Cold Fire

unannounced, he took her upstairs, showed her the guest bath, and got a pair of pajamas and a set of towels for her.
    “Try to be quiet,” he said. “I plan to be sound asleep in five minutes.”
     

----
     
    Luxuriating in the fall of hot water and clouds of steam, Holly was pleased that the shower did not take the edge off her beer buzz. Though she had slept better last night than Ironheart claimed to have, she had not gotten a solid eight hours in the past few days, and she was looking forward to a Corona-induced sleep even on the worn and lumpy sofa.
    At the same time, she was uneasy about the continued fuzziness of her mind. She needed to keep her wits about her. After all, she was in the house of an undeniably strange man who was largely a cipher to her, a walking mystery. She understood little of what was in his heart, which pumped secrets and shadows in greater quantity than blood. For all his coolness toward her, he seemed basically a good man with benign intentions, and it was difficult to believe that he was a threat to her. On the other hand, it was not unusual to see a news story about a berserk mass murderer who—after brutally slaying his friends, family, and coworkers—was described by his astonished neighbors as “a really nice guy.” For all she knew, in spite of his claim to be the avatar of God, by day Jim Ironheart heroically risked his own life to save the lives of strangers—and, by night, tortured kittens with maniacal glee.
    Nevertheless, after she dried off on the clean-smelling, fluffy bath towel, she took another long swallow of her Corona. She decided that a full night of deep and dreamless sleep was worth the risk of being butchered in her bed.
    She put on his pajamas, rolled up the cuffs of the pants and the sleeves.
    Carrying her bottle of Corona, which still contained a swallow or two, she quietly opened the bathroom door and stepped into the second-floor hallway. The house was eerily silent.
    Heading toward the stairs, she passed the open door of the master bedroom and glanced inside. Extension-arm brass reading lamps were mounted on the wall on both sides of the bed, and one of them cast a narrow wedge of amber light on the rumpled sheets. Jim was lying on his back in bed, his arms folded on the two pillows under his head, and he seemed to be awake.
    She hesitated, then stepped into the open doorway. “Thanks,” she said, speaking softly in case he was asleep, “I feel a lot better.”
    “Good for you.”
    Holly entered the room and moved close enough to the bed to see his blue eyes shining in the backsplash of the lamp. The covers were pulled up past his navel, but he was not wearing pajama tops. His chest and arms were lean but well-muscled.
    She said, “Thought you'd be asleep by now.”
    “Want to be, need to be, but I can't shut my mind off.”
    Looking down at him, she said, “Viola Moreno says there's a deep sadness in you.”
    “Been busy, haven't you?”
    She took a small swallow of Corona. One left. She sat down on the edge of the bed. “Do your grandparents still have the farm with the windmill?”
    “They're dead.”
    “I'm sorry.”
    “Grandma died five years ago, Grandpa eight months later—as if he really didn't want to go on without her. They had good, full lives. But I miss them.”
    “You have anybody?”
    “Two cousins in Akron,” he said.
    “You stay in touch?”
    “Haven't seen them in twenty years.”
    She drank the last of the Corona. She put the empty bottle on the nightstand.
    For a few minutes neither of them spoke. The silence was not awkward. Indeed, it was comfortable.
    She got up and went around to the other side of the bed.
    She pulled back the covers, stretched out beside him, and put her head on the other two pillows.
    Apparently, he was not surprised. Neither was she.
    After a while, they held hands, lying side by side, staring at the ceiling.
    She said, “Must've been hard, losing your parents when you were just ten.”
    “Real bad.”
    “What happened to them?”
    He hesitated. “A traffic accident.”
    “And you went to live with your grandparents?”
    “Yeah. The first year was the hardest. I was … in bad shape. I spent a lot of time in the windmill. It was my special place, where I went to play … to be alone.”
    “I wish we'd been kids together,” she said.
    “Why?”
    She thought of Norby, the boy she had pulled from the sarcophagus under the DC-10's overturned seats. “So I could've known you before