So Cold the River

“He pulled a gun on me, damn it! I told you that.”

They’d reached the logging road, and Josiah instructed him to turn in. He explained everything except the odd dreams of the black train and the man in the bowler hat.

“I don’t understand what everybody’s interested in Campbell for,” Danny said.

“I don’t either. But somebody named Lucas Bradford sent this guy down from Chicago to watch me, and old Lucas has himself some dollars. I found a bill in that dead guy’s papers, Danny—he’d been paid fifteen thousand as a retainer. And there’s a note in there says he was authorized to spend up to a hundred to resolve the situation. That’s what it said—resolve the situation. A hundred thousand dollars.”

Danny reached up and scratched the back of his neck. He was still in his church clothes, had on a starched white shirt that was showing sweat stains under the arms.

“Something going on, that’s for sure,” he said. “But the way you’re handling it ain’t right. You’re just making things worse. You said he pulled a gun on you? Shit, call the police and tell them that. Get yourself a lawyer—”

“Danny,” Josiah said, “I set the man on fire. You understand that? Think about that, and about the reputation I got in this town, and you tell me what’s going to happen.”

Danny was frozen for a moment, but eventually he gave a small nod. Then, in a whisper, he said, “What in the hell did you set him on fire for?”

“I don’t know,” Josiah said. “I don’t even know why I hit him the second time. Didn’t feel like myself. But I did it, and now I got to figure something out fast.”

“What are you thinking?”

“This fella Lucas Bradford has money to spare. And I’m in need of it. But first I got to understand some things—who he is, and why he’s asking about me. I’m going to need your help to do that. I’m asking you, please, to help.”

Danny sighed, reached out and wrapped his hands around the steering wheel, squeezed it tight.

“Danny?”

He nodded. “I’ll do what I can.”

“Good. Thank you. First thing I want you to do is find that son of a bitch who came down to Edgar’s and told us that bullshit about making a movie. He’ll be staying at one of the hotels. You find him, and you follow him.”

34

ALYSSA BRADFORD DIDN’T answer her phone. Eric called without even leaving the table, speaking into the cell phone in a hushed but hostile voice as he left yet another message, and demanded that she call him back, and this time he would be talking to her husband, thanks. Someone was dead, damn it, and he needed to know what the hell was going on.

The phone didn’t ring. He sat there for a while, waiting and thinking of Gavin Murray with his sunglasses and cigarettes and smug voice. Blown up in a van.

The waitress came by and said, “Is there a problem with the food?” as she eyed his practically untouched plate.

“No,” he said. “No problem. Just… thinking.”

He ate the meal without tasting it, paid, and went back up to the room. He hadn’t gotten the door open before the phone began to ring. Alyssa, he thought, it damn well better be you.

It wasn’t her. Rather, the manager of the hotel, wishing to inform him that the police were looking for him.

“Tell them I’ll be down in five minutes,” he said, and then he hung up and called Claire.

“Are you home?” he said when she answered.

“Yes. Why?”

“I’d like you to leave.”

“Excuse me?”

“I need you to bear with me for a minute, and I need you to believe that I’m not crazy. You still believe that?”

“Eric, what’s going on?”

“Somebody followed me down here from Chicago,” he said. “A man named Gavin Murray. Write that name down, or at least remember it, would you? Gavin Murray. This guy was a PI from Chicago, with a group called Corporate Crisis Solutions.”

“All right.”

He heard a sheet of paper tear loose, then a rattling sound as she looked for a pen.

“He showed up at the hotel yesterday,” Eric said, “and he knew all about me. He mentioned you by name. He knew that we were separated and that the divorce hadn’t gone through yet.”

“What?”

“Yeah—pretty detailed, right? He’d done his research, but that’s the sort of thing those guys can do quickly and easily. So I wasn’t too concerned. Now I’m starting to be.”

“You think I should be afraid of him?”

“Oh, not of him. He’s dead.”

“He’s what?”

“Somebody killed him last night,” Eric said. “Murdered him, blew up his van. I don’t know the details yet. I’m on my way to meet with the police. What I do know is that the guy followed me down here, offered me seventy-five grand to stop asking about Campbell Bradford, and then he was killed. I don’t have any idea what that means, but I do need to tell you that he essentially threatened me last night. He said other sorts of leverage could be used if I ignored the money.”

“Eric…”

“I’m sure this is an undue precaution,” he said, “but all the same, I’d like you to stay away from the house for a while. Until we understand a little more about this, I think that would be a good plan. It would give me some peace of mind, at least.”

“Eric,” she repeated, voice lower, “did you drink any more of that water?”

“That’s irrelevant right now, because we’ve got—”

“You did.”

“So what if I did?”

“I’m just wondering… are you sure this happened? Are you sure that man—”

“Was real?” he said, and gave a wild laugh. “Is that what you’re asking me? Shit, Claire, that’s just what I need, to have you questioning my sanity. Yes, the man was real and yes, he is really dead now, okay? He is dead. Somebody killed him, and I’m going to talk to the police about it now, and if you don’t believe that, then get on the damn computer and look it up, look him up, do whatever the hell you need to do to convince yourself—”

“All right,” she said, “okay, okay, calm down. I just had to ask, that’s all.”

It was quiet for a few moments.

“I’ll leave,” she said. “If that’s what you want, I’ll leave. Okay?”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t get upset when I ask you this, but why did you drink the water again?”

So he answered that as the room phone began to ring again—probably the police wanting to know what the hell was keeping him—and told her about the terrible night he’d had and the way Anne McKinney’s water had quelled it, and about the vision of Campbell Bradford and the boy with the violin.

“The only thing I’m worried about right now,” she said, “is what that water is doing to you. Physically, and mentally. All the rest of this—it’s scary and it’s weird, but it can be dealt with. But that water… that’s more frightening, Eric. Your body is dependent on it now. Your brain, too. That’s not a safe situation.”

“We don’t know if I’m dependent yet,” he said, but the headache was back and his mouth was dry.

“You need medicine,” she said, but then there was a knock on the door and he knew the police had decided not to wait for him to come down.

“I’ve got to go, Claire. I’ve got to talk to the cops. Will you please get out of the house for a while? At least until I know what’s going on.”

She said that she would. She told him to be careful. She told him not to drink any more of the water.

35

THE COP WHO TOOK the lead in talking with him was with the Indiana State Police, a guy named Roger Brewer. He drove Eric down to the little police station in the middle of French Lick, didn’t speak much on the way, didn’t say hardly anything at all until they were seated and he had a tape recorder going. He was a grave man with a focused stare.

“Isn’t a whole lot I can tell you at this time,” he said, “or at least that I can disclose to you, that’s the better word, but for right now it’ll suffice to say that Gavin Murray was killed last night. I was wondering what you could tell me about that.”

“What I can tell you?” Eric echoed. The headache had dialed up a notch as soon as they were under the fluorescent lights. In addition to the tape recorder on the table between them, there was a video camera showing near the corner of the ceiling. “I can’t tell you anything about that.”

“Then tell me about him,” Brewer said, “and about you. Curious as to what brought everybody down to Indiana.”

Eric started to speak, then caught himself and hesitated for a moment while Brewer arched a questioning eyebrow.

“Something wrong?”

“Just thinking it might behoove me to ask whether you consider me a suspect.”

“Behoove?” Brewer’s face seemed lost between angry and amused.

“That’s right.” Maybe it was a mistake to ask—Eric’s previous dealings with the police had been few, and he had a natural instinct to just roll with Brewer’s authority—but the hissing wheels of the tape recorder had put his guard up. Eric understood better than most the potential for manipulation of film and tape.

“Well, Mr. Shaw, as is generally the case when we have the discovery of a homicide victim, the suspect pool is initially deep and wide. Are you in it? Sure. So are plenty of others, though. Right now, you’re looking like one who can maybe provide some answers. Hate to think you’re unwilling to do that.”

“It’s not a matter of being unwilling, it’s a matter of understanding the situation. I’d like to know how you got my name.”

Brewer was silent.

“Look,” Eric said, “I’d like to talk to you. It’s my preference, in fact. But I’m also not going to treat this as a one-way exchange. I’m worried, and I feel like there are some things I deserve to know. If you want to have a conversation, great. If this is an interrogation, though, I’ll ask you to hold on until I get a lawyer in the room.”

Brewer sighed at the mention of the word.

“Hey,” Eric said, “it’s your call.”

“We have a homicide to solve,” Brewer said eventually, “and unless you were directly involved, I’d hate to think you’d voluntarily slow us down.”

“Detective, yesterday that man surprised me in a parking lot, discussed details of my personal life, and then made a clear threat. You want to know about it, I’ll be happy to share, but like I said, I have some other things to consider. Like protecting my family.”

He’d hoped a little tease of information would improve Brewer’s cooperation, and it seemed to. The cop’s eyes lit at the disclosure, and he pulled his chair closer.

“I’ll do what’s within reason for you, if you do the same for me, Mr. Shaw. And that’s going to require a full explanation, quickly.”

“I’ll give it. Just tell me, please, how you got my name. I need to know that.”

“Gavin Murray’s company.”

“They told you he’d come down here after me?”

Brewer nodded. “They said that you were the target of his investigation.”

“Well, who hired him?”

“We don’t know.”

Now it was Eric’s turn to sigh, but Brewer lifted a hand.

“No, really, Mr. Shaw, we do not know. That’s all his company would tell us. They’re balking at more disclosures right now, claiming attorney-client privilege.”

“Private investigators have attorney-client privilege?”

“They do when they’ve been hired by an attorney. At that point, they’re part of the attorney’s legal team. It’s legit, if a pain in the ass. They seem eager to cooperate, but refuse to provide the client’s name. We’ll work on it, but for now that’s where we stand.”

Brewer leaned back and spread his hands. “So as you can imagine, it is pretty damn important for us to hear what you have to say, Mr. Shaw. All we know now is that the man came down from Chicago to follow you. Or, apparently, to speak with you. The same night he arrived, he was killed. We’d like to know why.”

“So would I,” Eric said, and then he hesitated briefly, wondering again if a lawyer was in his best interests, because in the scenario Brewer had just recounted, Eric seemed not only like a suspect, but like a good one.

“The faster we move on this,” Brewer said, “the faster we can put your mind at ease for your family and yourself.”

“Okay,” Eric said. “Okay.”

He had Murray’s business card in his wallet, and he gave it to Brewer and then gave him Kellen’s name and number, and explained he was a witness to the initial encounter.

“But not to the conversation,” Brewer said. His tone was soft and unchallenging but it still stopped Eric short, gave him a tingle of warning.

“No,” he said. “There were no witnesses to the conversation. But I came back from it and told Kellen what had been said, immediately. That’s the best I can do.”

Brewer nodded, placating, and asked him to go on. Eric explained everything he could as Brewer sat quietly with his eyes locked on Eric’s, the tape recorder’s wheels turning steadily. Brewer’s face didn’t change throughout, didn’t react even when Eric spoke of the payment offer or the suggestion that he could be convinced to go home through other means if he passed on the money.

“He was talking on the phone when we left. You want to know who his client is, you should probably check the phone records.”

“We’ll be checking those, don’t worry.” Brewer looked down at the recorder, thoughtful, and said, “And this was both the first and last time you saw Gavin Murray?”

“Yes. You want to talk to someone, I’d look for Josiah Bradford. He was the last person Murray asked me about, and in my opinion, he’s probably the core of the reason Murray came down here.”

“Can you elaborate on that theory?”

“Have you talked to Josiah?”

Brewer looked pained, but he said, “We’re going to, don’t worry. It’s a matter of locating him, same as with you.”

“So he’s missing?”

“He’s not home, that’s all, Mr. Shaw. I’d hardly term him missing yet.” There was something in Brewer’s eyes that hinted at a deeper level of dissatisfaction, though, something that told Eric they were indeed interested in Josiah Bradford. “Now, could you please elaborate on the suggestion you just made?”

“Well, it’s a pretty simple idea. I came down here to do a movie about this rich guy in Chicago, about his childhood here. As soon as I get here, somebody offers me a decent amount of money to go home. Felt like a protective move to me, somebody maneuvering to head a problem off at the pass.”

A plausible explanation, but the details it omitted, like Eric’s growing confidence that the old man in the hospital was not the same Campbell Bradford of local infamy, were not minor. How in the hell could he be expected to explain it all, though? It was too damn strange. He’d sound like a lunatic.

“You said you’re making a movie,” Brewer said. “A documentary.”

“Yes.”

“Fascinating. So you tape interviews, things like that.”

“Yes.”

“Great. If we could have a look at the film you have from yesterday…”

“I don’t have any. Well, I’ve got audio. I can give you audio.”

But the audiotapes were going to introduce a new element to all this. Eric didn’t like the idea of Brewer and a roomful of additional cops sitting around listening to him tell Anne McKinney about his visions. No, that didn’t seem like a good choice at all.

“You don’t use a camera? Seems tough to make a movie without a camera.”

“I use them.”

“So you have one with you?”

“No. I mean, I brought one down, yeah. But it… it broke.”

Shit, that couldn’t sound more like a lie. Maybe he could find some wreckage from the camera to back him up, but that would require an accompanying explanation of how he’d come to beat an expensive camera into pieces on the hotel desk. Not the sort of story you wanted to tell a cop who was investigating a rage homicide.

“It broke,” Brewer said in a bland voice. “I see. Now, could you describe what your night looked like after your talk with Gavin Murray?”

“What it looked like?” Eric echoed, trying to focus. His head was pounding steadily now, and his stomach clenched and unclenched. He tried to will it all away, or at least down. Now was not the time for another collapse.

“Yes, what you did, who saw you, things of that nature.”

He should tell the truth, of course. But telling the truth would take them to Anne McKinney, and that would take them to his talk of visions and headaches. Of course, he’d already given them Kellen, who would have to say the same thing…

“Mr. Shaw?” Brewer prompted, and Eric lifted his head and looked at him and then the vertical hold went out in his eyes. It was like watching old reel-to-reel tape that had been damaged; the scene in front of him began to shake up and down, as if Brewer were sitting on a pogo stick instead of a chair. He had to reach out and grip the underside of his chair to steady himself.

Oh, shit, he thought, it’s coming back. It’s coming back already, I didn’t even get a day out of it this time.

The shaking stopped then, but double vision came in its place, two of Brewer across the table from him now, two sets of skeptical eyes regarding him, and there was a buzzing in his ears.

“I think,” Eric said, “I’m going to need to take a break.”

“Excuse me?”

“I’m not feeling well. It’s got to be nerves. I’m worried about my wife.”

“Mr. Shaw, I assure you there’s no reason to think your wife is in any danger. Unless you have a reason beyond what you’ve said…”

“I just need a break,” Eric said.

Yes, a break. That’s what he needed. A long-enough break to let him get back to his hotel room, let him get back to that plastic cup he’d filled with water from Anne McKinney’s bottle. It was the only thing that could save him now.

“I can get you some water,” Brewer said, and that produced an almost hysterical urge to laugh. Yes, water, that’s exactly what I need!

“I’d actually… I need to step out for a while,” Eric said, and the suspicion was building in Brewer’s face like a flush.

“Well, go on outside,” Brewer said. “But we do need to finish this talk.”

“No, I’m going to need to go. I can come back later. I need to lie down, though.”

“Excuse me?”

“Unless you’re arresting me, I’m going to need to lie down. Just for a while.”

He’d expected resistance, but instead Brewer gave him a very cool, skeptical nod and said, “Well, you do what you have to do, Mr. Shaw. But we’re going to need to talk again.”

“Of course.” Eric lurched to his feet as the buzzing intensified. He felt as if he were moving through water as he went to the door. “I’m sorry, I really am, but all of a sudden I’m feeling very bad.”

Brewer stood, and the sound of his chair sliding back on the floor went off in Eric’s brain like a power grinder applied to the edge of a blade, sparks coming off in showers.

“I’ll drive you back to the hotel,” the detective said, moving around the table, and Eric raised a hand and waved him off.

“No, no. I’ve got it. Could use the exercise. Thanks.”

“You really don’t look so good, Mr. Shaw. Maybe you should let me drive you.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“I hope you are,” Brewer said. “And I hope the recovery is quick. Because we’re not done talking.”

“Right,” Eric said, but he had his back to Brewer now. His double vision had persisted upon rising, and there were two doors floating in front of him, with two door handles. Better grab the right one. He reached out and fumbled, his hand sliding across the door, and then he had the handle and twisted it down and stepped out into the hallway, crossed through the front of the station and made it through the next set of doors, and then he was outside.

The fresh air was bracing and comforting, but it was accompanied by glaring sunlight that almost brought him to his knees. He staggered like a drunk and lifted a hand to shield his eyes and kept on going, plowing ahead the way he had in the dining room the night before, hoping this trip would have a better ending.

He got to the sidewalk and turned toward the hotel. There were white squares at the edges of his vision now, and he was certain he couldn’t continue, but then the sun fell behind a bank of clouds. They came in quickly, pushed by a strong, warm wind, and the white squares went gray and then faded and the headache seemed to lose steam.

On he walked, sucking in the deep, grateful breaths of a man just saved from drowning. When he crossed the street he looked back at the police station, saw Brewer standing in front of the building with his hands in his pockets, watching.

This could not have been timed worse. The last place he needed to have a breakdown was inside a police station while answering questions about his whereabouts during a murder. He probably couldn’t have looked guiltier if he’d been setting off three lie detectors at once. What could be done, though? It was remarkable he’d made it out as calmly as he had. The only choice was to go back to the hotel and drink what was left of the water and then call Brewer and apologize, tell him he was feeling better and ready to finish the interview. Maybe he’d even try to explain the whole crazy story. All that could be sorted out in time—right now, he needed the Pluto Water.

When he was halfway back to the hotel, the clouds lifted from the sun and the harsh white light was back, bouncing off the pavement and into his eyes, a searing, penetrating brightness that lifted the headache to a gleeful roar. He held his hands cupped over his eyes and stumbled along, walking quickly but unevenly, aware of the occasional slowing of cars beside him as passersby stared.

He’d forgotten to go through the casino parking lot and take the back way to the West Baden hotel and had walked instead all the way through town. For a long time he concentrated on his breathing, trying to keep a steady rhythm, but then his stomach got into the act, that swirling nausea, and he couldn’t keep count anymore. He was soaked with sweat, but it sat cold on the surface of his skin. At one point he felt his knees wobble and he almost went down, had to pull up short and bend over and brace his hands on his thighs. A white Oldsmobile pulled up slowly when he did that, and he was afraid the driver was going to offer help, but then the car pulled away again. Nobody wanted to get out for a stranger who was bent over on the sidewalk like some sort of derelict.

The sun disappeared while he was standing there, and a minute later his legs steadied and he straightened and began to walk again. About twenty steps after that, the wind picked up swiftly and then a few drops of rain began to fall.

