House of Mercy (42 page)

“I’m begging you. Please.”

“I can’t.”

“You can, but you won’t! You stubborn bull!”

“Careful, girl, I don’t owe you anything.”

“And God didn’t owe you a second life either! But he gave it to you—what are you going to do with it?”

Garner slammed his pruning shears down on the table and took off his gloves. “Is that how this works? You go around giving people gifts they don’t want and then expect something in return? No, I won’t be used that way. But even if I would, it doesn’t matter. There is no money, Beth! Get it? I don’t have squat, and I don’t know who told you I did!”

“You’re lying!”

“I’m telling you the truth like it has never been told in this family. I gave it away! There
is—no—money
!”

Grandfather and granddaughter faced each other underneath the harsh fluorescent lights. Back when he’d allowed his imagination to dream up grandchildren, he had never envisioned a woman who seemed so worn out, her eyes sinking into black bowls of skin, her lips thin and dragged downward by the weight of the world. She was too young to be so old. Her need and his inability to meet it sucked all the fight out of him.

“Okay,” she whispered.

“Do you believe me?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry, Beth.” And he truly was.

“I’m going to go . . . walk,” Beth said. She was small enough to slide by Dotti’s bulk, and her feet were weightless on the stairs, as if she was already vanishing from his life. Here, gone. Garner listened to her boots clack lightly across the floor over his head, heard the squeal of the wood-and-screen door swing open and then slap shut as she left the house.

“So, how much money do you really have?” Dotti asked.

He turned to her. “A fraction of what Hank has.”

“Hank? You gave your money to
Hank
?”

“To Mathilde. Got myself a brass plate and a bench for it.”

“Was it enough to save a ranch?”

Garner sighed. “It was enough to buy ten ranches.”

Dotti fell silent, and Garner found it impossible to look at her. But then she started laughing. “I can’t believe you gave it to Hank! I could have given you class-six whitewater rides
for life
! Much more exciting.”

Garner didn’t find that the least bit funny.

“It’s just as well,” she said, and she pushed herself off the steps and dusted off her backside with the palm of her hand. “People who have money believe it’s the answer to everything. Which, of course, it’s not.”

38

B
eth stood with Garner’s yard gate closed firmly behind her and started to cry.
You said you were going to show me mercy.

I don’t know what you meant
.

She would have to go back to the Blazing B empty-handed. After all that.

Before she left, however, she had a question to ask Nova. A question that might actually have an answer. Beth walked the unpaved roads between her grandfather’s shop and the doctor’s abandoned offices. She passed in front of the broken window that still had not been boarded up. And then she walked into Nova’s bookstore, drying her tears as she entered.

The aisles were narrow and the shelves were short enough to allow a person to see the entire room. Beth saw Nova at the back, rearranging some books. When she saw Beth enter, she raised her hand in a hesitant wave, and Beth thought how nice it would have been to know her older sister, the one now tucked in beside her father in the grave.

Nova spoke first. “I thought you’d have gone home by now.”

Beth shook her head. “I had some things to take care of first. I’ll probably go back today.” It was already late morning, though, and the thought of another night in the mountains—more cougars, more detours—took everything out of her. “Or maybe tomorrow. How are you feeling?”

Nova tipped her head to one side and aligned the spines of several books on the shelf. “It’s a sad time.”

“It is.”

They were quiet for a minute. Beth picked up some of the books Nova was shelving.

“I wanted to ask you about a photograph I saw in your apartment,” Beth asked.

“Which one?”

“The men with the horse—a white man and a Native American.”

“The white man is Jonathan Wulff.”

“Wulff?”

“The grandson of Mathilde Werner Wulff.”

“I don’t know who she is.”

“She is the one behind the Sweet Assembly. The church where you found me Monday night.”

“Miracle Mattie?” Beth asked, recalling something Trey Bateman had said.

Nova nodded.

“I guess I’m not up to speed on the story.”

While Nova arranged her books, she told Beth the tale of Mathilde’s journey, of the cougar attack, of the mysterious Indian man who rose from the cold fire pit and took her home. In the rich vision of the story world that Nova built, Beth momentarily forgot her troubles.

“Come over here,” Nova eventually said, and Beth followed her to the front of the store to a shelf labeled
Regional
.

“Mathilde’s original journal is still with the Wulff family,” Nova said as she ran her fingers along the titles, searching for one in particular. “There are excerpts on display at the Sweet Assembly. But about twenty years ago one of her descendants published it.” She found the slim paperback volume and pulled it out for Beth.
The Personal Account of Miracle Mattie
.

“Jonathan Wulff wrote the foreword,” Nova pointed out.

“The man in your picture,” Beth confirmed.

“Yes, the one whose leg was healed at the same place. Please take the book. It’s a small thing, but I’d like you to have it. For comfort in your own sad time.”

“Who is the other man in the photograph? The one riding the horse.”

“My great-great-grandfather. He was an elder among the Southern Ute in the 1930s. Jonathan married his daughter.”

“And I’m guessing that the saddle on the horse is the one Mathilde made for her husband—the one they gave to the tribe as a gift of thanks?”

“That’s right.”

“What happened to it?”

“I really don’t know. By the time it came into my grandfather’s hands, alcohol had damaged his authority as an elder. It is rumored that he traded the saddle for a case of whiskey.”

Was that like trading the saddle to save a horse’s eye? No—what Beth had done was worse. At least Nova’s grandfather had the right to trade it.

