House of Mercy (26 page)

It took her all of five minutes to pack. After that, the evening hours stretched ahead of her. She stayed in her room, studying the map. The San Luis Valley resembled the portrait silhouette of a wolf looking westward, as if its attention had been captured by some scurrying rabbit in Utah that wasn’t worth a chase. Tomorrow she would drive into the mountains via the wolf’s snout. Already she sensed its inhospitable snarl.

She missed Herriot.

She got on her laptop and Googled “Garner Remke Burnt Rock” and found a folksy, unsophisticated website devoted to medicinal herbs. Garner’s Garden. It had a Burnt Rock post office box number that matched the one on her mother’s wedding card, but the website was last updated two years ago. The phone number published there directed her call to a recorded message that said they were open for orders Monday through Friday. If she left a message a customer service representative would be happy to return her call.

“This is Beth Borzoi. I’m trying to reach Garner Remke. It’s an urgent family matter. Please call me back as soon as you get this message.” She left her number.

There was an order-fulfillment address in the Boulder area, several hours north of Burnt Rock. Based on the zip and area codes, Beth thought this might be where her voice mail message now resided. She decided to go to the mining town first, then head to Boulder if necessary.

Sleep wouldn’t come to her. Fully dressed, Beth lay awake on top of her bedding through the hours worrying. She wondered where Lorena was and suddenly feared that the girl might have run away. It was after eleven when Beth finally rose, left the room, and went in search of her.

She went as far as the top of the stairs. From the great room at the bottom of the split flight she heard Rose and Lorena talking in subdued tones.

Immediately Beth returned to her room. She pulled up her e-mail and wrote a note to Danny, the only family tie binding her to this ranch:

Hey, Danny,

Sorry to head off without saying good-bye, but I had to leave sooner than I expected. I’ll be back as soon as I can. In the meantime, if you need anything, you go to Jacob. I think Mom and Levi are going to be a little preoccupied for a while. For my part in their distraction, I’m sorry
.

You’re becoming a man in the worst circumstances. I wish I could fix everything that’s wrong with the world, but I couldn’t convince God to give me the job. Taking Joe for a joy ride kind of disqualified me, the kleptomaniac. I don’t know why God won’t fix what I can’t fix for myself, even though I’d pay any price for his help. If God can do miracles, why doesn’t he do them when we need them most?

Maybe someday we’ll know, but right now I’m holding on to the only lifeline I have. There’s room for you to grab hold too: Dad always said this ranch belongs to God, and he believed God’s mercy is great. I must believe it too. I pray every day for his mercy to swallow me up. Maybe you can be my prayer buddy in that
.

Just do your best. Back soon
.

I love you,
Beth

Again she tried to sleep. Again she failed. At four o’clock she finally pressed Send on her message to Danny, grabbed the keys off her dresser, and decided she could come up with an excuse for leaving this early if she had to. She went out of the house to her truck. It wasn’t in the front drive, where she usually parked.

She tried to think of who might have borrowed it, and why.

“Looking for something?” Levi came out the front door with his own keys jangling. He was shaking them unnecessarily, bursting with something to say. Had he been waiting for her? She waited for him to say it.

“Sold your truck last night.”

At first Beth didn’t believe him. He’d jab her and jab her and jab her until he grew bored. She headed down the side of the house intending to look for her truck at the back, where the kitchen entry was.

“Some kid needed it for the college commute. He came by for a look after dinner, had cash. The timing worked out well, I think. We were a little short on the funeral budget.”

Beth was struck by how much his statement had sounded like her own justification for stealing Jacob’s saddle. She couldn’t come up with a retort that didn’t condemn herself. Had they guessed that she would run? Were they trying to keep her close to home until the papers were signed? But it was a dumb idea to tell Beth to leave and then take away her transportation. Maybe the truck wasn’t actually sold, only hidden somewhere.

“You got somewhere to go?” Levi asked.

“Work.”

“It’s Sunday morning. Feed-and-tack doesn’t open until noon.”

“There’s plenty to be done before then,” she reasoned.

“Well, I’m headed in the other direction or I’d give you a lift.” He didn’t sound sorry about that at all. “Guess you’ll have to take the horse.”

“Guess so.”

“We wouldn’t sell Hastings, you know. He’ll come in handy.”

When Levi’s taillights were tiny red pricks in the gray morning light, Beth went to the barn. She whistled for Hastings and went inside to get his saddle. She also grabbed a bedroll, a blanket, a canteen, and a rain jacket, all of which could be easily strapped to his back. A large flashlight from one of the drawers in the feed room went into her backpack.

It didn’t take long for her to be mounted and riding away. Behind her, the sun wasn’t even yet a glimmer on the eastern rim of the Sangre de Cristos. She gave herself an hour to search for the truck, which wasn’t really a fair shake on ten square miles of land. But she couldn’t afford more time than that, or she might be discovered and made a prisoner in her own house.

She ruled out the Hub and the buildings closest to it. Levi wouldn’t have put her truck anywhere the other ranch hands might have found it. They’d only deliver it right back to her doorstep. She went instead to the more remote areas of the property that backed up into the foothills, which also had more trees, shrubs, and grasses grown tall and ungrazed through the summertime. As the morning sky shifted from its dark gray hues to pinkish reds, Beth and Hastings picked their way from north to south underneath a ledge of volcanic rock that hid them in its shadow.

There was no sign of her truck. No tire tracks, no foliage crushed by a vehicle passing through. Beth looked for two hours instead of one, and the August sun quickly grew warm even in the shade.

She drew Hastings to the creek for some water and let him drink. As he filled his belly, she turned her face westward. It might be possible to ride her horse to Burnt Rock; there were plenty of trails through these rugged mountains, trails used for more than a century by miners and prospectors, and then by ranchers and pool riders driving their herds uphill for summer grazing. She’d have to check the trail maps, because leaving a marked path in these lands would be idiotic. The map she carried, unfortunately, didn’t have these details.

