‘How long after the crash did she show up here?’ Barbara asked.

‘Not too long.’ Ealing was carrying a leather satchel similar to a physician’s bag. He shifted it from his right hand to his left. ‘The sound of the plane coming down woke me and Mercy before it hit. Louder than you ever hear a plane in these parts, but we knew what it had to be. I got out o bed, and Mercy turned on the light. I said, “Oh, Lordy,” and then we heard it, like a big far-off quarry blast. The house even shook a lit­tle.’

The older man was shifting impatiently from foot to foot.

Ealing said, ‘How is she, Ned?’

‘Not good,’ Ned said. ‘Not good at all.’

Looking out at the long driveway that dwindled through the lashing rain, Jeff Eating said, ‘Where the hell’s Doc Sheely?’ He

wiped one hand down his long face, which seemed to make it longer.

Barbara said, ‘If we’ve come at a bad time—’

‘We’ve got a sick mare, but I can give you a minute,’ Ealing said. He returned to the night of the crash. ‘Mercy called Pueblo County Emergency Rescue, and I quick got dressed and drove the pickup out to the main road, headed south, trying to figure where it went down and could I help. You could see the fire in the sky — not direct but the glow. By the time I got oriented and into the vicinity, there was already a sheriff’s car blocking the turnoff from the state route. Another pulled up behind me. They were setting up a barrier, waiting for the search-and-rescue teams, and they made it clear this wasn’t a job for untrained do-gooders. So I came home.’

‘How long were you gone?’ Joe asked.

‘Couldn’t have been more than forty-five minutes. Then I was in the kitchen here with Mercy for maybe half an hour, having some decaf with a shot of Bailey’s, wide awake and listening to the news on the radio and wondering was it worth trying to get back to sleep, when we heard the knocking at the front door.’

Joe said, ‘So she showed up an hour and fifteen minutes after the crash.’

‘Thereabouts!

Its engine noise masked by the heavy downpour and by the shivery chorus of wind-shaken aspens, the approaching vehicle didn’t attract their attention until it was almost upon them. A Jeep Cherokee. As it swung into the turnaround in front of the house, its headlights, like silver swords, slashed at the chain-mail rain.

‘Thank God!’ Ned exclaimed, pulling up the hood on his slicker. The screen door sang as he pushed through it and into the storm.

‘Doc Sheely’s here,’ Jeff Ealing said. ‘Got to help him with the mare. But Mercy knows more about that woman than I do, anyway. You go ahead and talk to her.’

Mercy Ealing’s greying blond hair was for the most part held away from her face and off her neck by three butterfly barrettes. She had been busy baking cookies, however, and a few curling locks had slipped loose, hanging in spirals along her flushed cheeks.

Wiping her hands on her apron and then, more thoroughly, on a dish towel, she insisted that Barbara and Joe sit at the breakfast

table in the roomy kitchen while she poured coffee for them. She provided a plate heaped with freshly baked cookies.

The back door was ajar. An unscreened rear porch lay beyond. The cadenced rain was muffled here, like the drumming for a funeral cortege passing out on the highway.

The air was warm and redolent of oatmeal batter, chocolate, and roasting walnuts.

The coffee was good, and the cookies were better.

On the wall was a pictorial calendar with a Christian theme. The painting for August showed Jesus on the seashore, speaking to a pair of fishermen brothers, Peter and Andrew, who would cast aside their nets and follow Him to become fishers of men.

Joe felt as if he had fallen through a trapdoor into a different reality from the one in which he’d been living for a year, out of a cold strange place into the normal world with its little day-to-day crises, pleasantly routine tasks, and simple faith in the rightness of all things.

As she checked the cookies in the two ovens, Mercy recalled the night of the crash. ‘No, not Rose. Her name was Rachel Thomas.’

Same initials, Joe realized. Maybe Rose walked out of the crash suspecting that somehow the plane had been brought down because she was aboard. She might be anxious to let her enemies think that she was dead. Keeping the same initials probably helped her remember the false name that she had given.

‘She’d been driving from Colorado Springs to Pueblo when she saw the plane coming down, right over her,’ Mercy said. ‘The poor thing was so frightened, she jammed on the brakes, and the car spun out of control. Thank God for the seat belts. Went off the road, down an embankment, and turned over.’

Barbara said, ‘She was injured?’

