So Cold the River

“What do you produce, then?”

“Cleaning products,” she said. “Things for Clorox.” Then she smiled and added, “Well, I suppose that’s got something in common, after all. Cleansers, right? Because the old stuff would clean out your—”

“I got it,” he said. “Okay. Thanks for your time.”

There was an older woman at a desk in the back of the room, and she’d been listening and peering at Eric over her reading glasses. As he turned to go, she spoke up.

“You want to know about folklore, you should look up Anne McKinney.”

He paused at the door. “Is she a historian?”

“No, she’s not. Just a local woman, late eighties but with a mind better than most, and a memory that beats anybody’s. Her father worked for Pluto. She’ll answer every question you could think to ask and plenty more that you couldn’t have.”

“That sounds perfect. Where can I find her?”

“Well, you follow Larry Bird Boulevard—that’s the street we’re on—right on up the hill and keep going out of town, and you’ll find her house. Nice-looking blue house, two stories with a big front porch, bunch of little windmills in the yard, wind chimes all over the porch. Thermometers and barometers, too. Can’t miss that place.”

Eric raised his eyebrows.

“Old Anne’s waiting on a storm,” the gray-haired woman said.

“I see. Think she’ll mind me dropping in, or should I call first?”

“I don’t think she’d mind, but if you don’t want to bother her at home, you could go on by the West Baden Springs Hotel at about two. She goes there for a drink.”

“A drink? Thought you said she was in her late eighties?”

“That’s right,” the gray-haired woman said with a smile.

17

AT NOON THE BAROMETER showed a pressure of 30.20, up a bit from morning. The temperature was at eighty-one but Anne didn’t think it would touch quite so high today as yesterday, what with that light breeze and some cloud cover coming in out of the southwest. Thin white clouds, no storm. Not yet.

She spent the morning on laundry. Was a time when laundry was not an all-morning task, but the washer and dryer were in the basement, and those narrow wooden stairs gave her some trouble now. Oh, she could take them well enough, just a bit slower. That was true of so much these days. Just a bit slower.

She had the laundry done by eleven and then made some iced tea and went out onto the porch with the newspaper. The New York Times, which she’d taken for more years than she could count. It was important to know what was going on in the world, and last time she’d trusted TV was the last day Murrow had been on it.

At noon she got up and checked the temperature and wind direction and speed and the barometric pressure, wrote it all down in her notebook. She had logs going back more than six decades, five readings a day. Make a real interesting record, if anyone cared. She suspected not many would.

Her weather-watching habits had their roots in childhood. And in fear. She’d been petrified of storms when she was a young girl, would hide under her bed or in a closet when the thunder and lightning commenced. It had amused her father—she could still remember his soft, low laugh as he’d come in to fetch her from under the bed—but her mother had decided something needed to be done about it and had found a children’s book about storms, one with illustrations of dark thunderheads, swirling tornadoes, tossing seas. Anne had been seven when she got the book, had the binding split from countless readings by the time she was eight.

“You can’t be scared of them, because being scared of them won’t change a thing,” her mother had said. “Won’t make ’em stop, won’t make you any safer. You respect them and try to understand them. More you understand, less you’ll be afraid.”

So Anne had returned to the book for another reading and started forcing herself to stay at the window when storms blew in, watching the trees bend and the leaves whip through the air as rain lashed the house, drilling off the glass. She went to the library and found more books and kept studying. Had it been a different time, she’d have probably gone up to Purdue and studied meteorology. But that wasn’t how things worked then. She had a sweetheart, got married right out of high school, and then the war was on and he was overseas and she had to get a job, and then he was back and they had children to raise. Children she’d put in the ground already, hardest thing she could imagine anyone bearing, her daughter gone at thirty with cancer, her son at forty-nine with a stroke. No grandchildren left behind.

She was thinking about her son when she first saw the car approaching slowly up the road, remembering the time he’d fallen off this very porch and landed on a flowerpot below, breaking his wrist. Five years old at the time, and he was trying to stand on the rail to impress his sister. Goodness, how that boy had cried. The car came to a stop then and turned in her drive, and her thoughts left the past and she got to her feet. The wind had freshened a touch just as the car pulled in, got the chimes jingling on the porch and lifted some dust off the floorboards. She swept the thing twice a day, but the world never would run out of dust.

The visitor got out, a man with short hair of a color that had gotten confused somewhere between blond and brown. He needed a shave but seemed clean enough.

“Anne McKinney? They gave me your name down in French Lick,” he said, swinging the door shut and walking up the steps when she nodded. “I’m interested in Pluto Water. The old stories, the folklore. Think you’d be willing to talk about it?”

“Oh, I’m willing enough. Day I’m not willing to tell the old tales, you best call the grave digger—if nothing else just so he can hit me in the head with his shovel. Ought to issue a disclaimer before I get to it, though: time I get to storytelling, you best be comfortable. I’ve been known to go on.”

He smiled. It was a nice smile, warm and genuine.

“Ma’am, I’ve got plenty of interest and time.”

“Then come on up here and have a seat.”

He walked up the steps and offered his hand. “Name’s Eric Shaw. I’m down from Chicago.”

“Oh, Chicago. Always loved that city. Haven’t been there in years. I can remember riding the Monon up more than a few times, though. In fact, that’s where my husband and I went on our honeymoon. Spring of ’thirty-nine. I was eighteen years old.”

“When did the Monon stop making that run?”

“Monon stopped making any runs, period, in ’seventy-three.”

Thirty-five years ago. She didn’t consider dates all that much, but she’d just rattled two of them off, and they both sounded impossibly long ago. She remembered the day the Monon made its final run quite well, actually. She and Harold went up to the Greene County trestle and watched it thunder on across, waving good-bye as it went. Hadn’t realized exactly all they’d been waving good-bye to. An era. A world.

“Each of the hotels here had its own train station for years,” she said. “Doesn’t that seem hard to believe now? But here I go—talking away from the topic before we even got started. What was it you wanted to know about Pluto Water?”

He sat down on the chair across from her and pulled out one of those tiny tape recorders and held it up, a question in his eyes.

“Oh, sure, if you actually want to listen to me go on about this a second time, you’re more than welcome to it.”

“Thank you. I was wondering if you could tell me what you’d heard about the… more unusual effects of the water.”

“Unusual?”

“I know that eventually people realized it was nothing more than a laxative, but in the early days the stuff had a reputation that went well beyond that.”

She smiled. “It certainly did. For a time, Pluto Water was reputed to do just about anything short of put a man on the moon. The popular response to your question, of course, would be that as the years passed, people got smarter, learned more about science and health and figured out that all of that had been nothing more than snake oil sales. That the company survived for a time by toning down the claims, advertising it as a laxative, but the world’s finest laxative. Then people saw through that, too, or found a better product, and Pluto Water went the way of a lot of old-fashioned things. Quickly forgotten, and then it disappeared entirely.”

“You said that would be the popular response,” Eric Shaw said. “Are you aware of a different one?”

That got her to grinning again, thinking about what her daddy’s reaction to this man would be if he were still here. Why, he’d be coming up out of his chair by now, taking his pipe from his mouth and waving it around to emphasize his point. All the poor man had ever wanted was an audience for his Pluto Water theories.

“Well, sure, I’ve heard a few,” she said. “My father worked for the company, understand. And the way he told it, the water changed over the years. Originally, they’d just bottle it fresh out of the springs and what you drank was essentially direct from the source. Problem they ran into with that was, the water didn’t keep. They tried putting it into kegs and casks, but it went bad quickly. Unfit to drink. That wasn’t any real dilemma until people realized how much money could be made from shipping the water all over. Then they had to do something about it.”

“Pasteurization?”

“Of a sort. They boiled the water to get rid of some of the gasses that were in it and then added two different kinds of salt that fortified it, allowed it to keep. Once they had that process figured out, they bottled it and shipped it all over the world.”

Eric Shaw nodded but didn’t speak, waiting on more. She liked that. So many people were impatient these days, hurried.

“The company and most of the people involved with it swore up and down that nothing changed in the water during that boiling and salting.”

“Your father disagreed,” he said, and she chuckled.

“He suspected the preservation process changed what the water could do.”

“You didn’t believe him.”

“I’d be willing to believe, maybe, that water fresh from the springs had more effect than the stuff they bottled and shipped. Isn’t that true of most things? You eat a tomato from your own garden, it tastes different than the one you buy from the store.”

“Sure.”

“He also had a notion,” she said, “that your standard-issue Pluto Water was a special thing, capable of startling healing powers, but that there were some springs in the area that went a touch beyond that. This area is filled with mineral springs. Some large, some small, but there’s a lot of them.”

“Did you ever hear rumors that the water caused hallucinations?”

That lifted her eyebrows. She shook her head. “I never heard that, no.”

He looked positively disappointed but was trying to conceal it, nodding his head and rushing out another question.

“What about the temperature? I’ve, uh, I’ve heard that it would stay unusually cold. That there was some sort of… a chemical reaction, I guess, and you could leave the bottles out in a warm room but they’d stay cold, even get a little frost.”

“Well,” Anne said, “I don’t know who you’ve been getting stories from, but they sound like a colorful source. I’ve never heard of anything like that.”

He was silent for a moment, eyes concerned, and seemed to be groping for something.

“But you had the water that had been preserved or fortified, right?” he said eventually.

“Yes.”

“What if it had been fresh water, bottled back before they did that process?”

“That would require the water being from before eighteen ninety-three, I think,” she said. “I really couldn’t say much about that, but I never heard anything about any unusual coldness.”

“What might happen if you drank Pluto Water that hadn’t been preserved?”

“Well, the way I was always told, it simply wasn’t fit for human consumption after much time had passed.”

“And if someone did drink it?”

“If they could actually choke enough of it down,” Anne said, “I do believe it would be fatal.”

That seemed to rock him. He wet his lips and dropped his eyes to the porch floor and looked a little queasy. She frowned, watching him, wondering about all these questions now, about what exactly she had on her hands here.

“You mind my asking what you’re working on?”

“A family history,” he said.

“Someone that worked for Pluto?”

“No, but I’m trying to put as much area history into it as I can. I’ll be making a film, eventually, but today I’m just doing some preliminary work.”

“Who was it filled your head with all those ideas about the water?”

“An old man in Chicago,” he said, and then, before she could respond to that, he asked, “Hey, is there a river around here?”

“A river? Well, not right here in town, no. There’s the creek.”

“I was told about a river.”

“The White River’s not far. And then there’s the Lost River.”

The wind kicked up then, set the chimes to work, a sound Anne would never tire of, and she tilted her head to look past Eric Shaw and out to the yard, where the blades were spinning on the windmills. Spinning pretty good, too, a decent breeze funneling through. Still nothing but sun and white clouds, though, no hint of a storm. Odd for the wind to be picking up like this with no storm…

“The Lost River?”

His question snapped her mind back. It was mildly embarrassing to be caught drifting off like that, but this wind was strange, grabbed her attention.

“Yes, sorry. I was listening to the chimes. It’s called the Lost River because so much of it is underground. More than twenty miles of it, I believe. Shows itself here and there and then disappears again.”

“That’s pretty wild,” Eric Shaw said, and Anne smiled.

“Everything that built these towns came up from underground. I walk into those hotels and just shake my head, because when it comes right down to it, they wouldn’t be there except for a little bit of water that bubbles out of the ground around here. If you don’t think there’s a touch of magic to that, well, I don’t know what to tell you.”

“That’s what Pluto was supposed to represent, right?”

“Right. He’s the Roman version of Hades, which isn’t all that pleasant a connotation to most folks now, but there’s a difference between Hell and the underworld in the myths. My father did some studying on those myths. Way he understood it, Pluto wasn’t the devil. He was the god of riches found in the earth, found underground. That’s why they named the company after him, see? Thing my father always found amusing was that in the myths all Pluto was in charge of, really, was keeping the dead on the banks of the River Styx before they crossed it to be judged. So Pluto was essentially an innkeeper. And what followed the water in this town?”

She waved her hand out across her valley, the springs valley. “Inns. Beautiful, amazing inns.”

She laughed and folded her hands, put them back in her lap. “Daddy probably overthought a lot of these things.”

They were quiet for a time then. Her visitor seemed to have something else on his mind, and she was content to sit and watch the windmills spin, listen to the chimes.

“You said you were around the water a lot,” he said eventually. “Think you could recognize a bottle if I brought one to you? Tell me when it might have been made?”

“I sure could. In fact, I’ve got a bunch of them upstairs, labeled with the years. Might be able to find a match. Where are you staying? French Lick or West Baden?”

“West Baden.”

“I head down there in the afternoon and have myself a little sip. If you have the Pluto bottle, you can just bring it down. I’ll be there in a half hour or so.”

That seemed to please him, but he’d looked unsteady over the last few minutes, a fierce bit of worry clearly going on in his head, and she wondered what it was had him so concerned. Maybe he’d harbored hopes of using a lot of nonsense in his film, hallucinations and eerie cold bottles and such. Well, rare was the storyteller who got trapped by reality. She imagined he’d find his way around it easy enough.

He thanked her and got into his car and drove off down the hill, and she stayed on the porch with her hands folded in her lap. He’d come by and sparked memories on a day when they were already warm. She’d been thinking about her son, Henry, that tumble he’d taken off the porch. Then this Shaw fellow arrived and said he was from Chicago and her mind had jumped right off that porch and onto a passenger train. Harold had let her have the window seat and she’d sat with her hand wrapped in his and her eyes on the rolling countryside, the wheels on the track offering a soothing noise, light and steady, clack-clack-clack-clack. He’d helped her to her feet when the train got to Chicago, pulled her into his arms, and kissed her long and hard, and someone on the train had whistled and she’d blushed red as the Monon car that carried them.

Spring of ’thirty-nine, she’d told Eric Shaw. Spring of? ’thirty-nine.

Now she wanted to chase him down the road, pull him out of his car and shout, Yes, it was the spring of ’thirty-nine but it was also yesterday. It was an hour ago, don’t you understand? It just happened, I just took that ride, just tasted those lips, just heard that whistle.

The train had seemed faster than anything to her that day, dazzling in its speed. There were race cars that went faster than the train, though, and planes that went faster than the cars, and rockets that went faster than the planes, but what still blew them all away was time itself, the days and months and the years, oh yes, the years. They went faster than anything man had the capacity to invent, so fast that for a while they fooled you into thinking they were slow, and was there any crueler trick than that?

The day Henry fell off the porch rail and broke his wrist, she’d scooped him into her arms and carried him up the steps and into the house before calling the doctor, doing it easily, without a thought. Today, though, she’d gone down the stairs one at a time, dragging the laundry basket behind her and clutching the railing.

She got to her feet and went inside in search of her car keys, ready to go to the hotel, a place that time had forgotten for a while and then remembered and returned to her.

18

I DO BELIEVE IT would be fatal.

Shit, what an encouraging statement that had been. Eric was past the casino parking lot and the old Pluto Water plant when his foot went heavy and hard to the brake pedal and a car behind him honked and swerved to avoid a collision. The driver shouted something as he went outside the double-yellow and passed, but Eric didn’t turn. Instead, he pulled slowly to the side of the road and into a parking space, staring out of the driver’s window.

Sitting there on a short rail spur in the middle of town was a white boxcar with a red Pluto devil painted on the side. According to the sign nearby, this was the French Lick Railway Museum, and as far as Eric could tell, it consisted of an old depot and a handful of decrepit train cars. Only one of which had caught his eye today.

He shut the engine off and got out. Might as well have a look. The wind came at him right away, warm and heavy, as he walked over to the station. When he entered, an elderly man wearing an engineer’s cap and bifocals looked up.

“Welcome!”

“Hey,” Eric said. “Yeah, look… I was just wondering…”

“Yes?”

“What’s the story on that Pluto boxcar?”

“Good-looking devil, ain’t it?” the man said and laughed as Eric felt a tide of liberation break through him. This train car was real.

“Sure is,” Eric said. “You know how old it is?”

“Oh, fifty year, maybe. Not one of the originals.”

“Okay. You mind if I take a look?”

“Shoot, no. Go on and climb inside if you’d like, but watch yourself. Them cars are taller than they look. Can fall right out of one. Say, you want to go on the next ride? Got a train runs up the valley, locomotive driven, just like the old days.”

“Locomotive driven,” Eric echoed. “They happen to run that in the evenings?”

“I’m sorry, no. Daytime only. Next ride in forty minutes. You want a ticket?”

“I don’t think so. Don’t really like trains.”

The old man looked at him as if Eric had just called his daughter easy.

“I’ve had some bad experiences with them recently, that’s all,” Eric said. “Thanks a lot.”

He closed the door and went back out into the heat and over to the Pluto car. The door was shoved most of the way shut and barely moved when he pushed on it. The size of the thing was impressive—they never looked that big from behind the wheel of a car. Had to be twelve feet tall, and the steel couplers on either side looked invincible, as if you could bang on them all day with a sledge and never do a bit of damage.

There was a ladder on either end of the car, as well as a few iron rungs on the front. He reached out and wrapped his fist around one of those, leaned on it, and that was when he saw the splotches. Glistening stains on the crushed stone beneath the car.

Water marks.

While he watched, another drop of water fell onto the stone, and he saw that it was coming from inside the car rather than from underneath it. When he stared through the door, though, there was nothing but old, dry dirt on the floor.

He tightened his grip around the rung of the ladder and hoisted himself up, swinging his left foot up and over the side. Hung there for a minute, peering into the shadowed interior, and then slid through.

The boxcar was heavy with trapped heat, the air smelling of rust. The car seemed far larger on the inside than on the outside, the opposite end lost in darkness. The rippled steel walls seemed to drink in the light, holding it all to the thin shaft in the center.

The floor beneath his feet was dry, but he could hear water now, a gentle sloshing sound. He took a hesitant step forward, out of the light, and felt cold moisture seep through his shoes and socks and find his skin.

He bent down and reached with his hand, dipped his fingertips into the water. About an inch deep, frigid.

Another step toward the sloshing sound, which had an even, constant beat. Water covered the floor throughout the dark portions of the boxcar, and he wanted to move back to the dry boards and the square of sunlight but kept shuffling forward into the darkness despite himself.

He was ten feet from the door and still moving when the silhouette took shape.

It was all the way at the back of the car, lost to the darkness except for the distinctive outline of a bowler hat.

Eric stopped where he was, the water like a winter creek on his feet, and stared down the remaining length of the boxcar, watching the silhouette take starker shape, first the shoulders and then the torso. The man was sitting in the water with his back against the wall and his knees drawn up, and he was tapping a slow, steady beat with the toe of his right shoe, slapping it into the water, which rose almost to his ankles.

“An elegy,” he said, “is a song for the dead.”

Eric couldn’t speak. It wasn’t just from fear or astonishment but from an almost physical thing, a limit he didn’t understand and couldn’t do anything about. He was a spectator in this car. Here to watch. To listen.

“I can barely hear it,” the man said. His voice was a sandpaper whisper. “What about you?”

The violin music was back, soft as a breeze, as if it couldn’t penetrate the walls of the boxcar.

“Been waiting a long time to get home,” the man said. “Longer ride than I’d have liked.”

Eric couldn’t make out his face, couldn’t see anything but the form of him.

