The Homecoming Baby (3 page)

But she couldn't. Trish had made it clear years ago that any deep conversation on the subject of Angelina was pretty much off-limits.

For a few minutes, Trish busied herself straightening up the desk, and then she looked back up at Celia.

“Don't pout,” she said, smiling. She was clearly herself again. “It really is Friday night, you know. Don't you have a date?”

“Absolutely not. I gave up men, remember?”

Trish was still neatening the desk as she talked. “Of course I remember. I just didn't believe it would last.”

“Well, it has. And it will. The Scratch and Dent Club is officially out of business.” That was what Trish had dubbed the long string of flawed boyfriends Celia had, over the years, mistakenly believed she could “fix.”

Trish chuckled as she arranged her pens in her drawer and lined up the paperwork with squared off edges. “Oh, sure,” she said. “It's out of business. Until you meet another cute wounded puppy who needs saving.”

“Nope.” Celia sat on the edge of Trish's desk, swinging her bare feet. “Never again. I've learned my lesson. No more losers. No more melancholics or workaholics, momaholics or liars. If I ever go back to dating—and I may not, I may become a nun—it would be because I found someone who doesn't need any fixing up. No scratches. No dents.”

Trish raised her eyebrows. “The perfect man.”

Celia nodded. “That's right. It's the perfect man from now on. Or no man at all.”

Trish leaned over, hoisted the large box of rejected dresses under her arm and gave Celia a smile that was half-teasing, half-wistful.

“Then you'd better get on out to Red Rock Bridge
and wish for one before the moon goes down,” she said. “Because here in the real world, there is absolutely no such thing.”

 

C
ELIA DID GO
. Though she had been tired, when she got home she realized she'd been cooped up in the office too long. She needed fresh air and open spaces.

She brought along a foot-long veggie sub and a bottle of white zinfandel, a romance novel and a flashlight. She ate half the sandwich and drank a quarter of the wine. She read a few chapters by flashlight.

Then she walked out to the edge, right to where the formation grew narrow, forming the fragile “bridge” between the two red rock columns, and sang corny Broadway love songs at the top of her lungs.

She gazed toward the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, so silent and endless in the moonlight. Then she lay on her back and dreamed up at the purple sky, which looked like one of Angelina Linden's dresses, velvety smooth, sprinkled with silver sequins and the round cameo brooch of the moon.

She heard a coyote howl in the distance, and she howled back, then laughed at herself because after that every tiny whispering noise startled her, as if the coyote might be loping her way, answering her call.

And then, after she stuffed her uneaten food and undrunk wine back into her bag, she stood up and walked back to the edge of Red Rock Bridge. She looked up at the moon, and she made her wishes.

She wished for rain to come and end Enchant
ment's drought. She wished for courage for Rose Gallen. She wished for rest for Lydia Kane, prosperity for the clinic and swift, healthy deliveries for every pregnant woman in their care.

She wished, especially, for peace to come to Trish Linden, who deserved it. After all that, it seemed too greedy to wish for the perfect man, so she agreed to take one with a little dent, if necessary. A tiny scratch that didn't go too deep would be all right.

Chuckling at her foolishness, she started to climb down from the bridge. But then she remembered one last thing.

“And if you have time,” she called into the vastness of the purple night, “please let every member of the Women's Club wake up with nasty red zits on their pointy little chins.”

 

P
ATRICK KEPT TELLING HIMSELF TO TURN
around. Go back. Give up.
You must be nuts.

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.

L
IFE 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.

He…he looked exactly like Teague Ellis. How could it be? And yet…

She'd seen pictures of Teague often enough. The sexy, bad-tempered mouth, the wavy black hair that fell into deep-set, deep-blue eyes. She'd never forget the scruffy animal glamour—like James Dean, she'd thought. James Dean drawn in a palette of devil-black and bedroom-blue.

And oh, those eyes…those eyes said the boy had known pain and would know, in turn, how to inflict it.

But, in the space of a couple of seconds, she came to her senses. The man in front of her smiled, and the hypnotic vision shifted to something more prosaic. An eerie, but coincidental, resemblance. Similar height, similar coloring…and the rest was the product of overactive nerves and the haunting power of this place.

“I'm sorry,” the man said. His voice was cultured and deep. “I didn't mean to startle you.”

He moved toward the pebbled edge of the stream. As he bent over to help retrieve the wildflowers she'd dropped, he looked up at her and smiled, the sun beaming straight into his amazing blue eyes. “I walked in just now. My car broke down a little way down the road, and I was looking for a telephone.”

She smiled back, feeling finally returning to her fingertips. Not Teague, of course not. How could she have been so idiotic?

For one thing, Teague had been nineteen the night he disappeared. This man must be nearly thirty, though that sexy mouth and brooding eyes certainly gave his looks the gut-kick virility of a hot-blooded teenager.

