The Ridge by Michael Koryta

Author:Michael Koryta [Koryta, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Tags: Fiction, Thrillers
ISBN: 9780316175357
Google: cgB_1L981tsC
Amazon: B0047Y16VC
Barnesnoble: B0047Y16VC
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2011-01-01T06:00:00+00:00

26

THE WAITER HAD JUST PLACED a thick steak and a fresh beer in front of Roy Darmus, and when his phone rang, he didn’t have much interest in answering it. The number was unfamiliar, and though he’d made a practice of answering every call during his reporting days, whatever news this might carry wasn’t going to roll out of the Sentinel’s presses. He ignored it, cut off a wedge of New York strip, and looked out the window at the town square, where a few stray snow flurries were drifting down from that web of Christmas lights that fanned out from the courthouse lawn.

Going to be a strange Christmas, he thought. What does someone do on a holiday if he’s not working?

Roy had always worked Christmas Day. Nobody else wanted to—they wanted to be with their families. Having no kids waiting at home, Roy had been happy enough to take double-time pay and maintain his own tradition, working at the news desk. This year, though, he’d have to find something to do.

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.

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