House of Mercy (45 page)

Danny and Jacob stayed at the Hub to water the horses, and Beth promised them a phone call as soon as she knew whether her hunch turned out to be correct.

“You’ve done well for yourself, Rosy,” Garner said from the backseat, admiring the beauty of the land.

“Appreciate it while you can,” she said. Her tone was more gentle than Beth had heard in months.

“I’m sorry about Abel. I was wrong about him, you know. Very wrong. Clearly, he was a fine man.”

“Thank you, Dad.”

Apology accepted
. Simple words carrying father and daughter toward each other. Beth imagined the real work of mending this relationship would take months. Years even. A slow and careful return. She imagined her grandfather here on the land in October, sipping tea and gazing out the screens of the enclosed porch while the cows returned to the property. It was a moment she hoped to witness.

Months ago she had found Wally digging in the cottonwood grove and used this same road to take him back to the Hub. Today she traveled toward the grove, where she had never kept her promise to help him dig. She wondered when he had remembered it. The car passed the ranch house, and Beth saw Lorena standing behind the porch screen that Herriot had jumped through. The mesh had been repaired. Beth waved at the girl. Lorena lifted a tentative hand.

The road ran alongside the horse pasture, the barn, the winter lean-to shelters—all empty now while the animals were out helping to search for Wally. Beyond the pasture at a walking distance, two hulking boulders marked the entrance to the cemetery. Beth looked in the direction of her father’s grave. A flash flood of sadness entered the space in her chest that had been filled the past week with urgency and sleeplessness and frantic prayers. Had it only been a week since her father passed? It felt like a year.

Today, however, there was no frantic desperation mixed up with Beth’s grief. She noted a new feeling of peace.

Later she would pay her respects. Right now it was more urgent that they find Wally. She turned her head to the cottonwood grove when the car passed it on the left. If Wally was there, he was hidden by the thick trunks and undergrowth.

A hundred yards past the grove, Beth parked Dotti’s 4x4 where the road ended, under the shade of a lush Wasatch maple, in the same place where she had left her truck the night she’d stolen Jacob’s saddle. Her mother and grandfather got out of the car and followed her back to the trees. The leaves rustled in a light breeze.

Dozens of small holes punctured the ground, everywhere that the roots would allow a shovel to enter.

They entered the grove and stepped over and around the prodded earth. The trees backed up against a steep hillside, a tiny intrusion of San Juan’s foothills, and it only took a few minutes for the threesome to reach the upward-sloping ground. They spread out then and turned down the narrow strip of earth. It was much longer than it was wide.

Beth found Wally’s shovel first, when she stepped on the blade and caused the gray wooden handle to rise up off the ground.

“Wally?” she called out.

“Who wants to know?” he answered.

Her heart lightened at the familiar question.

“Abel’s daughter,” she said.

“Beth!” he answered. “Over here.” She was quickly joined by Rose and Garner.

They found Wally seated on the ground with his back to them, one knee drawn up to his chest, shining a flashlight at a wide trunk that grew at an angle from the knobby hillside. She wondered why he needed the flashlight while the sun was still high. He twisted and looked up at her right away.

“You remembered my name,” she said, smiling at him.

“That cowboy said you . . . went on a trip. Actually, I don’t remember where he said you went. I only recall that you are not dead. Which I am so happy to see is true.”

“Me too,” she said.

“I’ve been waiting for you to get back. If you told me how long it would be, I forgot to write it down.” His little spiral-bound book was lying on the ground next to him, and he pointed at it. “This is all the memory I’ve got some days.”

Wally’s pleasure at seeing her faltered when he spotted Garner, and for a second she thought Wally might be as upset as if Levi had shown up.

“Doggone it,” Wally said. “Each time I think I’m getting better . . .”

Beth understood. “You haven’t met him before, Wally,” she said. “This is my grandfather, Garner Remke. Garner, my friend Wally.”

