Dark Moon Crossing (25 page)

Crunching through heavy underbrush, I reached the
building and was surprised to note that it was remarkably well preserved. It
still had doors and the few windows that weren’t boarded up held wavy panes of
glass that looked to be original. Amazing. All but a handful of the other
ghost towns in the state had been vandalized beyond recognition. Trying the
knob, I was surprised to find the front door locked. Disappointed, I peered
inside one of the windows, astounded to see rows of ancient-looking school
desks and a blackboard running the entire length of one side. Erasers and
chalk sat on the metal ledge. Several brass bound trunks stood along the
opposite wall next to a desk with a wooden chair pulled up close. Piles of
newspapers, magazines and books were strewn about as well as other items.
Squinting, I was able to make out the date on the calendar above the desk.
April 1936. Cool. I would have given my eyeteeth to get inside and
explore.

I turned and looked back towards the caretaker’s
house. Still no signs of life. Well, he wasn’t doing a very good job of
keeping people out, I thought smugly, moving on to the next structure that looked
like it may have been a stable. Edging a look over the chest-high wall, spray-
painted with odd five-cornered symbols and filthy graffiti, I drew in a sharp
breath and stared at the carcass of what seemed to be the remains of a golden
retriever. Closer inspection was even more disturbing. It appeared to be only
the skin and fur stretched out flat like a bear rug. The skeleton of the dog
wasn’t there. Sick. Goosebumps danced on my arms. What happened to the rest
of it?‌ My mind flashed to the mutilated cattle stories and the disturbing
rumor that it might be Russell Greene satisfying his carnivorous lust for
flesh. No way. Who could eat a dog?‌ More likely, this atrocity could be
attributed to the teenagers who’d been accused of practicing witchcraft. All
at once, the moan of the wind contained an eerie quality.

Definitely time to go. I started back down the hill
towards the gate. At first, when I heard the muffled sound, I was unsure of
what it was and assumed it was the sharp whistling of the wind. But then the
distinct timbre of a voice calling from somewhere in the distance stopped me in
my tracks and sent tingles of horror skating down my back. “Help!
Ken….daaalll! Help me!”

What?‌ Heart racing, my mind rebelled against the
possibility that anyone could know that I was here. I spun around, searching,
trying to identify where the voice was coming from. All my instincts urged me
to run, run back to the car as fast as I could, but the thought that someone
was in trouble made me hesitate. What if it was Russell Greene?‌ That would
explain why he wasn’t around. Had he gotten trapped inside one of the old
buildings?‌ I cupped my hands, shouting, “Hello! Is anybody there?‌”

No sound but the sibilant wind. I called again.
Nothing. Had I imagined it?‌

Suddenly, the landscape wavered before my eyes. I put
a hand to my forehead. My fever must be rising. That would explain it.

I started down the hill only to freeze again.
“Heeelllllpppp!”

Swinging around, I stared at a squat adobe structure
partially obscured in a snarl of mesquite trees, the only other building
nearby. A flash of bright yellow appeared, vanished, and then appeared again.
A distress signal?‌ Baffled, I hurried down the hill, only to slow my steps at
the sight of a section of yellow plastic caution tape flapping madly in the
branches of a stunted tree. Now that was odd. I located the door around the
far side of the structure. “Mr. Greene!” I shouted. “Are you in trouble?‌”

The wind, pushing hard at my back now, made it
difficult to pull the door open. I pounded on it. “Hello?‌ Anybody in
there?‌” I tugged harder and it moved a few inches. Man, it was thick,
possibly four inches or more. Panting with exertion, I yanked until there was
enough space for me to look inside. There was only one narrow window high on
the opposite wall and it was barred. The low light made it difficult to see
much, but the floor to ceiling iron bars caught my eye. Was this an old jail?‌
Fascinating. I kicked away some of the dirt and stones and was able to
shoulder the door open fully. Just to be safe, I searched around until I found
a boulder, which I wedged against the base to keep it from blowing shut. I
stepped just inside the doorway. It was cool. Dank. And really depressing.
“Hello?‌ Is anybody in here?‌” As I stood there in the gloom, trying to imagine
what it must have been like to be locked away on this lonely hillside, I felt a
violent shove against my back. Thrown forward by the force of the blow, I
barely had time to get my hands out in front of me before I slammed into the
opposite wall, hitting my head hard against the rough stone. Little pinpoints
of iridescent light danced behind my eyelids as I lay face down on the
debris-filled floor, my muddled brain struggling to make sense of what had
happened. Vaguely, I was aware of first a solid clang followed instantaneously
by a heavy thud. Oh, crap.

I lifted my head up, trying to focus, and when
everything stopped spinning, what I saw confounded me. Not only had the wind
blown the outer door shut, the iron door to the cell was also closed.

