3
Jim stopped in the driveway turnaround between house and barn, and got out of the Ford. He
The blank-windowed house held little power over him. When he looked at it, he felt only a sweet melancholy that might, given time, deepen into a more disturbing sadness or even despair. But he could stare at it, draw his breath normally, and turn away from it without being seized by a powerful urge to look at it again.
The barn exerted no emotional pull on him whatsoever, but the windmill was another story. When he turned his gaze on that cone of limestone beyond the wide pond, he felt as though he were being transformed into stone himself, as had been the luckless victims of the mythological serpent-haired Medusa when they had seen her snake-ringed face.
He'd read about Medusa years ago. In one of Mrs. Glynn's books. That was in the days when he wished with all his heart that he, too, could see the snake-haired woman and be transformed into unfeeling rock….
“Jim?” Holly said from the other side of the car. “You okay?”
With its high-ceilinged rooms — highest on the first floor — the two-story mill was actually four stories in height. But to Jim, at that moment, it looked far taller, as imposing as a twenty-story tower. Its once-pale stones had been darkened by a century of grime. Climbing ivy, roots nurtured by the pond that abutted one flank of the mill, twined up the rough stone face, finding easy purchase in deep-mortared joints. With no one to perform needed maintenance, the plant had covered half the structure, and had grown entirely over a narrow first-floor window near the timbered door. The wooden sails looked rotten. Each of those four arms was about thirty feet in length, making a sixty-foot spread across adjoining spans, and each was five feet wide with three rows of vanes. Since he had last seen the mill, more vanes had cracked or fallen away altogether. The time-frozen sails were stopped not in a cruciform but in an X, two arms reaching toward the pond and two toward the heavens. Even in hot bright daylight, the windmill struck Jim as menacing and seemed like a monstrous, ragged-armed scarecrow clawing at the sky with skeletal hands.
“Jim?” Holly said, touching his arm.
He jumped as if he had not known who she was. In fact, for an instant, as he looked down at her, he saw not only Holly but a long-dead face, the face of…
But the moment of disorientation passed. She was only Holly now, her identity no longer entwined with that of another woman as it had been in her dream last night.
“You okay?” she asked again.
“Yeah, sure, just … memories.”
Jim was grateful when Holly directed his attention from the mill to the farmhouse. She said, “Were you happy with your grandparents?”
“Lena and Henry Ironheart. Wonderful people. They took me in. They suffered so much for me.”
“Suffered?” she said.
He realized that it was too strong a word, and he wondered why he had used it. “Sacrificed, I mean. In lots of ways, little things, but they added up.”
“Taking on the support of a ten-year-old boy isn't something anyone does lightly,” Holly said. “But unless you demanded caviar and champagne, I wouldn't think you'd have been much of a hardship to them.”
“After what happened to my folks, I was … withdrawn, in bad shape, uncommunicative. They put in a lot of time with me, a lot of love, trying to bring me back … from the edge.”
“Who lives here these days?”
“Nobody.”
“But didn't you say your grandparents died five years ago?”
“The place wasn't sold. No buyers.”
“Who owns it now?”
“I do. I inherited it.”
She surveyed the property with evident bewilderment. “But it's lovely here. If the lawn was being watered and kept green, the weeds cut down, it would be charming. Why would it be so hard to sell?”
“Well, for one thing, it's a damned quiet life out here, and even most of the back-to-nature types who dream of living on a farm really mean a farm close to a choice of movie theaters, bookstores, good restaurants, and dependable European-car mechanics.”
She laughed at that. “Baby, there's an amusing little cynic lurking in you.”
“Besides, it's hardscrabble all the way, trying to earn a living on a place like this. It's just a little old hundred-acre farm, not big enough to make it with milk cows or a beef herd — or any one crop. My grandpa and grandma kept chickens, sold the eggs. And thanks to the mild weather, they could get two crops. Strawberries came into fruit in February and all the way into May. That was the money crop — berries. Then came corn, tomatoes—
He saw that Holly was still enamored of the place. She stood with her hands on her hips, looking around as if she might buy it herself.
She said, “But aren't there people who work at other things, not farmers, would just like to live here for the peace and quiet?”
“This isn't a real affluent area, not like Newport Beach, Beverly Hills. Locals around here don't have extra money just to spend on lifestyle. The best hope of selling a property like this is to find some rich movie producer or recording executive in L.A. who wants to buy it for the land, tear it down, and put up a showplace, so he can say he has a getaway in the Santa Ynez Valley, which is the trendy thing to have these days.”
As they talked, he grew increasingly uneasy. It was three o'clock. Plenty of daylight left. But suddenly he dreaded nightfall.
Holly kicked at some wiry weeds that had pushed up through one of the many cracks in the blacktop driveway. “It needs a little cleanup, but everything looks pretty good. Five years since they died? But the house and barn are in decent shape, like they were painted only a year or two ago.”
“They were.”
“Keep the place marketable, huh?”
“Sure. Why not?”
The high mountains to the west would eat the sun sooner than the ocean swallowed it down in Laguna Niguel. Twilight would come earlier here than there, although it would be prolonged. Jim found himself studying the lengthening purple shadows with the fearfulness of a man in a vampire movie hastening toward shelter before the coffin lids banged open.
What's wrong with me? he wondered.
Holly said, “You think you'd ever want to live here yourself?”
“Never!” he said so sharply and explosively that he startled not only Holly but himself. As if overcome by a dark magnetic attraction, he looked at the windmill again. A shudder swept through him.
He was aware that she was staring at him.
“Jim,” she said softly, “what happened to you here? What in the name of God happened twenty-five years ago in that mill?”
“I don't know,” he said shakily. He wiped one hand down his face. His hand felt warm, his face cold. “I can't remember anything special, anything odd. It was where I played. It was … cool and quiet… a nice place. Nothing happened there. Nothing.”
“Something,” she insisted. “Something happened.”
Holly had not been close to him long enough to know if he was frequently on an emotional roller coaster as he had been since they had left Orange County, or if his recent rapid swings in mood were abnormal. In The Central, buying food for a picnic, he'd soared out of the gloom that had settled over him when they crossed the
