“Not the usual thing — I mean, a black doctor and a white doctor in practice together in these parts, and not usual, either, to see a black woman with a white child around here. But I take all that to mean the world’s getting to be a better place at last, more tolerant, more loving.”
She folded the top of the bag twice and handed it to Barbara.
“Thank you, Mercy.”
To Joe, Mercy Ealing said, “I’m sure sorry I couldn’t be more help to you.”
“You’ve been a lot of help,” he assured her. He smiled. “And there’s cookies.”
She looked toward the kitchen window that was on the side of the house rather than on the back of it. One of the stables was visible through the pall of rain.
She said, “A good cookie does lift the spirit, doesn’t it? But I sure wish I could do more than make cookies for Jeff today. He dearly loves that mare.”
Glancing at the calendar with the religious theme, Joe said, “How do you hold on to your faith, Mercy? How in a world with so much death, planes falling out of the sky and favorite mares being taken for no reason?”
She didn’t seem surprised or offended by the question. “I don’t know. Sometimes it’s hard, isn’t it? I used to be so angry that we couldn’t have kids. I was working at some record for miscarriages, and then I just gave up. You want to scream at the sky sometimes. And there’s nights you lie awake. But then I think…well, this life has its joys too. And, anyway, it’s nothing but a place we have to pass through on our way to somewhere better. If we live forever, it doesn’t matter so much what happens to us here.”
Joe had been hoping for a more interesting answer. Insightful. Penetrating. Homespun wisdom. Something he could believe.
He said, “The mare will matter to Jeff. And it matters to you because it matters so much to him.”
Picking up another lump of dough, rolling it into a pale moon, a tiny planet, she smiled and said, “Oh, if I understood it, Joe, then I wouldn’t be me. I’d be God. And that’s a job I sure wouldn’t want.”
“How so?”
“It’s got to be even sadder than our end of things, don’t you think? He knows our potential but has to watch us forever falling short, all the cruel things we do to one another, the hatred and the lies, the envy and greed and the endless coveting. We see only the ugliness people do to those around us, but He sees it all. The seat He’s in has a sadder view than ours.”
She put the ball of dough on the cookie sheet and impressed upon it the mark of her thumb: a moment of pleasure waiting to be baked, to be eaten, to lift the spirit.
The veterinarian’s Jeep station wagon was still in the driveway, parked in front of the Explorer. A Weimaraner was lying in the back of the vehicle. As Joe and Barbara climbed into the Ford and slammed the doors, the dog raised its noble silver-gray head and stared at them through the rear window of the Jeep.
By the time that Barbara slipped the key into the ignition and started the Explorer, the humid air was filled with the aromas of oatmeal-chocolate-chip cookies and damp denim. The windshield quickly clouded with the condensation of their breath.
“If it’s Nina, your Nina,” Barbara said, waiting for the air conditioner to clear the glass, “then where has she been for this whole year?”
“With Rose Tucker somewhere.”
“And why would Rose keep your daughter from you? Why such awful cruelty?”
“It’s not cruelty. You hit on the answer yourself, out there on the back porch.”
“Why do I suspect the only time you listen to me is when I’m full of shit?”
Joe said, “Somehow, since Nina survived with Rose, survived because of Rose, now Rose’s enemies will want Nina too. If Nina had been sent home to me, she’d have been a target. Rose is just keeping her safe.”
The pearly condensation retreated toward the edges of the windshield.
Barbara switched on the wipers.
From the rear window of the Jeep Cherokee, the Weimaraner still watched them without getting to its feet. Its eyes were luminous amber.
“Rose is keeping her safe,” he repeated. “That’s why I’ve got to learn everything I can about Flight 353 and stay alive long enough to find a way to break the story wide open. When it’s exposed, when the bastards behind all of this are ruined and on their way to prison or the gas chamber, then Rose will be safe and Nina can…she can come back to me.”
“If this Nina is your Nina,” she reminded him.
“If she is, yes.”
Under the somber yellow gaze of the dog, they swung past the Cherokee and circled the oval bed of blue and purple delphiniums around which the terminus of the driveway turned.
“You think we should have asked Mercy to help us find the house in Pueblo where she dropped Rose and the girl that night?” Barbara wondered.
“No point. Nothing there for us. They never went inside that house. As soon as Mercy drove out of sight, they moved on. Rose was just using Mercy to reach the nearest sizable town, where she could get transportation, maybe call a trusted friend in Los Angeles or somewhere. How large is Pueblo?”
“About a hundred thousand people.”
“That’s large enough. Plenty of ways in and out of a city that size. Bus, maybe train, rental car, even by air.”
As they headed down the gravel driveway toward the paved road, Joe saw three men in hooded rain slickers exiting a stable stall beyond an exercise yard. Jeff Ealing, Ned, and the veterinarian.
They left both the lower and the upper halves of the Dutch door standing open. No horse followed them.
Huddled against the downpour, heads bowed as if they were a procession of monks, they moved toward the house. No clairvoyance was required to know that their shoulders were slumped not only under the weight of the storm but under the weight of defeat.
Now a call to the knackery. A beloved mare to be transported and rendered. Another summer afternoon on the Loose Change Ranch — never to be forgotten.
Joe hoped that the years, the toil, and the miscarriages had not caused any distance to open between Jeff and Mercy Ealing. He hoped that in the night they still held each other.
The gray storm light was so dim that Barbara switched on the headlights. In those twin beams, as they reached the paved highway, the silvery rain glittered like flensing knives.
In Colorado Springs, a network of shallow lakes had formed on the grammar-school playground next to which Joe had parked his rental car. In the gray-rinsed light, rising from the rain-dimpled water, the jungle gyms and the seesaws and the elaborate swing sets appeared strange to Joe, not at all like what they were, but like a steel-pipe Stonehenge more mysterious even than the ancient rock megaliths and trilithons on England’s Salisbury Plain.
Everywhere he turned his eyes now, this world was different from the one that he had inhabited all his life. The change had begun the previous day, when he’d gone to the cemetery. Ever since, a shift seemed to be progressing with gathering power and speed, as though the world of Einsteinian laws had intersected with a universe where the rules of energy and matter were so different as to baffle the wisest mathematicians and the proudest physicists.
This new reality was both more piercingly beautiful and more fearsome than the one that it replaced. He knew the change was subjective and would never reverse itself. Nothing this side of death would ever again seem simple to him; the smoothest surface hid unknowable depths and complexities.
Barbara stopped in the street beside his rental car, two blocks from her house. “Well. I guess this is as far as we go.”