Only two in the crowd moved: The woman in the mantilla went to the votive rack to light a candle and say a prayer, while a wedding photographer began shooting pictures of Dylan, Jilly, and Shep.
Looking down on these hundreds, sixty-seven of whom would have been shot, forty of whom would have perished, if she and Dylan and Shep hadn’t gotten here in time, Jilly was overcome by emotions so powerful, so exalting, and simultaneously so humbling, that no matter how long she lived, she would never forget her feelings at this incredible moment or be able to describe adequately the intensity of them.
From the platform at her feet, she picked up her purse, which contained what little she still owned in this world: wallet, compact, lipstick…. She wouldn’t have sold these pathetic possessions at any price, for they were the only tangible proof she had that she’d once lived an ordinary existence, and they seemed like talismans by which she might recover that lost life.
‘Shep,’ she whispered, her voice tremulous with emotion, ‘I don’t trust myself to fold three of us out of here. You’ll have to do it.’
‘Somewhere private,’ Dylan warned, ‘somewhere lonely.’
While everyone around her still stood immobile, the bride moved in the center aisle, weaving among her guests, stopping only when she arrived directly before Jilly. She was a beautiful woman, radiant, graceful in a stunning dress that would have been much talked about at the reception if the guests hadn’t had plenty of murder, mayhem, and derring-do to discuss instead.
Below, looking up at Jilly, at Dylan, at Shep, the radiant young woman in the fabulous white dress raised the bridal bouquet in her right hand, as though in tribute, in thanks, and the flowers blazed like the flames in a white-hot torch.
Perhaps the bride had been about to say something, but Jilly spoke first, with genuine sympathy. ‘Honey, I’m so sorry about your wedding.’
Dylan said, ‘Let’s go.’
‘Okay,’ said Shep, and he folded them.
45
Here lay a true desert so seldom washed by rain that even the few small cactuses were stunted by an enduring thirst. The widely scattered and thinly grown bunch-grass colonies would be a seared blackish green in the winter; here in the summer, they were silver-brown and as crisp as parchment.
The landscape offered considerably more sand than vegetation, and significantly more rock than sand.
They stood on the western slope of a hill that terraced gently in serried layers of charred-brown and rust-red rock. Before them, in the near distance and at least to the midpoint of a wide plain, curious natural rock formations rose like remnants of a vast ancient fortress: here, three sort-of columns thirty feet in diameter and a hundred high, perhaps part of a might-have-been entry portico; there, the hundred-foot-long, eighty-foot-high, crumbling crenelated ruins of use-your-imagination battlements from which skilled bowmen might have defended the castle keep with rains of arrows; here, turreted towers; there, ramparts, bastions, a half-collapsed barbican.
Men had never lived in this hostile land, of course, but Nature had created a vista that encouraged fantasy.
‘New Mexico,’ Dylan told Jilly. ‘I came here with Shep, painted this scene. October, four years ago this autumn, when the weather was friendlier. There’s a dirt road just the other side of this hill, and a paved highway four miles back. Not that we’ll need it.’
Currently this rockscape was a glowing forge where the white sun hammered into shape horseshoes of fire for those ghost riders in the sky that supposedly haunted these desert realms by night.
‘If we get in the shade,’ Dylan said, ‘we can endure the heat long enough to gather our wits and figure out what the hell we’re going to do next.’
Painted in dazzling shades of red, orange, purple, pink, and brown, the castellated formations were at this hour east of the sun, which had descended well past its apex. Their refreshing shadows, reaching toward this hillside, were the color of ripe plums.
Dylan led Jilly and Shepherd down the slope, then two hundred feet across flat land, to the base of an almost-could-be turreted tower suitable for an Arthurian tale. They sat side by side on a low bench of weather-smoothed stone, their backs to the tower.