People filled the road, complaining about the tall barricade. Harriett was forced to stop the truck.

“Quit blocking traffic!” Page heard Medrano yell.

Reluctantly the crowd parted.

Harriett drove on, passing the parked cars. Beyond barbed-wire fences, scrub grass stretched in both directions. Five miles later, she steered toward a gate on the left. Page got out, opened the gate, waited for the truck to drive through, then resecured the gate.

They drove along a dirt road. The heat of the day had dried the puddles from the previous night’s storm. Dust rose in small clouds to mark their passing. The rugged grassland extended toward the distant mountains, the vast area so flat and treeless that only the grazing cattle provided variation in the landscape.

Wait, Page thought, peering into the distance. Something’s out there.

He saw a speck at the end of the road. Leaning forward, he tried to identify what it was. As the truck drove nearer, the speck became larger.

“It’s a building,” Tori said, curious.

“Why do I feel like I’ve been here before?” Page frowned, recalling his sense of déjà vu when he’d flown over the cattle and the windmill on his approach to Rostov. He’d also felt it when he’d first driven along the town’s main street.

The building became more identifiable-and more puzzling. It was an impressive three-story ranch house. A covered porch stretched along its wide front. Several chimneys projected from its roofline. A square tower rose on the right corner, ending in a cupola that made the house look like a castle. But as majestic as the place appeared, it had a brooding, gothic quality.

“I’ve seen this house before,” Tori told Page. Abruptly she made the connection. “Birthright.”

“Of course!” Page said. “That’s why everything looked familiar when I flew here. This is the house Captain Medrano was talking about, the one Mullen took the tour to see.”

Page remembered when a restored version of Birthright had been shown in theaters to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. He and Tori had heard so much about the classic film-which had seldom appeared on television-that they’d made a point of seeing it.

“We love that movie,” Tori said.

“Yeah, it really makes an impression,” Harriett replied, the house becoming more distinct as she drove toward it. “People here in Texas sure admired it. They couldn’t stand the novel, which they thought looked down on them, but they felt that the movie showed their strength and determination, not to mention the vastness of the countryside. No fake-looking computer effects in those days. When you saw a hundred thousand head of cattle, every one of them was real. The miles and miles of ranchland. The endless sky. I don’t think a movie has ever looked so big. As big as the state. And the actors matched the bigness of the movie. James Deacon, Veronica Pageant, Buck Rivers. Legends.”

Page stared toward the looming house. Its dark, weathered wood reinforced the feeling of gloom that the structure exuded. Soon the truck was close enough for him to see that some of the boards had fallen, that there were gaps in the wall, that the porch was in danger of collapsing.

“Doesn’t anybody maintain it?” Tori asked in surprise.

“The movie people left it here, and the family that owns the ranch took care of it for a while, but then they got distracted,” Harriett answered. “And anyway, who would they have maintained it for? It’s not as if they wanted tourists tromping over their land and leaving the gates open so their cattle would wander down the road and maybe get hit by a car. By the time the parents died, the children had pretty much forgotten about it. When they finally remembered, it was too late. Now the place is in such bad shape that it can’t be repaired with- out basically being rebuilt.”

She stopped the truck at decaying steps that led up to collapsed boards on the porch. The ornate front door looked as if it was about to topple from its rusted hinges.

Page got out of the truck, his sneakers crunching on pebbly dirt. He helped Tori down and watched Harriett come around to join them. She put on her cowboy hat. The sun was intense enough that Page wished he’d thought to bring a baseball cap. Tori continued to wear hers, concealing most of her red hair.

“In the movie, a lawn was here,” Page said.

“And a curved driveway bordered by flower beds,” Tori added. “A cattle stampede tears it all up. Veronica Pageant and Buck Rivers put it all back together. Then they do it again when there’s a tornado. Then there’s a terrible drought, but somehow they keep building their empire.”

“Texas determination,” Harriett said.

“And James Deacon’s the white trash they humiliate, until he strikes oil and uses his money and power to get even with them. At one point, he drives his battered old truck across the lawn. He’s covered with oil from his first well. He jumps out and punches Rivers.” Page looked around. “But I don’t see any oil wells.”

“Forty miles from here,” Harriett said. “That’s where you’ll find them. One reason the movie was made here is that this isn’t oil country and there weren’t any wells to interfere with the illusion that this is what Texas looked like a hundred years ago, before the oil boom.” She paused. “I said there weren’t computer effects, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t any movie magic. Walk around the house, and you’ll see what I mean.”

Curious, Page and Tori did what Harriett suggested. Stepping around the corner, Page gaped. All he faced was more grassland.

“There isn’t any house,” Tori said in astonishment.

“The only part they built was the front.” Page couldn’t get over his surprise. “In the movie, you feel like you can walk right into the place.”

“Seeing’s believing,” Harriett told them. “But what you see isn’t al- ways what’s real.”

Like the cuttlefish, Page thought. “You’re making a point about the lights?”

“Eye of the beholder,” Harriett answered. “Sometimes we see what we want to see, sometimes what we ought to see, and sometimes what we shouldn’t see.”

“I don’t understand.”

“A lot of people in town were extras in the crowd scenes in Birthright, back when they were kids. Ask around, and you’ll hear all kinds of stories about what it was like to have movie stars walking the streets of Rostov.”

“What does that have to do with the lights?” Tori asked.

“For about three months, the stars lived right here in town. Rostov was even smaller back then, and everything the actors did was pretty much public knowledge, not that any of it was terribly shocking. There was so little to do that the film crew-including the actors- played baseball every Sunday afternoon against a team the townsfolk put together. People invited the actors to barbecues. Every evening, the director put up an outdoor screen and showed everyone the foot- age he’d shot a couple of days before. Did you know that all three of the stars were only twenty-three years old?”

“Twenty-three?” Tori echoed. “But they look like they’re in their forties and fifties for half the film.”

“The director had two choices: hire forty-year-old actors and use makeup so they’d look young in the early parts of the movie, or else hire young actors and use makeup to age them. The fame of Deacon, Pageant, and Rivers made him decide to appeal to a younger audience. The acting and the makeup were so brilliant, they convinced you that what you saw on the screen was real.”

“More illusion,” Page said. “Okay, I get it.”

“That’s not the point I wanted to make, though,” Harriett continued. “Deacon starred in only three movies. First, he played the younger brother in a family that runs a fishing boat in northern California.”

“The Prodigal Son,” Tori said.

Harriett nodded. “Then he made the street-gang movie, Revolt on Thirty-second Street. And finally Birthright. He filmed all three back- to-back, but he died in a car crash before any of them were released. He never had a chance to find out how big a star he was.”