Cold Fire (29 page)

She finished lightly buttering the first two slices of toast. “I see what you’re saying. God works in mysterious ways.”

“Very.”

They ate at the breakfast table. In addition to toast, they had sliced tomatoes and cold bottles of Corona with the omelettes.

The purple cloth of twilight slid across the world outside, and the undraped form of night began to reveal itself.

Holly said, “You aren’t entirely a puppet in these situations.”

“Yes, I am.”

“You have some power to determine the outcome.”

“None.”

“Well, God sent you on Flight Two forty-six to save just the Dubroveks.”

“That’s right.”

“But then you took matters into your own hands and saved more than just Christine and Casey. How many were supposed to die?”

“A hundred and fifty-one.”

“And how many actually died?”

“Forty-seven.”

“Okay, so you saved a hundred and two more lives than He sent you to save.”

“A hundred and three, counting yours—but only because He allowed me to do it, helped me to do it.”

“What—you’re saying God wanted you to save just the Dubroveks, but then He changed His mind?”

“I guess so.”

“God isn’t sure what He wants?”

“I don’t know.”

“God is sometimes confused?”

“I don’t know.”

“God is a waffler?”

“Holly, I just don’t know.”

“Good omelette.”

“Thank you.”

“I have trouble understanding why God would ever change His mind about anything. After all, He’s infallible, right? So He can’t have made the wrong decision the first time.”

“I don’t concern myself with questions like that. I just don’t think about it.”

“Obviously,” she said.

He glared at her, and she felt the full effect of his eyes in their arctic mode. Then focusing on his food and beer, he refused to respond to Holly’s next few conversational gambits.

She realized that she was no closer to winning his trust than she had been when he had reluctantly invited her in from the patio. He was still judging her, and on points she was probably losing. What she needed was a solid knockout punch, and she thought she knew what it was, but she didn’t want to use it until the right moment.

When Jim finished eating, he looked up from his empty plate and said, “Okay, I’ve listened to your pitch, I’ve fed you, and now I want you to go.”

“No, you don’t.”

He blinked. “Miss Thome—”

“You called me Holly before.”

“Miss Thorne, please don’t make me
throw
you out.”

“You don’t want me to go,” Holly said, striving to sound more confident than she felt. “At all the scenes of these rescues, you’ve given only your first name. No one’s learned anything more about you. Except me. You told me you lived in southern California. You told me your last name was Ironheart.”

“I never said you were a bad reporter. You’re good at prying information—”

“I didn’t pry. You gave it. And if it wasn’t something you wanted to give, a grizzly beat with an engineering degree and crowbar couldn’t pry it out of you. I want another beer.”

“I asked you to go.”

“Don’t stir yourself. I know where you keep the suds.”

She got up, stepped to the refrigerator, and withdrew another bottle of Corona. She was walking on the wild side now, at least for her, but a third beer gave her an excuse—even if a flimsy one—to stay and argue with him. She had downed three bottles last night, at the motel cocktail lounge in Dubuque. But then she had still been saturated with adrenaline, as superalert and edgy as a Siamese cat on Benzedrine, which canceled out the alcohol as fast as it entered her bloodstream. 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 floe. “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 Thome.’”

“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.”

“Did something terrible happen to you there, or what?”

He shook his head. “No. Not at all. I loved that place. It was... a sanctuary.”

“Then why did you go pale when I mentioned it?”

“Did I?”

“Picture an albino cat chasing a mouse around a corner and running into a Doberman. That pale.”

“Well, when I dream of the mill, it’s always frightening—”

“Don’t I know it. But if it was a good place in your life, a sanctuary like you say, then why does it feature in nightmares?”

“I don’t know.”

“Here we go again.”

“I really don’t,” he insisted. “Why did
you
dream about it, if you’ve never even been there?”

She drank more beer, which did not clarify her thinking. “Maybe because you’re projecting your dream at me. As a way to sort of make a connection between us, draw me to you.”

“Why would I want to draw you to me?”

“Thanks a lot.”

“Anyway, like I told you before, I’m no psychic, I don’t have abilities like that. I’m just an instrument.”

“Then it’s this higher power of yours,” she said. “It’s sending me the same dream because it wants us to connect.”

He wiped one hand down his face. “This is too much for me right now. I’m so damned tired.”

“Me, too. But it’s only nine-thirty, and we’ve still got a lot to talk about.”

“I only slept about an hour last night,” he said.

He really did look exhausted. A shave and a shower had made him presentable, but the bruise-dark rings around his eyes were getting darker; and he had not regained color in his face after turning pale at the mention of her windmill dreams.

He said, “We can pick this up in the morning.”

She frowned. “No way. I’ll come back in the morning, and you won’t let me in.”

“I’ll let you in.”

“That’s what you say now.”

“If you’re having that dream, then you’re part of this whether I like it or not.”

His tone of voice had gone from cool to cold again, and it was clear that what he meant by “whether I like it or not” was really “even though I don’t like it.”

He was a loner, evidently always had been. Viola Moreno, who had great affection for him, claimed he was well-liked by his students and colleagues. She’d spoken of a fundamental sadness in him, however, that separated him from other people, and since quitting his teaching position, he had seen little of Viola or his other friends from that life. Though intrigued by the news that he and Holly were sharing a dream, though he had called her “refreshing,” though he was to some degree attracted to her, he obviously resented her intrusion into his solitude.

Holly said, “No good. You’ll be gone when I get here in the morning, I won’t know where you went, maybe you’ll never come back.”

He had no energy for resistance. “Then stay the night.”

“You have a spare bedroom?”

“Yeah. But there’s no spare bed. You can sleep on the family-room couch, I guess, but it’s damned old and not too comfortable.”

She carried her half-empty beer into the adjacent family room, and tested the sagging, brown sofa. “It’ll be good enough.”

“Whatever you want.” He seemed indifferent, but she sensed that his indifference was a pretense.

“You have any spare pajamas?”

“Jesus.”

“Well, I’m sorry, but I didn’t bring any.”

“Mine’ll be too big for you.”

“Just makes them more comfortable. I’d like to shower, too. I’m sticky from tanning lotion and being in the sun all afternoon.”

With the put-upon air of a man who had found his least favorite relative standing on his doorstep unannounced, he took her upstairs, showed her the guest bath, and got a pair of pajamas and a set of towels for her.

“Try to be quiet,” he said. “I plan to be sound asleep in five minutes.”

 
 
Luxuriating in the fall of hot water and clouds of steam, Holly was pleased that the shower did not take the edge off her beer buzz. Though she had slept better last night than Ironheart claimed to have, she had not gotten a solid eight hours in the past few days, and she was looking forward to a Corona-induced sleep even on the worn and lumpy sofa.

At the same time, she was uneasy about the continued fuzziness of her mind. She needed to keep her wits about her. After all, she was in the house of an undeniably strange man who was largely a cipher to her, a walking mystery. She understood little of what was in his heart, which pumped secrets and shadows in greater quantity than blood. For all his coolness toward her, he seemed basically a good man with benign intentions, and it was difficult to believe that he was a threat to her. On the other hand, it was not unusual to see a news story about a berserk mass murderer who—after brutally slaying his friends, family, and coworkers—was described by his astonished neighbors as “a really nice guy.” For all she knew, in spite of his claim to be the avatar of God, by day Jim Ironheart heroically risked his own life to save the lives of strangers—and, by night, tortured kittens with maniacal glee.