The Mercy Contract

In the fall of 1881, three strangers arrive in a dying Nevada town, each carrying a torn piece of the same old photograph. On the back of every piece, someone has written one word: Remember.

Abigail Kern treats the sick without a license and keeps a bottle of laudanum in her coat. Fifteen years ago, in a wagon darkroom, she developed that photograph while men on the ridge fired into a winter camp. Moses Pitts hunts men for bounty now. Back then he wore a deputy's badge, and he wrote the report that called the killing something else. Henry Childress is nineteen, cannot read, and stutters on the questions no one in town will answer. The child in the photograph has his face.

Providence was founded on a contract signed after that morning: silence, on forfeit of each signer's life, and a promise that in fifteen years the surviving boy would be told the truth. The term comes due at sundown on November 17. Whoever tells Henry what happened will die. If no one tells him, everyone who signed will.

Jacob Ware, the last powerful founder, means to sell the town before then, and to get Henry's mark on that same paper or put Henry in the ground.

The Mercy Contract is a Western Gothic historical mystery for readers who like literary westerns, hard-won justice, and old crimes buried beneath respectable towns.