House of Mercy (18 page)

Garner laid his clippers on the table next to a plastic planter and sighed. He didn’t really have the heart to do any basement gardening today, regardless of what the plants needed. He sank onto a metal stool and felt his hip bones complain about the uncomfortable seat.

The weather had been so nice, and the tourists so numerous, that he’d opened up his house upstairs to allow an afternoon mountain breeze to clear out his rooms. The scent of sunshine drifted down into the basement but did nothing to revive his passions.

Cat Ransom sat on a matching stool and clipped peppermint sprigs from a full pot that sat between them. The fantastic bunches of arnica and yarrow she’d brought for Garner were hanging up to dry under a heat lamp. Not even these generous gifts had cheered him up.

“It’s a beautiful day,” she said. “Maybe you should leave this for a bit and go for a walk. Want to get a bite to eat?”

He couldn’t decide if he was hungry or not.

“As your friend, Garner, I have to say that you’re not doing your plants any good while you’re in this brooding frame of mind. The great thing about this setup of yours is that you can work down here any time of the day or night. The work’ll be here when you’re feeling better. Let’s get some fresh air.”

He continued to sit. “I don’t know, Cat. What am I doing here? I’ve been here in Burnt Rock . . . oh, how long now? Almost twenty years. When I first came here I thought it would just be for a year or two. I needed the isolation. I never thought it would go on this long.”

“It’s remote, sure. But you can’t say you’re isolated anymore, can you?”

He shrugged. “Depends on what you mean. From friends like you—no. ’Course not. They’re good people here.” He took a deep breath. “For the first few years I was really obsessed with my ex. I couldn’t figure out even after we split what her real complaint with me was. She said I was either a blockhead or a world-class con. I thought that after a while she might come back and explain herself a little more clearly. I was willing to give it another go, but she wasn’t into second chances.”

“Some people don’t know how to forgive,” Cat said.

“Well, she remarried. Even that didn’t totally dampen my spirits. That didn’t happen until the cancer took her. After all that, we were destined for the same fate.”

“That’s not true.”

“Maybe I could’ve been a help to her in the end, if she’d have let me.”

Cat stroked a peppermint leaf between her thumb and forefinger.

Garner cleared his throat. “Rose is all that’s left of that part of my life. She was twenty-three when she walked out. And sometimes when I consider she’s been away from me for more years than she was with me, it takes all the wind out of my sails. How long does a person have to wait for what’s upside down to right itself again?”

“Have you tried to contact her?”

“I wrote to her for a while in the beginning. Letters, postcards. She never replied.” He picked up his shears and used the tip to scrape green chlorophyll out from under his nails. “I miss her,” he said.

Cat stood and averted her face as she walked down a long aisle between two of the stainless tables. “Maybe one of the reasons you’re still here is because destiny knew I would need you to be my friend. My story is a mirror of yours, you know.”

“You have a daughter?” Garner was surprised. She’d never spoken of family.

“No—I had a father who wouldn’t accept me for what I was.”

“That’s outrageous. You’re gifted and lovely and successful and kind. He must have been an ungrateful man.”

She glanced his way. “I had pretty serious learning disabilities as a kid. A lot of struggles and delays. I think they embarrassed him.”

“That’s shameful.”

“Things got easier. It was hard work, but I wanted to please him so badly that I doubled my efforts in everything—therapy, school, extracurricular stuff. I graduated from medical school with top honors.”

“Of course you did!”

“After my graduation ceremony I took him out to dinner at his favorite restaurant. I said, ‘So what do you think, Dad?’ He said, ‘I’ll be impressed if you can complete your residency.’ A client called him away before he finished eating, and he left me with the tab.”

“Give me his phone number. I’ll give the man a lecture.”

“He died when I was in my third year.”

Garner shook his head and cursed under his breath. He had the sense that Cat meant to cheer him up with that story, but it only deepened his melancholy. If there was a worthy point, he hoped she would make it soon.

“It must have been hard to cope with that,” he said.

“If I had been in a different career, I might not have survived,” she said. “But everyone is so grateful and affirming. I can find all the acceptance I need in my patients.”

“Regardless, you didn’t deserve that kind of treatment from your father, Cat, girl. No one does.”

He heard footsteps cross his threshold on the floor above.

“Garner? You down there, old badger?”

On a typical day, the sound of Dotti Sanders’ voice was one that brought on a certain amount of hearing loss in Garner. Today, oddly, Dotti’s sweet and heavy perfume grabbed his attention. Of course, it overpowered the fresh air and had apparently killed all sense of smell in her own nose, but Dotti’s energetic personality could be highly motivational, especially when it came to selling rafting trips to visitors. Garner wasn’t interested in any whitewater today, but he could use some strong motivational energy.

Her thick ankles and trendy neon walking shoes—something orange and sparkly designed for the twenty-and-under crowd—appeared on the third stair from the top. She bent at the waist and peered under the hanging lights in his direction.

“Hiya, Miss Marple.” Originally, he’d not given her the nickname in kindness. She was an energetic, ubiquitous, sugary sweet busybody who didn’t know a thing about plants and wanted him to educate her. He hadn’t known at the time that she was fond of the fictional detective and thought he was paying her a high compliment. That revelation came later, when she suggested he participate in the Women’s Auxiliary Group reading of an Agatha Christie novel.

