would have been a better vehicle for the drug after all. She took the glass.
“I’ll get you a blanket.”
“Was he married?”
“Who, Garner?” Cat laughed. “No.”
“Is he buried here?” Beth asked.
Cat stopped laughing abruptly. She saw where this might go if she got sloppy. “Cremated,” she said. “Scattered.”
“Who handled his estate?”
“No idea. Do you want some more tea? I’ve got plenty.”
“Was there an attorney?”
Cat didn’t answer right away, and Beth didn’t appear to notice the delay. Cat mentally pieced together the motive behind the line of questions. Did Garner have money? She couldn’t imagine it, but these were the questions of a gold digger. More than anything, Cat wanted the woman to leave Burnt Rock and not come back. By morning, she’d forge a convincing rabbit trail for Beth to follow.
“I’ll ask around for you. It’s been years.”
“Just two, right? You said two.” Beth dropped her head into her hands. “What am I going to do?”
“Let’s leave the big decisions for later, Beth. You rest now. Everything will look better in the daylight.”
“You’re right. I’m so tired.”
“What did you need Garner for, Beth? I know he and your mother . . . had a falling out. Why did you come all this way? On Hastings?” She’d have to take the horse to the stables, of course. If the beast wasn’t fed and watered, it wouldn’t be able to carry Beth far enough fast enough.
Beth was asleep. Cat studied her, able to see now the line of Garner’s nose in hers, and the length of his fingers in her hands.
She locked the door on her way out, plotting the hours so she could return before Beth awakened. It was troubling that the girl felt the need to investigate Garner’s death. Cat wasn’t sure how to circumvent that.
As much as she was committed to keeping people alive, she might have to resort to killing after all.
29
The room smelled wrong. The blanket was the wrong texture. The moonlight was not coming through the window at the right angle. In fact, it wasn’t coming through the window at all. There was no window where it ought to have been.
The foreign shadows that crouched over Beth’s head confused her. She felt cold, although the blanket was heavy. She took a deep, sharp breath and sat up, and the hulking forms in the room righted themselves into sensible objects. A lampshade there, and a tall TV cabinet over there. Phantom shapes in a coffin of a room. There was no light, only the night vision of her own eyes adjusting to shades of gray. A fan rotated slowly overhead, charcoal paddles turning on a slate ceiling. She remembered that Garner was dead, but she couldn’t piece together how she knew this.
The doctor had told her he was dead.
“Dr. Ransom?” she said, hoping her tone was normal.
At the sound of her voice a large wet muzzle prodded her cheek, and she had the feeling the dog had been doing this for some time, trying to rouse her.
“Herriot?”
Beth reached over and turned on the tabletop lamp. Instead of illuminating the room, the bulb blinded her for long seconds of blinking and squinting and shielding her eyes with her hands.
It wasn’t Herriot, but Mercy. The door to the apartment was open, and he was already headed out and down the stairs.
Beth rose and knocked her shin on the coffee table, then found her way around it. In her sleep she had been dreaming of California, the state buried in mounds of volcanic ash with real estate signs staked at the top of each heap—For Sale. And she woke thinking that Roy Davis had said something about Garner making his fortune in California, which made her think that Garner’s attorney or estate manager might also be from there, and this was something she ought to mention to Dr. Ransom. It might lead somewhere. She tried to imagine what circumstances would lead a man to die without his own daughter learning of it, two years after the fact.
Her feet and hands seemed unnaturally heavy, swollen. She saw the dining room, the kitchen. The red numbers of the digital clock over the stove told her it was 1:20. No wonder she felt so groggy. On the other side of the room was a small archway leading to a hall, exactly like the one in Nova’s apartment.
Nova’s apartment? Who was Nova? Beth didn’t pull up the answer to that question until she was standing on the landing outside the doctor’s door, and then she