by Paula Munier
She paused for a quick salute. “Martinez.”
Mercy always saluted when coming and going to the house—her way of including him in her life here.
It was not the life they planned, and it was not the house they planned to live that life in.
They were going to get a little ranch out on the south Texas plains and raise dogs and kids and roses. He loved roses.
Her parents would not be pleased. Both her mom and her dad had abandoned their own rural upbringing for the city life, going to law school and then setting up their own law firm together in Boston. The family firm, which she was expected to join after her older brother, Nick, bailed for medical school. Apparently becoming a doctor earned him a free pass—but the pressure was on her to fill his slot.
She never wanted to do that. She’d only ever been interested in two things: literature and law enforcement. Neither of these passions impressed her parents. So when she dropped out of Boston College, she’d joined up right away, before her parents could guilt her out of it.
Then she met Martinez. She loved him as widely and deeply as she did poetry and police work. When she lost him, she lost two of her three anchors. She was no longer a lover, no longer a soldier. She was a caretaker to a dog who’d rather be somewhere else, with someone else, just as she would, each a constant reminder to the other of all they’d lost. She had nothing but the cold consolation of words to comfort her. Even Shakespeare came up short now.
Her parents saw her fiancé’s death as an opening, and resumed their campaign to bring her back to Boston to finish college and go on to law school. So far she’d resisted, but sometimes she wondered if it just might be easier to follow the path they’d already laid out for her rather than try to blaze a new one on her own.
But then, she wasn’t really alone.
Elvis sat patiently at the door, ears perked, waiting for her. He seemed to understand this ritual of hers, this halting at the flag that always ended in recollection and recrimination. She plodded up the porch steps to his side, unlocking the door and shouldering her way in, dropping their packs onto the oak hall tree that served as her mudroom, and kicked off her boots.
“Come on in,” she said.
The Malinois bounded in and went to fetch his bowl. He knew it was suppertime. The cabin’s wide windows were full of late-afternoon shadows; the light was fading away as it did so stealthily in the long days of summer. A northwest wind shuddered through the tall white pines and sugar maples that dominated the woods surrounding the house. With the approach of sunset came the slow quieting of the forest. Not that it was ever very noisy here.
The growing silence unsettled Mercy. She locked the door behind her, something she rarely bothered to do. After all, she had Elvis, and he was trained to take down intruders. She shook off her unease and padded to the kitchen, where the dog waited, his dinner bowl between his front paws.
She grabbed a peanut butter chew treat from the cookie jar and tossed it his way.
“This should keep you busy for a while.”
He caught it easily, wagged his black-tipped tail in thanks, and retreated to his bed. Which was really Mercy’s couch. A deluxe dog bed made of orthopedic foam and covered in soft quilted cotton occupied a corner of the kitchen, but Elvis never slept there. It had become the repository of all his toys, including his Kong, the red rubber chew toy he adored above all things. For sleeping, the dog preferred her long sofa, with its soft butter-colored leather upholstery, preferably nested in the quilts she kept folded at each end. A maroon one for her, a teal one for him.
She’d grown up in a house where animals were not allowed on the furniture, ever, but Martinez told her, “Elvis and I share everything. When I eat, he eats. When I sleep, he sleeps.” She had laughed at that—until she found herself envying the dog’s sleeping arrangements. She rarely got to spend the night with Martinez.
When she moved in here, she’d brought her great-grandmother’s cherry four-poster bed that they’d intended to share sans shepherd. But she couldn’t bear to sleep there alone. So she usually slept on the couch with Elvis. He had his side and she had hers.
The dog destroyed the peanut butter chew treat, a process that took an average of four and a half minutes. Mercy left him there on the sofa chomping away. She took a long, hot shower, scrubbing away the dirt and sweat of the day and washing her hair. Wrapping her wet head in a towel, she rubbed her limbs down with coconut oil and slipped into her favorite moose-print flannel pajamas.
She went back to the couch, but Elvis wasn’t there. She looked around the great room and over into the kitchen, but no dog.
He hadn’t had supper yet, so he should be at her feet, bowl in his mouth, reminding her to feed him. The fact that he wasn’t meant that he was stressed out.
Mercy knew how he felt—and where she’d find him. She went to the far side of the cabin, past her bedroom and the guest bedroom to the small workout room that had once been a screened-in porch. She’d furnished it with a heavy bag and weights, but the reason she and Elvis loved it was the yoga mat and the candles and the soft music. It was here to this warm womb of peace and quiet that they came when the stress of the outside world threatened to overwhelm them. And when the nightmares came—her dark visions of fury and firepower and his frightened puppy yelps signaling his bad dreams—marring their sleep.
The shepherd was there, curled up on the orange mat, his head resting on a long bolster pillow. He looked up at her as if to say, What took you so long?
She lit a candle, sweetening the air with lavender and sage, and turned on her playlist, a mix of Gregorian chant and kirtan, its East Indian complement. She settled cross-legged on the mat, and Elvis scooted over to her, dropping his fine head in her lap. She closed her eyes as he did.
