sheriff. That’s exactly what a thinking person would have done.”
Garner put one hand on the wall for balance and straightened up, got his opposite foot out from under him and planted it on the ground, and then froze in this position for long seconds.
“We have to break the glass,” Beth said. “We have to get to him.” She reached for the hammer dangling from Trey’s fingers at his side.
“He’s getting up.”
He was. His muscles found the coordination to push off the wall and floor together. The strength of legs, hips, torso, and arms worked together for a brief and beautiful moment, as Garner slowly, slowly rose to his feet. He was nearly erect when his head came forward, as if it thought his feet were already on the move, and then his chin went to his chest, and his entire body fell into the wall and slid down the face of it. Garner landed hard on his shoulder before rolling onto his back, where he lay still.
It seemed that shock had frozen Trey. Beth grabbed the hammer out of his hands and started beating on the window rather than the door. The vibration of the strikes buzzed like electricity down the hammer’s shaft and caused the bones of her fingers to hum. She wrapped the little hammer in both hands and raised it over her head, bringing it down on the window with all her weight, again and again. She closed her eyes and was overcome by the memory of Herriot leaping through that screen window when she went after Mercy. She saw her dog’s black paws and thick claws cutting through the mesh like butter, and then scrambling over the wall with no command or leash or common sense to stop her. Beth went after her grandfather with the same recklessness.
Her hammer seemed to freeze in the glass, and when she opened her eyes and looked up, she saw that the head had gone through it and become trapped in a web of fine cracks.
Trey shed his flannel shirt and shoved his hands back into the sleeves, wrapping the cuffs around his knuckles like makeshift gloves. He stripped her hands off the handle and wrenched the hammer head out of the window, then went after the breach. He was taller than Beth and able to come down on the weakness more forcefully. Beth jerked her face away as chips of glass flew.
Trey got them both into Cat Ransom’s office through the shattered window. There was glass under the window inside the waiting room, and Beth’s cowboy boots ground it deep into the chair cushions as she climbed over them, one hand in Trey’s sturdy grip. A shard bit into her shoulder as he helped her over the sill. But her eyes were on Garner, who looked like another dying man she wouldn’t be able to save.
Somehow she reached him before Trey did, at the precise moment when his entire body shuddered and he vomited against the wall.
Trey turned his head away. “Whoa.”
“It’s good, it’s good,” Beth said, grabbing his shoulder to roll him away from the choking hazard and into fresh air. She got him onto his other side. “Throwing up is almost always a good sign, right? His body’s getting rid of toxins. We have to find out what it is.”
Trey shook his head and talked through his fingers. “The ergot was days ago. Would it keep doing this now?”
Beth didn’t know.
Trey continued, “She could have given him anything. An overdose of something. Or drain cleaner.”
Garner’s heartbeat was slow but even, his airways were clear. Beth used her own sleeves to clean off Garner’s mouth and nose. The physical elements of illness had never bothered her. She’d seen worse in animals—calves wasted by Johne’s disease, cows with prolapsed uteri that had to be reinserted by hand, bulls made lame by foot rot more rank than any manure, horses trapped by barbed wire. It was the helplessness, not the earthiness, that punched her in the gut every time. The desire to help was so easily overwhelmed by ignorance of what to do.
Crouching over Garner now seemed so much like that moment in the crowded, suffocating cab of her father’s truck, while Beth did what her father’s heart couldn’t. But Garner’s heart and lungs were doing their own work, and her hands needed a task. They skimmed over his pallid face and shuddering chest without finding a place to land.
“His breathing is really shallow,” Beth said to Trey. “See what