The rain saved him. As it opened up and began to fall harder, the wind whistling in behind him, his head cleared and the nausea subsided. Not much, just the slightest change, but it was enough to keep him upright, keep him going. As the clouds went from pale gray to a dark, deep mass that covered the street in shadows, he lifted his head and let the rain fall on his face, water running into his eyes and his mouth.

It’ll keep raining, and you’ll keep walking. You’ll keep walking, and you’ll get there and get the water. It’s not that far.

It was raining hard by the time he reached the hotel, and there were short, soft rolls of thunder. The brick drive seemed impossibly long, miles upon miles, but he kept his head down and his stride as long as he could manage and he made it to the end.

Made it. I actually made it.

It was too early for a victory celebration, though—as soon as he stepped inside and the cooling rain vanished, hotel lights in its place, the sickness came galloping back out of the gates, digging the spurs in. He stumbled on his way to the elevator, turning heads and bringing silence to a group of women talking in the hall. Once he was in the elevator, the damn thing wouldn’t go up, and it took him a minute before he finally remembered it required a keycard. The rapid motion when it rose was enough to make him lean over and clutch the wall, but then the doors were open again and he was out in the hallway, just paces from the room, from salvation.

He opened the door and stepped in, awash with bone-deep relief, made it halfway to the table before his brain finally caught up to what his eyes were showing him.

The room had been cleaned—carefully and completely. And there beside the freshly made bed was an empty table, the half-filled water glass discarded.

36

THIS WAS TERROR, as true and as deep as he’d ever felt it.

He dropped to his knees, driven not by physical pain but by anguish.

“You bitches,” he said, speaking to the long-departed cleaning team that had removed the water. “Do you know what you did? Do you know?”

He knew. The withdrawal was going to return now in full glory, and this time there was nothing he could do to stop it, nothing he could take.

Call Kellen. Make him bring it back.

Yes, Kellen. That was the best chance he had. He got the phone out of his pocket, still on the floor, and dialed the number, held his breath while it rang.

And rang. And rang.

Then voice mail, and for several seconds he couldn’t even think of words to say, too awash in the sick sense of defeat. Eventually he mumbled out his name and asked for a call back. He had no way of knowing where Kellen was, though, or if he even still had the bottle. He could have passed it off to someone by now.

All he needed was a sip, damn it. Just a few swallows, enough to hold the monster at bay, but there was nowhere to find even that much because he’d given up both the Bradford bottle and Anne McKinney’s…

Anne McKinney. She was right up the road, with bottles and bottles of the water—old, unopened bottles.

All he had to do was make it there.

He stood again, shaky, dropping a palm to the bed to hold himself upright. He got in a few breaths, squinting against the pain and the nausea, and then went to the door and opened it and went out into the hall. He was alone in the elevator again, and that was good, because this time, holding the wall wasn’t enough—he had to kneel, one knee on the floor of the elevator, his shoulder and the side of his head leaned against the wall. It was a glass elevator, open on the back, looking down at the hotel atrium below, and he saw a young girl with braids spot him and tug her father’s sleeve and point. Then he was on the ground floor and the doors were open. He shoved upward, got out, and turned the corner and broke into a wavering jog. Speed was going to be key now. He could feel that.

He’d parked the Acura in the lower lot, closest to the hotel, and he ran for it now through the rain, which was coming down in gusting torrents, no trace of the sun remaining in the sky. Behind the hotel the trees shook and trembled.

He had his keys out by the time he got to the car, opened the door, and fell into the seat. The warmth inside the car made the nausea worse, so he put down the windows and let the rain pour in and soak the leather upholstery. He drove in a fog of pain, didn’t even realize the windshield wipers were off until he was out of the parking lot. He flicked them on then, but the slapping motion made him dizzy and clouded his vision even worse than the rain itself, so he turned them back off and drove with his right hand only, leaning out the window and squinting into the rain.

As he looped through the casino lots and into French Lick, each passing car seemed to have three windshields and six headlights. At some point he must have edged across the center line, because he heard a horn and jerked the wheel to the right and hit the curb, felt the front right tire pop up onto it and then drop back to the road with a jarring bang. The thunder was on top of the town now, harsh crackles of it, and occasionally lightning flashed in front of him, leaving behind a fleeting white film over his eyes.

The tires spun as he turned onto the uphill road that led to Anne McKinney’s house, but then the car corrected and he was almost there. A moment later he could see lights on in the windows, and out in the yard the windmills spun in silver flashes.

He missed the drive when he pulled in, felt the tires churn through wet soil instead, slammed on the brakes and brought the car to a stop and then threw it into park and popped the door open with the engine still running. He ran through the rain to the front door, and when he got to the steps, his shoe caught and he tripped and fell to his hands and knees on the porch. Then the door opened and Anne McKinney looked out at him, her face knit with fear, and said, “What’s wrong?”

“I need some water,” he said. “I need some of your water, fast.”

“Pluto Water?” she said, and she pushed the door back until it was open only a few inches, allowing her to peer out, as if she were afraid of him.

“Please. I’m sorry, but I need it. I’m getting sick. I’m getting very sick.”

She hesitated only a moment, then swung the door open, blinking against the rain that blew in her face, and said, “Get in here, then.”

Most days she’d have been down at the hotel at this time, but it was a Sunday, and on Sunday afternoons she stayed home. The rain that blew in made her glad of that, because it came down in gales, and she was no longer fond of driving in foul weather.

She’d been studying the skies when he arrived. What thunder there was had some courage to it, and the lightning flashes were brilliant, but beyond the quantity of rain it seemed a very ordinary storm, which both surprised and on some level disappointed her. The weather radio—or weather box, as her husband had always called it, a small brown cube that broadcast only the National Weather Service updates—crackled with the usual warnings, but there was no mention of tornadoes or even severe storms or supercells, no spotter activation. She kept watch on the clouds all the same—she never had required spotter activation, thank you—and didn’t see anything of note.

She’d been expecting more, and probably that was why the crashing arrival of Eric Shaw on her porch didn’t surprise her as much as it should have.

She left him on the floor and went to the stairs, and when she took the first step, pain flared in her back and her hip. Then she looked back at Eric Shaw and saw the anguish in his eyes, blended pain and terror, and she bit down against her own aches and got moving up the steps, going just as fast as she could.

The box with the water bottles was still out in the middle of the floor because she wasn’t strong enough to replace it, and now she was grateful for that. It took but a few seconds to grab a full bottle and remove the wrappings and start back down the stairs, clutching the rail with her free hand and taking careful steps, getting her foot down firm and flat each time. Eric had crawled back to the door, was sitting with his back against it and his head in his hands.

“Here you go,” she said, and she was almost scared to hand him the bottle, scared to touch him. Whatever was going on in his body and mind wasn’t right. Wasn’t natural.

He took the bottle from her and opened his eyes to thin slits, just enough to let him see the top. He was mumbling something, but she couldn’t make it out.

“What’s that?”

“Lights,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“Turn them off, please.”

She leaned over him and hit the wall switch and plunged the room into darkness. That seemed to give him some relief as he drank from the bottle. Years she’d saved those bottles, unopened, some of the only original Pluto Water in the valley, and now he’d gone through two in two days. Oh, well, wasn’t Christian to worry about a thing like that, sort of condition he was in.

There was still a light on in the kitchen, so she walked over and turned it off, too, and now the whole house was dark. She came back into the living room and stood with her hand on the back of a chair and watched him as the rain hammered the windows and another bolt of lightning lit the room briefly. He was sitting with his knees pulled up and his head down, and after a moment’s pause he drank again, just a few swallows.

I should call a doctor, she thought. He’s sick with something fierce, and the last thing that’s going to cure it is Pluto Water. I’ve got to call him a doctor.

But he was coming back. It was astonishing, really, the speed of it. He was recovering while she watched, his breathing easing back to normal patterns and color returning to his face and the tremors ceasing in his hands and legs. Across the room the grandfather clock Harold had made back in ’fifty-nine began to chime, and Eric Shaw lifted his head and looked at the source of the sound, and then he turned and looked at her. Smiled. Weak, but it was a smile.

“Thanks,” he said.

“You’re feeling better,” she said. “That fast.”

He nodded.

“I mean to tell you, I’ve never seen anything like it,” she said. “Shape you were in… I was standing here thinking I’d have to call for the ambulance, and then I took but a blink and you looked better.”

“It works quick when I get it.”

“And when you don’t?”

He closed his eyes again. “Gets pretty bad.”

“I could see that. Go on and finish it.”

“Don’t need to,” he said. “Doesn’t take much.”

He put the top back on the bottle, which was now about two-thirds full, and added, “I’m sorry. First of all to come crashing in your house in the rain like this; second for ruining more of your water.”

“Don’t you worry about that.” She went over to the hall closet and got a couple kitchen towels out, brought them over and handed them to him. “Go on and dry off.”

He dried his face, neck, and arms and then used the towels to mop up some of the water from the floor. While he was doing that, she noticed that his car was still running out in the yard, lights on and driver’s door open. She went outside and down the steps into the wet yard. The storm was dying down now, but the thunder still had a menacing crackle to it, like a dog snarling and snapping its jaws as it retreats. Thing about a dog like that—it always comes back.

When she got to the car, she leaned in and turned it off and took the keys in her hand. The interior was soaked, water pooled on the leather seat. She closed the door and then went back into the house and handed him the keys. When he finally stood, his legs looked steady. Anne told him to take the wooden rocker and she sat on the sofa.

“I’ve come across plenty of stories about that water,” she said, “but I never did hear of anyone needing it like you did. It’s almost like you’re addicted to it.”

“A lot like that.”

“Well, it doesn’t make any sense. I don’t know what would be in it that would—”

She stopped talking when she saw his eyes. They had shifted suddenly, warped into something flat and unfocused.

She said, “Mr. Shaw? Eric?”

He didn’t answer. Didn’t seem to have heard her, even, was staring at the old grandfather clock, but she wasn’t certain he was seeing that.

“You all right?” she asked, her voice a whisper now. He was in some sort of trance. Could be a seizure, could be something for that ambulance she’d considered a few minutes ago, but for some reason she didn’t think it was, didn’t think she ought to go for the phone.

Give him a minute, she thought.

And so, as the thunder continued to roll, softer now, pushing east, and a light, fading rain pattered off the porch and the windows, she sat there in the dark living room and watched him slip off into a place where she could not follow.

37

IT WAS TWILIGHT, the treetops lit by a gray gloom, and long shadows beneath, and the shack on the hilltop was creaking under the force of a strong wind. Stray raindrops splattered the ragged boards of the porch and plinked off the big roadster parked in front. Both doors opened and the two occupants stepped out—Campbell Bradford and the boy.

“Hold on there,” Campbell snapped, and then he took the violin case from the boy’s hand and flicked up the latches and opened it, lifted the instrument out. He handled the violin roughly, and the boy winced. Inside the case were a few handfuls of bills and coins. Campbell took all of the bills, folded them, and put them in his pocket. Then he dropped the violin back in on top of the coins and latched the case.

“There. What’s left is yours. Now go on and get your uncle. I need a word.”

Lucas took the case and went to the front door, stepping carefully around one gaping hole in the porch floor. A moment after he went inside, the door opened again and the old man stepped out, clothed in the same dirty overalls and with a hat on his head. The hat had holes in the brim.

“I don’t got no liquor for you tonight,” he said.

“I know it. Now come on down here so I can speak without shouting.”

The old man didn’t seem to like that idea, but after a hesitation he walked slowly down the steps and out into the yard.

“I wish you wouldn’t drag the boy down there with his fiddle,” he said. “He don’t like playing in front of folks.”

“He makes some money at it, and so do you,” Campbell said. “So kindly keep any more such thoughts unspoken. I like the sound of his playing.”

The old man frowned and shifted his weight but didn’t answer.

“I got a business dilemma,” Campbell said, “and you’re the cause of it. You ain’t given me but eight jugs in a month. That’s not enough.”

“It’s alls I had.”

“That’s the problem. What you have is not enough.”

“There’s other places for ’shine, Campbell. Lars has a still not two mile from here. Then there’s them boys from Chicago, they’d bring you down booze in barrels if you was to want it.”

“I don’t want their damn swill,” Campbell said. “Ain’t none of it the same as yours, and you know that.”

The old man wet his lips and looked away.

“How do you make it?” Campbell said, voice softer. “What’s the difference?”

“Make it same as anybody, I suppose.”

Campbell shook his head. “There’s something different about it, and you know what it is.”

“Figure it’s the spring water, maybe,” the old man said, shying away from Campbell’s stare. “I found me a good spring. Small one, but good. Strange. Water don’t look right coming out of it, don’t smell right either, but it’s got a… quality.”

“Well, I want more of it. And I want it fast, hear?”

“Thing is”—the old man shifted again, moving away from Campbell—“I’m not going to be able to help you much longer.”

“What?”

“I’m fixin’ to move. The boy needs to be somewhere else. I got a sister—not his mother, but another one—who got married and moved out east. Pennsylvania. Wrote and said he should be somewhere he could get music schooling. I don’t know about that, but this place… this place ain’t fit for raising a child. I ain’t fit.”

Campbell didn’t speak. Night was coming on quickly, shadows lengthening, and the wind howled around the home and the shed that housed the whiskey still.

“This valley’s drying up,” the old man said. “I’ve heard the talk, everybody losing their savings, banks closing. Won’t be anybody down here spending money on gambling and liquor anymore, Campbell. You ought to think about getting out yourself.”

“I ought to think about getting out,” Campbell echoed, his voice a thousand-pound whisper.

“Well, I don’t know what your plans are, but I’m going to try to get the boy east. Get him to somebody will see to him in the right way. Figure I’ll probably come back, this is the only home I know. But—”

“This is my valley,” Campbell said. “You understand that, you old shit-heel? I don’t give the first damn about what’s happening to banks and stocks, and I don’t give the first damn about what’s happening with your bastard nephew and your whore sister. This here is mine, and if I tell you to keep on making liquor, you damn well better take heed.”

The old man kept shuffling backward, but he lifted his head and dared to meet Campbell’s eye.

“That ain’t how it works,” he said. “You ain’t my master, Campbell. Run people all over here like you was, but the truth is, you’re just another greed-soaked son of a bitch. I’ve made money selling liquor to you, but you’ve made it back tenfold at least, so don’t tell me that I owe you a damn thing.”

“That’s how you see it?” Campbell said.

“That’s how it is.”

Campbell reached into his jacket, pulled out a revolver, cocked it, and shot the old man in the chest.

The gun was small but the sound large, and the old man’s eyes widened and his hands went to his stomach even though the bullet had entered high on his chest. His tattered hat fell from his head and landed in the grass a half second before he did. Blood ran thick and dark from the wound and coated the backs of his hands.

Campbell switched the gun to his left hand and walked over to him. His stride was brisk. He looked down at the body and spat a stream of tobacco juice onto the wound. The old man gurgled and stared.

“This world breaks many a man,” Campbell said. “I’m not one of them, old-timer. It’s a matter of the strength of your will. You ain’t never seen any strong as mine.”

The door to the shack banged open and the boy stood there, hands at his side, hair tousled. Campbell gazed at him without reaction. The boy looked at the body, and then at the gun in Campbell’s hand, and he did not move.

“Get down here,” Campbell called.

The boy made no response.

“Son,” Campbell said, “you best think about your future right now. You best think fast and hard. Ain’t going to be but this one chance to make the decision.”

The boy, Lucas, came slowly down the steps. He walked across the grass toward his uncle’s body. There was no motion from it now, no trace of breath. When he reached the body, he looked up at Campbell. He said not a word.

“You are facing,” Campbell said, “a key moment in your life, boy. Seminal is the word. Now look down at your uncle.”

Lucas gave the body a flick of the eyes. His knees were shaking and he’d squeezed his fingernails into his palms.

“Look,” Campbell said.

This time he turned his face down, stared right at the corpse. There was blood in the grass on both sides of it now, and the muscles of the dead man’s face looked stricken and taut.

“What you see there,” Campbell said, “is a man who had no appreciation for strength. For power. A man who could not take heed of ambition. What you have to decide now is, are you such a man?”

Lucas looked up. The wind was blowing hard and steady, bending the treetops and whipping his hair back from his forehead. He did not meet Campbell’s eyes, but he shook his head. He shook it slowly but emphatically.

“I thought not,” Campbell said. “You been up here for a good while. You’ve seen him at work. Do you know how to make that moonshine?”

Lucas nodded, but it was hesitant.

“Whatever you’ve forgotten about it,” Campbell said, “you’d be advised to start remembering.”

He put the gun away and then dropped his hands into his pockets, hunching against the wind.

“Time for you to find a shovel, boy. I’d hurry, too. Feels like rain.”

Eric’s hearing returned before his sight. He was dimly aware of the chiming grandfather clock before the room appeared around him, vaporous at first and then hard edged, and he found himself looking into Anne McKinney’s fascinated and fearful eyes.

“You see me again,” she said. It was not a question.

“Yeah.” His voice was a croak. She went into the kitchen and poured him a glass of iced tea and brought it back and watched silently as he drank the whole thing down.

“You had me a little nervous,” she said.

He choked out a laugh. “Sorry about that.”

“It was plain to see you’d gone somewhere else,” she said, and then, leaning forward, added, “Tell me—what were you seeing?”

“The past,” he said.

“The past?”

He nodded. “That’s the best I can describe it. I’m seeing things from another time…. They’re from this place, and they are not from this time.”

“This place,” she said. “You mean my home?”

There was something so excited in her voice, so hopeful, that he was taken aback.

“No. I mean the town. The area, I guess. But not your house.”

“Oh,” she said, disappointment clear. “Is it scary, what you’re seeing?”

“Sometimes. Other times… just like watching a movie.”

“You always have the visions when you drink the water?”

“I seem to,” he said. “They’re different when I have your water. Then I’m nothing but a spectator. When I drank from the other bottle… then it was more like seeing a ghost right here with me. I wasn’t seeing the past, I was seeing something out of it that had joined the present.”

She was quiet, considering what he’d said.

“Do you know the name Campbell Bradford?” he asked.

She rocked back. “That’s not who you’re seeing?”

He nodded.

“Oh, my. Yes, I know the name. Haven’t heard it in years, but he was the talk of the town when I was a girl. There’s plenty of folks who thought he was evil, you know. Or became evil, that’s the way I remember my daddy telling it. He said Campbell was just another mean man at first, but then something dark took hold of him and pushed him beyond mean. Pushed him until he wasn’t even himself anymore.”

“Something dark?”

“You know, a spirit. A lot of folks believed that sort of thing in those days.”

“You remember Kellen, the guy I brought over?” Eric said, and she nodded. “Well, his grandfather worked down here in the twenties and had some idea that the area was… not necessarily haunted, but—”

“Charged.” The word left their mouths simultaneously, and Eric pulled his head back and stared at her.

“He talked to you about this?”

“No,” she said softly, “it’s just the right word.”

“So you believe there are ghosts here?”

