No Mercy Read Online Free

do you remember?” she asked softly.
    My breath froze in my lungs.
    “I mean, what do you remember about her? Mama.”
    An unwanted image of my mother appeared—sprawled face-first in the horse stall, blood matting her hair, pink splotches soaking through her white eyelet blouse. Tan leather riding glove clutched in her right hand; the pulpy red mass that’d been her left forearm stretched out in the filthy hay. The rank smell of nervous horse sweat. Horseshit. My own urine-soaked jeans. The horse’s continual, loud, moist grunts of distress.
    Mostly I remembered my helplessness, peeking through the slats at her motionless body.
    Three decades later, the scene still haunts me. I’d neglected to take the saddle off the Thoroughbred we’d been boarding before I’d corralled her. The saddle had slipped beneath the horse’s belly, and the temperamental mare spooked. When my mother entered the stall to correct my oversight, the horse’s powerful hind legs connected with her head. Several times.
    “Sometimes when I’m out there I try to talk to her,” Hope continued, oblivious to my guilt and grief, “but I can’t remember the sound of her voice.”
    I’d never forget my mother’s high-pitched shrieks of pain. Her last words, garbled from a broken jaw. How she screamed at me to stay out. Screaming at me to run and get my father.
    In her confused state, she’d forgotten Dad and Hope were in town, spooning down ice-cream sundaes so she and I could go riding alone. My mother had understood my obsession with horses. She’d shared it. Encouraged it.
    That day cured my equine fascination. I haven’t been on a horse since.
    Hope giggled, a tinny sound that startled me back to the present. “I’m sure folks who were driving by the Gunderson Cemetery thought, ‘There’s that crazy Hope Arpel, talking to herself in the family graveyard again.’”
    “No one thinks you’re crazy,” I lied.
    Before I braced myself for the million reassurances Hope always needed, the kitchen screen door banged.
    Levi stormed in and slumped in the doorway, sweaty, covered in muck and fine pieces of hay, disaffected scowl distorting his face. “About time, Ma. Can we go home before Jake finds another shitty job for me to do?”
    “Watch your mouth.”
    “Why should I? Aunt Mercy swears all the time.” His brown eyes challenged me. “She even swore at me today. In front of the sheriff.”
    Traitor. Next time we were alone I’d do worse than swear at him.
    “Don’t blame her because you were caught breaking the law. I would’ve cussed you out too if I’d seen the sheriff hauling you from a cop car in handcuffs. You’re just lucky your grandpa ain’t around to see how you’ve been behaving.”
    “Ma—”
    “Don’t you ‘Ma’ me. You aren’t stupid. Why would you break into Mr. Pawlowski’s house? He’s such a sweet old man. Never been anything but nice to us.”
    “Like you care.”
    “That’s not fair. I care and you know it.”
    “No, you don’t. You told Aunt Mercy where you’ve been?”
    I lifted a brow.
    Hope’s cheeks flushed, but she didn’t acknowledge his taunt. “That’s why you stole? To make me worry about you? To punish me for not being at your beck and call?”
    His scraggly hair curtained his face as he dropped his chin to his chest.
    “Why’d you steal, Levi? For the money?”
    “Jeez, Ma, I didn’t do it for the money.”
    “Then why? I’m serious, Levi. You better come clean about every sneaky thing you’ve been doing lately.”
    My focus shifted to Hope. Raking Levi over the coals? Almost a responsible parental reaction from her for a change.
    Levi kicked the doorjamb.
    “Stop acting like a two-year-old and answer me.”
    “I did it for an initiation thing, for a… club.”
    “A club? Or a gang?” She leaped to her feet and got right in his pimply face. “Don’t even think about it. Those gangs on the rez are bad news. You know that.”
    “It ain’t a gang.”
    “Then what