Mercy Road

by Ann Howard Creel

  OTHER BOOKS BY ANN HOWARD CREEL

  The River Widow

  The Uncertain Season

  The Whiskey Sea

  While You Were Mine

  The Magic of Ordinary Days

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2019 by Ann Howard Creel

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542041980

  ISBN-10: 1542041988

  Cover design by David Drummond

  This story is based on real events, and although the author has striven to stay true to history, this is primarily a work of fiction and the characters are of the author’s imagination.

  CONTENTS

  Start Reading

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Epilogue

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  RECOMMENDED READING

  BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  The chauffeuses . . . were manifestly ladies of the new school . . . not sitting in balconies, gazing at sympathetic stars and longing for the hero to return. No, indeed, they were following him in a motor car.

  —Esther Pohl Lovejoy, MD, Chair of the American Women’s Hospital

  Chapter One

  PARIS, KENTUCKY

  MARCH 1918

  Tornado and I jumped the stone fence and landed, fleet-footed, in our far meadow. I let him run the way he had when he’d been a racehorse and so often placed first. Tornado exhaled ribbons of steam into the silent morning as the sun crested and our pastures glistened with dew in this, the bluegrass country of Kentucky. His gallop drummed the ground so beautifully, like a beating heart, and his black coat pulled in the dawn light and reflected emerald and gold as we left Favier Farm behind us and skirted the dense woods, where deer often appeared and disappeared like phantoms. We flew beyond the limits of our land, into the blue, and on to forever.

  It was but a dream, of course. Tornado was our most prized breeding stallion, a fierce Thoroughbred with a regal nose and wide-set eyes, whose contracts for siring live births able to stand and nurse right away were the most valuable assets of Favier Farm. Risking an injury to a stallion such as Tornado was foolhardy, and my father might have allowed an occasional careful canter, but galloping at full speed and jumping fences were out of the question.

  In the dream, Tornado finally tired, and I trotted him back toward the green-and-white stallion stables, complete with steeples, where my father stood outside in the tall and distinguished way he had about him, waiting and watching, a lit Gauloise cigarette in his right hand, its rich scent reaching my nostrils as Tornado lifted his head in response to approaching his master.

  But something was wrong. My father’s face, lined but still handsome, looked drawn and filled with loss, his eyes exhausted, as if he’d been searching for something—questions, answers, peace—that he would never find.

  A burning scent seeped into my brain. I opened my eyes to sudden consciousness. Tornado was dead. The dream vanished, along with its dozens of sensations, but the smell of cigarette smoke—or some other kind of smoke—was still there.

  Someone screamed.

  It was the middle of the night.

  I sat up straight, threw aside my covers, and hit the polished walnut flooring at a run. Flinging open my bedroom door, I recoiled as a fumid haze hit me. Throat burning, my eyes stinging, I whirled toward the staircase, then Papa’s face appeared out of the vapor, an ashen oval marked by the two dark smears of his wide-open eyes. Wearing only his dressing gown, he’d taken no time to don shoes.

  He spoke my name in a surprisingly calm voice, “Arlene,” as he grasped my arm. “The house is aflame. We must leave at once.”

  “What?” I sputtered. The house is aflame, he’d said . . . so calmly as if giving me a report about the weather. “Where are Maman and Luc?”

  “They are here. Now let us move.”

  I blinked and saw Maman, who must have been the one who screamed. She’d managed to slip a peignoir over her nightdress and now clutched the banister as she crept down the mahogany staircase. My brother, Luc, wrapped in a burgundy silk robe, followed.

  On the first floor, a dense blanket of noxious fumes seized my throat. Maman and Luc coughed desperately, overcome by the smoke, too. Gasping and choking, I stayed close to Papa. Only he seemed unaffected by the onslaught, or perhaps he pretended to be immune, showing strength for the three of us.

  Maman had to stop and lean over her knees, wheezing and hacking, her lacy nightcap trembling with the effort. Papa grabbed her arm, and with Maman and me pressed to his sides, he steered us into the center hallway. As I turned to make sure Luc stayed close behind us, I glimpsed through the smoke a scarlet inferno burning in our kitchen. Papa said, “Move away. Keep moving. Quickly, quickly,” as he shoved us adamantly down the hall toward the front door.

  A heavy, seething cloud billowed in, so fast, so impenetrable. Yes, we had to get out now. I groped for Maman—she would need my help—but the heavy vapor clogged my lungs. I could barely see. I tried to breathe, my throat spasming in revolt. Papa gripped my arm and thrust Maman and me forward, together as if one, then pushed us through the front door onto the porch, Luc on our heels, Papa the last to exit. We sucked in the clean air and stumbled down the porch steps, then came to a dazed halt on the gently sloped green lawn in front of our house. I turned and stared back in stunned disbelief.

  “What has happened? How has this happened?” asked Maman in a wretched voice.

