“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; end 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 away. 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