House of Mercy (33 page)

The foreign shadows that crouched over Beth’s head confused her. She felt cold, although the blanket was heavy. She took a deep, sharp breath and sat up, and the hulking forms in the room righted themselves into sensible objects. A lampshade there, and a tall TV cabinet over there. Phantom shapes in a coffin of a room. There was no light, only the night vision of her own eyes adjusting to shades of gray. A fan rotated slowly overhead, charcoal paddles turning on a slate ceiling. She remembered that Garner was dead, but she couldn’t piece together how she knew this.

The doctor had told her he was dead.

“Dr. Ransom?” she said, hoping her tone was normal.

At the sound of her voice a large wet muzzle prodded her cheek, and she had the feeling the dog had been doing this for some time, trying to rouse her.

“Herriot?”

Beth reached over and turned on the tabletop lamp. Instead of illuminating the room, the bulb blinded her for long seconds of blinking and squinting and shielding her eyes with her hands.

It wasn’t Herriot, but Mercy. The door to the apartment was open, and he was already headed out and down the stairs.

Beth rose and knocked her shin on the coffee table, then found her way around it. In her sleep she had been dreaming of California, the state buried in mounds of volcanic ash with real estate signs staked at the top of each heap—For Sale. And she woke thinking that Roy Davis had said something about Garner making his fortune in California, which made her think that Garner’s attorney or estate manager might also be from there, and this was something she ought to mention to Dr. Ransom. It might lead somewhere. She tried to imagine what circumstances would lead a man to die without his own daughter learning of it, two years after the fact.

Her feet and hands seemed unnaturally heavy, swollen. She saw the dining room, the kitchen. The red numbers of the digital clock over the stove told her it was 1:20. No wonder she felt so groggy. On the other side of the room was a small archway leading to a hall, exactly like the one in Nova’s apartment.

Nova’s apartment? Who was Nova? Beth didn’t pull up the answer to that question until she was standing on the landing outside the doctor’s door, and then she remembered everything. She wondered if the doctor had gone to check on her.

“Dr. Ransom?” she asked again. Her voice sounded louder out here, where an atrium separated the doctor’s flight of stairs from an identical set leading up to Nova’s home. The bottom of the stairs was joined by a hall, and an exit to the parking lot behind the building.

Beth looked across the atrium to Nova’s door. It stood open just as Beth had propped it a few hours ago. The gaping door seemed wrong to Beth, but she couldn’t pinpoint why. It had something to do with the doctor wanting the door closed, and with it still being open while Dr. Ransom was most likely inside.

Still dusty and fully dressed from the two-day ride up the mountainside, Beth went out of the apartment and down the stairs. In the hall, as she passed by the exit, she saw through the narrow sidelights that Hastings was gone as promised.

She reached Nova’s flight and turned to go up, then stumbled on the bottom step and went down on one knee. This kind of clumsiness wasn’t like her, but after three nights without decent sleep, it was probably to be expected.

“Hello?” she said at the door without waiting to be invited in. “Dr. Ransom? Are you here?” Her foot brushed a large brown bag standing near the door, and she was greeted by the happy clinking of sturdy glass knocking together. She hadn’t noticed this bag the first time she was here. It was folded over and stapled shut, and the thick lip of the sack bore the penned words
Mr. Remke
.

Beth studied this printing with the same confusion that had tainted her upside-down view of the shadows in Dr. Ransom’s dark apartment. Surely it would make sense to her if she could just see it from the right mental angle. But she couldn’t find it. Her reasoning was too wobbly. She knelt and pulled the staples apart at the top of the bag. Inside were six wide-mouth glass jars with screw-top lids.

She closed the bag, stood, then abandoned it. She took a few steps deeper into the living room. The lights seemed different, but she couldn’t say how. Darker, though that might have just been the time of day or her weary eyes.

