11
Cat Ransom’s life began to fall apart, again, on Monday morning.
In truth, the crumbling had begun the night lightning struck Garner Remke’s window and rekindled the man’s hope for a family reunion. Since then, Garner had fully recovered from his illness. It was no stroke or flu that had afflicted him, but a very carefully measured brew of elderberry-bark tea, disguised as something less toxic. Just enough to give him pause while she got to the bottom of the facts. Of course, she had no medical examiner “friend” in the valley. But she had loads of common sense. All that was required to confirm Abel’s non-death was a phone call to the Blazing B, a claim to be a supplier returning a call to Mr. Abel Borzoi, and a hasty hang-up when the calm person on the other end of the line said, “Let me fetch him for you.”
That was how Cat ended rumors of falling skies.
She hadn’t expected when she moved here to find a quaint kind of mysticism at work in the day-to-day thinking of its residents, the kind that let Garner read signs from God in broken glass and lured miracle-seeking tourists by the busloads to the Burnt Rock Harbor Sweet Assembly church, which was not a church in any traditional or reasonable sense. If not for Garner’s surprising devotion to her in spite of all this, she might have left before the first winter was over.
Devotion was all Cat had ever wanted from anyone, and until Monday morning she had thought Burnt Rock’s devotion to her was secure.
Her first indication that it was not came in the form of a phone call from Garner. They had plans to drive south of town and collect yarrow together while it was still at its peak.
“Cat, girl, you don’t mind if I take a rain check on our plans to head down the mountain today, do you?”
“But it’s not raining. It’s a gorgeous day!”
“A scorcher already.”
“You’ve never minded the heat,” she said.
“It’s not the heat, Cat. It’s . . . I don’t know what it is exactly, but I still don’t feel a hundred percent.”
She sank onto her sofa, feeling disappointed. “I understand. You should listen to your body, or all that progress we’ve made on your cancer will lose momentum. Hang the Closed sign on your shop and go straight to bed. I can bring you something to eat in a bit if you like.”
“Ah, Cat. You are so good to me. But it’s not like that. My body feels fine. It’s the old sentimental heart that’s blue today. I thought I’d attend Hank’s service at the Sweet Assembly and see if that might cheer me up a bit.”
Hank the handyman officiated short, meaningless services daily for the busloads who visited the site. For the entire summer he recycled the same twenty-minute inspirational message about creating one’s own miracles through the power of belief. She sat through it once. It was a load of tripe designed to bring in donations to keep the facility in attractive shape.
“You know I support anything that makes you feel better, Garner. But it stretches my imagination to think an old speech from Hank will do you more good than a fresh-air outing with me.”
“It probably won’t, and you’ll prove yourself right again. But this is where I need to be today. I hope you’ll understand.”
“Of course I do,” she said, though she didn’t at all. She looked ruefully at the collection kit and the picnic she had already prepared and placed by her door. Garner had never broken a commitment to her, for any reason. “If you don’t mind I’ll go out solo anyway. I’ll bring you a good share of whatever I find.”
“You’re the best, Cat. You really are.”
Those words soothed the hurt a little. Just a little. After they ended the call, Cat gathered up the bags and carried them down the rear stairs of the apartment. These stairs led down to a public hall and an exit from the building. At the left end of the hall was a private entrance to her doctor’s office, which was the one she used most of the time. Her patients entered from Main Street into the front waiting room. At the other end was a similar private entrance for Nova Yarrow’s bookstore, and a similar stairway that led up to the bookseller’s residence. A small atrium separated the businesses and the apartments.
Cat had the misfortune of timing her exit to match Nova’s emergence from her home. She thought Nova pretended not to see her as she locked the door.
The woman’s dislike of the doctor was as confounding to Cat as anyone’s faith in that silly little church up the hill. She had never, to her knowledge, done anything to offend Nova. Perhaps because she was feeling the sting of Garner’s decision to ditch her, Cat tried one more time to make a connection with her neighbor. She caught Nova’s eye and put as much goodwill as she possessed into her voice.
“Was it a good weekend for you? Looks like the tour buses are still coming up full.”
“It was fine.” Nova’s descent was as unhurried as her words. She seemed sluggish, and her olive skin was pale. Cat paused with the bags in her hands.
“I was just thinking of you this morning. I’m going out to collect some yarrow—how’s your supply? Want me to bring any back for you?”
“No, thank you.” Nova arrived at the bottom step and sighed. “I can get what I need from Garner.”
“But I can bring it to you fresh, and for free,” Cat said lightly. She smiled until her eyes crinkled. Nova didn’t even register amusement.
“I don’t need any.”
“Honest? I find myself recommending the stuff almost every day. I need enough to get everyone through the winter. They stop flowering in September, you know. There’s nothing you can’t use it for—stomachaches, hemorrhoids, toothaches, first aid. It even lightens up the menstrual cycle if that’s a concern. But I’m sure you know all this, since you share the name.”
Nova put her key into the door of her bookshop. Cat noticed the tiny tendrils of sleek but sweaty hair that had fallen out of their knot and lay on Nova’s collar. Her neck had a rosy sheen to it.
