House of Mercy (3 page)

“I heard that too.”

“Maybe that’ll be Phil’s miracle this time—an unexpected guest, someone with the right know-how or the right resources who will come to his horse’s rescue.”

“Angels unaware,” Beth said.

“Something like that. Night, Beth.”

Beth didn’t want him to go just yet. “Night.”

She lingered at the door while it closed, hoping he might intuit what she didn’t have the courage to say.

When he didn’t, she committed to her original plan. She descended the steps in a quiet rush, wanting to whisk the saddle away before he could object to what he didn’t know. She wanted to be the one who did the good works, who made the incredible rescue. She couldn’t help herself. It was her father’s blood running through her heart.

On the driveway, her smooth-soled boots skimmed the dirt, whispering back to her truck.

“It’s not your right to do it,” Jacob said. Beth gasped and whirled at the sound of his voice, unexpected and loud and straight into her ear, as if he’d been standing on her shoulder. “It’s not your gift to give.”

But the ranch house door was shut tight under the cone of the porch light, and the bright window revealed nothing inside but heavy furniture and cluttered tabletops. At the back of the house, a different door closed heavily. Jacob was headed out to the bunkhouse to check on Wally already.

Beth let her captured breath leave her lungs. She looked around for an explanation, because she didn’t want to accept that the words might have been uttered by a guilty conscience.

At the base of the porch steps, crouching in such darkness that its black center sank into its surroundings, was the form of an unusually large dog. Erect ears, broad head, slender body. A wolf. She had passed that spot so closely seconds ago that she could have reached out and stroked its neck.

She took one step backward. Of course, her mind was dreaming this up because Wally had suggested a wolf to her. If he hadn’t, she might have said the silhouette had the outline of a snowman. An inverted snowman guarding the house from her lies. In May.

Beth stared at it for several seconds, oddly unable to recall the landscape where she’d spent her entire life. She was distressed not to be able to say from this distance and angle whether that was a shrub planted there, or a fence post, or an old piece of equipment that hadn’t made it back into the supply shed. When the shape of its edges seemed to shift and shudder without actually moving at all, she decided that her eyes were being tricked by the darkness.

Convincing herself of this was almost as easy as justifying her saddle theft.

She turned away from the house and hurried onward, looking back only once.

2

T
he Kandinskys’ horse ranch lay a half hour’s drive from the Blazing B. It seemed to belong in the rolling hills of Kentucky or New York, not to these simple plains. The white fences and ornamental gates were out of place in this land of wood posts and steel rails. The Rolls Royces parked in house-sized garages were entirely impractical, too good to drive down the two-lane highways. But the family members, though a bit standoffish, were nationally respected breeders of Fox Trotters and Morgans. They made good money in this valley acquiring reliable working stock for the ranchers. It seemed reasonable that Mr. Kandinsky’s brother-in-law, a Thoroughbred breeder transferring some of his livelihood to a new ranch in California, would pick this place for a rest stop along the way.

Phil had given Beth directions to the horse breeder’s secondary stables, a barn reserved for the workhorses rather than the studs. She parked near the sliding door that opened onto the stable alley.

Beth kept a first-aid kit for animals behind the driver’s seat. She withdrew it, not sure if the ointments and disinfectants and dressings and poultices would be at all relevant. But the weight of the bag felt good in her hands, like confidence.

She entered the barn. Hay scattered across the ground silenced her footsteps. The entire facility, which boasted twelve stalls, was lined with fresh wheat straw and thick rubber mats and shining pine tongue-and-groove siding. If these quarters were for the lowly workers, the studs must have been housed in a crystal palace. Several of the stalls were occupied, but Phil leaned out of the box at the far end and motioned her to come.

She hoped that the horse’s condition was not as bad as he had made it out to be over the phone.

Beth kept her voice low so as not to startle the animals. “Hey, Phil. Fiona,” she said to his teenage sister who, judging by her sleeping bag, intended to spend the night with poor Marigold. Both Phil and Fiona had willowy statures and fine brown hair that fell into their eyes. Fiona sat on the ground, hugging her knees. Beth looked at the horse. “How’s she doing?”

