She folded the top of the bag twice and handed it to Barbara.
“Thank you, Mercy.”
To Joe, Mercy Ealing said, “I’m sure sorry I couldn’t be more help to you.”
“You’ve been a lot of help,” he assured her. He smiled. “And there’s cookies.”
She looked toward the kitchen window that was on the side of the house rather than on the back of it. One of the stables was visible through the pall of rain.
She said, “A good cookie does lift the spirit, doesn’t it? But! sure wish I could do more than make cookies for Jeff today. He dearly loves that mare.”
Glancing at the calendar with the religious theme, Joe said, “How do you hold onto your faith, Mercy? How in a world with so much death, planes falling out of the sky and favourite mares being taken for no reason?”
She didn’t seem surprised or offended by the question. “I don’t know. Sometimes it’s hard, isn’t it? I used to be so angry that we couldn’t have kids. I was working at some record for miscarriages, and then I just gave up. You want to scream at the sky sometimes. And there’s nights you lie awake. But then I think. well, this life has its joys too. And, anyway, it’s nothing but a place we have to pass through on our way to somewhere better. If we live forever, it doesn’t matter so much what happens to us here.”
Joe had been hoping for a more interesting answer. Insightful. Penetrating. Homespun wisdom. Something he could believe.
He said, “The mare will matter to Jeff. And it matters to you because it matters so much to him.”
Picking up another lump of dough, rolling it into a pale moon, a tiny planet, she smiled and said, “Oh, if I understood it, Joe, then I wouldn’t be me. I’d be God. And that’s a job I sure wouldn’t want.”
“How so?”
“It’s got to be even sadder than our end of things, don’t you think? He knows our potential but has to watch us forever falling short, all the cruel things we do to one another, the hatred and the lies, the envy and greed and the endless coveting. We see only the ugliness people do to those around us, but He sees it all. The seat He’s in has a sadder view than ours.”
She put the ball of dough on the cookie sheet and impressed upon it the mark of her thumb: a moment of pleasure waiting to be baked, to be eaten, to lift the spirit.
The veterinarian’s Jeep station wagon was still in the driveway, parked in front of the Explorer. A Weimaraner was lying in the back of the vehicle. As Joe and Barbara climbed into the Ford and slammed the doors, the dog raised its noble silver-grey head and stared at them through the rear window of the Jeep.
By the time that Barbara slipped the key into the ignition and started the Explorer, the humid air filled with the aromas of oatmeal-chocolate-chip cookies and damp denim. The windshield quickly clouded with the condensation of their breath.
“If it’s Nina, your Nina,” Barbara said, waiting for the air-conditioner to clear the glass, “then where has she been for this whole year?”
“With Rose Tucker somewhere.”
“And why would Rose keep your daughter from you? Why such awful cruelty?”
“It’s not cruelty. You hit on the answer yourself, out there on the back porch.”
“Why do I suspect the only time you listen to me is when I’m full of shit?”
Joe said, “Somehow, since Nina survived with Rose, survived because of Rose, now Rose’s enemies will want Nina too. If Nina had been sent home to me, she’d have been a target. Rose is just keeping her safe.”
The pearly condensation retreated toward the edges of the windshield.
Barbara switched on the wipers.
From the rear window of the Jeep Cherokee, the Weimaraner still watched them without getting to its feet. Its eyes were luminous amber.
“Rose is keeping her safe,” he repeated. “That’s why I’ve got to learn everything I can about Flight 353 and stay alive long enough to find a way to break the story wide open. When it’s exposed, when the bastards behind all of this are ruined and on their way to prison or the gas chamber, then Rose will be safe and Nina can… she can come back to me.”