“Are you okay, Nova?”
“Yes.”
“You look a little—”
“Tired. Nauseated. It’s nothing. I’m fine, really. I’m—”
“Pregnant,” Cat said, seeing it all in a flash. “You’re expecting! Of course you don’t want to be taking medicinal herbs right now. Though I should mention that you could still rub the yarrow on your skin as an insect repellent. Congratulations! What great news.”
The woman was short and bird thin. If she reached full term, she might not tip the scales at much over a hundred, Cat thought.
Nova pulled her door open now and held it ajar with one hand as she turned halfway back to Cat. Her eyes held poorly veiled annoyance, but her voice was level.
“There is no news yet, Dr. Ransom. I’m sure you understand.”
“Of course I do. Don’t be silly. When it comes to doctor-patient privilege I am more discreet than a Victorian grandmother. You should come in so we can get your prenatal care underway. Are you already on vitamins? I have samples—let me fetch some for you.” She set her bags down and turned in the direction of her offices. “You should feel free to use my rear entrance for as long as you want to keep your news private.”
She couldn’t fathom who the father might be. If Nova was seeing anyone from the area, she was a queen of stealth.
“I am in need of nothing,” Nova said before she reached the door. This time, her tone held a warning.
Cat’s keys dangled from her fingertips. “Okay. But I can get you on the appointment books. It’s no trouble at all.”
“I don’t intend to make an appointment,” Nova said.
“What? Of course you will. What are you talking about? This is a small town, but we’re civilized here.”
“If that was a reference to my Ute heritage, I will overlook it. But even if it is not, let’s understand each other: this baby I carry is a gift from the heavens. He is blessed. He is specially protected by the sign of his conception, and the sign of his delivery. It’s a fortuitous pairing. And the two of us, I’m glad to say, won’t be needing your services.”
Cat’s lips parted, but nothing came out. This nutcase was putting the health of her fetus in the hands of a horoscope? Was this what Nova’s hatred was all about—astrology versus medical science?
Nova’s door floated shut behind her before Cat summoned the boldness to ask.
All Cat had ever wanted to do was help people stay alive. She aimed her 4-wheel drive up and out of Burnt Rock’s basin, rose to meet the paved highway, and then dropped by twisty mountain miles into lower elevations, where the vegetation was more lush and varied. She wondered what kind of a world it was where such a noble desire to serve people could ever be called criminal, while people like Nova could turn up their noses at common sense and simply be called eccentric.
Cat felt deeply wounded by this, and the beauty surrounding her didn’t ease the hurt, as it usually did. Probably because she was alone.
She had been left alone by Garner. She had been rejected by Nova.
Innumerable shades of green fluttered along the steep hillside, seeming to race her downhill. Densely growing spruce trees began to yield ground to the long-needled ponderosa pines and silvery quaking aspens.
On sunny days like this one, when the thermometer pushed into the high eighties even on the mountaintops, it was hard for Catherine to imagine that within six months this same region would be subjected to winter-weather blockbusters, the kind that featured avalanches and road closures and small snowbound towns at the heart of cannibalistic tales. Burnt Rock had no such morbid history, though it was occasionally cut off from the outside world, and this was one reason why Cat Ransom had chosen it for her home. She had ruled out the tourist trap fifty miles south because of its tacky museum commemorating a historic flesh-eater born there two hundred years ago.
“There’s no point in trying to leave one’s mark where the competition is so long established,” she had said to Dotti Sanders of that town and its clinic a few days after setting up office in Burnt Rock. The spunky octogenarian who still went river rafting had made an appointment for a stubborn infection in her foot. Dotti was reclined in a dentist’s chair, which had been left behind by the previous physician.
Dotti raised an eyebrow while Cat gently peeled away the old dressing and then said, rather fearlessly Cat thought, “You don’t plan to eat my toes, do you?” And Cat had laughed, because she hadn’t realized that the remark might have been interpreted that way. It wasn’t what she meant at all.
“You have nothing to fear,” she’d replied. “I’m all about keeping people alive.”
Today the brightness of the sky cut through Cat’s windshield as she followed the downward turns in the highway. The descending lane hugged the mountainside and set her back twelve feet from the precipitous cliffs. Few guard rails protected the ascending side. What protected careless drivers also made hard work for snowplows. Except in particularly dangerous spots, the state had opted to go without the rails so that heavy snows could be pushed away without obstacle. Leaving Burnt Rock never generated the same anxiety in Cat’s nerves that returning to it did. Besides the risk of accidentally tumbling off the road, there was always the chance that her secrets had been discovered in her absence.
Not so long ago, Cat was known in a western state as Katrina White. Dr. White had been unfairly stripped of her license to practice medicine and likely would have spent some time in prison had she not thrown herself at the mercy of the plaintiff and the court, convinced both that she posed no flight risk, and then fled the state with cash and a new identity.
Catherine Ransom wiped Katrina White off the map.
