Cold Fire

gear and driving away from there.

They cruised by Tivoli Gardens, a small park at the corner of Main and Copenhagen, which fell laughably short of its namesake. No fountains, no musicians, no dancing, no games, no beer gardens. There were just some roses, a few beds of late-summer flowers, patchy grass, two park benches, and a well-maintained windmill in the far corner.

“Why aren't the sails moving?” she asked. “There's some wind.”

“None of the mills actually pumps water or grinds grain any more,” he explained. “And since they're largely decorative, no sense in having to live with the noise they make. Brakes were put on the mechanisms long ago.” As they turned the corner at the end of the park, he added: “They made a movie here once.”

“Who did?”

“One of the studios.”

“Hollywood studio?”

“I forget which.”

“What was it called?”

“Don't remember.”

“Who starred in it?”

“Nobody famous.”

Holly made a mental note about the movie, suspecting that it was more important to Jim and to the town than he had said. Something in the offhanded way he'd mentioned it, and his terse responses to her subsequent questions, alerted her to an unspoken subtext.

Last of all, at the southeast corner of Svenborg, he drove slowly past Zacca's Garage, a large corrugated- steel Quonset hut perched on a cement-block foundation, in front of which stood two dusty cars. Though the building had been painted several times during its history, no brush had touched it in many years. Its numerous coats of paint were worn in a random patchwork and marked by liberal encrustations of rust, which created an unintended camouflage finish. The cracked blacktop in front of the place was pitted with potholes that had been filled with loose gravel, and the surrounding lot bristled with dry grass and weeds.

“I went to school with Ned Zacca,” Jim said. “His dad, Vernon, had the garage then. It was never a business to make a man rich, but it looked better than it does now.”

The big airplane hangar-style roll-aside doors were open, and the interior was clotted with shadows. The rear bumper of an old Chevy gleamed dully in the gloom. Although the garage was seedy, nothing about it suggested danger. Yet the queerest chill came over Holly as she peered through the hangar doors into the murky depths of the place.

“Ned was one mean sonofabitch, the school bully,” Jim said. “He could sure make a kid's life hell when he wanted to. I lived in fear of him.”

“Too bad you didn't know Tae Kwon Do then, you could've kicked his ass.”

He did not smile, just stared past her at the garage. His expression was odd and unsettling. “Yeah. Too bad.”

When she glanced at the building again, she saw a man in jeans and a T-shirt step out of the deepest darkness into gray half-light, moving slowly past the back of the Chevy, wiping his hands on a rag. He was just beyond the infall of sunshine, so she could not see what he looked like. In a few steps he rounded the car, fading into the gloom again, hardly more material than a specter glimpsed in a moonlit graveyard.

Somehow, she knew the ghostly presence in the Quonset was Ned Zacca. Curiously, though he had been a menacing figure to Jim, not to her, Holly felt her stomach twist and her palms turn damp.

Then Jim touched the accelerator, and they were past the garage, heading back into town.

“What did Zacca do to you exactly?”

“Anything he could think of. He was a regular little sadist. He's been in prison a couple of times since those days. But I figured he was back.”

“Figured? How?”

He shrugged. “I just sensed it. Besides, he's one of those guys who never gets caught at the big stuff. Devil's luck. He might do a fall every great once in a while, but always for something small-time. He's dumb but he's clever.”

“Why'd you want to go there?”

“Memories.”

“Most people, when they want a little nostalgia, they're only interested in good memories.”

Jim did not reply to that. Even before they arrived in Svenborg, he had settled into himself like a turtle gradually withdrawing into its shell. Now he was almost back into that brooding, distant mood in which she had found him yesterday afternoon.

The brief tour had given her not a comfortable feeling of small-town security and friendliness, but a sense of being cut off at the back end of nowhere. She was still in California, the most populous state in the union, not much farther than sixty miles from the city of Santa Barbara. Svenborg had almost two thousand people of its own, which made it bigger than a lot of gas-and-graze stops along the interstate highways. The sense of isolation was more psychological than real, but it hovered over her.

Jim stopped at The Central, a prospering operation that included a service station selling generic gasoline, a small sporting-goods outlet peddling supplies to fishermen and campers, and a well-stocked convenience store with groceries, beer, and wine. Holly filled the Ford's tank at the self-service pump, then joined Jim in the sporting-goods shop.

The store was cluttered with merchandise, which overflowed the shelves, hung from the ceiling, and was stacked on the linoleum floor. Wall-eyed fishing lures dangled on a rack near the door. The air smelled of rubber boots.

At the check-out counter, Jim already had piled up a pair of high-quality summerweight sleeping bags with air-mattress liners, a Coleman lantern with a can of fuel, a sizable Thermos ice chest, two big flashlights, packages of batteries for the flashes, and a few other items. At the cash register, farther along the counter from Jim, a bearded man in spectacles as thick as bottle glass was ringing up the sale, and Jim was waiting with an open wallet.

“I thought we were going to the mill,” Holly said.

“We are,” Jim said. “But unless you want to sleep on a wooden floor without benefit of any conveniences, we need this stuff.”

“I didn't realize we were staying overnight.”

“Neither did I. Until I walked in here and heard myself asking for these things.”

“Couldn't we stay at a motel?”

“Nearest one's clear over to Santa Ynez.”

“It's a pretty drive,” she said, much preferring the commute to spending a night in the mill.

Her reluctance arose only in part from the fact that the old mill promised to be uncomfortable. The place was, after all, the locus of both their nightmares. Besides, since arriving in Svenborg, she had felt vaguely … threatened.

“But something's going to happen,” he said. “I don't know what. Just… something. At the mill. I feel it. We're going to … get some answers. But it might take a little time. We've got to be ready to wait, be patient.”

Though Holly was the one who had suggested going to the mill, she suddenly didn't want answers. In a dim premonition of her own, she perceived an undefined but oncoming tragedy, blood, death, and darkness.

Jim, on the other hand, seemed to shed the lead weight of his previous apprehension and take on a new buoyancy. “It's good — what we're doing, where we're going. I sense that, Holly. You know what I mean? I'm being told we made the right move in coming here, that there's something frightening ahead of us, yes, something that's going to shock the hell out of us, maybe very real danger, but there's also something that's going to lift us up.” His eyes were shining and he was excited. She had never seen him like this, not even when they had been making love. In whatever obscure way it touched him, this higher power of his was in contact with him now. She could see his quiet rapture. “I feel a … a strange sort of jubilation coming, a wonderful discovery, revelations …”

The bespectacled clerk had stepped away from the cash register to show them the total on the tape.