As the haunting intonations enveloped them, she breathed in and out, stroking the shepherd’s dark muzzle and scratching the sweet spot between his triangular ears. She could hear his quick panting slow and deepen as her own breathing slowed and deepened, and their respective inhalations and exhalations fell into a synchronized rhythm.
They sat together like this for a long time, until Elvis nudged her hands with a cold, wet nose. A signal that he was feeling better and ready for dinner. Funny how he was always quicker than she to know when they needed to sit and breathe, and when they were ready to move on.
She followed him as he padded into the kitchen and retrieved his dinner bowl. She poured herself a glass of Big Barn Red and made herself a roast beef and Vermont cheddar on Gérard’s sourdough slathered with mustard and loaded with maple sweet pickles. Lillian Jenkins would be proud, she thought. When she wasn’t running the Vermonter or the Friends of the Library or the historical society, Lillian was president of the Vermont Locavore Association and on the board of the Vermont Fresh Network. God forbid anything produced outside the borders of the Green Mountains should pass through a true Vermonter’s lips.
Elvis would pass on the pickles, but he was as fond of Vermont cheddar as the next Belgian shepherd. And he wasn’t a snob about it like some of his countrymen might be.
Slicing the sandwich in perfect halves, she removed the pickles from his side, placed it in his bowl, and laid the bowl on the coffee table before him. He had very good table manners, and not just for a dog. His sergeant had seen to that. Better than most of the guys she’d served with.
Elvis watched her as she carried her wine and her half of the sandwich to her side of the couch with her maroon quilt. He’d already arranged the teal one to his liking on his side.
“Bon appétit!” She lifted her glass to him, and he devoured his dinner on cue.
Mercy nibbled at her sandwich, but she still wasn’t hungry. She gave the rest to Elvis. He gobbled it down, then stretched out on his side of the sofa. Within minutes he was asleep. She knew that she should sleep, too. But her head was crowded with the mysteries of the day: the missing baby, the unknown corpse, the buried explosives—or lack thereof. And Troy Warner, the lifeguard wh
o grew up to be a game warden.
She grabbed her glass of wine and went out to the front porch, settling into her grandfather’s rocker, facing west, and staring up at the darkening sky. She watched the stars blink into view, keeping the young moon company. Here in the dusk in her garden, surrounded by forest, she breathed in the scent of roses and lavender and pines and reminded herself to notice how beautiful it was here and how lucky she was to be home when so many others were not.
Even if it was lonely sometimes.
She finished her wine and put her glass down on the porch floor. Then she closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the chair, rocking slowly, slowly, slowly, until she dozed off.
* * *
THE SCREECHING OF a barred owl jolted her awake. Darkness had fallen—and out here on the edge of the forest the darkness was complete. A total void. Mercy shivered. And not just because it had grown cold. She felt uneasy, and she wasn’t quite sure why.
Time to put in floodlights, she thought.
She took her wineglass and went back inside, where Elvis raised his head from the couch to acknowledge her presence and then went right back to snoring. She paced around the room, trying to reclaim her serene self.
Ordinarily just being here in this place calmed her. With its warm pine walls and thick beams and wide-planked floors, this cabin was her cocoon. She hadn’t done much to the place, other than move her books out of storage and onto the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that she built by hand with the help of her carpenter cousin, Ed. He said at the time that he didn’t see how anybody would want to read so many books, much less want to keep them all, but he helped her build the shelves just the same. And it was Ed who came up with the idea of installing a library ladder so she could climb her way to the top shelves. The bookshelves competed for attention with the soaring twenty-foot ceilings and enormous flagstone fireplace—and they won. She knew he took as much pride in those bookcases as she did, because since she moved in most of the few visitors she’d had were prospective clients brought in by Ed to see for themselves what great work he could do for them should they be wise enough to hire him.
But even her wall of books failed to steady her now.
Mercy went to her bedroom. She pulled out the top right-hand drawer in the highboy and removed her service weapon. She hadn’t fired the Beretta since she left the army. But she had a sense she might need it now.
The click of Elvis’s paws on the pine floors turned her around. “No worries, boy, we just want to be prepared. Come what may.”
He knew what a gun was. He knew what guns could do.
“It’s okay,” she told him. “You’ve had a big day, going back to work. And now this.”
She scratched that sweet spot between his ears with her free hand. “Good job, good dog.”
That’s what Martinez always used to say after they returned from a mission outside the wire. He’d say it with a smile, and he swore that Elvis would smile in return. An acknowledgment between two peers of a job well done. But she thought he was dead wrong. Dogs didn’t smile, they just curled their lips in a weird way once in a while, and people anthropomorphized that into a smile.
“Good job, good dog,” she said again.
Elvis smiled at her.
Mercy laughed out loud. Wherever Martinez was now, he was laughing, too.
The dog followed her back to the living room, and they dove under their respective quilts on their respective sides of the sofa. She slipped the Beretta under one of the pillows. Elvis inched over to her side and placed his well-shaped head on her ankles.
Mercy knew she would sleep better now, with a dog on her feet and a gun under her head.
