The Homecoming Baby

He had work to do. Deals to finalize. A client to visit in Santa Fe. He did not need to be squandering good gas and putting hard miles on his favorite Mercedes crawling through these winding mountain roads looking for a place called Enchantment, New Mexico.

But he kept ignoring himself—proving that the inner voice was right. Yes, sir, he was definitely nuts.

He couldn’t even find a decent radio station to help keep his mind off his own thoughts. He dictated a few notes into his digital recorder, but eventually even that grew old.

Finally, he decided to relax and take in the scenery. In fact, he was amazed by the verdant green mountains around him. He hadn’t spent much time in New Mexico before, and his mental image had been a cliché born of too many Westerns—flat, dusty-red deserts littered with bleached cattle skulls.

The colors here surprised him. Lots of red, yes, but not dusty and dried out. Instead, pinks and blues subtly mingled with the pure blue sky and the yellow wildflowers to create a rich sense of innocence. Like a box of crayons in a happy two-year-old’s hands.

And all this space…endless vistas down mountainsides and across valleys.

He wasn’t sure he liked it. It felt kind of…lonely.

He was a city man. For him “land developing” meant taking one highly coveted acre of land and erecting a building on it that would allow the maximum number of people to imagine that they “owned” it. It meant beehives and shopping centers and high-density ratios. It meant top dollar and bottom line.

So if he’d been expecting some kind of epiphany—an interior “Eureka!” that said this was his secret heritage, that he belonged in an adobe house with a horse in the front yard—he’d been sadly mistaken. He thought it was nice, but nothing inside went “click.”

To his annoyance, the only “click” he heard came from under the hood of his car. At least twenty minutes outside Enchantment, something began rhythmically slapping as he drove, and he smelled the metallic odor of water scorching against engine parts. The needle on the temperature gauge began to climb and finally steam rose from around the edges of the hood.

“Damn it.” He was going to have to stop.

He looked around. Where the hell was he? He could just imagine himself calling the auto club and asking them to come find him in the middle of nowhere, somewhere on the side of some mountain.

He whipped his cell phone out of its carrier, looked down and cursed again. He really was in the middle of nowhere. They didn’t even have service up here. Probably one of these picturesque trees was blocking the signal.

He lifted the hood, stepping back to avoid having his face steam cleaned. He was no mechanic, but even he could see the problem. A hose dangled like a dead black snake. And, even more ominously, he could see water bubbling out of a hole in the side of the radiator. He stared at it, then glanced one more time at his cell phone.

Still no service. Probably out here real men didn’t need auto clubs. They probably just fashioned makeshift radiator belts out of grapevines and kept driving.

Okay, now what? Enchantment was still about ten miles away.

But he remembered passing a small road sign just a few yards back. It had directed him to turn left to get to some place called Silverton. Whatever that was. He unfolded the map and finally found it. Very small, but definitely there.

And it was only about a mile away. That he could handle in a heartbeat. San Francisco might not have classes on how to turn a rabbit’s pelt into a radiator belt, but it had health clubs, and he jogged five miles a day at his.

As he walked, he checked every few yards to see if his cell service had returned, but no luck. No cars, either. This must be the most deserted stretch of road in the entire state of New Mexico.

He had decided to stop at the very first house he saw—the suburbs of Silverton were fine, any structure that had a telephone was fine. But there were no suburbs. Suddenly, without warning, without signs or billboards or outlying development of any kind, there it was. Just a small, ornate, old-fashioned metal plaque.

Silverton.

He kept walking, but his mind had stalled. What the hell was this? It wasn’t even a town, really. It was just an X carved into the land. Two small, crisscrossing streets of dilapidated old buildings.

Some of the structures had obviously been vandalized. Whole walls of wood had been stripped away, and doors stood in their isolated frames, entryways to open air. Some of the buildings were leaning toward the ground as if they wanted to lie down and rest. A few seemed intact, but they all were completely, unquestionably deserted.

Deserted. He stopped in his tracks. By God, he had stumbled onto a ghost town.

