The Homecoming Baby Read Online Free PDF

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 todrive 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 onlyliving 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