She frowned and looked at the window. “I’ve always connected it more to the weather myself. That’s what I study, you know. And there’s something different in this valley…. You can feel it in the wind now and again, and on the edge of a summer storm, or maybe just before ice comes down in the wintertime. There’s something different. And charge is the best word for it. There’s a charge, all right.”

“Does that mean you believe there are ghosts here or not?”

“There’s something in this area that’s close to magic,” she said. “You call it supernatural if you want; I’ve always called it magic. But there’s something in the place itself—in the earth, in the water, in the wind—that has power. You know, with weather there are cold fronts and warm fronts, and when they collide, something special is going to happen. I think there’s something about Springs Valley that’s similar. It feels the same way to me as the air does right before those fronts collide. That probably doesn’t make sense to you but it’s the only way I know to explain it. A special kind of energy in the air, maybe energy beyond the natural. Could there be ghosts here? Certainly. Not everyone sees them, though. That much I’m sure of. But those who do, well, I imagine it has a mighty powerful influence.”

Eric was staring at her, silent.

“Thing you need to remember?” she said. “You can’t be sure what hides behind the wind.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

She smiled. “You’re too worried about figuring out what you can believe about all of this, and then figuring out how to control it. That’s how most people approach their lives. Way I feel, though, after a lot of years of living? Not much of what matters in the world is under your control. You don’t dictate, you adapt. That’s all. So stop trying to control this, and start trying to listen to what it’s telling you.”

His reaction made her frown and tilt her head. “What?”

“If there’s a single point to these visions,” he said slowly, “I haven’t been able to understand it yet. Except the first one, with the train, when he tipped his hat at me. I understood that. Campbell was thanking me.”

“Thanking you? For what?”

“For bringing him home.”

38

ONCE DANNY LEFT AND it was just Josiah up at the old timber camp, time slowed to a lame man’s crawl, the heat baking him as he sat outside the old barn and swatted at mosquitoes that approached with a mind for feasting.

He wished he’d thought to ask Danny to bring him some food and water, but he hadn’t, and now his tongue was thick from thirst and his belly knotted with hunger. Eventually the heat and mosquitoes conspired to send him into the barn.

It was a dusty wreck of a place, lined with discarded equipment and broken crates and pallets, two chipmunks coming and going through a torn board near the floor. It should have been dark, but the light bled in from a thousand cracks and holes and gaps and formed crisscrossing beams through the shimmering dust in the air that reminded him of the laser security systems you saw in heist movies.

He wandered, shoving pallets and barrels around, searching the place because it offered a distraction to ease the painful passage of time. There was a chain saw in one corner, but it was rusted and worthless. Beside it was a long metal box, padlocked shut. That struck his curiosity—anything in a lockbox might have value. He gave the lock a tug but it held. The hasp around it was rusted, though, and the metal looked thin.

There was a crowbar in the bed of the truck, and he went for it now and returned to the box and gave it a gentle tap near the hasp. The sound of metal on metal banged loudly in the barn, and the box held. It was damn foolish to be hammering away up here, risking attention, but he was curious, so he gave it another whack, harder this time. Then a third, and a fourth, and on the fifth, the edge of the crowbar bit through the metal above the hasp. Success in sight now, he swung it in again, punching a hole in the box, and then levered the crowbar up and down, working it like a water pump handle, until the hasp had split from the box and the lock was now meaningless. He dropped the crowbar onto the dusty floor and lifted the lid.

Whatever the hell was inside certainly hadn’t been cause for all that effort. A weird tangle of rubber hosing, all connected but crimped in intervals of about sixteen or eighteen inches. Looked like something you’d see in a butcher shop, a long string of sausages waiting to be cut into individual links.

He reached in and grabbed one end, then hauled the stuff up close so he could see better in the dark. There was some fine print written along the casing, and he squinted and read it: DynoSplit.

“Shit!”

He dropped the stuff back into the box and took a stumbling step backward. It was dynamite, a form of it, at least. He’d been around a construction site or two, had worked for about six months at a quarry up near Bedford, knew enough to understand that dynamite wasn’t made of red sticks with wicks at the end like in some cartoon. But he hadn’t seen a long, continuous tube like that either. And here he’d been, hammering away at the damn box with a crowbar…. Maybe you couldn’t set the shit off without a detonator, but that wasn’t an experiment he wanted to try.

He closed the lid carefully and stepped back from the box, wiping sweat from his face. Best not to smoke a cigarette in this place, that was for sure. He wondered how old the stuff was. Ten years? Fifteen? More? Probably wasn’t even usable at this point. There was a shelf life to explosives, and the way he recollected, it wasn’t long. Again, something he’d just as soon not find out in person, though.

He went back to the truck and dropped the crowbar into the bed and leaned on it with his forearms, looking around the dim, dank barn and feeling the sweat drip off his face and down his spine. He felt alone, as alone as he ever had in his whole life. Wanted to check in with Danny, see what the word was down in town, but he didn’t trust the cell phone anymore. Maybe the radio would give him a sense of the situation. He got in and turned the battery to life, having no desire to start the ignition with a boxful of old dynamite not fifteen feet behind him.

There was a partial expectation in his head of hearing an “all-points bulletin,” like something out of an old gangster movie, calling him armed and dangerous. Instead, he listened to fifteen minutes of shitty country music and never heard so much as a mention of the murder. He gave up then and waited until it was on the hour, when they always did a short news update, and tried again. This time they mentioned it, but said only that a man from Chicago had been killed in a van explosion in French Lick and that homicide was suspected.

It was stuffy as hell, even with the windows down, and the heat made him sluggish. After a while he felt his chin dip and his eyelids went weighted and his breathing slowed.

Good, he thought, you need the sleep. Been a while since you had any. Last you did, in fact, was at the gulf, laying there on the rock with no reason to hide from the police, no blood on your hands…

The shadow-streaked barn faded from view and darkness replaced it, and he prepared to ease gratefully into sleep. Just as he neared the threshold, though, something held him up. Some warning tingle deep in his brain. A vague sense of discomfort slid through him and shook loose the shrouds of sleep and he lifted his head and opened his eyes. Ahead of him the closed barn doors looked just as they had, but when he exhaled, his breath formed a white fog. It was pushing on ninety degrees in here, he had sweat dripping along his spine, but his breath fogged out like it was a February morning. What in the hell was that about?

He felt something at his shoulder then, turned to the right, and saw he was no longer alone in the truck.

The man in the bowler hat was beside him, wearing his rumpled dark suit and regarding Josiah with a tight-lipped smile.

“We’re getting there,” he said.

Josiah didn’t say a word. Couldn’t.

“We ain’t home yet,” the man said, “but we’re getting on to it, don’t you worry. Like I told you, there’s a piece of work to be done first. And you made a bargain to do it. Made an agreement.”

Josiah glanced down toward the door but didn’t go for the handle, knowing on some instinctive level that he couldn’t get out of this truck now and that it wouldn’t matter even if he did. He turned back to the man in the hat, whose face seemed to be coated with the same shimmer Josiah had noticed in the dust motes caught by the streaks of sunlight in the barn. Only the man’s eyes were dark.

“You don’t look grateful,” the man said. “You ought to be, boy. Didn’t have to be you that I selected for the task. Nothing requires it. I’m bound by no laws, bound by nothing your sorry mind can even comprehend. But I came back for you, didn’t I? Because you’re my own blood. All that’s left of it. This valley was mine once, and will be again. You’re the one who’s going to see to it. Time to start showing gratitude, because ain’t a man alive can help you now but me.”

The man turned from Josiah and gazed around the barn, shook his head and let out a long, low whistle.

“It’s a fix you got yourself in now, ain’t it? There’s a way out of it, though. All you got to do is listen, Josiah. All you got to do is listen to me. You can count on me, yes, you can. Ask anybody in this valley, they’ll tell you the same. They’ll tell you that you can count on Campbell. Consistent as clockworks, boy. That’s me.”

His head swiveled again, dark eyes locking on Josiah’s.

“You ready to listen?”

Wasn’t nothing Josiah could do but nod.

The rain had stopped but the clouds were still winning the bulk of a struggle with the sun, allowing the occasional insurgency but then stomping it out quick, when Eric left Anne McKinney’s house to go back to the hotel. She followed him out onto the porch and pressed the bottle of Pluto Water into his hand.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Of course. Doesn’t take much brains to see you need it bad. But it isn’t going to work forever. So…”

“I’ve got to figure something out before you run out of bottles. Because then there’s none of it left.”

“Sure there is,” she said. “Hotel’s got it coming in through pipes.”

“What? I thought they stopped making the stuff decades ago.”

“Stopped bottling it, not making it. Shoot, never was something you made. Comes out of the ground, nothing else to it. There’s still springs all over the area. They got one piped into the hotel, use it for the mineral baths.”

“You can still take a mineral bath?”

She nodded. “One hundred percent pure Pluto Water.”

“Maybe I’ll sneak some gallon jugs in there, fill them up, and go the hell home. Pardon my language.”

“Son,” she said, “I was having your sort of week, I’d be saying a lot worse.”

“You saved me today,” he said.

“Held it off. You ain’t saved yet.”

That was true enough. He thanked her again and went to the car, felt the water soak instantly into his jeans when he sat. The seat and dashboard were drenched, but his cell phone, dropped onto the passenger seat and forgotten, was dry. He picked it up and saw nine missed calls, ignored them all, and called Alyssa Bradford. Got no answer. Hung up and dialed again, and then a third time, and this time she picked up on the first ring.

“I’m sorry,” she said. Her voice was hushed, and he was so surprised that she’d actually answered that for a moment he said nothing.

“Sorry,” he got out at last. “You’re sorry. Do you understand that I’ve spent my day with police because a man is dead?”

“I don’t know anything about that,” she said, and now it was clear that she was whispering intentionally. Someone was probably in the room with her or nearby, and she didn’t want this conversation to be overheard. “Listen, I can’t talk to you. But I’m sorry, and I don’t know what to say except that you should leave that place—”

“Why did you hire me?”

“What?”

“You didn’t send me down here to make a happy little memory film, damn it. The bottle was part of it, but I want to know what you really were hoping to find out.”

“I was tired of the secrets.” She hissed it.

“What does that mean? What secrets?”

“It doesn’t matter anymore. Not to you. Just—”

“Don’t tell me it doesn’t matter to me! I’m the one down here dealing with murders, not to mention the effects of that fucking water! Someone from your family knows the truth, and you need to find it out. I don’t care if you have to go into that hospital and electroshock your father-in-law back into coherence, I want to know—”

“My father-in-law is dead.”

He stopped. Said, “What?”

“This morning, Eric. About four hours ago. He’s dead, and I need to be with my family. I don’t know what else to tell you. I’m sorry about everything, but let it go. Leave that place and get rid of that bottle and good luck.”

She disconnected, and he was sitting with a dead phone at his ear and Anne McKinney watching him from the door. He lowered the phone and started the car and gave her a wave, tried to put some cheer into it.

The old man was dead. Not that it mattered—he’d been as good as dead anyhow, but, still…

He thought of Anne’s words about the supernatural being just like the weather, ebbing and flowing, fronts colliding, one side winning at least a temporary victory. When that old man in the hospital died, the one who’d been keeper of the bizarre damn bottle for so many years, what did it mean? Would it have any significance? Did it matter?

Stop thinking like that, Eric thought. Stop buying into the idea that whatever is happening down here is real. You’re seeing visions, but the people in them can’t affect this world. They just can’t do it.

“They can’t.” He said it aloud this time, hoping the sound of his voice would add strength of conviction in his mind. It did not.

39

THE MAN IN THE bowler hat disappeared in a blink. Just that fast. He was in the passenger seat at Josiah’s side, real as the truck beneath him, and then he was a memory. A memory that had every muscle in Josiah’s back tight as winch cables.

He actually put his hand out and waved it around the cab. Caught nothing but air. Then he puffed out a deep breath and waited to see if it would fog again. It did not.

The man in the hat, that’s how Josiah still thought of him. But this time he’d identified himself. Had called himself Campbell, had told Josiah that he was all that remained of the family blood.

Didn’t have to be you that I selected…. Nothing requires it…. All you got to do is listen, Josiah. All you got to do is listen to me.

It had been another dream, that was all. Just yesterday Josiah had wondered if the man in the dream could be Campbell, and his heat-addled brain had grabbed on to that and worked it into this latest dream. Odd thing was that all his life Josiah had been a man of deep, dreamless sleep. What had changed?

Hadn’t been a thing strange going on until the men from Chicago had shown up in town. The first of the strange moments had been the dream he’d had yesterday morning after the fight the night before…

No, it hadn’t been then. The first strange thing had been what happened when he went to wash Eric Shaw’s blood off his hand. The way the water had gone from hot to ice cold when it touched the blood. He’d never felt anything like that before. The house was still on a well, had an electric pump bringing in water from the same ground that produced the springs and the Lost River and the Wesley Chapel Gulf, and Josiah had always liked it that way. Didn’t need any treated city water.

But, still… that had been strange. Then the dreams began, culminating in this last experience which should have been a dream but absolutely was not. It was like the man in the bowler hat snuck up on him only when Josiah let his conscious mind down a bit, when he was asleep or close to it. And strange as it was, the man felt familiar. Felt connected, the way old friends did. The way family did.

He popped the door handle and crawled down, his legs numb from the long stretch of sitting, looked all around the dark barn and saw nothing but shadows. Even the streaks of sun were gone, and that realization unnerved him, sent him toward the doors. When he slid them back, he saw the sky had gone the color of coal and rain was beginning to fall. There was even thunder, and how in the hell he’d missed that, he couldn’t guess. Maybe this was proof that he had fallen asleep, that it had been another dream.

As he stood in the open barn door and let the rain strike his face, though, he knew that wasn’t it. He’d had dreams with the man before, and this had not been one of them. This time, the man had been here. He’d been real.

He stepped out into the rain, heedless of the storm, and walked toward the trees. He felt strange, off-kilter. As if some worries had been lifted, not from his memory but from his ability to care. The rain and the thrashing trees and the lightning didn’t bother him, for example. Neither did the murder warrant they were probably filing for him right now. That was strange. He should have been concerned as hell about that.

But he wasn’t.

The rain soaked his clothes and made a flat wet sheet out of his hair, but he figured, what the hell, he’d needed a shower anyhow. He walked on into the woods, moving along the top of the ridge, the saturated ground sucking at his boots. He was out of sight of the timber camp and Danny was due back at any time, but the hell with Danny. He could wait for Josiah.

He came out to the edge of the ridge and stood in the open, looking out over the wooded hills that stretched away from it, a few cleared fields in the distance, the towns of French Lick and West Baden somewhere beyond. There was a sturdy sapling near the steep side, and he wrapped his hand around it and then leaned out over the drop.

“My valley,” he said. His voice sounded strange.

His priority, just hours ago, had been escape. He’d need some money to do it, but if he could pull that off, he was going to get the hell out of Dodge. Now, hanging here above the stormy landscape, he didn’t much want to leave. This was home. This was his.

But that didn’t mean he intended to let go of the money. Lucas G. Bradford’s money, a man who bore Josiah’s name and had some tie to old Campbell himself. Could be Campbell had left this valley and made himself a dollar or two, then left it to Lucas G.; could be Lucas G. had made it for himself. Josiah figured it was the former. He was feeling a strange sense of loyalty to Campbell, the great-grandfather he’d never seen. Poor old bastard had become a figure of infamy in this valley over the years, but time was when he ran it, too. He’d been a big man here once, and people liked to forget that. Would be nice to offer a reminder.

The rain was gusting into his face, no trees shielding him from the west wind now, but he was enjoying the water. Felt good to be in it. Funny, because most times he hated to get caught out in the rain.

No, he wasn’t feeling like himself at all.

There were five messages on Eric’s phone. One from Detective Roger Brewer, who said he was wondering when they might be able to finish their talk. The edge in his voice wasn’t anything as casual as his words. Three from Claire, each with a sense of growing urgency. One from Kellen. “Heard from the police,” he said. “This is no good, is it? I’d like to hear what you think.”

Was there suspicion in his voice? Couldn’t fault him if there was. Eric called Claire first, and the relief-fueled anger he heard in her voice when she answered warmed him in an odd way.

“Where are you? I’ve called that hotel fifteen times. They’re probably going to throw you out of there if I call again.”

“I was talking to the police,” he said. “And then I, uh, I had a rough spell.”

Her voice dropped, softened. “Rough spell?”

“Yeah.” He gave her the update.

“You left the police station? Walked out in the middle of an interview?”

“Wasn’t much else I could do, Claire. You don’t have any idea what these spells are like. I barely made it to the door.”

“You could have tried to explain—”

“That I’m having drug reactions to mineral water? That I’m seeing dead men? I should explain these things to a cop who’s questioning me about a murder?”

It was a terrible moment of déjà vu, a return to so many instances over the past few years, him shouting at her for her inability to understand, for just not getting it, and her responding with silence.

A few seconds passed, and when she spoke again, it was with the careful, measured tone that he’d always found infuriating because it made him feel so small. Damn her composure, her constant control.

“I understand that might be a little difficult,” she said. “But I’m worried that if you didn’t offer some explanation, you’re going to create problems for yourself.”

“I’m not short on problems, Claire. Let’s add more to the pile, what the hell.”

“All right,” she said. “That’s one approach.”

He rubbed his temples again, but this time there was no headache. Why was he snapping at her? Why did he always resort to this, no matter the situation?

“Where are you?” he said.

“With my parents.”

Oh, how he wished she’d said a hotel. Now Paulie could step in and protect her, clean up yet another of Eric’s messes. He was probably enjoying the hell out of it.

“I don’t know if that’s such a good place. If anybody’s looking for you, that will be near the top of the list.”

“They have good security here.”

Indeed they did. They were twenty-six floors up in a restricted-access, luxury condo building overlooking Lake Michigan. Was going to take a damn long grappling hook to get up there.

“Dad’s been making calls,” she said.

“What? Why in the hell is he making calls?”

“To find out about the man who was murdered. Gavin Murray.”

“Damn it, Claire, the last thing I need is your father stirring up more trouble.”

“Really? Because it seems to me what you need is some help, Eric. It seems to me you need some answers. Who hired this guy, and why?”

Grudging silence. She was certainly right on the need for answers, and Paul was well connected in the Chicago legal community. He just might be able to get some.

“Tell him to start with the Bradford family,” he said finally. “Start with Alyssa, and then see who surrounds her. She shut me down today, and it wasn’t her decision. She was following instructions. Her only advice for me was to leave. Real insight, huh? Oh, and she said the old man is dead. Campbell. Or some version or impersonation of Campbell. Whatever the hell he was, he’s dead.”

“What? How?”

“Died today in the hospital, I think. She hung up without offering details.”

“Wonderful. One more person who can’t verify what you’ve told the police.”

“He couldn’t talk anyhow,” Eric said, thinking, except to me. He could talk to me, no problem at all. But let’s not share that with the police just yet.

“Have you heard back on the water test?” she said.

“Not yet. I need to call Kellen back. Then the police.”

“I don’t think you should do that. My father said you shouldn’t.”