Cat pulled her car into a scenic turnout that featured a pleasant waterfall when the snow melted off. At the other end of the lot, Garner and she had marked their own private trailhead, which was cloaked by shrubs and untrod grasses, and defined by a familiar boulder here and an aging spruce there. The all but invisible path led to a meadow rich with wild herbs, especially the cheerful yellow arnica and the more dour stinging nettle.
Cat retrieved from her trunk the backpack she used for herb gathering. It contained gloves, paper lunch bags, a small trowel and gardener’s pruning shears, rubber bands for binding cut stems, cheesecloth for wrapping more fragile cuttings, and a pocketknife. She set off, expecting the short hike to take less than two hours one way.
Since leaving the West Coast, she’d devoted her primary efforts to a greener form of healing. Her newfound focus on herbal remedies had resulted in an advantageous bond with Garner, whose impressive basement provided Cat with much of what she needed that didn’t grow in the Rocky Mountain wilds, and at a much better price than she could have it online. And as it turned out, her singular attentiveness to his personal well-being had actually been good for his health.
She’d invested more money in her new identity than she’d initially planned. But the extra expense gained her the licenses and numbers she needed to conservatively write prescriptions under her new name. In this way she could present herself to the world as an open-minded, even-keeled physician who treated patients’ symptoms with every resource available to her.
With only a few, unimportant exceptions that Cat was able to pass off to more traditional doctors down in the valley, the Burnt Rock residents were happy to have such a doctor among them: one who respected the natural order of the world, who prescribed artificially concocted remedies only when nature needed assistance, and who had escaped the evil clutches of those politicking pharmaceutical giants by choosing this humble, small-town life of modest means. It seemed the whole aching world was rushing her door for healing compresses dipped in her arnica liniment, made from the fresh blooms steeped in rubbing alcohol. From the dried flowers, she could make salves to last through the colder months. She picked up a few extra stalks when she gathered the yarrow.
As Dr. Cat Ransom became more and more adored, Dr. Katrina White receded into the shadows of Cat’s imagination. Nevertheless, the two women shared one unfading quality: selfless devotion to the well-being of others. No court would ever strip her of that.
As she worked, however, Cat’s hatred of the Sweet Assembly’s magnetism grew, as did her distaste for the commercial promises of astrologers and so-called psychics. No wonder she and Nova would never get along. She hoped Garner wouldn’t also lose his head.
After a productive hour of gathering as much as she could reasonably store and use in the coming winter, she felt better. Renewed. Cat began the walk out of the field and was startled to take note of a sprawling growth of stalks about two feet tall. This relative of the lily bore clusters of small creamy white flowers, like a spear, that were beginning to drop. The leaves, slender and floppy, rose like tall blades of grass around the stalk.
Uprooted, the bulbs resembled green onions, with small edible bulbs. Well, the blue-flowered stalks, the common blue camas, were edible. These with the white flowers were so toxic from top to root that it was said they were deadlier than strychnine. They were called the death camas, and though they had killed more livestock than humans, no doctor or outdoorsman was cavalier about them. When the flowers weren’t in bloom, the blue and white camas were nearly impossible to tell apart. And yet they weren’t even in the same plant genus.
In Colorado, one generally assumed that no camas was edible. Blues tended to be rare in this part of the Rockies, whereas the white death camas came in two varieties: the fatal mountain death camas, and the seven times deadlier meadow camas.
Nonetheless, Garner once told her that all mountain residents should be educated in the life-and-death consequences of their local botany. He taught her a trick to help distinguish between the two, a bit of lore that had never failed him yet, though he hadn’t seen it documented by a qualified scientist anywhere.
He had cut off a death camas stalk about two inches above ground. At the cross section, the leaves around the stalk folded into each other to form the general shape of a triangle. Then he pulled the bulb out of the soil and sliced it in two horizontally. The core of the fatal onion twin also resembled a triangle. Similar cross-sections of the blue camas bore tidy little circles rather than three-sided designs.
“I think we ought to name these Bermuda onions,” she had said. “As a mnemonic device.”
“I don’t get it.”
“You know—the triangle?”
“Oh. Well, death camas is far more poetic, don’t you think?” he said. “And I think the real Bermuda onion growers would object.”
At this time of year, identification by slicing was unnecessary. The alluring white flowers and the egg-shaped bulbs that didn’t smell like onions were all the clues she needed.
Cat had no practical use for these plants, but she thought she should collect some. Play with it a little. It was wise to be prepared for all possible events, in and out of season, and Zigadenus venenosus wasn’t exactly available online.
Wearing her gloves, she stripped a slender aspen branch of its leaves and used it to help pry the death camas out of the earth undamaged. She hardly needed the tool; summer rains had softened the earth, and nearly all of them uprooted with ease.
Cat filled a large brown sack with a couple dozen. Surely more than she needed, but she found the gesture cathartic after such a difficult morning. Just one of these bulbs could kill a child and two could kill a man, and she was no murderer. But such a large bag did make her feel a little bit powerful.
She would need to take great care with how she labeled it, to prevent an innocent soul, even herself, in a split second of distraction from accidentally applying the meadow death camas to a tragic use. Because she was all about keeping people alive.