The Ridge Read Free

Sawyer County traffic,” she said. “Yes, that area around the courthouse gets pretty gridlocked for about two minutes each morning. Particularly now, with the students home for the holidays? Why, you might have to sit through one entire red light.”
    He didn’t answer.
    “You don’t like the idea,” she said. “Do you? Me being out of here, even for a few hours.”
    “That’s not true,” he said, and maybe it wasn’t. Maybe he liked the idea an awful lot.
    “Well, I like it,” she said. “Out of these walls, out of these clothes. Do you know how long it’s been since I wore something other than this?”
    She grasped her orange shirt between her thumb and index finger and tugged it away from her body. He got a glimpse of her collarbone and below it smooth, flawless skin.
    “You could drop by there sometime,” she said. “You know—see me on the
outside.
” She shifted her tone to a theatrical whisper and capped it off with a wink. He could feel his dick begin to stiffen, performing against his will, his own body laughing at him. He got to his feet abruptly, making his arousal evident.
    “Kevin?”
    “I’ve got to get started back,” he said. “It’s a long drive. Too long.”
    “Why are you leaving so early? Did I say something—”
    “Be safe,” he said, the same thing he always said, and walked to the door, using his hand to adjust himself within his pants, not wanting the attendant CO to see
that
development.
    “I thought you would be happy for me. I thought if there was one person in the world who’d be happy for me, it would be you.”
    “I am happy for you, Jacqueline. Goodbye.”
    By the time the guards opened the door, he had his police eyes back.
    It had been a long drive for a short visit. That was how it went with her. He could never stay too long.
    Be careful with her,
Wyatt French had told him.
    Yeah, buddy. Listen to the old drunk. Watch your ass, Kimble.
    Be very careful with her.

3
     
    T HE
SAWYER COUNTY SENTINEL
WAS at 122 years and counting when they shut it down. Peak circulation, 33,589. On the last day, they printed 10,000 copies. That was a bump, too, operating with an expectation that the locals would want their piece of history, so the
Sentinel
printed extras to make certain they could shake an ash out of the urn for everybody who wanted one.
    The staff—nineteen members strong at the end, down from forty-eight at the start of Roy Darmus’s career—blew the corks off a few bottles of champagne at five that afternoon and passed glasses around the newsroom and cried. Every last one of them. The editors, the reporters, the pressmen. Even J. D. Henry, the college intern, couldn’t help it. He’d been with them all of two months, but there he was leaning on a desk and sipping champagne he wasn’t old enough to drink legally and wiping tears from his eyes. Because they were a family, damn it, and it was a business that had spanned more than a century and told the stories of a community day by day and year by year longer thananyone alive could remember, and now it was gone. Who could be part of that and not cry?
    When the champagne was gone, they’d all moved on to Roman’s Tavern, had burgers and onion rings and pitchers of beer and told stories that had been told a hundred times before, treating each one like new material.
    Sometime around midnight, as awkward silences were becoming more common than bursts of laughter, J. D. Henry commented on how strange it had been to look around the place and see all those empty desks.
    “Weren’t all empty,” Donita Hadley said. She’d been writing obits for thirty years, and if there was anyone who wouldn’t miss the details of a death, it was Donita. “Roy’s got his work cut out for him yet.”
    How in the hell she’d known that, Roy couldn’t say. He’d taken everything off the cubicle walls and cleared the surface of his desk, but he hadn’t touched the drawers. Perhaps she’d opened them, snooping around. But