It had been a long time since Beth had sat and listened to the sounds of the land. It was eerily silent this morning, with the cows miles away in the mountains and the hot morning air too still to stir the leaves or grasses. The water at Hastings’ lips was also quiet, trickling now at the end of summer. The noise of his drinking and dribbling was a pleasant disruption.

She heard a dog bark. A faraway yip of excitement. Hastings lifted his head and flicked his ears in the direction of the sound.

When Beth was a little girl, Rose had once tried to explain to her that mothers of mammal species were uniquely equipped to recognize their offspring’s cries. A cow could find its calf among thousands of cattle, even if separated by miles. A human mother was so attuned to her infant’s cries that the sound alone could cause her milk to let down. And not only did a mother recognize her child’s cries, but she could distinguish among these as well: the hungry cry from the sleepy cry from the sick cry, and so on.

Beth understood this on some level, because even though she wasn’t technically a mother, she had raised her dog, Herriot, by hand when the mother rejected the runt. She believed she could recognize Herriot’s bark and distinguish between the types: the get-along-dumb-cow bark, the intruder-alert bark, the boy-am-I-happy-to-see-you bark.

This distant bark belonged to Herriot, and it fell into the last category.

Beth nudged Hastings to cross the creek bed in the direction of the sound. She half expected Herriot to launch herself out of the shrubs and onto the horse’s back, clinging to Beth and washing her face with her thick tongue until both of them fell out of the saddle.

The grasping branches of a willow caught the corners of her eyes as Hastings came up the other bank. The horse seemed to sense what Beth wanted, and needed no guidance in following the happy noise, which repeated itself in more or less the same manner every few minutes.

After gaining some height and a slightly better view on the rocky slope, where the trees were fewer in number than they were at the creek, Beth thought it strange that Herriot hadn’t made any move toward her. Maybe the dog was captive, secured by a leash or a cage, and had merely caught Beth’s scent.

Hastings didn’t hesitate to go on, even when doubt crept across Beth’s thoughts. The second realization to trouble her was that the volume of Herriot’s bark hadn’t changed in the half hour she’d been pursuing it. Surely it should be growing louder. Even if the rocks and trees and slopes, now rising more steeply with every quarter mile, had distorted or cloaked the source of the bark, it seemed to Beth that the volume should be changing.

Two hours later she wished she had turned back then, at the moment she thought something was wrong, before she realized that she was far from any familiar trail and had no map or food, before trees started filling the landscape once more and crowding her perspective. But the sound of her lost dog’s happy cries had a stronger pull than her good sense. Truly, Beth had expected to find Herriot long before all the ponderosas started to look the same and the sun had come to a point so directly overhead that she lost all sense of direction. The dog had sounded so much closer.

Still the pleasant barking continued, and Hastings showed no sign of fatigue. What was there to do but continue until a smarter alternative presented itself ?

When Beth saw the prints of a mountain lion in the rain-moistened soil, she decided she was the stupidest person to ever wander into these mountains.

It was impossible for her to tell how old the prints were. The cougar might have passed through a week ago or a minute ago. When the tracks veered north and her dog’s barking stayed to the south, Beth felt relief.

She and Hastings went on like this for a long time, with the sun continuing its arc and the prompting of her dog always the same distance ahead of them. The birdsong had long shifted from busy morning chatter into the infrequent afternoon communication. They’d soon return to their nests, and it seemed more and more likely that Beth might be staying overnight outdoors, where cougars prowled.

This thought took up hardly any space in her head compared to the mystery of the sound they followed. Why was it always in front of her, like a carrot dangling from a stick tied to her own horse? She felt as if she’d lost Herriot all over again. She began to doubt that the noise belonged to anything real, though it sounded as real as Beth’s own breathing.

And then the barking stopped. The white-trunked aspen trees in front of Beth parted onto a steep bluff. The lip of it dropped away into a narrow valley cut in half by a snaking stream. The water poured off rocks at the west end and then meandered away through a pass to the southeast.

Beth reined in Hastings. She paid little attention to the vista. Most of her mind was focused on the hope that she’d hear Herriot again.

A crackling of underbrush caught her attention. Beth turned her head and saw a golden mountain lion with a wide white muzzle and a tail as thick as her arm already airborne. It was aiming for a meal.

Beth’s limbs seized up. Her only reflex was to call up an image of that wolf leaping out of darkness. Oddly, Hastings didn’t seem to notice that he was a target. She didn’t understand anything about those two seconds of her life:
Tick
and there was a fang-bared cougar flying at her;
tock
and the cat dropped to the ground like a fighter jet struck midair by a missile.

The mountain lion tangled with a mass of long gray fur that was no match for its own great size. In spite of this inequality, they tumbled all the way to the edge of the bluff, snarling and snapping. Freed from her shock then, Beth kicked Hastings and reined him away from the fight.

The horse didn’t respond.

Beth yelled at him, kicked harder, yanked on the reins.

Hastings snorted and stayed put.

The animal kingdom has gone mad!

It was a wolf that had intercepted the wildcat—no, not just a wolf, but
that
wolf, the one that had disrupted her life. The one with the four-clawed scar striping its back. The ferocious creatures fought at the brink like men with a score to settle, all teeth and claws.

Once she accepted the wolf’s identity, she also knew that she wouldn’t be able to run away. If Joe couldn’t outrun this wolf, the butler Hastings was lost already. That would explain why he so senselessly hung around, waiting for the inevitable.

Resignation was one thing—but why wasn’t he afraid? She was terrified. She thought of her pocketknife and wished she had thought to bring a gun.