She slowed the Jeep, then stopped. She’d been driving for three hours across the high desert, chasing a story about abandoned mines, and her mind was as empty as the landscape. But this—this was something else.
By late afternoon, she reached the ghost town. The mine shaft was a black wound in a hillside. She parked, and as she reached for her camera, she saw that the web had vanished from the paper.
She snapped a photo, then tore a page from her notebook, carefully coaxed the stem and the web onto the paper, and carried it to the passenger seat. The spider never moved.