“We weren’t able to settle on a cause,” Barbara said. “Never like to close a file until we know what happened. Why we’re here is to ask about the woman who knocked on your door that night.”
“Sure, I remember.”
“Could you describe her?” Joe asked.
“Petite lady. About forty or so. Pretty.”
“Black?”
“She was, yes. But also a touch of something else. Mexican maybe. Or more likely Chinese. Maybe Vietnamese.”
Joe remembered the Asian quality of Rose Tucker’s eyes. “Did she tell you her name?”
“Probably did,” Eating said. “But I don’t recall it.”
“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 of 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.