“I can’t just blow them off, Claire, you just said that yourself.”

“I didn’t say blow them off. But Dad said that under the circumstances you absolutely should not talk to them again without a lawyer in the room.”

“But I’m just a witness.”

“You’ve told them what you know, right?”

“But he said he had more questions and I—”

“Here are some of his questions, Eric—he wants to know if you have a history of drug or alcohol abuse or violent episodes.”

“What?”

“Those were high on the list of questions when he called me, which was what I was going to explain before, but you cut me off. He seemed disappointed when I told him we were still on good terms. In other words, never say I can’t lie for you.”

Nice shot.

“I can’t believe he called you,” Eric said.

“Well, he did. And when I told my dad what was said, his response was that you need to get a lawyer. Your background isn’t relevant unless they consider you a suspect.”

“He doesn’t think I should talk to them at all?” Eric said, hating to give any credence to Paul Porter’s advice, but recognizing that the man had been a criminal attorney for many years.

“Not if you’ve already given a statement. He said he’ll get a lawyer if you—”

“I can find a lawyer.”

“All right. Great. You need to do that, and then you need to come home. You can’t stay down there anymore. You can’t.”

His response came without any thought: “But the water’s here.”

“The water? Well, take the bottle you have and come home and go to see a doctor! That’s what you need to be doing.”

“I don’t know,” he said, still taken aback by his own strange response. The water’s here? It had left his mouth as if of its own accord.

“What’s not to know? Have you even heard yourself tell me what’s been happening? You’re sick. That water is making you very, very sick.”

The idea was logical enough, sure, but it felt wrong. Leaving felt wrong.

“Anne’s water is different,” he said. “When I drink that, Campbell stays in the past. Stays where he belongs. As long as I don’t drink any more of the original bottle—and I don’t even have that one right now—I’ll be fine.”

“Listen,” Claire said, “either you come back here, or I go down there.”

“That’s probably not a good idea.”

“It’s a hell of a lot better idea than you staying down there alone, Eric. You really want to do that? With everything that’s happening to your body and to your mind, you want to be down there alone?”

No, he didn’t. And the idea of seeing her… that was an idea he’d been trying to keep out of his head for weeks. Stop wanting her, he’d told himself, stop needing her.

“I’m coming down,” she said, firm with conviction now. “I’m going to drive down in the morning, and we’re coming back together.”

He was thinking of the weeks of silence, the way he always waited her out, lasted until she called him so he wouldn’t have to show need or desire. Now here she came again, ready to get in the car and come after him while the incomplete divorce paperwork he had requested floated between them. Why, he wanted to ask, why are you still willing to do this? Why do you want to?

“I don’t know if you should be here,” he said. “Until we understand—”

“I’m going to leave in the morning,” she said. “And I don’t give a shit what we understand until then.”

That actually made him smile. She rarely swore, only when she got fired up about something, and he’d always made fun of her for both that restraint and the periods when she cast it aside. The Super Bowl when the Bears had lost to the Colts, for example.

“I’ll call you when I get close,” she said. “And until I do, can you please just stay around the hotel? Please?”

“All right,” he said, and he was fascinated and ashamed by the way their separation did not cast even a shadow over the conversations they’d had today, by the way she’d slipped so easily and completely back into the role of his wife. There when he needed her. Why?

“Good,” she said. “Stay there, and stay safe.”

40

HE TOOK CLAIRE’S ADVICE and ignored Brewer’s messages, called Kellen instead.

“You in town?” he asked.

“Yeah. Think you could come fill me in on this? I’ve had cops calling me.”

“I’m hanging tight to this hotel,” Eric said. “Preferably with witnesses present.”

It was supposed to be a joke, but Kellen’s silence confirmed that it was a bad one.

“Why don’t you come down here and meet me at the bar,” Eric said.

He agreed to that, and twenty minutes later Eric was sitting in the dark, contained side of the hotel bar when Kellen stepped through the door.

“My brother’s game is on now,” he said when he got to the table, “and I don’t miss those games. But this is a unique circumstance.”

“Sorry. If it helps, they got it on the TVs here. You heard anything on the water?”

Kellen shook his head, sliding into the chair across from Eric, then rotating it so he could see a TV. It was late in the first quarter and Minnesota was down six. Darnell Cage had gone to the bench. Eric hadn’t seen him hit a shot yet.

“So the cop wanted to know about you and that guy who stopped us in the parking lot,” Kellen said. “You can imagine my surprise when they told me he was dead.”

“You can imagine mine,” Eric said.

Kellen nodded, his eyes on Eric’s, and then said, “Did you kill him?”

“No. You don’t know me well, don’t have any reason to believe that, but I assure you, the answer is no.”

“I don’t think you did.”

“I did see a murder today, though.”

Kellen raised his eyebrows.

“Campbell Bradford committed it,” Eric said. “He killed the boy’s uncle. The boy with the violin. His uncle was a moonshiner, and Campbell murdered him.”

“You’ve gathered all this through your visions.”

“I know it sounds crazy, but you’ve seen that bottle, you’ve been around for everything’s that happened and—”

“Whoa,” Kellen said. “Slow down, man. Slow down. All I did was ask a question. Didn’t make a single accusation that I can recall.”

“All right,” Eric said. “Sorry. I just hear how it sounds when it leaves my mouth, and I know what you must think.”

“A lot of what I’d usually think has changed in the last day or two, hanging around your weird ass. So while I’m not dismissing one crazy word that comes out of your mouth, I’d also like to hear you tell me what the hell’s been happening down here.”

It took them almost an hour, Eric explaining what he knew and Kellen offering the same, arriving at a total that was just as empty as its parts. Kellen said Brewer had told him that while Josiah Bradford was “historically fond of trouble, but not the murdering sort of trouble,” detectives were indeed looking for him. Eric knew he should care more about that, but it was hard to right now. Ever since the latest vision, it was hard to keep his mind on the present, in fact. Strange.

“I’ve got a question for you,” Eric said.

“Shoot.”

“You’re the student of the area, you’re the one who knows so much about the history of this place. Do you believe that the moments I’ve seen after drinking Anne’s water have been real? Those scenes with Campbell and the boy?”

Kellen thought on it for a long time, and then he nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I do. Obviously, I can’t speak to the details you’re seeing. But in general terms, they fit with history. Could be you’re making the whole thing up, of course. I can’t imagine a reason you’d do that, though, and after seeing you collapse in the dining room the other day, I’m pretty damn convinced that whatever is happening to you is real.”

“Okay,” Eric said. “That’s what I think, too. That the moments I’ve seen are real. And I’ve started to think about ways to utilize it.”

“Utilize it?”

“Think about it, Kellen—I’m seeing an untold story, but a true one. If I can keep seeing it… if I can get a sense of the whole, then we can try to document it, right? Document it and tell it.”

“Right,” Kellen said slowly.

“You’re thinking that the average person would write it off as crazy,” Eric said. “People love this sort of shit, though. If I could make a film out of this? Oh, man. We could be on every talk show there is, telling this story.”

Kellen gave a slow nod, no response showing, and Eric had to swallow his annoyance. Get excited, he wanted to shout, don’t you see what this could do? It could bring me back, Kellen. It could give me my career back.

There was no need to push that idea yet, though. He could take it slow. There was plenty of water.

“Anyhow,” he said, “I’m just thinking out loud, sorry. I really would like to try to find that spring, though. The one they used for the alcohol. If the boy’s uncle was really murdered, there must be some record of it, right? Some way to put a name with him, to identify him.”

“Probably. I’ve been wondering about that spring, though. You said Campbell claimed it was different from the rest, and that’s the same thing Edgar told us about Campbell’s liquor. Remember? He said it made a man feel like he could take on the world.”

“You’re thinking that’s what is in my bottle?” Eric said.

“Could be.”

“And there might be a whole spring of that shit somewhere out in the woods around here?” Eric laughed. “Who knows what would happen if I tasted that one.”

“Yeah,” Kellen said. “Who knows.”

The rain returned about an hour after Eric Shaw left Anne’s house, but it was gentler and without the theatrics. Hardly any wind at all, but she remembered that fading thunder that had reminded her of a retreating dog and she knew that it would be back. Probably these were lines of storms coming in from the plains, a prelude to a cold front. It wasn’t an unpleasant prelude to her, though. This was what she watched for. What she did, now that there was no job and no children to raise, no husband to care for. She watched over the valley instead. They didn’t know she was there, maybe, didn’t pay her any mind as she sat up here with an eye to the skies, but still she watched for them.

She had a card taped to the refrigerator with a few handwritten excerpts from the National Weather Service’s advanced spotter’s field guide.

As a trained spotter, you perform an invaluable service for the NWS. Your real-time observations of tornadoes, hail, wind, and significant cloud formations provide a truly reliable information base for severe weather detection and verification. By providing observations, you are assisting NWS staff members in their warning decisions and enabling the NWS to fulfill its mission of protecting life and property. You are helping to provide the citizens of your community with potentially life-saving information.

And below that, written larger and underlined:

The most important tool for observing thunderstorms is the trained eye of the storm spotter.

This claim made in an era of Doppler radars and high-tech satellites. They were the experts, too. So if they said it, she figured it was true. Besides, that statement was the sort of thing that had always made sense to her. It gave science its due while warning that humans hadn’t yet developed a science that could understand, encompass, or predict all the tricks of this wild world. Nor, she knew, would they ever.

She turned the television on and saw they still had a thunderstorm warning active for Orange County. Well, they could pull that down. The storm was gone now and wouldn’t be back for a bit. They might want to keep the flash flood warnings handy, though, because if this rain fell all night, the creeks would be high come tomorrow, when the thunderstorms returned.

There was nothing on TV worth watching. A basketball game, but while she’d been raised on basketball, she didn’t care for the pro game. Still followed the Hoosiers, of course, and went to the high school sectional, but that had never been the same since they broke the legendary tournament into classes. Thank heaven Harold had been gone before that happened.

The phone rang just as she was making dinner, startled her, and she went to it, wondering if it was Eric Shaw, fearful he was having trouble again. Instead it was Molly Thurman, a young woman—well, forty—from church who was calling to tell Anne she’d been right about the weather again. Anne had guaranteed a storm after the service this morning, and it was nice to see somebody had remembered and thought to call. Molly had two boys, five and seven, and it wasn’t but a minute after she called that she had to hang up to tend to some crisis with them.

The phone was silent then, as was the house around it, just the hissing of the gas flame on the stove and the dripping of water down the gutters and off the porch roof to keep her company. She was glad the phone call hadn’t been Eric Shaw, having another spell, but she also would have been interested to know what was happening with him. If he were to be believed, things would remain normal for a few hours, at least. Then the pain would come back, and then he’d need some more of her water, and then he’d take to seeing things… seeing the past.

That’s what he’d said this afternoon, at least. What were you seeing? she had asked, and he’d said, The past. Moments from the valley’s history. And people from it. He’d seen the hotel in its glory, and then some old whiskey still up in the hills, seen it just as vividly as if it were real, seen the people as if they were in the room with him.

She thought on that while she ate her dinner and cleaned up, and when she was done, she went to the stairs again, sighed, and took the railing and started up.

When she got up to the empty bedroom, she unwrapped another bottle—her supply was dwindling fast this weekend—and held it in her hand. She hadn’t tasted the stuff in years. Decades. Surely nothing would happen, though. Whatever Eric Shaw was experiencing had to be unique, or unrelated to the water at all.

But she’d seen him react to it. She’d sat there in the living room and watched his eyes leave this world and find another, and in that world was this town in a way she ached to see it, with people she missed, people she loved.

He’d told her it appeared to be sometime in the twenties in the visions. Her mother and father would have been young people then. Her grandmother would have been alive. Now, that would be something to see again.

There was no telling the water would land her in the same place as him, either. It could take her fifty years back instead, to a time of Harold and her children…

“Why not, Annie,” she said. No one had referred to her by that name since she was a child, but sometimes she said it aloud to herself. Now she unfastened the wires and lifted the stopper from the bottle, smelling the sulfur immediately. What she’d told Eric Shaw on his first visit was true enough—this water was probably dangerous. But then, he didn’t seem to drink much of it. Just a taste. And that taste took him back.

She tried a nip. Horrible stuff, made her head pound and her stomach churn, but she got it down. One thing she’d never lacked was willpower. She took a minute to settle herself and then tried another swallow, smaller this time, and then she replaced the stopper and wrapped the bottle again and put it away.

Now she would wait. Wait and, hopefully, see.

41

TIME SLID AWAY FROM Josiah while he was out in the wet woods. He’d walked all the way to the far end of the ridge and then down the slope, moving aimlessly but enjoying the feel of the water running over his skin and saturating his clothes, savoring the way he sometimes had to blink it out of his eyes just to see. The lightning stopped and the thunder softened and then faded away, and it surprised him when he realized that the western sky was no longer dark from storm clouds but from sunset.

He started back up the ridge then, mud and wet leaves stuck to his boots, everything smelling of damp wood. He caught himself spitting often, which was odd as it wasn’t a habit he’d practiced before. Stranger still was the mild taste of chewing tobacco in his mouth.

The long stretch of summer twilight that should have guided him back wasn’t present beneath tonight’s overcast sky. He came back to the timber camp in almost total darkness and didn’t make out the shape of the car until he was almost upon it. He gave a start at first and shrank back into the woods but then recognized it as Danny’s Oldsmobile. When he came up behind it, the driver’s door swung open and Danny stepped out with a face twisted with consternation.

“Where in the hell you been? I swear, Josiah, I was ten minutes from leaving.”

“My truck was in the barn.”

“I seen it, else I would’ve been gone an hour ago.” He frowned. “You been walking around in the rain?”

“I have.” Josiah leaned past him, looked into the car. “That a pizza?”

“Figured you’d need some grub. Cold by now, of course.”

“Hell if I care.”

They pushed the barn door open a few feet and sat just inside while Josiah ate some pizza and drank a bottle of water. It took the edge off the powerful thirst that had built in him, but neither food nor water removed that faint taste of tobacco.

While he ate, Danny gave him the update from town. Talk of the murder was common, but credible theories were not.

“You find out if the one who called himself Shaw is still in town?” Josiah said.

“He is. I had a hell of a time finding him, but then I got lucky.”

“Yeah?”

“I called both hotels and asked for him. French Lick said he wasn’t registered, but West Baden put me through to a room. I hung up soon as it rang.”

“That’s a hell of a hard time?”

“No. But just because he had a room doesn’t mean he was still in it, and besides, you told me to follow him. But I don’t know what kind of car he has. Car they were in yesterday was the black guy’s.”

“Right.” Josiah caught Danny frowning at him. “What are you staring at?”

“Why do you keep spitting?” Danny said. Josiah was surprised; he hadn’t even realized he was doing it again.

“No reason,” he said. “Get back to the story.”

“Well, I went through the parking lot, looking for Illinois plates, but there was quite a few of them, so I didn’t know what to wait on. It started to rain then and I decided I’d drive back up here and ask what you thought. I was halfway through town when I seen him walking down the sidewalk.”

“You did.”

“Uh-huh. Wouldn’t have even noticed him but he was all bent over like he was about to be sick. He walked all the way back up to the hotel, stumbling like a drunk. Wasn’t but five minutes later he came out and got in a car. Acura SUV. Then he drove to Anne McKinney’s house.”

“Anne McKinney?” Josiah said, incredulous.

“You know who she is, right?”

“Got that house with all the windmills and shit. Comes to the hotel every day.”

“Yeah.”

“What would he be doing up there?”

“I’m not sure,” Danny said, “but he looked awful strange going inside. Left the door open and the engine running. She had to come out and turn it off.”

“She did? Well, how long did he stay?”

“A long time. Then he went back to the hotel. Didn’t see him come out again, so I left to come up here. Something else—what he told Grandpa is that some woman from Chicago hired him.”

“A woman?”

“That’s what he said.”

“Bullshit. He’s working for Lucas.”

“I got to say I don’t know what we’re doing, following this guy around,” Danny said. “You’re in a shit-ton of trouble. You ask me—”

“I didn’t ask you.”

Danny shut his mouth and stared at Josiah, then spoke again, his voice lower.

“Maybe not. But if you did ask, I’d say you only got two options. First is to turn yourself in. I know you don’t want to do that, but I think it’s smartest. That guy pulled a gun on you, right? You did what you had to.”

“Not going to happen,” Josiah said. “I got no interest in trusting the local law.”

“Fine,” Danny said. “Then you best get out of town. You said you need money to do it, but I don’t know how you’re getting any from these people from Chicago. I’ll give you what I got left from the casino, be enough to get you out of here, at least.”

Josiah shook his head. “Again, not an option that I favor. I’m disinclined to leave a place I’ve known for so long as home. It’s more mine than theirs, Danny, more mine than theirs.”

Danny tilted his head and squinted at him. “Why you talking like that?”

“Way I always talk.”

“No, it’s not.”

Josiah shrugged. “Well, you never know how a man might progress, Danny, in conversation and conduct.”

“I got no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Here’s all you need to know—they aren’t going to take me from this valley again, aren’t going to take me from my home.”

“Again?”

“My blood kin, Danny. Campbell.”

“Campbell? What the hell? The man’s been dead for eighty years! You’d never have so much as known his name if it weren’t for Grandpa.”

“And there’s the dilemma, Danny, my boy. Isn’t hardly anybody remembers his name anymore, and those that do, well, they got no word but a harsh word. In his time, Campbell did plenty for these people. Why’s the man faulted just for having some ambition? Can you answer that?”

“He ran out on his family. What are you talking about, ambition?”

“That’s the thing—weren’t his choice to leave. He never had a mind to go.”

Danny stared at him. Out beyond the barn, the dark trees were starting to weave again in a mild breeze.

“Why you using that voice?”

“Only one I got.”

“Don’t sound normal. Don’t sound anything like you.”

“Boy, you are one critical son of a bitch today, aren’t you? Pardon my voice, Danny, pardon my manner of speaking, and pardon my occasional desire to spit. Sorry such qualities don’t find your favor this evening.”

“Whatever, man.”

“You had enough of helping me? Going to leave me to handle this on my own?”

“I didn’t say that. I just don’t understand what I’m supposed to do that can help.”

“Good thing I do, then. I got a real clear sense of your role, Danny, and it won’t be a difficult task. All I’ll require now is that you go on down to the gas station and buy two of those prepaid cell phones. I have some cash for you to use. Bring them back up here. I’ll wait before I make my call. Seems like the sort of call you make in the middle of the night.”

The pain held off until evening. Eric lingered with Kellen at the bar, drank a few more beers and even ate a meal and felt fine through all of it, actually had himself thinking maybe it was done.

It wasn’t.

The first headache came about an hour after he’d eaten. The nausea settled in soon after the headache, and when he looked up at the bartender and saw the vertical hold go again, that rapid shuddering of the scene in front of him, Eric knew it was time to go.

“Feeling bad again?” Kellen said when Eric got to his feet.

“Not great. Probably just need to lie down.”