“You didn't startle me,” she lied, hurrying to pick up the rest of her flowers before the stream carried them away. “Or rather, it's just that I thought I was alone.”

“Yes.” He turned and scanned the dusty, broken buildings. “This place could make you feel you were all alone in the whole world, couldn't it? I could tell right away I wasn't going to find a phone, but I couldn't resist the urge to explore. It's fascinating.”

She nodded, pleased that he seemed sensitive to the atmosphere—and that he didn't find it depressing or ugly. She'd always thought the intense solitude was one of Silverton's charms. It was a good place to think things over.

“I'm afraid there's never been a single telephone
in the town of Silverton,” she said. “The mine closed up at least ten years before it was invented.”

He handed her the flowers. “I was afraid of that,” he said. “Well, I guess I'd better start hiking back, then.”

He smiled again, and the smile was so open and friendly that his resemblance to Teague Ellis faded even further. You could tell from Teague's picture that he had rarely smiled, and when he had it probably had possessed a sinister, wolfish quality.

“Maybe,” the man who wasn't Teague said, “you'd be willing to point me in the direction of the nearest town that
isn't
a ghost town.”

She hesitated just a second. She could almost hear Trish now, ordering her not to be naive. You couldn't go giving a man a lift in your car just because he was handsome, wore an expensive suit and had a nice smile. Bad guys didn't come equipped with neon signs that said Danger. Murderers and thieves sometimes looked exactly like bankers and lawyers.

Still, if this man had wanted to harm her, couldn't he have done it already? If he wanted to bash her over the head and steal her earrings, or toss her down in the chilly stream and ravish her, there certainly wasn't anyone in Silverton to stop him.

After sharing a deserted ghost town with him, would letting him into her car really be so much more dangerous?

“The nearest gas station is in Enchantment,” she said. “That's only about ten miles from here. I'd be glad to give you a ride.”

He tilted his head with a well-bred diffidence. “Are you sure? I wouldn't want to take you out of your way.”

“It's not out of my way at all. I live in Enchantment.” She transferred the flowers to her left arm and held out her hand. “By the way, I'm Celia Brice—” she looked down at the flowers “—wildflower enthusiast.”

His handshake was strong and warm, but entirely civilized and respectful. There was really no reason for Celia to start shivering.

The spring wind must have decided to turn cool, as it sometimes did up here in the mountains. Of course it didn't help that she was standing ankle deep in a running brook.

Or that this was the sexiest man she'd ever seen.

“Patrick Torrance,” he said, letting go of her hand at the perfect moment. Obviously he wasn't harboring a single, solitary, ravish-related thought. “And I would be very grateful for a ride into Enchantment. I was actually on my way there when the car broke down.”

“You were? Why?”

She hadn't meant to sound so astonished. But Enchantment was a small town, and while it attracted its fair share of tourists, this man didn't look like a tourist somehow. Enchantment's other claim to fame was the birthing center, which was the best in the region. She paused, irrationally disliking that idea. He hadn't mentioned having anyone with him. Surely he
wouldn't have left a pregnant wife back at the stranded car all alone.

But men sometimes did come to the birthing center alone, looking for their wives or their girlfriends, looking to mend a rift, to claim their unborn children…

No. She didn't believe it. This man was too confident, too poised and powerful. He wasn't the type who had to chase women anywhere. If anything, he was probably running away from one.

He chuckled softly. “You're frowning—and you sounded pretty shocked. Is there something wrong with Enchantment? I had planned to spend a week or two there. Should I rethink?”

She flushed. “No. Of course not. It's just that—Well, we're not big and famous, not like Taos or Santa Fe. During the winter, when the ski slopes are active, things get pretty busy, but this is spring, and I just wondered why someone like you would—”

She broke off, embarrassed. She sounded as if she were fishing for personal information, which, she realized, she was. She couldn't help it. She found him very attractive, and having him materialize before her like this had created an artificial sense of intimacy.

But artificial was the important word. What did she think—that Patrick Torrance was her own personal ghost, and now she could take him home and keep him?

“I'm sorry,” she said, fidgeting with the flowers. “I was just being nosy. Forget I said anything. Let me put on my shoes, and we'll get started.”

He didn't argue with her, or insist on spilling his plans. He obviously wasn't used to explaining himself to anyone, least of all some kooky, barefoot woman he stumbled over in the local ghost town.

He followed her to the rocky bank of the stream, where she'd left her shoes. He watched as she sat down on a large, fallen tree trunk, which made the perfect bench, and began to brush the sand and leaves from the soles of her feet.

