“I knew he died young, but I had no idea it was before his movies came out,” Page said.

“The waste,” Tori said. Something in her voice made Page wonder if she was thinking about her own disease. “All the other great movies he might have made.”

“At the time, his fans were convinced that he hadn’t really died in the car crash,” Harriett went on. “They believed he was disfigured, that he hid from the public so he wouldn’t shock people and ruin his legacy.”

She paused, bracing herself for what she wanted to say.

“Deacon was a troubled farm boy from Oklahoma. His mother ran away with the hired hand. His father was as stern and joyless as the father in The Prodigal Son. As a teenager, he rebelled to the point that he was accused of stealing a car and almost went to reform school. A teacher got him interested in acting in high school plays. He loved it so much that he found several part-time jobs, saved a hundred dollars, and hitchhiked to New York City, where he convinced Lee Strasberg to let him audition and was allowed to take classes at the Actors Studio.

“What people tend to forget is that at the beginning of Deacon’s career, he played bit parts in a couple of movies, but he never made an impression. He had secondary roles in a lot of live television plays, and no one paid attention to those, either-deservedly. Even though he studied with Strasberg, he was terrible. Awkward, dull, lifeless. If he hadn’t been so good-looking, he probably would never have been hired.

“Finally he became so discouraged that he gave up and drove his motorcycle across the country. That was in the summer of ’56. By the fall, he was back in New York, where he managed to persuade a casting director to give him a small part in a Broadway play. Suddenly he was acting so brilliantly that a Hollywood talent scout gave him a screen test for a small part in The Prodigal Son. The test was so spectacular that the director asked for a second one and then gave Deacon the starring role. According to the DVD of the movie, that’s one of the great success stories in Hollywood history. What do you sup- pose made the difference?”

Page shrugged. “I guess the motorcycle trip gave him a chance to get focused.”

“Or maybe he had help,” Harriett said.

“Help?”

“That summer, Deacon was on his way from El Paso to Big Bend National Park. That’s southeast of here. He happened to drive into Rostov.”

Tori stepped forward. “He saw the lights?”

“He spent most of August and all of September here. Every night, he drove out to the observation area, which wasn’t even a parking lot back then. And every night, he stayed until dawn. Then he drove back into town and slept in a tent he’d put up in the park. Late afternoons, he went around town and made friends. He was so good-looking, I don’t imagine that was difficult. Then one day he was gone, returning to New York and his big break.”

Page frowned. “You’re saying the lights had something to do with it?”

“They were the only thing that was different in his life,” Harriett replied. “I can imagine him staring at the lights for all those weeks. Night after night. Spellbound. In Deacon’s earlier roles, his eyes are dull. In his last three films, they glow. When he was hired to be one of the stars in Birthright, he told the film’s director about Rostov and how the area around here would be perfect for location shooting. He was so persuasive that the director came out to take a look and instantly decided to build the ranch house-right here.” She gestured at the ruined structure. “Seems awfully coincidental that we’re ten miles from the section of road where Deacon first saw the lights.”

“Did the director see the lights, too?” Page asked.

“No. Local people who worked on the movie remember that Deacon went there every night and dragged Pageant, Rivers, and the director with him several times. They had no idea what he was talking about. The crew members didn’t get it, either, and finally Deacon was the only one who went out there.”

Harriett drew a breath.

“He didn’t need makeup to look older,” she finally said.

Despite the heat, Page felt a cold ripple on his skin. “What do you mean?”

“The director shot the movie in sequence. As Deacon was supposed to look older, he actually did look older. The rumor on the set was that he was drinking and taking drugs every night instead of watching the lights, as he claimed. He began to look so wasted that the director begged him to stop abusing himself. There was talk of shutting down the picture and sending Deacon to a hospital to dry out. But every evening, when the town gathered to watch scenes from a few days earlier, Deacon looked so perfectly in character, so real in the part, that the director kept filming. The makeup people needed to use all their talents to get Pageant and Rivers to look as believably older as Deacon did.”

Standing in the shadow of the ranch house’s ruin, Tori asked, “What made that happen?”

“All I can tell you is that when Deacon finished his last scene and drove away on his motorcycle, people say he looked sixty years old,” Harriett answered. “Five days later, he was killed driving his sports car to a race in northern California near where he’d filmed The Prodigal Son. He was going a hundred miles an hour when a pickup truck pulled onto the road. A witness saw sunlight glinting off the truck’s windshield. The theory was that the glint blinded Deacon and kept him from being able to steer around the truck.”

Page stared at the splintered boards lying on the ground. “Why hasn’t any of this been talked about?”

“Deacon’s death really traumatized everyone associated with the movie. They didn’t claim to understand him, but they respected his brilliance, and they didn’t want to tarnish his legacy by claiming that he was wasted on booze and drugs. They certainly weren’t going to make him sound like a nutcase by mentioning the lights, which no- body believed in anyhow.”

Harriett lapsed into silence. In the hot sun, the only sounds were cattle lowing in the distance and a breeze scraping blades of scrub grass.

“So the lights inspired Deacon, and then he became so obsessed by them that he was destroyed?” Tori asked.

“It depends on what you mean by destroyed. That final performance bordered on greatness,” Harriett answered.

“But the bottom line is, he died,” Tori emphasized.

“It could be that’s what Deacon wanted. Maybe he’d lived so in- tensely during the previous year that he couldn’t bear it any longer.”

“You’re suggesting…?”

“The glint on the windshield of the truck he hit. Maybe he was so burned out that he decided to drive into the light.”

The breeze faded, everything becoming still.

“Yesterday you told us how blessed the people in town feel because they’ve seen the lights,” Page said.

“That was my experience.”

“But not everybody’s experience,” Page added. “Is it possible to have too much of a good thing? In town, I heard a store clerk say that when she was young, she used to go out to see the lights, but now she never does. Yesterday you said you stopped going out to see them, also.”

Harriett looked pointedly at Tori. “When Chief Costigan phoned yesterday to say you were coming to see me, he explained how fixated you are on the lights. I brought you here to try to make you under- stand that, yes, it’s possible to have too much of a good thing.”