“Got any murders for me to solve today?” she asked him, bent and clutching the rail. Her curly gray locks bobbed, and he feared she might do a somersault down the stairs. On purpose.

“I lost a rosemary plant.”

“Rosemary’s impossible to kill, you told me.”

“And yet I did it.” Garner pointed toward a sorry-looking woody shrub without a hint of green on it.

“What a man you are, able to do the impossible.”

“I guess that’s one way of looking at it.”

“Hi, Dr. Ransom.”

“Hello.” The tone of Cat’s voice was so flat that Garner turned to look at the doctor. She appeared stricken by Dotti’s interruption.

“Or we might say it was bound to happen in a dark place like this,” Dotti continued, still talking about the herb. “It’s just beyond me that you can keep anything alive down here.”

“And yet I run a successful business doing it.”

“Yes, well, there you go, doing the impossible again. Forgive me, Garner, but it’s a cave in spite of these glaring lights. I fear I’ll come down straight into the jaws of a saber-toothed tiger. I’ve come to fetch you for lunch.”

“But I just ate breakfast.”

“Nonetheless, an hour with a friend will do your heart good.”

“My heart is perfectly healthy. And as you see, Cat’s here.”

“The good doctor is welcome to join us, if she has the stomach for it. Don’t be a meathead, dear.”

“What’s this, Marple? You never give a gentleman notice?”

“That’s ridiculous. I’ve had two husbands, and neither of them ever needed notice if I had food to put in front of them. It might be a stretch to say they were gentlemen, but that’s neither here nor there.”

“But what makes lunch so urgent today?”

“The sandwich shop has come up with some new ‘mountaineer’ concoction, and I want to try it.”

“What’s on it?”

“They say it’s elk, but if it is, it’s got to be a freezer-bitten slab from last year’s hunting season.”

“An elk sandwich?”

“With grilled onions and banana peppers. And melted cheese to cover up the horror of it all.”

“My heart might be worse off after lunch than before,” Garner said, raising his eyebrows in Cat’s direction.

She said, “I’ll have to advise against it.”

“They’re calling it a ‘seasonal special,’ ” Dotti said. “That means they don’t need repeat business, just enough people to buy it one time. I tell you, that Mazy is cleaning out before the men start to bring back their fresh kills. Can you believe the things outsiders will fall for? For goodness’ sake! It’s August. Who eats any kind of melt this time of year?”

“Am I to understand that your lunch invitation is actually a dare?” Garner said. This was just the medicine his spirits had anticipated.

“If that makes you more inclined to come. I’m just doing my part to keep this town alive. A twelve-dollar sandwich will take us a ways. And it’ll buy you and me some goodwill come January when all she’s offering to everyone else is canned tomato soup.”

Garner started chuckling as Dotti returned to the main level of the house.

“I want a few sprigs of your perfect mint if you’ll cut some before you come up,” she called. “You put the grocery store to shame, Garner—it’s algae, what they sell. Don’t make me wait. Lunch rush is upon us.”

When he stood, his hips were flexibly fiftyish again. He picked up his clippers and marched to the mint. Snip-snipped quickly and headed for the stairs, light on his feet. Surprise, surprise. What tea couldn’t fix, perhaps a stringy, greasy meal with a decent woman would.

“You coming?” he asked Cat when he reached the bottom step and realized she wasn’t following him.

“Mm, no. It’s still a bit early for me to be eating.”

“Well, I can see why a young thing like you wouldn’t want to hang out with old fuddy duddies like us.”

“I’ll watch the shop if you like,” Cat offered. “No appointments until three, and the tourists have been keeping themselves out of trouble.”

“No, don’t bother with that. I’ll just hang the sign in the window.”

From upstairs, Dotti hollered, “Are you down there getting cold feet? It’s
lunch
, dear! Not a wedding!”

“Right there!” Garner hollered.

“And change out of those ridiculous red clogs! They’re an embarrassment.”

“Only if you take the tangerines off your feet!” He started to ascend. He said to Cat, “Go do something fun for once, if you have free time.”

She was still nodding when he reached the top of his stairs.

Was Garner leaving her? The question rattled Cat to the core. She wasn’t asking whether he was leaving her for lunch, or leaving her for another doctor. She wanted to know if he was leaving his role as her surrogate father. What man who intended to stay in her life could be tempted away so easily by a heartburn-inducing sandwich? Had he heard anything she was trying to tell him?

The story she told was true. It was the story of Katrina White’s childhood.

Cat sank onto the stool Garner had vacated and stared at the rows of plants. She didn’t cry. Her lifetime allotment of tears had been spent by the time she was sixteen. But she fretted and she worried. And she felt the pressure of anxiety closing in around her lungs.

Garner was a better man than her father. That much had been made clear from the first day she met the herbalist. It was
the
reason why she had decided to stay on in Burnt Rock after the first year. In twelve months the old man had showered her with more praise and affection than her father was capable of producing in a lifetime.

Cat had hoped that Garner would also be a better man than Newell Reinhart, the father of her young patient Amelia. Cat—no, Katrina—had first fallen in love with the child, a precious thing with a weak body and a strong, strong spirit. Amelia thought Katrina ruled the stars. Amelia brought her gifts. Amelia filled her office with crayon drawings and second-grade poetry.

As for Newell, Cat fell in love with his devotion to his daughter before she’d fallen in love with the man himself.