Cold Fire

just… I think … I think it was a stroke.” Large parts of the past were mists within a mist. He realized now that he rarely thought about the past. He lived totally in the present. He had never realized there were huge holes in his memories simply because there were so many things he had never before tried to remember.
    “Weren't you your grandfather's nearest relative?” Holly asked.
    “Yes.”
    “Didn't you attend to the details of his funeral?”
    He hesitated, frowning. “I think … yes …”
    “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 something 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 calligraphic messages with their wings, their meaning no more decipherable than the elusive memories darting through the deeper grayness of Jim's mind.
     

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    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 same time eager to confront his misremembered past and wrench his recollections into line with the truth. The experience at the gravesite had shaken him, however, and now he was no longer in a rush to find out what additional surprises 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 him of New Svenborg again.
    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 glimpsed from a moving car yesterday. The dreary impression it made could not be blamed solely on the overcast sky. The grass was half parched from weeks of summer sun, which could be quite intense in any central California valley. Leggy runners had sprouted unchecked from the rose bushes; the few remaining blooms were faded and dropping petals in the thorny sprawl. The other flowers looked wilted, and the two benches needed painting.
    Only the windmill was well maintained. It was a bigger, more imposing mill than the one at the farm, twenty feet higher, with an encircling deck about a third of the way up.
    “Why are we here?” she asked.
    “Don't ask me. You're the one who wanted to come.”
    “Don't be thick, babe,” she said.
    She knew that pushing him was like kicking a package of unstable dynamite, but she had no choice. He was going to blow anyway, sooner or later. Her only hope of survival was to force him to acknowledge that he was The Enemy before that personality seized control of him permanently. She sensed that she was running out of time.
    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. “Wait a sec—is this where you saw Robert Vaughn? Was he in the movie they made here?”
    With a bewildered expression that slowly gave way to a frown, Jim turned in place, surveying the small park. At last he headed toward the windmill, and she followed him.
    Two historical-marker lecterns flanked the flagstone path in front of the mill door. They were all-weather stone stands. The reading material on the slanted tops was protected behind sheets of Plexiglas in watertight frames. The lectern on the left, to which they stepped first, provided background information about the use of windmills for grain milling, water pumping, 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 in front of them, which was called, rather aptly, the New Svenborg Mill.
    That material was as dull as dirt, and Holly turned to the second lectern only because she still had some of the doggedness and appetite for facts that had made her a passable journalist. Her interest was instantly piqued by 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 marker.
    There was a photograph of the jacket of a young-adult novel— The Black Windmill by Arthur J. Willott,