House of Mercy (20 page)

Rose took a deep breath, silenced whatever words bubbled on her lips, and turned her palm up toward him.
Fine. Continue
.

“I asked Sam to become an investor.”

“No sane man would pour his cash down a drain like this.”

“Not an investor in the Blazing B, per se. But a partner of sorts.”

“In
what
, Levi?”

“In the Blazing B Resort.”

Beth’s mind crawled with an image of fat city slickers in shiny new cowboy boots and too-tight jeans riding Hastings and Gert.

“A dude ranch?” Rose’s tone was disbelieving. “You want to turn our home into a dude ranch?”

“That’s such a bad label for a full-scale resort. Do you know what we can do on sixty-five hundred acres? In eighteen months we can have condos up on the river and be taking reservations for pool rides in the mountains. We can have seasonal events, offer classes, spas, cookouts—”

“No. No. I can’t believe you think that’s a good idea.”

“It’s been done before, right here in this valley. How do you think ranchers are making it? Even the ones who aren’t staring down the throat of a monster lawsuit have come up with all kinds of creative ways to make ends meet.”

“It can’t work.”

“The model works. The numbers work. In fact, they work so well that Sam will tackle Darling’s money for us. Wipe it off the charts.”

Rose’s hands were on her hips now. “At what cost to us?”

“A very small one.”

“How small, Levi?”

“It’s a partnership with him or lose the land entirely. No price would be too great.”

“Levi. Give me a number.”

Levi looked at Herriot, who dashed along the wall to the corner of the room, ears and tail alert. “We’d get to live here, with guaranteed employment for as long as the resort was operational.” Rose’s hands fell to her sides. Her son would not look her in the eye. “Negotiable salaries, benefits, free housing.”

“He’d take the land,” Rose said. “All of it.”

“We’d keep a fifteen percent stake in the profits.”

The insulting number dropped a smothering silence over the room. Rose had no ready reply, no retort. She sank back into her chair.

“Sam would incorporate everything. You’d get a voting seat on the board,” Levi said. “Or I would, if you don’t want it.”

“That’s why you don’t want me to bury your father here. The family cemetery—”

“It will probably have to be . . . relocated. It’s in a bad place. For a resort.”

“You never pretended to love your family legacy more than you loved profitable thinking,” Rose whispered. “The men who count on us now—there’s no room for them in a place like the one you’re describing. You’d throw them out.”

“It’s time to save ourselves, Mom. We’re the ones who need help this time. Sam’s offering it.”

Herriot barked once, then growled again. But whatever was out there—a fox looking for shelter under the porch, a cottonwood tree bent into villainous shapes by the rainfall—was less of a threat than what was going on in this small screened room.

Beth stepped into the reach of the oil lamp’s light. “What about Garner?” she asked.

Levi flinched. Beth looked at Rose.

“Dad thinks—thought Garner could help us out.” Her mother’s face was unreadable.

“Who’s Garner?” Levi asked.

“I think he’s our grandfather,” Beth said. “Grandpa Remke.”

“He’s dead,” Levi said. He looked at Rose. “You told us he died.”

“But he’s alive. Isn’t he, Mom?”

Rose pushed herself out of the chair. The wicker creaked and squeaked. “He’s dead to me,” she said.

Levi’s expression might have been distorted by the shadows of the flickering flame, but Beth thought he was relieved by this proclamation, as if Garner’s very existence might undermine his carefully laid plans to do business with Sam Johnson.

“Dad thought Garner could help—”

“Sam can help,” Levi said.

“But maybe Garner could help us”—Beth groped for words—“less . . . commercially. More personally.”

“Your father meant well,” Rose said, “but he was always an optimist.”

“But what if we could keep Sam’s fingers out of the ranch?”

“I don’t think you have too much wisdom to offer us at this point, little sister.”

