Cold Fire

Holly felt her own excitement growing with his. She said, “What did you do in the act?”

“It was … a form of stage magic. My mom would take objects from people in the audience. My dad would work with me, and we would … I would hold the objects and pretend to have psychic impressions, tell the people things about themselves that I couldn't know.”

“Pretend?” she asked.

He blinked. “Maybe not. It's so strange … how little I remember even when I try.”

“It wasn't a trick. You could really do it. That's why your folks put together the act in the first place. You were a gifted child.”

He ran his fingers down the Bro Dart-protected jacket of The Black Windmill. “But …”

“But?”

“There's so much I still don't understand….”

“Oh, me too, kiddo. But we're getting closer, and I have to believe that's a good thing.”

A shadow, cast from within, stole across his face again.

Not wanting to see him slip back into a darker mood, Holly said, “Come on.” She picked up the book and took it to the librarian's desk. Jim followed her.

The energetic Mrs. Glynn was drawing on posterboard with a rainbow of colored pencils and magic markers. The colorful images were of well-rendered boys and girls dressed as spacemen, spelunkers, sailors, acrobats, and jungle explorers. She had penciled in but not yet colored the message: THIS IS A LIBRARY. KIDS AND ADVENTURERS WELCOME. ALL OTHERS STAY OUT!

“Nice,” Holly said sincerely, indicating the poster. “You really put yourself into this job.”

“Keeps me out of barrooms,” Mrs. Glynn said, with a grin that made it clear why any kid would like her.

Holly said, “My fiancee here has spoken so highly of you. Maybe you don't remember him after twenty-five years.”

Mrs. Glynn looked speculatively at Jim.

He said, “I'm Jim Ironheart, Mrs. Glynn.”

“Of course I remember you! You were the most special little boy.” She got up, leaned across the desk, and insisted on getting a hug from Jim. Releasing him, turning to Holly, she said, “So you're going to be marrying my Jimmy. That's wonderful! A lot of kids have passed through here since I've been running the place, even for a town this small, and I can't pretend I'd remember all of them. But Jimmy was special. He was a very special boy.”

Holly heard, again, how Jim had had an insatiable appetite for fantasy fiction, how he'd been so terribly quiet his first year in town, and how he'd been totally mute during his second year, after the sudden death of his grandmother.

Holly seized that opening: “You know, Mrs. Glynn, one of the reasons Jim brought me back here was to see if we might like to live in the farmhouse, at least for a while—”

“It's a nicer town than it looks,” Mrs. Glynn said. “You'd be happy here, I'll guarantee it. In fact, let me issue you a couple of library cards!” She sat down and pulled open a desk drawer.

As the librarian withdrew two cards from the drawer and picked up a pen, Holly said, “Well, the thing is … there're as many bad memories for him as good, and Lena's death is one of the worst.”

“And the thing is,” Jim picked up, “I was only ten when she died — well, almost eleven — and I guess maybe I made myself forget some of what happened. I'm not too clear on how she died, the details, and I was wondering if you remember …”

Holly decided that he might make a decent interviewer after all.

Mrs. Glynn said, “I can't say I recall the details of it. And I guess nobody'll ever know what on earth she was doing out in that old mill in the middle of the night. Henry, your grandpa, said she sometimes went there just to get away from things. It was peaceful and cool, a place she could do a little knitting and sort of meditate. And, of course, in those days it wasn't quite the ruin it's become. Still … it seemed odd she'd be out there knitting at two o'clock in the morning.”

As the librarian recounted what she could recall of Lena's death, confirming that Holly's dream had really been Jim's memory, Holly was touched by both dread and nausea. What Eloise Glynn did not seem to know, what perhaps no one knew, was that Lena had not been in that mill alone.

Jim had been there, too.

And only Jim had come out of it alive.

Holly glanced at him and saw that he had lost all color in his face again. He was not merely pale now. He was as gray as the sky outside.

Mrs. Glynn asked Holly for her driver's license, to complete the library card, and even though Holly didn't want the card, she produced the license.

The librarian said, “Jim, I think what got you through all that pain and loss, more than anything, was books. You pulled way into yourself, read all the time, and I think you used fantasy as sort of a painkiller.” She handed Holly the license and library card, and said to her: “Jim was an awfully bright boy. He could get totally into a book, it became real for him.”

Yeah, Holly thought, did it ever.

“When he first came to town and I heard he'd never been to a real school before, been educated by his parents, I thought that was just terrible, even if they did have to travel all the time with that nightclub act of theirs—”

Holly recalled the gallery of photographs on Jim's study walls in Laguna Niguel: Miami, Atlantic City, New York, London, Chicago, Las Vegas …

“—but they'd actually done a pretty fine job. At least they'd turned him into a booklover, and that served him well later.” She turned to Jim. “I suppose you haven't asked your grandpa about Lena's death because you figure it might upset him to talk about it. But I think he's not as fragile as you imagine, and he'd know more about it than anyone, of course.” Mrs. Glynn addressed Holly again: “Is something wrong, dear?”

Holly realized she was standing with the blue library card in her hand, statue-still, like one of those waiting- to-be-reanimated people in the worlds within the books upon the shelves within these rooms. For a moment she could not respond to the woman's question.

Jim looked too stunned to pick up the ball this time. His grandfather was alive somewhere. But where?

“No,” Holly said, “nothing's wrong. I just realized how late it's getting—”

A shatter of static, a vision: her severed head screaming, her severed hands crawling like spiders across a floor, her decapitated body writhing and twisting in agony; she was dismembered but not dead, impossibly alive, in a thrall of horror beyond endurance—

Holly cleared her throat, blinked at Mrs. Glynn, who was staring at her curiously. “Uh, yeah, quite late. And we're supposed to go see Henry before lunch. It's already ten. I've never met him.” She was babbling now, couldn't stop. “I'm really looking forward to it.”

Unless he really did die over four years ago, like Jim had told her, in which case she wasn't looking forward to it at all. But Mrs. Glynn did not appear to be a spiritualist who would blithely suggest conjuring up the dead for a little chat.

“He's a nice man,” Eloise Glynn said. “I know he must've hated having to move off the farm after his stroke, but he can be thankful it didn't leave him worse than he is. My mother, God rest her soul, had a stroke, left her unable to walk, talk, blind in one eye, and so confused she couldn't always recognize her own children. At least poor Henry has his wits about him, as I understand it. He can talk, and I hear he's the leader of the wheelchair pack over there at Fair Haven.”

“Yes,” Jim said, sounding as wooden as a talking post, “that's what I hear.”

“Fair Haven's such a nice place,” Mrs. Glynn said, “it's good of you to keep him there, Jim. It's not a snakepit like so many nursing homes these days.”

* * *

The Yellow Pages at a public phone booth provided an address for Fair Haven on the edge of Solvang. Holly drove south and west across the valley.

“I remember he had a stroke,” Jim said. “I was in the hospital with him, came up from Orange County, he was in the intensive-care unit. I hadn't… hadn't seen him in thirteen years or more.”

Holly was surprised by that, and her look generated a hot wave of shame that withered Jim. “You hadn't