House of Mercy

31




It would be best to kill Beth before the benzodiazepine wore off. It would be painless that way. Humane. It was good and right to be humane. Garner, if he were not so sick in this moment, would agree with her.

Cat stood in her clinic next to Garner’s bed. He was still unconscious and delirious, but stable.

It had been a long time since Cat had been afraid that someone might die. In fact, she couldn’t remember ever being anxious about the possibility. But tonight, death was boiling water and this entire building was an infusion, steeping in it: Garner here, Beth upstairs, Nova across the hall.

The doctor rested her hand on the safety rail that prevented Garner from falling out of his hospital bed. It felt grimy under her palm. The floor stank of age and mountain grit, though she knew it was clean. In that moment Cat Ransom wondered why she had ever come to Burnt Rock. What precise lineup of mistakes and poor judgments could have started with love for a child like Amelia, for a man like Amelia’s father—

Cat held her breath. She couldn’t remember the man’s name. Where had it gone from her memory? How was such a thing possible? She scrambled for it—Neil, Nelson, Nieman, Newell. There it was, Newell. Newell Reinhart.

What an awful name. That might explain why she had forgotten it. Or perhaps she had never loved the girl’s father at all. Yes, this was true: she hated that man Newell, because he had taken Amelia away from her, because he was the one who’d reported her to the police—

There would be no police this time, she hoped. She hadn’t thought this through. What would she use to usher death into her home?

The death camas that she had collected was still drying in her office. She could use that, though it would be difficult to administer. It might provide Cat with a necessary alibi if Beth’s death was discovered and investigated. She came to me already sick. Maybe she ate them on the trail, thinking they were onions.

Cat’s breath was coming more quickly now. She felt her blood pressure rising, and for a second, as she let go of Garner’s bed rail and turned toward the dim hall, she lost sight of where she needed to go. Outside? Upstairs? The entire world was dim and she was alone in it.

She soon found herself standing in front of the medicine cabinet in her office, unable to recall exactly how she had arrived there. Garner, in the adjacent room, was mumbling nonsense. Her hand shook as she passed it over the vials and blister packs and various bottles that she’d acquired from mail-order pharmacies. She tried to focus on the vials, liquids, easily injectable. But the labels were a floating blur. All she needed was a simple overdose—1000ccs of something that should have only been 100, or 100ccs when 10 would do—and Garner would never ever know that his estranged granddaughter had been demoted from ten feet above him to six feet below.

Some level of Cat’s consciousness was working, and she didn’t care how. Her muscles obeyed her intellect, and her fingers snatched up a handful of vials that she had read yet couldn’t read. Digitalis, a heart medication powerful enough to turn the heart inside out and squeeze all the air out of the lungs. She fumbled in a drawer for a syringe and came out with one that might or might not be the right size. She didn’t check, didn’t have time, didn’t have enough confidence that she might actually get out of this office and reach the top of her stairs and inject humane death into Beth Borzoi’s body.

But she did get out, did climb the stairs, did fit her key into the knob and turn it without dropping the vials, though her entire body wobbled as if afflicted by low blood sugar.

Somehow her action had locked the doorknob. She repeated with the key and unlocked the hardware this time. Cat stubbed her toe on the threshold and nearly fell into the very dark space that was her home. The weak hall light cast her shadow into the open doorway but reached no farther. She was startled to hear quick and heavy breathing. The benzodiazepine should have suppressed Beth’s lungs considerably.

Then she realized that the hyperventilation was her own.

And then she thought that the benzodiazepine and the digitalis might work against each other, and it bothered her that she couldn’t remember the potential side effects of this drug interaction. She should know such things. They should come to her when summoned like the name of every person she had ever loved. Had she brought enough vials with her for the digitalis to overpower the sedative?

Cat flicked the light switch on the wall next to her. She turned the vials in her palms. There were only three, not four.

Two epinephrine. One insulin. No digitalis.