Garner extended his hand. “I’m Rosy’s dad.”

“It’s a pleasure, sir,” Wally said. “I’m sure it will be a pleasure each time. For me anyway. Howdy, Mrs. Borzoi,” he said to Rose.

“You okay, Wally?” she said. “Everyone’s worried about you.”

“Yes, ma’am. I’m surely sorry if I’ve caused any trouble. I’m just in a bit of a dilemma here, and you showed up at a fine time to bail me out of it.”

He glanced back toward the tree and lifted the flashlight again. He hadn’t been shining the light on the trunk as Beth first thought, but alongside of it. A tall Apache plume grew here, the shrub’s downy leaves and pink-feather flowers looking like a fluffy pillow behind the cottonwood.

Wally leaned in and pressed the silvery branches aside to expose another hole, this one larger than the pockmarks in the grove, deeper, and running straight back into the hillside rather than down into the ground. The flashlight’s beam disappeared into blackness.

“Did you dig that yourself ?” Rose asked, bending over his shoulder.

“No, ma’am,” Wally said. “Something else dug this.”

A metallic glint on one side of the hole about twelve feet back caught Beth’s eye.

“Is that your lockbox?” Beth asked.

“I do believe it is,” he said.

Garner uttered the first question to pop into Beth’s mind. “How did it get way back there? The hole’s too small for a man.”

The answer came just as swiftly to Beth’s heart: “Mercy put it there,” she said.

“Who?” asked her mother.

Beth looked at Wally. “The night it first went missing, you told me the wolf took it.”

“What wolf ?” Rose demanded.

“That I did,” Wally said. “Says so right here.” He released the shrub and picked up his notebook, then began to flip through the pages.

“The wolf’s name is Mercy,” Beth said without thinking, and she noted her grandfather raised his eyebrows. Though he had yet to explain the reason for his change of heart, she was beginning to suspect that Mercy might have had something to do with it. “I first saw him”—she wished she could close this can of worms—“that same night.”

“Him?” Wally asked. “The wolf I saw was a girl. Any chance your memory’s starting to go?”

This silenced Beth. Garner started chuckling.

“Yes, I’ve got it here,” Wally said. “I drew a little wolf face to remind me. Put the box in her mouth and a bow over her ear. See?” He held the sketch out under Beth’s nose.

“What wolf is this?” said Rose again, straightening up and crossing her arms.

“And I made a note,” Wally said. “‘May 23. Gray wolf. Mile 6.25 fence post, cottonwood grove.’ That’d be here. Been back here a lot since then, but I just found this last night.”

“So what’s your dilemma?” Beth asked.

“My dilemma, right. Well, as . . . as this fine man here has already observed”—he indicated Garner—“I’m a little too big for the opening, and I’d like to get my box back. But that’s a minor detail. Bigger one is I can’t leave this spot, because your brother knows where to find it for himself. After all the work I’ve done, he’d surely find this place a lot quicker than I would.”

“Levi took your notebook,” Beth said, recalling Jacob’s account of their argument.

“Read it back to back, no doubt,” Wally accused. “No telling what that boy might do if I let this place out of my sight.”

Garner was kneeling by the hole now, holding back the Apache plume and looking in.

Rose’s voice took on a more gentle tone. “What’s in your box that Levi would want, Wally?”

Wally’s expression took on a sudden look of anxiety.

“Your ‘legal tender’?” Beth prompted, recalling Wally’s frustration the first night the box went missing. “You have money in the box?”

“What? Fifty bucks? Pfft. He can have it,” Wally said. “I used to be a rich man, you know, back in my Wall Street days. Wish I still was—once upon a time I could have helped you all out. But the people who call themselves my family sank their teeth into that gold mine long ago. Where there’s money, there’s always someone who wants it. It’s something I like about the Blazing B, you know. The simple life.”