Fiona shook her head and bit her lip. She rocked herself gently.

“You tell us,” Phil said. “It’s her left eye.” His tone was hopeful. For Fiona’s sake, Beth thought.

Marigold lay on her side on a bank of straw, her eyes closed, and Beth took heart in the mare’s peaceful appearance. There was no indication that the eyelid had been damaged. Her eyelashes were horizontal, as they ought to be. The contour of Marigold’s head was smooth and free of swelling. Quite possibly, Phil and Fiona’s inexperience had overstated the trouble.

Beth made a gentle clucking noise to alert Marigold to her presence before kneeling and stroking the mare’s shoulder. The horse allowed it, approving with a deep sigh as Beth’s fingers moved upward on the neck, caressing the jaw in the comforting way that Hastings liked so much.

When her hands approached the mare’s eye, intending to lift the lid for a closer look, Marigold tossed her head away from Beth’s probing. She nickered a warning and shot an open-eyed glare that caused Beth’s hope to drop. The protective tissue over Marigold’s eye, which should have been water clear, was a white cloud so dense that the pupil and iris were nearly invisible. And toward the rear corner of the eye, the surface was uneven and waxy, like the dribbles of a melting candle.

“Her cornea has an ulcer,” Beth began.

“Is that bad?” Phil asked.

“Not normally.” Corneal ulcers were one of the more common injuries a horse might receive in its lifetime. Hastings had suffered his share. “I’m sorry, girl,” she said to the mare. “How long has she been like this?”

“The cloudiness—two weeks?” Phil said.

“Sixteen days,” Fiona said. Beth groaned inwardly.

“But that oozing, it just started yesterday.”

“Day before,” Fiona corrected.

Beth shook her head at Phil’s optimism. “Sixteen days ago we could have turned this around with topical antibiotics. She might have improved in a few days. But this—this is called a melting ulcer. They’re wicked. Somewhere along the line that plain vanilla ulcer picked up some bacteria or a fungus. The infection is only going to get worse.”

Her first-aid kit sat in the straw beside her, worthless.

Phil glanced at Fiona. “What do we do?”

“You get a vet on this right now. A licensed vet. Tonight. I can call someone for you.”

“What’s he going to tell us?”

“That you waited too long to call him. That Marigold might need surgery to reverse this, depending on how deep it’s gone. Two weeks is a long time, you guys.”

“She just didn’t give any sign that it really bothered her,” Fiona said.

Beth was sure the horse had. It was more likely that Phil and Fiona didn’t recognize what they were seeing. “I don’t mean to be cruel, but you need to understand how serious this is. She could lose her eye if you don’t treat it aggressively.”

Fiona dropped her head onto her knees. Phil paled. He didn’t have to say what Beth knew was running through his mind. The cost of an equine surgery on a grocer’s salary would hurt. Even if surgery wasn’t part of the equation, the antibiotics, the anti-inflammatories, the medications to control the enzymes that were destroying the eye tissues would all add up.

Beth placed a hand on Phil’s arm. “Come with me for a second. I brought something that might help.”

Over the next several minutes, Beth focused on restoring hope to the siblings. She took them out to her truck and showed them the saddle’s silver.

“You can remove it from the leather,” she explained. “Sell it for cash. I’m sure there’s enough here to cover whatever Marigold needs.” It took some effort, but she eventually coaxed them into accepting the gift for Marigold’s sake. Then Beth called the Blazing B’s own vet and asked his phone service to rouse him from his sleep. While the threesome waited for Dr. O’Connor’s return call, she sang his praises. By the time he agreed to come out in spite of the hour, Phil and Fiona had regained some of their optimism.

“We thought of the perfect way to thank you,” Fiona said as Beth closed her cell phone. There was excitement in the light touch she placed on Beth’s arm. “Wait here. It’ll just take a few minutes.”

