House of Mercy (4 page)

“He’s not too old to have forgotten his top speeds, is he?”

“You’re a good rider,” Phil said, “but you’ll be better off if he’s forgotten at least a little bit.”

“Are you saying he’s too much horse for me?”

“Did I say that? I didn’t say that.” He whispered to Joe, “Go easy on her, old man.”

The horse snorted as if even Phil didn’t have the inside track on whatever joke he planned to pull.

“Here.” Phil handed her a helmet.

“I don’t need one of those for a little canter.”

“Yeah yeah. I know how these things start.”

She snatched up the helmet and strapped it under her chin.

“I hope you don’t lose your job over this,” she whispered to him so Fiona wouldn’t hear.

“I won’t. This is you: Princess Borzoi, Her Majesty the animal whisperer. I’m not worried about a thing. Let Joe lead the way.”

That would be the easiest thing she’d done all night. Her understanding of an animal’s spirit was what would make her a great veterinarian some day, her father often said to her. She could sense, in the light dance of Joe’s feet as she leaned forward in the saddle, that the creature was happy to go for a ride this evening. She could sense, in the patient way he waited for her to attend to the details, that he was pleased to share the adventure.

With a gentle heel, she nudged Joe toward the fresh air. He needed no other prompt. They passed through the wide doors and then navigated a few gates, and Joe told her with his confident stride that his heart would be a reliable compass on this sky-lit night.

In the Thoroughbreds, God had married strength and grace and created a magnificent breed that few people could appreciate firsthand.
Let’s go for a ride
. Beth closed her eyes. There was little for her to see, and her efforts to guide the horse might lead him into dangers worse than mere shadows cast by the moon.

She did as Phil suggested, gave Joe the reins, and trusted the animal’s instincts. In seconds his walk shifted to a trot and then to a canter, and then to a gallop as pleasant as a swiftly flowing creek. Joe was an eagle born to glide above water. The surface of the pastures fell away. She leaned into the horse’s neck and tucked her head and couldn’t remember any sensation as wild and reckless as this.

If she gave in to her urge to grin, the bugs would hit her teeth. The thought of it, the sheer joy of this rush, brought a laugh out of her throat, and then a gasp that invited some witless insect to ride the stiff air straight back down.

The shock jolted her eyes open. Phil should have given her goggles and a mask along with the helmet, she thought. But Joe took no note of her comic sputtering, and after recovering from her coughing fit, she laughed some more. His neck stretched out and so did his stride. Together they picked up speed.

I’ll love you always, Hastings
, she thought,
but you’re an old British butler compared to this rock star
.

She wondered how much faster than this Joe had gone in his youth, on a refined racetrack, with the jockey he trusted most. Next on her list of dreams would be to find someone who might make that experience a reality. Maybe she could arrange some kind of reality-TV career swap with a jockey for a week, or however that worked.

She envisioned a short jockey in all his pink and yellow silks, up to his armpit in the backside of a cow, testing by hand as was traditionally done to see if the bovine was pregnant or open. The image buoyed her good mood.

The horse had reached a pace that Beth understood was beyond her ability to contain. Joe was in charge of her fate now. A flicker of fear passed over her but then flew away from her mind like a rooftop in a high wind. She surrendered to Joe’s confidence, and to the thrill of being out of control.

But Joe’s mood shifted.

Beth noticed it first in a sudden deviation from his course, a quick and not-so-graceful dig into the earth that thrust his weight off center. The angle of his ears changed as he moved off the perimeter of the fence; they stood erect now and resisted the rushing air. And though Beth hadn’t thought it possible on this unrefined terrain, the Thoroughbred accelerated, fueled by an energy that came off his back like fear.

The muscles on the inside of her thighs began to burn as she held her weight off the saddle. She took back the reins, but Joe did not respond to them. Her fingers, entwined in the leather, found the saddle horn. Her eyes, squinting and dry and unexpectedly disoriented, looked for the light of the stables. She thought they might be behind her.

