Page 43 (1/2)

The iron sky was pressing lower

The trees see over hiht months after Lena?" His h spit to speak, and the words caainst desert stone "What the hell do you want froht monthsMay twenty-fourth of the next year"

"How did he die?" "II don’tI don’t remember"

"Illness?" Shut up, shut up! "I don’t know"

"An accident?" "IjustI thinkI think it was a stroke"

Large parts of the past were ht about the past He lived totally in the present

He had never realized there were huge holes in his s he had never before tried to rerandfather’s nearest relative?" Holly asked

"Yes"

"Didn’t you attend to the details of his funeral?" He hesitated, frowning "I thinkyes"

"Then did you just forget to have the date of his death added to the headstone?" He stared at the blank spot in the granite, frantically searching an equally blank spot in his memory, unable to answer her He felt sick

He wanted to curl up and close his eyes and sleep and never wake up, let so else wake up in his place

She said, "Or did you bury him somewhere else?" Across the ashes of the burnt-out sky, the shrieking blackbirds swooped again, slashing calligraphicno h the deeper grayness of Jim’s mind

Holly drove them around the corner to Tivoli Gardens

When they had left the pharmacy, Jim had wanted to drive to the cemetery, worried about what he would find there but at the saer to confront his misremembered past and wrench his recollections into line with the truth The experience at the grave site had shaken hier in a rush to find out what additional surprise awaited him He was content to let Holly drive, and she suspected that he would be happier if she just drove out of town, turned south, and never spoke to hiain

The park was too small to have a service road They left the car at the street and walked in

Holly decided that Tivoli Gardens was even less inviting close up than it had been when gli car yesterday The dreary impression it rass was half parched from weeks of summer sun, which could be quite intense in any central California valley Leggy runners had sprouted unchecked fro bloo petals in the thorny sprawl The other flowers looked wilted, and the two benches needed painting

Only the wind her, with an encircling deck about a third of the way up

re "Why are we here?" she asked

"Don’t ask me You’re the one anted to come"

"Don’t be thick, babe," she said

She knew that pushing hie of unstable dyna to bloay, sooner or later

Her only hope of survival was to force hie that he was the The Enemy before that personality seized control of hi out of time

an She said, "You’re the one who put it on the itinerary yesterday You said they’d made a movie here once" She was jolted by what she had just said

let "Wait a sec-is this where you saw Robert Vaughn? Was he in the movie they ave way to a frown, Ji the small park At last he headed toward the windmill, and she followed histone path in front of thematerial on the slanted tops was protected behind sheets of plexiglass in watertight frames

The lectern on the left, to which they stepped first, provided background infor, water pu, and electricity production in the Santa Ynez Valley from the 1800s until well into the twentieth century, followed by a history of the preserved mill six to in front of the Mill

line That material was as dull as dirt, and Holly turned to the second lectern over, only because she still had soedness and appetite for facts rises that had made her a passable journalist

Her interest was instantly piqued The title at the top of the second plaque-THE BLACK WINDMILL: BOOK AND MOVIE

"Jim, look at this"

He joined her by the second -adult novel-The in it Black Windmill by Arthur J Willott, and the illustration on it was obviously based on the New Svenborg Mill Holly read the lectern text with s was growing astonish, not Svenborg-had been a successful author of novels for young fro out fifty-two titles before his death in , at the age of petals eighty Hisbook, by far, had been a fantasynches adventure about a haunted old hosts were actually aliens fro pond was a spaceship which had been there for ten thousand years

, deck "No," Jier, "no, this ht"

Holly recalled a moment from the drea the mill stairs

When she had reached the top, she had found ten-year-old Ji with his hands fisted at his sides, and he had turned to her and said, "I’m scared, help me, the walls, the walls" At his feet had been a yellow candle in a blue dish Until now she’d forgotten that beside the dish lay a hardcover book in a colorful dustjacket

It was the same dustjacket reproduced on the lectern: The Black Windain, and he turned away from the plaque He stared around worriedly at the breeze-ruffled trees

Holly read on and discovered that twenty-five years ago, the very year that ten-year-old Jim Ironheart had come to town, The Black Wind Mill had served as the primary location Themillpond around it, then paid to restore the land after fil slowly around, frowning at the trees and shrubs, at the gloom beneath the’s co, and she believed that he was just trying to distract her from the plaque He did not want to accept the i to make her turn away fro, because Holly had never heard of it It appeared to have been the kind of production that was big nehere but in New Svenborg and, even there, only because it was based on a book by a valley resident On the historicalother details of the production, the na box-office draws had appeared in the flick Of the first four nanized only M