“People ’round here seem to have forgotten it,” the man said, “but this is my valley. Was once. Will be again.”

His voice seemed to be gathering strength, and the features of his suit were now showing, along with his nose and mouth and shadowed eye sockets.

“Ain’t but a trace of my blood left,” he said, “but that’s enough. That’s enough.”

The man dropped his hands into the water then, two soft splashes, and pushed off the floor. His silhouette rippled as he stood, like a water reflection pushed by wind, and something that had been unhooked in Eric’s brain suddenly connected again and he knew that he had to move.

He turned and stumbled back for the streak of sun that represented the door, slid on the wet floor but righted himself, and then banged off the wall, groping with his hands. He got out of the water and onto dry floorboards and then had his hand around the edge of the door, shoved his shoulder through and lunged into the light.

His feet caught and he was free but falling, landing on his ass in the dirt and stone.

“Now, what did I tell you!” someone shouted, and Eric looked up to see the old man in the engineer’s cap standing just outside the depot, shaking his head. “I said watch your step coming out of there!”

Eric didn’t answer, just got to his feet and brushed the dirt from his jeans as he moved away from the train car. He took a few steps before turning to look back at it. After a few seconds he walked all the way back and dropped to one knee below the door.

The water marks were gone. The stones were pale and dry under the sun.

“You ain’t hurt, are you?” the old man yelled, and Eric ignored him again and took hold of the edge of the big cargo door, leaned his shoulder into it, and grunted and got it moving. He slid it all the way back as the old man yelled at him to go easy on the equipment, then stepped aside and looked in.

The sun caught the corners now, and there was nothing in sight, neither man nor water. He leaned in and stared into the far end, stared at the emptiness. Then he bent and picked up a small stone and tossed it inside, listened to it skitter off the dry floor.

The wind picked up and blew hard at his back then, swirling dust around the old boxcar. There was a high, giddy whistling as it filled the car, as if it had been working on the door for a long time and was delighted to find someone had finally opened it the rest of the way.

19

HE CALLED ALYSSA BRADFORD from the car, sitting with the air-conditioning blasting and the vents angled so the cold air blew directly into his face. The old man from the railway museum was leaning against the door frame, watching him with a frown.

“Alyssa, I did have a few follow-up questions I forgot to ask,” Eric said when she answered. “The bottle of water you gave me…. Can you tell me anything about it at all?”

She was quiet for a moment. Then said, “Not really. That’s why I wanted you—”

“I understand what you wanted. But I need a little help. It’s the only thing you brought me that first day. The only artifact of any sort you gave me. No photos, no scrapbook, just that bottle. I guess I’m wondering why you thought it was so special.”

He was staring at the Pluto boxcar, at the grinning red devil.

“It’s strange,” she said eventually. “Don’t you think it’s strange? The way it stays cold, the way it… I don’t know, feels. There’s something off about it. And it is the only thing—and I mean the only thing—that he had from childhood. My husband told me that he kept it in a locked drawer in his bedside table, and said the bottle was a souvenir from his childhood and that no one was allowed to touch it. As you can see, it meant a lot to him for some reason. That’s why I’m so curious.”

“Yes,” Eric said. “I’m curious, too.”

“When I talked to you at Eve’s memorial service,” she said, “and I saw how you intuited the importance of that photograph, I knew I wanted to give you the bottle. I thought you might see something, feel something.”

That damn photograph was why she had hired him, why she’d sent him here. He could have guessed it from the start but instead he’d chosen to believe her hollow assertions of being impressed by the film. Claire wouldn’t have been fooled.

“I think I need to talk to your husband,” he said.

“What? Why?”

“Because he’s the one who’s actually related to the guy, Alyssa. It’s his family, and I need to ask him what the hell he really knows about his father. What he’s heard, what he thinks. I need to ask—”

“Eric, the entire point of this film was that it would be a surprise for my husband and his family.”

I don’t care were the words that rose in his throat, but he needed to keep any touch of hysteria down, and he was close to shouting now, close to telling her that something was very deeply wrong with Campbell Bradford, and once he got started on that, it’d be rolling downhill faster than he could control, stories of phantom trains and whispering ghosts coming out, and then his reputation in Chicago would be crushed just as completely as the one he’d had in Hollywood.

“I’d like to ask you to rethink that,” he said. “I believe I’m going to need to find out a little more from him to make any progress.”

“I’ll consider it,” she said in a tone of voice that made it clear she would not. “But I’m heading out right now and I’m afraid I have to let you go.”

“One more thing, Alyssa.”

“Yes?”

“Is there any chance your father-in-law played the violin?”

“Yes, he played beautifully. Self-taught, too. I take it you’re having some luck finding out about him, after all.”

Eric said, “I’m learning some things, yes.”

“Well, I’m amazed you learned that, because he hated to play in front of people.”

“Really.”

“Yes. As far as I know, he would only play when he was alone, with the door closed. Said he had stage fright and didn’t like to be watched when he played. But he could play beautifully. And there was a quality to it… maybe it was because of the fact that I never saw him play and only heard it, but there was something about the sound that was absolutely haunting.”

He drove back to the hotel then, leaving the Acura beneath one of the few trees in the parking lot for shade and avoiding the bright light of the rotunda, sticking to the perimeter hallway. The headache was showing itself again but not yet at full strength, a scout party sent ahead of the battalion.

The first thing he saw when he opened the door to his hotel room was the shattered camera on the floor. The cleaning people had been in here, but they’d left the camera on the floor, clearly unsure of what the hell to do with what was obviously expensive equipment, even if destroyed.

He’d never even wanted to use that damn camera, a gift that felt like a taunt from his father-in-law, a reminder that the days when he’d used first-rate studio equipment were long gone. A reminder of his failure.

“Claire tells me you’re going to be doing something on your own,” Paul Porter had said. “Thought this would help.”

He’d emphasized the something, two unspoken questions—what and when?—clear in the word. And Eric had to thank him with false gratitude and put on a show of marveling at the camera, Claire standing beside him, watching it all with a smile.

She’d been on his ass for months, prodding him along when all he needed was some patience, and if she thought he missed the connection between all that and her father’s gift, she was crazy. Ever since they’d left L.A. she’d been after him for his plans, and though he’d satisfied her with them at first—write a script himself, get some financial backing, direct his own indie film and use that as a springboard back to the big time—it wasn’t long before she was dissatisfied with his efforts.

His efforts. In truth that wasn’t the best phrase, maybe. He hadn’t done all that much. Had not, for example, directed the film or sought financing or even written the script. Started the script, for that matter. It wasn’t something you could rush right into, though, you had to have the right idea first, and it was going to need to be a big idea, with the right scope and ambition, and then you had to let it gestate for a time…

Yes, he’d been slow. Or totally stagnant. And gradually the gentle prodding turned to full-on accusations and demands and then things were spiraling down fast and deadly. They’d had one terrible blowup when she happened into a bar and grill downtown for lunch with a friend and found him camped out there with three whiskeys already gone, this at noon. It had been a sighting that led to an unfair conversation later that night, a conversation that quickly turned angry, and when Eric stormed out of the house with a string of expletives and an upended coffee table in his wake, he’d done so with an expectation of returning in a few hours. He’d ended up in a hotel room instead, though, refusing to give her the satisfaction of surrender and one night in the hotel quickly turned to ten and then he was looking for an apartment.

The bullshit “career” he was involved with now had been as much a guilt trip as anything. He’d wanted to find something so pathetic she had to feel the weight of it. Instead, she’d just told him how glad she was to hear he was working again. Oh, and she was happy to know he could make use of her father’s camera.

“Made good use of it, Paulie,” he said and let the door to the hotel room swing shut as he got down on his hands and knees and began cleaning up the mess.

It was no good to be without a video camera, not with these circumstances, when he needed something to tell him what the hell had been real and what hadn’t. He still had the micro-recorder, though. He took that out when he had the camera cleaned up and played a few minutes of his talk with Anne McKinney, enough to verify that everything on the tape progressed as he’d experienced it. He was still listening to it when his phone rang, and he turned off the recorder and looked at the phone, hoping for Claire but instead finding a number he didn’t recognize.

“Eric? It’s Kellen. I got in touch with Edgar Hastings, the old guy who knew Campbell’s family, and he’s willing to see you. Should be able to straighten out this confusion.”

“Great.”

“I’m actually up in Bloomington right now, seeing my girl. Was going to stay overnight, but if I head on back down we can go together.”

“You don’t need to do that.”

“No, it’s cool. She’d just as soon throw me out anyhow.”

Eric could hear a laugh in the background, a sweet female sound that cut him.

“That’s your decision, Kellen. I’m not going anywhere.”

“I’ll give you a call when I get down there.”

Eric hung up. The clock told him almost an hour had passed since he left Anne McKinney, which meant she’d probably be at the bar by now. He took a deep breath and picked up the bottle, felt its cold wetness against his skin.

“Okay,” he said. “Routine sanity check coming right up.”

She was in an armchair not far from the bar, with a short glass of ice and clear liquid in her hand, a lime perched on the rim. She’d added jewelry since he left her porch, two bracelets and a necklace, and her blouse was different. She’d gotten dressed up to head into town and have her cocktail, evidently. He was hardly into the atrium before she lifted a hand and waved. Good eyes. Eric’s own mother was twenty years younger and wouldn’t have noticed him from this far away if he’d been riding in on a camel.

The bottle sweated more once it was in his hand, and as he crossed the atrium, a few drops of water fell from it and slid down his wrist and dripped onto the rug beneath.

Anne’s eyes were already fixed on the bottle as he pulled up a chair, and she set her drink on the table and said, “Well, let’s have a look.”

He passed her the bottle, and when she took it, her eyes first widened and then narrowed as she frowned, and she shifted it quickly from one hand to the other. A streak of moisture glistened on her wrinkled palm.

“You’ve been keeping it in ice?” she said, and Eric felt an explosion of relief, almost sagged with it.

“No,” he said. “That’s just how it is.”

She stared at him. “What?”

“That bottle hasn’t been anywhere other than the desk in the room since I got here. Before that, it was in my briefcase in the car. It hasn’t been near a refrigerator, a freezer, or an ice bucket.”

“Are you having me on? I don’t understand the trick.”

“It’s no trick, Mrs. McKinney. This is why I asked about the cold. I thought it was very strange.”

She was studying his face, looking for some sign that he was the sort of asshole who’d get a kick out of playing a game with an old woman’s mind. Apparently she found none, because she gave an almost imperceptible nod and then dropped her eyes and looked at the bottle again, rolling it over in her hands.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” she said, her voice soft. “Or heard of it. Even Daddy never said anything like this, and he was full of stories about Pluto Water.”

“Could it be so old that it never went through that boiling and salting?”

She shook her head. “No. This bottle isn’t anywhere near that old.”

She used her thumb to wipe some of the frosty condensation clear, then traced the etching of Pluto at the base.

“This one couldn’t be any earlier than ’twenty-six or ’twenty-seven. I’ll double-check, of course, but this color and this design… no, this would have to be from the late twenties. I’ve got a dozen like it. They made millions of them.”

He didn’t say anything, just watched her turn that bottle over again and again.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” she repeated, and then, without looking up at him, said, “You drank some of it, didn’t you.”

“Yes.”

She nodded. “I thought maybe you had. You seemed so worried about what it would do. Looks like you’ve had a good deal of it, too.”

Yes, by now he’d had at least two-thirds of the bottle.

“I think there’s something else in here,” she said. “That colored look, the sediment, that shouldn’t be there.”

“Go ahead and open it,” he said, “and tell me if it smells like Pluto Water to you.”

She opened it and held it to her nose and shook her head almost immediately.

“That’s not Pluto Water. It would smell—”

“Terrible,” he said. “Sulfuric.”

“Yes.”

“That’s how it smelled when I opened it originally. Since then—”

“It’s almost sweet.”

“Yes,” he said, again feeling that relief, this old woman confirming now with multiple senses what he’d feared was a trick of his mind.

“You asked about hallucinations,” she said, speaking carefully and gently.

“I think I’ve had a few, all since tasting it.”

“What do you see?”

“It’s varied, but I imagined a conversation with a man in Chicago, and then I got down here and thought I saw an old steam train…”

“That’s the kind they run for the tourists.”

“It wasn’t that train,” he said. “It was the Monon, the same one you talked about, and it came out of a storm cloud of pure black, and there was a man in a hat hanging out of a boxcar filled with water…”

He spit all this out in a breath, hearing the lunacy in it but watching her eyes and seeing no judgment.

“And I’ve had headaches,” he said, “awful headaches that go away quickly when I have another taste.”

She looked down at the bottle. “Well, I wouldn’t try any more of it.”

“I don’t intend to.”

She fastened the cap again and then passed him the bottle. He didn’t really want it back in his hands; it was nice to see somebody else handling it. He set it on the table beside her drink, and they both eyed it with a mix of wonder and distrust.

“I just don’t know what to think,” she said.

“Nor do I,” Eric said. Then he reached into his pocket and withdrew the microrecorder, rewound it without comment, and pressed play. Their voices came back, discussing the water, repeating all of those things that had just been said. He played about thirty seconds of tape, then shut it off and put the recorder back in his pocket. Anne McKinney was watching him with both knowing and astonished eyes.

“That’s why you’re taping everything. You want to be sure you’re not imagining it. You want to be sure it’s real.”

He managed a weak smile and a nod.

“Son,” she said, “you must be scared to death.”

20

DANNY CAME BY IN midafternoon, and Josiah was feeling fine, having spent the day sanding and painting the porch rails, with a beer or three for company. Funny, too, because those porch rails had needed paint for years, and he’d never gotten around to it. He’d bought the paint damn near a year ago, figured on tackling the job the next day, but the next day got away from him and soon the paint cans were covered with dust and cobwebs and the porch rails looked worse than ever.

Today, though, he got to the job simply because he needed something to busy himself with. It was a fine day, warm and filled with promise, one that called for doing something beyond sitting on your ass. Most weekends, Josiah was more than content to sit on his ass; he spent Monday through Friday working for other people, figured he’d earned himself a couple days of doing jack shit. Something was different today, though, in his mind and in his body, as if that evening wind that blew up while he slept on the porch had carried some sort of energy right through his skin. Mark it on your calendars, folks—as of May 3, Josiah Bradford was no longer content to bide his time.

It was a shame to involve somebody like Danny Hastings in such a plan as this, but fact was, there were some things you couldn’t do alone. Some things called for a bit of help, and though Danny wasn’t ideal in a lot of ways, he was loyal to a fault. They’d been brought up near as family, though they weren’t blood-related, and Josiah had spent much of his childhood kicking the shit out of Danny and then watching the little freckled bastard come ambling along for more, like a dog that doesn’t know how to stop loving its master regardless of the whip. Danny was fire tested by now.

When Danny arrived in his Oldsmobile Cutlass with the mismatched door, Josiah was pacing the porch with paintbrush in hand, looking for places that needed a touch-up and not finding any. He’d done a thorough job. The house—if it could be called that—was a one-bedroom, cracked-slab-on-sloping-grade shit pile that Josiah never could figure why he’d purchased. It had been a bank repo, bought for a song but still overpriced, and there wasn’t a thing desirable about it except for the fact that it was located within a sprint-car race of what had once been Bradford property. There had been a good-size parcel in Bradford hands once, and generation by generation, it got sold off in bits and pieces to keep the bill collectors at bay, pissed away until there wasn’t anything left at all. Why he wanted to be close to those memories he didn’t know, but somehow he’d found himself drawn back here.

“Hell,” Danny said, walking up beside Josiah, cigarette dangling from his lips, “I was close to certain you wasn’t never going to get that painted. What got into you?”

“Boredom,” Josiah said. There was something about the porch rails that offered him a surprising amount of satisfaction, his work shining clean and white and stark under the sun. It had the shine of achievement.

“Looks nice, though.”

“Don’t it?”

“Better’n you anyhow. That black boy poked you good, didn’t he? Your eye looks like hell.”

“It was a bullshit sucker punch,” Josiah said and walked away. He went to the spigot that hung loose from the foundation—he’d been meaning to mortar it back in for years—and, turning on the water, put the brush under the stream and massaged it with his fingers, watching the white paint wash away from the bristles and waiting on his anger to do the same. Last thing he wanted to hear about was his damn eye.

“I got a funny story,” Danny began, but Josiah lifted a hand to shut him up, not enough patience in him to listen to Danny carry on about some bullshit or another.

“You hear what I asked you earlier?” Josiah said.

“About making some money?”

“That’s the one.”

“I heard it, yeah.”

“And you’d like to be in on that.”

“You was to twist my arm enough, I’m sure I’d agree to it.”

“Even if it was the sort of thing could get you in a piece of trouble if you were dumb enough to get caught.”

Danny’s florid face went grave and he took the cigarette from between his lips and tossed it down in the weed-riddled gravel drive, smashed it out with his boots. Wasn’t like he could be shocked by the suggestion—he and Josiah had done some law breaking in their time—but he didn’t look thrilled by it either.

“I hope you ain’t talking about cooking crank,” he said.

“Hell, no.”

That seemed to put Danny’s mind at ease. He’d had a buddy, a guy they all called Tommy Thunder for no reason Josiah could ever recall, who blew up his trailer and killed himself while attempting to fine-tune a batch of meth. Danny, who’d sampled the drug as a user and mover prior to that occasion, had steered clear of it since. Only took one explosion to get his attention.

“All right. Good. But what is it you’re thinkin’ of?”

Josiah went up the porch and into the kitchen, came back out with two Keystones and handed one to Danny and cracked the other open for himself.

“You ever lift your head up when you’re pulling weeds down at that damn hotel?” he asked. Danny also worked on the grounds crew; he had, in fact, gotten Josiah the job.

“Every day,” Danny said cautiously. He hadn’t opened his beer yet.

“You noticed any signs up lately?”

“Always signs up.”

“Uh-huh. I’m talking ’bout one in particular. List of things going on down there, conventions and tours and shit.”

“I know it.”

“You noticed what convention’s heading in next month?”

Danny shook his head.

“Gemstones,” Josiah said. “Gonna have an exhibit down in the lobby, cases of diamonds and rubies and shit. A pile of stones worth millions, Danny. Millions.”

Danny’s face went sour and he took a few steps to the side, started to lean on the railing, then remembered it was wet and stopped himself.

“A thing like that comes rolling into your town,” Josiah said, “you’d be fool not to capitalize on it.”

“You got to be kidding,” Danny said.

“Kidding hell. We’re going to get those stones. Won’t be all that hard either. See, the way I got it figured, a fire clears that building out, and fast. With all the liabilities and shit they got to consider? Man, first flame goes up, that place empties out.”

“Josiah… you don’t think them guys who own the stones have thought of that?”

“They can think of it all they want, point is they can’t stop it. You have any idea the sort of scene you’d have down there with a fire going? They call that chaos, son, and you know what happens during chaos? Shit gets lost.”

“You think they’re not going to notice—”

“’Course they’re going to notice, numb nuts, what I’m saying is by the time they do, it’ll be too late. We get a fire going, get the building empty and the sprinklers on and then hit those cases fast and get out. You don’t got to worry about alarms because there’ll already be a thousand going off, a few more ain’t gonna mean a damn thing.”

