By the time they reached Magdalena, they could hear faint sirens sounding from somewhere up the road to Willcox. The main street of the town still looked abandoned, though Ross thought he detected movement behind the windows of one of the adobe houses. In the parking lot of the market, deflated balloons hung from the crooked antenna of an old pickup truck. A lifeless dog lay in front of the gas pumps.
He thought of the lyrics to an old Simon and Garfunkel song: Nothing but the dead and dying back in my little town.
Facing the wrong way on the street, he parked in front of the bar and got out. All of them did.
The sirens drew closer.
Kevin tapped him on the shoulder, smiling wryly. “Unc?”
“Yeah?” Ross said.
“We’re even.”
THIRTY NINE
Dirty and disheveled after several days of living out of her van, Jill returned to the house in San Diego to collect her belongings. And take a shower. The place was empty, Ross nowhere in sight, and for that she was grateful. She didn’t want to face him right now.
It felt as though she’d awakened from a long dream. No. From a drunken blackout. She’d been acting like…not herself, and while she understood why, the fact that it had occurred at all was a complete embarrassment to her.
She found the note Ross had left, read it, and relaxed a little. She didn’t have to rush; it looked like he wouldn’t be back for awhile.
After taking a long leisurely shower and changing into some clean clothes, Jill went into the kitchen to make herself a sandwich. She walked around the house as she ate, mentally deciding what she should and shouldn’t take with her. Finishing the sandwich and grabbing a water bottle out of the refrigerator, she started packing her clothes. Cleaning out her half of the dresser and placing her underwear in her open suitcase, she thought about Ross with bewilderment. She had actually moved with him here to California? Why? That wasn’t the sort of thing she did.
He wasn’t even her type.
Not that she had a type.
She wasn’t that shallow.
But an engineer? That was out of character for her, and she wondered now what she could have been thinking. It wasn’t a knock against Ross. He was a nice guy, and she liked him all right, but not enough to move in with him and follow him to another state.
No wonder her mom was mad at her.
She got a trash bag out of the kitchen and used it to bag up the dirty laundry that she fished out of the hamper. Luckily, she hadn’t taken everything out of her house. In fact, most of it was still back in Magdalena. She smiled wryly. At least emergency evacuations were good for something.
She bagged up her toiletries, then started carrying things out to the van, placing the bags, boxes and suitcases next to the godawful paintings of that reservoir that she had wasted her time on. It took only four trips, and after the last one, she walked back inside, looking through each room to make sure she hadn’t missed anything. Glancing over at the lone bookshelf on the wall above Ross’ computer, Jill realized that the only books displayed were manuals and technical books on science and engineering.
How could she not have noticed that before?
She left her key on the kitchen counter. And a note, a short message stating simply that she was moving out. It didn’t explain anything, but, then, she didn’t know how to explain what she was going through. She didn’t understand it herself.
She would call him later, she decided, once she’d figured out what to say. For now, she just wanted to go back to Mesa.
And see her mom.
FORTY
Ross returned to Magdalena the following weekend in a rented pickup. Lita and Dave were already back at the L Bar-D and in the process of cleaning up, Lita still taking it easy for the most part, following doctor’s orders, limiting herself to housework so she could take frequent rest breaks as instructed, Dave hard at work outside, using a borrowed tractor to drag all the accumulated debris out to a spot in the field, where he intended to burn it. Word had spread that Lita’s cousin Ross was the one who had come up with the plan to destroy the monster, and as a way to say thank you, several people, farmer’s market customers mostly, had volunteered to help Lita and Dave fix up the ranch, and they were there with rakes and shovels, planting new plants, cleaning out the root cellar.
There would be a lot of the communal spirit in the coming weeks, he knew, as neighbor helped neighbor get back on track.
That was one of the things he liked about Magdalena.
The bees, miraculously, had survived. Some might have flown off and not returned, but most of them were back in the boxes, in their hives. The horse and goat were nowhere to be found, but somehow, in the midst of all this chaos, new chickens that Dave ordered had arrived, and they were in their yard, clucking happily and scratching in the dirt. It was both a relief and a welcome change to see the hens acting perfectly normal, and more than anything else, it made Ross feel that everything was going to be all right.