Read House of Mercy Online

Authors: Erin Healy

Tags: #Christian, #Suspense, #Fiction

House of Mercy (30 page)

BOOK: House of Mercy
4.84Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Instead she was the one who clutched the throat of her jacket and gasped. The bookseller Nova was at the base of the stairs that led to the second-story bedrooms. She held on to the balled newel-post cap with both hands as if her knees had already begun to buckle. Her fine hair clung to her face as if she’d been swimming, and sweat had turned her light gray cotton shirt the color of charcoal around her throat.

“Mr. Remke?” The voice was so weak.

“Nova?” Dotti said. She reached out for the girl and helped her to kneel on a step.

“Where’s Mr. Remke?”

“He’s ill, honey. What can I do that would help you?”

“I was wondering if he has—a tincture? A cramp bark tincture?”

Dotti hadn’t the foggiest idea what a cramp bark tincture might be. She’d never seen a woman suffer from menstrual cramps like these.

“I don’t know. I don’t know. Have you bought some from him before?”

Nova shook her head slightly, as if shaking it too hard might cause unspeakable nausea. “It’s called
Viburnum
. Could you . . . could you look?”

Of course she could look, if she had the slightest idea how to spell the word. And being an ancient veteran of excellent customer service, Dotti would have looked it up and asked all sorts of questions and turned the house inside out to find precisely what this woman needed so that she could leave happy.

“My dear,” Dotti said, “you seem to be beyond the help of a tincture of vubeer . . . vubur . . .

“Viburnum,”
Nova whispered, and her hand went to her stomach. Her cheeks were flushed, and Dotti thought she might lose her lunch right there. But she merely swayed.

“Let me call Dr. Ransom for you. I know right where she is.”

“No, just a . . . tincture will do. Please.” Nova took a deep breath, sharp and steep, and braced herself where she knelt. When the pain passed, she closed her eyes and panted lightly.

“I really think we should get you to a doctor.”

At this Nova began to sob, and she dropped her forehead to one of the higher steps, and Dotti’s alarm grew. She decided that she wouldn’t try to sort this one out on her own. She would call Cat, then go sit with Garner while the good doctor got to the bottom of Nova’s situation.

“I’m getting Catherine.”

“No. Not her.”

“Why not? She’s a doctor. You’re sick. Don’t be a fool too. What do you have against Dr. Ransom?”

“She . . . killed . . . my baby,” the woman sobbed. “That doctor.”

The girl was ranting. The fever had made her delirious. Dr. Ransom was a physician, not a killer. And yet this did look like a miscarriage at least. There was a small puddle of dark blood forming on the stair around Nova’s knee.

“Promise me you won’t call her,” Nova pleaded. “Promise me.”

Whatever it took before that lake of blood became an ocean.

“Where is the baby’s father?” Dotti demanded.

“Far away.”

“Can I call him?”

“No. He . . . doesn’t know. It doesn’t matter.”

“Well that’s just dandy. Tell me who to call for you, because I’m not the person you need. Do you understand that, Nova? Who can I call?”

She shook her head. No one.

“You need medical help, and I won’t be responsible for your refusing it. You came to the wrong person for that. So let’s try to reach an agreement here. I will give you three minutes of my time to search the house for the vuh . . . vuh . . .”

“Viburnum.”

“Viburnum,”
Dotti repeated.

“V-i-b . . . u-r . . . n-u-m.”

Dotti rushed to grab a scrap of paper behind Garner’s cash register. “The Romans could have come up with shorter Latin, don’t you think?”

“It’s probably in a brown bottle.”

Dotti quickly scribbled the word on the scrap. She started searching Garner’s pretty shelves immediately. “Three minutes starting now. If I can’t find it in three minutes, I am taking you directly to Catherine. Those are my conditions.” When Garner came around, she would recommend he alphabetize his inventory.

Nova nodded. The rosy color of her feverish cheeks had intensified.

It took Dotti all of thirty seconds to confirm that Garner didn’t have the tincture Nova needed on these shelves. She went through the kitchen and raced downstairs to the basement, knowing exactly where Garner kept what little stock he had. It took her less than a minute to pillage these small boxes. No
Viburnum
.

