THE CHILDREN’S WING OF THE NORTHSHIRE MEDICAL CENTER was on the third floor. Troy and Mercy stood in a small office decorated with the same bright and cheerful jungle murals as the rest of the ward, interviewing head pediatric nurse Anne Dougherty about Baby Doe’s disappearance. He’d warned Mercy to let him handle the questioning, and she’d complied, more or less.
But so far they’d gotten nowhere. No one knew anything or saw anything.
Troy was frustrated, but he hoped it didn’t show on his face as clearly as it did on Mercy’s. Even her freckles looked angry now, dark dots against pale skin flushed with impatience.
“There’s a security code to get into the ward,” she was saying to the nurse, although it sounded more like an accusation. “How could anyone get in?”
He cleared his throat, a signal to Mercy to back off.
“Yes,” said Anne. “There is a security code. But one of our seriously ill patients took a turn for the worse, and we had to admit several young people injured in that big accident on Route 313. Much more coming and going than usual. Whoever took her must have slipped in then.”
Troy nodded. “I heard about that.”
“Terrible.” Anne folded her hands into the pockets of her scrubs. “We were focused on getting everyone in and evaluated and treated as quickly as possible.”
“Understood,” he said. Anne was an implacable middle-aged woman with kind eyes and a firm manner clearly designed to deal with young patients and their worried parents. Mercy may not have been Baby Doe’s mother, but she sure acted like she was. Troy wondered how someone so tough on the outside and yet so soft on the inside ever survived combat. But she had.
“Have we spoken to everyone on duty?” He stepped forward, taking back control of the interview. Mercy stayed where she was.
“Everyone but Mary Hodges,” said Anne. “She left her shift early to go on vacation. Before we knew that the baby was gone.”
“Where?” asked Troy and Mercy in unison.
So much for letting him run his own interview, he thought.
Anne checked her watch. “She’s on the Long Trail somewhere between here and Canada by now.”
“We’ll want to talk to her as soon as we can.” He wrote down Hodges’s cell phone number as Anne dictated it. “Let’s see the room where the baby was staying.”
“Of course.” Anne led them out of her office and down a long hall lined with patient rooms on one side and offices on the other. All the doors were painted bright colors, reminding him of the poster of front doors in Dublin that hung framed over the table in his grandmother Maeve’s kitchen. She was his only Irish relation in a sea of Yankee forbearers who dated back to pre-Revolutionary days—and she never let him forget it.
The baby’s room held a single white metal adjustable crib and the usual medical paraphernalia, overseen by a tower of tan and orange giraffes nibbling at the leaves of green acacia trees painted on the walls. A cheerful room, despite the hospital smell and the disheartening fact that its occupants were always sick children.
The crib was empty and unmade.
“Everything here looks like hospital issue,” he said.
“Yes,” confirmed Anne.
“What happened to the backpack carrier?” asked Mercy. “And the baby’s clothes? The teethers?”
“We keep the patient’s personal belongings in here.” Anne opened the small closet at the side of the bed. “Nothing here. Whoever took the baby must have taken the baby’s things as well.”
“Sounds like a domestic snatch,” said Troy. “So she’s probably physically safe, at least.”
“We’ve got to find her,” said Mercy.
“We will,” he said. “Starting with an AMBER Alert.”
* * *
MERCY WAS NOT happy when Troy sent them home. Nothing she could say could talk him out of it. He kept telling her to get a good night’s sleep and they’d touch base in the morning. Which she knew was cop code for “You’re just a civilian, let us pros handle it.” She didn’t expect to hear from him any time soon. So she’d have to carry on herself, with Elvis as her right-hand canine.
The search for whoever had left the baby in the woods had turned up nothing, and odds were whoever had the baby now was long gone from southern Vermont. But she still had to try.
She turned the Jeep into the long drive that led up to the old log cabin on the hill. The small house—originally a hunting camp—sat on fifty acres of forest land fronted by a stream that ran along the back of the barn. She’d bought the property when she came home from Afghanistan, drawn to its Lincoln Log charm and desolate isolation in equal measure. Here she hid out with Elvis and an assortment of noisy birds, aggressive squirrels, wild turkeys, hungry deer, and the occasional black bear for company. And she liked it that way.
The wild turkeys were the ones most likely to overrun the property. Several fearless fowl cluttered the drive now, unafraid of the vehicle and its passengers. Even Elvis didn’t scare these guys. He’d befriended the tough birds on that first day the cabin was theirs, somehow knowing they were here first and belonged here. But he did not extend that same courtesy to the other little critters on the property, which scrambled whenever the Belgian shepherd showed up.
She angled the Jeep around the turkeys and pulled up to the side of the cabin, parking by the old stone wall that separated the front yard from the driveway. She grabbed their packs and trudged to the back of the vehicle, opening the hatchback for a very animated Elvis. The dog leapt out and streaked straight for the front door. He seemed as happy to be home as she was. It had been a long day, and they were both tired.
She followed him through the weathered rose arbor and up the worn granite path through the garden that led to the wide south-facing front porch, where you could sit in one of the rocking chairs and watch the sun rise over the mountains to the east at dawn and set over the mountains to the west at dusk. When she’d first come back from Afghanistan, she’d spent a lot of time rocking on this porch, staring out at the mountains. Her only enhancement to that splendid view was a flagpole and an American flag, which flew day in and out at half mast in honor of her fallen comrades.
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 who 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.