House of Mercy (19 page)

But he too went away. As it turned out, most people in the world did not know that love was created to be reciprocal. Katrina White especially was victimized by this failure, used up by ungrateful souls who demanded she cure their every ailment and then disappeared without even a thank-you the moment they could manage their own health again.

Cat’s breathing had wandered into the shallow memories of Newell and Amelia Reinhart. She had cured Amelia, and in thanks, Newell had returned the child to her previous life—a life that did not include Katrina White.

She couldn’t live with that again.

Walk with me, Garner
, she said to her father figure.

No, fool girl. But I will walk with Dotti
.

Dotti had a sturdy build that was more agile than it appeared, and better suited to this high-altitude environment than a body that age ought to be. The doctor often thought of her—affectionately of course—as a marmot. She was squat and thick, not fat, and Cat had come to believe that at least half the woman’s body was a cavern for the largest set of lungs ever found in a human being. Dotti was never breathless, although many athletes found Burnt Rock’s air too thin.

Cat had to stop Garner from leaving. She needed him to stay, to remember just how much he loved his daughter. His daughter, Catherine Ransom.

Cat found a scrap of paper on a table under the wall phone and wrote a hasty note.

Garner—Dinner at my place Saturday night, 7 sharp. Bring your friend. Affectionately, Cat

17

I
t might have been a thunderclap that woke Beth from her nightmare. When her eyes popped open in the darkness of her bedroom, the sound of driving rain filled her ears. It trampled the roof of the house like stampeding cattle and flailed at the window like a flock of trapped birds. The fright of her dream lingered, though the images and story line had evaporated.

She thought she’d been dreaming of Levi.

Salt tracks from dried tears cracked on the surface of her cheeks.

At the foot of Beth’s bed, in the trench between Beth’s and Lorena’s legs, Herriot was also awake. The dog’s eyes and ears were alert to the closed door until Beth rose to her elbows. Herriot gave her a glance, but when Beth didn’t offer instructions, the dog resumed her watch.

Lorena was dead to the world, having exhausted herself with sobbing past midnight, as if Abel had been her best friend rather than a man she barely knew. Beth had awkwardly and ineffectively tried to comfort her.

But now a noise Beth couldn’t hear over the clatter of the rain brought Herriot to all four feet. Her ears, soft triangles bowed over the sides of her face, lifted, but her tail, which usually curled like a snail’s shell up onto her back, drooped.

Beth pushed the sheet off her legs and slipped out of bed. When her toes touched the floor, Herriot jumped down and waited for her. The clock on the nightstand said it was after four.

She pulled the door open onto a pitch black hall and Herriot trotted out ahead of her, toenails clicking down the flight of stairs to the left of Beth’s door. Danny’s room was a black cave opposite hers. To her right, at a distance, was the master bedroom. Levi slept downstairs, near the kitchen, in a room originally designed for the housekeeper.

The Blazing B hadn’t had a housekeeper for twenty years.

Beth followed Herriot down the stairs without turning on any lights. The stairway turned back on itself halfway down and dropped into the great room, where the red brick hearth was cold.

This room was the family gathering place from October through spring. This was where the five Borzois would assemble during rainy days, and on Christmas morning, and on winter Sundays when Pastor Eric would bring church to them. The comfortable space was spread with handwoven rugs and cracked-leather reading chairs, tables for chess or puzzles or hot coffee, an old faded pool table with several patched holes in the felt, and cues of varying lengths that Levi and Danny never put away.

The rain sounded distant on this lower level of the house. Less threatening.

Beth needed no light to cross this area. The shadows had not changed in her lifetime. She had spent years in this room looking after Danny, rolling balls to him and building Lego trains with him and reading stories aloud for him while their parents worked.

Today it was nothing more than a bleak room that harbored ghosts. She didn’t reminisce, but followed Herriot’s urgent trot and passed straight through, into the home’s formal entryway and then the dining room beyond. The dining room was connected to the kitchen. Off the rear of the kitchen were the housekeeper’s room and a mudroom. At the side, through a sliding door, was a porch enclosed by a roof, a half wall, and screens.

From the dining room she couldn’t see where Herriot had gone. All was dark except for a gold glow on the porch, an oil lamp’s flame held steady by a bubbled hurricane lantern.

The brass lantern held some special meaning for Danny and their dad, though the men had never told her why. She guessed it had something to do with the one time they went camping alone together and lost all their gear in a flash flood—all their packs and food and bedding, everything except a cell phone, their horses, and an old Coleman lantern. How that might have turned into a positive memory for them was a private story between father and son.

Beth emerged into the kitchen. The sliding glass door between the kitchen and porch stood open, and the new-earth scents kicked up by the rain came into the house on a breeze.

The lamp formed a halo between Rose and the screens, reducing her to a dim, bowed version of her strong self. She sat on a wicker chair facing the sleeping morning.

Beyond her, Herriot’s forelegs were propped against the low wall, nose twitching against the flimsy wire mesh, as if to detect what the humans’ senses couldn’t. Her tail waved calmly. Outside, the distortion of rain transformed the nearby barn’s moth light into a bobbing firefly.

Beth hesitated in the kitchen, unsure if it was the right time to approach her mother, and if it was, what the proper posture would be: Comforting? Penitent? Grieved? Reassuring?

“Beth’s up.” Her mother was looking at Herriot, and her chilly tone rooted Beth to the floor.

Half of Levi’s face came into the lamplight. The other half, like the dark side of the moon, stayed in shadow. Levi was looking at their mother with barely veiled impatience. He didn’t seem to care if Beth was up, but she withdrew into the kitchen shadows.

“Don’t bury him here,” Levi said.

“All the Borzois who ever set foot on American soil are buried here,” her mother replied.

“You’d put him in the very ground that you intend to sell?”

