House of Mercy (9 page)

“It’s a four-hour drive,” she said.

“But a man is dead.”

“We’ll be dead if we attempt those mountain roads in this storm.” She didn’t meet Garner’s eyes. Cat lifted the cup to her lips, and steam snaked out around her cheeks and drifted to the back of her head like the ties of a spooky carnival mask, cloaking her expression.

Of course driving now was foolishness. What was he thinking? And yet—he sensed something more than practicality at work in Cat’s reticence. It came to him immediately. He strode across the waiting room and placed his hand firmly on Cat’s shoulder.

“You have nothing to worry over, girl. Rose can’t replace you in my life. I’m a lucky old man. I’ll have two daughters now! She’ll love you as much as I do.”

When Cat didn’t reply right away, Garner grew uncomfortable. He feared he’d exposed some vulnerable spot in the woman’s soul. Or maybe he’d overstepped his bounds in asking for a favor.

“But you should finish your tea first,” he said. “Is that my lemongrass blend? Yes, I can smell it. You take your time, girl, and then you’ll know I’m right. Tea fixes everything. Just everything.”

The doctor regarded Garner over the lip of the mug. Her blue eyes seemed unnaturally dark in the poor light of the storm, and Garner noticed that not one table lamp in the comfortable space was lit. They spoke by the shifting beams of the swinging lamps outside, and by the weak backlight that spilled out of her rear office. The effect was momentarily unsettling.

But then Cat offered him a half smile before she took another sip. She said, “Of course it does, Garner. Especially your tea. You know I’d do anything for you. But we’ll go tomorrow, not now.” Then she drank again, and the tight spot in the middle of Garner’s stomach relaxed.

“There’s no rush to leave this second,” he agreed.

“It’s safer that way.”

“It is.”

“Come have a cup with me.”

“Thank you. I will.”

“The dead are never in a hurry.”

It wasn’t the dead Garner wanted to see, but he found himself nodding in agreement anyway.

7

I
t had become Beth’s habit, when the timing of her work shifts allowed it, to take Hastings out for a ride in the summer evenings. Rather than face her family, she would slip onto the Blazing B from a rear access road, park on the backside of the barn, and fetch Hastings’ saddle before anyone knew she was home.

The first few times Beth did this, she was distracted and delayed in the tack room by the sight of the empty rack that had held the silver saddle, but she soon learned not to look at the accusing vacancy. She became efficient at saddling Hastings quickly and riding off to a creek that separated the ranch from the bordering public lands, where she’d stay until the sun set.

The day Lorena joined the family, Beth discovered Hastings waiting for her, already saddled up, gnawing on a tuft of grass that had poked its green fingers into the dusty corral. He abandoned it at the sight of her and whinnied. Descending sunlight reflected off his chestnut coat, marbling it with gold. Storm clouds gathered behind the foothills. It would be raining hard up in the San Juans.

She wondered who had noticed her habit and made this kind gesture. Even as she asked herself the question, she caught sight of a rider heading southward, away from the stables. By now he was the size of a figurine, an erect cowboy on a snowflake Appaloosa. Both the spotted mare, Gert, and the Indiana Jones hat crammed low over the man’s ears belonged to Jacob Davis.

If he had ever noticed his saddle missing, he hadn’t mentioned it to her.

Beth watched Jacob’s form diminish. “Are you courting Gert without my consent?” she murmured to Hastings while stroking his nose.

The gelding nickered, a polite insistence that butlers did not deserve their reputation as covert agents.

“Okay, then,” she said. “Let’s go.”

She mounted him from the corral rail and felt the stabbing ache in her shoulder where the wolf’s paw had torn it. The skin had healed, but the deep wound remained. Beth didn’t hint to anyone that it had been a wolf’s paw, not the blow of the fall, that crushed her. There simply was no evidence that a wolf had ever set foot on the Kandinskys’ land, or on the Blazing B. As everyone else saw it, with Phil’s help she’d kidnapped Joe, forced him to ride blind into a lather, and turned his leg in a snake hole.

