was normal wolf behavior. Beth had no point of reference. If she’d been asked before this moment, she would have said no wolf could unseat a rider from a fully extended horse.
His concentrated weight bore down on her ribs so that she couldn’t take a full breath. Beth prayed. God have mercy.
The beasty breath, full of heat and moisture and the scent of blood, caressed her chin and floated over her lips and rose through her nose into the panic centers of her mind.
She heard a voice within her ringing head say, I will show you mercy.
She decided the voice belonged to God.
She thought it would be a mercy to die.
3
The party for the doctor was Garner Remke’s idea. As a seventy-three-year-old who’d been slowed down by liver cancer, he hadn’t thrown a party for years. He wasn’t sure he ever had. Pulling this one off made him feel like a kid again.
The partygoers gathered at the Burnt Rock Harbor Sweet Assembly. The building stood at the base of a spectacular cliff high in the Rocky Mountains, high above Burnt Rock itself, where the air was as pure as the spring snowmelt. Built in the fifties by a wealthy family with ties to the old mining town, the Sweet Assembly was a historic landmark. It was a museum. And it was a church of sorts, which Garner occasionally attended.
But tonight it was simply the best location in town to celebrate the work of Catherine Ransom, MD, who seemed modestly flattered by all the attention.
Nearly all of Burnt Rock’s 457 residents had accepted his invitation, as happy as he was to have something partyish to do during the summer months that didn’t involve entertaining tourists. For the last two hours they’d been mingling outside under the lattice-covered patios, sipping real lemonade spiked with sprigs of mint that Garner had grown in his very own basement greenhouse. Everyone who had a grill had hauled it up to the mountain overlooking their homes, fired up the charcoal, and loosened up with a local microbrew bottled near the headwaters of the Rio Grande. They ate their fill of buffalo burgers, which had been shipped up within a day of slaughter from a free-range bison ranch down in the valley. They sawed away at venison steaks and nibbled at skewered rattlesnake and ate smoky green hatch chilies whole, right out of the tumbling fire roaster.
They entertained each other with dumb-tourist stories—the Texas oil man who didn’t believe the Rio Grande started in Colorado, the college thesis writer who asked if Burnt Rock had a Starbucks—and chatted up all the valley gossip and economic indicators of their tourist season, which was about six weeks underway. Would it be a boom or a bust? On a night such as this, with full bellies and warm hearts and boisterous company, everyone agreed: a boom.
Garner was as close to heaven as he figured he would ever get.
When he decided to call everyone inside, he enlisted the help of Hank and Karen Smith, who ran the hardware store. They had been sharing a table with Nova Yarrow, the bookstore owner, and Dotti Sanders, who was eighty going on eighteen and ran her own rental shack for river rafters. She winked at Garner when he leaned over Hank’s shoulder, then saluted him with her rattlesnake skewer.
“When are you going to attend that herb-garden seminar in Salida with me?” Dotti asked him. “You already missed the first two of the season.”
“Sign me up for the next one,” Garner said, taking pleasure in the surprise that crossed her face. Dotti had been after his companionship for two years, and tonight he finally felt accommodating.
“Well it’s about time,” she muttered.
“And we’ll have a coffee afterward. Now let’s start a trend toward the indoors,” he said. “Don’t sneak off now, or you’ll miss the desserts.” Mazy had outdone herself tonight, claiming she’d been wanting to try out some new concoctions for her popular café. But before they indulged, they would all give Dr. Ransom—Cat, Garner liked to call her—a proper welcome as a true member of the community.
Cat was laughing among a small crowd of business owners: a stable manager, a quilter, a handyman, a mechanic, and a geologist who did his field work here six months out of the year. If the men weren’t all married they might all have been besotted. The good doctor was a slight and fit woman, much shorter than the men in spite of her erect and easy thirtysomething