“All them stones is, like, registered or whatever,” Danny said. “You can’t sell them. Where we gonna sell them? Go on up to the pawnshop and sell stones like that?”

“We won’t sell them here.”

“Well, I know that, but where do you think we’re going to do it? We could go all the way across the country—”

“Won’t sell them in this country,” Josiah said, voice soft, and that brought Danny up, his version of a thoughtful expression coming on.

“I’m getting out,” Josiah said. “You can come or not, it ain’t my concern. But I am getting out of this place.”

“It’s a dumb idea,” Danny said, and the audacity of that blew Josiah away. Danny Hastings calling him dumb? He should’ve swung on him, knocked the red hair right off the top of his head. He didn’t, though. Instead he just stood there and stared. Something was odd about what Danny had just said, and it took a minute but then Josiah figured out what the odd quality was—Danny had been right. It was a dumb idea.

Dumb, but not impossible. And Josiah Bradford was just about ready to take those odds, like one of the fools who went down to the casino on Friday night knowing they’d get cleaned out but not giving a shit. Worse came to worst, they’d remember Josiah in this town. They’d damn sure do that.

“It can be done,” he said, but there wasn’t much vigor in his voice. “If you don’t have the balls, all right. But don’t you tell me it can’t be done.”

Danny was quiet. After a time he opened his beer and then they drank in silence for a while, standing there awkwardly because they couldn’t lean on the rail. Josiah went over and sat on one of the chairs and Danny followed and took the other.

“Story I had to tell you is that I spoke to my grandpa today. He said a man’s in town asking about old Campbell.”

Josiah frowned and lowered his beer. “That same son of a bitch I told you about?”

“The black kid? No. Said there’s another one now. This one is doing some kind of movie. Black kid is helping him.”

“A movie about Campbell?”

This was some kind of strange. Josiah’s great-grandfather had been the subject of plenty of old Edgar’s rants over the years, but who in the hell would want to make a movie about him?

“Edgar’s addled,” he said. “A movie?”

“What he told me,” Danny said, “was that some guy was down from Chicago working on a movie and wanted to ask about Campbell today.”

“Well, I don’t know why anybody would want to waste their time on him. Campbell left a lot of nothing behind, and I’m still living off that today.”

Danny said, “Well, that’s what I was wondering. If what this guy told Grandpa is true, and he’s making a movie about somebody in your family, don’t he owe you something?”

It was a fine question. A fine question. What right did strangers have to go wandering around asking about Josiah’s own blood? Let alone turn a profit from it?

“You said these guys are headed down to see Edgar today?”

“That’s right. I was going to go down there myself, make sure they wasn’t running some sort of scam like the ones you hear about with older folks, but you’d told me to come by…”

Josiah finished his beer, crushed the can, and tossed it aside.

“We’ll take my truck.”

21

ERIC LEFT ANNE IN the rotunda when Kellen called to say he was nearing the hotel, took the bottle back to his room, and then went outside to wait. He was feeling better after having the elderly woman confirm all of the things he’d seen in the bottle.

Kellen pulled up outside the hotel in his Cayenne with the windows down and hip-hop music thumping from the speakers, old stuff, Gang Starr that had probably come out when Eric was in high school and Kellen was, what, seven? Eric had to suppress a smile as he got inside the car. A midthirties white guy like him sitting in a Porsche listening to rap—ah, this was almost like being back in L.A.

“You feeling all right?” Kellen asked when Eric climbed in.

“Yeah. Why?”

“Look pale.”

“I’m white.”

“Knew there was something funny about you.” Kellen pulled away from the hotel. He was wearing jeans and a shiny white T-shirt made from one of those fabrics that were supposed to wick moisture, along with sunglasses and a silver watch.

“Are you close to your brother?” Eric asked, looking around the Porsche and thinking about the source of it.

“Oh, yeah. We talk about three, four times a week.”

Eric nodded.

“You’re wondering if it’s hard,” Kellen said. “Being his brother. Being the unfamous one.”

“No, I wasn’t,” Eric lied.

“Man, everybody wonders. It’s cool, don’t worry about it.”

Eric waited.

“I love my brother,” Kellen said. “I’m proud of him.” The fierceness in his voice seemed directed at himself, not Eric. “But the truth? No, it’s not easy. Of course not.”

“I wouldn’t think so.”

“I was supposed to be a professional basketball player. That was my destiny. I was certain of it. By the time I was in eighth grade, I was six four, and I was an athlete, you know? In AAU ball I had coaches coming to see me from the ACC, Big Ten, Big East, all of ’em. This at fourteen.

“I was a great student, too, reading books all the time. But you want to know why? This is the truth, man, I swear it—I was working on my image for when I joined the league. The NBA. I was going to be a paradox, you know, the professional athlete who was also a scholar. I had this plan for it, how in press conferences I was going to make comparisons between ball games and battles, coaches and generals, referees and diplomats. I would actually plan the interviews in my head, no lie. I would hear them, man, hear what these announcers would be saying about me, hear it like it was real.”

Eric looked away, feeling embarrassment not for Kellen, but for himself. Kellen was describing a child’s fantasy. He was also describing Eric’s twenties. And, hell, most of his early thirties, when mythical movie reviewers had raved constantly about films he would now never make. Was just a matter of time, he’d known, until the fantasies became the facts. He’d been sure of that.

“When you’re real young, all the coaches care about are tools,” Kellen said. “And, brother, I had them. Size, speed, strength. Didn’t have the feel for the game that some of the other kids had, but that comes with time, right? Well, it didn’t come for me. Ever. I was hearing the word focus so much it should’ve been my name, but I just couldn’t get into the flow the way I needed, could never lose myself in the rhythm of it. By high school, when other kids caught up in size, that was showing.”

They were driving out through the hills south of the hotel now, winding country roads.

“My brother feels that game,” Kellen said. “When he plays it, there isn’t anything else there. Nothing. He sees it all before it happens; even as a kid he was like that. He’d come down the lane on a fast break, go right to left, then somebody would step out to cut him off, and he’d see it just before they committed, and then dish… he was slick. No question. But he was a kid, too, and scrawny as hell. So it was no big deal.”

Eric was silent, waiting.

“My junior year of high school,” Kellen said, “I had a game in front of some major coaches. And I just butchered it. Scored thirteen and had eight rebounds but damn near double figures in turnovers, too. They had this small, fast team that ran a press the whole time and just rattled the hell out of me. I couldn’t handle it. Each time I’d make a decision on what to do with the ball, it was a half second too late. Just a disaster.

“So that’s on a Friday night, and the next afternoon I go with my parents to watch my brother’s eighth-grade game. And Darnell, he just ran on ’em. That’s all. Not a soul on that court could even imagine playing at his level. He drove anytime he felt like it, got shots anytime he wanted them, made passes when he didn’t, stole the ball from the other team like they’d left the doors unlocked and ladders at the windows. It was filthy. I went out on the court after the game and I congratulated him, but it was stiff.”

He ran a palm over the back of his head, leaned forward, close to the steering wheel.

“That night, he’s sitting in the living room watching TV, and I walked in and changed the channel without saying a word. He got pissed, naturally, and I just went after him. Tackled his ass over the couch and hit him and had my hands around his throat when my dad came in and dragged me off.”

He gave a small, wry smile. “My father, he is not a small man. He took me out in the yard, and he just whipped my ass. Knocked me up one side and down the other and then kept coming, and the whole time he’s doing it, he’s saying, Who you mad at? Who you mad at? Over and over in this real soft voice, Who you mad at? Because he’d been at my game and then at my brother’s, you know, and he understood what was going on. He understood it better than I did.”

“Did you end up playing college ball?” Eric said.

“No. I had scholarship offers to small D-1 schools, but nowhere elite, and if I couldn’t play at that level, I didn’t want to play at all. Some people would call that quitting. I call it understanding. Because I never quit playing, I busted my ass right up until the last second of my high school career. But basketball, it was not my game. And I came to understand that. I had this real high grade point average, which was supposed to be like a complement to my game, right? Well, that changed. I refocused. Got an academic scholarship and then a degree and then a master’s, and now I’m closing in on the doctorate. I am good at what I do, right? But it’s not playing ball. That’s not quitting, though. That’s changing. That’s growth.”

“Good thing you’re a likable guy,” Eric said. “Because if there’s anything more obnoxious than a wise old man, it’s a wise young one.”

“Man, it just sounds good ’cause I’ve had a lot of time to think on it,” Kellen said with a laugh, and then he hit the brakes and twisted the wheel, taking a hard turn off the road and down onto a rutted gravel drive. “Damn. Almost missed it.”

This was a far sight different from visiting Anne McKinney. Instead of the well-kept two-story home on the hill surrounded by windmills and weather vanes, there was a small house with warped and peeling siding and a front gutter that hung about a foot off the roof at one end. An old aerial antenna was mounted at the peak of the roof, tilting unnaturally and covered with rust. There was a trailer set on stone blocks no more than thirty feet from the house and only one gravel drive and one mailbox.

“You know which it is?” Eric said.

“He told me to come to the house.”

Kellen parked in front of the trailer and they got out and closed the car doors. When they did, a dog with long golden fur rose from the tall weeds that grew alongside the block foundation. Eric tensed, thinking this was the sort of place where bite might precede bark, but then he saw the dog’s tail wagging and he lowered his hand and snapped his fingers. The dog walked over with the stiff gait of arthritic hips and smelled Eric’s hand, then shoved its muzzle against his leg, the tail picking up speed.

“You make friends fast,” Kellen said.

It was a mutt, some blend of golden retriever and shepherd probably, and was friendly as hell. Eric scratched its ears for a few seconds before moving on to the house, the dog following at his side like they’d been together forever. Only the screen door was closed, and when they got there, Kellen called out a loud hello instead of knocking.

“It’s open,” someone on the other side said.

Kellen pulled the screen door back and the dog immediately started through. Eric made a grab at its neck but found no collar, and then the thing was inside the house, nails clicking on the old wood floor.

“What in hell you go and let him in here for?” the voice inside shouted. “He’ll wreck this place faster than a hurricane.”

“Sorry,” Kellen said, and then he stepped inside and Eric followed, seeing Edgar Hastings for the first time, an angular-faced, white-haired man in a blue flannel shirt, sitting in a chair in the corner of the room. The TV was on but the volume was off. He had a pack of cigarettes in the pocket of the flannel shirt, and a crossword puzzle on his lap. One word had been filled in. There were a half dozen juice glasses on the end tables around him, all of them partially filled with what looked like Coke that had gone flat.

“I’ll get him out of here for you,” Kellen said. The dog was off in the kitchen now, regarding them from behind the table, and something about his expression told Eric those arthritic hips were going to get a hell of a lot looser when the dog wanted to avoid being caught and put out of the house.

“Oh, don’t worry about Riley. I’ll get him out in time. Go on and sit on the davenport there.”

Davenport. There was a term Eric hadn’t heard in a while. He and Kellen sat on the couch Edgar had indicated, a spring popping beneath Kellen, and Riley, as if aware that the threat of imminent eviction had passed, came back over and dropped to his haunches at Eric’s feet.

“Nice dog,” Eric said.

“My grandson’s, not mine. He lives in the trailer.” Edgar was regarding Eric with a harsh squint, skeptical. His face was spider-webbed with wrinkles, even his lips, and whiskers were scattered on his chin. “Now tell me why in tarnation you want to know about Campbell Bradford?”

“Well, Eric here is interested in someone of the same name,” Kellen said, “but we’re not sure if it can be the same person. His Campbell is still alive.”

The old man shook his head. “Not the right man, then. He’d have to be long dead. Who sent you down here to ask about him?”

“A woman in Chicago,” Eric said. “She’s a relative of Campbell’s, but the one she knows is ninety-five now.”

“Different man,” Edgar said flatly. “Should’ve made a phone call.”

“Well, my Campbell says he grew up in this town. Left when he was a teenager.”

“He’s lying,” Edgar said.

“You claim to know everyone in the town?”

“I know everyone has the name Bradford, and I absolutely know everyone has the name Campbell Bradford! Hell, anybody from my time would. Wasn’t never but one Campbell Bradford in this valley, so if somebody’s telling you otherwise, they’re lying. Why in hell they would want to do that, though, I have no idea. He wasn’t the sort of man you’d want to pretend to be. Campbell went beyond bad.”

“Excuse me?”

“He was worthless as worthless gets, ran around with every gambler and crook ever came to town, didn’t pay any mind to his family at all. Used to keep a hotel room just for fornicating, drank all hours of the day, never met a truth he wouldn’t rather turn into a lie. When he ran off, he left his wife without a cent, and then she died and my parents had to take in the child. Those days, that’s what folks would do. My parents was Christian people and they believed that’s what they ought do, so that’s what they done.”

He offered the last part like a challenge.

“He doesn’t sound impressive, I’ll grant you that,” Eric said.

“Campbell even went beyond all that,” Edgar answered. “Like I told you, that man went beyond bad. There was the devil in him.”

“You’re telling me he was evil?”

“You say that like it’s funny, but it ain’t. Yes, he was evil. He was, sure as I’m sitting here. It’s been damn near eighty years since the man left. I was a boy. But I remember him like I remember my own wife, God rest her. He put the chill in your heart. My parents saw it; hell, everybody saw it. The man was evil. Came to town in the middle of the high times, started in with the gamblers and the whiskey runners, made the sort of money doesn’t come from honest work.”

Eric felt an unpleasant throb in his skull, the headache level jumping on him.

“You told me Campbell didn’t have any family left but Josiah,” Kellen said.

“That’s right. Josiah is Campbell’s great-grandson, last true member of Campbell’s line that there is, least as far as anyone around here knows. I’m as good as a grandfather to him myself, I suppose, though there’s plenty days when I wouldn’t want to claim that. Josiah’s got him a streak of difficult.”

Kellen hid a laugh by coughing into his fist, looking at Eric with amusement.

“I mean, we was all like family, you know, even though I’m not blood relation to that side,” Edgar Hastings said. “Josiah’s mother, she called me Uncle Ed, and I thought of her as a niece. We was close, too. We was awful close.”

The room seemed smaller to Eric now, as if the walls had sneaked in on him during a blink, and he was more aware of the heat, felt perspiration worming from his pores and sliding along his skin. How in the hell could Edgar Hastings possibly wear a flannel shirt in here? He took his hand away from the dog’s head and got a whine in response, one that sounded less like a complaint and more like a question.

“Like I told you, I just don’t know who’d want to bother with a man like that in some sort of movie,” Edgar said. “Not that I think most movies are worth anything anyhow, I got that TV set on from sunrise to sunup and don’t never find anything a normal person would want to watch.”

That one seemed to amuse Kellen again, but the smile left his face when Edgar flicked his eyes over, and Kellen said, “Um, so there’s just no way the Campbell who left this town could still be alive up in Chicago?”

“No. He left in fall of ’twenty-nine, and he was in his thirties then.”

Eric said, “Could it be he had another son after he left? Gave the son his name?”

“Hell, anything’s possible after he left.”

“And is there any chance that he came back to town, or brought his son back…?”

“None.” Edgar gave an emphatic shake of his head.

“You met the man personally,” Eric said. “Correct?”

“Yes. I was only a boy when he left, but I remember him, and I remember being scared to death of him. He’d come by and smile and talk to me, and there was something in that man’s eyes like to turn your stomach.”

“You told me he was involved with bootlegging,” Kellen said.

“Oh, sure. Campbell was supposed to provide the best liquor in the valley, and the valley was waist-deep in liquor during Prohibition. My father didn’t drink much, but he said Campbell’s whiskey made a man feel like he could take on the world.”

“They still make booze that will do that,” Eric said with a grin that Edgar wouldn’t match.

“I’ve seen liquor turn good men sour,” he said. “I used to have a glass or two, but truth is, I stayed away from it much as I could. It takes things from a man. You look at my grandson, he’s thirty year old and can’t even get off my property. Good boy, means well, but he lets the liquor take him. Wasn’t for me, who knows where he’d be now, though. My wife had the best luck with him but she passed nine years ago.”

“So he was a bootlegger,” Eric said. “Illegal, yes, but not evil. I don’t see—”

“Campbell saw to it that the law in town stayed bought off to certain enterprises,” Edgar said. “All the sorts that he was involved in. When they didn’t, they died. Was a deputy in town back then who was a cousin of my father. Good man. He wanted to investigate Campbell for killing a man had tried to run out on some debts. Wanted to charge him, thought he had the evidence. Told people in town he was going to nail Campbell to the wall. It’s a turn of phrase, you know. Figure of speech.”

Nobody spoke when Edgar paused, staring at Eric with flat eyes.

“They found that deputy nailed to his own barn wall. Literally. Had ten-penny nails through his palms, wrists, and neck. One through his privates.”

The dog whined again at Eric’s feet. Kellen said, “Did anyone try to arrest Campbell for that one?”

Edgar gave a small, sad smile. “I don’t believe so. Matter of fact, I believe it made things a little easier on Campbell. Those who had thoughts of crossing him, well, maybe they changed their minds.”

At that moment, there came the sounds of an engine and tires plowing through gravel, and Eric and Kellen twisted to face the window as the dog barked and stood.

It was an old Ford Ranger, two men inside. Came to a stop just behind Kellen’s Porsche and then the doors banged open and the men stepped out. A shorter, redheaded guy from the passenger side, and from the driver’s side a lean, dark-haired…

“Oh, shit,” Eric said. The driver was Josiah Bradford.

“Who is it?” Edgar said, pushing up from his chair and peering out the window. “Oh, hell, it’s just my grandson and Josiah. You might as well meet Josiah. Like I said, he’s the last of Campbell’s line.”

“We’ve met him,” Kellen said softly, and he stayed on the couch while Eric stood and went to the door.

22

ERIC WATCHED THROUGH THE screen door as the redheaded man walked to the porch and Josiah Bradford hung back, standing in the driveway staring at the Porsche. He was still studying it when his companion came through the screen door without a knock. Edgar Hastings’s grandson entered with his chest puffed out, swaggering in bold and tough, like a cowboy crashing through saloon doors, but the sight of Eric standing so close to the door gave him an awkward moment of hesitation, one that Edgar filled by saying, “Damn it, Danny, show some manners.”

The redhead looked at his grandfather, then back at Eric, and grudgingly put out his hand.

“Danny Hastings,” he said.

When Josiah Bradford left the Porsche he moved quickly, up the steps and across the porch and through the door in a flurry. The door banged off the wall and his eyes found Eric’s and then went to Kellen on the couch. Kellen gave him a little wave and a wriggle of the eyebrows, Groucho Marx if Groucho had been six foot six and black.

“Edgar, these sons of bitches are asking about my family?” Josiah said.

Danny still had his hand out, and Eric shook it, said, “Good to meet you. I’m Eric Shaw.”

Danny pulled his hand back like it had touched hot coals, then stepped away hurriedly and looked to Josiah for guidance. Josiah stood in the doorway with his feet spread wide. Kellen still hadn’t moved from the couch. Now he leaned back against the cushion, stretched, and laced his fingers behind his head, watching them with a lack of interest, as if the scene were unfolding on the TV instead of five feet away.

“You know them?” Edgar asked Josiah. Then to Eric, “Thought you was from Chicago?”