“Maybe I don’t want to sell it after all. The insurance—”

“By the time you pay for the hospital and the funeral, you won’t have enough left over to buy that fat jockey Darling a breakfast!”

“Levi. Watch your volume.”

He complied but stood up and leaned over her, trading one form of intensity for another. Their mother seemed unaffected by his show.

“Don’t tell me a measly life-insurance policy changed your mind.”

“My mind was never made up. I only thought that selling this place would be essential to his recovery. But now—I can’t help but wonder if the very suggestion was what killed him.”

“Beth killed him,” Levi said.

Her mother didn’t defend her.

Levi’s voice dropped so that it was difficult for Beth to hear. “What does it matter? He’s gone now. Danny’s not old enough to take on this piece of hell on earth, and I don’t want it.”

“No one’s making you stay, Levi.”

“You can’t make a go of this place without me.”

Yes, we can
, Beth thought.
We have Jacob and Roy, Emory and Eric. We just don’t have any money
.

“Now’s not the time to be making such big decisions,” Rose said.

“When will it be right? Eighteen months will find us without our shirts in the middle of winter, and we’ll all pretend to be surprised by that. Unless we act now.”

“What do you propose? You want to sell this place just so you can get your investment out of the dirt and run off to your own life? Where would you go? What would you do?”

“I’d make a
living
. What kind of life is this, breaking our backs day in and day out? I pour my sweat and blood into the filth of this land, and it’s never, ever satisfied.” Levi’s voice was filled with disgust. “I want wealth. That’s all I ask for.”

“You have no idea what true wealth is,” Rose said.

Levi changed his approach. He squatted next to his mother’s chair and took her hand, softened his tone. “Every day we hold on to this ranch we get deeper and deeper into the money hole.”

Rose shook her head. “Men rely on us. We can’t pretend they’re not a factor.”

“How do you expect to take care of them or pay Beth’s debts if we don’t do something drastic?”

At the screens, Herriot went still. A low growl vibrated at the bottom of her throat. Beth watched her dog through rising tears. Levi and Rose were too wrapped up in their own dilemma to worry about Herriot’s distraction.

“The market for selling might be better next spring—”

“Mom, this trouble is bigger than we are.”

Rose supported her forehead with her other hand. “Who wants a ranch these days? It’s too big for the romantic types who think ranching is a dreamy life; it’s too small for the commercial ventures.”

“We’re sitting on prime real estate.”

“Parts of it are—what are you suggesting? That we subdivide it? What a nightmare. I wouldn’t have what it takes. It would be like dicing up your father’s body and feeding it to vultures. I’d rather try to reach an agreement with a single buyer. Even Darling. Maybe he’d let the four of us stay here, work the place for him.”

Levi recoiled, and Beth felt nausea shake her by the shoulders.

“This land isn’t going to Darling,” Levi said, and he spoke it like a vow.

His tone jarred Beth’s forgotten nightmare loose from her sleepy memory. In half a second she recalled everything: She and Levi standing at the creek. A wolf with a bloody muzzle sleeping at her feet. Levi raising the rifle to his shoulder and taking aim.

At their father dressed in white, standing on the opposite bank.

The rifle shot and impact were silent and weightless. The weapon didn’t recoil when it was discharged. Her father didn’t reel when hit. But his blood was gushing and noisy, falling into the creek water like a sudden heavy rain.

Dream and reality tangled long enough for Beth to believe Levi had murdered their father, which was ridiculous. Her eyes darted through shadows of the kitchen and porch, looking for a rifle, for blood. Of course, there was neither in this space. There was only the notable absence of any sorrow for the man who had loved them all so much.

Beth shook off the horror of the dream but couldn’t shed her rising wariness of her big brother.

“I can’t leave this place,” her mother said. “I can’t even think of it now. Maybe if your father were with me—I thought I could, but I need . . . I need time.”

“What if I told you that you wouldn’t ever have to leave it?” Levi said. “That I know a way to keep you here forever, without another day of worry about how we’re going to make it?”

Her mother’s profile was like a child’s in the lamplight, with a hopeful, lifted chin.

“I called Sam Johnson today,” Levi said.

The name filled Beth with as much dread as Darling’s did.

“The developer?” Rose’s voice reflected Beth’s shock. She stood now, nearly as tall as her firstborn. Between them, Herriot’s growl rose a notch and the glistening tips of her fine fur rose off the back of her neck.

“Of course the developer.”

“We can’t sell the land Sam wants to buy.”

“We
can
sell it, it’s just that no one wants to.”

“Don’t act so dense. It’s prime,” Rose argued. “Two thousand acres of our best land—the best irrigated, the best soil. We sell that, and the cows can’t survive. The ranch can’t survive. If you think I’ll parcel off little plots to that man and give up the Blazing B just so I can live in this house”—she stomped her foot on the drum-like floorboards—“you don’t understand my love for it at all.”

“Settle down. He doesn’t want those acres anymore.”

“Then what on earth does he want?”

“Sam’s a generous man, Mom. He only wants what’s best for us.”

“That’s not how I would have characterized the proposal he presented to us last year.”

“But this time I was the one with the proposal. And he was very interested in my thoughts.”

Beth leaned in, placed her hand on the cool metal door frame of the open slider, not wanting to miss a word. If Levi was about to be her savior, she’d be stunned. Grateful, but stunned. And a little frightened of what he might demand from her in return.

“Is it too much to ask that you share those thoughts with me before you go around making business proposals with the world?” Rose asked.

Levi took a step back and pretended to look wounded. “What’s wrong with you? I’m standing here with a plan to bail us out of an impossible situation, and you’re treating me like I’m still a kid. We all have to grow up now, don’t we? Dad’s gone and I’m the only one who can see straight. It’s you and me now, just the two of us to save this place.”