He should have been furious. There was obviously no telephone to use in this town. No gas station to drive him back to the car and repair the belt. But for the moment, the radiator belt seemed oddly unimportant.

He wandered through the buildings, fascinated, his imagination running ahead of him. Silverton. Silver Town. Of course. All little boys read dozens of books about these things, and he was no exception.

The wind blew through the buildings now, so dried and damaged were the walls. And the windows lay in daggers of glass on the ground, too dusty to sparkle even in this bright spring sunlight.

But, as an investment advisor, he was accustomed to transforming run-down companies and places in his mind, and it was easy to do that here. He could almost see the dirty, tired miners, digging all day, and maybe all night, too, hoping to find that tiny glimmering thread that meant freedom. Treasure.

And their families, having arrived here from a hundred different places, banding together to make their own version of civilization. Music from that building, perhaps, at night. And in that larger one, whose faded lettering pronounced it the general store, bolts of cloth and jars of candy and cans of food.

Dreams and courage and, eventually, the long death of hope. Obviously the silver had dried up—and the town had followed. The miners and their families, and the bank and restaurant and boardinghouse that had supported them, had moved on to another place, another, more promising, hole in the ground.

And now, all these years later, he was the only living human being listening to the echoes in this sad, forgotten place.

He walked around the back of the boardinghouse, drawn by the glitter of a small stream tumbling over rocks. As he rounded the corner, a bird screeched, startling him. His heart knocked once. He had grown so accustomed to the silence.

When the stream came into view, his heart seemed to skid to a halt.

He had been wrong. He was not alone.

A woman, maybe just a girl, maybe just a dream, stood barefoot in the brook, hazy and ethereal—like a trick of the sunlight. He couldn’t see her face—she was looking toward the trees—but her hair fell like silver water down her back. Her long, graceful legs were pale and her skirt, which she held up around her thighs, was filled with flowers.

For one paralyzed moment, he couldn’t speak. He just stared, lost in the beauty.

And then, slowly, she turned her face toward him. He took a breath. She was beautiful, her sweet, full mouth and her round blue eyes shining in the shaft of sunlight.

She looked at him, blankly at first, and then with a growing, widening horror. “No,” she said.

She swayed strangely. She put out one hand to balance herself, but there was nothing to grasp. She took a halting step. The other hand let go of her skirt, too, as if her fingers were numb. A rain of flowers fell, forgotten, into the dancing stream around her feet.

“No,” she said again, but she obviously wasn’t distressed about the flowers. She was frightened. She was blanched and frozen, as if she’d seen a ghost.

And the ghost was Patrick.

CHAPTER THREE

LIFE WAS BEAUTIFUL, especially in a ghost town.

Celia had a skirt full of flowers, and the brook was cool and clear as it slipped around her toes. She decided she might never go home. She might just go into the roofless old boardinghouse, make herself a pallet of wildflowers and sleep under the starry sky.

Actually, she was one of the few people who truly wouldn’t be afraid to do such a thing. She had grown up on ghost stories of Teague Ellis. In Enchantment, no giggling sleepover was complete without a spooky tale of how, if you were daring enough to go to Silverton at night, you would hear the rumble of Teague Ellis’s motorcycle as it invisibly prowled the deserted streets.

Some said he walked the corridors of the high school, listening for the sound of a baby crying. Through the years, half a dozen hysterical girls had sworn they’d seen him at the Homecoming dance, a dark, angry, handsome face in the crowd, searching for Angelina.

Celia had always laughed at the stories. Useful for boys who wanted their dates to shiver and cling to their strong, protective arms, but pure fantasy, of course. She never felt the slightest bit skittish in Silverton, though Teague’s poor body had been found there only two years after his disappearance. She’d never heard the ghostly motorcycle, or the moans that were said to waft up through the planks of the boarded-over mine shafts.

Celia was very levelheaded. She did not believe in ghosts.

But this…this was different.

As she stared at the stranger who had materialized there, just ten feet away, a primal fear rippled along her nerves, as if an unseen hand played them like the strings of a harp.