Fighting a wave of nausea, I stood up and held onto
the wall for support. Something was in my right eye. I reached up to wipe it
away and my hand came away wet. Uncomprehending, I gawked at the blood for a
few seconds before gingerly feeling underneath my hair. “Ouch!” There was a
pretty substantial gash.

“What a jackass you are,” I scolded myself mildly.
Why hadn’t I used a bigger rock to secure the door?‌ Better yet, I should never
have come inside in the first place. Best get out of here pronto. I pushed
against the bars, expecting the door to swing open. It didn’t budge. Huh?‌
Using my right shoulder, I shoved hard several times and then shook the bars
before reaching around them to feel for the lock. When my fingers encountered
an empty keyhole, my blood iced up. Where was the key?‌ I scrabbled around on
the floor searching. Nothing. Springing to my feet, I shook the bars again,
hoping against hope to loosen the door. “No, no, no!” I screamed. “Don’t do
this to me!” This could
not
be happening. Suddenly, I couldn’t seem to
get enough air. Oh, dear God, no. I hadn’t had an asthma attack for such a
long time I’d neglected to bring my inhaler with me. “Get a grip, girl,” I
panted. Think. Pressing my face between the bars, I stared into the
semi-darkness, my eyes searching the corners near the door. What I saw made my
heart shrink. My cell phone, my handy-dandy little cell phone, lay totally out
of reach in the far corner, blinking its little green light at me.

Panic is a destructive emotion. It demolishes
cognitive reasoning, rendering perfectly working brain cells useless. For
several minutes I raced in circles, scratching and pounding at the solid walls
of my cell screaming like a trapped animal before collapsing into a corner.
Bawling like a baby, feeling worse than I could ever remember, I huddled there
holding my throbbing head. My throat burned like I’d swallowed a jar of
jalapeno peppers, my nose dripped and I ached all over, as if I’d been pummeled
in a fight. What a time to get sick. Frantic to escape, I scrambled to my
feet again and rattled the bars, yelling, “Help! Heellpppp! Someone let me
out of here!”

Icy horror shimmied through me when I realized that I
sounded just like the voice I’d heard only moments ago. Had it been real, or
an uncanny premonition of things to come?‌ Shit! Why did I keep getting myself
into these situations?‌ Was I terminally stupid?‌ It hadn’t been that long
since my last brush with catastrophe in Morgan’s Folly. I was still paying the
price for that one. Oh, no! Tally! The thought of him standing impatiently
in the dawn light waiting for me, believing I’d broken my promise to him,
re-ignited my panic. Ginger’s words of warning from Friday night echoed in my
head. ‘You’re going to fool around and spoil things with Tally if you ain’t
careful!’ No kidding. This could be the proverbial straw that soured our
relationship for good. And, as usual, I had no one to blame but myself.

I slumped against the bars, wallowing in self-pity. I
had no food, but at least I had some water, I thought, clutching the plastic
bottle protectively to my chest. But, how long would it last me?‌ I was
locked away in the sturdiest building still standing in Morita, there didn’t
appear to be any way out, my goddamned cell phone was lying out of reach and
nobody knew I was here. Heart thudding dully against my ribcage, I closed my
eyes and concentrated on my breathing for a few minutes. Inhale deeply.
Exhale. Try to think. Relax. Get your shit together and calm down.

At some point the caretaker had to show up, or at the
very least he would see my car parked near the gate and investigate. Even
better, Dean was expecting me to come and claim Marmalade. When I didn’t,
would he call the sheriff and report me missing, or just assume I’d changed my
mind and gone home?‌ No, no. Think rescue. Taking comfort in that thought, my
mind cleared enough for me to take a careful look around my prison. As
illogical as it might sound, my number one fear in the short term was spiders.
Positioning myself in the very center of the cell, I did a slow turn, examining
the corners of the room for webs. There were a number of deserted ones
undulating in the breeze filtering through the window, but none appeared to
have a current occupant. That allowed me a small measure of relief.

I stuck my face between the bars in the door, trying
to calculate how far away the phone was. Kneeling, I reached my arm through as
far as it would go, but it was no use. It lay at least a yard beyond my fingertips.
I needed to find something long enough to pull the phone within reach. In the
dim light, with only the mournful whistle of the wind as my companion, I sifted
through piles of discarded junk looking for a useful tool. There were stacks
of disintegrating newspapers, bent aluminum cans and broken beer bottles,
scraps of clothing…ugh, used toilet paper, and a brittle, rusted mattress
spring that looked like it might be a hundred years old. Nothing there. Now
what?‌ I moped around the cell for long minutes and then rushed towards the
narrow window. Standing on my toes, I was just barely able to touch the bottom
ledge. Returning to the other end of the cell, I pulled out some of the
newspapers and wrapped them around my hands like oven mitts before grabbing
onto the sharp metal mattress spring. It screeched and groaned as I dragged it
across the concrete floor and shoved it beneath the window. I heaped
newspapers on top and then, cautiously balancing myself on the wavering pile, I
reached up to grab hold of the bars. I tugged with all my might, but those
puppies weren’t going anywhere. Damn! I screamed for help until my voice was
ragged. Nothing. Nothing but the wind. Despondent beyond measure, I slid off
the papers, zipped my jacket up to my chin and flopped down in the corner
nearest the barred door, dismally watching the second hand on my watch tick off
the minutes. Two fifteen, two seventeen, two twenty-five. Perhaps I’d just
close my eyes for a little while.

