33
Cat needed so little from her apartment. She took a tote bag off her closet shelf and snapped it open, overcome by a sense of déjà vu that filled her with unexpected calm. When she’d fled California, she had even less time than she did now, and most of the essentials were already in her car.
She went into the kitchen to retrieve what cash she stored in the kitchen drawer, and some photographs of Newell and Amelia that would connect her to her life as Katrina White. They were a moot concern. Fingerprints all over this apartment and office would confirm her double identity, and she didn’t have time to clean. But she couldn’t part with the pictures.
It was fortunate that she had no images of Garner. It would make him easier to forget.
She took her one framed photograph, a snapshot of her parents on their honeymoon, but left the frame behind. Purse. IDs. A change of clothes, her favorite makeup. Books on the region’s native, edible, and medicinal plants. Perhaps she’d stay in the Rocky Mountain region. She had time to collect her favorite teas and the valuable herbs that had taken so many hours to gather and prepare for storage.
Everything else could turn to dust. She left without locking the door.
She intended to move downstairs and away from her office as quickly as possible without glancing back. She took each step downward on heavy feet, marching to a parade of new names she might pick from. Carrie. Mary. Kendall. Sherry. Clarissa. Melissa. Bernadette. Terri. She didn’t want any of them.
Her foot hovered over the landing. She wanted to be Catherine, Katrina—a name that could be anything she wanted it to be, anything anyone wanted it to be. Cat. Cathy. Katie. Kate. It helped draw people to her, this easy way of being, this flexible label. She didn’t want to let go of it yet.
And yet she had to. She had never despised her life more than at this moment.
A cry from her office cut straight through the rear entry of her offices as she passed it, and the burst of terror almost turned her head. She covered her ears and ducked her head and jumped off the last step, then ran down the common hall toward the back door.
Garner raised his voice again, and this time her name penetrated the barrier of her fists.
“Catherine . . .”
It was a weak, dry, pathetic cry. A pitiful, wasted sound that shouldn’t have been able to travel past his own toes. But it sought her out and found her, and she was troubled. He never called her Catherine. Only Cat. Cat, girl, have a look at this. Cat, child, you’re on the prowl. What’s bugging you?
“She’s fainted!” Garner croaked.
He was hallucinating, a side effect of the ergot. It would wear off, if he didn’t die first. There was nothing to do for ergot but to let it wear off.
“You’re needed at the church!”
With her purse on one shoulder and tote bag over the other, Cat lowered her clenched hands until they shielded her heart. She told herself not to turn around. She should leave the building now. Her office was a fishnet and Garner’s voice was the lure, and the authorities were the fishermen who would haul her off to prison and filet her soul and lay it bare on a plate, and the hungry bears would say, before they ate her alive, that she was cold-blooded and calculating and deserving of such treatment.
No one would ever know the depths of her capacity to serve, to heal. To love.
Cat reached out and touched the exit. She leaned into it. She placed her forehead on the wood.
“Cat, girl.” The whisper-thin words were barbed hooks in her heart. “I need you.”
The door became an immovable object. I need you. She had no will to force it open. I need you. The three words she had never in her life been able to turn away from. If only Garner knew what he was saying.
She couldn’t refuse to help him. Cat returned to her office. She passed through the entry without feeling the weight of the knob under her fingers. She floated across the old looped carpet, barely touching the fibers, and reached the exam room where Garner lay as he had ten minutes ago, lashed to that board with no one to help him up. His eyes were wide and unfocused, darting around in his head as if each hole in the ceiling’s acoustic tiles commanded his undivided attention.
“I’m here,” she said as she stood at his feet, which were still clad in the red clogs he wore around his basement garden every day.
“Ashes fall,” he murmured. “They burn.” And then, more frantic, “They burn!” His fingers strained against his restrained arms, contorting to reach out to an imaginary fire.
The flames of heartbreak licked the back of Cat’s eyes then, as she watched him babble and twist. It would take hours, days of this wild nonsense before Garner was himself again. And by then they would be separated, he placed in the care of another physician who didn’t know or care about a fraction of Garner, the father figure. And then they would teach him to hate her.
He would protect her if he could. But now he would never know that Cat had done this for the good of their relationship, for the strength of their father-daughter bond. What her own father had severed, she had restored with the skill of a precise and patient surgeon.
Cat knew then that she would never leave Garner. She’d suffered from a momentary lapse into selfishness, and now was the time to set that aside. They would never be separated the way she’d allowed her father to separate himself from her childhood, the way she’d allowed Newell Reinhart to walk away with Amelia. Never again would anyone rob Catherine Ransom of the right to care for another person. Not relatives. Not the law. Not anyone or anything lesser than human love.
“I will never leave you or forsake you,” she said to her friend. “I will not leave you to die alone. I will go with you.”
Garner let loose a shriek that sent a spike of nausea into Cat’s belly. She let her tote and purse slide down her arms to rest on the floor. Then she stooped and began to rifle the bags for her supply of death camas.
There was plenty for them both.
Cat locked the doors.