the most dogmatic cop in the county spoke of specters with blue torches and bargaining that led to murder and invisible beams of light that had protected Blade Ridge for many years. He told all of this, and Roy listened, and he believed.
The time when he could not believe had passed.
“If I’m crazy,” Kimble said, watching him carefully, “at least I’ve got company. I appreciate that.”
Then Kimble told him his intention to take Jacqueline Mathis to the ridge, and Roy found himself shaking his head.
“Too dangerous for you, Kimble. Even if Grayling approved it, if something goes wrong out there and you’re left with this explanation, you’re done.”
“I know it,” Kimble said simply. “I’ve thought on that a great deal, trust me. But let me show you the other side of that coin. If I don’t take her out there, and I don’t do anything about it, and a hundred years from now someone is still adding names to that list Wyatt started… well, which would you rather have? Your parents died out there.”