CHAPTER TEN
TROY SPENT A COUPLE OF HOURS at the regional office in town filling out paperwork and filing reports. He put out an AMBER Alert on the Baby Doe, using the pictures Mercy Carr had taken of her on her cell phone.
Susie Bear slept at his feet, spread out on the portable rollout pad he kept in his truck for long nights on the job. Troy could use some shut-eye himself, and planned on heading home for a nap before the inevitable 2:00 a.m. calls for drunk ATVers and lost campers started coming in. He whistled for the slumbering dog to wake up. Together they packed up their stuff—she carried her collapsible water bowl in her mouth, he carried everything else, including the laptop—and trudged to the truck. He’d finish up his reports and research at home when he got the chance.
They were about half a mile down Route 7A when a call came in from Dispatch.
“Old Man Horgan’s gone wandering again,” said Delphine. “Local PD’s asked for your help.”
Walter Horgan was an eighty-eight-year-old widower who lived on his own at home. Every day since his wife, Eileen, died eight years before, he left the white Victorian farmhouse with the blue gingerbread trim that he’d shared with her for sixty-one years of marriage and walked down West Road to the Northshire Cemetery on Main Street to visit her grave. The journey was just short of a mile each way, long enough to fulfill his physical need for a healthy constitutional every morning, and his emotional need to touch base with the woman he’d loved so much for so long. Everyone in Northshire knew Mr. Horgan and kept on eye on him as he made his way down the street, cane tapping the marble sidewalk in a staccato that announced his progress—until that turn onto Main Street crossed Route 7A and the sidewalk ended, forcing him to skirt the woods for several hundred yards.
During daylight hours this trek was manageable enough, but lately Walter had taken to roaming the cemetery after dark. Woods surrounded much of the twenty-acre park, and the worry was that he’d wander off track and get disoriented or dehydrated or worse.
“When’d he go missing?”
“His daughter says he never answered the phone tonight.”
They knew the daughter Isobel, who lived up in Burlington now and checked in on her father by phone every night before he went to bed.
“And George?”
George from Meals on Wheels dropped by around seven o’clock each evening to give Walter his dinner.
“George says he wasn’t there. And you know how much he loves Chef Pinette’s meals.”
Walter, a retired restaurant owner, would tell anyone who would listen how much better the food was since Pinette, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, had come on board.
“It’s after nine now, so he’s been gone at least two hours. What’s the Point Last Seen?”
“As far as we know, PLS was his house, where his next-door neighbor saw him get the mail around three p.m. He was wearing his usual button-down blue shirt, khakis, and his favorite Agway cap.”
“Okay. We’re on it.”
Susie Bear could find a lost old man faster than anyone else. Local law enforcement knew it, and often when a situation like this arose they turned to Troy and his dog, especially when they were preoccupied with tourists on busy holiday weeks like this one.
“You’ve already put in a full day,” said Delphine. “And you’ll be out again come midnight.”
“It’s on the way home,” he told her, and hung up before she could point out that wasn’t exactly true. But close enough.
He’d never turn down an opportunity to help find a lost individual, especially an elderly person. Nights like this were the reason he’d joined the service. His great aunt Renée had lived with his family when he was a kid. A retired botanist and devoted bird-watcher, she’d taken him on long nature walks, teaching him the names of the fauna and flora of her beloved Green Mountains. But as Alzheimer’s set in, she grew confused on her daily walks with Troy, and he would guide her home. One autumn night she slipped out of the house and into the forest that flanked their backyard. His bedroom was next to hers on the second floor, and he never forgave himself for not hearing her shuffle past his open door and down the stairs.
The next morning his mother discovered she was gone. A search was organized; villagers and law enforcement alike went looking for her. They searched all day in t
he woods by his house. The fall of darkness and the threat of a nor’easter cut the effort short, and everyone came home.
Everyone except the game warden, a tough outdoorsman named Frenchie Robicheaux, and his dog Bella, a sweet yellow Labrador. They ventured deeper into the wilderness and found Aunt Renée hiding in an abandoned blind more than two miles in. She was dehydrated and hypothermic, but alive.
Frenchie and Bella saved her from the forest, but they couldn’t save her from the disease that robbed her of her woodland wisdom. She died of Alzheimer’s eight years later. But Troy never forgot the kindness and fierceness of the warden and his dog, and decided then and there he’d follow in their footsteps.
He parked the truck at the entrance of the Northshire Cemetery, between the two tall stone angels that stood sentinel at the gate. He let Susie Bear out, slung his pack onto his back, secured his headlamp, and switched on his flashlight.
The moon was just a silver sliver in the dark now, and the stars stood out against the night sky. They passed under the solid gaze of the seraphim and into the graveyard proper, as dark and pretty as a park of the dead should be.
Northshire dated back to 1791, the final resting place for Revolutionary War heroes, poets and politicians and philanthropists, teachers and farmers and generations of Warners, including his Aunt Renée.
The headstones shone pale and ghostly in the weak glow of the crescent moon. No place lonelier than a cemetery. They said cemeteries were peaceful, but when Troy wanted peace, he went to the woods. He knew his late aunt probably felt the same way, but hoped she’d found some eternal rest in the Warner mausoleum here on the grounds.