The Ridge Read Free Page B

smile. It was in the bottom right-hand desk drawer, a good five inches thick, jammed with letters. He opened it up and began to read through them, and, as he’d hoped, couldn’t help but smile. There was the savage critique of his story judgment from a woman who wanted to let the public know that she and her husband had caught the
exact
same smallmouth bass on the
exact
same day, and just what was the matter with him that he didn’t think people would be interested in that? There was the collection of letters from a group of neighbors who had recorded sightings of a sasquatch—well, it was probably a sasquatch but potentially a wolf capable of walking on its hind legs, which was
twice
as alarming, didn’t he think? There was a note from a woman who was certain her neighbor was breaking into her house to use her Jacuzzi andasserted that she had the pubic hair to prove it, and the allegation that the mayor had been sighted in Maloney Park in carnal embrace with a sheep.
    He remembered them all, remembered sharing them with Donita or Laura or Stewart and sharing laughs. There would be no more crank letters here, there would be no more laughs. The smile gone from his face, he set the folder on top of his desk with a sigh and walked all the way into the break room in search of coffee, pulling up short when he saw the pot was gone. Right. He turned on his heel, and had just settled back down at his desk when the phone rang.
    It was startlingly loud in the empty newsroom, which was going dark as the stormy day faded to night. Roy picked it up and said hello.
    “Mr. Darmus. This is Wyatt French.”
    “Oh. Hot-tip time?”
    Old Wyatt was a well-known figure to those in the newsroom and those in the liquor business. He didn’t appear to intersect with much else, just booze and bizarre news. Roy had written about the old man’s lighthouse once, and apparently Wyatt had appreciated the tenor of the piece, because he’d taken to calling every so often with what he referred to as “hot tips.” They generally involved police misconduct or local bars that served watered-down bourbon. Lately the calls had been focused on the pending relocation of an exotic-cat rescue center to his isolated stretch of the woods. Wyatt did not approve of the facility, at least not across from his home. Today he’d either missed the fact that the newspaper was no longer in business or he was too drunk to remember.
    “Mr. Darmus, I wanted to tell you… wanted to ask that you…”
    “Buddy, we’re out of the tip business, I’m afraid,” Roy said, smiling, but then the smile faded when he heard French’s ragged breathing.
    “It will be very important to keep the light on when I’m gone,” Wyatt French said. “Very important.”
    “You’re leaving?”
    “I’d like to say otherwise, Mr. Darmus. I would so dearly like to say otherwise.”
    Roy frowned. “Wyatt, what’s wrong?”
    “You were right about this place, you know. You just didn’t look far enough. Didn’t look hard enough. I don’t blame you. There’s more to it than I can explain, and more than a sane man would pause to hear. I’m not one who would be heard, anyhow. The mountain could tell it, if it could talk.”
    “I don’t understand.”
    “Of course you don’t. You haven’t got the faintest notion what I’m talking about. I did more than most, though. I fought it.”
    “Let’s slow down,” Roy said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    “If I felt I could make a soul believe me, I might stay around to try. The longer I stay, though, the greater the risk. I’m getting scared of the dark coming. I’m getting scared of what I could do in the dark.”
    The rant faded back to ragged inhalations. The breathing of a panicked man. Roy’s frown deepened.
    “Wyatt, do you need help out there?”
    “Oh, yes. Help is needed out here. For me? Sure. For you? Absolutely. I tried to provide it. I did what I could. You tell them that. You tell them that