He wasn’t sure why he said that; they both knew it was bullshit.

“You want me to hang around or…”

Eric shook his head. “No, no. You don’t need to worry about it, man. If it gets bad, I’ll do what I’ve got to do.”

“And see what you have to see,” Kellen said, face grave, studying him. He put out his hand. “All right, my man. Good luck to you. And I’ll be in town tonight. So anything gets away from you…”

“I’ll be fine. Guarantee it. By the time we talk tomorrow, you’ll see.”

There was an odd ghosting to the door as he walked out of the bar, a hint of double vision returning, and the lights in the hallway burned in his skull, but somehow neither occurrence struck quite the same the chord of fear that it had before. Bad things were coming for him, yes, but he could hold them at bay now. He knew that.

He’d just take some more of the water, that was all. Every day. Have some bad moments, sure, maybe deal with some effects that weren’t ideal, but it would keep the real demons away, too. Even though it had given birth to them, it could now keep them away. Wasn’t that a hell of a thing? So he’d stay on the cycle, that was all, protect himself with the same thing that threatened him.

Up to the fourth floor, hand on the elevator wall for balance, then out into the hall, smiling and nodding past a middle-aged couple who went by without a second look. He was getting the hang of this now, learning how to hide the symptoms, knowing that he no longer had to cope with them—the water would do that for him.

There was a rapid tremor working deep within him and his vision was blurred and unsteady, but he found himself laughing at it as he took the keycard from his pocket, whistling as he opened the door, cheerful as hell. Can’t touch me, can’t touch me, can’t touch me. Not anymore, it couldn’t. He had the cure, and who gave a shit if it was also the cause? Important part was that it worked. Control was his again.

He’d left the bottle in the room, but this time he’d taken a precaution. The room had one of those traveler’s safes in the closet, the sort people used for jewelry or wallets. He’d put a bottle of water in his. Now he punched in the code—the number of Claire’s old apartment in Evanston—popped the door open, and found the bottle.

Cool but not cold to the touch, completely normal in fact, and he found himself almost missing the Bradford bottle as he opened this one and drank. The taste of Anne’s water was so unpleasant, fetid and harsh, with none of that honey flavor that had developed over time in the Bradford bottle. It would do the job, though, and that was enough.

Only this time it didn’t do the job. Not as quickly, at least. Five minutes later, his nausea was worse and the headache still present. Odd. He gave it another five and then drank again. Full swallows this time, steeling himself against the sulfuric taste.

Finally, success. A few minutes after this second dose, the throbbing in his temples diminished and his stomach settled and his vision steadied. His old friend was coming through again. He’d just needed a touch more this time, that was all.

He was still in the chair when the violin called to him. Whisper-soft at first, but he raised his head like a dog hearing a whistle. Man, it was beautiful. An elegy, the boy had called it. A song for the dead. The more Eric heard of it, the more he liked it.

He got to his feet and went to the balcony, where the music seemed to be originating. He opened the doors softly and stepped out and the rotunda below was gone, vacant gray space stretching on beneath the balcony instead, falling away like an endless canyon. Even the smells of the hotel were missing, replaced by dead leaves and wood smoke. Two points of light showed somewhere down in the gray canyon, and he turned to watch them. As they approached, the hotel and his memory of it faded away.

He was with the lights now and saw that they were the cold white eyes of Campbell’s roadster, which had pulled to a stop outside a long wooden building with a wide front porch. Rain was pouring down, finding holes in the porch roof here and there. A few black men sat on the porch in the dry areas, smoking and talking in voices that went soft when the car door opened and Campbell stepped out into the puddles beside the car. A moment later the passenger door opened and there was Lucas, with the violin case in hand. It seemed always to be in hand.

“Gentlemen,” Campbell said. “Enjoying the porch on a rainy evening, I see.”

None of the black men responded.

“Shadrach’s indoors?” Campbell said, unbothered.

“Downstairs,” one said after a long pause, and Campbell tipped his hat and went to the door, opened it, and held it for the boy to step through. Now they were in a dark room with round tables and a long wooden bar with a brass rail. The bar and all of the tables were empty. Stacks of cards and chips stood on one of the tables. Everything was covered with a fine layer of dust.

The two of them walked through the empty room to a dark staircase in the back, went down the steep, shadowed steps. At the base of the stairs was a closed door, and Campbell opened it without knocking and stepped inside.

“Easy there,” he said. A short but muscular black man was standing just inside the door and had lifted a gun when Campbell intruded. There was another man, much larger, probably close to three hundred pounds, hulking on a stool on the other side of the door, and a third, rail-thin and very dark-skinned, seated behind a wooden desk. He leaned back in the chair with his feet propped on the desk, enormous feet, a pair of equally large hands folded over his stomach. He didn’t speak or move when Campbell and the boy entered, just flicked his eyes over and studied them without a change in expression. The man with the gun lowered it slowly and moved a step back from Campbell.

“Shadrach,” Campbell said.

“Mr. Hunter is what I’m called by those who aren’t friends,” the man behind the desk said.

“Shadrach,” Campbell said again, no change of tone at all.

Shadrach Hunter gave that a wry curling of the lip that seemed to pass for amusement, and then he looked past Campbell to Lucas.

“This is Thomas Granger’s boy?”

“His nephew.”

“What in hell’s he carrying the fiddle for?”

“He likes to have it with him,” Campbell said. “You’ve heard him play.”

“I have.” Shadrach Hunter was regarding Lucas with a distrustful squint. “Plays like no boy should.”

It sounded like a reprimand. Lucas had kept his eyes on the floor since entering the room, and they stayed there now.

“I’ve got the car out front,” Campbell said, “and it’s raining mighty strong. Best be stepping to it.”

“Might not be the best night for a long drive, then.”

“It ain’t far. Just out beyond the gulf. You’ve been out there, and don’t tell me otherwise, you lying son of a bitch. You’ve been looking for it on your own. I’m here to tell you that as of now, that spring is mine. You want a piece, you’re going through me to get it.”

Shadrach gave him a dour stare. “I still don’t know why you think I’d be fool enough to partner with you, Bradford.”

“Sure, you do. There’s money to be made. You’re a man, like myself, who appreciates his money.”

“So you’ve told me. But I’m also a man has made his money by staying away from those of your sort as much as possible.”

“Hell, Shadrach, I don’t care about the color of your damn skin, I care about the size of your capital.”

“You the only one talking about color,” Shadrach Hunter said in a soft voice.

Campbell went quiet and stared at him. Just outside the wall, water streamed through a gutter and exited in noisy splatters. The wind was blowing hard.

“You might have some dollars saved,” Campbell said, “but there are no more coming your way, Shadrach. With the way white folks around here are hurting, how you think your people will fare? Now, I got an offer that’s been made, and you can take it or leave it. You’ve tasted the whiskey. You know what it’s worth.”

“There’s whiskey all over.”

“You find any matches that? Shit, Old Number Seven ain’t nothing but piss water compared to that. I got connections in Chicago who’ll be ready to pay prices you ain’t even imagined for it.”

“Then why you down here looking for me?”

“Because,” Campbell Bradford said, “some projects require a piece of assistance. And I’ve been told you’re the only man in this valley got a heart as black as mine.”

Shadrach Hunter showed his teeth in a grin, then said softly, “Oh, there ain’t nobody in this valley comes close to that, Bradford. And that’s a known fact.”

Campbell spread his hands. “Car’s out front, Shadrach. I’m getting back in it.”

There was a moment of hesitation, and then Shadrach Hunter nodded and dropped his feet to the floor and stood up. His two companions moved toward the door with him, but Campbell shook his head.

“No. You ride with me, you ride alone, Shadrach.”

Shadrach stopped cold at that, looking displeased, but after a long pause he nodded. Then he opened a drawer of his desk and took out a pistol and slid it into his belt. He took a long jacket, still streaked from rain, off a peg on the wall and put that on, and then he reached back in the desk drawer and took out another gun, a small automatic, and put it in the jacket pocket. He kept his hand in the pocket.

Campbell smiled. “Brave enough yet?”

Shadrach didn’t answer as he walked for the door. He went out and up the stairs, followed by Campbell, Lucas in the rear. The top of the stairs was utterly black, and as Shadrach Hunter stepped into it, he disappeared. Then Campbell did the same, and finally there was nothing left but a pale square from the back of Lucas’s white shirt. Then that was gone, too, and there were voices and sounds of people moving in the hotel and Eric realized he was sitting on the balcony with an empty bottle of water in his hand.

Empty.

He’d had every drop.

42

FOR THE FIRST TIME, he did not feel relief when the vision passed. Instead, he felt almost disappointed. Cheated.

It had been too abrupt, like a film cut off in midscene. Yes, that was exactly what it was like—always before he’d gotten a full scene, and this time it had ended without closure.

“I got the name,” he said aloud, recalling all that he’d seen. “He said the damn name. Granger. Thomas Granger. Lucas is his nephew.”

The realization was exciting; the disappointment that countered was that the men had been bound for the spring when he lost the vision. If he could have stayed there longer, remained in the past, he might have seen the way to it. He was seeing the story, seeing more than random images, but now it was gone. Lucas and Campbell and Shadrach Hunter had been replaced by the reality of the hotel once again, and he held an empty bottle in his hand, which was astounding, because he didn’t remember drinking it. And troubling, because this meant he was out.

The effective dose had, in the space of forty-eight hours, increased dramatically.

“Tolerance,” he said. “You’re building a tolerance.”

Disconcerting, maybe, but not drastic. He’d just have to keep tweaking it, that was all. Surely, his need would plateau at some point. He wasn’t going to run out of the stuff. Springs abounded in the area, filled pipes and poured from faucets down in the spa.

Poured from faucets. Indeed it did.

There was no need for another drink. Not now. His headache was gone; the sickness had been avoided.

But he could see the story again if he had more water.

He looked at the empty bottle in his hand and thought about the conversation he’d had with Claire, her insistence that he’d always been prone toward psychic tendencies. Hell, he knew that. He’d lived through the moments, after all, from the valley in the Bear Paws to the Infiniti to the snapshot of the red cottage for the Harrelson video.

The ability had always been there. The gift, if you wanted to call it that. The only change now was that the water gave him some control over it. He’d been scared of the stuff initially, but was that the right response? Should he fear it, or should he embrace it?

“You’ve got to shoot this,” he said softly. “Document it and shoot it.”

Kellen’s response to the idea had been less than enthusiastic. The look he’d given Eric had been more doubtful than any of the looks he’d offered after discussions of ghosts and visions and the rest, and what in the hell kind of sense did that make? Oh, well, Kellen didn’t have to be involved. He didn’t appreciate the possibility the way Eric did. It was the sort of thing that was so damn strange, people wouldn’t be able to get enough of it. He could imagine the interviews already—Larry King’s jaw dropping as Eric sat there and calmly explained the circumstances that had led to the film. The gift was always there… always with me. It just took me a long time to get control of it. To learn how to use it.

He got to his feet and went back inside the room. There was an extension number for the spa listed on the card beside the phone. He called.

The girl who answered told him the spa was closing in thirty minutes. There wasn’t enough time for a session, she explained. A session? All he wanted was to see the damn mineral bath. He told her as much, and was met with polite but firm resistance.

“Sessions in the mineral bath run for half an hour or an hour. There’s not enough time for that, sorry. We can schedule you tomorrow.”

“Look,” he said, “I’ll pay for a full session.”

“I’m sorry, sir, we just can’t—”

“And tip you a hundred dollars,” he said, the situation suddenly feeling urgent to him as he looked at the empty bottle in his hand. “I’ll be out by nine, when you close.”

“All right,” she said after a long pause. “But you’re going to want to hurry down here, or you won’t get much time at all.”

“That’s all right. Say, do you have any plastic water bottles down there?”

“Um, yes.”

He said he was glad to hear that they did.

The spa was beautiful, filled with high-grade stone and ornate trim, fireplaces crackling. He’d routinely mocked men he knew in California who frequented such places, too much of the Missouri farm-town boyhood still in him to sample that lifestyle. Yet here he stood in a white robe and slippers, padding along behind an attractive blond girl who was opening a frosted door that led to the mineral bath.

“It’s a complete re-creation of the originals,” she said, pausing with the door half open. “But most people these days do add aromatherapy. Are you sure you don’t—”

“I want the natural water,” he said. “Nothing else.”

“Okay,” she said, and opened the door. The potent stench of sulfur was immediately present, and the blond girl grimaced, clearly horrified that he hadn’t elected to go with the scent of vanilla or lavender or butterfly wings or whatever the hell it was that you were supposed to use.

“You might feel a little light-headed at first,” she said. “Kind of giddy. That’s from all the gases that are released by the water, lithium and such. There’s a complete list of the chemical content there on the counter if you’re int—”

“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll be all set.”

She’d been on the verge of a full introductory speech, he could tell, and he didn’t want to waste time. He wanted to get to work emptying the two plastic water bottles she’d given him and filling them with Pluto Water.

She left then, and he was alone in the green-tiled room that stank of sulfur. The tub was still filling, pouring out of the hotwater faucet only. There were two faucets, the girl had told him, both depositing mineral water directly from the spring, with the only difference being that one carried water that had been heated to one hundred and two degrees.

There was a sink across from the tub, and he poured the water from his bottles into that, shook them as dry as possible, and returned to the tub. He turned on the cold-water faucet, cupped his hand, and caught some of the water. Lifted it to his mouth and sampled, frowning and licking his lips like some asshole wine connoisseur. It tasted different from Anne McKinney’s, crisper and cleaner. Of course, it hadn’t been in a glass bottle for eighty years. Just because it tasted different didn’t mean it wouldn’t work. He hoped.

He filled one bottle about a third and then pulled it back from the faucet and stared at it, thinking of the last vision he’d had, of the boy vanishing up the stairs beside Campbell Bradford and Shadrach Hunter. Where had they gone? What had happened next?

The idea that had slipped into his mind was growing legs now: if he could find ways to document this, if he could tell a tale that had been hidden from historians, hidden from the eyes of ordinary men, well, the result would be extraordinary. In the past, he’d never discussed his rare and brief flashes with anyone but Claire, because a man who claimed psychic tendencies would quickly be dismissed as a lunatic. It was the way of the world. But suppose he could prove what he’d seen as the truth. And suppose, with the water as his aid, he could do it again, on another story. A self-proclaimed psychic was the subject of ridicule, but a proven entity, a film director whose exclusive ability allowed him to shatter secrets and expose the unknown, would be something else entirely. He’d be a star. Beyond that. A legend. Famous as famous got.

It was a fantasy. But there was also a possibility, perhaps a stronger one than he dared admit, that it could become a reality. See the story, document it, and turn to the Hollywood connections he had left. There were publicists and agents who’d salivate at the very idea. And once the buzz began…

But first he had to see the rest of it. First he had to know what had happened. The water would provide that for him.

In a soft voice, he said, “Show me. Show me what happened,” and drank. Drank it all. That done, he leaned back to the faucet.

Once both bottles were filled, he put them in the pocket of the big robe, then looked around the room and watched the water cascade into that old-fashioned tub. What the hell, he’d come down here, and he’d paid for it.

He took off the robe and his underwear and stepped down into the water, finding it the perfect temperature for soaking sore muscles. He probably had only ten minutes left, but that was all he’d need. He’d never been one for hot tubs, really.

But this one did feel good. Felt incredible, really, like it was finding kinks and knots in his muscles and lifting them away, lifting him a little bit, too. That must be the gas from the mineral blend. It did make you a little giddy, at that.

He flicked his eyes open and inhaled deeply, breathing in those mellowing fumes. The ceiling looked different. For a moment he was confused, unsure of the change, but then he realized—there was a fan overhead now, wide blades paddling lazily through the air. That hadn’t been there before, had it? He rolled his head sideways then, back toward the door, and saw he was no longer alone.

There was a second tub in the room now. A long, narrow white bowl resting on claw feet. There was a man inside. He had his head laid back as Eric had a minute ago, face to the ceiling, eyes closed. He was clean-shaven and had thick dark hair, damp and glistening. His chest rose and fell in the slow rhythm of sleep.

He is another vision, Eric thought, not moving at all, afraid a single ripple in the water would cause the man to raise his head. It’s just like the others.

It wasn’t like the others, though. Not like watching a movie, everything distant. This time, it was here with him. As it had been with Campbell in the train car.

He heard a click then, and the door pushed open, nothing but blackness on the other side, and Campbell Bradford stepped into the room.

His eyes were straight ahead, on Eric. Maybe it was going to be like the one in the train car, when Campbell had spoken directly to him, when he’d had to run for the door because Campbell was on his feet and walking toward him…

Campbell turned away, though. He flicked his eyes away from Eric and to the sleeping man in the other tub, and then he walked toward him. He moved quietly, his shoes sliding over the tile floor, his suit barely rustling. When he reached the man in the tub, he stood over him silently, looking down. Then he slid his suit coat off his shoulders and laid it over the back of a chair. Once the jacket was off, Campbell unfastened his cuff links and set them on top of the coat. Then he rolled both sleeves up past the elbows. Still the man in the tub didn’t move, lost to sleep.

Warn him, Eric thought. Say something.

But of course he couldn’t. He wasn’t part of this scene, he just felt like he was. Campbell couldn’t see him; Campbell was not real. Eric hadn’t taken any of the Bradford water, none of that dangerous stuff that brought Campbell out of the past and into the present. All he had to do was watch and wait for it to go away. It would end in time. He knew that it would end in time.

For a long moment, Campbell stood above the man in the tub and watched him, almost serenely. When he finally moved, it was with sudden and violent speed. He lunged out and dropped the palm of one hand on top of the man’s head and put the other on his chest, near the collarbone, and then slammed his weight behind them and drove the man into the water.

The tub exploded into a frenzy of water and both of the man’s feet appeared in the air, flailing. His hands clenched first on the edges of the tub and then grappled backward at his antagonist. Campbell appeared not to notice.

He held him down for a long time, and then straightened and hauled back. His right fist was wrapped in the man’s hair now. Once he cleared the water, gurgling and gasping, Campbell slammed him down again. This time he held him even longer. Held him until the frantic motions slowed and almost ceased. When the man’s hands had lost their grip on Campbell’s jacket and drifted back toward the water, he let him up again.

They do not see you. Cannot see you. It was a frantic mantra, the desperate reassurance of someone in a plane hurtling toward the earth—the pilot will fix this.

Campbell had released the man in the tub and stepped aside and was only a few feet from Eric now. The man hung on to the side of the tub, gasping and choking, water streaming from his hair to the tile floor.

“There are debts to be paid,” Campbell said. His voice was eerily calm. “I’ve established this with you in the past. Yet they remain unpaid.”

The man looked at him with disbelieving eyes, chest heaving. His face was wet with water and tears, and there was a smear of blood-tinged mucus beneath his nose.

“I don’t have any money!” he gasped, pulling back to the edge of the tub, dragging his knees up as if to protect himself. “Who does right now, Campbell? I lost my savings. You see how empty this hotel is? That’s because nobody has any money!”

