Free The Secret of Everything by Barbara O'Neal Page B

other restaurants in town, map out some possible hikes and outdoor activities. On the table was a thick glossy book of trails in northern New Mexico, and she flipped through the chapters on the area around Los Ladrones with keen hunger. She was dying to get out on the trails again! She absolutely respected the healing process, but it had been way too long since she’d been able to take a good long walk.
    Easy does it. She’d have to pace herself. Start small and gauge her progress carefully.
    In between, there were plenty of other things to do. She would definitely explore the church and the pilgrimage route to the shrine, and discover any attractive legends and stories they could use in the brochure. She also needed to visit Green Gate Farms. And, for herself, she needed to go down to the river.
    A coppery cold moved along her spine at the thought. It could wait.
    This morning, she’d head down to the hotel restaurant and check out their brunch. Much as she’d love to just go back to 100 Breakfasts, she should sample more than one meal at the hotel. And there might be some celebrity-sightings, too. Always fun.
    The heat surprised her when she left the hotel in late morning. It murmured around her as she walked down the portico in the deep shade, but when she stepped out of the shadows, the sunfell on her skin like a skillet, heavy and hot. She paused for a moment, closing her eyes, letting it sink deep into her bones. Sunlight at such a high altitude had ferocity to it, texture, weight.
    “Don’t forget your sunscreen, young lady,” said a man passing by.
    Tessa opened her eyes. He was thin and stooped, maybe eighty or a little more, and she’d seen him doing his loops around the plaza yesterday. She smiled. “It feels good, doesn’t it?”
    “I like the snow myself, but we’re not long off for that, so it’s all right I reckon.” He waved twisted fingers her way and marched onward.
    Earlier, the church bells had been ringing loud and long. Tessa had looked up the history of the ancient church on the Internet as she ate her breakfast on the patio, covertly watching a pair of actors feed each other cubed cantaloupe.
    Her father had told her there were ghosts attached to the church, and the history of the place certainly lent itself to that idea. Maybe the missionaries slaughtered by the Indians, or the Indians the Spanish slaughtered when they returned. There had also been a raid by the Comanche, who stole seven women from a wedding feast.
    Standing now in the high, hot sun, Tessa shaded her eyes to look at it. It was the kind of church painters could not resist, with adobe covering its curved bones like peachy flesh, exaggerated by the sharp shadow cast by that fierce sun. Over the whole stretched the plastic blue sky. Constructed simply, it had two bell towers, with a heavy pine doorway between them. A wall created a protected garden in front. A bus with its motor still running was parked in the narrow street in the rear, and milling tourists shot it from several angles.
    Tessa resisted shooting it now, when there were so many people about. Not only the cluster of tourists from the bus but another knot of people had gathered outside the wall, at the base of what looked to be a trail. Most of them were barefoot, and as she watched, they took off their hats and gave water bottles to a young man collecting them in a box.
    She asked a man nearby, “Do you know what they’re doing?”
    “Pilgrims,” he said. “They walk to the top of the mountain to visit a shrine.”
    “Ah, I read about that.”
    Through her viewfinder she focused on a woman who looked to be in her sixties, with curly salt-and-pepper hair and knobby knees. A rosary looped around her left wrist, green beads glittering. For a minute, Tessa was lost in the repetitive shapes—curls and kneecaps and beads. Joy, the soft white of clouds, moved in her. She was shooting everything in her drunken rediscovery and would be lucky to get even a handful