back.”
“Figured? How?”
He shrugged. “I just sensed it. Besides, he’s one of those guys who
never gets caught at the big stuff Devil’s luck. He might do a fall
every great once in a while, but always for something small-time.
He’s dumb but he’s clever.”
“Why’d you want to go there?”
“Memories.”
“Most people, when they want a little nostalgia, they’re only interested
in good memories.”
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