“You don’t need to do anything. Really.”

“We do, we do. Give us five.”

Five minutes was nothing to ask. The vet wouldn’t arrive for forty-five at least.

Beth opened the tailgate and sat under the bright moon while she waited. Phil had carried the silver-clad saddle back through the stables to his own truck on the other side, and already she was having second thoughts about whether offering that up had been the right thing to do. She was disappointed in herself for not bringing it up to Jacob. And she could think of a dozen things that silver might have paid for at her very own ranch. Why hadn’t she considered any of them in the hour between Phil’s concerned phone call and her brilliant idea to foot Marigold’s bill?

Because her idea had been inspired. Two hours ago she had no doubt that it was exactly what she ought to do. Beth sent her memory in search of that certainty so that she could hold on to it more firmly this time.

“It’s not your right to do it,” Jacob said, loud and close, and Beth jerked out of her reverie, expecting to see him standing beside the truck. Instead she found Fiona. The girl seized Beth’s wrist and yanked her right off the tailgate, then tugged her back into the bright stables.

Phil was grinning at her, standing in the alley next to the tallest, glossiest, most beautiful Thoroughbred horse Beth had ever seen. She felt her lips form an O as admiration filled her next breath.

“What d’ya think?” he said.

Beth’s sigh was awed and contented at the same time. “He’s amazing,” she breathed.

“Beth, meet Java Java Go Joe. Joe, meet Beth.”

The horse’s name was appropriate, considering the sheen of his coat, an oily dark-roasted coffee bean. The stud’s track record at the races and in siring winners had lived up to the moniker too.

“Your reputation precedes you, sire,” Beth said. The stallion before her, the Kandinskys’ guest, was more than seventeen hands high and glistening, majestic. His lean legs made up most of the size difference between him and the ranch horses. Her father’s geldings, including Hastings, averaged fourteen to fifteen hands. Those sturdy beasts saved many a cowboy’s head while driving cattle through the forested mountains, where low-hanging tree limbs could steal hats and dent foreheads.

Her father objected to Thoroughbreds on the ranch. “They’re too tall, too fast, and they don’t have good cow sense,” he always said. Beth knew a couple of ranchers who didn’t seem to mind these shortcomings in their own horses, but her father was immovable.

It took Beth a long time to notice that Joe was saddled and ready to ride.

“No,” her mouth said, while her heart cried
yes
.

Phil gestured to the blocks at Joe’s side. “A small gesture of our appreciation,” he said.

Beth stroked the animal’s neck, and his muscles flickered under the skin. He seemed peaceful, easygoing, as if getting dressed out at this hour were an everyday thing.

“I shouldn’t. I can’t.”

“Sure you can,” Phil said.

“He’s not even Mr. Kandinsky’s.”

“He’s still family.”

Beth shook her head. “It’s wrong.”

“What’s wrong with giving a champion like him any excuse to relive the glory days? He’s retired, you know. He resents that they only love him for his stud fees anymore. He told me so. But I said you’d love him for all the right reasons.”

Beth laughed and found herself standing on the blocks.

“I guessed at your stirrup length,” he said.

“Then we should see how good at guesswork you are,” she said, and she was astride Joe’s strong back before she could decide not to be. Her adrenaline kicked in. Beth felt him shift, evaluating her size and weight. She inserted her feet in the stirrups. Phil’s estimate was perfect.

“Ten minutes,” Phil urged. “No harm, no foul. In the three days he’s been here he’s blazed a trail all his own around the center pasture. Let him show you around. I guarantee you’ve never been on anything like him.”

“I’ve never been thanked for terrible news quite like this before.”

“It’s not for that. It’s for the saddle. Duh,” Fiona said kindly.

On her perch, Beth towered over the pair. Taking the horse out to the pasture at this hour was a risky and maybe even stupid idea. And yet their upturned faces held so much expectancy. It seemed wrong to deny them. And she had often dreamed of riding a horse like this.