“Why not? Because what the rest of us might want will mess up your precious business deal? Cut you out of a nice little profit? What perks are Sam going to give you for cooking up this brilliant scheme, Levi? How’s he going to line your pockets with gratitude?”

“That’s enough,” Rose said. “That’s enough. Fortunately a deal like this takes awhile to draw up. Long enough for all of us to have time to settle down. We’ll pay respects to your father, and then we’ll move on. Levi, call Sam in the morning and tell him I’m ready to take the next steps, on one condition.”

“We’re not really in a position—”

“One condition. I will make your life so much harder if you want to argue with me. You’re still my son, and this ranch is still mostly mine.”

Levi crossed his arms across his chest.

“Your father will be buried in that cemetery along with his father and grandfathers, and the daughter we lost before Beth came along. And Sam will just have to deal with it, because it’s not going to move, and neither am I.”

“Done,” Levi said.

Beth wanted to blame Levi for this terrible turn of her life, and yet she was to blame for all of it.

“I think Danny should have a say in this,” Beth said, and at the same time, Herriot’s posture shifted and caught the corner of Beth’s eye.

Divided attention, when combined with darkness, could be a deceptive thing. Her mother looked like she might agree with Beth, but before she could say so, Herriot’s growl became a disturbing snarl. As Beth turned her head, the light and shadow created illusions. She thought she saw, beyond the screen, the glassy green flicker of wild-animal eyes catching the lamp’s glow.

Her brain suggested
wolf
at the same time that Herriot’s hind legs launched her high onto the screen. All three people in the room turned as one to the dog. Her thick claws penetrated the lightweight mesh and shredded it like newspaper as she dropped back to the floor.

Beth shouted, lunged for the dog’s collar, and missed. Teeth bared and fur electrified, the Appenzeller leaped again and this time went through the fresh hole.

A terrible tumble of snarls and snapping jaws ensued.

A crevasse of dread opened up in Beth’s mind. In one motion, while Levi and Rose were still statues, Beth grabbed the cool handle of the oil lamp with one hand and ripped out a floppy panel of screen with her other so that the opening was large enough for her to follow. She leaned into the wall with her hip and swung her legs over the edge, screaming at the dog fight as if words alone could break it up.

As her weight shifted forward and she felt herself slipping off the wet sill toward the ground, she remembered she was barefoot.

A ground cover of chipped granite rocks bit into the balls of her feet and, on the right, cut deep. Her disruptive shouts became a cry of pain. She fell forward into a smacking belly flop on the damp ground.

Her elbow and the oil lamp hit the ground at the same time. Her fingers released the handle. The lamp tipped, and the glass globe protecting the flame shattered.

In the
whoosh
of flame that flared to campfire size, Beth saw the dogs unfurl from their tangled ball of mud and tails into two distinct animals that were unevenly matched. Herriot had the disadvantage of a smaller size and unrestrained boldness. Rain sizzled and raised some smoke as it hit the puddle of spilled oil, but it didn’t quell the flames.

Through the barrier of fire, Beth’s eyes met the wolf’s. The wild animal shuddered, as if shaking itself off of the encounter with Herriot, then bolted. The Appenzeller gave chase, ignoring Beth’s commands that she come back.

The porch door hit the side of the house as Levi walked out with a blanket. He approached the mess without urgency, then unfurled the blanket and dropped it on top of the small pool of flaming oil. The fuel was trapped by the boundaries of the soaked ground and would burn itself out shortly. Her brother crouched next to her body.

“You’re a drain on this family,” Levi said. “Expect me to do my best to boot you out of it.”

She lowered her forehead to the mud.

18

W
ithout returning to the house for her shoes, Beth limped to the barn as the sky’s intense midnight blue took on the dusty denim hue of morning. The last scattered drops of rain cut paths through the mud on her face and clothes, and the oily smoke coated her nostrils.

She needed to find Garner. She needed to find Herriot. She needed to bandage her bleeding foot. Examining it in the weak light before she shoved her toes into a pair of muck boots, she realized she might need stitches.

