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. Grinning, he said, “Newlyweds?”
At the convenience store next door, they bought ice for the chest, then orange juice, diet soda, bread, mustard, bologna-olive loaf, and pre-packaged cheese slices.
“Olive loaf,” Holly said wonderingly. “I haven't eaten this stuff since I was maybe fourteen and I learned I had arteries.”
“And how about these,” he said, snatching a box of chocolate-covered doughnuts off a shelf, adding it to the market basket that he was carrying. “Bologna sandwiches, chocolate doughnuts … and potato chips, of course. Wouldn't be a picnic without chips. The crinkled kind, okay? Some cheese twists, too. Chips and cheese twists, they go together.”
Holly had never seen him like this: almost boyish, with no apparent weight on his shoulders. He might have been setting out on a camping trip with friends, a little adventure.
She wondered if her own apprehension was justified. Jim was, after all, the one whose presentiments had proven to be accurate. Maybe they were going to discover something wonderful at the mill, unravel the mystery behind the last-minute rescues he had performed, maybe even encounter this higher power to which he referred. Perhaps The Enemy, in spite of its ability to reach out of a dream into the real world, was not as formidable as it seemed.
At the cash register, after the clerk finished bagging their purchases and was making change, Jim said, “Wait a minute, one more thing,” and hurried to the rear of the store. When he returned, he was carrying two lined yellow tablets and one black, fine-point felt-tip pen. To Holly, he said, “We'll be needing these tonight.”
When they had loaded the car and pulled out of the parking lot at The Central, heading for the Ironheart Farm, Holly indicated the pen and tablets, which she was holding in a separate bag. “What'll we be needing these for?”
“I haven't the slightest idea. I just suddenly knew we have to have them.”
“That's just like God,” she said, “always being mysterious and obscure.”
After a silence, he said, “I'm not so sure any more that it's God talking to me.”
“Oh? What changed your mind?”
“Well, the issues you raised last evening, for one thing. If God didn't want little Nick O'Conner to die up there in Boston, why didn't He just stop that vault from exploding? Why chase me clear across the country and 'throw' me at the boy, as you put it? And why would He up and change His mind about the people on the airliner, let more of them live, just because I decided they should? They were all questions I'd asked myself, but you weren't willing to settle for the easy answers that satisfied me.” He looked away from the street for a moment as they reached the edge of town, smiled at her, and repeated one of the questions she had asked him yesterday when she had been needling him: “Is God a waffler?”
“I would've expected …”
“What?”
“Well, you were so sure you could see a divine hand in this, it must be a bit of a letdown to consider less exalted possibilities. I'd expect you to be a little bummed out.”
He shook his head. “I'm not. You know, I always had trouble accepting that it was God working through me, it seemed like such a crazy idea, but I lived with it just because there wasn't any better explanation. There still isn't a better explanation, I guess, but another possibility has occurred to me, and it's something so strange and wonderful in its way that I don't mind losing God from the team.”
“What other possibility?”
“I don't want to talk about it just yet,” he said as sunlight and tree shadows dappled the dusty windshield and played across his face. “I want to think it through, be sure it makes sense, before I lay it out for you, 'cause I know now you're a hard judge to convince.”
He seemed happy. Really happy. Holly had liked him pretty much since she had first seen him, regardless of his moodiness. She had perceived a hopefulness beneath his glower, a tenderness beneath his gruffness, a better man beneath the exterior of a lesser one, but in his current buoyant mood, she found him easier than ever to like.