Joe changed course again, zigging to the previous zag. Beth slipped an inch before she recovered her center.

“Whoa,” she instructed. She didn’t share his fear yet. He might respond to her steady calm. “Settle down, boy.”

She attuned her own ears to the surroundings, trying to get a clue for what had upset Joe. Excitement no longer energized the horse. It was replaced by panic, frantic and panting. Beth couldn’t imagine what, on this secure and sheltered land, would be so terrifying. She uttered the soothing tongue clicks and hums that Hastings liked. The sounds were trampled by the pummeling of hooves tearing up the ground, thumping like helicopter blades. Wind whistling over her ears.

A ghost-gray form floated into the periphery of Beth’s vision. She glanced twice, and then a third time. The hulking spirit hovered just above the ground, gliding with a swift and otherworldly intention toward Joe’s flank.

That rooftop of fear crashed back down on Beth’s mind, knocking the breath out of her. She felt Joe’s terror as if it were her own. His foaming sweat flew off his neck and spattered her arms, and into the vacancy of her imagination rushed Wally’s wolf.

It can’t be a wolf
, she told herself.

Whatever it was dashed behind Joe, there and gone like the memory of a dream.

She tried to twist in the saddle, wanting to see what it really was and where it was going, but the power of the horse’s speed forced her to stay forward, low above the Thoroughbred’s back. All she could do was hold on, with weakening thighs and floppy ankles and fingers soft as cooked spaghetti.

Joe’s desperate footwork jerked Beth awry again. Clods of dirt were flying up from behind his hooves, smacking her in the back.

Then the ghost she had lost sight of snarled, and the noise pierced all the other sounds bouncing around her ears. This sound, this primal shriek, declared that this wild dog was neither a phantom nor a fiction dreamed up by a Blazing B associate. It was physical, and it was robust, and it had performed the astonishing feat of predicting how the horse would move to evade the hunt.

The wolf had overtaken them and now came from the front, head-on. It was lunging for Joe’s neck, taking an impossible leap.

The wolf’s weight struck her in the face. One second Joe was solid under Beth and the next she was plunging, gasping, choking on a mouthful of fur. The leather rein caught hold of her wrist and snapped taut, shocked by the weight of her falling body as she left Joe’s back. She felt the joints in her arm and wrist popping as her insignificant mass yanked against Joe’s, which was a bullet train moving in the opposite direction.

She stayed connected to him by that stubborn strap. And the wild animal stayed connected to her, its claws curled into her collarbone.

Beth and beast hit the ground and bounced. She heard rocks connecting with the helmet Phil had insisted she wear. Her body flipped over onto the dog as they rolled, her distended arm still tangled in the reins, and then the animal emerged on top, teeth snapping so close to her face.

Joe might have dragged her to her death if the sudden impact hadn’t jerked his neck sideways and led his hooves into a terrible misstep.

His mountainous body toppled inches from hers, but by now she was deafened by firecrackers in her skull, and she didn’t hear Joe’s collapse. Instead she felt the vibrations of his fall, and his heaving body pulsed atop her forearm, the one roped and pinned under Joe’s shoulder like a calf tossed by a cowboy.

Beth’s mind piled up sandbags against the rising flood of pain. She couldn’t move.

She expected the wolf to tear into her, to finish her off. And it was a wolf. The weight, the coat, the claws—it could be nothing else. It stood on her chest, its padded feet the size of her own hands, but the animal didn’t rip into her jugular or try to dig out her heart, if that was normal wolf behavior. Beth had no point of reference. If she’d been asked before this moment, she would have said no wolf could unseat a rider from a fully extended horse.

His concentrated weight bore down on her ribs so that she couldn’t take a full breath. Beth prayed.
God have mercy
.

The beasty breath, full of heat and moisture and the scent of blood, caressed her chin and floated over her lips and rose through her nose into the panic centers of her mind.

She heard a voice within her ringing head say,
I will show you mercy
.