  No one answered. Instead we watched it burn—our beloved white Colonial home with its two-story columns standing tall across the front, its wide veranda adorned with white-painted chairs, blooming flower beds below. My father had built the house after relocating from Montreal as a young gentleman to begin his own horse farm. After he married my mother, she decorated it in an elegant but warm style. Now this adored family home was afire, with tongue-like flames bursting through the windows and walls on the kitchen side and licking at the second floor.

  Papa raked a hand through his perpetually pomaded salt-and-pepper hair. Even after awakening in the middle of the night and fleeing a fire, he had a commanding presence. His calm came partially from his nature, but on that night, it also aimed to arrest the panic rising in the rest of us. “It appears to have started i
n the kitchen,” he said over the roar of the fire, now spitting sparks, then asked us to please step back farther.

  “How could this have happened?” Maman asked helplessly, as if she could keep asking the same question in a slightly different way and receive a different answer. “How could this have happened so quickly? While we slept?”

  Although we kept domestics for housework, they went home every night unless we were hosting out-of-town guests. With our bedrooms located upstairs, we Faviers were sound sleepers. Until then, our lives had been so pleasant we’d had no cause to suffer from insomnia.

  Luc, always a straight shooter despite being one of the quietest people I knew, finally said something. “The house is gone.” His quiet demeanor and gentleness in manners had made some people wonder if my brother might be simpleminded, but he wasn’t.

  Frantic now, Maman lifted her hands in the air. “Can’t we do anything?”

  Before fleeing, we hadn’t had time to call on the hallway telephone, and any water we might have lugged in buckets to douse the flames would have amounted to a pitiful attempt at the impossible. It was too late for the house now. Our horses could hear and smell the fire—they whinnied wildly in the stables—but the building sat far enough away, out of danger. I listened, closed my eyes, and found, thankfully, that no wind blew that night, the air beyond the house eerily still. But if even the slightest breeze stirred up and blew sparks close to the stables, I would’ve immediately dashed there to set the animals free.

  Instead I watched the house, now full of strange colors appearing in the flames, the fire brighter and bigger, its heat burning the skin of my face and hissing and spewing and forcing us to take more steps backward. Trying to let it all go—our furnishings, wardrobes, family photos, art on the walls, brasses of horses, Maman’s china and crystal, our heirloom rugs, our feather beds. What terrible pain, but I had never coveted inanimate possessions. People, my family, our horses, our land—those things meant everything to me. Even then I could whisper a tiny prayer of thanks for our escape.

  “How did this happen?” Maman asked the air again, and God help me, I found myself growing the tiniest bit annoyed. I loved my mother, but I was Papa’s girl, and he and I had never had to speak to understand each other. I could almost hear his thoughts: Arlene Favier. You must be kind. You must keep yourself together for her. The house is—was—her domain.

  But instead Papa looked faraway for a moment, trapped in another realm, frowning and shaking his head, as if he might rid himself of the fire’s mystery the way dogs shake water off their bodies after emerging from a pond. He whispered through a forlorn and removed sigh I’d never heard before, “We may never know . . .”

  It startled me, but I thought he meant that we may never know how the fire had started. Later I came to wonder what else he might have meant. What else would we never know? His expression revealed devastation and a sad acceptance, the same way he and other horsemen and horsewomen knew that a lame animal must be put down.

  I turned back toward the house, and an image of the fireplace mantel expanded in my head. In a leather frame, a photo of my father taken after he’d won his first race. Another showed my grandparents posed in front of their horse farm outside Montreal, where they’d lived since immigrating to Canada from France. Baby photos of Luc and me, and Papa’s lucky horseshoe, polished to a silver sheen. My parents’ wedding portrait. And above the fireplace, an artist’s rendition in oil of Provence, which Papa had brought back from a trip to Paris and given to Maman upon their engagement. On either side of the painting, mirrors in gilt frames. The fireplace flanked by side chairs shipped to us from New York City, their leather upholstery as soft and warm as butter. All gone now.

  And then a pitiful gasp jerked my attention toward Papa. He lurched forward while shooting a demand back at us. “Take yourselves farther away. I must go inside.”

  A moment of stunned, perfectly horrible silence. Then “NO!” Maman screamed, and panic hit me like a whip.

  Papa darted a severe look at Luc and, pointing his finger, yelled in a fierce and fraught voice I’d also never heard before, “Do not follow me, and do not let them.”

  “Papa!” I said, but he had already started sprinting up the porch steps, two at a time, and then he vanished inside the gaping hole of our front door.

  My eyes searched the door for his quick return, my last glimpse of him splitting into hundreds of pieces as though he had walked through a broken mirror. Little did I know that those fragmented images would accompany me for the rest of my life.

  Moments felt like hours, a battle raging inside my head, and my mouth so dry I could not swallow. The house now reduced to a skeleton, pieces of timber began to fall with immense guttural groans, fangs of flame thrashing like evil spirits, and cinder showers exploding and drifting downward like so many falling stars.