“You seem to think that your circumstances affect your debt,” Campbell said. “That is not an idea which I share.”

“You’re crazy, trying to collect now. Not just from me—from anybody. There’s no money left in this valley. The whole thing’s going to disappear in a blink. Don’t you read the papers? Listen to the radio? This country is going to hell, man.”

“I’m not concerned with this country,” Campbell said. “I’m concerned with what’s owed me.”

“They’re not even going to be able to keep this hotel open, I can promise you that.” The man was babbling now, his voice nearly hysterical. “Ballard might try to force it along, but it’ll close and they’ll be broke, too. Everyone will be. Everyone in this whole country will be broke soon, you wait and see. It’ll come for us all.”

Campbell used his index finger to push his hat up on his head, and then he reached into his pocket and came out with a chaw of tobacco, worked it in behind his lower lip. The man in the tub watched warily, but Campbell’s silence and cool demeanor seemed to have soothed his panic. When the man spoke again, his voice was steadier.

“Hand me that robe, will you? You could’ve killed me earlier. All to try and get money that I don’t have. Now what would the point of that have been?”

“The point?” Campbell said. “I don’t understand your confusion. There’s nothing difficult to this situation. The world breaks some men. Others, it uses for the breaking.”

He tilted his head and smiled. “Which one do you figure I am?”

The man in the tub didn’t answer. When Campbell walked toward him, he did not speak or cry out in alarm. Instead he watched, silent, until he saw Campbell’s hand dip into his pocket and come out with a knife. Words left his mouth then, left in a harsh whisper of terror, just two of them: “Campbell, no—”

Campbell’s hands flashed. One caught the man’s sopping wet hair and jerked backward, exposing the throat; the other dropped the blade and cut a ribbon through it. Blood poured into the water.

Eric’s body seized at the sight. He couldn’t get a breath, couldn’t do anything except watch the blood drip into the tub, the sound like a water glass being refilled from a pitcher. They can’t see me, he thought. Had to remember that. Had to remember…

Campbell turned and looked at him. Those watery brown eyes found his, and when they did, the wild thoughts died in Eric’s brain and even the sound of the blood seemed to disappear.

“You wanted me to show you,” Campbell said. “Now you’ve been shown. There’s plenty more on the way for you, too. I’m getting stronger, and you can’t stop it. All the water in the world ain’t going to hold me back now.”

Then he pulled his lips back, the gesture a cross between a smile and the warning of a dog showing his fangs, and spit through his teeth. A stream of tobacco juice landed in the mineral bath, splattering Eric’s stomach and chest with brown drops.

Eric shouted, the moment having just cost him any slight faith that what was happening in this room was not real. He scrambled to get out of the tub, moving to the far end, away from Campbell, and as he turned his head, Campbell laughed, a low whispering snicker of delight. Eric’s knee caught the faucet and his shin smacked off the ceramic edge of the tub and then he was over the side and on the tile floor, naked and dripping and helpless as Campbell advanced. Eric twisted to face him, thinking he’d do what little he could to defend himself.

Campbell was gone. The second tub was gone, and the bleeding man.

Eric sat there on the floor in a puddle of water and gasped for breath, and then the door banged again. He tried to jump to his feet but slid in the water, his heels going out from under him and dropping him back against the edge of the tub with a painful impact as a female voice floated in from the other side of the door.

“Mr. Shaw? Are you—”

“I’m fine!” he yelled. “I’m fine.”

“I thought I heard you shout,” she said.

He reached for the robe and dragged it down to cover himself.

“No, no. I’m done, though. I’m going to be coming out.”

He got unsteadily to his feet and slipped into the robe. The pockets banged off his hips, weighed down by the two plastic water bottles he’d filled.

“Just another vision,” he said to himself. “Harmless as the others. You’ll get used to them.”

He turned to lift the plug from the tub and froze with his arm extended.

There, on the surface, floated a cloud of brown liquid. Tobacco juice.

He stared at it for a long time. Closed his eyes and reopened them and it was still there. Straightened and stood above the tub and studied it from an angle, then turned in a full circle, making sure the rest of the room was as it had been when he entered, before looking at the tobacco juice again. Still there. Disintegrating in the water now, thinning and separating, but still there.

How?

It had come from Campbell’s mouth, and Campbell had been a vision, was gone completely now, just as had happened with all the previous visions. Never before had a trace lingered, never before had the visions left any mark on reality.

“Mr. Shaw?”

“Coming out!” he shouted, and then he opened the drain and let the tub of mineral water begin to empty. He stood there until the tobacco juice found the drain, and when it did a shiver rode high on his spine.

For a moment, just as it swirled out of sight, it had looked exactly like blood.

Part Four

COLD BLACK CLOUD

43

IT TOOK DANNY ABOUT forty minutes to return with the cell phones. At first Josiah waited on the floor of the barn near the open door. As time passed, though, he found himself outside in the rain, leaning up against the barn wall, the weathered boards rough on his back. There was a tree that hung over the barn at this edge and kept the rain from falling on him. It was a light rain now, a gentle touch on his flesh, so he moved away from the tree and found a spot where he could sit against the barn wall and let the rain come down unobstructed. He was there when he saw the headlights of an approaching car, and though he knew he should move into the woods until confirming it was Danny, he did not. For some reason, he wasn’t all that concerned about who it was.

The car was the Oldsmobile, though, and Danny pulled it up close to the barn and pushed his door open while the engine was still running.

“What are you doing sitting in the rain?”

“Passing time,” Josiah said, rankled by both the question and Danny’s expression, the way he was staring at Josiah like he was crazy. “You get the phones?”

“I did.”

“Well, bring them here. And shut the damn headlights off.”

They went back into the barn and Danny set up one of those battery lanterns, filled the room with a white light.

“Figured you could use this,” he said. He also had a few bottles of water and a bag of beef jerky, and all Josiah did was grunt a thank-you, but he didn’t like the lantern. He’d grown used to dark—almost to the point of fondness, really.

Danny had purchased, as instructed, two prepaid cell phones and a battery charger that Josiah could plug into the truck’s cigarette lighter. He got the first phone out of the package now and started charging it.

“I don’t understand why you needed two of them.”

“If I’m going to be calling these people in Chicago, you think it’d be a real good idea to call you from the same number?”

“Oh,” Danny said. “That’s good thinking. This guy you’re going to call, his number was in the briefcase you stole?”

“Yes.”

“I still don’t understand how you’re going to get any money out of him.”

“Fact is,” Josiah said, “a man can get awful lost in details if he dwells too much on them. I don’t intend to have such a hindrance. The man paid someone thousands of dollars to drive down here and sit outside my home, Danny. Paid another man to come down and talk to Edgar. Hell, might have been paying that one that told me he was a student. But the paperwork I got suggests something about me was worth a dime or two to this old boy. If it was worth something last night, it still will be tonight.”

“Last night his detective wasn’t dead.”

“Now, that is a fair observation.”

“Josiah, why don’t you just take the money I got and get—”

“You gone down to the hotel yet to check on Shaw?”

“No. You told me to get the phone first.”

“Right. Well, now I got it.”

Danny frowned. “All right. I’ll go. You just want to know if he’s there?”

“And where he goes if he leaves, yes. You got the numbers off the phones you bought, right?”

“Yes.”

“Well, use the first one. Don’t even think about calling the second one, just the first, got it? Call if you see him move.”

Danny hesitated and then gave a short nod and moved toward the door. He stopped when he was just on the other side, turned back, and looked at Josiah, his face a pale moon in the lantern light.

“So you’re going to call this guy and ask for money? Like that’s all there is to it?”

“That’s all there’ll be to the start of it,” Josiah said. “I figure there could be a twist or two along the way.”

Evening came on and settled and the rain fell soundlessly but unrelenting. Anne sat in the living room with a book in her lap but didn’t read. The depth of her desire was surprising to her, the sense of urgent anticipation she had as she watched the clock tick minutes off the day and waited for the water to take effect.

Come on, she thought, let me see what he is seeing. Let me go back to those times I never appreciated enough when I was in them, let me see those faces and hear those voices again.

Nothing happened. The short hand found seven and then eight and then nine, and she saw nothing but the achingly familiar walls of the house. She considered going for more water, but the stairs seemed so steep and the results so uncertain that she stayed in her chair. She’d seen how much Eric Shaw had to drink before the visions came for him and was sure she’d had at least an equal amount. Why, then, was he allowed to see the past and she was not?

She went to bed after taking her last round of readings, turned off the light, and watched the shadows shift as the moon struggled for a space amidst the clouds. The water had not worked for her. She’d felt vaguely nauseated since taking it, but she had seen nothing. A wasted risk. How could she have allowed herself to do such a thing? The water could have poisoned her. Or, worse, wreaked the sort of havoc it had with Eric Shaw, putting her into the throes of pain and addiction.

Logical as all those thoughts might be, she couldn’t make herself care about them. She’d understood the risk well enough at the start, but the reward had seemed so tantalizing… and still did.

Maybe it started with his bottle, the bottle he claimed came from Campbell Bradford. Maybe you wouldn’t see anything until you’d tried some of that. She’d have to call him in the morning, see if he’d gotten the Bradford bottle back yet, hope it would work with her as it had with him. It seemed worth a try.

She had a sense, though, that it would not work. She could drink his water and still see nothing, still be trapped here in the present, the lonely present of this empty house, and the ones she’d loved would continue to exist merely as memories and fading photographs. Why was Eric Shaw allowed to see the past and she was not? Why was some of the world’s magic presented to only a few and hidden from others?

The visions would not come to her, no matter how much of the water she drank. She would wait for them without reward, just as she’d waited for the big storm, waited with faith and patience and a confidence of purpose that she would be needed, that there was a reason she remained here. They’d need her someday; they’d need her knowledge and her trained eye and her shortwave radio. She had been certain of it.

But maybe not. Maybe it was all a charade, a silly girl’s notion that she’d never let die. Maybe the storm was never coming.

“Enough,” she whispered to herself. “Enough of this, Annie.”

Sleep swept over her then, descending with the speed and weight of a long day filled with unusual activity. She had a dim realization, just before it took her, of a light whistling sound.

The wind was coming back.

44

I’M GETTING STRONGER, and you can’t stop it. All the water in the world ain’t going to hold me back now.

The memory chased Eric up the stairs and back to his room, the words echoing through his brain.

He’d been real again. Without so much as a drop of the Bradford water passing through Eric’s lips, Campbell had been made real again. This time the vision had been a sort of hybrid, actually—a moment from the past again, yes, but this time Eric had been a participant as well as a spectator.

What in the hell had happened? What had changed?

He called Kellen. The first thing he said was, “He spoke to me again.”

“Campbell?”

“That’s right.”

“He spoke to you in a vision?”

“Well, it wasn’t on the elevator.”

Quiet again. Eric said, “Sorry, man. I’m just a little—”

“Forget it. What did you see?”

Eric told him about the murder of the nameless man in the mineral bath. He was sitting in the desk chair in the room, hair still damp, muscles still tight and stomach trembling from what he had seen.

“At first it was like they have been recently, you know, a scene from the past. Only there wasn’t any distance; I was right there for it. It didn’t involve me, though. Not in the beginning. When it was done, after he’d killed that guy… he turned and spoke to me. He spoke directly to me and spit tobacco juice into the water, and the tobacco juice was still there after he was gone. It was real, damn it. It was—”

“Okay,” Kellen said, his voice soft, calming. “I get it.”

“I don’t know why it changed,” Eric said. “I can’t figure out why it would have changed. Maybe because I was in the water, you know, immersed? But the only times I’ve seen him like that before were after drinking from the original bottle, and that thing’s nowhere near me now.”

“He said he was getting stronger?”

“Yeah. And that all the water in the world wasn’t going to stop him.”

“So the water’s been helping you.”

“Helping me?”

“You know, protecting you.”

From what? Eric thought. What in the hell is going to happen if I stop drinking the water? And what if he wasn’t lying—what if he is getting stronger? Does that mean the water won’t work anymore?

“You said that was your second vision,” Kellen said. “What was the first?”

So he told him about the Shadrach vision, realizing halfway through that he’d completely forgotten that he’d been given the name of the boy’s uncle. Somehow such details seemed insignificant after the scene in the spa.

“Let me ask you something,” Kellen said. “What did Shadrach Hunter look like?”

Eric gave as much detail as he could and then described the bar.

“I’ll be damned,” Kellen said, voice soft. “It’s real. What you’re seeing is real.”

“Yeah?”

“I’ve found a few pictures of Shadrach. Very few. Aren’t many that exist anymore. You just described him to a T. And that bar, that’s one of the old black clubs, the one they called Whiskeytown. That’s Shadrach’s club.”

“I’ve got to find that spring, Kellen.”

“Why?”

“I think it matters,” Eric said. “Check that—I know it matters. You were right with what you said earlier. Anne’s water hasn’t been causing problems; it’s been preventing them. Showing me the truth but keeping Campbell at bay. I need to find the spring that mattered so much to all of them, though. There’s a point to these visions, Kellen, and they’re all headed in that direction. I need to follow them.”

Kellen was silent.

“Can we find it?” Eric said.

“The uncle’s name is a start, but I don’t know how much of a help it will be. There’s nothing else that we can go on? Nothing else you saw or heard?”

“No,” Eric said. “Just that his name was Thomas Granger, and—. Wait. There was something else. Campbell told Shadrach he knew he’d already been out in the hills, looking for the spring. He said it was by the gulf. But what in the hell would that mean? The only gulfs I know are in the ocean.”

“Wesley Chapel Gulf,” Kellen said. “You’ve got to be shitting me.”

“What?”

“It’s part of the Lost River. A spot where it rises from underground and fills this weird stone sinkhole and then sinks again. One side of the sinkhole is like a cliff, must be a hundred feet high at least. I’ve been there once. It’s a very strange spot. It’s also where Shadrach Hunter’s body was found.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. His body was found in the woods on the ridge above the gulf. That’s why I went out there. I just wanted to see the place and, like I said, it’s strange.”

“Well, maybe I should see it, too.”

“Yeah,” Kellen said, and there was unconcealed fascination in his voice. “You’re really seeing it, man. The truth. Everybody thought Campbell murdered Shadrach, but it’s never been proven, you know? What you just saw, with the two of them heading out there… that’s the truth, Eric.”

I knew it was, he thought, and maybe now you’ll see the potential in this.

“You can get me there, then?”

“Absolutely.”

“We’ll go tomorrow,” Eric said. “First thing.”

“All right,” Kellen said. “But before you hang up, there’s something I wanted to tell you. I talked to Danielle, and she said the bottle’s getting warmer.”

“Warmer?”

“Yeah. The Bradford bottle, the original. I thought it had warmed up a little during the drive, but she said it’s almost normal now.”

“Weird,” Eric said. He didn’t know what else to say.

“Yeah. I was just thinking that suggests whatever’s happening has a lot to do with its proximity to this place.”

“Maybe,” Eric said, thinking that it had been cold back in Chicago, though, and that was miles farther away. “I’ll call you in the morning, all right?”

He hung up and went out onto the balcony, stood and looked down over the hotel. The bottle could be affected by its proximity to this valley. Eric had consumed its contents, and the effects had changed dramatically once he left Chicago and came here. Perhaps if he left, they would lessen. Stop altogether, even.

But then I wouldn’t be able to see it, he thought. I want to keep on seeing it.

He’d stay, then. There was no other choice. He couldn’t leave now.

I’m getting stronger, Campbell had said.

Never mind that. He was a figment, nothing more. He had no real power in this world.

None.

Josiah waited until midnight to call. Originally, he’d planned to do it later but he was impatient and there was something about the hour of midnight that attracted him.

Both phones had full charges by then, and he used the second one and didn’t worry about trying to block the number. It was an anonymous phone, paid for in cash, and even if they could trace it to the gas station where Danny had bought it, Josiah didn’t much care. Anything coming from that sort of detective work took time, and he wasn’t too worried about long-term plans. More concerned with getting what was owed to him. He didn’t know what that was yet, but his gut said that Lucas G. Bradford did.

He called the number that was listed as residence on the paperwork he’d taken from the detective, listened to it ring. After five rings it kicked over to a message. He disconnected, waited a few minutes, and tried again. This time, it was answered. A male with a husky voice, speaking low, as if he didn’t want to be overheard.

“Lucas, my boy,” Josiah said.

“Excuse me?”

“I’m sure you’ve heard the unfortunate news of your friend in French Lick.”

The silence that followed brought a smile to Josiah’s lips.

“Who is this?” Lucas Bradford said.

“Campbell Bradford,” Josiah said. Hadn’t even planned on that; it just left his lips, natural as a breath. Once it was said, he liked it, too. Campbell. That felt right. Hell, felt almost like the truth. He wasn’t Campbell, of course, but he was a representative. Yes, these days, he was the next best thing.

“You think that’s funny?”

“I think it’s true.”

“Is this Eric Shaw? You better believe I’m calling the police to report this.”

Eric Shaw? Now what the hell was that supposed to mean? Shaw was working for the guy… unless the story he’d told Edgar about working for a woman in Chicago had been true. But then who was the woman?

“The police will be called—”

“Really?” Josiah said. “That’s what you’d like? Because I have some interesting documents in my possession, Lucas. And your detective, he had some interesting things to say before he died.”

That last bit was improvisation, but it silenced the prick’s tirade, seemed to take a little of his heat away.

“I’m not worried about that,” he said, but there was no strength in his voice.

“Here’s what I understand,” Josiah said. “Some funds have been authorized to resolve what you perceive as a crisis. One hundred thousand dollars, I believe.”

“If you think you’re getting that now, you are out of your mind.”

“I’ll get what’s owed to me.”

“There’s nothing owed to you.”

“I disagree, Lucas. I firmly and vehemently disagree.”

As he heard the words leaving his mouth, Josiah frowned. Danny was right—he was starting to talk funny. Not like himself, at all. That probably wasn’t a bad thing on a call like this, though. A disguise of sorts, albeit unintentional.

“I’m not interested in the hundred grand,” he said. “I don’t find that sum to be satisfactory. In fact, I haven’t determined what will be satisfactory. I’m still considering.”

“If you think we’re in a negotiation, you’re mistaken. I know my wife had no idea what she was doing when she hired you, but she regrets it now, and any further contact you have with this family will be done through attorneys. I encourage you to find a good one. My recommendation is that it be one with criminal defense experience, too.”

When my wife hired you? This was interesting. This was different.

“Never call this house again,” Lucas Bradford said.

“Now, Lucas,” Josiah began, but the line had clicked and gone dead. He switched to the other cell phone and called Danny.

“What happened?” Danny said, his voice choked with either alcohol or sleep or both. Hell of a guy to have working for you on a stakeout. “What’s going on?”

“I think you best get your eyes open,” Josiah said. “I do believe there may be a police appearance at the hotel shortly.”

“Why? What are you talking about?”

