Looking at the broken glass, Brett chuckled. Yes. Beautiful. Sweet Ashlyn would know bad times were coming.
16
Ash reached for her towel when she finished her shower. It wasn’t where she thought she’d hung it—it was still on the counter. She stepped barefoot out of the stall and sliced her toe on something sharp. Crying out, she grabbed her towel, then hobbled across the room to sit on the toilet seat. A jagged piece of glass was sticking out of her toe.
What the heck?
She pulled it out and pressed a corner of the towel against the bloody wound. The glass shard was a piece of her necklace. She gasped as she realized it had fallen off the counter and shattered.
Great. Not only had she just had to acknowledge to herself that Merc was not and would never be hers, now the secret connection she’d had to him was also lost.
She cleaned up her wound and put a Band-Aid on it. Then, carefully avoiding other sharp little shards, she left to dress so she could sweep the mess up.
Maybe it was just as well. Every time she handled that medallion, she got a jolt of comfort—comfort she had no right to claim from him.
She’d tried to throw the necklace away the night she’d met him at the fort, but somehow she must have sleepwalked and gotten it out of the trash. It had been in her hand the next morning when she woke. She’d kept it with her ever since…until now.
She swept the sharp pieces into a dustpan and dumped them in the trash, then took it to the big bin outside.
The thing that tormented her since she first held it was gone, and with it, her tie to Merc. She was free. And so was he.
And now life could be normal again.
She hoped.
Ash slept restlessly that night. Every time she dozed off, some thought would whisper through her mind. Terrible things that weren’t her normal fear topics. Things that reminded her of what happened in Colombia. Things that had to do with Merc—him in agony in the pit or at the height of passion during sex or lost, standing at that seaside cliff.
He needed her; she was certain of it.
It was raining when she woke. The cold spring storm and night of torturous dreams made her sluggish. She dragged herself to the office. Weather didn’t usually bother her, but the dark day made it feel as if things were returning to winter, something entirely possible in a cold Colorado spring. At least it was raining and not snowing.
She didn’t have the energy for the gym after work, so she went straight home. She made a sandwich and opened her laptop. A photo from Valle de Lágrimas was her background image—a brilliant blue sky over the central plaza with its white stucco walls and red tile roofs.
Staring at the image, she realized how badly she missed that odd little town. All of her recent troubles had started there. She wondered…if she were to go back and try to unravel the reality behind what she’d seen and experienced, would she get her mind back?
Maybe Merc and the town had colluded on a plan to bring visitors in. She did a search for the village on her laptop and found a ton more hits than before she’d gone. Several of the articles and blogs referenced material the person had seen in the travel vloggers’ posts about the miracles of Valle de Lágrimas.
Ash was happy the group was getting such great attention. She called up their site and re-watched all the segments they’d posted so far. They were doling them out in short increments, making them go farther. She noticed that in the time since they were all in the village, newer vids of the three seated dead men posted by later visitors to the town showed further decay, but the bodies still sat guard over the mural walls that artists were covering with new stories.
Ash fetched Larry’s business card and called him. “Hey, Larry. It’s Ash in Colorado.”
“Hey, you! Celia and I were just talking about you.”
“Huh. I’ve been watching your videos. They look great. And creepy.”
“It was creepy,” Celia said.
“I see you’re getting a lot of people interested in what happened.”
“We are,” Larry agreed. “It’s been phenomenal. Our best series so far.”
“Did it really happen?” Ash asked. “I mean, the miracles. They weren’t real.”
The line was silent a moment. “There were a lot of witnesses,” Celia said.
“Maybe the town concocted the whole thing,” Ash said.
“We’ve heard from some of our followers there were government officials back in town to remove the new bodies in the pits,” Larry said. “And you know what? Some of those people weren’t dead. I knew that. I told you guys that when we were there.”
“The locals said the ones that weren’t dead died when the crews tried to remove them from town,” Celia added.
Ash was stunned. “Oh. God. That’s awful. Both the dying during the rescue and the not being dead while in the pits. It’s all just awful.”
“I’m hearing many of them were on different lists of wanted criminals,” Larry continued. “There’s an investigation being opened about whether the government is just offing people and dumping them rather than giving them due process.”
“So who knows what really happened,” Celia said. “Maybe it was a conspiracy by the town to piggyback on what the government was doing up in the pits.”
Ash seized on that as a plausible explanation. It was certainly more believable than the miracle option. “Do you believe that?”
“It’s as possible as anything, I guess,” Larry said. He paused. “We’ve gotten some big interest in our work from this. A producer from a cable travel and science channel came out to look at our content.”
“Wow. That’s huge news! I’m happy for you.”
“He was very interested in you,” Celia said.
“Why?” That sent a shiver of foreboding through Ash.
“Don’t know,” Larry answered. “Look, Ash, you aren’t gonna sell us out, are you? I mean, if he’s only interested in you?”
“God no. Larry, I was just a tag-along. The videos are your guys’ thing. I’m just still off my game. I can’t get the village out of my mind. I wanted to talk to someone who experienced what I did. I’m perfectly happy if you leave me out of it completely.”
He didn’t like that. “We can’t—we need you for the explosive finale. What happened to you in there, anyway?”
“I don’t know. I had some kind of a vision. Or I thought I had one.” She didn’t tell them she’d met the saint of Valle de Lágrimas. That was a weird twist she couldn’t process. “While I was in there, what happened to you guys? Why did you leave?”
The pause seemed lengthy before Larry answered. “We saw something in the woods.”
“Something…what?” Ash asked.
“It was big, and dark, but we couldn’t get a good look at it. You didn’t hear the howl it made?”
“No. I was a little preoccupied just then.”
“We got it on video,” Larry said. “Well, not a visual, but its howl.”
Ash shivered. She couldn’t believe she’d been contemplating heading back to the village. They chatted for a few more minutes before hanging up.