When she reached a high branch of the creek, Beth dismounted and let Hastings wander while she followed the water upstream to her favorite rock, which was squat and flat. The rocks in this area were mostly black and coarse, remnants of a catastrophic super-volcano. The La Garita Caldera, a crater twenty-two miles wide and forty-seven miles long, was not far away from this very spot as the eagle flew. Eons ago, when La Garita had erupted and devastated most of the state of Colorado, it released enough pyroclastic material to have buried California in thirty-nine feet of the stuff. The event was granted a ranking in the upper tiers of Earth’s most destructive volcanic eruptions ever. And then, like a toddler wasted of energy after a tantrum, the cooling caldera had settled into a peaceful sleep.

At the base of Beth’s volcanic rock, clean snowmelt continued to run through the creek even at this time of year. The runoff had come down out of the mountains, racing downhill east of the Continental Divide toward the larger streams and rivers, watering the valley. It was pure water, famed water that poured out of these Rocky Mountains, and to Beth it represented hope. God willing, she too might emerge clean from the volcanic disaster of her own making.

From her perch she was able to lie down on her stomach and scoop a palmful of water from the stream. She drank, then washed her face and neck. After her shift at the feed-and-tack, she smelled like a barn and was covered in oat dust. Her hair, sweaty from her efforts to relocate pallets of feed sacks, had dried in stiff strands at the base of her neck and the tops of her ears.

Beth sensed the wolf before she saw it. The depression behind her collarbone seemed to deepen, and the faintest remnants of the claw tracks along her neck began to itch, way under her skin where she couldn’t have scratched. It came onto the scene like wind, not there when she reached out for the water, there when she lifted her face and felt the cool liquid running off her nose and chin. It stood on the opposite bank, head low, smudges of blood on its white muzzle.

The canine’s eyes were clear and piercing. She didn’t feel fear, not right away, though her nerves sent a low vibration along the surface of her ribs. The beast had passed up the opportunity to kill her at least once.

It was both beautiful and awful. In that instant of realizing she was not alone, before the fear set in, she felt aware that some imbalance in the world was shifting, correcting itself, that something bigger than her own trouble was about to unsettle all of her assumptions about how God worked.

Beth wiped the water off her cheek with her shoulder, eyes wide and locked on the wolf, seeing it in daylight for the first time. A male, tall and strong. It was true that the “common”
Canis lupis
had been hunted into exile by Colorado’s ranchers and hunters as World War II was dawning. But this animal was no ghost or spirit of the past. The light in his golden eyes was real, and the blood on his jaw glistened like the silver water between them, and his growl warned her that there might be a real, non-ghostly cost to her if she continued to lie there on the rock.

He was much larger than Beth in her limited experience had imagined wolves to be, at least twice the size of Herriot. The wolf’s legs were longer than she expected, and its wide head was almost too big for its slender body.

Beth stood slowly and whistled for Hastings, then sent up a prayer for God’s protection on them both. She hoped the bloody muzzle meant the wolf was no longer hungry. As her spine straightened, the wolf blinked and his shoulders relaxed, the same way Herriot did just before a stretch and a yawn.

Beth stepped off the rock. The wolf matched her step and entered the water. She headed downstream, toward the place she’d last seen Hastings, keeping the wolf in her peripheral vision. The beast crossed swiftly and came up on her side of the bank.

Dark memories of long claws at her throat and hot breath on her eyes quickened her pace. Was this the same animal that had attacked her? The seed of fear in her mind bloomed. Could he detect this emotion, the way predators could sense which targets were easiest to catch? Her airways seemed inflamed. She began to jog, her ankles wobbling on uneven ground. His stride matched hers, an easy trot.

“God have mercy,” she whispered as she ran. Last time, he had.

I will show you mercy
.

The voice that answered was not her own, wasn’t audible to her ears, but to her heart, the same as before. This time, though, the words filled her with peace instead of foreboding.

