POLLY!
At first he thought the object ahead might be a mirage. But it didn’t shimmer and it grew in appearance as his car approached, so it was definitely real.
It was a large two-story mansion of shiny white stone, with rows of windows on each story reflecting the early afternoon sun. The front porch was shaded by an overhang supported by a row of gleaming white marble pillars, and in front of the house was a rectangular patch of green lawn sharply delineated from the barren desert around it.
He’d driven this road before and didn’t remember seeing anything like this. That had been a few years ago, though, and anything could have happened in the meantime.
The highway ran past the front of the house, about a hundred feet away. The land all around was perfectly flat, devoid of anything o
