House of Mercy by Erin Healy Page A

stay with me,” Beth said.
    Rose shrugged. “That’d be fine.”
    “If you don’t mind sharing a bed,” Beth said to the girl.
    “I don’t. Of course I don’t. It sure beats the floor. And I sleep small.”
    Abel chuckled. “I don’t know what that means, but I can guarantee you’ll be sleeping hard. This is no resort we’re running, much as Levi would prefer that approach.”
    Lorena grabbed his outstretched hand in both of hers and pumped it up and down. “I can’t thank you enough.” Then she jogged away. Rose was already climbing back into her vehicle.
    “Your shoes,” Beth called out. “You won’t last a day in those. See if you can find something in my closet.”
    Her mother waved acknowledgment. She’d have Lorena all set up and sweeping the floors before the hour was out.
    “Well that was easy enough,” Abel said. “Let’s get on with it, men. Where’d my map go?”
    Beth watched Rose and Lorena drive back toward the Borzoi house and wondered why she felt a gnawing regret in the back of her stomach. Usually she felt joy—excitement, hope, peace, a dozen other positive emotions—whenever a new associate came onto the ranch. But in this moment she felt strangely like she’d been cast off.
    The truck crested the slight rise and then descended the back side of the hill, out of sight.
    “It’s not going to happen,” Jacob said, beside her startlingly close. Water droplets had spotted his leather work boots. His hair tended to curl up around his ears underneath the rim of his dusty hat, which sat low on his brow and accentuated how wide set his clear-blue eyes were. His laugh lines and crows’ feet were prematurely deep but made him look kinder rather than older. His close-cut mustache and beard was his only flaw, Beth thought. It covered a dimple to the left of his mouth and made him look more country singer than cowboy.
    Whenever Jacob sang, the cows bellowed their protest.
    “What’s not going to happen?” she asked.
    “You, getting replaced.”
    “Everyone’s dispensable. But that’s not what I was thinking about.” She didn’t in fact remember exactly what she’d been thinking about. At the moment, her mind was consumed with a terrible guilt about his silver-plated saddle, and the knowledge that she would never, ever have the character to confess her crime before it came to light.
    “No one’s dispensable,” he said. “But I don’t think anyone’s as generous as you.”
    “My father—far more.”
    “He’s never shared his bed with an associate.”
    Beth laughed. “No, his calling’s a little higher than mine.”
    “No calling’s higher or lower than anyone else’s. We all do what we can with what we’ve got.”
    She turned to him, intending to say that she’d been overly generous with things that were not hers to give, and the cost of her generosity might be more than anyone here could afford. This was why she was losing her place at the Blazing B. This was why she had to leave the ranch to work two jobs, and why her mother could so easily take another young woman into the house. Already Beth had been moved out into the margins of the family’s life.
    “Well, my bed’s all I’ve got these days. And Lorena doesn’t have one. Anyone would share it.”
    He shook his head. “If you say so,” he conceded. “See you around.”
    His praise sat in her stomach like too many helpings of rich dessert.

6
    O n the afternoon that the black clouds rolled over the mountain ridge and poured down into Burnt Rock like an avalanche in summer, Garner Remke was balanced precariously on a ladder in his basement, because he was replacing a high-output fluorescent light tube in one of his heat lamps. It was to his credit that he’d unplugged the fixture before beginning work on it, because at the moment that the tube connected with the contact plate, the thunderstorm passed over his house.
    This high in the Rocky Mountains there was little difference between an electrical