The Speed of Mercy by Christy Conlin (good books for high schoolers txt) 📕

to stop at the Jericho County Care Centre on her way, to try to speak to Stella so soon. Mal was never going to get near her again with the crazy old lady guarding her. It was so much more complicated than she had ever imagined. She folded up the article and put it back in the pocket of her stylish but practical hiking shorts.

The confidence that had billowed through her while travelling from San Francisco to Halifax, and then all the way through the forested trail to the lake, was sagging. Mal was alone, deep in the woods in a strange place. There was no signal on her phone, and the GPS had been useless once she turned off the main highway. The fire roads and dirt roads were obscure, lost in the past. She had a paper road atlas that did have the small roads marked, tiny thin lines, almost unbelievable.

When Mal had stopped at the Jericho Centre just after lunch, before driving west to find Mercy Lake, the first thing she’d done was hand her business card to the tall old lady outside smoking on a bench and ask if she knew Stella Sprague. The old lady had bolted up with such speed that Mal jumped.

“Why are you looking for Stella?”

Mal had tried to think of a smart answer, but nothing came.

The old woman had no shortage of words. “Why do you want to talk to Stella? Do you know her? Are you some cousin?”

“I just want to talk to her.”

The woman was obviously a resident. A loon called from the lake. Mal couldn’t believe how naive she was — she should have assumed the old woman was a resident. She had clicked her dentures and globs of white spit dotted the corners of her thin lips.

“About what?” The woman’s voice had been so suspicious, her eyes so narrowed.

“About something that happened way back.” Mal hadn’t been prepared for what the lady asked next.

“Is danger coming?”

It was such a strange question that Mal had nodded before she could catch herself, before she could stop the words pouring out of her mouth. “Yes. Danger is coming. Danger is already here. I think people are looking for me, and probably because I’m looking for her. Does Stella have something that might incrimi­nate someone?”

The loon called again, and Mal remembered how she’d immediately wished she could take back what she’d said.

The old woman had shut her eyes for a moment and then opened them again. “You go away from here. They don’t want visitors coming ’round unannounced. Didn’t you see them signs inside? You go away. Don’t bring any trouble here. I’m late for yoga.” The old woman had then marched in through the main doors.

Mal had hurried to her car, aware that security guards might come out to ask her what the hell she was doing. She was lucky no one else had been outside. She didn’t have journalistic instincts — that was very clear now she had come all the way to the lake alone.

Mal was already making a mess of this trip she never should have come on in the first place. She walked around the site of the old lodge, holding up her phone, taking a video as she circled the area before walking back to the north side, just to the east of the trail. There was a patch of mint near the tree line, pungent in the heat. And just beyond, rosemary spiked out from the overgrown grass, the heat amplifying the sharp aroma. It was strange, this wild herb garden. She took pictures of the unexpected plants. There was nothing intentional about it. Maybe someone many years ago had tossed a bouquet that had rotted and decayed and seeded. In the high meadow grass to the side of the trail were tiny true-blue star-flowers. Borage. Mal knew all of these from her mother’s garden in Los Gatos. And about ten feet to the south of this, in the bright sun and sandy soil, were lavender plants growing up through the weeds, purple flowers bright in the pale green grass near the beach.

If this were a short story, Mal would know it was a story that started with deceit, a lie that led to all her problems. It was the truth of how her trip from California to Nova Scotia had begun, with deceit. Her mother was a famous oil painter, brilliant and beautiful. She was just emerging from her grief over her husband’s death, and Mal was living with her. Mal’s mother had decided she’d spend the end of the summer on a painting retreat in Big Sur — she was doing a series of paintings on grief for a show at the Triton Museum.

Mal told her mother she too was going on retreat, a pilgrimage to the place her mother was from: the backwoods hick land, as her mother called it, of rural Nova Scotia — a place of primal beauty, of seafood and fecund fields and orchards, a place where racism ran like an eternal current just below the polite surface. It might not be as blatant as it was in other parts of the world, but it was more durable in its disguise, embedded in the society of polite. Her mother said that Silicon Valley used to be much like the Annapolis Valley, a place of traditional farming, rural communities, but it changed and became a place of innovation and reinvention. Mal could hear her mother’s voice in her head now.

The Annapolis Valley isn’t a woke place, as you say, my darling. It’s sort of lost in time, and that’s not always a good thing, you know, a place where there is a lot of misremembering.

Mal knew there were Black people, multiracial people, addressing racial inequities in Nova Scotia. She had read online about Black Lives Matter protests and Gamechanger 902, a Black activist group. Her mother made it sound like a place where no one was doing anything. Mal