But then she recalled that Garner had shipments brought up from the post office by one of Hank’s fine sons, who deposited these in Garner’s ample pantry at the back of the kitchen until Garner could process them all. There might be something there, especially since there was nothing anywhere else in the house. Surely a fresh order of
Viburnum
awaited upstairs! She hauled herself back up into the kitchen and turned quickly into the pantry.

Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Dotti slapped her hands together as if dusting flour from her fingers. “Well, I’ve held up my end of the bargain,” she called out as she returned to the entry hall. “And I’m relieved. Even if I’d found a tincture, you still should have seen the doc—”

The staircase was empty except for the evidence of Nova’s crisis. The front door was wide open. And Nova Yarrow was tearing away from Garner’s house in the driver’s seat of Dotti’s 4x4.

27

T
he course that Wally set for Beth was steeper than the one she would have chosen. She rode Hastings, and Herriot trotted behind her. The wolf, again, had vanished. As the sun peaked and then began to sink, Beth came up the mountains behind Burnt Rock through a recovering burn area. Ten years ago, when Beth was an adolescent, a lovesick and irresponsible forest ranger—someone with no excuse—had burned her ex’s letters in a campfire. Sparks of bitterness escaped the pit with the help of a summer wind.

Until this day, Beth had forgotten about that incident, which made headlines across the country. For ten years the earth had been gradually reawakening in bursts of greens among the black matchsticks of firs and pines. It would take a few more decades before all visible evidence of the scorching was erased, but even then the earth would be able to tell its story in the layers of rock and rings of trees.

The promise of restoration was mixed up together with the permanent proof of death. Beth supposed that a person might look at this scene and call it hopeful, while someone else might look at the same place and call it tragic. The burn wasn’t planned and, according to prevailing opinion, never should have happened.

But what if the same blaze had been set off by a lightning strike or a drought? Such triggers raised flames in these mountains every year, and most of them went unnoticed. Was a fire destructive only when caused by a careless person, and beneficial only when scheduled, and neutral when considered to be an “act of God”? Was any event better or worse than the other?

Beth’s mind wanted the world’s causes and effects to make sense, and she was frustrated by the idea that they might mingle in such a sloppy way.

Some of the blackened tree skeletons stood, and some had fallen to create a maze for anyone passing through. Hastings wasn’t impeded by any of it but carried her on sure footing exactly where Beth’s compass and Wally’s map instructed them to go.

The aspen here flourished, because aspen were not individual trees, but a unified organism that grew from a single taproot. This root was protected deep underground from even the largest, most devastating fires, and it was constantly sending up vibrant shoots while other plants struggled to be reborn from seeds in the charred soil. The great irony of the aspens’ natural durability, Beth often thought, was that the wood itself was too soft for most construction purposes. When these trees were harvested, they were used to make matchsticks.

The group climbed out of the lower elevations that the aspen preferred. It took several hours and more frequent rests for Hastings, who felt the altitude as much as any human might, though he was fit to endure it. The long-needled ponderosas too eventually yielded ground to the spruces—the dusty-blue Colorados and the yellow-green Engelmanns, the hardiest of trees in this oxygen-deprived air. The undergrowth also thinned out, and Beth could see the timberline on the peaks behind the shorter slope she scaled. Even now, in August, remnants of last winter’s snow caked the mountainsides’ shady crevices.

And then they reached a ridgetop, and the ground fell away as if it had been chipped off by God’s chisel. Beth found herself looking down onto the old mining village that was Burnt Rock, which she guessed to be about two miles away. A modern paved road wound up the mountainside and into Burnt Rock from the southeast. She saw fresh paint on restored facades, and colorful signs that shouted out to tourists of opportunities to pan for gold or tour a mine or ride a mule or experience a miracle.

That last one caught Beth’s eye, but she couldn’t make out the details that would explain the meaning.

She saw a hotel, and what she presumed was a post office, and a long string of conjoined shops lining the main drag. The street was like the center vein in a narrow brown leaf, with more slender veins branching off to the north and south, unpaved routes that led to free-standing buildings and boxy, haphazardly arranged homes and cars. A few multipassenger vans were parked in a wide lot at the far end of town. She spotted one building that might be a stable, with mules rather than horses ambling in the corral.