Spooning lumps of thick dough on greased baking sheets, Mercy said, ‘No, both fine and dandy, just shaken up some. It was only a little embankment. Rachel, she had dirt on her clothes, bits of grass and weeds stuck to her, but she was okay. Oh, shaky as a leaf in a gale but okay. She was such a sweet thing, I felt so sorry for her.’

To Joe, Barbara said meaningfully, ‘So back then she was claim­ing to be a witness.’

‘Oh, I don’t think she was making it up,’ Mercy said. ‘She was a witness, for sure. Very rattled by what she saw.’

A timer buzzed. Diverted, Mercy slipped one hand into a baker’s

quilted mitten. From the oven, she withdrew a sheet filled with fragrant brown cookies.

‘The woman came here that night for help?’ Barbara asked.

Putting the hot aluminium tray on a wire cooling rack, Mercy said, ‘She wanted to call a taxi service in Pueblo, but I told her they never in a million years come way out here.’

‘She didn’t want to get a tow truck for her car?’ Joe asked.

‘She didn’t figure to be able to get it done at that hour of the night, all the way from Pueblo. She expected to come back the next day with the tow-truck driver.’

Barbara said, ‘What did she do when you told her there was no way to get taxi service from out here?’

Sliding a sheet of raw dough drops into the oven, Mercy said, ‘Oh, then I drove them into Pueblo myself.’

‘All the way to Pueblo?’ Barbara asked.

‘Well, Jeff had to be up earlier than me. Rachel didn’t want to stay over here, and it wasn’t but an hour to get there, with my heavy foot on the pedal,’ Mercy said, closing the oven door.

‘That was extraordinarily kind of you,’ Joe said.

‘Was it? No, not really. The Lord wants us to be Samaritans. It’s what we’re here for. You see folks in trouble like this, you have to help them. And this was a real nice lady. All the way to Pueblo, she couldn’t stop talking about the poor people on that plane. She was all torn up about it. Almost like it was her fault, what happened to them, just because she saw it a few seconds before it hit. Anyway, it was no big deal going to Pueblo. . though coming back home that night was the devil’s own trip, because there was so much traffic going to the crash site. Police cars, ambulances, fire trucks. Lots of lookie-loos too. Standing along the side of the road by their cars and pickups, hoping to see blood, I guess. Give me the creeps. Tragedy can bring out the best in people, but it also brings out the worst.’

‘On the way to Pueblo, did she show you where her car had gone off the highway?’ Joe asked.

‘She was too rattled to recognize the exact spot in the darkness and all. And we couldn’t be stopping every half mile or whatever to see if maybe this was the right embankment or then we’d never get the poor girl home to bed.’

Another timer buzzed.

Putting on the quilted mitten again and opening the door on the second oven, Mercy said, ‘She was so popped, all sleepy-eyed. She didn’t care about tow trucks, just about getting home to bed.’

Joe felt certain that there had been no car. Rose walked out of the burning meadow, into the woods, all but blind as she left the blaze for the dark, but desperately determined to get away before anyone discovered that she was alive, somehow sure that the 747 had been brought down because of her. Terrified, in a state of shock, horrified by the carnage, lost in the wilds, she had preferred to risk death from starvation and exposure rather than be found by a rescue team and perhaps fall into the hands of her eerily powerful enemies. Soon, by great good luck, she reached a ridge from which she was able to see, through the trees, the distant lights of the Loose Change Ranch.

Pushing aside her empty coffee cup, Barbara said, ‘Mercy, where did you take this woman in Pueblo? Do you remember the address?’

Holding the baking sheet half out of the oven to examine the cookies, Mercy said, ‘She never told me an address, just directed me street to street until we got to the house.’

No doubt it was one that Rose had chosen at random, as it was unlikely that she knew anyone in Pueblo.

‘Did you see her go inside?’ Joe asked.

‘I was going to wait until she unlocked the door and was inside. But she thanked me, said God bless, and I should scoot back home.’

‘Could you find the place again?’ Barbara asked.

Deciding that the cookies needed an additional minute, Mercy slid the tray back into the oven, pulled off the mitten, and said, ‘Sure. Nice big house in a real nice neighbourhood. But it wasn’t Rachel’s. It belonged to her partner in the medical practice. Did I say she was a doctor down in Pueblo?’