She decided the voice belonged to God.

She thought it would be a mercy to die.

3

T
he party for the doctor was Garner Remke’s idea. As a seventy-three-year-old who’d been slowed down by liver cancer, he hadn’t thrown a party for years. He wasn’t sure he ever had. Pulling this one off made him feel like a kid again.

The partygoers gathered at the Burnt Rock Harbor Sweet Assembly. The building stood at the base of a spectacular cliff high in the Rocky Mountains, high above Burnt Rock itself, where the air was as pure as the spring snowmelt. Built in the fifties by a wealthy family with ties to the old mining town, the Sweet Assembly was a historic landmark. It was a museum. And it was a church of sorts, which Garner occasionally attended.

But tonight it was simply the best location in town to celebrate the work of Catherine Ransom, MD, who seemed modestly flattered by all the attention.

Nearly all of Burnt Rock’s 457 residents had accepted his invitation, as happy as he was to have something partyish to do during the summer months that didn’t involve entertaining tourists. For the last two hours they’d been mingling outside under the lattice-covered patios, sipping real lemonade spiked with sprigs of mint that Garner had grown in his very own basement greenhouse. Everyone who had a grill had hauled it up to the mountain overlooking their homes, fired up the charcoal, and loosened up with a local microbrew bottled near the headwaters of the Rio Grande. They ate their fill of buffalo burgers, which had been shipped up within a day of slaughter from a free-range bison ranch down in the valley. They sawed away at venison steaks and nibbled at skewered rattlesnake and ate smoky green hatch chilies whole, right out of the tumbling fire roaster.

They entertained each other with dumb-tourist stories—the Texas oil man who didn’t believe the Rio Grande started in Colorado, the college thesis writer who asked if Burnt Rock had a Starbucks—and chatted up all the valley gossip and economic indicators of their tourist season, which was about six weeks underway. Would it be a boom or a bust? On a night such as this, with full bellies and warm hearts and boisterous company, everyone agreed: a boom.

Garner was as close to heaven as he figured he would ever get.

When he decided to call everyone inside, he enlisted the help of Hank and Karen Smith, who ran the hardware store. They had been sharing a table with Nova Yarrow, the bookstore owner, and Dotti Sanders, who was eighty going on eighteen and ran her own rental shack for river rafters. She winked at Garner when he leaned over Hank’s shoulder, then saluted him with her rattlesnake skewer.

“When are you going to attend that herb-garden seminar in Salida with me?” Dotti asked him. “You already missed the first two of the season.”

“Sign me up for the next one,” Garner said, taking pleasure in the surprise that crossed her face. Dotti had been after his companionship for two years, and tonight he finally felt accommodating.

“Well it’s about time,” she muttered.

“And we’ll have a coffee afterward. Now let’s start a trend toward the indoors,” he said. “Don’t sneak off now, or you’ll miss the desserts.” Mazy had outdone herself tonight, claiming she’d been wanting to try out some new concoctions for her popular café. But before they indulged, they would all give Dr. Ransom—Cat, Garner liked to call her—a proper welcome as a true member of the community.

Cat was laughing among a small crowd of business owners: a stable manager, a quilter, a handyman, a mechanic, and a geologist who did his field work here six months out of the year. If the men weren’t all married they might all have been besotted. The good doctor was a slight and fit woman, much shorter than the men in spite of her erect and easy thirtysomething posture. She wore her sleek black hair in a bob that swooped under her chin, and her lined eyes gave her the look of a brooding poet. In spite of these austere features she was much more approachable than anyone had expected the day she moved into the vacant offices previously occupied by a dentist. She never donned a white coat. Her soft turtlenecks and slim jeans did a far better job of instilling patients’ confidence and assuaging any anxiety they associated with doctors’ offices.

Hank and Karen were rounding up the guests when Garner took Cat’s hand and gently pulled her away from the group.

“My turn with the guest of honor,” he said. “We’re heading in. Don’t miss out!”