He was talking over his worry now, Beth thought: he couldn’t remember why it was so important he guard the lockbox from Levi. There was no proper response to that, just as it wasn’t right for Beth to speak the truth: the survival of this “simple life” was dependent on quite a large sum of money.

Oddly, though, that truth didn’t drive a knife through her heart the way it might have a week earlier. She looked at her mother and grandfather. There was something good and right about this moment, these three family members making their way through loss by returning to each other, each of them having nothing, and repairing what was broken.

Wally licked his thumb and began to search for the answer in his book. “It was important.” He seemed flummoxed that he couldn’t find what he had previously written down. “It was really important.”

“It’s okay, Wally,” Beth said. She knelt beside him and rested her palm on his shoulder. “We can stay here until it comes to you. Let’s think of a way to get it out. I might be small enough to climb in.”

“You will not,” her mother ordered.

Garner fished through some fallen leaves for Wally’s discarded flashlight, found it, and aimed it into the hole for a clearer look.

Wally sighed. In his right hand he let his notebook fall shut, and he raised his left hand to press it against Beth’s cheek. His skin was dusty and cracked and as gentle as a loving father’s touch.

“Do you ever see something and find that it reminds you of something else, but your mind can’t make the connection?” he asked her. “That’s what most of my days are like now, since the stroke. But the reason I could always remember your father is because when I laid eyes on him, my old, broken brain always made the connection. I could remember why I came to this ranch, and what a gift that man had extended to me.”

Beth placed her own hand atop Wally’s, holding it next to her skin.

“My family found a way to get my money, but they couldn’t be bothered by the old man who has trouble remembering what he ate for breakfast. You know what kind of life awaits someone like me?”

Beth could guess. She nodded once.

“Your father gave me something that exceeded every imagination, every hope. And he never asked about the money. Never needed it. Such a man is impossible to forget.”

Beth closed her eyes and called up her own unforgettable memories of the man she missed so much. She heard Wally’s notebook hit the dirt, and he placed his other hand on her other cheek and pulled her bowed head toward him. He planted a soft kiss on the middle of her forehead and then let her rest her face on his narrow shoulder. He smelled like alfalfa and rainwater. She leaned into his kindness, his hands warm on her back.

Her nose picked up another scent too, in the breeze that enveloped them. It was musky and earthy, solid, rich. It was the scent of Mercy, growing more familiar to Beth with each passing day.

A flinch in Wally’s wrists brought her back to the present. She lifted her head, and his eyes were shining.

“I remember,” he said.

“What?”

“It’s not the box that needs protecting.”

Beth waited.

“It’s them,” Wally said, and he pointed over her shoulder.

Before she was able to turn, Beth caught sight of her mother’s face. Rose was pale and looking past Wally’s outstretched finger. “Don’t move,” she whispered, but she herself took a step backward.

At the mouth of the hole, behind the bent shrub, Garner looked up and then rose from his belly. Beth turned. As she came around, a wet muzzle swiped the side of her cheek, and Beth tipped backward on her hands. The gray wolf Mercy pressed in and ran his moist nose along Beth’s jaw and into her hair, sniffing as if meeting her for the first time.

“There she is,” Wally said happily.

The wolf licked Beth’s nose, and Rose uttered a small scream.

“It’s okay,” Beth said, wiping away the damp greeting. “That means I can stay in the pack.”

“There’s a
pack
?” Rose croaked.

“Seven of ’em,” Wally said. “Ha! What do you know? I didn’t even have to look that up in my little book!”

At this announcement Beth realized that the wolf who’d greeted her wasn’t Mercy after all. This one’s coat was a lighter gray color, more silver than ash. The dog’s frame was slightly smaller, and the gender was, just as Wally had claimed, female.

The dog left Beth and padded up to Rose, who clamped her eyes shut and murmured, “Will she hurt me?”

“She’s wild,” Beth said wryly.

“This one won’t,” Garner said. And this time it was Beth’s turn to raise her eyebrows and laugh.