Tending to her injury, then, was the first thing she needed to do. But she sensed her mother was fundamentally wrong about the time it would take Levi to close a deal with Sam. If Sam had accepted it within beats of her father’s last breath, Beth would assume that the two men had been in discussion behind the family’s collective back for much longer than Levi claimed. Perhaps the deal was already well underway.

Beth whistled for Hastings, slipped onto his back without a saddle, and rode out. She took him past the torn-up screen in the empty porch, past the smoky puddle of lantern oil, where the broken brass lamp was still tipped on its side. She went directly to the Hub house, to Jacob and his father, Dr. Roy.

She had loved the Hub until the day she stole that saddle. It was as honest a place as any on the ranch, and she herself was no longer honest.

By the time she arrived and slid off Hastings’ smooth back, blood had collected, thick and sticky, in the toe of the muck boot. She tried to walk normally up the steps to the front door, thinking the pressure would help staunch the flow. It was nearly five o’clock, guessing by the color of the sky. Everyone should be up.

Jacob opened the door before she reached it, fully dressed and alert, but sleep and sorrow still pulled at the soft skin under his eyes. He waited for her to speak.

“Got a first-aid kit?” she asked.

Less than a minute later she was sitting on the rim of an old bathtub and rinsing her injury under warm water gushing from the spigot. Her pajama bottoms and tank top were covered in mud, which also colored the tips of her long hair. At this point, only her hands and feet were clean. A slippery bar of gray soap decorated with bloody bubbles danced at the drain under the pressure of the water.

Jacob entered with the kit she’d asked for and leaned over her to set it in the dry part of the tub. In the close quarters, the width of his shoulders shielded her from the loss of her father, the risk to her dog, the greed of her brother, the grief pouring off her mother and Danny. For a fleeting moment, Beth felt protected.

Jacob straightened up and shoved his hands into his pockets. Beth flipped the box open and grabbed the bottle of peroxide, which she poured over the gash. The resulting bubbles were fierce.

“You’ll need stitches,” he said.

She set the bottle on the lip of the tub, then rifled the white metal box for a butterfly bandage. “Nah. I have a healer’s touch, remember?”

“Even healers need their tools.”

She nodded noncommittally. “I need to find Herriot.”

“I sent Emory out to have a look at her tracks.”

“Should be plenty. All that rain.” She feared that Emory would instead discover Herriot’s mangled body. “You don’t think that—”

“Herriot’s the smartest dog we’ve got. She’s fine.”

“It was a wolf she went after,” Beth said. “A wolf. She’s an idiot.”

“Probably a coyote. She’s big enough to handle one of those.”

“I saw them,” she whispered. “It wasn’t a fair match.”

Mud smeared Jacob’s white T-shirt sleeve where she’d gripped his shoulder for support as she hopped into the house. Except for that handprint he’d be a model for a laundry detergent commercial. Next to him, Beth felt small and filthy. She focused on applying pressure to the cut.

“Well, let’s wait and see what Emory thinks,” Jacob said.

A new voice said, “Emory thinks we ought to let the wolves have the run of the place.” Beth twisted on her perch and saw Dr. Roy at the bathroom door. The man handed a stained cup of coffee to Jacob and set a second one on the back of the toilet tank, where she could reach it.

“Better the mythical wolves than that Sam Johnson,” Jacob said to his father.

Beth shot a glance at Jacob. “How’d you know about that?”

“Sam crashed the ranchers’ coffee klatch yesterday,” Jacob explained.

“He didn’t crash it,” Roy said. His teeth were stained from coffee, but his smile was so disarming as to make a person look past the imperfect hygiene. “Levi invited him to be there.”

“He did?”

“No need to worry, Beth,” Dr. Roy said. “We were polite. I didn’t even do anything worse than to spit once in his coffee cup. Yours there, I put a little cream and sugar.”