“Eric Shaw should be getting some visitors,” Josiah said, and then he hung up and sat in the dark with a grin spreading across his face. Shaw would buy him some time, and that was good, but moreover he’d enjoyed this first brush with Lucas G. Bradford. He liked the rich bastard’s tone, the sense of control, the belief that he could run this world and everyone in it. He thought he was strong, and Josiah was pleased by that. Let it turn into a battle of will, Lucas, let us see who breaks first.

45

FOR A LONG TIME Eric sat on the balcony, sipping the water he’d taken from the faucet in the spa and waiting for visions, but none came. Eventually, he went back inside and pulled the curtains shut and turned off every light before he got into bed. Around him the room existed in shadows and silhouettes and nothing changed within it or entered from outside. At some point consciousness slid away from him, folded beneath sleep.

The thumping on the door woke him.

He let out a grunt and sat up, blinking at the dark room and trying to get his bearings. Just when he thought he’d imagined the sound, he heard it again. A knock.

The clock beside the bed said it was twenty past one.

He sat in bed, supported by the heels of his hands, and stared at the door. It’s Campbell, he thought, and then he turned and looked at the door to the balcony, as if he could run out there and hide like a child or fling himself from it and sail down to the floor below and escape.

Another knock then, louder this time.

“Shit,” he said under his breath, and then he got to his feet, wishing for a weapon. He’d never had any interest in guns as an adult, though he’d hunted as a boy, but he wanted one now. He ignored the peephole because he was afraid to peer out and see what waited, chose instead to unfasten the lock quickly and jerk the door open.

Claire stood in front of him.

“I didn’t think it was a good idea to wait until morning,” she said, and then she stepped past him and into the room.

He closed the door and locked it, then pulled on jeans and a T-shirt while she sat on the edge of the bed, regarding him like an engineer inspecting a building’s structural integrity, searching for cracks. He had not seen her in more than a month. Her beauty struck him now just as it always had, or maybe even harder because it had been so long. She was wearing jeans and a black tank top over a white one, no jewelry and no makeup, and her hair was tousled in the way it often was after a drive because she liked to have the windows down. He’d always loved that about her, had always liked a woman who didn’t mind being windblown. There were laugh lines around her mouth, and he remembered telling her he was proud of them when they began to show because he could take credit for plenty of them. There were also lines on her forehead now, though, creases of frowns, of sorrow and pain. He could take credit for plenty of those, as well.

“What are you doing here, Claire?”

“Like I said, I didn’t think it was good to wait until morning. The conversations we had today were getting progressively worse. Scarier.”

“What did you do, climb out the window and rappel down from Paul’s penthouse? There’s no way he would’ve wanted you to be a part of this.”

“Actually,” she said, “he encouraged it. He thought it was a dangerous idea for you to be alone. Medically, and legally.”

He grunted.

“Can I see it?” she said.

“See what?”

“The bottle.”

“I don’t have it, remember? Kellen took it up to Bloomington to have it tested.”

“I didn’t realize you sent the whole thing. I thought maybe he just took a sample. I wanted to see it.”

“Well, it’s gone.”

She’d given him an odd look when he told her the bottle was gone, and he wondered if she was searching for proof, looking for some sort of sanity test.

“You’ve stayed here tonight?” she said. “Haven’t left the hotel?”

“That’s right.”

“I looked for your car in the parking lot. If you were gone, I was going to hunt you down and kick your ass.”

He couldn’t find anything to say. It felt so out of place to be in the room with her, to be looking her in the eye again. She sensed the response.

“You may not want me here. I understand that. But I’m worried. If you come back to Chicago, if you go to see doctors and lawyers and people who can help, I will step aside. But I want to make sure you do that.”

“Thank you.”

“Hey, don’t worry about it. Just protecting my reputation. Reflects poorly on me if my husband gets arrested for murder or locked up in a hospital for the insane.”

He smiled. “People would gossip about you.”

“Point their fingers and whisper. I couldn’t bear that shame. Just taking social precautions, that’s all.”

Say, “I miss you,” he thought. Say it, you dumb shit, it’s all you want to tell her, so just put the words in your mouth and let them go.

“How long was the drive?” he said.

She gave him a look that was both amused and sad. “That’s what we should be talking about?”

“Sorry.”

“No, I understand. It’s strange to see me, and you don’t even really want me here, but there are things—”

“Stop,” he said. “It’s good to see you. The fact that you came down… I appreciate it more than you know.”

“You can mail me a formal thank-you next week. Use nice stationery. But until then, we’ve got to figure out what to do. I still think you need to go home. It’s why I came. To bring you home.”

“Right,” he said. “Go home.” Home. Away from here, away from the story that had wrapped him in its eerie embrace. Away from the water.

“So you’re agreed? We can leave in the morning?”

He got to his feet and walked over to the balcony door, pushed back the heavy draperies, and waved his hand out at the dome and the expansive rotunda.

“It’s a hell of a place, isn’t it?”

“Gorgeous,” she said. “So we’re leaving in the morning?”

He looked out at the hotel for a long time in silence, then turned back to face her.

“Claire, the things I’m seeing… the story that’s there, it’s powerful.”

“What does that have to do with staying or going?”

“I’m getting the story because I’m here, Claire. Because I’m here, with the water. I’m seeing it almost like a narrative now, I’m seeing the story moving forward, and—”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m beginning to realize that there’s a purpose to it, that I need to tell this story. This is the movie, Claire, this is the one I’ve been waiting for, the one I couldn’t find. If I stay down here for a while—long enough for me to get the whole thing down—I can turn this into something special, I can use this to get back in the game. Wouldn’t that be amazing? To use something like this as a way to get back what I’ve lost? But I’m starting to feel like that’s what it was all about, like I’ve been given a shot here, a chance at redemption and I just had to see that it was there.”

She was watching him in disbelief, lips parted. Now she said, “Are you kidding me? You want to keep having these visions? To keep drinking that water? The water that almost killed—”

“That was when I didn’t take it. The water has been nothing but good for me.”

“Nothing but good for you! Eric, are you hearing yourself?”

“This story needs to be told, and I’ve been looking desperately for something that would give me a chance to get back. There’s a purpose to this, Claire.”

She shook her head in exasperation and turned away from him.

“You can stay with me,” he said. “Give me some time.”

“No. I will not stay. I came to get you, Eric, damn it, I came to bring you home because I was afraid for you. But I will not stay here with you!”

She shouted so rarely—that had always been his job, a self-appointed task, of course—that this outburst stunned him silent. After a moment, he nodded and held his hands up, palms out.

“Trust me, Claire, there’s nobody more concerned than me. I’m the one who’s going through it. But I’m also trying very hard not to panic. So can you back me on that? Can we throttle down on the planning and wait to see what tomorrow brings?”

“How long, though, Eric? How much time do we give it?”

It was a frighteningly familiar question to hear issued in her voice. One that had been offered in response to so many of his explanations and rationalizations over the past two years. He’d work again, he just needed time. He’d write a screenplay, he just needed a while to think of the idea. He’d be in a good mood again, he just needed a few days to get through this bad spell…. How long, Eric? How much time?

“Let’s talk it out in the morning,” he said. “Let’s see where we are then, okay? We’ll get some sleep, and then see where we are.”

She nodded. It was a grudging, fatigued gesture. Like she was going along with somebody else’s practical joke even though she understood she was the target, even though she’d seen the joke before and knew it wasn’t a damn bit funny.

He walked toward the bed. He wanted to reach for her, wanted to push her down onto that soft mattress and cover her body with his own, but instead he picked up one of the pillows and stepped away.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“I’ll crash on the floor. You should have the bed.”

She gave a sad laugh and shook her head. “I’m sure we can sleep in the same bed without touching each other. In fact, I thought it was an art we’d perfected by now.”

He didn’t respond to that, just turned off the light. He heard two soft thumps as she kicked her shoes off, and then she slid back on the bed and stretched out and put her head on a pillow. He crawled stiffly in on the other side and lay on his back beside her, no part of them touching.

It was quiet for a while, and then he said, “Thank you for coming.”

When she answered, her voice sounded choked, and all she said was, “Oh, Eric.”

The rain let up sometime after midnight and the clouds thinned, showed the moon again. Josiah left his position by the old barn and paced the woods, waiting. Every now and then he checked the cell phone to see if there was a signal. It claimed there was, but he was surprised Danny hadn’t called yet. Surprised there’d been no word.

He went through a bottle of water, rinsing and spitting with it more than drinking, still unable to rid himself of the odd tobacco taste that had taken to his mouth. It wasn’t an unpleasant taste, though. Matter of fact, he was growing to like it.

He wondered what the scene was like down at the hotel. Must be taking a while if Danny hadn’t reported back in yet. Would the cops stay down there to talk to Shaw or haul him off to the police station? Couldn’t arrest him for anything, but maybe they’d bring him in for questioning. Maybe he already had been in for questioning, if Lucas Bradford was so convinced he’d done Josiah’s killing. It was a strange circumstance, no question, and one that begged for exploitation.

By one-thirty his enthusiasm was gone. There should have been word by now. Josiah called, fearing the lack of answer that would tell him Danny had run into trouble and Josiah was now in this thing without any help at all.

Danny answered, though. Said, “Josiah? That you?” in a hushed voice.

“Yes, it’s me, but if you’re not sure, then don’t use my damn name when you answer the phone, you jackass. What if it had been a cop?”

“Sorry.”

“Why in the hell haven’t you called? What’s going on with the police?”

“Haven’t been any police.”

“What?”

“Not a one, Josiah. I’m parked where I can see the back of the hotel and the front drive, and there’s not been a cop car up here yet.”

More than an hour had passed since he’d hung up with Lucas Bradford. If the man were going to call the police, he’d have done it by now. This was both surprising and encouraging. Whatever had kept Lucas from phoning the police once probably would again. Now it was just a matter of getting his sorry ass engaged in conversation, keeping the son of a bitch from hanging up on Josiah and acting like he could avoid the hell storm that was headed into his life.

“Josiah? You there?”

“Yeah, I’m here. Just thinking.”

“Well, there ain’t been cops. But somebody else might’ve come to see Shaw.”

“Who?”

“A woman. See, I got a place where I can look down at his car, that Acura. Well not fifteen minutes ago this woman drives up real slow through the parking lot, like she’s looking for a car. Then she pulls in and parks right by his. When she got out, she put her hand on the hood. Like she wanted to see if it was warm, if it had been driven.”

“Could be a coincidence.”

“Could be. But the car has Illinois plates.”

No coincidence. The woman had come to see him, a woman from Illinois.

When my wife hired you…

“Oh, Lucas,” Josiah breathed. “You dumb bastard, you’re in trouble now.”

46

HE LAY IN THE DARK in bed with his wife of fourteen years and he could not sleep. They had not spoken in more than an hour now. He was no longer sure if she was awake. Her chest rose and fell slowly as if in sleep but there was a rigidity to her body that suggested she was not.

Six weeks since he’d last seen her. And then it had been tense and angry, as was always the case since they’d separated. Since he’d moved out of the home they shared, moved out because she dared to question the indulgence of self-pity that he was still riding after two years.

You are a child, Eric thought, a petulant boy, not a man. And still she is here now. Still she came for you.

He wasn’t surprised either. Despite everything that had happened, he’d believed she would be there when he needed her. She’d gotten into the car and driven six hours through the night, and that very act defined the question he’d never been able to answer, one that had been in his head for years—why was she still with him?

He understood the possibilities she’d originally seen; theirs had been a truly passionate romance from the start, and the future they had planned to share was full of promise. Had been, at least, until his failure.

And that was it—failure—no other word applied, though Claire had sure as hell tried plenty of them out. There’d been talk of obstacles, setbacks, hindrances, delays, tests, interruptions, and holdups, but never talk of the one cold truth. Eric had failed. Had gone out to California expecting to be directing films within a few years, expecting to be a figure of fame and acclaim soon after that. It hadn’t happened. The goal had been clear, the results equally so, and the verdict couldn’t be argued: failure.

It was in her calm acceptance of that, in her unyielding patience, that Eric’s frustration grew. Don’t you get it? he’d wanted to scream at her, it’s over. I didn’t make it. What are you still doing here? Why haven’t you left?

He’d never have blamed her. Hell, he was expecting it. After the broken dreams in California, followed by the two-year tantrum in Chicago, how had she not left him? It was the right thing to do, so he’d waited for her to go, waited and waited and still she was there, so finally he’d left himself. It had to happen. The circle had to be completed, the whole package of Eric’s once-bright future, professional and personal, had to be sealed and stamped with one bold black word: FAILED.

He was merely trying to complete the fall, but she kept interrupting it, kept trying to lift him up again. Why?

Because she loves you. And you love her, love her more than you’ve ever loved anything in this world except for yourself, you stupid, selfish bastard, and if you can learn to deal with that, maybe it would be a start.

She was asleep now. Hadn’t stirred or changed her breathing in a long time, and he thought that it would be safe to touch her, very lightly. He wanted to touch her. He turned onto his shoulder and reached out with his left hand and lowered it, gently as he could, onto her stomach. He felt the fabric of her shirt under his palm and felt the heat of her and the slight rise and fall of each breath. He was sure that she was asleep until she lifted her own hand and wrapped her fingers over his. For some reason when she did it, he held his breath.

Neither of them spoke. For a long time, they just lay there in the dark with their hands joined across her flat stomach.

“I should tell you that you are a bastard,” she whispered. “Do you know that?”

“Yes.”

“But that’s exactly what I shouldn’t say, too. Because it’s all you really believe.”

“I love you,” he said.

It was quiet. After a long time, she took his hand and lifted it to her face, held his palm over her eyes. She did not speak. Soon he felt moisture on his hand. Tears. She did not make a sound.

“I love you,” he said again, sliding toward her. “I’m sorry, and I love—”

“Shut up,” she said, and she let go of his hand and grabbed the back of his head instead, pulled it down roughly and kissed him hard on the mouth. She tightened her fingers in his hair as she held the kiss, his scalp alight with wonderful pain.

They shed their clothes in an awkward, frantic tangle, trying to help each other but then having to finish alone, graceless and hurried and needy. When she was naked, he rolled on top of her, still kicking his underwear from his feet, and he tried to force himself to slow down, ran a palm along her side and up her thigh in a deliberate, measured stroke as he lowered his mouth to her breast.

“No,” she whispered, and for a terrible moment he thought she was calling him off entirely, but then she tugged on his shoulders and pulled him upward and he understood that she wanted to move quickly, perhaps because she thought it was a mistake. He was afraid of that, but then her hand was on him and guiding him and all the thoughts in his mind faded and there was only her. When he entered her, she let out a soft gasp and he dropped his face to her neck, her hair tangled about him, and for a moment he lay completely still and breathed in the smell of her hair. Then she lifted her hips and urged him forward, and though he began to move, he kept his face pressed close to hers, where he could hear her and smell her and taste her.

They were done quickly the first time, lay breathing heavily but not speaking for a while and then began again, this time with a different pace, the slow savoring of one encountering something once feared lost. They spoke in breaths and kisses but not words, and it was quite a while before they were finished again, the sheets now damp with sweat.

“Your hands are shaking,” she said. Her cheek was on his chest, and she was holding his right hand close to her face.

“All of me is shaking,” he said. “It’s a good thing.”

Truth was, he seemed to have developed a muscle tremor in his hands, and the headache was returning already. He didn’t want to think about that.

“It won’t always feel this easy,” she said.

“I know it.”

“Do you? Because if you want to keep running, let’s be clear on that now, and not let tonight slow you down.”

“I don’t want to run, Claire. I want to be with you.”

“And you want it to be easy,” she said. “Easy, and as planned. You want everything to fit into the plan, your plan. Some of us try so hard to fit into that for you. It doesn’t matter. You still can’t handle the fact that the entire world does not.”

Her voice was weary when she said it, and he lifted his head to look down at her.

“You sound like you’ve given up,” he said.

“On you? On us? Oh, please, Eric. I’m the only one who never will.”

“Then we can make it work. I know it will not be easy, or as planned. But we can make it work.”

“You left,” she said. “You left. Don’t you remember that? And now I’m supposed to be thrilled with the idea of you coming back?”

“You don’t me want to?”

She snorted out a laugh of exasperation. “I didn’t want you to leave, Eric. But you did. So when you talk about making this work, forgive me if I’m a little hesitant.”

“I love you, Claire.”

“I know that,” she said. “The problem is, you’re going to have to figure out how to like Eric a little bit, too. Or at least be at peace with him. Until the two of you can sort that out, I’m afraid I’ll be lost in the middle.”

She fell asleep soon, her head on his chest and her hand curled around his side, and he watched her, feeling a sense of hope and possibility that had been absent for far too long. They would fix this. They would fix it all.

Though she did not yet know it, the water had saved him. It was the water that had returned her to him, that had her at his side right now. Without the water, he’d been alone. With it, here she was. It had revived his marriage and it would revive his career.

The thought returned his mind to Campbell and Lucas and Shadrach, to the story that could lift him to success. He was bothered that the water he’d bottled at the spa had not produced a vision or stopped the withdrawal pains, bothered that he’d required so much from Anne’s last bottle to achieve so little. What he needed was the original. The Bradford bottle. There’d been something different about it, and while the regular Pluto Water had fed the need for a while, it was not doing the job now.

It’s that spring, he thought, the spring that the boy’s uncle used for the moonshine. There was something different about it, and if I could find that spring…

If he could find it, the possibilities were damn near endless. If he could find that spring, the world would just about curl up in his palm.

But he could not find it tonight, and the headache was building and his hands were shaking and he needed to try to hold the dragon at bay if he could. He moved Claire gently, slipped out from beneath her, and went for the plastic bottle he’d filled at the spa. He’d had only a little before falling asleep the first time, and it had not been enough. He’d have to adjust, that was all. A little more, bit by bit, until he found the amount that worked. As the dark hours moved toward the light ones, he drank the water and watched his beautiful wife.

The planning took longer than it should have, wasted more time than Josiah would have liked. But he didn’t know much of the enemy, had only limited information to work with, and that slowed him.

He’d hung up on Danny after instructing him to continue to watch the hotel, and then he returned to pacing the woods around the old timber camp and thinking.

Lucas himself had confirmed that his wife had hired Shaw. Now a woman from Illinois had arrived in the middle of the night, and Lucas had chosen not to send the police after Shaw. Why not? There would be layers to that answer, Josiah was sure, but one of them had just landed at the West Baden Springs Hotel, Carlsbad of North America, Eighth Wonder of the Friggin’ World.

How to leverage that, though? The simple answer was that Josiah needed control of the situation, and that meant he needed control of both Shaw and Lucas’s wife. He went back to the dead detective’s briefcase and riffled through the papers until he came up with a name. Alyssa. Alyssa Bradford. Pretty name. Probably was a pretty girl. According to the detective’s files, she was thirty-six and Lucas was fifty-nine. Trophy wife.