Beth looked at the plain book cover in the light of the large window. She fell into wondering how the saddle had traveled across the decades from a whiskey trader to Jacob, the taciturn son of a psychiatrist, without being dismantled. Knowing the history of this old piece now, she could barely believe that she had suggested Phil and Fiona strip it of its silver.

But she was pulled back to the conversation when a mental puzzle piece fell into place.

“Wait—that means you’re related to Mathilde?”

“Yes,” Nova said reluctantly. “I am her great-great-
great-
granddaughter.”

“That’s something.”

“I find it best around here not to draw attention to it.”

“Why?”

“Because people ask questions I can’t answer. There’s no rhyme or reason to why some people get what they need and others don’t, though men like Hank try to explain it. Good people say their prayers, give their money. They beg and plead and leave crying. What kind of God could turn his back on such people? Grandfather Wulff thought the Sweet Assembly would be for everybody. But it’s only for the lucky few. I take no pride in it.”

“But that’s where you went when you had nowhere else to turn,” Beth observed.

Nova turned her eyes back to the book spines as if she was looking for something, and she clasped her fingers behind her back. “Yes. Well. Maybe I’m a fool.”

“Or maybe you’re just hopeful,” Beth said. The morning sun coming in through the storefront was a comforting blanket around her shoulders.

Nova turned around and reached out to touch Beth’s arm. “I would not find it hard to put my faith in a person like you, after what you did for me. And for Mr. Remke. People are talking. They don’t believe, but it’s easy for me.” She pulled Beth down onto a narrow wooden bench in front of the bookcases as if she would prevent her from ever leaving. “You have power.”

Her words and her touch alarmed Beth, who tried to pull away. “No,” Beth said. “I told you I don’t. Only God has real power.”

“Then tell me how you get it. Tell me how you make your God do what you want him to do. How did you heal me? How did you raise Mr. Remke from the dead?”

The childlike desire in Nova’s question melted away Beth’s panic. It was the question she herself had been trying to figure out from the moment her life began to fall apart. Her search for a formula that she could apply to God was no different from what Nova wanted.

She took Nova’s hand. “It doesn’t work that way,” Beth said. “I came here hoping for my own miracle, Nova. And I didn’t find it. I couldn’t make it happen. Other things happened—other miraculous things that I couldn’t have dreamed up. But they weren’t what I asked for.”

Nova frowned. “And what would be the purpose of that?”

“I don’t know yet. Maybe I won’t ever know.”

“Maybe
you’re
the fool.”

Beth smiled at that. “Do you think I am?”

Nova appeared to be caught in the awkward space of not wanting to call her healer a fool. She said, “Why do you follow such a God?”

The answer came to Beth’s mouth swiftly. “Because I believe he is
good
. Not because he gives me what I want, but just because he is. He doesn’t owe me any other explanation.” And in that moment she recalled her father’s faith, his close-to-dying words, which she was so far from understanding at the time:
“My faith isn’t in good outcomes, Beth, only in the goodness of God.”

It was enough to bring her to her feet. She wanted to go home. She wanted to be with the people she loved, regardless of the outcome.

Nova was shaking her head and staring at her hands. “He has not been so good to me.”

There was more pain than defiance in her words, a resignation to life’s difficulties that broke Beth’s heart. She reached out and took both of Nova’s hands. “Maybe you just don’t know what you’re looking at, Nova. God is present even when life is so hard. Ask him to show his goodness to you. He’ll do it. I promise you.”

A new voice entered the conversation. “Mind if I eavesdrop?”

Beth turned. Trey Bateman was leaning against a display behind the women. His hands were crammed into dress pants, and he wore a T-shirt under a maroon-colored vest, and a matching maroon bow tie.

“Is that your work uniform?” Beth giggled at him while also wiping moisture from her eyes. Nova stood up too and withdrew her hands from Beth’s.

“I’m a trendsetter, what can I say?”

Beth nodded. “Did you just pull in?” She glanced out the window and saw his bus in front of the post office.

“I did. Saw you come in, but it takes a little while to pull away from the visitors.”

“That’s okay.”

“I’ve got an hour before I have to guide a group through the mining museum.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder toward the door. “Do you have time to get a coffee or something? I thought we could talk.”

Nova slapped Beth lightly on the arm and busied herself with her books again. Beth looked at him and found his question too difficult to answer.

“About your wolf,” he said.

“What?”

“We could talk about your wolf. Or about whatever you want. I’m just a curious guy. About you. And wolves. And all the ways you’ve weirded me out in the last thirty-six hours.”

She laughed at this.

“But maybe now’s not a good time,” he said.

“It’s not a bad time. But I think I need to go home.”

“I can walk you back up to Garner’s.”

“I mean to the ranch. To my family. Garner isn’t very happy with me right now.”

Trey sighed. “So when are you going to leave? Wait—are you going to ride back? On your horse?”

“Well I don’t have a car.”

He shook his head. “Let me drive you. It’s a big bus. No room for the horse—”

“That’s really nice of you, but—”

“It’s too late to start out on horseback.”

“Maybe I won’t go until tomorrow.”

“Even so. Where did you sleep last night?”

“At Dotti’s.”

“She’ll let you stay with her again.”

Nova touched Beth’s elbow. “Actually, I was hoping to talk you into staying with me tonight. I have more questions.”

Trey started bobbing his head. “There, see? Now you can’t go until tomorrow. It would be rude to leave sooner.” He reached out and took Beth’s hand and pulled her toward the door. “But I have first dibs on talking with our new pal,” he said to Nova. “You’ll have to wait. I’ll have her back in an hour.”

Nova waved them out of her store. And Beth accepted Trey’s and Nova’s friendship. It was a good gift from a good God.