On one wall, an art light topped a matted black-and-white photograph that looked like an enlarged copy of an old glass photography plate. The lines were soft rather than sharp, and the gray tones had a hint of yellow in them, and several white scratches marred the negative. An Indian man sat on a gentle spotted horse that reminded Beth of Jacob’s Gert, and a white man stood near the horse’s head, holding the bridle. The Indian sat erect on a saddle, which Beth noticed because she had always thought of the Native Americans as bareback riders, though that was probably a narrow-minded assumption. But the saddle itself caught Beth’s eye. That butterfly skirt, that hand-stamped pattern of flame, that silver stirrup—she knew this saddle.

It was Jacob’s saddle. The one she’d stolen. Or one exactly like it.

In that dim moment of recognition she couldn’t comprehend the saddle’s connection to Burnt Rock, just as she couldn’t figure out what a dead man would do with a bag full of glass jars. Her mind stayed on the saddle while her body passed under the archway and across the hall into Nova’s room.

“Dr. Ransom?”

The sloping lampshade next to the bed cast geometric light on the walls and a line of shadow on the diagonal across Nova’s face. She was still sleeping, as the doctor had said she’d be, but she had been perspiring, and tossing herself between the sheets as if they were a straitjacket that she couldn’t escape, as if she wanted more than anything to be awake. The woman’s expression was so pained that Beth worried. Maybe the lamplight was distorting her features. But she came closer and realized that it was not.

Nova’s condition should have propelled Beth out the door in a wider search for Dr. Ransom. Instead she felt overcome with the certainty that she could do more to help Nova than any physician. She sat on the edge of Nova’s bed and took the woman’s hand, tacky and cold, and began to pray for the woman’s peace and physical recovery.

In spite of her own spiritual crises, Beth believed in God’s compassion. She had faith in his ability to meet the physical needs of people even before they understood their own spiritual needs. Just as Jesus had done for the man at the pool of Bethesda.

Beth sensed the first change in Nova’s fingers. The surface of her skin warmed, and then her stiff joints softened like a winter creek, thawing. Her quick and shallow breathing found a healthier pace at a deeper level. And then the wrinkled worry of her brow smoothed out like a rumpled blanket tugged taut.

These were the changes in Nova. Beth herself felt an inner shift like a realignment of her spine, or a tidying up of her organs. It was a slight adjustment—like a handful of pine needles tossed on a campfire, or a firm leather rein applied to a horse’s neck, or a rain-soaked clod of earth falling away from a hillside.

Nova’s eyes opened as if she were a baby doll set upright. Beth jumped off the bed.

“She’s not welcome here,” Nova whispered. Under the clinging tendrils of stringy hair, her face was pale, and it seemed she lacked the strength to sit up, though her eyes were wide and alert.

At first Beth thought Nova was speaking about her to an unseen visitor. But then Nova looked at Beth and repeated herself.

“She’s not welcome here.”

“Who’s not?” Beth asked.

“Catherine Ransom.”

“She’s not here now,” Beth said.

Nova sighed with relief, and her eyes returned to a more relaxed, less petrified shape.

“She told me you’d sleep through the night,” Beth said, returning to the edge of the bed. Nova reached out for her hand and gripped it fiercely.

“She says what she wants people to believe.”

“Why would she lie about your sleep?”

“Because she’s sick,” Nova said. “Sick in the head. That’s my diagnosis.”

“Dr. Ransom told me you had a miscarriage. Was that a lie too?”

“
Miscarriage
sounds so unintentional.” The peaceful lines of Nova’s face began to collapse. “My baby’s dead, and it was no accident.”

“What happened?”

Her voice cracked. “Poison. She did it.”

Beth hardly knew what to say to that kind of accusation. She didn’t know which woman might be less reliable. Nova didn’t seem to be in a clear state of mind. Nova lifted Beth’s hand in hers and looked at Beth’s calloused, dirty fingers through full, wet eyes.

“Your hands are very comforting. I remember them. In the church, before Catherine arrived.” Beth let her twist and turn them in the angled light of the lamp. “These are good hands. A healer’s hands.”

