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Authors: Erin Healy

Tags: #Christian, #Suspense, #Fiction

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BOOK: House of Mercy
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“You’ve outdone yourself,” Cat said to Garner.

He sandwiched her hand in his and squeezed. “I can’t think of anyone else I’d rather celebrate,” he said.

“The food was amazing, and everyone is being so kind.”

“You bet they are. No one else in this town is quite so easy to like as you. You’re good for us all.” The bookseller Nova was sitting alone at her table as Garner and Cat passed by. “Are you coming?” he asked her. Though Nova looked at Garner when he spoke to her, she gave no answer.

Mazy appeared at Garner’s side. “That one’s a bit off in the head,” the restaurateur said of Nova in low tones.

“Balderdash. She’s of sounder mind than I am,” Garner said. “And thoughtful too. She recycles all her glass jars and lets me pick out the ones I can use at the shop.”

Mazy made a
pfft
sound with her lips. “Frankly, I’m surprised she’s here.”

“You shouldn’t say stuff like that. She’s always real sweet to me. And the most well-read person I’ve ever met. Don’t you think so too, Cat? You probably know her better than anyone here.”

Cat lifted her eyebrows but didn’t reply, because of course, thought Garner, she was too professional and polite for this kind of nonsense.

The room where the residents of Burnt Rock gathered this lovely summer night was a theater in the round. Its beautiful domed roof boasted skylights that were big enough to see the stars sparkling in the cobalt blue sky. At the center of the circular space, a glowing fire pit that was never extinguished reflected Garner’s everlasting good mood.

Almost four hundred people filed in quickly, chattering like morning birds though the sun had set, many still holding drinks and plates of food as they squeezed onto the long benches that encircled the dancing fire pit. The gathering place didn’t exactly accommodate a crowd this size, but no one seemed to mind.

“Thank you, all!” Garner’s strong voice rapidly settled the crowd. “Thank you for coming up here tonight to celebrate my fifty-ninth birthday!”

Everyone laughed at that, and Hank yelled from the back, “And my twenty-first is tomorrow! C’mon by the hardware store—we’ll be serving shots of prune juice on the house!”

Garner drew Cat to stand next to him while the chuckling rippled around the room and finally settled into attentive silence. “All right, all right, so this old body can’t pass for fifty-nine anymore, but I am here to tell you something even more unbelievable: today my oncologist called me himself to say that my aggressive cancer has met its match.” Garner placed his arm around Cat’s shoulder and squeezed her with a sideways hug. “It’s true. That beast hasn’t spread by a single cell in the last three months. Now, the oncologist is a man of modern medicine, and you all know I don’t shun that—on the contrary, I’m grateful. But I know something else too. We all know it. And that is that we have a fine young doctor of our own among us, an attentive and smart woman who knows a thing or two about complementary therapies.”

A flurry of whistles and applause rippled around the room.

Garner held up a finger. “You know the world’s been turned upside down when someone from the big bad corporate hospitals has a kind word to say about a small-town physician.” Garner looked at Cat. “He gives you his compliments, my dear. And all of us here give you our thanks.”

“Hear, hear!” someone shouted.

“Until Dr. Ransom wandered into town one year ago today, we all limped along with our illnesses. We hunkered down here until our colds turned to infections and our flus turned to the plague and minor accidents became ‘conditions.’ We couldn’t see a doctor without driving a hundred miles down the mountain to the nearest emergency care center, spending all our money on gas and those waiting room vending machines, only to be told by big shots who don’t even know us to take two aspirin and come on back down in the morning.”

A few people booed.

“And then this young lady showed up on my doorstep with her magic bag, wanting to buy my medicinal herbs for her new clinic, and we all felt the earth shift, didn’t we?” The room rippled with bobbing heads and murmurs of agreement. “My dear Cat, you’re blushing! You probably know from our collective blood pressure that we’ve all been sitting on pins and needles waiting to see if you’d survive your first winter here—and it didn’t go easy on you, did it? No one before has loved us enough to also abide our desolate location and our annoying small-town habits. We are, after all, kind of like that extended family that gathers for Christmas dinner and gets snowed in together for unbearable weeks.”

Cat rolled her eyes. “You are not.”

“And yet she so far has not tired of our quirks, our complaints, or our ailments, real and—in your case, Hank—imagined. My friends,” Garner said over the guffaws, “Dr. Catherine Ransom has decided to call herself one of the family. Her Burnt Rock private practice is, as of this week, officially permanent, and tonight we welcome her with joy and gratitude.”

Garner led the group in applause that swelled around the room. And as it grew, he felt the warmth of the little fire at his back and the peace that had been growing in his heart across the past year. Emotion rose in his throat, and he raised his hands for quiet.

“Many of you know that I . . . that I lost a daughter many, many years ago.” He briefly pursed his lips and removed his wire-rimmed glasses. “But tonight is not a night for sad stories. I just wanted to point out that the condition of our bodies is often an indication of the condition of our hearts, and when you came here last year, Cat, I was a dying man. But you . . . you have a gift of healing, and such a big heart, and I just want to say”—he resented these watery eyes that came with his age!—“that I think of you like my daughter come home.”

The moment commanded a respectful silence. Cat tilted her head sweetly, accepting the compliments with the sophisticated smile of a fine woman, the kind of woman he’d once thought his only child might grow up to be.

“I’d be a fool to leave a place full of this much respect and appreciation,” Cat said. “Some people have real families who are far less kind to each other than all of you have been to me. I hope you all know how much Burnt Rock has done to improve the quality of my life too. And so I thank you from the bottom of my heart for making it so easy to stay.”

