26
The men were right about the mud. Hidden by a dense stand of alders, Beth carefully stripped off her jeans. The hot coffee had left a bright red imprint on her thigh that looked a little bit like a hand with long fingers. The shape brought to mind Wally’s unusually lengthy digits, like a pianist’s.
She tossed her jeans onto a rock, then waded into the water that gently lapped its sides. The chill to her toes was knife-like, nerve-severing. She tipped the edge of the coffee can into the clear water and took in enough to turn the dry brown dirt into pasty goo. Water bugs skittered out of her way, and she returned to the bank as she stirred the contents with her fingers.
The mud was silky smooth when she applied it to her burn, and the chilly texture gave her immediate relief, calming down the raw discomfort. It felt so nice that she opted not to wash it off right away, but stood there at the bank letting the brownish trickle of water trace the shape of her legs and drip off the bones of her ankles. She closed her eyes and turned her face up to the warming sun, the new heat of the day mingling with the cool salve and creating peace.
This was mercy, that all the emotions that scalded her soul like boiling coffee—her grief, anxiety, and fear—could be so easily masked by a handful of mud, if only for the moment. Beth stood there, not wanting the peace to go away any sooner than it had to. She stood there until she felt the mud begin to dry and tug on her skin, and she allowed herself to imagine that the warm sun on her head was the steadying, strengthening hand of God.
Beth opened her eyes and Mercy was on the rock, stretched out atop the jeans, head resting on his front paws. It was no surprise that he could be so stealthy; the shock came that Herriot, who never before had approached Beth without a greeting, seemed to have learned his tricks. She sat beside him on her haunches, panting happily with her tongue hanging out one side of her mouth.
“Come to see if Wally knows his stuff ?” she asked them. The wolf yawned.
Beth waded back into the stream, finding the cold water more pleasant this time. She stooped and scooped the water in the cup of her hands, ladling it up over the mud on her leg, rinsing and rubbing and half expecting the process to hurt, half knowing that it would not.
When the mud was gone, her skin was smooth and clear.
She regarded this fact with a strange mixture of awe and acceptance, the kind of expectation she had that the sun would rise every morning, though the event was uniquely beautiful every time. Deep within, she knew that this couldn’t have happened if Wally hadn’t said it would.
A tiny rebel in her thought she ought to test this.
Beth climbed onto the bank and returned to the rock. She pulled at the jeans under the wolf’s belly, and he neither objected nor moved to get off of them. She tugged them against his body weight until they were free, then used them like a towel to dry herself off.
“That kind of thing is just an everyday occurrence for you two, is it?” she asked the dogs. Herriot’s happy tail started whapping the rock and Mercy as it flopped back and forth. When had the canines started getting along?
She changed into the fresh jeans she’d stuffed into the backpack, then rolled the cuffs up to her knees and sat down beside the dogs. She lifted her foot onto her knee so she could see the cut she’d received while going after these two at the ranch. The glue she’d used to seal the wound held well, but the injury remained tender and red.
It’s not magic mud, she reminded herself. But didn’t she have . . . a talent?
She scooped more mud out of the can and applied it to the bottom of her foot. Then she propped it on the rock to dry a little in the sun, as she had the coffee burn.
A small amount of mud coated her fingers. Using Herriot’s demeanor to gauge Mercy’s, Beth assumed that the wolf’s docile behavior would continue. So she held the mud under his muzzle and let him sniff it.
“I don’t suppose you would explain this to me, however it is that you talk,” she said. “How does the healing work? Why can’t I make sense of it, what gets fixed, or what lives or dies, or how, or when?”
She reached out and rubbed the tiny bit of mud into one of the scarred groves running down the wolf’s back. His head snapped back and he nipped at her wrist as if she’d hurt him. She snatched her fingers out of his reach. The moment lasted half a second and was like a gunshot that launched her heart into a hundred-meter sprint.
The wolf got up and stalked off the rock. Herriot looked at Beth, accusing her of stupidity, then followed Mercy.
Some of Beth’s confusion returned. Alone on the rock now, she stuck her mud-caked foot back into the stream and let it dangle there. Maybe it didn’t matter if she didn’t understand what was happening to her. Her journey to Burnt Rock was what she needed to be doing, and she couldn’t wait for clarity on everything before she did it.
She took the map out of the top of her pack and opened it up. With a red marker, Wally had marked out a trail that appeared to cut several miles off the journey. If she left within the hour, the map promised, she should arrive in the small town by nightfall. She wondered if she could trust the route not to put her in harm’s way, or if Wally’s lines would lead her to insurmountable cliffs and chasms that couldn’t be crossed.
When Beth took her foot out of the water, her toes had no feeling in them, and the wound on the bottom of her foot was also numb. But it remained inflamed at the edges and ghostly white down the center. She sighed, not sure what she’d been expecting, or even simply hoping for. But then, Wally hadn’t said anything about fixing her foot, had he? All he had promised was a route to Burnt Rock, and a leg that could endure the saddle on the way there.
She prepared to leave.
Dotti parked her 4x4 right in front of Garner’s shop to make it look busy. Busyness drew more business these days. She’d do him proud while he recovered and would try not to worry in the meantime. Worry was exhausting, and a body needed stamina in order to be helpful.
