Cold Fire

refreshing, and you said, 'So are you, Miss Thorne.' My heart just now went pitty-pat-pitty-pat again, remembering it. Oh, you knew just what you were doing, you smoothie. Told me your name, told me where you lived, gave me a lot of those eyes, those damned eyes, played coy, then hit me with 'So are you, Miss Thorne,' and walked away like Bogart.”

“I don't think you should have any more of that beer.”

“Yeah? Well, I think I'll sit here all night, drinking one of 'em after another.”

He sighed. “In that case, I'd better have another one myself.”

He got another beer and sat down again.

Holly figured she was making progress.

Or maybe he was setting her up. Maybe getting cozy over Corona was a trick of some kind. He was clever, all right. Maybe he was going to try to drink her under the table. Well, he'd lose that one, because she'd be under the table long before him!

“You wanted me to find you,” she told him.

He said nothing.

“You know why you wanted me to find you?”

He said nothing.

“You wanted me to find you because you really did think I was refreshing, and you're the loneliest, sorriest guy between here and Hardrock, Missouri.”

He said nothing. He was good at that. He was the best guy in the world at saying nothing at just the right time.

She said, “You make me want to smack you.”

He said nothing.

Whatever confidence the Corona had given her suddenly began to drain away. She sensed that she was losing again. For a couple of rounds, there, she had definitely been winning on points, but now she was being beaten back by his silence.

“Why are all these boxing metaphors running through my head?” she asked him. “I hate boxing.”

He slugged down some of his Corona and, with a nod, indicated her bottle, from which she had drunk only a third. “You really insist on finishing that?”

“Hell, yes.” She was aware that the brewski was beginning to affect her, perhaps dangerously, but she was still plenty sober enough to recognize that the moment had come for her knockout punch. “If you don't tell me about that place, I'm going to sit here and drink myself into a fat, slovenly, alcoholic old crone. I'm going to die here at the age of eighty-two, with a liver the size of Vermont.”

“Place?” He looked baffled. “What place?”

Now. She chose a soft but clear whisper in which to deliver the punch: “The windmill.”

He didn't exactly fall to the canvas, and no cartoon stars swarmed around his head, but Holly could see that he had been rocked.

“You've been to the windmill?” he asked.

“No. You mean it's a real place?”

“If you don't know that much, then how could you know about it at all?”

“Dreams. Windmill dreams. Each of the last three nights.”

He paled. The overhead light was not on. They were sitting in shadows, illuminated only by the secondhand glow of the rangehood and sink lights in the kitchen and by a table lamp in the adjacent family room, but Holly saw him go pale under his tan. His face seemed to hover before her in the gloom like the face-shaped wing configuration of a big snow-white moth.

The extraordinary vividness and unusual nature of the nightmare — and the fact that the effects of the dream had continued after she had awakened in her motel room — had encouraged her to believe that it was somehow connected with Jim Ironheart. Two encounters with the paranormal in such close succession had to be linked. But she was relieved, all the same, when his stunned reaction confirmed her suspicion.

“Limestone walls,” she said. “Wooden floor. A heavy wooden door, banded in iron, that opens on some limestone steps. A yellow candle in a blue dish.”

“I've dreamed about it for years,” he said softly. “Once or twice a month. Never more often than that. Until the last three nights. But how can we be having the same dream?”

“Where's the real windmill?”

“On my grandparents' farm. North of Santa Barbara. In the Santa Ynez Valley.”

“Did something terrible happen to you there, or what?”

He shook his head. “No. Not at all. I loved that place. It was … a sanctuary.”

“Then why did you go pale when I mentioned it?”

“Did I?”

“Picture an albino cat chasing a mouse around a corner and running into a Doberman. That pale.”

“Well, when I dream of the mill, it's always frightening—”

“Don't I know it. But if it was a good place in your life, a sanctuary like you say, then why does it feature in nightmares?”

“I don't know.”

“Here we go again.”

“I really don't,” he insisted. “Why did you dream about it, if you've never even been there?”

She drank more beer, which did not clarify her thinking. “Maybe because you're projecting your dream at me. As a way to sort of make a connection between us, draw me to you.”

“Why would I want to draw you to me?”

“Thanks a lot.”

“Anyway, like I told you before, I'm no psychic, I don't have abilities like that. I'm just an instrument.”

“Then it's this higher power of yours,” she said. “It's sending me the same dream because it wants us to connect.”

He wiped one hand down his face. “This is too much for me right now. I'm so damned tired.”

“Me, too. But it's only nine-thirty, and we've still got a lot to talk about.”

“I only slept about an hour last night,” he said.

He really did look exhausted. A shave and a shower had made him presentable, but the bruise-dark rings around his eyes were getting darker; and he had not regained color in his face after turning pale at the mention of her windmill dreams.

He said, “We can pick this up in the morning.”

She frowned. “No way. I'll come back in the morning, and you won't let me in.”

“I'll let you in.”

“That's what you say now.”

“If you're having that dream, then you're part of this whether I like it or not.”

His tone of voice had gone from cool to cold again, and it was clear that what he meant by “whether I like it or not” was really “even though I don't like it.”

He was a loner, evidently always had been. Viola Moreno, who had great affection for him, claimed he was well-liked by his students and colleagues. She'd spoken of a fundamental sadness in him, however, that separated him from other people, and since quitting his teaching position, he had seen little of Viola or his other friends from that life. Though intrigued by the news that he and Holly were sharing a dream, though he had called her “refreshing,” though he was to some degree attracted to her, he obviously resented her intrusion into his solitude.

Holly said, “No good. You'll be gone when I get here in the morning, I won't know where you went, maybe you'll never come back.”

He had no energy for resistance. “Then stay the night.”

“You have a spare bedroom?”

“Yeah. But there's no spare bed. You can sleep on the family-room couch, I guess, but it's damned old and not too comfortable.”