Page 29 of Mistaken

Lindsay and Shawn and Brent were all in Shawn’s big pickup truck, which he’d parked at the entrance to Ghost Ranch. It felt awfully conspicuous sitting out in the open like that, but because there wasn’t another soul around for miles and miles, she knew her feeling of unease was purely visceral and nothing that was actually based on reality. At any rate, the facility itself was located several miles away down a very rough dirt road, so there wasn’t much chance of anyone — or anything — sneaking up on them.

“Let me see,” she said, and Shawn only shook his head.

“There’s nothing to see,” he replied, holding up his phone so she could see the screen.

Sure enough, it was now utterly black, which hadn’t been the case a few minutes earlier. The two men were in the front seats while she was in the back, but the whole time Shawn had been controlling the drone, he’d done his best to position his phone so she could mostly have a good view of what was happening.

Not that she had a very good frame of reference, since she’d never visited Ghost Ranch in the before times, so she had no idea whether what she’d been looking at was the same old, same old, or whether something had changed here over the previous four-plus years.

And neither Shawn nor Brent had been here, either, so they were all kind of flying blind. The only thing she’d been able to tell was that there didn’t seem to be any sign of Sarah Wolfe anywhere in the area.

Judging by the scowl Shawn currently wore — a departure from his usual sunny expression — he wasn’t too happy about his new toy goingkaput.

“I could have sworn I saw something down there,” he said as he set his phone on the console that divided the two front seats.

“Like what?” Brent asked.

“I’m not sure,” Shawn replied, and his gaze moved to the phone, even though the drone had obviously stopped transmitting and there was nothing to see on its screen. “There were trees in the way, but it still looked like something was moving beneath them.”

“Maybe some kind of animal,” Lindsay suggested. “A goat or a horse or something. Lots of them running wild these days.”

That was for sure. They had their own herds of sheep and goats and cows in Española, but there were far more that still roamed around the countryside, fending for themselves.

Shawn looked dubious, but it seemed as if he didn’t want to argue. No, he only said, “That could have been it. Still doesn’t explain what happened to the drone.”

“It must have malfunctioned,” Brent said. “I guess that’s not so weird, considering how long it had been sitting when we found it. Maybe something in the wiring or the electronics went bad, and it just needed some more flying time before it totally failed.”

“I suppose so,” Shawn said, but then his gaze moved to the empty landscape beyond the lodgepole gate that framed the entrance to the ranch. “Still, I can’t shake the feeling that someone did that on purpose.”

“You mean a djinn?” Lindsay asked. She guessed her expression now was as skeptical as Shawn’s had been a moment earlier. “No one’s ever heard of any djinn settling out here.”

A shrug. “Maybe not. Is it something we can check on?”

“Sure,” she replied, since she knew finding out whether Ghost Ranch was occupied by a djinn should be easy enough. “I can radio Julia and Zahrias when we get back to Los Alamos.”

“Then we might as well get going,” Shawn said as he began to reach for the ignition button.

Brent stared at him. “Aren’t we going to go in and look for Sarah?”

While that might have been the right thing to do, something about Shawn’s previous line of questioning made Lindsay wonder if there was a lot more going on here than met the eye. Never in the world would she have said she was remotely psychic, and her hard-headed engineering background made her a great foil for her scientist husband…but the thought of venturing into Ghost Ranch right now with only Brent and Shawn for backup made chills run up and down her spine.

“Eventually,” she said. “But I think Shawn is right on this one. If there really is a djinn lurking somewhere on the ranch, we can’t just walk in there like we own the place. Look at what happened to the drone.”

“A djinn might not have had anything to do with that,” Brent argued.

“Or they could have had everything to do with it,” Shawn returned. “I don’t want to stir up something we can’t handle.”

For a few seconds, Brent didn’t say anything. His jaw was set, and Lindsay knew he hated the idea of abandoning Sarah there without even attempting to go in and find her.

On the other hand, drones didn’t usually blow themselves up in the middle of a clear sky…if that was even what had happened. The drone was too far away for them to have had it in their line of sight, so it might have simply lost power, dropped like a stone, and broken apart on impact.

Mechanical failure didn’t give her the creepy crawlies like this, though.

“We’ll come back for Sarah,” Lindsay said, keeping her tone gentle.

“But first, we need to figure out what’s really going on out here.”

Chapter10

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