“I am,” Eric said. “Just got in yesterday. Haven’t been here for twenty-four hours yet, but it was long enough to meet Josiah and have him take a swing at me.”

“I believe we encountered that difficult streak you spoke of,” Kellen told Edgar.

“I’d have beat the shit out of you last night and I’ll do the same today,” Josiah said as he stepped into the living room. The dog hurried away into the kitchen and placed himself behind the table and chairs. Evidently Riley was acquainted with Josiah.

Josiah pulled up with his face a few inches from Eric’s. “Who are you, and what business is it of yours to come into my town asking about my family?”

Eric was looking into the other man’s weathered face, burnt by the sun and seasoned by the wind. The skin beneath his right eye was swollen and discolored, streaked with purple and black, a souvenir of Kellen’s left hand. Eric found himself staring at it, something about the color of the bruise reminding him of the storm cloud he’d seen coming with the train. Above the injury Josiah Bradford’s eyes were a dark liquid brown that seemed familiar. Campbell’s eyes? No. Eric had just seen Campbell on the tape that morning, remembered well that his eyes were blue. But he’d seen these eyes, too. They were the eyes of the man on the train, the man who’d played the piano.

“I asked you a question, dickhead,” Josiah said.

“I’ve been hired to do a video history,” Eric said, not wanting to stare at Josiah Bradford’s eyes any longer but unable to stop himself. “My client wanted me to find out about Campbell Bradford. I didn’t know a damn thing about you, your family, or anybody else here until I got down here yesterday. Sure as shit didn’t expect to have you acting like an idiot the first night I got in town, begging for a fight.”

The longer Eric looked into Josiah’s eyes, the worse his headache became. It had swelled into a pain so intense and so demanding that even the conflict of this moment couldn’t distract him from it, and he turned away from him and sucked air in through his mouth, wincing and lifting his hand involuntarily to the back of his head.

“You been fighting again?” Edgar said. “Josiah, I swear you’re a lost cause.”

“They was looking for trouble, Edgar.”

“Bullshit.”

“Ah, he was only joking around with us yesterday,” Kellen said. “Say, Edgar, you ever hear the one about the nigger in the fur coat?”

Josiah lifted his arm and pointed at Kellen. “You watch your ass.”

“You watch yours,” Edgar shouted. “I won’t have this carrying on in my house.”

Josiah dropped his arm, ignoring the old man, and looked back at Eric. “I want to know why you’re down here asking about my family.”

“I already told you,” Eric said, and he had to speak with his head turned sideways. He didn’t like that body language; it suggested he was intimidated, but he also couldn’t stand to look him in the eye, because when he did, the pain flared worse.

“You didn’t tell me shit. Working on a movie, my ass. Where’s the cameras?”

That made a smile creep over Eric’s face.

“You think it’s funny lying to me? I’ll whip your ass right here.”

“Like hell you will,” Edgar said, and over by the door his grandson said, “Ease up, Josiah,” in a voice that was near a whisper.

“Where’s the cameras?” Josiah repeated.

“I had a little equipment malfunction this morning.”

“I don’t believe you.”

Eric shrugged.

“Who’s making the movie?” Josiah said. “And why?”

“I have no interest in answering that question,” Eric said, and this time he got his head lifted and looked Josiah Bradford in the face, taking care to stare at the center of his nose and avoid a direct look into those liquid brown eyes.

“Well, boy, I’m about to give you the interest,” Josiah said, stepping up and bumping his chest against Eric’s. Eric held his ground as Edgar shouted at Josiah to back off and Danny Hastings shifted uneasily at the door. Kellen stretched his legs out and put his feet up on the coffee table and yawned.

“You got no right to be asking about my family,” Josiah said, breath warm and reeking of beer. “You got questions? Then you’ll pay for the answers. I got a financial right to anything you do that so much as mentions my family.”

“No,” Eric said, “you do not. Perhaps you’ve never heard the word biography. I wouldn’t be surprised. Even if I want to make a movie about you, asshole, I’m legally entitled. The good news is, nobody in the world would be interested in seeing it. So rest assured, that won’t be happening. Meantime, if you threaten me again or harass my friend or pull any more of your pathetic, childish shit, I’ll have your ass thrown in jail.”

“It’s been there before,” Edgar said from his chair. “Going to have to say something different than that to convince him.”

“Shut up, Edgar,” Josiah said, his eyes still on Eric.

“Hey,” Danny Hastings said. “No call for that.”

Eric said, “Thanks for your time, Edgar. You were a help.”

He walked past Danny, then turned back when he had his hand on the door and watched Kellen get to his feet slowly, letting his full size unfold and fill the room.

“Get out,” Josiah said.

Kellen smiled at him. Then he leaned across the coffee table and offered his hand to Edgar Hastings, passed very close to Josiah without touching him or looking at him, nodded at Danny, and joined Eric at the door. Eric pushed it open and they stepped outside. They were halfway to the car when Josiah followed to yell a parting line.

“You better forget you ever heard the name Campbell Bradford,” he shouted. “All right? You better forget you ever heard his name.”

Neither of them responded. Eric kept his eyes on the mirror as Kellen started the Porsche and backed around the pickup truck, but Josiah stayed on the porch.

“Well, that sure was fun,” Kellen said as he backed out of the drive. “Made the trip down from Bloomington worth it.”

“Sorry.”

“No, no, I’m serious. I’d have driven an extra hour to see that. You get a look at his eye?” He laughed. “Ah, that made my day. You notice he seemed a little less brave today? No punches, no jokes.”

“I noticed.”

“Yeah, well, black eye can do that.”

There was a blue minivan pulled off on the side of the road not far from the house, and Kellen came dangerously close to sideswiping it, flying along at least twenty miles an hour over the limit.

Kellen looked over at Eric, eyes hidden by the sunglasses. “You mind my asking you something?”

“Go ahead.”

“Seeing as how your Campbell doesn’t seem to have existed in this town… have you stopped to consider that he might be a liar? Might have been pretending to be somebody else for his whole life?”

“Yeah.”

“In which case, he’s successful, rich, and has a family,” Kellen said, “but he assumed the identity of an asshole from a small town in another state. Why in the hell would anyone do that?”

“I think that,” Eric said, “is about to become a really important question. I got one other thing I could throw at you, too, but my guess is after you hear it, you’ll probably want to kick me out of your car.”

Kellen tilted his head, confused. “What?”

“It’s going to sound crazy, man.”

“I can dig crazy.”

“See the thing is… I’ve seen Josiah’s great-grandfather before. I’ve seen that Campbell. I’m almost sure of it. And he’s not the same guy as the one I met in Chicago.”

“Then, where did you see him?”

“In a vision,” Eric said, and Kellen pursed his lips and gave a slow, thoughtful nod—Oh, sure, in a vision, of course.

“You don’t have to believe that,” Eric said, “but before you make any judgments, I’ve got a bottle of water I’d like to show you.”

23

AT FIVE THE BAROMETER dropped a bit and the western sky began to fill with tendrils of clouds. They were cirrus, rode very high in the atmosphere, twenty, thirty, even forty thousand feet. The name was a Latin term for a lock of hair, and that’s exactly what they looked like today, fine wisps of white up there against a backdrop of cobalt blue.

They seemed almost stationary, trapped near the western horizon, but Anne knew that in reality they were moving along just fine. Problem was, they were so high that their speed didn’t show itself. They were serene clouds, looked still and peaceful, but they heralded a change, too. High cirrus clouds like that signaled a pending deterioration in the weather and stronger winds on the way. There was even an expression for it—See in the sky the painter’s brush, the winds around you soon will rush. Interesting thing about today’s clouds was that the wind was already rushing. Had been since yesterday. So if this meant something stronger was on the way…

She logged the changes in her notebook and then went inside and prepared a vegetable soup. The weather changes didn’t hold her mind as they normally would. Her thoughts were on the strange man from Chicago, Eric Shaw, and that bizarre bottle of Pluto Water. She’d never seen anything like it. So cold. And the man himself, well, he was scared. That much had been obvious.

She’d heard plenty of folklore about Pluto Water, but even the wildest tales had always claimed it to be a cure, not a curse. She couldn’t remember a single story about visions or premonitions. The town had its share of ghost stories, sure, but none connected to Pluto Water. She believed Shaw, though, believed at least that the visions hadn’t come until he’d tasted the water. And she wasn’t all that surprised.

This valley, her home for so many years, so many decades, was a strange place. It was a spot touched by magic, of that she was certain, but ill winds often followed the favorable ones here, ebbing flows of wealth and poverty, glory and tragedy. Everything about the valley seemed in a permanent state of flux unlike any other place she’d known. She had some ideas on it, too, but they weren’t the sort you told people about. No, ideas like that would get you laughed at mighty quick.

She put the soup on the stove and then left the kitchen and faced the stairs that had stood for weeks without supporting so much as a footstep. Well, time to go up. She used the railing and went slowly and tried not to think about a fall, got to the top, and then walked into one of the empty bedrooms, the one that had once been home to her daughter, Alice, and pulled open the closet door. A stack of cardboard boxes faced her, musty and dust-covered and taped shut. A few years ago she’d have remembered which box held the bottles, but it had been a long time since she’d opened them and now she had no idea. Nothing to do but start at the top then. They were heavier than she’d expected, the sort of thing she had no business trying to move by herself, but she knew all the contents were carefully wrapped and would hold up to a little jostling. She dragged the first one off the top until it started to fall and then got her foot out of the way just in time. It hit the floor with a loud thump, dust rising. She got her sewing scissors and set to work on the tape.

The bottles didn’t turn up until she’d reached the third box from the top, and by the time she got that one open, her joints were screaming and she felt exhausted and didn’t think she’d even be able to eat the soup, wanting only to get off her feet and shut her eyes. Then she got the tape off the third box and her spirits lifted, success bringing some energy back. There were nearly thirty different bottles in the box, all protected by the Bubble Wrap and labeled with a date. It took her only a few minutes to find a match for the one Eric Shaw had shown her. There was a piece of masking tape stretched across the wrapping, the year 1929 written on it. She’d been right.

She unwrapped the bottle and held it in her hand. It felt cool, but naturally so, the way glass was supposed to feel. Inside, the water was a little cloudy, but not so grainy and discolored as what she’d seen in Eric Shaw’s bottle.

She left the boxes on the floor. It was one thing to tug them down, another to lift them back up. With the bottle in hand she went back downstairs, checked on the soup, and then called the West Baden Springs Hotel and asked to be put through to Eric Shaw’s room. The phone rang several times, and then she got a machine.

“This is Anne McKinney. I have an idea…. I’m not sure if it’ll be any help, but I don’t see where it could do any harm either. I found a bottle that’s the twin of yours. Only one I have from that year, and it’s still full. Never been opened. I’ll let you take it. My idea was that you could find a place to test the water. I don’t know who’d be able to do it, but surely there’s a laboratory somewhere that can. They could analyze both of them, and tell you what the difference is. There’s something in your Pluto Water that’s not in mine. It might be a help to you if you knew what that was.”

She left her number, hung up the phone, and went out to the porch. Her back throbbed when she pushed open the door. Outside the windmills were turning fast and steady, and the cluster of cirrus clouds that had stood in the western horizon at her last check were now directly overhead. The air was fragrant with the smell of rhododendrons and the honeysuckle that grew along the side of the house. An absolutely gorgeous day, but still that wind blew, and those clouds, they were warnings.

24

KELLEN CAGE SAT IN the desk chair and stared at the green bottle, touched it gently with his fingertips, and then pulled them back and studied the traces of frost as they melted away, leaving a wet shimmer on his dark skin. Eric had told him all of it by now, and Kellen hadn’t said much yet. He’d held Eric’s eye contact throughout, though, and that was promising. One thing Eric had taken away from years of gradually deteriorating meetings with studio execs—when people questioned your judgment or believed you flat-out crazy, they began to find other places to look during a conversation.

“I can believe this shit would give you hallucinations,” Kellen said. “What I can’t believe is that you ever drank it in the first place. Looks nasty to me.”

“It was,” Eric said. “The first time, at least. The second time, it was fine. And that last time, this morning? Stuff was good.”

Kellen took his hand off the bottle and scooted the chair back a few inches.

“Whole time we been talking, it just gets colder and colder.”

“Uh-huh.”

Kellen eyed the bottle distrustfully. “Good news is, maybe the visions will go away if you don’t take any more of it.”

That was probably true, but while the hallucinations were terrifying in their vividness, the other side of the coin was marked by what he’d come to think of as withdrawal symptoms, the headache and vertigo and dizziness. His head was throbbing as badly as it had all day, and even while Kellen sat there and told him how repulsive the Pluto Water looked, Eric found himself wanting another sip. Just something to take the edge off the blade that was turning slowly in his skull, a blade that seemed to have found its way to a whetstone in the past half hour. Withdrawal, indeed—he craved that infamous hair of the dog.

“Likely your mind is just spinning out from whatever’s in the water,” Kellen said.

“I’m telling you,” Eric said, “that guy in the train, his eyes were a perfect match for Josiah Bradford’s.”

“I believe it. But you’d already seen Josiah’s eyes. Got an intense look at them last night. So they were already in your brain, something for your mind to fool around with when the water took you on a trip.”

Possible, but Eric wasn’t convinced. That man on the train had been Campbell Bradford. He was sure of that in the same way that he’d been sure they had the wrong valley on that film about the Nez Perce, and in the same way he’d been sure of the importance of that photograph of the red cottage in Eve Harrelson’s collection.

The phone on the desk began to ring. Kellen looked at him questioningly, but Eric shook his head. Let it go to voice mail. Right now he didn’t want an interruption.

“I guess if it’s more than a drug effect, you’ll know soon,” Kellen said.

“What do you mean?”

“If it’s a drug effect that gives you straight-up hallucinations, then they’ll stay random, right? You’ll start seeing dragons on the ceiling next. But if it’s something else, if you’re seeing… ghosts or something, well, it’ll be more of the same guy, right?”

More of the same guy. Eric remembered him in the boxcar, saw that water splashing around his ankles and the bowler hat he’d tipped in Eric’s direction. No, he did not want to see more of that guy.

“I’m having visions,” he said, “not seeing ghosts. Maybe that shit sounds one and the same to you, but it’s not. Trust me.”

Kellen leaned back, one shoe braced against the edge of the desk. Looked like about a size sixteen. “You know what got me interested in this place to begin with?”

Eric shook his head.

“My great-grandfather was a porter at this hotel back in the glory days. He died when I was eleven, but until then his favorite thing to do was tell stories about his time down here. He talked about Shadrach Hunter a lot. Had a theory that Campbell Bradford murdered the man, like I said earlier, and that it was over a dispute concerning the whiskey Campbell ran through this town. He talked about the casinos and the baseball teams and the famous folks who came down. All those stories about what it was like to be a black man in this town in those times are what gave me my original interest. But those weren’t the only tales he told.”

Eric said, “Don’t give me ghost stories.”

“Don’t know if you could call them ghost stories, really. The man did believe in spirits, though—he called them haints—and he thought there were plenty of them down here. An unusual number, according to him. And they weren’t all bad. He thought there was a mix of both, and that there were a lot of them here. What he told me was that there was a supernatural charge in this valley.”

“A charge?”

“That’s right, just like electricity. Way he explained it to me was to think of it as a battery. He said every place holds a memory of the dead. It’s just stronger in some than in others. A normal house, according to old Everett”—there was a smile on Kellen’s lips but his eyes were serious—“was nothing more than a double-A battery, maybe. But some places, he said, it’s more like they’ve got a generator going, working overtime.”

“This hotel is one of those places?”

Kellen shook his head. “Not the hotel. The whole valley. He thought there was more supernatural energy in this place than anywhere else he’d ever been.”

“That a place would hold a memory of the dead, I could believe,” Eric said. “Hell, I have to believe it, with the experiences I’ve had. But the idea of a ghost, of anything that can actually affect things in the world, I cannot buy.”

“This valley is a strange place in a lot of ways.”

“So it is. But there’s strange, and then there’s the idea of active ghosts. You don’t believe in the latter, do you?”

Kellen smiled. “I’m going to quote old Everett on this one, brother. ‘I ain’t a superstitious man, but I know better than to walk through a graveyard after dark.’”

Eric laughed. “It’s a good line.”

They looked at each other in silence for a while, as if neither one really knew how to redirect the conversation now that ghosts had become a focal point of it. At length, Kellen nodded at the phone, which was now blinking red.

“You got a message.”

Eric picked up the phone and played the message. Anne McKinney. He was listening with half attention at first, but then her words clarified and he focused. What the old lady was suggesting was a hell of an idea, actually. He wrote her number on the pad beside the desk, deleted the message, and turned back to Kellen.

“Remember the woman I told you about who came by to see the bottle? She’s got a match. Same bottle style, same year, never opened.”

“Let me guess,” Kellen said. “It ain’t covered in frost.”

“No. But her idea was that I could take that water and mine somewhere to have them compared. Chemically.”

Kellen tilted his head and pursed his lips in a way Eric was beginning to recognize as one of his habits and nodded slowly. “That could be worth trying. And I might be able to help. Well, my girl might. She was a chemistry grad student at IU, spent the last semester studying for the MCATs. If there’s somebody local who can run an analysis on it, she might know who.”

“Fantastic,” Eric said, and though this suggestion of Anne McKinney’s was a small thing, it felt bigger, because it gave him some kind of action to take. Because it gave him some sense—or some illusion, maybe—of control.

“You might not have the need for it, running on ghost-water the way you are, but I could stand to get a meal,” Kellen said.

“Actually, I need to eat. Haven’t had a damn thing all day. But do you care if I run up to get the bottle from this woman first? I’d like to have it.”

“Nah, man, I’ll drive.”

Eric called Anne McKinney back, thanked her for the offer, and said they’d be by to pick the bottle up. She told him that was fine, but she sounded different than she had that afternoon. Less spark. Tired.

The sun was low and obscured by the hills west of the hotel as they came outside and walked to the parking lot. There was a blue minivan beside Kellen’s Porsche. Eric didn’t pay it any mind until the driver’s door opened and a man in a sweat-stained polo shirt stepped out and said, “Slow down, Mr. Shaw. I’d like to have a word.”

The driver was a short but well-muscled guy of about forty, bald except for razor-thin sidewalls of dark hair above his ears. He stood ramrod straight and with his shoulders back, a military bearing. Cold blue eyes, a BlackBerry in a leather case clipped onto his belt.

“Should I know who you are?” Eric said, coming to a stop as Kellen walked on to his Porsche and leaned against the hood, watching them, curious. He had his sunglasses on, and when the stranger glanced in his direction, Eric could see his reflection on the golden lenses.

“Mr. Cage,” the guy said, nodding.

“Wow,” Kellen said, “he knows everybody.”

“Just need to take a minute of your time if I could.”

“Then you better tell us who you are,” Eric said.

The bald man took out a business card and passed it to Eric. Gavin Murray, Corporate Crisis Solutions, it said. Three phone numbers and a Chicago street address.

“I don’t have a corporation,” Eric said, “or a crisis.”

He moved toward Kellen’s car and when he did, Gavin Murray held up a hand, palm out, and said, “You may be headed toward a crisis, though, and I’d like to help you avert that. We should have a quick talk about what you’re doing for Alyssa Bradford.”

