Ancient Fire Read Online Free PDF

the old days, sixty or more years ago. Baseball
historians say being a Giants fan is almost as hard as being a fan
of the Cubs or the Indians. But at least they won the series when I
was little.
    Maybe that’s a bad omen, deliberately moving
fifty miles north of such a run of hard luck. Apparently the person
in our family who started Moonglow wrestled a lot with his luck,
too.
    It was some great-uncle of mine, Solomon, I
think — in any case, a brother of my granddad, Silas Sands (and
boy, am I glad my dad broke the “S” chain and didn’t give me a name
like Sam or Sylvester) — who tried to start the winery, with some
money he made way back by investing in a company that made clunky
old desktop computers that you couldn’t even fold up.
    I never met Solomon or my granddad, but when
Dad was a kid, he spent part of a summer working at the winery
before it went bust.
    That’s where the lucky streak started to wind
down; a couple of plant diseases wiped out a lot of the grapes, and
when the fruit recovered, my great-uncle found out nobody wanted to
buy a wine called Moonglow, at least not one with a creepy picture
of a glowing glass of green wine on the label.
    That was my great-uncle again: He thought he
was an artist, and insisted on designing the label himself.
    So the winery sat there, and Solomon had some
kids who grew up and eventually planned to use the land for a
shopping center or something, but never got around to it. Both of
them died, without kids of their own, so Moonglow wound up in my
dad’s hands, and sat there until the time that he needed to escape.
When that tax bill came, reminding him of the winery’s existence, I
heard him laugh. It was the first time he laughed since Mom
vanished.
    The winery itself was kind of falling apart;
the roof had holes, and water was getting inside.
    Our first night there, we just took sleeping
bags out of the car and found a dry spot on the wood floor in what
used to be the tasting room.
    On the morning of the third day, Dad drove to
Sonoma in search of some basic roofing supplies. His idea was that
he and I would fix up Moonglow and wait things out.
    Which things?
    I don’t think he was sure. Life itself,
maybe, so that no more bad stuff could happen to us.
    I don’t know why he thought that would
work.
    By the seventh day, we’d patched up several
holes in the roof and polished the floors. We cleaned up a small
dinette table and some chairs we’d found in an old employees’
lunch- room and made that our kitchen.
    There’d never been many employees — my dad,
that summer, was one of the few — but there was a lunchroom.
    The building sat next to a hill, and there
were caves dug out of the side, which you entered from the winery.
They were made of limestone and were used to store the wine at a
cool temperature.
    By the ninth day, I was really beginning to
think that this wasn’t just a phase my dad was going through, and
maybe I could stay out of school for the whole rest of my life,
since he hadn’t gotten around to even talking about where I might want to go.
    On the tenth day, a package arrived.
    Now, Dad hadn’t told anybody where we were
going — well, nobody but A.J., but I’m not sure if that counted —
but it wasn’t necessarily a huge secret. We weren’t trying to hide.
I mean, I told Andy. And anyway, between stuffing a vidpad into
your pocket and carrying a cell card, it’s not like anyone was hard
to locate.
    But we weren’t going out of our way to let
anyone know where we were headed, either. We just locked up the
house and drove straight out of Jersey.
    And now here we were. Between our drive out
and nailing tarpaper on the roof together, Dad and I were the
closest we’d been since the accident. And then the package
came.
    From Mr. Howe.
    There was no announcement, no preparation. An
unmarked delivery truck just whizzed up our road, and a man stepped
out, tapping a vidpad.
    “You Mr. Sandusky?”
    “I’m Sandusky