I woke with a start, unable to fathom where I was for
a couple of seconds before the reality of my situation pierced me like a cold
knife blade. My God! It was four-thirty. If help didn’t come soon, I’d be
spending the night in this forbidding place. I could tell by the soreness of
my skin that my fever had climbed higher while I’d slept. A few sips of water
helped cool the raging inferno in my throat. Could things be any worse?‌ The
easiest thing would have been to curl up in a ball and give in to despair, but
I pushed to my feet and reached around the bars to feel the lock once again.
Why wasn’t I able to just push the door open?‌ How could it have locked by
simply slamming shut?‌ As I reconstructed the exact sequence of events in my
mind, the tiny seed of doubt inside me blossomed into suspicion. If the wind
had blown the outer door shut, where was the rock I’d placed there to secure
it?‌ I didn’t know a whole lot about physics, but wouldn’t it have been pushed
inside also?‌ Was my incarceration in this little hellhole really an accident
of nature?‌ What if someone actually had called my name to lure me in here?‌
But who would do such a thing?‌ My mind splayed out, taking several paths at
once. Who else besides Hank Breslow knew I was coming here?‌ And, why would he
do such a thing?‌ I hadn’t mentioned this side-trip to anyone except Walter on
the phone…oh…my…God! That meant whoever had been listening on the extension
certainly knew. Jason seemed the logical culprit but for the life of me I
could not figure out what purpose a stunt like this would serve. That it had
been designed to frighten me was a given and might be the result of my recent
confrontation with him and Cutter. But it could also have been Bethany. What
was the motivation behind her apparent animosity, including her nasty little
trick this morning?‌ My mind did a couple of back flips and suddenly Payton’s
worry that Brett might be gaining a new daddy took on disturbing significance.
Oh, man. What if she’d planned this?‌ Clever bitch. With me out of the way,
she’d be free to pursue Tally… Cut! Cut! Don’t do this! Don’t drive yourself
crazy conjuring up imaginary scenarios that have no basis in reality. Focus.
Focus on the problem at hand.

Blink. Blink. Blink. I glared at the cell phone.
There had to be some way to get hold of that little sucker. And I had to do it
before nightfall. Returning to the junk pile beneath the window, I began to
sort through it again. Nothing sturdy enough. Nothing long enough. I wracked
my brain. What if I rolled newspapers into tight cylinders?‌ That would give
me the length I needed, but what would I use as a hook?‌ I searched every
square inch of the cell, but could find nothing useful. Fighting despair, I
set about rolling the pages of paper into tubes and then inserting the ends
into each other until I had a paper wand about four feet long. Then, with
cautious expectancy, I fished it through the bars. It reached the phone, but
its weight buckled the paper time and again until my arm ached with exertion.
This wasn’t working. “Crap!” I yanked the tube back into the cell and in a
fit of fury, grabbed it in both hands and swatted it against the bars until it
was torn to shreds. As I watched the pieces waft slowly downward, I slid into
a crumpled heap and sobbed into my hands. My little tantrum had solved nothing
except to make me feel even more miserable. Relying on the miniscule part of
my feverish brain that was still able to function rationally, I gathered some
of the newspapers and, in the fading light of dusk, spread them on the cold,
hard floor forming a makeshift bed. The remaining ones I tucked over and
around me like a blanket. I also used several pieces to blow my nose. “See,”
I blabbered to the empty room, “newspapers
can
be useful for some
things.”

Huddled beneath the paper, burning up one minute and
quaking with chills the next, I took tiny sips of my precious water, keenly
aware that dehydration was a real possibility. Oh, what I wouldn’t do to get
hold of those apples still inside the cooler in my car and the extra water.
Feeling supremely sorry for myself, I drifted in and out of restive sleep
packed with nonsensical, irritating dreams until I was awakened by a brilliant
ray of blue light shining in my eyes. Groggy, I propped myself up on one elbow
and peered out the window, thinking it must be the moon, but when the beam
disappeared I blinked in confusion and rubbed my eyes, not really sure I was
awake. I stared between the bars for a long time before slipping back into a
deep sleep.