Nova ran her fingertips over Beth’s palm the way a carnival fortune-teller might assess the wrinkles. She turned Beth’s wrist gently, admiring the tops of her hands as well.

“I’m not a healer,” Beth said. “A wannabe vet, but not a healer.”

“You were talking about the man at the pool of Bethesda.”

Beth didn’t think she had been speaking aloud.

“I heard that story once, a long time ago,” Nova said. Beth feared she might be slipping back into sleep. “I like that story.”

“Nova, is there someone I can get for you? A friend, a relative?”

Nova frowned and slowly shook her head. “I have no one. Just like that man. That poor paralyzed man.” She drew a deep breath. “Catherine gave me some food. She hates me, you know. She hates the real healers. You ought to be careful of her. Garner isn’t careful enough.”

It was a difficult choice for Beth, which topic she ought to chase with which question. What were “real” healers? Was this “food” the same poison Nova had mentioned? Did Nova also see herself as some kind of doctor? Beth didn’t so much choose as she allowed one question to fight its way to the top of the pile.

She said, “Is that how Garner died? She told me it was cancer. Do you think the doctor killed him?”

Nova gasped and used her grip on Beth to haul herself up to sit. Beth could see the tears flow into her eyes, going up like a wall of glass. “Mr. Remke is dead?”

“Isn’t he?” Beth asked.

“That monster! That witch! I’ll kill her with my own hands.”

“Nova—”

“When did it happen?”

“I don’t know exactly.”

Nova’s face began to crack. “I don’t understand how this could have happened. If she killed him because of me, I’ll never forgive myself. I saw him Sunday morning—I went to him for some peppermint, for the nausea.”

“Sunday?” The meaning of the glass jars by the door was clearer now.

“I asked him to go with me to Mathilde’s, but he couldn’t just then. He said he was under the weather. And Monday I couldn’t find him. I needed him, but he wasn’t there.”

“Nova, wait—”

“When you found me I was waiting, you know, waiting for that miracle they say can happen to the right person in the right place. I’ve seen it once before. It’s never happened to me, but if anyone needed it to happen, last night I did.”

“Nova.”

“You have to wait and wait for such things. I don’t know why. I was in so much pain.”

“Dr. Ransom told me he died two years ago.”

Nova’s well of words ran dry.

“Two years ago,” Beth repeated. She was standing next to the bed now, ready to leap to somewhere, but she had no direction. “He was with you Sunday morning?”

“Yes. I see Mr. Remke most days. He lives two blocks from here.”

“Where?”

“On the Old Stage Road. Parallel to Main Street. He’s got a shop.”

“Garner’s Garden.”

“That’s right.”

“It’s not just an online place?”

“No. It’s his home too.”

“What’s the number, the house number?”

“I don’t remember. Twenty-six? Twenty-eight? There’s a sign hanging from the porch.”

“I’ll go check on him.”

Nova gestured to the phone underneath her table lamp. “Just call him.”

“It’s not even two in the morning.”

Nova reached for the phone and, in hesitating and squinting gestures, dialed it, while Beth felt suddenly sick and certain that the reason Dr. Ransom wasn’t here was because she was
there
, killing the man she’d already proclaimed dead.

Of course, it might be that Nova was a lunatic.

“Nova, I shouldn’t wait.”

The woman didn’t answer. Those lines of worry on her forehead that plagued her sleep began to reappear the longer she held the handset to her ear. She finally lowered it and raised her eyes to Beth. “He says he sleeps like a bear in winter.”

“Are you okay for me to leave you?”

Nova reached out and gripped Beth’s fingers. She closed her eyes and bowed her chin to her chest, then rested her other hand atop her slender belly, which was still tucked into the sheets. It wasn’t long that she stayed this way, with Beth’s fingers in a knuckle-crushing clench, but every second stretched out into a long minute for Beth, who didn’t understand what Nova was doing. She appeared to be praying, as far as anyone interested in alien abductions and haunted houses might pray. But color was returning to her pallid skin, and the strength of her grip came as a great surprise.