When she picked up her shoe, though, a simple white sneaker, she found that a spider had crawled into it. She tried to tip him out, but he crawled farther into the toe. She hadn't seen his markings, so she hesitated to reach in and whisk him out with her fingers.

She shook the shoe. “Come on out, darn it.”

“Here,” Patrick Torrance said, coming closer and holding out his hand. “I'll kill it for you.”

She looked up at him. “Kill him? Why would you kill him?”

He tilted his head, and then he smiled. “Did I say kill it? I mean to say I'd get it out for you. A purely harmless relocation.”

She smiled back and handed over the shoe. “Okay.” For a city boy, he caught on quickly. “Thanks.”

He had found a curved twig on the ground, and he maneuvered the point into the toe of her shoe. He had good hands. Gentle. He angled his wrist subtly a couple of times, with a minute scooping movement.

He tilted the shoe up to his face and peered into
the shadows. Finally he eased his hand out, bringing the twig free, with the little spider clinging to it.

He walked over to a nearby patch of dead leaves—the ideal new home for a spider—and then he lay the twig and spider down, so deftly that the spider didn't even scurry away. The little guy probably thought the whole move had been his own idea.

“Well done,” she said with a smile.

Then he came over and knelt on the ground before her. “Your slipper, my lady.”

Oh. Flushing, she found that she almost couldn't let him do it. It was too personal, too oddly sexy. Besides, she wasn't much for fancy clothes and shoes, and those sneakers had tramped many a mile around the dusty roads of Silverton and Enchantment.

Darn. She hoped her foot was clean enough. For the first time in her life, she wished she wore toenail polish.

But he was waiting, so she stuck out her foot. He was just kidding around. She was getting way too worked up. Maybe she shouldn't have given up men after all—it had left her too susceptible to the slightest flirtation.

He took her calf in his hand, and shivers went all the way up her leg. She laughed a little, just out of nervousness. Just to distract him from those pale goose bumps under his fingers.

He slipped on the sneaker, then cupped his palm around her heel, rocking it to be sure the shoe was seated properly. Then he pulled gently on the tongue,
took the laces between his fingers and tied a quick, nimble bow.

He met her gaze. “Why, it fits perfectly,” he said, smiling in a way that crinkled the edges of those remarkable eyes.

Oh, dear. She definitely should not have given up men. It made you kind of crazy.

Still smiling, he stood, and he held out his hand.

“And now,” he said, laughter gilding the edges of his pleasant voice, “If your pumpkin is waiting, maybe you could take me with you to the land of Enchantment.”

Celia sighed. Oh, heck, why fight it? Whoever Patrick Torrance was, and whatever he was here to do, wasn't all that important, was it? She knew he had laughing eyes and gentle hands. And she knew that the moment she'd laid eyes on him, even when she still thought he was a ghost, she had been washed with an attraction more intense than any she'd ever felt.

She took his hand and let him pull her to her feet. They stood there a minute, just smiling at each other. Something warm and golden moved inside her.

He'd be here a week, he'd said. Or two. Two weeks of reckless magic—and then the clock would strike midnight.

Oh, it was insane to even consider it—it was completely unlike her. Trish would have a fit. And besides, technically Patrick Torrance hadn't even asked.

But he would. He felt the magic, too. It was in the
warm touch of his fingers. It was in the surprised sparkle of his eyes. Oh, yes, he would ask.

And maybe, just maybe, she would say yes. Because sometimes even two weeks of magic was better than none at all.

 

T
HE CLINIC WAS OPEN ONLY
half a day on Saturdays, unless one of the mothers was in labor. This Saturday was slow, so Trish had decided to give the windows of the reception area a thorough spring-cleaning. The clinic had a good professional cleaning crew, of course, but Trish had her own standards.

Cloth and vinegar solution in hand, she knelt on the sofa cushions and rubbed at the front multipaned window, giving each of the rectangles special attention. The cleaning crew sometimes ignored the edges.

Through the shining window, she could see the front parking lot, where a couple of cars sat, drowsing under the spring sunlight that filtered through the pines.

After a few minutes, Celia's silly little Volkswagen Bug pulled in. Celia leaped out and executed a happy twirl in a shaft of light, arms outstretched as if she wanted to gather in the spring day and give it a hug.

Trish's hand stilled, and she watched with a deep, vicarious pleasure. Even at twenty-eight, even though she was well educated and smart and dealt with real problems in her patients every day, Celia was in many ways as innocent as a child.

She believed the whole world was as good and gentle as she was. She picnicked in the mountains alone
at night, she picked herbs in ghost towns, she made wishes on Red Rock Bridge in the moonlight and expected them to come true. It worried Trish, but she could never find a way to stop her.

That was because Celia had never known anything but love and affection. Her physician father was a little arrogant, and her mother was just a touch subservient, but nothing truly wicked ever happened at the Brice household.