The Homecoming Baby. Kathleen O'Brien

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.

      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.