The Homecoming Baby Read Online Free PDF Page A

every member of the Women’s Club wake up with nasty red zits on their pointy little chins.”
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    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.
    â€œDamn 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 couldhandle 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