The next step was getting control of Eric Shaw and Alyssa Bradford. It wasn’t something he could accomplish with them in that hotel, but luring them out of that hotel and into a place more suitable for his needs was going to be a difficult task. The only person he knew who had any ties to them was that big black kid.

Wait a second. Wait just one moment, Josiah, use that head on your shoulders.

He called Danny back.

“Anything happening?”

“Nope. Nobody’s come. I wrote down the license plate of that—”

“Great,” Josiah interrupted. “Now tell me, Danny, you said when you followed him earlier today, he went to Anne McKinney’s house. Right?”

“Right. Got out of his car and left the engine running and the door open and…”

Josiah tuned him out, thinking now of the old woman’s house, that lonely, isolated place on the hill outside of town, no neighbors for a half mile in any direction.

“Okay,” he said. “Just needed verification. You stay awake and watching, hear? I’ll be in touch.”

He hung up in the middle of a question from Danny, feeling a tingle in his limbs now, puzzle pieces fitting into place, giving him a sense of the whole. He had the crucial next step, and it was time to get moving. Dawn would be on him soon, and the less of daylight he saw, the better.

It would be a long hike, and there was a temptation to try and avoid that, but in the end Josiah relented. He didn’t want to run the risk of taking his truck out on the roads, not even for a short drive. He filled his pockets with shells and took his shotgun, was just out of the barn when he stopped and went back and opened the door to the truck and tossed the wad of cash he’d stolen from the detective onto the driver’s seat. He’d tell Danny to come get it. Danny’d earned that much, no question. Josiah didn’t feel any great sense of loss, handing the cash over. Funny thing, but the more consumed he became with the concept of debt, the less concerned he was with money itself. Now, what kind of sense did that make?

It was beginning to rain again when he left the timber camp and walked into the woods. Gently so far, but with thick drops and an uncommon humidity for these hours opposite the sun. He hiked up to the highway and then pushed back into the trees, keeping about forty feet from the road. All told, it was probably six miles of solid hiking to Anne McKinney’s, which would take at least two hours going through the brush. If he was at her home by dawn, that would be good enough.

What Josiah wanted out of this was only what was owed to him. There was a dollar figure to it, and he’d settle upon one eventually, but it started with answers. He was damn sure owed some answers, and he had a feeling—no, an assurance by now—that they weren’t the sort of answers got offered up in conversation. They were the sort of answers got offered up when you had a gun barrel to someone’s head.

He worked his tongue around his mouth and spat, that taste of tobacco growing. No cars passed on the dark, empty highway, and though the shotgun was awkward to carry, he was making good enough time, tramping along through the wet underbrush and working up a sweat. He’d spent years bitching about this place, promising himself he’d get out of the town someday and never look back. But out here in the woods, no other people around, no buildings or houses or hotels, he could appreciate what it had. It was beautiful land, really, rich and filled with strange gifts. It was the valley of his birth, the valley of his ancestors. Wouldn’t be so terrible if it ended up being the valley of his death, too. No, that wouldn’t be so bad at all.

The whole place was supposed to be coming alive again, was supposed to be on the threshold of a grand return. There were those who doubted it would happen, but the groundwork had been laid, and those hotels shone beside their casino, and through it all nobody remembered the Bradfords, nobody recalled that Campbell had been the man that made it work for years. Hell with Taggart and Ballard and Sinclair. Some men had visions, others had deeds.

“They forgot you, Campbell,” Josiah whispered as he ducked under a branch and came up into a wind-whipped burst of rain. “You loved this valley more than any of them. Still do.”

He should have felt strange to be talking to his dead ancestor, maybe, but he didn’t. Felt close to him, in fact, felt the meaning of blood kin in a way he never had before. They were shared people, he and Campbell. Different versions of the same blood. Now, that was heavy stuff.

“I’ll make ’em remember you,” he said. “Might have to burn this whole town down to do it, but I’ll make ’em remember you, and I’ll get what’s owed to us.”

That last notion—of burning the town to the ground in order to see Campbell get his due—lingered in his mind. He envisioned those damn hotels going up in the same way the private eye’s van had, a burst of white-to-orange heat, and he smiled. That would be fucking gorgeous. See the shining dome of the West Baden hotel exploding into a cloud of flame? Yes, that would be as sweet a sight as he’d ever happened across. Wouldn’t be as easy as blowing that van up had been, though. It would require a good bit more than a pocketknife and a cigarette lighter, would require time and high-grade explosives and…

He stopped walking. The wind had died momentarily but now it returned in an irritable gust, blowing a squall line of rain into his face. It hit hard, the water like pebbles on his flesh, but he didn’t so much as blink. Just stood there staring into the dark.

High-grade explosives.

He’d just walked a few miles away from an abandoned timber camp where a box of explosives sat, those strange sausage-looking dynamite strands. It was old stuff, probably not even potent enough to blow. Certainly not worth the walk back, because even if he had the shit, what in the hell was he going to do with it? The shotgun would be all the assistance he required. And yet…

It had been there for him. A box of dynamite, sitting in a barn that had stood empty for as long as he could remember. It felt almost planned, felt almost… promised.

All you got to do is listen, Josiah. All you got to do is listen to me.

Yes, that was a promise. Consistent as clockworks, that’s what Campbell had called himself, and who cared that he was a dead man—he was a stronger friend than Josiah had left among the living.

He wiped the rainwater from his face and turned his head and spat and looked up at the hill he’d just climbed down, a slow, painstaking climb. No way he could carry that box of explosives all the way to Anne McKinney’s house. Not if he had all day, and he didn’t. He’d have to take the truck, and that was one hell of a risk.

“That shit won’t even be good anymore,” he said. “No way it’s still good.”

And yet it was there. As if it had been waiting for him. And all he had to do was listen…

He was halfway back up the hill before the rain started again in earnest.

47

THERE WERE NO VISIONS.

Eric couldn’t believe it after the first hour—and half of the bottle—had passed, went back and drank the rest down, waited thirty minutes, and started on the second bottle.

Nothing.

The headache might have faded. Might have. It didn’t worsen, but didn’t disappear either, and his hands shook unless he held them clenched together. A tremor had taken hold in his left eyelid, too, made it hard to watch Claire, the damn thing fluttering constantly, twitching. This was not good.

He got back into bed as dawn rose, lay behind Claire’s tightly curled body and stroked her arms and smelled her hair. Her presence was comforting, but still the water’s lack of impact nagged at him. He could go for Anne’s water in a few hours. Maybe that would help. But he was no longer sure that it would, and he was sure that it wouldn’t be enough. Not after the way he’d gone through it tonight.

So it was the spring, then. The source itself. He had to find it.

He did not sleep. About an hour after he got back into the bed, Claire woke slowly, letting out a soft groan before stretching and rolling over to face him, and he leaned over and kissed her. When he did that, her eyes opened for the first time and he saw a flicker in them, a trace of anger. What am I doing in bed with you? her eyes seemed to say. You left. Why am I here with you again?

It would be that way, though. It would have to be. A smooth return wasn’t reasonable; too much had happened, there would have to be awkward, painful moments. But he could minimize them. He could try to do that.

“Morning,” she said, and he had a feeling she was thinking the same thoughts.

“Morning.”

She sat up, pulling the sheet up to cover herself, and ran both hands through her hair, then held them to her face, eyes lost in thought.

“Is that a What have I done? look or a What do we do now? look?” Eric said.

“Neither,” she said, and then, “both.”

But she smiled, and that was enough. He kissed her again and this time she returned it without the same flicker in the eyes.

“What we do now,” she said, “is the simple part. Today, at least.”

“Yeah?”

“We go home.”

He looked away.

“Eric?”

“You said we would talk it out in the morning,” he said. He had his hands pushed hard against the mattress, to still the shaking lest she notice.

“I also said that I would not stay.”

“There’s something I need to do,” he said. “Something I need to resolve first. Once it’s resolved, I’ll leave with you. I promise I will leave with you. But first there are a few things I need to know. Document who the boy’s uncle was, for one. That will be a legal help, Claire, maybe an important one.”

She didn’t respond. He felt desperation creeping on.

“I need you to understand, Claire, that what I’m going through, what’s happening to me, it’s powerful. It is strong. So I’m just struggling to deal with it, figure it out.”

“I know that.”

“Twelve hours, then. Give me that much. Give me one day.”

“What can possibly be accomplished in a day?”

“I can try to get the answers I just told you I needed,” he said. “If I can’t do it by then, we’ll leave, go home, and figure the rest of it out from there.”

I can find that spring in twelve hours. I better. I sure as shit better.

“My preference,” she said slowly, “would be to get in the car and head north. No pausing for loose ends, breakfast, even a shower. Just go. That would be my preference.”

He waited.

“But if you need the day, take the day,” she said. “We’ll leave tonight, though?”

“Yes. We will leave tonight.”

She stared into his eyes for a long time before nodding. “All right. In that case, I guess I’ll go ahead and take the shower.”

She slipped out of the bed naked and walked into the bathroom, beautiful and elegant as she moved through the dim light, always comfortable in her own skin. He watched her go, thought, my wife, savoring the sound of it.

She’d just closed the door when the phone rang.

He rolled onto his side and lifted the phone, said, “Yeah?”

“Eric. How you holding up, son?”

“Hello, Paul,” Eric said, voice flat, and the bathroom door opened and Claire peered out.

“I’ve heard that you ran into some trouble down there.”

Ran into some trouble, yes. Just like I did in California, just like you’re sure I’ll do again, and you want to play the role of the protector for your daughter now, prove to her yet again that I was a mistake, you passive-aggressive prick. He wanted to shout it all, but Claire was standing there at the bathroom door, watching him as if he were taking a test, and he said only, “It hasn’t been a real good week.”

“So I’ve gathered. Claire is with you?”

“Yes.” And she’s going to stay with me, Paul, and I will stay with her, your influence be damned.

“Good. Listen, I’ve been trying to help. I’ve been trying to find out who hired this man Murray, the one who was killed.”

“Uh-huh.”

“The investigations firm has been hiding behind attorney-client privilege so far, but when I called them, I said I’d be representing you—”

“You did what? I haven’t asked you to—” Claire stepped out of the bathroom, a towel wrapped around her now, and Eric stuttered for just a moment, interrupted by her return. It was all the gap Paul needed to plunge ahead.

“I thought it was imperative that you know who hired this man before you made any decisions on how to act, so I pointed out that their client might be protected by his attorneys but that they had to disclose said attorneys, if nothing else. If anyone was going to stonewall, it had to be the law firm. They didn’t like that but I mentioned a district attorney friend who’d be happy to call them and clarify the issue and possible repercussions, and they gave me the name of the firm: Clemens and Cooper.”

“Terrific,” Eric said. “But if all they’re going to do is keep up the secrecy—”

“Well, the thing is, I have a few friends at Clemens and Cooper. I put in a call to one and said, without any explanation, that I understood they represented a man named Campbell Bradford and I needed to know which partner handled his interests. He just called me back this morning to tell me I was wrong—they don’t represent Campbell, but they do represent his son.”

His son. Alyssa’s husband.

“His full name,” Paul said, “is Lucas Granger Bradford. Does that mean anything to you?”

Claire was at Eric’s side now, her hand on his arm. Her touch seemed hot on his skin, a cold shiver rippling through him.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, it does.”

“He’s married to the woman who hired you, correct?”

“Yeah,” Eric said, but that wasn’t the point of interest—the first and middle names were far, far more fascinating.

“Okay. Well, I called Lucas this morning. He told me you had called him last night and threatened him?”

“What? Paul, that’s insane. I’ve never spoken to the man. And Claire was with me, she was here the whole—”

“I believe you, son. Of course, I believe you. I told Lucas he had some issues he was going to need to respond to, explained the criminal charges that could be brought his way if any withholdings put you or my daughter in jeopardy or sent undue police pressure your way. He was resistant. I was persistent.”

Eric almost grinned despite himself. About damn time Paul’s abrasive personality worked for him instead of against him.

“Did he tell you anything?”

“Not much. But he did say that the reason he hired a detective involved a letter written by his father, who is now deceased. The letter made some unusual claims, and he wanted to have it checked out before it hit the legal system. Evidently, the old man wanted this letter attached to his will, part of his estate order.”

“What did it say?”

“He won’t disclose that. He just said that he was sure the letter was the ravings of senility and that’s what he intended to prove with the detective. He told me that he had not informed his wife of the situation, and he was unaware of her hiring you. When he found out she had, he asked his investigator to call you off.”

“There’s a hell of a lot more to it than that,” Eric said. “He didn’t try to call me off, he tried to pay me off. It’s not so innocent, Paul.”

“I’m sure it isn’t. This is all that I’ve got so far, though. I’m trying to help.”

“You have helped,” Eric said. “Paul, you absolutely have helped.”

Lucas Granger Bradford.

Yes, this was help, indeed. Paul was still talking, but Eric could no longer focus on his words. He was carrying on about the need for an attorney and people he could recommend, and Eric cut him off.

“Look, Claire really would like to talk to you. I’m going to pass the phone over to her. But Paul… I appreciate this. Okay? I want you to know that I appreciate this.”

“Of course,” Paul said, and there was a sense of genuine surprise in his voice, like he didn’t understand why he’d be thanked, like he’d forgotten the conflict that had existed between the two of them for years. He and Claire were good at that sort of thing.

Eric passed the phone over to his wife and then got to his feet and went into the bathroom, closing the door to mute the sound of her voice. The headache was nudging around again, and enough nausea that he had no appetite, but right now those things didn’t matter. He’d been given a gift, a piece of understanding. He used his cell phone to call Kellen.

“I was right,” he said. “We were right. The old man in Chicago who was calling himself Campbell Bradford was actually named Lucas. And he was the nephew of the moonshiner, Thomas Granger.”

“How’d you determine that?”

“My father-in-law just called. He found out that the PI firm was retained by my client’s husband and gave me his name. It’s Lucas Granger Bradford. He gave his son his own real name, and that middle name was his uncle’s last name. You think we can find the spot where he lived?”

“We’re damn sure going to try,” Kellen said.

48

ANNE McKINNEY WOKE EARLY, as was her custom the last few years. Her body just didn’t tolerate long stretches of sleep anymore. For three seasons of the year that wasn’t such a problem, but the winter mornings, when darkness lingered long after she rose, were a burden on the heart.

She stayed in bed longer than she ordinarily would, let the clock pass seven and carry on till eight and then she sighed and got out of bed and went into the bathroom. She washed and dressed and came out into a living room filled with strange gray light. Not the light of predawn but the light of a cloud-riddled sky. It was long past sunrise but still the house was painted with shadows and silhouettes. Stormy.

There was no rain now, but it had evidently come down hard throughout the night, because her yard was filled with puddles and the tree branches hung heavy. The wind had not fallen off in the way that it typically did after a front passed through, but continued to blow, the porch a choir of chimes as she moved toward the front door. She felt the force of it as soon as she got the door open, an unusually warm wet wind for dawn. Where was all that wind coming from? She put it at just below twenty miles an hour.

She was wrong. According to the wind gauges, it was blowing twenty-two, this after the storm had finished its work. The barometer was still falling, but the temperature had risen overnight. That and the wet, rain-soaked earth would give this new front lots to work with. There’d be storms aplenty today, and some of them might be fierce.

Down at the end of the porch a flash of white caught her eye, and she took a few shuffling steps and leaned over the rail and stared into her own backyard. Way down by the tree line, parked close to the woods but carefully positioned behind her house, was an old pickup truck. Now, who in the world could that belong to? It had come in during the night, clearly, but there was no one behind the wheel.

“Get the license and call the police,” she said softly, but the truck was a long way off across the muddy yard, and suddenly she didn’t feel like being exposed out there, wanted to get back inside with the doors locked and the phone in her hand.

Her hearing wasn’t what it used to be, and the yard was noisy with the wind and the chimes, but still the man must have moved silent as a deer because she was absolutely unaware of his presence until she turned back to face the door. He was standing in front of it with a shotgun hooked over his forearm. He looked familiar, but she couldn’t place him just yet. She gave a start, as anyone would, took a small step backward. He gave a cold smile, and it was then that she recognized him.

Josiah Bradford.

A local ne’er-do-well, not one she’d have troubled her mind over in the past, but he was more than that to her today. He was Campbell’s last descendant, and something mighty strange was going on with Campbell.

“Josiah,” she said, trying to put a stern touch in her voice even though she was standing with her hand at her heart, “what on earth do you think you’re doing?”

“You have a reputation for unrivaled hospitality,” he said, and his voice raised a chill in her because it did not fit the man, did not fit even the time. “For offering housing and help. I’m seeking both.”

“I never opened my door to a man with a gun before. And I won’t start now. So go on your way, Josiah. Please go on your way.”

He shook his head slowly. Then he shifted the gun from one arm to the other. When he did it, the muzzle passed right over her.

“Mrs. McKinney,” he said. “Anne. I’m going to need you to open that door.”

She didn’t speak. He reached out and twisted the knob and opened the door.

“Would you look at that.” He turned back, the artificial smile gone from his face, and pointed the gun at her. “After you, ma’am. After you.”

There wasn’t a neighbor in view of the house, and Anne’s voice would have been lost to that wind. Her car was in the carport on the other side of the porch, and the road stretched beyond that, kind neighbors in either direction, but Anne McKinney’s days of running were many years past. Those much-loathed, sturdy tennis shoes on her feet might help get her up the stairs, but they wouldn’t get her to the road. She took another look at the gun, and then she walked past Josiah Bradford and into her empty house.

He came in behind her and closed the door and locked it. She was walking away from him, toward the living room, but he said, “Slow down there,” and she came to a stop. He walked into the kitchen, took the phone down and put it to his ear and smiled.

“You seem to be having some trouble with your service. Going to need to get a repair crew out for that.”

She said, “What do you want? Why are you in my home?”

He frowned, wandering out of the kitchen and into the living room and settling into her rocking chair. He waved at the couch, and she walked over and sat. There was a phone right beside her hand, but that wouldn’t be any help now.

“It wasn’t my desire to end up here,” he said, “just the unfortunate way of the world. Circumstance, Mrs. McKinney. Circumstance conspired to bring me here, and now I must take some measure to gain control of that circumstance. Understand?”

She could hardly take in his words for the sheer sound of his voice, that unsettling timbre it held, a quality of belonging to another person.

“Yesterday,” he said, “a man paid you a visit in the afternoon. Came running in out of a rainstorm. I’m going to need you to tell me what was said. What transpired.”

She told him. Didn’t seem a wise idea not to, with him holding a gun. She started with his first visit, explained what he’d said about making the movie, which Josiah Bradford dismissed with a curt wave of his hand.

“How’d he hear of my family? What lie did he tell you, at least?”

“A woman in Chicago hired him. And she gave him a bottle of Pluto Water. That’s why he came to see me.”

“To ask about it?”

She nodded.

“Then why’d he come back yesterday?”

“For my water. I’ve kept some Pluto bottles over the years. He needed one.”

“Needed one?”

“To drink.”

“To drink?” he said, and the gun sagged in his hand as he leaned forward.