Eric stopped short and looked back at him, got a cool stare in response. Kellen slid his sunglasses off and clipped them to the neck of his shirt and looked at Eric with raised eyebrows.

“Like I said, he knows everybody.”

“I do, Mr. Cage. I’m awfully quick when it comes to getting to know people. Congratulations on your brother’s success, by the way. Hell of a ballplayer. And your father-in-law, Mr. Shaw, why, he’s sold a lot of books, hasn’t he? Oh, I know you’re separated from Claire, but until the divorce is final, he’s still your father-in-law.”

He gave them an empty smile. “Now, how about that talk?”

“All right,” Eric said, reaching up to squeeze the back of his neck, the headache seeming to be lodged there now, driven toward his spine. “Let’s hear it.”

“Good. But much as I’ve enjoyed meeting Mr. Cage, this is a private discussion. So if he’ll wait for you for a few minutes, let’s take a walk down there to the gardens.”

Eric hesitated, but Kellen said, “Go on, man. This boy’s got a pretty clear plan. Hate to get in his way.”

“Appreciate that,” Gavin Murray said, and then he turned and walked away from the cars, leaving Eric to follow.

25

I WASN’T PLANNING ON grabbing you in the parking lot like that,” Gavin Murray said as they walked away from Kellen. “Was going to go into the hotel and ask them to send you down, but before I had a chance, you walked out. Figured now was as good a time as later.”

Eric said, “I’m guessing Alyssa didn’t send you.”

“No.”

“Who, then?”

“I can’t answer that question,” Murray said. “I’m in a confidential business.”

“And what business is that?”

“CCS is an investigations and solutions firm. Think of us as troubleshooters.”

“Traveled all the way down here from Chicago instead of making a phone call. This must be some trouble you’re shooting.”

“We like to conduct business in person. The discussion I need to have with you is important, and it’s actually to your benefit.”

“Is that your opinion or your client’s?”

“Both, in this case.”

Eric was silent. They were walking into the gardens now, toward the fountain.

“I understand that you’re down here working on a video history,” Murray said. “Sounds like an interesting line of work. Must be fun. But this isn’t the project for you.”

“No?”

“No.”

“I think that could stand some clarification. Like who sent you.”

“I’m really not at liberty to disclose that. I’m sure you understand.”

“Sure,” Eric said. “You’re doing your job. Respecting your client’s wishes, fulfilling their requests.”

“Exactly.”

Eric stopped walking. They were beside the fountain now, and a strong wind pushed fine drops of spray across his skin.

“Well, that’s what I’m doing, too,” he said. “And it’s what I’ll keep doing, Gavin, old buddy. I’ve been paid, and I’ll complete the job.”

Gavin Murray didn’t look up at him. He took a pack of American Spirits from his pocket and pulled one out, pausing to offer the pack to Eric, then sliding them back in his pocket when Eric shook his head. He lit the cigarette, took a deep drag, and exhaled smoke through his nose, gazing back up at the hotel.

“How much is she paying you?”

“That’s both irrelevant and none of your business.”

“I’ve been authorized to give you fifty thousand dollars to cease the endeavor.”

“Hell,” Eric said, “that’s less than I’m making on it.”

A lie, of course, but he was curious just how much this was worth to whoever was at the other end of Gavin Murray’s puppet strings. Fifty grand was a hell of a starting point, one that put a prickle in his spine.

Murray smiled around his cigarette. “A negotiator. Well played. I can go as high as seventy-five while we stand here. You can ask for more than that, but you probably won’t get it, and you know seventy-five is more than you could hope for.”

“I’m not going to ask for more than that, and I don’t hope for any of it. Go on home, Gavin. Sorry you wasted the trip.”

“Give the self-righteous thing a rest, Shaw. I’m surprised at this. You were in the movie business for long enough that you should know how rare a sure-money offer is, and how fast they can go away.”

“They go away fast,” Eric agreed. “But you know what never does? Cocksuckers who try to use money as muscle. There seems to be an inexhaustible supply. Shit, L.A. alone has more than I ever cared to meet. But I met a lot of them, enough to get awfully tired of the act. So go on and call your client, tell him to roll his seventy-five or a hundred or two hundred grand up nice and tight and put it right up his ass.”

He started away but Murray followed, saying, “You’re too smart for this. You know how business works at this level. Money’s a first attempt, and other leverage is found if it’s needed.”

Eric stopped walking and turned to face him. “What does that mean?”

Murray tapped ash out of his cigarette. “It’s not a complex statement.”

“It sure as hell better be. Because if it’s as simple as it sounded, then you just threatened me, asshole.”

Murray sighed and brought the cigarette back to his lips. “Guys like you are exhausting, you know that? There’s no reason in the world—none—for you to be a stubborn bastard on this, but you still can’t stop yourself.”

“Must be nice to have a bank ledger where your ethics should be, Gavin. You’ll probably go on to big things. Most people like that do.”

“It would be a great idea to negotiate, Mr. Shaw. I can assure you of that.”

“Negotiate with who? You offer me money, I damn well want to know where it’s coming from.” Eric studied him. “So which family member do you work for?”

“Excuse me?”

“The only person who’d be worried about what I’m doing would be somebody close to Campbell Bradford back in Chicago.”

Gavin Murray smiled. “You would think that, wouldn’t you?”

Eric waited but nothing else was offered. He said, “I’m done with you, Gavin. And tell whoever hired you that they can find me directly if they want to talk.”

“I’ve got one more question,” Murray said. “What exactly were you discussing with Josiah Bradford?”

Eric cocked his head. “You really do know everybody, don’t you?”

That got a tight smile and a nod.

“What I told him was a private matter,” Eric said. “But if you don’t get the hell out of my sight, I’ll go fill him in on some more things. Like the fact that somebody’s in town waving seventy-five grand in my face. Wonder what they’d wave in his.”

“Not a cent.”

“I find that hard to believe. Looks to me like somebody’s awfully concerned about the Bradford legacy. And probably the Bradford stock portfolio.”

“Not true.”

“No? Then what are you doing in beautiful French Lick, friend?”

Silence.

“Right,” Eric said. “Well, enjoy your stay, buddy. And keep away from me.”

This time, Murray let him go.

26

KELLEN WAS WAITING IN the car with the windows down and music playing. He turned the volume down when Eric got in.

“So, who’s that guy working for?”

“Someone who offered me seventy-five grand to go home.”

Kellen leaned across the steering wheel, mouth agape. “What?”

Eric nodded. “Started with fifty, then bumped it up to seventy-five.”

Kellen said, “What?” again as if the answer had never been offered.

“I know,” Eric said. He was staring back down the hill, looking for Gavin Murray. He finally located him beside one of the gazebos, standing with a cell phone glued to his ear. Probably calling Chicago to provide the update and await instructions.

“Another family member would be my guess,” Eric said. “Or somebody from Campbell’s legal team. The old man’s dying, and he’s worth a few hundred million. Could be worried about Josiah.”

“You think?”

“Yeah. If Josiah’s close blood to the old man in the hospital, he could make a compelling legal claim to compensation. Campbell abandoned the family. A few generations ago, maybe, but there would be plenty of lawyers who’d be happy to argue for reparations on Josiah’s behalf.”

“But you don’t think the two Campbells are the same guy.”

“No, I don’t. Which makes this all the more interesting, don’t you think?”

“Sure. Also makes me wonder what your client will have to say.”

“Oh, yeah,” Eric said. “She’s getting a call. Right now.”

Down by the gazebo, Gavin Murray lowered the phone and put it back in the case at his belt and lit another cigarette. He was leaning against the rail, staring up at them.

“Think that’s a good idea?” Kellen said. “Telling her about this?”

“She has a better chance of understanding what the hell it’s about than I do. How can it be a bad idea?”

Kellen shrugged, then waited while Eric dialed Alyssa Bradford’s number. Cell first, then home. No answer. He left messages on both phones but no details, just a request to call him as soon as possible.

“Headache back?” Kellen said when he hung up, and Eric realized he’d been rubbing the back of his skull while he made the calls.

“Don’t worry about it. Let’s get moving. I told Anne we were on our way.”

As they drove away from the hotel, Gavin Murray lifted a hand in recognition. He was on the phone again.

Josiah left Danny at his grandfather’s and drove off without a word minutes after the Porsche pulled out of the drive. He considered following them, driving that polished piece of shit right off the road and hauling them out of it one at a time, administering the beating he should’ve issued at Edgar’s house. They were out of sight, though, no car visible ahead except for a blue minivan pulled into the weeds.

Josiah blew past that and on into town, stopped at the gas station and put twenty dollars’ worth into his empty tank and bought a six-pack, drank one down fast while he stood at the pump. Someone pulled in and tapped the horn, annoyed that Josiah was there blocking the pump while drinking a beer, but it only took one look to make the driver go on to the next available pump.

He threw his empty beer can into the trash and drove away from the station, heading home. His house was out in the wooded hills just east of Orangeville, surrounded by a few hundred acres of Amish farmland. They ran up and down the road in their buggies and sold vegetables in front of the farm, and early on, Josiah would hit the gas in his truck when he passed, let that oh-so-scary modern machinery roar at them. Made him laugh. Over time, though, he began to appreciate them despite himself. They were quiet neighbors, took care of their land, didn’t bother him with noise or forced-friendly conversation or gossip. Minded their own, let him mind his. As it should be.

The porch looked clean and bright when he pulled into the drive, but it no longer satisfied him. He’d taken a hell of a one-two punch. Seeing those guys sitting in Edgar’s living room was bad enough, but that had come right on the heels of Danny Hastings, old dumbass Danny, looking Josiah in the eye and telling him he thought Josiah’s plan was stupid. And being right to say so.

Yes, this day was spinning away from him in an altogether unpleasant fashion. Hell, the whole weekend was. Had gone south fast and furious, starting last night. Things had been fine Friday morning, fine as they ever were, at least.

That was the problem, though—things never were fine and never were going to change. Not unless he took some action. He’d be sitting on the porch drinking piss-water beer and matching wits with Danny for the rest of his pathetic life, till his reflexes went and he could no longer handle the truck with booze in his veins and he put it off the highway and into the trees just like his worthless father had before him.

“Something’s got to change,” he whispered to himself, sitting there in the cab of the truck with sweat trickling along his neck and the beer warming in the sun while horses walked in circles at the Amish farm next door, turning some sort of mill wheel, their heads down the whole time, step after step after step. “Something has got to change.”

He got out of the truck but didn’t want to go in the house, didn’t want to sit on the stained couch and look at the cracks in the wall and the sloped floor. The porch rail glinted under the sun, sure, but now he realized just how damn little the porch rail meant. The house was still a dump, with sagging gutters and a stain-streaked roof and mildew-covered siding. Sure, those things could be addressed, but it took money, and even then, what the hell was the point? Could only accomplish so much with polish on a turd.

Instead of going inside, he took the beer and set off on foot, walked through the backyard and into the field beyond, picking his way through the barbed-wire fence that separated the properties. He’d walk up into the wooded hills, have a few more beers.

He was halfway across the field, head bowed against the sun and the warm western wind, when he remembered the second half of his dream, the man waiting for him at the edge of the tree line. The thought was enough to make him look up, as if he’d see the old bastard standing out there. Wasn’t anything in sight, but the memory chilled him just the same, thinking of the way the guy had been shaking his head at Josiah as the day faded away and the night came on. Weird damn dream. And that after the one on the train, the same man standing in the boxcar with water around his ankles.

We’re going home to take what’s yours.

There were those who believed dreams meant something. Josiah had never been of that breed, but today he couldn’t help it, thinking about the man in the bowler hat. Take what’s yours, he’d said. Wasn’t much in the world that belonged to Josiah. Funny, though, him having a dream like that just when everyone was asking questions about his family. Who the hell would possibly care about Campbell at this point? Had been damn near eighty years since the thug hopped a train and disappeared.

Hopped a train. An old-fashioned train, with a steam locomotive and a caboose, like the one in his dream.

“Was that you, Campbell?” Josiah said softly, tramping across the field, and he smiled. A bunch of crazy, stupid thoughts, that’s what he was lost to today. Setting fires and stealing gems and seeing his great-grandfather in dreams? He was coming unhinged.

The sun was hot and the beer cans clanged awkwardly against his leg as he walked, but he didn’t mind. His shirt was soaked with sweat and gnats buzzed around his neck but that was fine, too. It felt good to be outside, good to be moving, good to be alone. He’d grown up in the woods and fields out here, spent more time in them than in his home. Field runners, Edgar used to call him and Danny. Old Edgar had done well by Josiah. Josiah’s own family had been such a damned disaster that he’d as good as taken in with the Hastings instead. He and Danny had been close as brothers, and while Danny wasn’t much in the brains department, Josiah had never minded that so much as he did lately. Fact was, he’d always liked Danny fine, just looked down on him a touch. Danny was a good man, but not one who was going to do anything with his life. Even when they’d dropped out of high school on the same day, it had felt like Danny was playing out his fate while Josiah was making a choice. Josiah was the half of the pair who would accomplish something, the half with ambition.

That had always been the notion in his head, at least. Now, though, he felt as if he’d sobered up and took a blink and realized there was nothing separating him from Danny at all, nothing that anybody else would see, at least, nothing tangible. They were both still in town, living in shitty houses and driving shitty cars and swinging weed eaters and hedge clippers and drinking too much. How in the hell had that happened?

The place he was headed today was a spot he’d found when he was a kid, twelve years old and hiking alone. Well, not hiking as much as running, with the sting of the old man’s belt still on his back. They’d lived only two miles from where he did now, two miles separated by the fields he’d just come through.

That day he ran until his lungs were clenched tight as fists and his hamstrings were screaming, and then he’d slowed to a stumbling walk, moved through another field and into the woods, and found himself scrambling across the face of a steep hill. It was a difficult climb, overgrown and pockmarked with slabs of limestone. He’d heard a gurgling noise and frozen, listening and growing progressively creeped out because the sound was coming from beneath him. From right under his feet, he was sure of that, yet there wasn’t so much as a puddle in sight.

He’d followed the sound, fought down through the trees, and found a cliff face, a good hundred feet of sheer rock leading to a strange pool of water below that had an eerie, aquamarine glow. The pool was still as a farm pond, but all around it the gurgling, churning noise of water in motion persisted. Birch trees had tumbled off the ridge and lay half in and half out of the water, their ghostly white limbs fading into green depths. All along the top of the cliff face, root systems dangled free, hanging across the stone like something out of one of those slasher movies set in the swamps.

The ridge ran around all sides of the pool, forming a giant bowl, and it took some effort for him to pick his way down to it. At the bottom the place seemed even more ominous than at the top, because here there was no getting out fast, and the wind picked leaves off the trees that rimmed the ridge and sent them tumbling down on you. Now and then one corner of the pool would seem to snarl, spitting water into more water, and beneath the rocks water trickled, always audible but invisible.

Josiah had never imagined such a place.

He’d risked another beating that night by telling his father about it, swearing the place was something magic, and the old man had laughed and told him it was the Wesley Chapel Gulf, or the Elrod Gulf if you were an old-timer, one of the spots where the Lost River broke the surface again, coughed up by the caves that held it.

“You stay away from there in flood season,” the old man had warned. “You know where the water was today? Well, it’ll rise up thirty feet or more along that cliff when the underground part of the river fills up, and it’ll spin, just like a whirlpool. I’ve seen it, boy, and it’s made for drowning. You go there in flood season and I’ll tan your ass.”

Naturally, Josiah had gone back to the gulf during the spring floods. And son of a bitch if the old man wasn’t telling the truth for once—the water did climb the cliff face, and it did spin like a whirlpool. There was a shallow spot in the bowl-shaped ridge that held it, and the water broke through there and found a dry channel and filled it, rushing along for a piece and then disappearing into one of the swallow holes only to resurface a bit farther on.

It was one strange river, and it held Josiah’s attention for most of his youth. He and Danny traced the dry channels and located the swallow holes, found more than a hundred of them, some drinking the water down in thirsty, roiling pools, others spitting it back to the surface as if disgusted. There were springs, too, some of them so small as to be missed unless you were standing beside them, springs that put off a potent odor of eggs gone bad. They even found traces of old dwellings scattered along the river and through the hills, rotted timbers and moss-covered slabs of stone.

The gulf became a regular spot for Josiah, but one he’d never hiked to with anybody but Danny until he was sixteen, when he brought a girl named Marie up to it one night. She’d bitched the whole way, said the place was creepy, then stopped him from putting his hand up her skirt and had been with another guy not a week later. After that, Josiah never took anybody else back.

Sometimes people came by and dumped trash down the slope and into the pool, and that incensed Josiah in a way few things ever could. He’d hauled countless beer cans and tires out of there, once an entire toilet. When he was in high school, the national forest claimed the property, realizing it was something special, and they cleaned it out and put up a sign and took to monitoring the place.

Today he climbed up to the east side of the ridge and picked his way down to a jutting limestone ledge that looked out over the pool below. He sat with his feet dangling off the ledge and cracked open a beer. It was lukewarm by now.

If he were on the opposite side of this same hill and the leaves were off the trees, he’d be able to look out to the house he’d grown up in, what was left of it, at least. Place had been vacant for ten years, and last spring a tree had come down and bashed a hole in the roof above the kitchen, letting the rain come in. He was surprised the county hadn’t knocked the house down when they came to remove the tree.

The gulf was within walking distance of his childhood home, and within walking distance of his adult home. He was all of two miles from the place of his birth.

Two miles. That was how far he’d gotten in life. Two fucking miles.

He drank another beer as the sun sank behind the trees and the air began to cool. Down in the gulf, long trunks of fallen trees weathered to bone white faded into the shadows, the blue-green of the water edging toward black. Now and then there was a churlish splashing at the edge of the pool as the Lost River gave up more of its hidden water, and the wet whispering of it moving through the stone below ground was always present. He opened one more beer but didn’t drink any, just set it beside him and stretched out on his back. He wanted to close his eyes for a piece. Try not to think about the man from Chicago or the one from the dream. Try not to think about anything.

27

ANNE McKINNEY ANSWERED THE door with bottle in hand. She smiled when Eric made introductions between her and Kellen but kept her hand on the door frame, too, looking less steady than she had earlier in the day.

“It’s the same as yours, isn’t it?” she said, offering Eric the bottle.

He turned the bottle over in his hand and nodded. Every detail was the same, but this one was dry and room temperature, felt natural against his skin.

“It’s a perfect match.”

“I don’t know who you’d ask to compare them. Maybe it was a foolish idea.”

“No, it’s a great idea. Kellen knows somebody who should be able to help.”

“Good.”

“And you’re sure you don’t care? Because I’d hate to open this if I thought—”

She waved him off. “Oh, it doesn’t matter. I’ve got more, and I doubt anybody will care much about them when I’m gone anyhow. I’ll leave them to the historical society, but they’re not going to miss one out of the lot.”

“Thank you.”

“How you feeling now?” she asked with what seemed to be genuine concern.

“I’m doing fine,” he lied and then surprised himself by saying, “what about you?”

