Cold Fire

Even so, she had hit the bed as hard as a lumberjack who'd downed a dozen boilermakers. If she passed out on Ironheart, she'd no doubt wake up in her car, out in the street, and she would never get inside his house again. She opened the beer and returned to the table with it.

"You wanted me to find you," she said as she sat down.

He regarded her with all the warmth of a dead penguin frozen to an ice flow. "I did, huh?" "Absolutely. That's why you told me your last name and where I could find you.”

He said nothing.

"And you remember your last words to me at the airport in Portland?" "No.”

"It was the best come-on line any guy's ever dropped on me.”

He waited.

She made him wait a little longer while she took a sip of beer straight from the bottle. "Just before you closed the car door and went into the terminal, you said, So are you, Miss Thorne.'" "Doesn't sound like much of a come-on line to me.”

"It was romantic as hell.”

" So are you, Miss Thorne." And what had you just said to me.

You're an asshole, Mr. Ironheart'?" "Ho, ho, ho," she said. "Try to spoil it, go ahead, but you can't.

I'd told you that your modesty was 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.”