  I broke free of my puzzled trance. “Papa!” I screamed, all fury and fear let loose and coming out in animal-like panting and shooting tears. “He’s not coming out. He can’t get out!”

  I lunged forward, but Luc grabbed me from behind. My younger brother, only sixteen, already had Papa’s strength. He held me even as I struggled and found myself in the middle of the blackest nightmare, and I couldn’t writhe away. Luc would not let me go, even as his tears dropped on my head and the back of my neck. Luc would never disobey an order given by our father.

  Falling through the crust of hell. Papa.

  As a girl, I’d sat on his lap while he braided my long auburn hair. He’d taught himself such little motherly duties so I would sit with him longer, but finally he’d allow me to leave his lap for visiting the broodmares or running with colts or winding ribbons into the manes of fillies. A few clucks would escape from his lips, and then he would smile and say, “Go along, ma poulette.” My little chicken.

  Papa always groomed his small mustache and wore a clean, starched shirt with pressed trousers every day, even while working with the horses. Born in Paris, France, he’d mastered English, but he still retained that lovely French accent. I adored the way he said “feesh” instead of “fish” and “poe-leece” for “police.” He taught Luc and me to speak his native language at the same time we learned English from Maman and at school.

  Trying to breathe. My eyes would not close as the fire continued to burn, a rage of flames, sparks, bursts, and collapsing explosions finally engulfing the entirety of our home, taking my father with it.

  That night I learned the most brutal lesson of my life: The devil could poke his finger through the earth’s ether to tinker with any of us at any time. He could play a sinister trick just because he wanted to. He could change the very fiber of us in only a matter of moments.

  More screaming, whereas I had no awareness of even existing. Maman kept crying and wailing louder than the sound of the fire. I blinked, and then the scream, which had been large and loud and ringing in the air around us, moved backward toward me and slipped back into my mouth.

  Maman on the ground now, weeping, Luc silent. And still I struggled. I didn’t stop fighting until help arrived and two of our closest family friends held me still, swept me up, and took us away. With the house still burning, a partially standing carcass, we drove off the land in an ash-covered Maxwell automobile, and Papa’s friend Charles Bentwood covered my eyes with his hand and pushed my chest down into my lap, at long last suppressing the screams that I hadn’t swallowed after all.

  Chapter Two

  Papa’s funeral took place in the Methodist church, and then the remains of Beaumont Favier were laid to rest in the town cemetery. Dressed in black crepe dresses loaned to us by others, mine hitting just above the ankle and Maman’s floor-length, we clung to each other, and my brother, wearing a borrowed black suit, tried to remain composed.

  This day marked the beginning of the end of all we had known. I would never be young and carefree again. My innocence had vanished.

  We had been a fortunate family, not excessively wealthy, but comfortable, not o
nly financially but because we did what we loved. Papa, Luc, and I devoted ourselves to the horses—Papa and I knew their breeding, their blood, their speed and strength, while Luc had gifts more attuned to the animals’ daily needs, their physical manifestations, and even what he believed went on in their minds. He spoke on their behalf in the world of the language-speaking creatures entrusted to care for them. And Maman had her home, her friends, her little soirees, and her tame place in society.

  While in high school, one of my classmates lost both of his parents, one from an accident, the other from a mysterious fever only a few months later. Jimmy was all boy and a humorous scold whom everyone liked. Suddenly left homeless and destitute and all alone, he needed help; therefore Papa hired him for after-school and weekend work in our stables. Away from school, where boys usually played with boys, and girls usually played with girls, he and I took to each other almost immediately, but Maman discouraged my growing friendship with Jimmy, claiming that we moved in different circles and it was best to keep it that way.

  On the funeral day as a cool breeze washed over the town of Paris, Kentucky, the only home I’d ever known, I remembered Jimmy. Now I understood the losses he’d suffered, and I wondered what had happened to him. He no longer lived in Paris, and when I first learned he had moved, I wondered what would make someone take his leave of this land, such a genteel place, the perfect landscape for breeding horses, sipping bourbon, and growing sweet green things.

  Papa had discovered Paris as a young man after striking out on his own. Located seventeen miles north of Lexington in Bourbon County, Paris had taken its name in tribute to France’s help during the Revolutionary War. The pretty little town, lined with filigreed two-story buildings, must have attracted my father because it shared a name with his birthplace, but it also happened to be in the middle of the best horse country anywhere. The rich soil full of limestone strengthened the bones of racing giants. Here Papa had raised a house, horses, and a family.

  I had expected to get through the funeral by placing myself in something of a fog, but instead everything stood out in etched detail, from the leaves on the trees to the deep-brown contours of Papa’s casket as it was lowered into the ground. Maman wore a crepe-trimmed mourning bonnet with heavy veiling. Behind the veil, her face appeared skull-like, pale as bone, eyes like empty sockets.