A strange humming intruded into my nightmarish
dreams. But when I opened my eyes, I couldn’t see because of the damned blue
light again. Almost blinded by its intensity, I sat up, jumping at the crackle
of the newspapers falling away from me. What the hell
was
that?‌ It
couldn’t be the moon unless it had changed orbit while I slept and was now
setting in the south. Weak and disoriented, I stumbled to the window,
stretching as high as I could. My heart rate shot through the roof at the
sight of something, I don’t know what, hovering just to the left of the
sandstone pillars of rock. Pulsing eerily, the incandescent light brightened,
turning green, orange and yellow before it zoomed upward and vanished. I
should have been scared out of my wits, but instead, and perhaps it was due to
my foggy-headedness, I just stared mesmerized at the indigo sky until my
trembling legs refused to support me any longer. I fell away from the ledge
and the sudden head rush sent me lurching back to my newspaper bed where I hunched
on the chilly floor, shivering. What I had just witnessed defied logic.
Either I was hallucinating or I’d just seen an honest to God unidentified
flying object. Could a manmade aircraft move that fast?‌ I acknowledged for
the first time that Javier and the migrant’s bizarre stories just might be
true. But what was I going to tell Lupe if I ever got out of here?‌
Sorry,
looks like your brother and uncle really were abducted by extraterrestrials.
Just
thinking it made me cringe. Did I dare even tell a soul what I’d seen?‌
Everyone I knew would think I’d slipped off the deep end. Or not. Mazzie La
Casse didn’t seem like a crackpot and neither did Payton Kleinwort. What about
the thousands of other people all over the world who’d witnessed UFO sightings?‌

I tried to stop the next thought from even entering my
conscious mind, but it was there front and center. Would the space creatures
be coming for me now?‌ They obviously knew I was here. Resting my forehead in
my hand, I croaked, “Come and get me, you ugly bug-eyed bastards! At least
that’s one way I can get the hell out of this dungeon.”

Okay, obviously I was losing it. I felt around for my
water bottle and it was a real test of strength to keep from downing the entire
thing. The rest of the night plodded along as slowly as a desert tortoise.
The predicted rain I’d been anticipating finally arrived about three o’clock,
accompanied by thunder, lightning and gale-force winds. It poured non-stop for
about two hours. Ordinarily I would have relished the fresh-scented spray
blowing through the narrow opening, but it only served to make matters worse by
dampening my newspaper blanket. Great. I’d be lucky not to come down with
pneumonia. Huddled beneath the soggy mass, rehashing what I’d just seen, I
couldn’t decide whether the strange lights had been real or a product of my
fever-induced imagination.

Extreme
relief poured through me when the first silvery rays of dawn seeped through the
bars, ending one of the longest nights of my life. But my relief didn’t last
long. The pain of a thousand harpoons punctured my heart when I pictured Tally
loading the horses into the trailers, checking his watch again and again and
wondering where in the hell I was. Would he worry about me or harden his heart
and continue the trip as planned, interpreting my absence as a sign that I no
longer cared about him?‌ Hot tears flooded my eyes. I wept until I wasn’t sure
I had enough strength to sit up. Eventually, however, I did. Somehow, I had
to figure a way out of here so I could explain what happened. And pray he
would forgive me.

At least the maddening whine of the wind had stopped,
so maybe Russell Greene would hear my calls for help. One of the worst moments
of my life occurred next. When I tried to shout, nothing came out but a faint
crackling honk. I bowed my head in surrender. Oh, mercy. How was I going to
get myself out of this one?‌

The morning hours crawled by and at noon I tried
yelling again, but my swollen throat would not cooperate. My water bottle was
almost empty. Damn, I’d been locked away for almost twenty-four hours. Why
hadn’t anyone come looking for me?‌ Of course, everyone at the office thought I
was happily on my way to California with Tally. But, what about Ginger?‌
Wasn’t she wondering why I hadn’t come by and dropped off my new pet?‌ Had my
prior conduct convinced her that I’d become so obsessed with Lupe’s problem
that I’d decided to forgo my trip so I could stay and pursue the story?‌ No
wonder I wasn’t missed. My reputation preceded me.

Mentally sucking my thumb, I languidly gazed at my
phone. It was still blinking, but I knew the battery wouldn’t last much
longer. My hands were so weak I could hardly roll the newspaper cylinders a
second time and as I looked around the cell searching for any useful object I
may have overlooked, my gaze locked onto the old mattress springs. Hey! Some
of the coils in the middle were rusted and so brittle I was able to break off
an entire section. By hooking the coils into one another I created a crude
circle. Padding my hands with newspaper again, I wound sharp pieces of metal
around my paper pole and then attached my homemade ‘net’ to the end of it after
bolstering it with metal bands fashioned from the springs.