The doctor stared at these for a long time before her peripheral vision made note of the empty sofa. A gray chenille blanket poured like a waterfall off the cushions and onto the floor.

Cat spun, looking for Beth, expecting to see her emerging from the bathroom with a tissue or from the kitchen with a glass of water. How could she have awakened so soon? And where could she have gone without the horse? Anywhere in town!

Or merely down the stairs and across the building to Nova.

Of course, Beth would have gone looking for her, not running away from her.

The foolishness of her plans to erase Beth from Burnt Rock was clear now. Beth might have told a dozen people of her plans to seek out her grandfather. All of them might have come looking for her, at the very least her mother. And Nova, who probably wouldn’t die of her misguided grief, would tell anyone who asked that she had seen the girl, and that Cat had seen her too.

There had to be another way.

With killing now out of the question, Cat sank into a pool of relief and found the calm center of it. Her lungs deepened into a healthy rhythm, and the trembling in her core slipped away. She crossed the room and laid the medications and the syringe—definitely the wrong size, she could see that now—on the dining room table. She picked up the blanket from the floor and folded it across the arm of the sofa. Then she left the apartment and pulled the door behind her and went to Nova’s home.

Her restored sense of well-being faltered when she saw that Nova’s door was closed.

And locked.

Cat rapped gently. “Beth? Are you in there? I was downstairs in my office doing paperwork—I should have left a note.”

When no answer came after several seconds, Cat put more force into her knock. “Beth?”

Perhaps she’d fallen asleep again here, the effects of the drug not being completely worn off. Cat pounded.

“Beth! Wake up!”

“You wake up!” Nova’s voice was clear and bold, magnified rather than muffled by the wood between her and the doctor, as if she were shouting into a megaphone. “She knows about Garner, you fraud.”

How could Beth know Garner was in her office even now, sickened by the same fungus that had sickened Nov—

This was not what Nova meant. Beth knew Garner was alive. Cat rattled the doorknob, and when that didn’t yield, she pressed both hands to the door and pressed her forehead into the wood.

“What did you tell her?” Cat demanded.

“I told her you’re a killer.”

“That’s a lie. You’re . . . you’re unstable. Crazy with grief.”

“I’ll prove it eventually.”

Panic did a cannonball dive into Cat’s pool of calm. “Prove what?”

“You’re no more a doctor than I am.”

“Where’s Beth?”

“You killed—”

“Where is she!”

“—my baby.”

“You can’t kill a fetus,” Cat hissed. “I saved a baby from a miserable life with you, you pathetic creature.”

It was Nova’s silence that returned Cat’s words to her like a verdict. Her confession was out there, impossible to retract.

“I could have helped you,” Cat said, but she didn’t care if Nova heard her or replied. Nova was the least of her concerns now. Cat fled down the stairs and back to her offices, to Garner, to the only person she’d ever known who’d appreciated her love and returned it.

She couldn’t stay in Burnt Rock. Nor could Garner. They had to leave. Now, within the hour, before the sunlight exposed all of Cat’s lies.

She went to her desk first. She closed her computer and slipped it into her case. The laptop contained all the most important components of her false life—passwords and résumés and diplomas and operational ID numbers, all of which had cost her so much money—and contact information for the people who could provide all that to her again.

The thought of beginning once more after so little time brought an ache to Cat’s head. Could she do it? Could she enter another town, another set of lives, with a life of her own so perfectly groomed and presented that they couldn’t help but love her? The false her? The doctor who was no longer a doctor, who gave so much and asked for so little?

She took what her fingers touched without thinking about why she was doing it. Prescription pads that she’d throw away when Catherine Ransom ceased to exist. Pens and magnets given to her by the Burnt Rock business owners. Intake forms that existed on her computer. She left her framed license hanging on the wall.