“Oh, I’m a little tired. Did more than I should have today probably.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t you worry about that. It’s just been one of those days…” Her eyes drifted past him, out to the windmills that lined the yard and looked down on the town below like sentries. “Some strange weather coming in. If I were you two, I’d have an umbrella handy tomorrow.”

“Really?” Kellen said, looking up at the blue sky. “Looks perfect to me.”

“Going to change, though,” she said. “Going to change.”

They thanked her again and went down the porch steps and back to the car. The chimes were jingling, a beautiful sound in an evening that was going dark fast.

Kellen asked if he had a dinner preference, and when Eric said no, they ended up back at the buffet in the casino, because Kellen said he was “in a mood to put a hurting on some food.” By the time they got inside, Eric’s stomach was swirling and the headache had his vision a little cloudy, sensitive to the lights that surrounded them. All he needed to do was eat a little. Surely that was it.

When they entered the long, wide, and brightly lit dining room, the smell of the food was strong and immediate, and Eric had to hold his breath for a second to ward off the surge of nausea the odor brought. They followed the hostess to a table out in the middle of the room, and he wished she’d put them somewhere else, a corner maybe, or at least close to the wall. When she took their drink orders, he barked out, “Water’s fine, thanks,” just because he wanted her to go away, wanted everybody in the damn room to go away until he’d had a chance to get himself together. But Kellen was already heading toward the serving areas, so he followed.

The china plate felt heavy in his hands, and he grabbed at food without giving it much thought. He had a plate full of fruit and vegetables when he turned and found himself staring at the carving station, watching a heavyset man in a white apron work a massive knife through a roast. The knife bit into the meat and then the man leaned on it, using his weight to drive it through, and when he did, juice flowed from the meat and formed a pink pool on the cutting board and Eric’s knees went unsteady and a hum filled his ears.

He turned fast, too fast, almost spilling the plate, and started for the table, which seemed miles away. His breath was coming in jagged hisses, and then the hum picked up in pitch and almost took his stomach with it. He got to the table, thinking that he just needed the chair, just needed to get off his feet for a moment.

For a few seconds, he thought that might actually do the trick. He leaned on the table with his forearms and concentrated on slowing his breathing, and he was just starting to feel a touch better when Kellen returned and sat before him with a steaming plate of food. Then the hum returned and his stomach went into the spin cycle.

Kellen was oblivious, chattering away while he set to work with a knife and fork, and Eric couldn’t even speak, knowing only that he needed to get out of the room fast.

He lurched to his feet and bumped into his own chair but shoved past it, eyes on the exit and the hallway beyond, which seemed to be undulating, all the harsh white light in the room slipping into motion now as the hum in his ears turned to a roar. A warming sensation enveloped him and spread through his limbs and tingled along his skin as he passed the cashier’s stand and kept moving toward the hallway, thinking, I’m going to make it, just before the warmth exploded into a scorching heat and the dancing lights went gray and then black and he fell to his knees and the room vanished around him.

A soft, sweet strings melody lifted him and guided him through the tunnel that led to consciousness. It was a beautiful sound, so soothing, and when it began to fade, he was racked with sorrow, hated to let it go.

He opened his eyes and stared directly into a glittering light fixture. Then a face floated down and blocked it, Kellen Cage’s face, eyes grave. He was saying Eric’s name, and Eric knew that he should answer but didn’t want to yet, didn’t want anyone to speak, because maybe if it was completely silent, he’d be able to hear that violin again.

The first coherent thought he had was of the cold. Where before the blackout his flesh had tingled with warmth there was now a deep cold, but it felt good. The warmth had been ominous, a harbinger of physical disaster, and the cold seemed to be his body’s reassurance that it could handle the ailment on its own—Don’t worry, buddy, we got those boilers turned down for you.

“Eric,” Kellen said again.

“Yeah.” Eric licked his lips and said it again. “Yeah.”

“We got an ambulance on the way.”

There were other faces over Kellen’s shoulder, a security guard talking into a radio and then a cluster of curious onlookers. Eric closed his eyes, feeling the embarrassment of this now, realizing that he’d just fainted.

“No ambulance,” he said with his eyes closed, and took a deep breath.

“You need to go to the hospital,” said someone with a deep and unfamiliar voice.

“No.” Eric opened his eyes again, then rose slowly, until he was sitting upright with his arms hooked around his knees for balance. “I just need some sugar, that’s all. Hypoglycemic.”

The security guard nodded, but Kellen’s face said bullshit. A woman nearby murmured that her sister was hypoglycemic and then left to get him a cookie.

He was on his feet by the time she got back, and though the idea of food was sickening, he had to stick to the lie now, so he took the cookie and a glass of orange juice and got both of them down.

“You sure you don’t want to go to the hospital?” the security guard said.

“I’m sure.”

They called off the ambulance then, and Eric thanked the woman and the guard and made some lame joke to the rest of the onlookers about being happy to provide dinner theater. Then he told Kellen he wanted to head back to the hotel.

They went out and walked down the sidewalk in silence and crossed to the parking lot. When they were halfway out to the Porsche, Kellen said, “Hypoglycemic?”

“Sure. Didn’t I mention that?”

“Um, no. Left that out.”

They walked to the car and Eric stood with his hand on the passenger door handle for a few seconds before Kellen finally unlocked the doors. Once they were inside, Kellen turned to him.

“You really should be going to a hospital right now.”

“I just need some rest.”

“Just need some rest? Man, you don’t even know what went on in there. One minute you were sitting at the table, next you were passed out in the hallway. Something like that happens, you don’t rest, you talk to a doctor.”

“Maybe I’ll call somebody in the morning. Right now, I just want to lie down.”

“So you can swallow your tongue or some shit in the middle of the night, die up in that room?”

“That’s unlikely.”

“Look, I’m just saying—”

“I get it,” Eric said, and the force of his words brought Kellen up short. He studied Eric for a few seconds, then gave him a shrug and turned away.

“I appreciate the concern,” Eric said, softer. “I really do. But I don’t want to go to a hospital and tell them I’m having blackouts from Pluto Water, okay?”

“You think that was from the water?”

Eric nodded. “The headache came back and was getting worse. By the time we left Anne’s, I was feeling bad. Thought maybe it would help if I just got some food.”

“Didn’t help.”

“No. Sorry about your dinner, by the way. You were starving.”

Kellen laughed. “Not a big deal, man. I can always eat. What you got going on, though… that’s something needs to be figured out.”

“Withdrawal symptoms,” Eric said.

“You think?”

“Yeah. Definitely. The physical problems go away when I have more of the water and get worse the longer I go without it. Anne McKinney’s right—I’ve got to figure out what’s in that bottle.”

“And until then?”

Eric was quiet.

“This is why I suggested a hospital,” Kellen said. “I believe you—it’s probably withdrawal from whatever is in that water. But if it’s getting worse, you could be in real trouble. That act you pulled back there was scary, man.”

“I could just take more of the water, if that’ll relax you.” It was supposed to be a joke, but Kellen tilted his head sideways, thoughtful.

“Wow, you’d be good in AA,” Eric said. “That’s not one of the ideas you’re supposed to support.”

“No, I was just thinking, what if you tried different water?”

“I drank about ten glasses of water today, trying to flush this out. Hasn’t helped.”

“Not regular water. Regular Pluto water.” Kellen nodded at the bottle Anne McKinney had given him. “It’s a thought, at least. Things get worse tonight, try her bottle before you go back to yours.”

Kellen dropped Eric off at his hotel, and the look he had when Eric got out of the car was that of a parent watching a child wander toward traffic.

Eric’s headache was whispering to him again by the time he got off the elevator, and the sense of defeat he had at that realization was heavy. He’d hoped that the episode during dinner had been punishment enough, that he’d earned a few hours of reprieve. Evidently not.

The message light on the room phone was dark and his cell showed no missed calls. He felt a vague sense of apprehension over that, having expected Gavin Murray to try and make contact again, to put some other offer—or threat—on the table. He called Alyssa Bradford again and got voice mail. Annoyed, he waited ten minutes and called back, still with no success. This time he left a message. Call immediately, he said. There is a serious problem to discuss.

Serious problem seemed almost too light a phrase. Where was Gavin Murray now? The blue minivan hadn’t been in sight when Kellen brought him back, but it seemed unlikely that Murray was driving back to Chicago already. Eric got his laptop out and logged onto the Internet, ran some searches under both Murray’s name and the name of his company, Corporate Crisis Solutions. Didn’t find much on Murray—his name on some roll of military personnel attending a reunion at Fort Bragg was the most noteworthy result. Bragg was home to the Special Ops boys.

Corporate Crisis Solutions didn’t have much of a Web profile either. There was a company site, but it seemed intentionally vague. A few pages for private investigators offered links with CCS contact information. Hell, he should call Paul Porter, ask him what he knew. Paul had done twenty years as a criminal defense attorney before selling his first book and giving up the practice to write a series of best-selling novels about an intrepid crime-solving lawyer, no doubt some sort of pathetic wish fulfillment. Still, he was connected to the Chicago police and legal worlds both through his writing and his background, and he’d probably heard of the firm, and maybe even Gavin Murray.

“I won’t give him the satisfaction,” Eric muttered. That was just what Paul would want, wayward son-in-law calling for help. Son of a bitch had actually suggested once that he and Eric work together to shop the film rights for Paul’s novels, which he’d been hanging on to all these years despite offers. I could write, and you could direct, Paul had said. Yeah, that would’ve been a hell of a pairing.

Eric had actually liked the guy all right at first. They’d gotten along just fine back when they were separated by a few thousand miles and Eric’s career was on an upward trajectory. Paul hadn’t displayed any less ego over his little series of detective novels back then, but it hadn’t rankled Eric as much either. Probably because things were going well on his end. Gave him a layer of protection. It wasn’t until they’d moved back to Chicago and Paul was underfoot at all times that it got really bad. All those damn suggestions of his, the ideas, story proposals—shit, they had never stopped.

He closed the laptop, beginning to suspect that staring at the screen was goosing his headache. He turned the lights off and put the TV on, tried again to distract himself from the pain. Over on the desk, Alyssa Bradford’s bottle glittered and sweated, and Anne McKinney’s stood beside it, dark and dry.

Let them sit, he told himself. Let them sit there untouched. I know what’s coming for me, and I can take it. I won’t drink the water again, though.

28

JOSIAH WAS BACK IN the gray city again, that colorless empire, and the wind blew through the alleys and whistled around the old-fashioned cars that lined the empty streets. A huffing noise filled his ears and he knew before he turned to look that it was the train coming on and thought, I’ve had this dream before.

But at least the train was coming back for him. Dream or no dream, he’d lost it last time, run after it and couldn’t catch up and then found himself in that field walking hard against the dark. Yes, if the train came back around this time, he surely ought to take it.

He stood to the side and watched as it thundered toward him, stone dust rising from beneath its wheels, a funnel of black smoke pouring from the stack. All just as it had been. Good. Must be the same train.

It slowed as it passed, and again he could see the white car with the splash of red across its doors, the colors standing out so stark against all that gray. He walked toward it, eager now, as the locomotive whistle shrilled and the train lost momentum. This one was headed home. The man in the bowler hat had promised him that.

And there was the man, visible in the open boxcar door as he had been before. He wasn’t leaning out of it this time but sitting with his arms resting on raised knees and his back pressed against the door frame. He lifted his head as Josiah approached, used one finger to push the hat up on his forehead.

“’Spect you want a ride,” he said when they were close enough for words, and the smile was gone, the charm not present in his eyes this time.

Josiah said he’d be more than happy for a ride, provided they were still homeward bound. The man paused at that, considered Josiah through those dark eyes. Josiah could hear a gentle splashing from inside the car, saw drops of water coming out over the rim of the door frame and falling to the sidewalk below.

“Told you we was homeward bound last time through,” the man said. “Told you there was a need to hurry should you want a ride.”

The man seemed displeased, and that made Josiah’s stomach tremble and his skin prickle as if from the touch of something cold. He told the man that he had desired a ride, indeed, and that he’d run in pursuit of the train, run as best as his legs could do, and still not caught up.

The man listened to that, then tilted his head and spit a plume of tobacco juice toward Josiah’s feet.

“I was to tell you it’s time to get aboard now, you’d take heed?” he said.

Josiah assured him that was a fact.

“You’d also understand,” the man said, “I might be needing you for a piece of work when we get home.”

Josiah asked what that work would entail.

“A good mind and a strong back,” the man said. “And an ability to take direction. Might those be traits you possess?”

Josiah said they were, but he wasn’t overly pleased at the prospect, and it must have shown in his face.

“You don’t think that’s a fair exchange?” the man asked, his eyes wide.

Josiah didn’t answer that, and up ahead the steam whistle blew again and the engine began to chug. The man smiled at him and spread his hands.

“Well,” he said, “you know another way of getting home, you’re welcome to it.”

Josiah was unaware of another way home, and he’d already missed this train once. Time came when you had to make a sacrifice or two in the pursuit of what you desired, and right now Josiah desired a ride home. He told the man he’d get aboard.

“About time,” the man said, and then he rose to offer Josiah his hand and help him into the boxcar. When he stood, water streamed from his suit. Josiah edged closer to the train and leaned forward.

Took his hand.

Part Three

A SONG FOR THE DEAD

29

AN HOUR AFTER KELLEN dropped him off, Eric’s headache was back in full force, and he took more Excedrin and drank a few glasses of water and turned the volume on the TV louder, searching for distraction.

It didn’t work.

By eleven he had the TV off and was holding a pillow over his head.

I can beat it, he told himself. I can wait this out. I will not drink the water.

The hum soon returned to his ears, quickly built to a bell-clear ring. His mouth dried and when he blinked, it felt as if his eyelids were lined with fine grains of sand.

It’s terrible, but it’s real, too. These things are better than the alternatives. I am seeing nothing but the walls of this room and the furniture and the shadows, seeing no dead men in train cars filled with water. This I can take. This I can bear.

When the nausea caught him in full stride, he made it to the bathroom before vomiting, taking that as a comfort until the second wave hit and drove away what little strength he had left.

Let it come, he thought savagely as he lay with his cheek on the cool tile and a string of spit hanging from his lip. Let it come with the best it has, because I’m not drinking that water, won’t take a sip.

The sickness returned, even though his body was empty, and then came again, and by the end, he could no longer lift himself from the floor, racked by vicious dry heaves that seemed to spread his ribs even while squeezing his organs, the headache a crescendo and his conviction a memory.

The visions were bad, yes, but these withdrawal effects, they could kill him.

His mind went to Kellen’s suggestion, the words floating through his pain-fogged mind as he lay on the floor: Things get worse tonight, try her bottle before you go back to yours.

Anne’s bottle was on the desk, looking as normal as could be. It had been when he last saw it, at least. That had been on his way to the bathroom, and who knew how much time had passed since then. Maybe five hours, maybe fifteen minutes. He really couldn’t say.

He couldn’t stand. Managed only to get to his hands and knees, wobbling and bumping against the door frame, spit hanging from his mouth, a human pantomime of a rabid dog. He crawled forward, felt the tile change to carpet under his hands, and went left, toward the desk. He blinked hard and his vision cleared and he became aware of a glow from the top of the desk, a pale white luminescence that seemed like a guiding light.

He pulled up then and came to an abrupt stop, the rabid dog told to heel.

The light was coming from the bottle. Alyssa Bradford’s bottle. It offered a faint glow that seemed to come not from within it so much as from an electricity that clung to the outside, a sort of Saint Elmo’s fire.

Drink it.

No, no. Don’t drink it. The whole point, the reason for this absurd suffering, was to avoid taking any more of that water.

Things get worse tonight, try her bottle before yours.

Yes, her bottle. It wasn’t glowing, wasn’t covered in frost, looked entirely normal. He pulled himself over to the desk and reached for it, and when he did, his hand went to the glowing bottle first, and some part of him wanted that one desperately. He stopped himself, though, shifted his hand to Anne McKinney’s bottle, and got his fingers around it, brought it down. His breath was coming fast and uneven again, and he opened the bottle quickly and brought it to his mouth and drank.

It was hideous stuff. The sulfuric taste and smell were overpowering, and he got only two swallows down before he had to pull away. He gagged again, sagging back against the legs of the desk, and then he waited.

“Work,” he mumbled, running the tip of his tongue over lips that had gone dry and cracked. “Work.”

But he was sure it wouldn’t. The water his body desired so desperately was in the other bottle, the one putting off that faint glow and gathering ice in a seventy-degree room. This version, this sane version, would do nothing.

Then his breathing began to steady. That was the first perceptible change; he could fill his lungs once again. A few minutes after that, he felt the nausea subside, and then the headache dulled and he was on his feet again, splashing cold water on his face from the bathroom sink. He stood there with hands braced on the counter and lifted his face and stared into the mirror.

It was working. Anne’s water. What did that tell him? Well, for one thing, the Pluto Water was involved in whatever was happening to him, was part of it. Part. He couldn’t believe it was the sole cause, because Anne’s water didn’t have any of the same bizarre properties as Alyssa Bradford’s. And yet it had quelled the agony that came from Alyssa’s water. Whatever had been put into his system seemed satisfied now. Content.

As if it had just been fed.

How he’d slept so long on a rock ledge, Josiah couldn’t imagine. No pillow for his head, even, and still he’d managed to sleep past sunset. When he opened his eyes, the treetops above him were a rustling mess of shadows, and when he sat up with a grunt, the pool of water far below was no longer visible. Full night.

Two of the beers remained warm and unopened at his side. The gulf gurgled down below, and he got to his feet stiffly, thinking about the dream and unsettled by it. Wasn’t often that Josiah dreamed when he slept, and he couldn’t recall ever having the same dream twice, or even a variation of it.

But this one had returned, this dream of the man aboard the train. Strange.

He’d ordinarily hike back the way he’d come, but he had no flashlight and it was a difficult trek in the darkness even if you knew where you were going. Too many roots to stumble over and holes to turn an ankle in. Taking the road would be longer but easier.

He left the ledge and climbed to the top of the ridge and found the trail that led to the gravel drive the state had put in. From there he came out to the county road as a dog barked in the distance and the moon and stars glittered and lit the pavement with a faint white glow. To the right he could see the white sides of Wesley Chapel gleaming against the dark, and a few pale orbs surrounding it, the stone fronts of the monuments in the old cemetery also catching the moonlight. He turned left, toward home.

Not a single car passed. He hiked south, open fields on each side of him for a spell, then into the woods of Toliver Hollow, and there the road curved away and he walked east for a time before leaving it for another road and moving south once more. A half mile farther and he left the paved road for a gravel one. Almost home. He’d taken no more than twenty steps on the gravel when he pulled up short and stared.

The moon was three-quarters full and bright in the periods between clouds, and it was glittering off something just down the road from Josiah’s house.

A windshield.

A car.

Parked on the Amish farm property. Last time Josiah had checked, his Amish neighbors didn’t have cars.

He hesitated for a moment and then left the road and went into the weeds as he continued on. As he got closer, he could tell it was a van. Funny place to leave a car, and funnier still was that it was parked in one of the few locations where Josiah’s home showed in the gaps between the trees. He could see the outline of his house from here. The Amish barns were visible, but not their home. Just Josiah’s.