She placed her hand over her heart and dipped her head while everyone beamed at her. Everyone but Nova, whose wide eyes and frail body had always reminded Garner of a starving baby bird. She stood at the back of the room behind the crowd where she was nearly invisible, her brows drawn together.

Garner returned his glasses to his face and clapped his hands once. “Well, I know each person here tonight feels similarly about you in one way or another, and so—everyone! Many of you have already had much to say to Dr. Ransom, but all compliments bear repeating. She’ll be manning the dessert table, and the price for Mazy’s cherry cobbler is a word of thanks to our very fine, very own doctor!”

Nova’s departure was as swift as it was stealthy. She received none of the syrupy cobbler and liquid ice cream at the outdoor dessert table, though she could have been the first in line. Garner tried not to fret over this. It seemed no one else had noticed. Except Cat, whose eyes alighted on Nova’s tiny form for mere seconds as the bookseller left alone via the dirt trail that led back into town.

It was the only time Garner had ever seen Cat scowl.

4

J
ava Java Go Joe died the night of her undoing, as Beth came to think of it. She was unconscious or sleeping or some combination of the two until the moment that the beautiful broken stallion was put down, after he’d suffered for more than five hours.

While she was unaware of her surroundings—while Phil and Fiona searched for her in the blackness, found the unspeakable devastation, and then waited to get help almost as long as they’d waited to treat Marigold—Beth developed a vivid memory that could only have been a dream, except that there was physical evidence of its reality. In this state, she understood that the hundred-plus-pound wolf took the collar of her shirt in its teeth and dragged her around Joe’s groaning, heaving body. Somehow, the rein that had held her wrist captive during the fall released it.

The wild dog dropped her close enough to Joe’s shattered leg that Beth could smell the blood that seeped out of the Thoroughbred’s broken skin. She rolled away, confusion gradually suffocating her mind. In her dream, the wolf’s muzzle worked under her hip like a pry bar under a boulder, leveraging her toward the fallen horse. She resisted the force until the delusion ended.

It was the gunshot ending Joe’s agony that brought her around, the burst so close to her head that she thought the bullet had split her own scalp in two. There was no wolf, but Mr. Kandinsky was bent over her throbbing, rigid body, his face a mixture of anxiety and fury.

Joe’s owner, whom she soon came to know as Anthony Darling, was poised to insert his rage into the Borzois’ life the way a climbing ivy invades every fissure in an established brick building and reduces it to dust. The retired champion jockey had an ego ten times the size of his own body and a net worth that could seduce any money-hungry attorney.

Near her head, Mr. Darling waved the gun he’d just discharged into Joe’s ear, spewing curses at her. She would suffer long in the misery he was about to create for her, he promised her that.

Phil tried to put distance between Mr. Darling and the scene, perhaps trying to prevent the mercy killing from becoming an act of revenge as well. Mr. Kandinsky noticed this intervention as if he was noticing Phil for the first time since the drama had been exposed. He fired Phil on the spot.

The sun rising behind the eastern Sangre de Cristos caused long shadows to fall on them all. Beth wished the very mountains would collapse and bury her before she was forced to rise and face her parents’ disbelief and try to make amends. She had faith that the mountain could move. She told it to. The mountain refused.

It took less than a week for the wealthy breeder to level his promise against Beth in the form of a lawsuit. This was the same as saying he had leveled his ire against her family and her family’s livelihood, because she was a co-owner of the Blazing B, which all Borzois became at the age of eighteen.

The claim outlined damages for the lost horse, the lost progeny of the horse, the lost progeny of the progeny, and the reduced reputation of the breeder, who might have to wait untold years until he owned a stud of Java Java Go Joe’s value once again. The demanded sum was staggering, including emotional damages for all of these real and projected losses, which had allegedly caused Mr. Darling’s latent alcoholism to rear its head, which led to further damages and losses.

Blood ties spared the Kandinskys from similar litigation.

A separate suit was filed against Phil’s family, but Beth didn’t know the details of it. She heard from the vet that Marigold had lost her eye. She didn’t call Phil, and Phil didn’t call her. She had no idea what became of the stolen saddle.

The day after having been served with legal paperwork, Beth rose at her usual hour to dress and help her mother prepare breakfast. She had been awake most of the night formulating a plan to stand between Mr. Darling and her family’s future, and she hoped they would be agreeable to it.

She scratched at the triple track of healing scabs across her collarbone where the wolf had clawed her. The doctor thought the cuts were inflicted by a shrub, and Beth hadn’t contradicted him. She rubbed antibiotic ointment into the six-inch trails before pulling on her shirt.

Her dog, Herriot, seemed to sense that Beth’s life had been disrupted, and was underfoot most days. Herriot was an Appenzell Mountain Dog, a European breed cut out for high-altitude and harsh-weather herding, even higher and harsher than Colorado’s mountains. She was a solid, stocky girl about the same weight as the average coyote, but thicker in the chest and not as tall.

The dog’s short-haired coat was the glossy color of melted chocolate. Rich white cream splashed across her chest and muzzle, cresting between her eyes. Streaks of caramel ran up all four of Herriot’s legs and also framed her happy smile with the mischievous look of a sweet-toothed troublemaker. Twin caramel dots on the inside of her brows made her seem extra intelligent to Beth, and perhaps slightly fierce from a cow’s point of view.

With the exception of Beth’s father, the dog was the only living creature at the ranch who didn’t seem to be judging Beth’s fool actions. She pressed into Beth’s legs as they went downstairs to the kitchen, bumping her haunches along the wall.

BOOK: House of Mercy
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