She left her keys in the ignition, just as everyone left their front doors unlocked. More efficient that way for all the running around and car-swapping one did in a town this size. She bipped up the stairs, crossed the porch, and shook her head when she saw that the door was actually open, leaning into the house by three or four inches.
Dotti gripped the doorknob and burst in, the better to shock the thief who might think he could walk off with a few bottles of salve while the shopkeeper had stepped out.
Instead she was the one who clutched the throat of her jacket and gasped. The bookseller Nova was at the base of the stairs that led to the second-story bedrooms. She held on to the balled newel-post cap with both hands as if her knees had already begun to buckle. Her fine hair clung to her face as if she’d been swimming, and sweat had turned her light gray cotton shirt the color of charcoal around her throat.
“Mr. Remke?” The voice was so weak.
“Nova?” Dotti said. She reached out for the girl and helped her to kneel on a step.
“Where’s Mr. Remke?”
“He’s ill, honey. What can I do that would help you?”
“I was wondering if he has—a tincture? A cramp bark tincture?”
Dotti hadn’t the foggiest idea what a cramp bark tincture might be. She’d never seen a woman suffer from menstrual cramps like these.
“I don’t know. I don’t know. Have you bought some from him before?”
Nova shook her head slightly, as if shaking it too hard might cause unspeakable nausea. “It’s called Viburnum. Could you . . . could you look?”
Of course she could look, if she had the slightest idea how to spell the word. And being an ancient veteran of excellent customer service, Dotti would have looked it up and asked all sorts of questions and turned the house inside out to find precisely what this woman needed so that she could leave happy.
“My dear,” Dotti said, “you seem to be beyond the help of a tincture of vubeer . . . vubur . . .
“Viburnum,” Nova whispered, and her hand went to her stomach. Her cheeks were flushed, and Dotti thought she might lose her lunch right there. But she merely swayed.
“Let me call Dr. Ransom for you. I know right where she is.”
“No, just a . . . tincture will do. Please.” Nova took a deep breath, sharp and steep, and braced herself where she knelt. When the pain passed, she closed her eyes and panted lightly.
“I really think we should get you to a doctor.”
At this Nova began to sob, and she dropped her forehead to one of the higher steps, and Dotti’s alarm grew. She decided that she wouldn’t try to sort this one out on her own. She would call Cat, then go sit with Garner while the good doctor got to the bottom of Nova’s situation.
“I’m getting Catherine.”
“No. Not her.”
“Why not? She’s a doctor. You’re sick. Don’t be a fool too. What do you have against Dr. Ransom?”
“She . . . killed . . . my baby,” the woman sobbed. “That doctor.”
The girl was ranting. The fever had made her delirious. Dr. Ransom was a physician, not a killer. And yet this did look like a miscarriage at least. There was a small puddle of dark blood forming on the stair around Nova’s knee.
“Promise me you won’t call her,” Nova pleaded. “Promise me.”
Whatever it took before that lake of blood became an ocean.
“Where is the baby’s father?” Dotti demanded.
“Far away.”
“Can I call him?”
“No. He . . . doesn’t know. It doesn’t matter.”
“Well that’s just dandy. Tell me who to call for you, because I’m not the person you need. Do you understand that, Nova? Who can I call?”
She shook her head. No one.
“You need medical help, and I won’t be responsible for your refusing it. You came to the wrong person for that. So let’s try to reach an agreement here. I will give you three minutes of my time to search the house for the vuh . . . vuh . . .”
“Viburnum.”
“Viburnum,” Dotti repeated.
“V-i-b . . . u-r . . . n-u-m.”
Dotti rushed to grab a scrap of paper behind Garner’s cash register. “The Romans could have come up with shorter Latin, don’t you think?”
“It’s probably in a brown bottle.”
Dotti quickly scribbled the word on the scrap. She started searching Garner’s pretty shelves immediately. “Three minutes starting now. If I can’t find it in three minutes, I am taking you directly to Catherine. Those are my conditions.” When Garner came around, she would recommend he alphabetize his inventory.
Nova nodded. The rosy color of her feverish cheeks had intensified.
It took Dotti all of thirty seconds to confirm that Garner didn’t have the tincture Nova needed on these shelves. She went through the kitchen and raced downstairs to the basement, knowing exactly where Garner kept what little stock he had. It took her less than a minute to pillage these small boxes. No Viburnum.
But then she recalled that Garner had shipments brought up from the post office by one of Hank’s fine sons, who deposited these in Garner’s ample pantry at the back of the kitchen until Garner could process them all. There might be something there, especially since there was nothing anywhere else in the house. Surely a fresh order of Viburnum awaited upstairs! She hauled herself back up into the kitchen and turned quickly into the pantry.
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Dotti slapped her hands together as if dusting flour from her fingers. “Well, I’ve held up my end of the bargain,” she called out as she returned to the entry hall. “And I’m relieved. Even if I’d found a tincture, you still should have seen the doc—”
The staircase was empty except for the evidence of Nova’s crisis. The front door was wide open. And Nova Yarrow was tearing away from Garner’s house in the driver’s seat of Dotti’s 4x4.