Someone had run out of gas or had engine trouble, no doubt, pushed the thing off the road and left it till daylight. Nothing to trouble his mind over; Josiah couldn’t give a shit whose car it was. Had nothing to do with him.

That was his thought for another fifty paces, until he saw the glow.

A brief square of blue light inside the rear of the van was visible for about five seconds and then extinguished. A cell phone. Someone was inside that van. In the back.

He felt something dark spread through him then, a feeling he knew well, his temper lifting its head on one of those occasions when it would not be denied, when fists would surely be swung and blood drawn.

Somebody was watching his house.

There was nothing else to see from there. Nothing but fields and trees and Josiah Bradford’s own home.

A memory hit him then, a flash of something seen but ignored—the blue minivan that had been pulled off the road near Edgar’s house when the man from Chicago and the black kid left. Josiah had driven right past it, had seen that it was parked off the shoulder and in the grass. Just like this one was now.

Son of a bitch was following him.

This would not be tolerated.

He dropped the beer cans he’d been carrying into the grass, then slipped down off the road and into the weed-covered ditch and picked his way along in a crouch. The van was parked facing the cattle gate, both sides exposed to the road, but its occupant was in the rear, and odds were he was watching the house and not the road.

It took him a long time to work his way down until he was directly across from the van. Twice the blue light appeared and disappeared, and he decided that whoever was inside was checking the time. Impatient, wondering where the hell Josiah was. Waiting on him.

Ideas tumbled through his mind, endless options. He could walk right up and knock on the door, call this son of a bitch outside. Could pick up one of the large loose stones from the ditch and use it to bash the windshield in. Could sneak home and get his shotgun. One way or another, he’d get this asshole out and answering questions.

That should have been his desire, at least. Find out who this was and what in the hell he was doing following Josiah. Funny thing was, Josiah was having trouble bringing himself to care. Those questions he should be asking, they didn’t seem to matter anymore. All that mattered was the fact that someone was here watching his home. The hell with answers—Josiah wanted punishment. Wanted to crawl under the car, puncture the gas tank, set the thing on fire. Watch it blow this nameless son of a bitch sky high in a cloud of orange flame, teach him there were people to be fooled with and people not to be fooled with, and Josiah Bradford was absolutely of the latter set.

He dropped his hand into his pocket at the thought and wrapped his fingers around his cigarette lighter, actually tempted for a minute. But no, those answers were important, and if he blew up the van before the questions had been asked, he would surely regret it. So the dilemma was how to get the man inside the van out of it and willing to talk. Well, the cigarette lighter might help with that after all.

He pulled off his T-shirt and felt around the bottom edge of it until he found one of its holes. Worked his fingers in and tugged and then the cheap cotton tore, the sound loud. He went slower, quieter, tearing again and again until he had five separate strips of fabric. When he had the shirt torn up, he crammed the strips into his pockets, patted around the ditch with his hands until he found a large stone—felt like the broken-off corner of a cinder block—and then dropped to his belly, the weeds and gravel tearing at his skin as he crawled up onto the road and toward the van.

Slow, patient going, stopping occasionally to catch his breath and adjust his position. The ditch on the other side of the road was deeper, and it came to an end right where the van was parked, had a steel culvert that ran from one end of the dirt farm lane to the other. It was packed with dry leaves. Josiah waited for a moment, hearing nothing, and then he slid right under the van.

He left the cinder-block chunk behind, pushed across the gravel on his stomach until he was beneath the front of the van, and put his hand back in his pocket and took out the strips of T-shirt and the lighter. Then he sparked the lighter’s wheel and got the flame going and held it to the end of one strip of cloth and then another. When he had them both going, he reached out and tossed them down into the ditch, which was filled with leaves and grass and was dry from days of sun and wind. Wouldn’t do anything but burn itself out, but all it had to do was burn.

He had a third strip of shirt out, ready to light another, but the fire had already caught some fuel down in the ditch, so he dropped the cloth and slid backward, under the van again.

It was a good thing he’d moved when he did, because the man in the van spotted the fire when it was still in its infancy. Josiah heard a murmuring from inside and then the door slid open and someone stepped out, said, “What in the hell?” under his breath, and then walked down into the ditch and began stomping at the fire. When he did, Josiah slid out from under the van on the other side, screened from view, and crawled around to the back, kneeling and grabbing the chunk of cinder block.

He stood up just as he came around the back, maybe ten feet from the man, who was still stomping at the grass, the fire already gone. Josiah was intending to just bounce the chunk of stone in his hand and tell this boy it was time to talk. When he came around the van, though, he saw that the man had a gun in his hand, thought, Well, good thing I didn’t just knock on the door, and then jumped into the ditch and swung the hand with the cinder block.

The guy was fast, got turned and had the gun half lifted before the stone caught him flush on the side of the head, caught him with an impact that jarred Josiah’s shoulder and made a wet crunch in the silent night, and his knees buckled and he was down in the ditch with dark blood dripping into the grass and his gun loose at his side. It was over then, over, and Josiah knew it, but for some reason he jumped down there and hit him again, even harder this time, and the sound the stone made on the man’s skull was terrible, a hard-to-soft shattering.

For a moment Josiah stayed where he was, crouched above the guy, who hadn’t so much as twitched. Then he reached down and put his fingertips on the man’s chin and turned his head to the side, and even in the shadows what he saw made him hiss in a breath between his teeth. He took his lighter from his pocket and flicked the wheel and lowered the flame toward the man’s head and said, “Oh, shit, Josiah, oh, shit,” and then he snapped the lighter off because he didn’t want to look anymore.

30

ERIC SLEPT SOON AFTER drinking Anne McKinney’s water. Slept deep and restful, stretched out on his back on top of the covers. When he woke, his first thought was one of relief, an immediate recognition that the terrible pain was past, that he was whole again.

It was cold in the room—he’d cranked up the air in an effort to combat the fever sweats—and he’d been above the covers and below the air vent. Too cold for sleep.

He swung his feet to the floor and sat on the bed for a moment, breathing deep and testing his physical sensations, looking for a chink in the armor. Nothing. His throat was a little raw, his lips dry, but other than that, he felt almost normal.

Over on the table, the Bradford bottle still glowed, though the glow seemed fainter to him, almost like a reflection from some light source he couldn’t see. He got to his feet and went to the thermostat and turned the temperature up, then reached down and touched his toes and stretched his arms above his head, feeling liberation at the ability to move without pain.

The heavy curtains had been pulled to block out any trace of the lights that fueled his headaches, but now he crossed the room and shoved them back, looked down on the rotunda below. Beautiful. At night the massive pendulum that hung from the center of the dome was equipped with colored lights that shifted every few seconds. He unlocked the door to the balcony and stepped out, braced his hands on the railing, and looked down.

Empty and still. No one in the atrium or out on one of the other balconies. It was his world right now, his alone.

He knew he should go back to bed, that his body would demand plenty of sleep after the gauntlet he’d just run it through, but he didn’t want to. Instead, he propped the door open and dragged the desk chair out onto the balcony, sat and put his feet up on the railing, and watched the colors change on that incredible ceiling. Purple, green, red, purple, green, red, purple, green…

The colors faded on him then, shifting to darkness broken by small points of white light, and then the ceiling and the hotel were gone and he was someplace else entirely.

It was a cloudless night, the sky a splendor of stars, and beneath a gleaming half-moon stood a shack that appeared unmeant for habitation. There were torn strips of cloth plugging holes in the shingles, and the front door was separated from its frame at the bottom, hanging from just the top hinge. Of the three windows in the front of the house only two panes of glass remained. Beyond the house was a tilting shed and an outhouse with no door.

Somewhere in the dark, soft but sweet, a violin played. There was no living thing in sight, neither man nor creature, just that sad, shivering song.

Another sound soon caught the violin and overran it, the strong purring of an engine, and headlights lit the filthy gray front of the house as a roadster with wide running boards appeared and pulled right up to the sagging edge of the front porch. The door to the shed banged open and a man stepped out and peered at the car. He was tall but stooped, a bare chest showing under his open shirt, tangled gray hair hanging down over his ears and along his neck. He had a cigar pinched in one corner of his mouth.

“That you, Campbell?” he hollered, squinting and shielding his eyes.

“You get many other visitors?” came the chill-voiced reply.

The old man grumbled and stepped farther out from the shed as Campbell Bradford advanced, pushing his bowler hat up on top of his head. He’d left the car running and its headlights on, and the light came up from behind him and spread his shadow large across the front of the shed.

“You’s late,” the old man muttered, but he extended his hand, friendly.

Campbell didn’t move his own hands from his pockets.

“I don’t want your handshake, I want your liquor. Step to it now. Don’t want to spend any more time in this den than I have to.”

The old man edged backward, grumbling but not raising his head. Maybe because he didn’t want to look into the lights; maybe because he didn’t want to look into Campbell’s eyes. He turned and went in the shed. There was a lantern lit inside, casting flickering golden streaks about the walls. In the middle of the shed stood a rusting cistern. Then the door swung shut and it was hidden from view.

Campbell Bradford remained outside, shrouded by the headlight beams, shifting his weight impatiently and looking around the wooded hill with distaste. He took the bowler hat from his head and scratched at his scalp and then put it back on. Removed a pocket watch from inside his suit and flicked it open, twisting it to catch the light, and then his shoulders heaved with a sigh and he snapped the watch shut.

It had been quiet since his arrival, but now the violin began again. Softer even than before. Campbell looked once toward the house and then turned away, uninterested. The music played on, though, and at length he cocked his head to the side and stood stock still, listening.

The old man reappeared with a jug in each hand. He set them at Campbell’s feet and turned to go back in but Campbell reached out and caught his arm.

“Who’s that fiddling?”

“Oh, it’s just my sister’s boy. She passed with the fever a year back and I’ve had him at my damned heels ever since.”

“Bring him out here.”

The old man hesitated, but then he nodded and shuffled past Campbell and through the weeds and into the dark house. A moment later the music stopped and then the broken door pushed open again and the old man returned, a tall, thin boy behind him. He had pale blond hair that caught the moon glow, and a violin in his hands.

“What’s your name, boy?” Campbell said.

“Lucas.” The boy did not look up.

“How long you played?”

“I don’t recall, sir. Long as I’ve known.”

“How old are you?”

“Fourteen, sir.”

“What was that song you were playing?”

The boy, Lucas, chanced a look up at Campbell and quickly dropped his head again.

“Well, it don’t have a name. Just something I made up myself.”

Campbell Bradford leaned back and tilted his head in surprise. When he did it, the headlights caught him full in the face, and his dark eyes seemed to swirl against the brightness like water pulled toward a drain.

“You wrote that song?”

“Didn’t write nothing,” the old man said. “He can’t read no music, just plays it.”

“I wasn’t speaking to you,” Campbell said, and Lucas tensed. “What kind of song is that? I ain’t never heard the like of it, boy.”

“It’s what they call an elegy,” he said.

“What’s that mean?”

“It’s a song for the dead.”

It was quiet for a moment, the three of them standing there in the headlights, silhouettes painted across the weathered boards of the whiskey-still shed, a mild wind waving the treetops that surrounded them.

“Play it for me now,” Campbell said.

“He don’t play for nobody,” the old man said, and Campbell turned on him fast.

“Am I speaking to you?”

The old man took a few quick steps backward, lifting his hands. “I ain’t meaning to interrupt you, Campbell, I’m just warning you. He won’t play in front of nobody. Won’t play at all ’cept by himself.”

“He’ll play for me,” Campbell said, and his voice was darker than the night woods.

The old man said, “Go on and play, Luke,” in a jittery voice.

The boy didn’t say anything. He fidgeted some with the violin but did not lift it.

“You listen to your uncle,” Campbell said. “When I tell you to play, you best get to fiddling. Understand?”

Still the boy didn’t move. There was a pause, five seconds at most, and then Campbell stepped forward and struck him in the face.

The old man shouted and moved forward to intercede, but Campbell whirled and struck again and then the old man was on his back in the trampled weeds. Campbell leaned into the boy, who now had a trickle of blood dripping from his lip, and said, “Let’s try this again.”

Down in the grass, the old man said, “Luke, just shut your eyes. It’ll be like playing in the dark, nothing to it. Shut your eyes and play, boy!”

Lucas shut his eyes. He brought the violin to his shoulder and then the bow, which shook violently in his hand, and began to saw across the strings. At first it was a terrible wreck of a song, no note clear for the shaking, but then his hand steadied and the melody stepped forward and rang out into the night.

He played for a long time, and nobody said a word. The old man got to his hands and knees in the dirt and then crawled hesitantly to his feet, watching Campbell, who snapped his head in the direction of the shed. The old man went inside and came back out with more jugs, eight in total, and then he carried them down to the car and loaded them inside. All the while the boy played, eyes closed, facing away from the light.

When the old man had made his final trip, Campbell said, “Enough,” and the boy stopped playing and lowered the instrument.

“How’d you like to make a dollar or two doing that?” Campbell said.

“Aw, Campbell,” the old man said, “that really don’t seem like a good idea.”

Campbell turned and looked at the old man and whatever argument might have come died a quick and trembling death.

“I got a liking for that song,” Campbell said, “and I’m going to bring him down in the valley to play it.”

He reached into his vest pocket and pulled out a handful of money and passed it over to the old man.

“There. Five extra dollars in it for you. Satisfied?”

The old man rubbed the money with a greasy thumb and nodded and put it in his pocket.

“You play that song,” Campbell said to the boy, “and you play it right, and there’ll be some dollars for you, too. Go on and get in the car.”

“When you bringing him back?” the old man asked.

“When I get tired of the song,” Campbell said. “Why’s he still standing there?”

“Listen to Mr. Bradford,” the boy’s uncle said to him. “Go get in the car.”

The boy left them and went to the car without ever speaking a word. When he walked into the headlights, he took on a strange, shimmering glow, and there were colors in the light now, purple and then green and then red and…

The ceiling of the dome was back in front of Eric’s eyes, and he was on the balcony. There was no more car or house in the woods or boy with a violin. No more angry blows from a man he’d just heard called Campbell. The past was gone from him now. He sat up slowly and looked around him. Twisted his head right and then left and saw the whole room was empty again, and quiet, and above him the dome changed colors, a beautiful silent sentry to it all.

31

THE WIND PICKED UP while Josiah crouched in the ditch over a man he knew was dead, watching the flow of blood from the wound slow, a thick pool of it all around now, spreading so much that Josiah had to move back to keep it from hitting his shoes.

It was dark and silent and no cars would come along the road at this hour, but all the same, decisions needed to be made, and fast, because this man was dead.

The stone was going to be a problem. It would have blood on it and maybe hair and flesh and for damn sure would have Josiah’s fingerprints. He felt around in the ditch until he relocated the chunk of cinder block and then he held it and hesitated for a moment, considered tossing it into the field but decided against that. They’d bring dogs out here and find it no problem and then they’d have his fingerprints, and Josiah had been arrested enough times that matching those prints wasn’t going to be a problem.

What to do, then? What to do?

Now that he thought about it, this whole ditch was filled with evidence—there were pieces of Josiah’s shirt down there beside the dead man—and there wasn’t any way in hell he’d get all of it cleaned up. He could load the man into the van and drive him off somewhere, but that didn’t get rid of the blood in the ditch, and odds were somebody would’ve known his location anyhow.

Odds were, somebody would’ve known he was watching Josiah.

No good way to clean up this mess, then, but he could leave more of one behind. Burn this place, scorch it all, and let them sift through the ashes for evidence.

He wiped the rock down carefully on his pants and then set it on the edge of the road and, dropping onto his back, slid under the van and found the gas line and jammed his pocketknife into it. First few times it glanced off the metal, and once his hand slipped down and across the blade and opened his flesh up. First his fingerprints, now his blood. He drove the knife at the gas line again, drove it with the fury of fear and anger, and this time the blade popped through and gasoline spilled out and onto his bare chest.

The idea of trying to tip the van into the ditch and create an accident scene ran through his mind but he discarded it. There wasn’t enough time, and it probably wouldn’t work anyhow. He wrapped his hand in one of the torn pieces of shirt he still had and then opened the driver’s door and climbed inside. There was a leather case on the passenger seat, and all the way in the back he found a digital camera. He took them both—after all this risk, might as well get something out of it, and maybe it would help if the scene had the look of a robbery. Then he went down into the ditch and patted through the dead man’s pockets and found a wallet and took that, too, dropped it into the leather case as the gasoline ran through the gravel and dripped into the ditch behind him.

He tucked the camera into the case, set it aside, and pulled the two remaining strips of shirt from his pocket and held them in the pool of gasoline forming by the car. When they were damp, he got the lighter out and lit them, one at a time. The first flared too hot and burned his hand, the hand that was already bleeding, and then he tossed the strip down onto the dead man’s body. For a moment it looked like the flame would go out, so he held the other strip of cloth over it and squeezed and the drops of gasoline got the blaze going again, and this time it caught the dead man’s shirt and then he was burning.

Josiah lit the final strip of cloth and tossed it back up on the gravel, into the pool of gasoline, which went up like a bastard, three feet tall and brilliantly light before he’d even had a chance to move. He got to running then, grabbed the leather case in his bleeding hand and ran for his house as the fire spread behind him. He was no more than a hundred feet away when the gas tank blew, and he felt the shock of it in the ground, and the whole night was filled with orange light then and he knew his time was slim, indeed.

He hit the front yard at a dead run, dropped the case in the grass, got his keys out of his pocket and unlocked the door, ran inside in the dark, and went to his bedroom. Pulled a fresh shirt on, then opened the closet. There was a twelve-gauge pump shotgun inside, and he took that and a box of shells and ran into the yard. Tossed the shotgun and the shells into the bed of the truck and pulled a plastic tarp over them, then grabbed the leather case and threw it onto the passenger seat. His front yard was lit by the fire, but already the blaze was going down. He thought he could hear voices up at the Amish farm, but maybe that was his imagination.

He got into the truck and started it, thought about leaving the headlights off but then realized that would be begging for trouble and turned them on, pulled out of his driveway and sped down the gravel road, came out to the county road, and turned west. Sirens were audible by the time he reached the first stop sign. He drove on into the night.

Eric didn’t expect to sleep again, but he did. Long after the vision had passed he was still on the balcony, waiting, willing it to return.

It did not.

Eventually, he rose and carried the chair back into the room and looked at the clock and saw it was four in the morning. Claire was in the central time zone, an hour behind, and it was too early to call. Kellen would be asleep. All sane people would be asleep.

He lay on the bed and stared at the bottles on the desk as the sounds of early-morning preparations carried on around him in the old hotel.

Campbell, the old man had called the one in the bowler hat. Campbell.

It was what Eric already knew, had known since he looked into Josiah Bradford’s eyes and saw the similarity. The man in the bowler hat was Campbell Bradford, and he’d arrived in town yesterday on an all-black train. The boy, then? The boy who played the violin with his eyes squeezed shut to block his terrible stage fright?

He was Alyssa Bradford’s father-in-law. Eric was sure of that in the way he’d been sure of Eve Harrelson’s affair in the red cottage and of the Nez Perce camp in that valley in the Bear Paws. But the boy’s name was Lucas, and he had not been a relative of Campbell’s. So why had he claimed the man’s name? Had he been adopted, removed from the care of his uncle and placed into Campbell’s? Why take the name, though?