She found several large cardboard boxes that held bulk supplies. Toilet paper, paper towels, hand sanitizer. She dumped the contents out on the floor and filled the empty boxes with her entire inventory of medications and medical supplies, items that would be almost as costly to replace as her identity. She had no time to organize or file, only to take. She thought through what Garner would need, what she would have to access easily, and placed these in a separate, smaller box. One by one she carried these out to her car at the back of the building.

The perspiration of rushing, hurrying, worrying broke out at her temples.

When she finished with the boxes she went to the supply closet and pushed aside the coat she’d stashed there last winter. It was holding up a backboard she’d used only once, when Mazy had slipped on the ice behind her diner in January. Cat took this into the room where Garner rested, fretting. She should have invested in a gurney. It had taken herself and two men to get this hospital-grade bed, then empty, into the room. There would be no getting it out now that it was occupied. She unhooked the IV bag from its pole and rested it on Garner’s chest. She moved around the bed, untucking the sheets from around the mattress, preparing to slide him onto the backboard, strap him in, then drag him to her car. It would be a jarring, primitive effort.

She wedged several inches of the slim board underneath the sheet at his left side and gripped the fabric. When she gave it a firm tug, her fingernails pierced the thin cotton and ripped a six-inch gash in it. Her heart fell at the sound of the threads snapping. This was a job that generally took three or four people and sturdy materials.

She tried again, this time pulling on both the sheet and a belt loop in Garner’s pants. She leaned against the edge of the board and used her hips to shove it under Garner’s body. His backside came up onto the board this time, but his legs and torso bent away from her. Cat went around to the opposite side of the bed as the IV bag slipped off Garner’s chest and plummeted to the floor. She failed to catch it in time, and her despair began to mount, even though the bag didn’t burst and the tube was long enough that it didn’t yank the angiocatheter from Garner’s hand.

Even if she could get him onto the board—which after more than a minute she finally managed, first his legs and then his shoulders and head—his hundred seventy pounds might as well have been two hundred seventy. She didn’t have a clear vision in her head for how this plan would work. One step at a time, one problem at a time. She wrapped the sheet around him and secured him to the board with the safety straps like a baby in a papoose.

After ensuring that the bed’s wheel brakes had been set, Cat pushed the board off the end of the mattress. When it began to gently teeter she went to the foot of the bed and guided the bottom edge of the board to the floor. She jiggled it once to make sure it was stabilized and then stepped away to lower Garner’s head. When she moved, her shoe caught Garner’s foot and she lost her balance, and before she recovered it the board was sliding on the slick floor and Garner’s head was falling, and when her reflexes sent her arm out to catch him, the board with all of Garner’s weight on it fell on top of her hand and pinned it to the floor.

She watched the board bounce and rattle Garner’s head before it came down on her hand a second time. The pain was so quick and intense that Cat couldn’t be sure right away if her bones had been crushed or fractured or merely bruised. For several seconds she couldn’t even move to get the board off of her. She lay prone on the floor, her throbbing hand trapped under the unconscious form of her dear friend, and began to weep.

It was impossible, what she was trying to do—everything was impossible, from trying to create a new life to trying to take Garner with her.

For a time, she considered staying with him. But they would only be separated in the end. By the girl, by the law, by fate—no matter how tenderly she nursed Garner back to health, not only from the ergot, but from the cancer too. No one cared about any of that.

She would have to leave him here.

As the knife-sharp pain in her bones began to wane, so did her paralysis. Cat found her knees and reached out to shove Garner’s board off her hand. The wooden thunk was a distant sound under the dull roaring of pain in her head. She couldn’t stay on the cold floor a second longer.

Without looking at Garner, without pausing to assess the damage to her hand, Cat stumbled out of the room and out of the office. The night sky in the windows had lightened almost imperceptibly from black to charcoal. To Cat the change was as loud as Cinderella’s midnight tolling, counting down the final seconds of an ending dream.

She stumbled upstairs to collect the valuables she would need for her next life.





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