‘But you didn’t actually see her go into this place?’ Joe asked. He assumed that Rose waited until Mercy was out of sight, then walked away from the house and found transportation out of Pueblo.

Mercy’s face was red and dewy from the oven heat. Plucking two paper towels off a roll and blotting the sweat from her brow, she said, ‘No. Like I said, I dropped them off in front, and they went up the walk.’

‘Them?’

‘The poor sleepy little thing. Such a dear. She was the daughter of Rachel’s partner.’

Startled, Barbara glanced at Joe, then leaned forward in her chair toward Mercy. ‘There was a child?’

‘Such a little angel, sleepy but not cranky at all.’

Joe flashed back to Mercy’s mention of ‘seat belts,’ plural, and to other things she had said that suddenly required a more literal interpretation than he had given them. ‘You mean Rose. . . Rachel had a child with her?’

‘Well, didn’t I say?’ Mercy looked puzzled, tossing the damp paper towel into a waste can.

‘We didn’t realize there was a child,’ Barbara said.

‘I told you,’ Mercy said, perplexed by their confusion. ‘Back a year ago, when the fella came around from your Board, I told him all about Rachel and the little girl, about Rachel being a witness.’

Looking at Joe, Barbara said, ‘I didn’t remember that. I guess I did well even to remember this place at all.’

Joe’s heart turned over, turned like a wheel long stilled on a rusted axle.

Unaware of the tremendous impact that her revelation had on Joe, Mercy opened the oven door to check the cookies once more.

‘How old was the girl?’ he asked.

‘Oh, about four or five,’ Mercy said.

Premonition weighed on Joe’s eyes, and when he closed them, the darkness behind his lids swarmed with possibilities that he was terrified to consider.

‘Can you… can you describe her?’

Mercy said, ‘She was just a little slip of a doll of a thing. Cute as a button — but then they’re all pretty darn cute at that age, aren’t they?’

When Joe opened his eyes, Barbara was staring at him, and her eyes brimmed with pity for him. She said, ‘Careful, Joe. It can’t lead where you hope.’

Mercy placed the hot baking sheet full of finished cookies on a second wire rack.

Joe said, ‘What colon was her hair?’

‘She was a little blonde.’

He was moving around the table before he realized that he had risen from his chair.

Having picked up a spatula, Mercy was scooping the cookies off the cooler of the two baking sheets, transferring them to a large platter.

Joe went to her side. ‘Mercy, what colour were this little girl’s eyes?’

‘Can’t say I remember.’

‘Try.’

‘Blue, I guess,’ she said, sliding the spatula under another cookie.

‘You guess?’

‘Well, she was blond.’

He surprised her by taking the spatula from her and putting it aside on the counter. ‘Look at me, Mercy. This is important.’

From the table, Barbara warned him again. ‘Easy, Joe. Easy.’

He knew that he should heed her warning. Indifference was his only defence. Indifference was his friend and his consolation. Hope is a bird that always flies, the light that always dies, a stone that crushes when it can’t be carried any farther. Yet with a recklessness that frightened him, he felt himself shouldering that stone, stepping into the light, reaching toward those white wings.

‘Mercy,’ he said, ‘not all blondes have blue eyes, do they?’ Face to face with him, captured by his intensity, Mercy Ealing said, ‘Well… I guess they don’t.’

‘Some have green eyes, don’t they?’

‘Yes.’

‘If you think about it, I’m sure you’ve even seen blondes with brown eyes.’

‘Not many.’

‘But some,’ he said.

Premonition swelled in him again. His heart was a Bucking horse now, iron-shod hooves kicking the stall boards of his ribs.

‘This little girl,’ he said, ‘are you sure she had blue eyes?’

‘No. Not sure at all.’

‘Could her eyes have been grey?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Think. Try to remember.’

Mercy’s eyes swam out of focus as memory pulled her vision to the past, but after a moment, she shook her head. ‘I can’t say they were grey, either.’

‘Look at my eyes, Mercy.’ She was looking. He said, ‘They’re grey.’ ‘Yes.’

‘An unusual shade of grey.’ ‘Yes.’

‘With just the faintest touch of violet to them.’

‘I see it,’ she said.

‘Could this girl . . . Mercy, could this child have had eyes like mine?’

She appeared to know what answer he needed to hear, even if she could not guess why. Being a good-hearted woman, she wanted to please him. At last, however, she said, ‘I don’t really know. I can’t say for sure.’