Directly beneath her at the base of the cliff was a squat building with a roof like a wagon wheel turned on its side, the hub a large domed skylight. It might be a church positioned to keep watch over the town.

To the left of Beth was a path that led downward by first going away from the sheer drop. Mercy took this route.

Herriot did not. Facing away from Mercy’s path, she barked once at something Beth couldn’t see. It was a vocalization like her intruder-alert bark, but something about it was different. She stood at attention, ears and tail erect.

“C’mere, girl,” Beth said, and she clicked her tongue as she turned Hastings toward the trail.

Herriot bounded away from her.

“Herriot! Come!” This time Beth whistled. Her dog responded with three short barks and a plunge through a tight stand of spruces, and then she was silent.

“Herriot!”

On the trail, Mercy had come back into Beth’s view and seemed to be waiting for her.

“Your girlfriend’s run off again,” she said to the wolf.

The wolf appeared uninterested in this revelation. He turned around and resumed his walk. Beth took a deep breath, sent up a prayer for Herriot’s safety, and followed Mercy.

He led the descent down a very shallow Z-shaped trail. At one point she thought the trail might bypass the town entirely, but then a sharp left turn offered to put her in the right direction again. A signpost told her that if she didn’t turn, her present course would take her up to a mine called the Caged Bird.

The next leg of the trail was no more steep, but much longer, and as she passed through a thick stand of Engelmann spruce, she lost sight of Mercy. The trees and the setting sun darkened her way considerably. But Hastings’ good sense of direction didn’t falter, and he brought her onto a single-lane dirt road, which was something of a driveway. To her right she was at eye level with the building she’d looked down upon from the cliff.

A landscaped welcome at the top of the road seemed at odds with its naturally rugged surroundings. A sculpted path of pea gravel, flower beds full of blooming annuals, and molded plastic benches bearing placards with donors’ names invited her into the Burnt Rock Harbor Sweet Assembly. The drive appeared to make a loop around the building. A dusty 4x4 was parked at the side of this sign, in front of a lattice-covered walkway.

The wolf sat under the shelter as if he’d been waiting for her.

A piercing shriek came out of the building and sent Hastings backward three or four paces. Beth uttered calming sounds to him, though the sound had washed away the beauty of the place like a flash flood.

There was another cry, less piercing this time and angry, but also longer, more agonizing. Thickened by sadness, like a wail.

The wolf turned and padded toward the entrance of the building.

Beth followed him. She tied off Hastings at one of the split-rail fences bordering a high-altitude garden.

One of the double doors stood open. The thick wood panels bore carved designs, and the one that was closed bore a crouching mountain lion poised to leap onto a horse carrying a young woman. The image gave Beth shivers.

The wail poured through the open door. That kind of sadness in this “sweet harbor” made as much sense as all those fire-blistered tree skeletons upright in the blooming green earth.

The lobby of the church looked like a museum, dim and with track lighting illuminating art on the earth-toned walls. Beth passed through it without noticing any details. When the scream came this time, she was sure it belonged to a woman, and it was a scream of anger and protest and grief. It was exactly the scream she herself had put into Jacob’s ear when he found her wandering along the highway after her father’s death.

The round room seemed to be a sanctuary, with six sections of pews coming out from the center like the arms of a snowflake. One of the aisles led directly from the passage where Beth stood to the center of the room, where a low rail encircled a pit with a low-burning gas flame in the center. Directly in front of it, a woman with her back to Beth had collapsed onto her side. She appeared to be alone. One of the woman’s hands still gripped the rail, elevating her right arm. The left was a pillow for her tilted head. Her keening filled the room.

BOOK: House of Mercy
4.84Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

One Week as Lovers by Victoria Dahl
The Light-Kill Affair by Robert Hart Davis
Darling Jenny by Janet Dailey
Need by Sherri Hayes
Always Friday by Jan Hudson
The One That Got Away by Carol Rosenfeld
Mustang Annie by Rachelle Morgan