Sole Survivor

they made it clear this wasn't a job for untrained do-gooders. So I came home.”
        “How long were you gone?” Joe asked.
        “Couldn't have been more than forty-five minutes. Then I was in the kitchen here with Mercy for maybe half an hour, having some decaf with a shot of Bailey's, wide awake and listening to the news on the radio and wondering was it worth trying to get back to sleep, when we heard the knocking at the front door.”
        Joe said, “So she showed up an hour and fifteen minutes after the crash.”
        “Thereabouts!”
        Its engine noise masked by the heavy downpour and by the shivery chorus of wind-shaken aspens, the approaching vehicle didn't attract their attention until it was almost upon them. A Jeep Cherokee. As it swung into the turnaround in front of the house, its headlights, like silver swords, slashed at the chain-mail rain.
        “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