Dean Koontz - Sole Survivor

‘Thank God!’ Ned exclaimed, pulling up the hood on his slicker. The screen door sang as he pushed through it and into the storm.

‘Doc Sheely’s here,’ Jeff Ealing said. ‘Got to help him with the mare. But Mercy knows more about that woman than I do, anyway. You go ahead and talk to her.’

Mercy Ealing’s greying blond hair was for the most part held away from her face and off her neck by three butterfly barrettes. She had been busy baking cookies, however, and a few curling locks had slipped loose, hanging in spirals along her flushed cheeks.

Wiping her hands on her apron and then, more thoroughly, on a dish towel, she insisted that Barbara and Joe sit at the breakfast table in the roomy kitchen while she poured coffee for them. She provided a plate heaped with freshly baked cookies.

The back door was ajar. An unscreened rear porch lay beyond. The cadenced rain was muffled here, like the drumming for a funeral cortege passing out on the highway.

The air was warm and redolent of oatmeal batter, chocolate, and roasting walnuts.

The coffee was good, and the cookies were better.

On the wall was a pictorial calendar with a Christian theme. The painting for August showed Jesus on the seashore, speaking to a pair of fishermen brothers, Peter and Andrew, who would cast aside their nets and follow Him to become fishers of men.

Joe felt as if he had fallen through a trapdoor into a different reality from the one in which he’d been living for a year, out of a cold strange place into the normal world with its little day-to-day crises, pleasantly routine tasks, and simple faith in the rightness of all things.

As she checked the cookies in the two ovens, Mercy recalled the night of the crash. ‘No, not Rose. Her name was Rachel Thomas.’

Same initials, Joe realized. Maybe Rose walked out of the crash suspecting that somehow the plane had been brought down because she was aboard. She might be anxious to let her enemies think that she was dead. Keeping the same initials probably helped her remember the false name that she had given.

‘She’d been driving from Colorado Springs to Pueblo when she saw the plane coming down, right over her,’ Mercy said. ‘The poor thing was so frightened, she jammed on the brakes, and the car spun out of control. Thank God for the seat belts. Went off the road, down an embankment, and turned over.’

Barbara said, ‘She was injured?’

Spooning lumps of thick dough on greased baking sheets, Mercy said, ‘No, both fine and dandy, just shaken up some. It was only a little embankment. Rachel, she had dirt on her clothes, bits of grass and weeds stuck to her, but she was okay. Oh, shaky as a leaf in a gale but okay. She was such a sweet thing, I felt so sorry for her.’

To Joe, Barbara said meaningfully, ‘So back then she was claiming to be a witness.’

‘Oh, I don’t think she was making it up,’ Mercy said. ‘She was a witness, for sure. Very rattled by what she saw.’

A timer buzzed. Diverted, Mercy slipped one hand into a baker’s quilted mitten. From the oven, she withdrew a sheet filled with fragrant brown cookies.

‘The woman came here that night for help?’ Barbara asked.

Putting the hot aluminium tray on a wire cooling rack, Mercy said, ‘She wanted to call a taxi service in Pueblo, but I told her they never in a million years come way out here.’

‘She didn’t want to get a tow truck for her car?’ Joe asked.

‘She didn’t figure to be able to get it done at that hour of the night, all the way from Pueblo. She expected to come back the next day with the tow-truck driver.’

Barbara said, ‘What did she do when you told her there was no way to get taxi service from out here?’

Sliding a sheet of raw dough drops into the oven, Mercy said, ‘Oh, then I drove them into Pueblo myself.’

‘All the way to Pueblo?’ Barbara asked.

‘Well, Jeff had to be up earlier than me. Rachel didn’t want to stay over here, and it wasn’t but an hour to get there, with my heavy foot on the pedal,’ Mercy said, closing the oven door.

‘That was extraordinarily kind of you,’ Joe said.

‘Was it? No, not really. The Lord wants us to be Samaritans. It’s what we’re here for. You see folks in trouble like this, you have to help them. And this was a real nice lady. All the way to Pueblo, she couldn’t stop talking about the poor people on that plane. She was all torn up about it. Almost like it was her fault, what happened to them, just because she saw it a few seconds before it hit. Anyway, it was no big deal going to Pueblo. though coming back home that night was the devil’s own trip, because there was so much traffic going to the crash site. Police cars, ambulances, fire trucks. Lots of lookie-loos too. Standing along the side of the road by their cars and pickups, hoping to see blood, I guess. Give me the creeps. Tragedy can bring out the best in people, but it also brings out the worst.’

‘On the way to Pueblo, did she show you where her car had gone off the highway?’ Joe asked.

‘She was too rattled to recognize the exact spot in the darkness and all. And we couldn’t be stopping every half mile or whatever to see if maybe this was the right embankment or then we’d never get the poor girl home to bed.’

Another timer buzzed.

Putting on the quilted mitten again and opening the door on the second oven, Mercy said, ‘She was so popped, all sleepy-eyed. She didn’t care about tow trucks, just about getting home to bed.’

Joe felt certain that there had been no car. Rose walked out of the burning meadow, into the woods, all but blind as she left the blaze for the dark, but desperately determined to get away before anyone discovered that she was alive, somehow sure that the 747 had been brought down because of her. Terrified, in a state of shock, horrified by the carnage, lost in the wilds, she had preferred to risk death from starvation and exposure rather than be found by a rescue team and perhaps fall into the hands of her eerily powerful enemies. Soon, by great good luck, she reached a ridge from which she was able to see, through the trees, the distant lights of the Loose Change Ranch.

Pushing aside her empty coffee cup, Barbara said, ‘Mercy, where did you take this woman in Pueblo? Do you remember the address?’

Holding the baking sheet half out of the oven to examine the cookies, Mercy said, ‘She never told me an address, just directed me street to street until we got to the house.’

No doubt it was one that Rose had chosen at random, as it was unlikely that she knew anyone in Pueblo.

‘Did you see her go inside?’ Joe asked.

‘I was going to wait until she unlocked the door and was inside. But she thanked me, said God bless, and I should scoot back home.’

‘Could you find the place again?’ Barbara asked.

Deciding that the cookies needed an additional minute, Mercy slid the tray back into the oven, pulled off the mitten, and said, ‘Sure. Nice big house in a real nice neighbourhood. But it wasn’t Rachel’s. It belonged to her partner in the medical practice. Did I say she was a doctor down in Pueblo?’

‘But you didn’t actually see her go into this place?’ Joe asked. He assumed that Rose waited until Mercy was out of sight, then walked away from the house and found transportation out of Pueblo.

Mercy’s face was red and dewy from the oven heat. Plucking two paper towels off a roll and blotting the sweat from her brow, she said, ‘No. Like I said, I dropped them off in front, and they went up the walk.’

‘Them?’

‘The poor sleepy little thing. Such a dear. She was the daughter of Rachel’s partner.’

Startled, Barbara glanced at Joe, then leaned forward in her chair toward Mercy. ‘There was a child?’