“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“After what happened to my folks, I was … withdrawn, in bad shape, uncommunicative.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—real tomatoes, not the plastic ones they sell in the markets.”
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 Santa Ynez Mountains, and he'd been almost jubilant. Then the sight of the farm was like a plunge into cold water for him, and the windmill was the equivalent of a drop into an ice chasm.
He seemed as troubled as he was gifted, and she wished that she could do something to ease his mind. She wondered if urging him to come to the farm had been wise. Even a failed career in journalism had taught her to leap into the middle of unfolding events, seize the moment, and run with it. But perhaps this situation demanded greater caution, restraint, thought, and planning.
They got back into the Ford and drove between the house and barn, around the big pond. The graveled path, which she remembered from last night's dream, had been made wide enough for horses and wagons in another era. It easily accommodated the Ford, allowing them to park at the base of the windmill.
When she stepped from the car again, she was beside a cornfield. Only a few parched wild stalks thrust up from that abandoned plot of earth beyond the split-rail fence. She walked around the back of the car, across the gravel, and joined Jim where he stood on the bank of the pond.
Mottled blue-green-gray, the water resembled a slab of slate two hundred feet in diameter. It was almost as still as a piece of slate, as well. Dragonflies and other insects, alighting briefly on the surface, caused occasional dimples. Languid currents, far too subtle to produce ripples, made the water shimmer almost imperceptibly near the shore, where green weeds and a few clusters of white-plumed pampas grass thrived.
“Still can't remember quite what you saw in that dream?” Jim asked.
“No. It probably doesn't matter anyway. Not everything in a dream is significant.”
In a low voice, almost as if speaking to himself, he said, “It was significant.”
Without turbulence to stir up sediment, the water was not muddy, but neither was it clear. Holly figured she could see only a few feet below the surface. If it actually was fifty or sixty feet deep at the center, as Jim had said, that left a lot of volume in which something could remain hidden.
“Let's have a look in the mill,” she said.
Jim got one of the new flashlights from the car and put batteries in it. “Even in daylight, it can be kind of dark in there.”
The door was in an antechamber appended to the base of the conical main structure of the mill, much like the entrance to an Eskimo igloo. Although unlocked, the door was warped, and the hinges were rusted. For a moment it resisted Jim, then swung inward with a screech and a brittle splintering sound.
The short, arched antechamber opened onto the main room of the mill, which was approximately forty feet in diameter. Four windows, evenly spaced around the circumference, filtered sunlight through filthy panes, leeching the summer-yellow cheer from it and imparting a wintry gray tint that did little to alleviate the gloom. Jim's big flashlight revealed dust- and cobweb-shrouded machinery that could not have appeared more exotic to Holly if it had been the turbine room of a nuclear submarine. It was the cumbersome low technology of another century — massive wooden gears, cogs, shafts, grinding stones, pulleys, old rotting lengths of rope — so oversized and complicated that it all seemed like the work not merely of human beings from another age but of a different and less evolved species altogether.