“If this Nina is your Nina,” she reminded him.
“If she is, yes.”
Under the sombre yellow gaze of the dog, they swung past the Cherokee and circled the oval bed of blue and purple delphiniums around which the terminus of the driveway turned.
“You think we should have asked Mercy to help us find the house in Pueblo where she dropped Rose and the girl that night?” Barbara wondered.
“No point. Nothing there for us. They never went inside that house. As soon as Mercy drove out of sight, they moved on. Rose was just using Mercy to reach the nearest sizable town, where she could get transportation, maybe call a trusted friend in Los Angeles or somewhere. How large is Pueblo?”
“About a hundred thousand people.”
“That’s large enough. Plenty of ways in and out of a city that size. Bus, maybe train, rental car, even by air.”
As they headed down the gravel driveway toward the paved road, Joe saw three men in hooded rain slickers exiting a stable stall beyond an exercise yard. Jeff Ealing, Ned, and the veterinarian.
They left both the lower and upper halves of the Dutch door standing open. No horse followed them.
Huddled against the downpour, heads bowed as if they were a procession of monks, they moved toward the house. No clairvoyance was required to know that their shoulders were slumped not only under the weight of the storm but under the weight of defeat.
Now a call to the knackery. A beloved mare to be transported and rendered. Another summer afternoon on the Loose Change Ranch—never to be forgotten.
Joe hoped that the years, the toil, and the miscarriages had not caused any distance to open between Jeff and Mercy Ealing. He hoped that in the night they still held each other.
The grey storm light was so dim that Barbara switched on the headlights. In those twin beams, as they reached the paved highway, the silvery rain glittered like flensing knives.
In Colorado Springs, a network of shallow lakes had formed on the grammar-school playground next to which Joe had parked his rental car. In the grey-rinsed light, rising from the rain-dimpled water, the jungle gyms and the seesaws and the elaborate swing sets appeared strange to Joe, not at all like what they were, but like a steel-pipe Stonehenge more mysterious even than the ancient rock megaliths and trilithons on England’s Salisbury Plain.
Everywhere he turned his eyes now, this world was different from the one that he had inhabited all his life. The change had begun the previous day, when he’d gone to the cemetery. Ever since, a shift seemed to be progressing with gathering power and speed, as though the world of Einsteinian laws had intersected with a universe where the rules of energy and matter were so different as to baffle the wisest mathematicians and the proudest physicists.
This new reality was both more piercingly beautiful and more fearsome than the one that it replaced. He knew the change was subjective and would never reverse itself. Nothing this side of death would ever again seem simple to him; the smoothest surface hid unknowable depths and complexities.
Barbara stopped in the street beside his rental car, two blocks from her house. “Well. I guess this is as far as we go.”
“Thank you, Barbara. You’ve taken such risks—”
“I don’t want you to worry about that. You hear me? It was my decision.”
“If not for your kindness and your courage, I’d never have had a hope of getting to the bottom of this. Today you’ve opened a door for me.”
“But a door to what?” she worried.
“Maybe to Nina.”
Barbara looked weary and frightened and sad. She wiped one hand across her face, and then she looked only frightened and sad.
“Joe, you keep my voice in your head. Wherever you go from here, you remember to listen for me at the back of your mind. I’ll be an old nag, telling you that even if two people somehow came out of that crash alive, it’s damn unlikely that one of them is your Nina. Don’t swing the sword on yourself, don’t you be the one to cut yourself off at the knees.”