Amidst all the questions were two other confirmations: Anne McKinney’s water both alleviated his withdrawal pains and brought back the visions. Only this time, the vision had been more like watching a movie. He had distance. Previously, Campbell had looked right at him, spoken to him. He’d been a participant, not a bystander. With Anne’s water, what he’d experienced felt truly like a vision of the past, a glimpse into something that had happened long ago and could not affect anything in this world. What he’d seen from the Bradford bottle was hardly so tranquil. In those moments, Campbell had been with him.

He fell asleep sometime around six and woke to the phone ringing at nine-thirty. He fumbled for it with his eyes still closed, knocked the thing off the base, and then got it in his hand and gurgled out a sound that didn’t even come close to hello.

Kellen said, “You made it through.”

“Yeah.” He sat up, rubbed at his eyes.

“No problems?”

“Wouldn’t say that.”

“Uh-oh.”

Eric told him about it all, disclosing the depth of physical agony and the drinking of the water and the vision that had followed. It was odd he’d be willing to tell this stranger so much, but he was grateful that Kellen was willing to listen to it. He wasn’t running yet, dismissing Eric as crazy. That meant something.

“This changes things,” Kellen said. “It’s not the specific bottle of water that hits you, it’s Pluto Water in general.”

“I don’t think we can go quite that far. I’m getting visions from them both, yes, but there’s still something different about that first bottle, the one that started it. Last night, after trying Anne’s water, it was like I was watching something out of the past. When I’ve had the Bradford water, everything I see is right here with me.”

“So you still want to run the test.”

“Absolutely.”

“Well, I’ll come by and get the bottles then, take them up to Bloomington.”

Eric opened his mouth to say that was great, then stopped, realizing what it meant. If Kellen took both bottles to Bloomington, Eric would have nothing in his arsenal. It was a thought that chilled him.

“Do you know how fast they can test it?” he said.

“No idea. But it’s Sunday, you know, so probably not today.”

“If there’s any way they could test it today… or at least tomorrow… I’m just thinking, the faster, the better. I’ll pay whatever it takes.”

“Well, you’re talking to the wrong person, my man. I got no idea what the process entails. But I’ll see what I can do once I’m up there.”

Kellen said he’d come by the hotel in a few minutes and they hung up. Eric studied the bottles for a few seconds longer and then, hating himself for it, went into the bathroom and found one of the plastic cups and emptied a few ounces of Anne Mc-Kinney’s bottle into the cup. He took a small taste. Just as bad as it had been hours earlier, no trace of sweetness or honey. Good. This one didn’t change.

He took the plastic cup and carried it over to the bedside table and set it down. There if he needed it. He would try not to need it, but at least it would be there.

The Bradford bottle he left untouched.

He got in the shower, was hardly out when Kellen called from the lobby. He threw on clothes and grabbed the bottles, then almost dropped the Bradford bottle.

Cold was no longer an accurate assessment. The thing was freezing, gave his hand the sort of cold burn you could get from touching a metal railing on a Chicago winter night. The frost was dry now; he had to use a fingernail to scrape any off.

“I’m going to find out what’s in you,” he said. He carried the bottles down in the elevator and out into the lobby, shifting them from one hand to the other because the Bradford bottle was too cold to keep in one for a prolonged time. Kellen was waiting near the front doors. He looked at Eric with a critical eye as he approached.

“Looks like you did have a rough night.” Kellen lifted a finger and indicated his own eye. “You ruptured some blood vessels, man. Across the bridge of your nose, too.”

Eric had already seen that in the mirror.

“Like I said, it wasn’t a whole lot of fun.”

“Doesn’t look like it, no.” Kellen reached out and took the bottles from him, said, “Damn!” when he touched the Bradford bottle.

“Getting colder,” Eric said.

“You ain’t kidding. That’s a big difference from yesterday.”

Eric watched Kellen study the bottle, saw the awe in his eyes, and thought, This is why he believes me. The bottle was so insane it made Eric’s story acceptable.

“I called Danielle,” Kellen said.

“Danielle?”

“That’s my girl, yeah. Told her we needed to get somebody to look at this thing fast, and she said she’d call around and see what she could do. No promises, though.”

“I appreciate it. Tell her I’ll pay—”

“Nobody’s worried about that.” Kellen was juggling the bottles from hand to hand now just as Eric had been. “She knows somebody to do it, that’s all.”

“You said she’s going to med school?”

“Yeah.”

Eric nodded, feeling a pang of guilt. Claire had been in law school when they’d met. Had dropped out when they got married to follow him to L.A. She had a good job now, working for the mayor’s office, but it wasn’t the career she’d had in mind for herself. She’d given that up for him.

“Well, you might ask her to have them run a specific test,” he said. “If it’s even possible. I’ve got an idea of what might be in it. We know Campbell was involved with bootlegging and moonshine, and in my vision last night I saw that whiskey still…”

“Old moonshine,” Kellen said and gave a nod. “That would make some sense. Who knows what the hell they put in it or how potent it was back then, let alone now. It could be giving you fits, no question. I still think it might be worth talking to a doctor.”

“I will if I need to,” Eric said. “But I’m feeling all right now.”

“Okay. I’ll come back down this afternoon, catch up with you then.”

Eric followed Kellen out the doors and onto the veranda overlooking the grounds. Out in front, at the end of the brick drive, a TV news van was parked.

“Something going on today?” Eric said.

“I don’t know. Saw another one on my way here, somebody interviewing a cop on the sidewalk. Could be something happened last night.”

“Casino robbery. Ocean’s Eleven shit.”

“There you go.” Kellen laughed, then lifted the bottle and held it up to the sun. The frost glittered. “All right, I’m off to Bloomington.”

“Hey, thanks for helping with the water. I appreciate it, more than you know.”

Kellen looked at him, serious, and said, “You take care today, all right?”

“Sure.”

He left and then it was just Eric on the veranda, facing into a warm morning wind that was tinged with moisture. It was humid already, and though the sky was blue, it had a hazy quality. Maybe Anne McKinney had been right. Could be a storm brewing.

32

TIRED OF THIS TOWN as he was, Josiah still found himself grateful for familiarity in this situation. Figured he had to get himself hidden quick, because there wasn’t going to be a whole lot of time passing before the police were looking for his truck. Hell, they’d do that on principle, something like that happening so near his home. He wasn’t real eager to talk the matter over with them either.

Time to get off the roads and out of sight, then, and while the idea of flight was appealing, gassing up the truck and heading for the Ohio River line and points beyond, he wasn’t foolish enough to do that. He had a grand total of twenty-four dollars in his wallet and maybe four hundred in the bank, and that wasn’t going to get him far.

He drove about three miles west of his house, into the woods that climbed the hills between Martin and Orange counties, and turned into a gravel drive marked with a half dozen no trespassing signs. Had been a timbering camp at one time, years ago, and now all that remained was a weathered barn and decrepit equipment shed. The place was isolated, though. Josiah had found the spot deer hunting one year—the property wasn’t open to hunting, but hell if he cared—and filed it away in the back of his mind, knowing that such a location could prove useful to any of the handful of illegal ventures he experimented with from time to time. This wasn’t the sort of use he’d hoped to require it for, but right now he was glad that he’d stumbled across the spot.

He stopped and then dug his toolbox out of the truck and found a stout pair of bolt cutters. Should’ve thought to grab a hacksaw, but he hadn’t been exactly flush on time when he’d left the house. He left the lights on in the truck, used them to illuminate the sagging doors on the barn. Just as he’d recollected, there was a rusted chain with a padlock holding them closed, and the chain wasn’t thick. It took him a few minutes of grunting and swearing—his burned and bleeding hand hurt like hell each time he squeezed the bolt cutters—but eventually he broke through half a link and then he slipped the chain apart and dropped the lock at his feet.

The doors swung open with a crack and groan, but they slid apart all right, and inside there was plenty of room for the truck. He pulled it inside, hearing a harsh scrape as he dragged past the door, then turned the engine off, and sat there in the dark.

What in the hell had he done? What in the hell had he just done?

The last fifteen minutes had been too full of action for much thought, but now, up here in the dark barn, hiding his truck from the police who’d soon be looking for it, he was forced to consider what had just occurred. That man was dead, and Josiah had killed him. Killed him, then lit his ass on fire. That wasn’t just murder, that had to be some aggravated version of it. Sort that got you on death row.

It wasn’t as if Josiah had never thought of killing a man before, he’d just never actually expected to do it. Figured if he ever did, it would come slow and calculated, the product of a great deal of provocation. Revenge for some grave offense. But tonight… tonight it had happened so damn fast.

“Was the gun that did it,” he said. “Was his own fault for pulling that gun.”

Surely that had been it. A self-defense move and nothing else. You see a man swinging a gun your way, what in the hell were you supposed to do?

Problem was, it hadn’t been the first blow that killed him. Josiah was almost certain of that. Oh, it had knocked him out well enough, but the one that killed him had been that second strike, when the man in the ditch was already down and out and Josiah jumped down there and laid the cinder block to his head with every last ounce of strength he had in him. That wasn’t Josiah’s nature; he’d never been one for kicking a man he’d already put on the ground. But tonight he’d done that, and then some. And in that moment, that blink-quick moment, he hadn’t even felt like himself. He’d felt like another man entirely, a man who’d enjoyed that deathblow a great deal.

Shit, what a mess. You killed someone, better have both good cause for it and a good plan for dealing with it, and Josiah had neither. Didn’t even know who the son of a bitch was, just that he’d been watching the house. Why had he been watching the house?

He reached over to the passenger seat and got the case he’d stolen, a big leather bag with a shoulder strap, and felt around for the wallet. When he got his fingers around it, he flicked on the interior lights and opened it up. First thing he saw was a photo ID. Licensed Private Investigator.

A detective. That didn’t make a bit of sense, and the name—Gavin Murray—didn’t mean a thing to Josiah either. He studied the picture, confirmed that this man was a stranger. The address given on both the investigator’s license and his driver’s license, which was tucked in the same compartment, was Chicago.

Same city as the man who’d gone to see Edgar, pretending to be making a movie. Two of them in French Lick on the same day, one asking questions about Campbell, the other watching Josiah’s house with a camera. What could these bastards be after? Hell, Josiah didn’t have anything to take.

He removed the cash from the wallet and put it in his pocket, then felt around in the case and came across a fancy leather folder, took that out and opened it, and found himself studying a sheet of paper with his own name, date of birth, and Social Security number. Plus a list of addresses going back the better part of fifteen years, places he’d almost forgotten about. He thumbed past this sheet and saw that the next one detailed his arrest history, complete with case numbers and dates of arrest and charges. He flipped through a few more papers, then found one that said Client Contact. There were two phone numbers and a fax number and e-mail address, but Josiah was far more interested in the name itself:

Lucas G. Bradford.

This morning the humidity had arrived even ahead of the heat. It was a liquid breeze that came in through the screen as dawn rose, and Anne, expecting to see heavy clouds when she got out of bed and looked out the window, was surprised to find sun.

She showered, a process that now took too much time and too much energy, holding on to the metal railings with one hand at all times, and then dressed in slacks and a light cotton blouse and the sturdy white tennis shoes she wore every day. Had to wear them; balance was all that kept her from a hospital or a nursing home. She loathed those shoes, though. Hated them with a depth of passion that she’d rarely felt for anything. When she was young, she’d been a shoe fan. All right, that was an understatement and a half—she’d been crazy about shoes. And the shoes she loved had heels. They were tall and elegant and you had to know how to walk in them, you couldn’t just clomp around, you had to walk like a lady. Anne McKinney had always known how to walk. Had earned her share of stares over the years because of that walk, had watched men’s eyes drop to her hips all the time, long after she became a mother, even.

She took short, steady steps now in her flat, sturdy shoes. Hated the walk, hated the shoes. The past taunted with every step.

Once she was dressed, she went out onto the porch to take the day’s first readings. The barometer was down to 29.80. Quite a drop overnight. The sun was out, but the lawn didn’t sparkle under it, no heavy dew built up overnight the way there had been recently. She leaned out from under the porch roof and looked up and saw a cluster of swollen clouds in the west, pale on top but gray beneath. Cumulonimbus. Storm clouds.

All signs, from the clouds to the dry grass to the pressure drop, indicated a storm. It was confirmation of what she’d suspected yesterday, but she felt a vague sense of disappointment as she studied the clouds. They were storm makers, sure, but somehow she’d expected more. Still, it was early. Spring supercells developed quickly and often unpredictably, and it was tough to say what might find its way here by day’s end.

She recorded all of the measurements in her notebook. It was a ritual that usually gave her pleasure but today, for some reason, did not. She felt out of sorts, grumpy. It happened when something of note occurred, like Eric Shaw’s visit, and she had nobody to share it with. It was then that she felt the weight of the loneliness, then that the mocking of the empty house and the silent phone rose in pitch. She’d kept her mind all these years, her memory and logic, was proud of it. Mornings like this, though, she wondered if that was best. Maybe it was easier to be the doddering sort of old, maybe that dulled the sharp edges of the empty rooms that surrounded you.

“Oh, stop it, Annabelle,” she said aloud. “Just stop it.”

She would not sit around here feeling sorry for herself. You had to be grateful for every day, grateful for each moment the good Lord allowed you to have on this weird, wild earth. She knew that. She believed it.

Sometimes, though, believing it was easier than at other times.

She went back inside and fixed toast for breakfast and sat in her chair in the living room and tried to read the paper. It was tough to concentrate. Memories were leaping out at her this morning, nipping the heels of her mind. She wanted someone to talk to. The phone had been quiet all week but that was partially her own fault—she’d worked so hard to convince those at church and in town of her strong independence that they didn’t worry about her much. And that was good, of course, she didn’t want to give anyone cause to worry, but… but it wouldn’t hurt if someone checked in now and again. Just to say hello. Just to make a little conversation.

Heavens, but Harold had loved to talk. There had been plenty of times when she’d said, Harold, go outside and give my ears a break, just because she couldn’t take the unrelenting chatter. And the children… oh, but those were his children, sure as anything, because both of them caught the gift of gab like it was a fever. This house had been filled with talk from sunrise to sundown.

She set the paper down, stood up, and went to the phone, ignoring, as she usually did, the cordless unit that sat beside her, because it was good to move around, good to stay active. She called the hotel and asked to be put through to Eric Shaw. It had occurred to her last night that she’d never asked what family he was researching. Maybe she could help. Maybe if he told her the family name, she’d remember some things about them, maybe she could tell him some stories.

It went to voice mail, though, and so she left a message. Anne McKinney calling, nothing urgent. Just wanted to check in.

33

ERIC WENT INTO THE dining room and ordered breakfast, realizing with relief that he was truly hungry again, sipping his coffee with a touch of impatience, eager to see the food brought out. That had to be a good sign.

He couldn’t stop thinking about the effects of Anne’s water. It had eased his physical suffering just as the Bradford bottle had, but the vision it brought on was so different, so much gentler. Like watching a film, really. He’d had distance, separation of space and time. If what he’d seen were real…

The possibilities there tempted him in a strange way. Maybe it was a hallucination the same as those experienced by drug users every day. If it wasn’t, though, if he was really seeing the past, then the water provided him something far different from pain. Provided him with power, really. A gift.

“French toast with bacon,” a female voice behind him said, and then the waitress set a plate before him that intensified his hunger. “And you need more coffee. Hang on and I’ll get a refill. Sorry about that. I stopped to watch the TV people for a few minutes.”

“Uh-huh,” Eric muttered, putting the first forkful of French toast into his mouth even before she was gone. It tasted fantastic.

“They were filming right in the lobby,” she said. “I was hoping they’d come in here and I could make the news. You know, fifteen seconds of fame.”

Eric swallowed, wiped his mouth with the napkin, and said, “Oh, right, I saw the TV vans. What’s the deal?”

“Someone was murdered,” she said, dropping her voice to a grim whisper as she leaned over him to fill his coffee cup. “Blown up in his van, can you believe it?”

“Really? So much for this being a peaceful place. If people find out the locals are blowing one another up, it might hurt business.”

“Oh, it wasn’t a local. Was some man from Chicago. And he was a detective, too. So it’s even more interesting, you know? Because who knows what he was doing down here. I don’t remember his name, but they said that—”

“Gavin,” Eric said, feeling his body temperature drop and his breathing slow, the food in front of him no longer so appealing. “His name was Gavin Murray.”

It was a hell of a long hike, particularly going through the woods to avoid the road, but Josiah didn’t trust his cell phone, figured they could track it. He turned it off and took the battery out to be sure it wasn’t transmitting any signal, and then he set off through the woods and toward town. He hated to involve Danny Hastings in this mess, but there was work to be done now that he couldn’t do alone, and Danny was the only person he trusted to keep his mouth shut no matter what happened. Oh, Danny would stand a good chance of getting caught at it, but he’d never tell the cops a thing. They’d gotten into plenty of scrapes with the police over the years, and if there was one thing Danny knew how to do in those situations, it was keep his mouth shut.

The hike into town took more than an hour, and then he had to chance being seen, come out into the open for at least a little while. There was a pay phone at the gas station, one of the last pay phones in town, and he called and told Danny where to meet him. The whole time he felt a prickle in the middle of his back, expecting a police car to come swerving around the corner at any minute, cops boiling out of it, guns drawn. Nothing happened, though. Nobody so much as blinked at him.

As soon as he hung up, he went back into the woods and climbed out of sight. Sat on an overturned log and waited. Fifteen minutes later, Danny’s Oldsmobile appeared, driving slow, Danny craning his head and looking for him. Shit, way to avoid attention.

Josiah hustled down the hill and came out of the woods and lifted a hand. He jerked open the passenger door when the car pulled up, and said, “Drive, damn it.”

Danny took them up the hill, the transmission double-clutching and shivering.

“What in the hell is going on, Josiah?”

“I got powerful problems is what’s going on. You willing to help a friend out?”

“Well, of course, but I’d like to know what I’m getting into.”

“It ain’t good,” Josiah said, and then, softer, “and I’ll try to keep you out of it much as possible. I will.”

It was that remark, the show of concern for someone other than himself, that seemed to tell Danny the gravity of the situation. He turned, frowning, and waited.

“I got into a scrape last night,” Josiah said. “Man pulled a gun on me. I had a rock in my hand, and I used it on him. Hit him once more than I needed to.”

“Oh, shit,” Danny said. “I ain’t helping you bury no body, Josiah. I ain’t doing it.”

“Don’t need to bury a body.”

“So you didn’t kill him?”

Josiah was quiet.

“You did kill him?” Danny almost missed a curve. “You murdered somebody?”

“It was self-defense,” Josiah said. “But he’s dead, yeah. And you know what the police around here will do to somebody like me in a case like that. Self-defense ain’t going to mean shit. The prosecutor will pull out all my old charges and tell the jury I’m nothing but trash, dangerous trash, and I’ll be up in Terre Haute or Pendleton.”

Danny’s fat tongue slid out, moistened his lips. “It wasn’t that guy in the van?”

“How’d you know about that?”

“Whole town knows about it, Josiah! Grandpa dragged my ass up to church today, was all anybody was talking about. Oh, hell, it was you?”