Nothing, nothing about this encounter made sense. Not even her decision to stop running, which wasn’t a decision so much as a reflex. She halted and turned to face her hunter. She had no wisdom that might keep her alive for a minute longer, but she was no longer afraid.

The wolf ran up to her and then stopped and sniffed the ground at her feet, eyes upward on her face. Seconds passed loudly in Beth’s ears like a roaring prairie wind that might be followed with equal chances by a sudden calm or a life-threatening tornado. He circled her, and she remained as still as the eye of a storm, taking deep, sweet breaths, watching him. Behind his shoulders, his lightweight fur coat stood on end and revealed long scars that ran the length of his back, four parallel stripes running all the way to his hindquarters, as if he’d narrowly escaped a predator of his own.

His orbit finished, he stopped sniffing but remained in a hostile posture, the fur on his back electrified, his muzzle low, his eyes high. And then the wolf bared his teeth and growled.

Beth scrabbled backward. Her heel met a stone and took her legs out from under her. She landed on her seat in the stream. Water soaked through her jeans in the two or three seconds it took her to get vertical again. The wolf didn’t attack but continued to press in, the way Herriot might goad a stubborn cow.

Now the ears flattened back against his head; his nose dropped another inch and his head leveled out with his neck; the lip riding high on his teeth flickered.

They understood each other then, wolf and woman. Silently, Beth agreed to follow the canine’s direction. Yielding to his push, she began a cautious backward walk in a weaving line along the bank of the creek. The sun was west of her, glaring on the ridgeline in a way that made it difficult to see. She strained her eyes to their limits, demanding they include the wolf and stumbling hazards at all times.

A scrubby stand of thinleaf alder trees had taken root near the stream. Beth reached out for one when she was close enough to touch it. The growth was sprawling and might provide a place for predator and prey to circle until she could make a plan.

She lifted her left arm behind her, into her blind spot, reaching out for leaves and branches. Her hand hit the shrub, and the foliage rustled. At the same moment, the wolf stopped. Beth froze too, and waited to see what he would do.

The air was still and the earth, dampened by the moving water, smelled like it was less than a day old.

A panting reached Beth’s ears, the quick and short breaths of someone in pain. It was the sound of her ten-year-old self the time she slipped off a boulder and caught her ankle in the marmot hole beneath it. The hurt had been so bad that long minutes passed before her body remembered where to find its tears.

But this sound wasn’t coming out of her memory. The sound wasn’t even human, and it was rising from the backside of the alder. Beth took her eyes off the wolf and looked for the source of the heaving lungs.

She immediately realized her mistake and whipped her head back around, expecting claws and snarling teeth bared under a bloody gray muzzle.

The wolf was gone.

Beth spun, searching and backing into the protection of the tree’s shelter at the same time. The slender branches of the tree-shrub snagged her hair. She had never imagined a wolf could vanish like that. The only thing worse than a wolf on the hunt, she thought, was an invisible wolf on the hunt.

Branches scratched at her cheeks and neck and hands as she circled, watchful.

At the place where the alder roots reached for the water, she stumbled over an animal lying at her feet, and the shock of the encounter pulled a yelp out of her throat. It wasn’t the wolf, though. The heaving shape of its rounded belly was smooth and shorthaired, the golden color of winter grass. Its pure white underside and matching short tail looked soft as angora, and three matching stripes circled the creature’s throat like the wide necklaces of an African beauty.

It was a pronghorn antelope. A bloody bite placed high and in front of the shoulder seemed positioned to rip these stripes right off the animal’s neck.

Perhaps Beth’s perceptions were running unnaturally high, but when she saw the wounds her hand went first to the claw scars at her own neck.

His breathing faltered when she squatted to touch the buck’s flank. When it resumed, she could hear a gurgle under the effort. Her heart broke for the animal’s suffering.

Beth’s first thought was that the wolf should have forced her
away
from his trophy. It was possible that she didn’t understand one thing at all about wolf behavior, but his pressing her this way, here, trumped all expectation.