The Influence(108)
A chill caressed her spine. “Did the sheriff ever come out there?” she asked. “Or any priests or anyone from the Catholic church?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
She’d been afraid of that, though she didn’t see how it was possible. Several people had gone to the sheriff’s office, Ross and Dave had both phoned, and the sheriff had to send someone out to at least take a look at what was happening in Magdalena.
Of course…
It was powerful. She remembered the mob that had been gathering in front of the market before they left town, seeing in her mind the man with the pig nose, the suddenly youthful Ben Stanard. Anything that could do that could certainly exert a little influence over local law enforcement.
In a way, that was what scared her the most: how easy it was for the institutions of society to break down, how quickly Magdalena could be so completely cut off from the rest of the world. It made her realize that things like this could be happening all the time in small out-of-the-way locales without anyone in the wider world being the wiser.
“Get out of there,” she told the handyman again.
“I will,” he said. “Soon.”
After that call, she and Dave were both depressed. They were glad to be away from Magdalena but felt guilty that they’d run away without doing anything to stop the horrors that were occurring there. It was the uncertainty of the future, however, that weighed heaviest upon them. His parents were dead, her mom was dead, her dad was missing…what would come next? How far did those tentacles reach?
Dave was no longer suggesting that they return to Magdalena, but neither of them wanted to live indefinitely in her mom’s house here in Albuquerque, either. Their lives were on hold, everything was up in the air, and it left them feeling completely unsettled.
They had finished sorting through most of her mom’s belongings, separating the things they were going to sell from those having sentimental value that Lita wanted to save. Originally, she’d planned to have a big garage sale, but they decided to do what they’d done with Dave’s parents’ possessions and have someone come in and buy the whole estate, so until they figured out where they were going to live, she needed to find a cheap storage unit to hold everything she planned to keep.
Her eyes alighted on a small unicorn of curlicued glass that was lying on top of a box of knickknacks. She remembered when she bought that unicorn for her mom at a glass-blower’s shop in Scottsdale. She’d been ten, and her dad had brought her back to the shop after dropping her mom and her aunt off at Los Arcos Mall. She’d given the object to her mom for Christmas, and Lita was both touched and surprised that she’d kept it all these years.
She picked up the unicorn, her eyes tearing up.
Maybe their luck would change again, Lita thought.
Although she wasn’t sure if she really wanted that. She didn’t want anyone she knew to die, but at the same time, there were a thousand different ways that their lives could be affected by a slight change of fortune. Their car could have a dead battery, which would make them stay home instead of going to the grocery store as planned, and because they didn’t go to the store, they would be home when a robber tried to break into her mom’s house, and, upon seeing them, the robber could break out his gun and start shooting...
Her mind instantly came up with a dozen such scenarios, but Lita immediately pushed them all from her mind, not wanting to consider any of them.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” she told Dave. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
She tripped on the way. She was not a clumsy person; in fact, she had always been athletic and very well coordinated. But she stumbled over a wrinkle in the hallway carpeting, and instead of instantly righting herself, the way she would ordinarily, her left foot, already in mid-step, smashed into the back of her right ankle, and she pitched forward, arms flailing. In the brief second before her forehead connected with the corner of the table that her mother, for some inexplicable reason, had placed in the hallway, a single thought flashed through her mind:
Her luck had run out.
****
Dave called Ross from the hospital and told him what had happened.
“She’s still unconscious, but she’s stable. You don’t need to come out here,” he added quickly.
“I’m coming.”
“No. I don’t want you to. Lita wouldn’t want you to.”
“Why?”
“Something…might happen.” There was no need to go into more detail. He knew that Ross knew what he was talking about. “You and Jill just stay there.”
“Jill’s gone,” Ross said.