reminded herself that he had not actually said he loved her. His
commitment had been carefully and indirectly phrased. He might be no
more reliable than other men she had trusted over the years.
On the other hand, she had not actually said that she loved him, either.
Her commitment had been no more effusively stated than his.
Perhaps because she still felt the need to protect herself to some
extent, she had found it easier to reveal her heart to the motel clerk
than to Jim.
Washing down blueberry muffins with black coffee, for which they had
stopped at a convenience store, they traveled north on the San Diego
Freeway. The Tuesday-morning rush hour had passed, but at some places
traffic still clogged all lanes and moved like a snail herd being driven
‘, toward a gourmet restaurant.
I Comfortably ensconced in the passenger seat, Holly told Jim about her
four nightmares, as promised. She started with the initial dream of
blindness on Friday night, concluding with last night’s spookshow, which
had been the most bizarre and fearful of all.
He was clearly fascinated that she had dreamed about the mill without
even knowing of its existence. And on Sunday night, after surviving the
crash of Flight 246, she had dreamed of him at the mill as a ten
year-old boy, when she could not yet have known either that the mill was
a familiar place to him or that he had spent a lot of time there when he
was ten.
But the majority of his questions related to her most recent nightmare.
Keeping his eyes on the traffic ahead, he said, “Who was the woman in
the dream if she wasn’t you?”
“I don’t know,” Holly said, finishing the final bite of the last muffin.
“I had no sense of her identity.”
“Can you describe her?”
“I only saw her reflection in that window, so I can’t tell you much, I’m
afraid.” She drank the last of the coffee from her big Styrofoam cup,
and thought a moment. It was easier to visualize the scenes of that
dream than it should have been, for dreams were usually quick to fade
from memory.
Images from that one returned to her quite vividly, however, as if she
had not dreamed them but experienced them in real life. “She had a
broad clear face, more handsome in a womanly way than pretty.
Wide-set eyes, full mouth. A beauty mark high on her right cheek, I
don’t think it could’ve been a spot on the glass, just a little round
dot. Curly hair. Do you recognize her?”
“No,” he replied. “Can’t say that I do. Tell me what you saw at the
bottom of the pond when the lightning flashed.”
“I’m not sure what it was.”
“Describe it as best you can.”
She pondered for a moment, then shook her head. “I can’t. The woman’s
face was fairly easy to recall because when I saw it in the dream I knew
what it was, a face, a human face. But whatever was lying at the bottom
of the pond. . . that was strange, like nothing I’d ever seen beù fore.
I didn’t know what I was looking at, and I had such a brief glimpse of
it and. . . well, now it’s just gone. Is there really something
peculiar under that pond?”
“Not that I know of,” he said. “Could it’ve been a sunken boat, a
rowboat, anything like that?”
“No,” she said. “Nothing at all like that. Much bigger. Did a boat
sink in the pond once?”
“I never heard of it, if one did. It’s a deceptive-looking bit of
water, though. You expect a millpond to be shallow, but this one is
deep, forty or fifty feet toward the center. It never dries out, and it
doesn’t shrink during dry years, either, because it’s formed over an
artesian well, not just an aquifer.”
“What’s the difference?”
“An aquifer is what you drill into when you’re sinking a well, it’s sort
of a reservoir or stream of underground water. Artesian wells are
rarer. You don’t drill into one to find water, ’cause the water is
already coming to the surface under pressure. You’d have the devil’s