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.”