So Cold the River

“That’s right.”

“You let him drink that old shit?”

“He said he needed it, and I believed that he did. It gives him some… unusual reactions.”

“What in the hell are you talking about?”

She liked seeing him confused and unsteady. It dulled the fear a little.

“It takes away his headaches, but it gives him visions.”

“Visions? Are you senile, you old bitch?” His voice sounded closer to normal now, the snapping anger of a young man, none of the eerie formality he’d shown before.

“He sees your great-grandfather,” she said. “He sees Campbell.”

His forehead bunched into wrinkles above those strange eyes he had, eyes like oil.

“That man told you he’s seeing visions of Campbell.”

“Yes.”

“Either you are without your senses, or whatever scam this son of a bitch is running is more interesting that I had imagined. Can’t be a thing about it sorted out without him, though, can there?”

Anne didn’t answer.

“So we’ll need a meeting,” Josiah said. “A powwow, as our red brothers called it. You don’t mind your house being the location, do you? I didn’t expect that you would.”

He looked at the grandfather clock. “Too early for you to call, so we’ll have to enjoy each other’s company for a spell.”

She stayed silent, and he said, “Now, there’s no cause to be unfriendly, Mrs. McKinney. I’m a local, after all. Called this valley home for all my life. You just think of me as a visiting neighbor and we’ll be just fine.”

“If you’re a visiting neighbor,” she said, “you’d be willing to do me a favor.”

“I suspect you’re going to request something unreasonable.”

“I’d just like those curtains pushed back. I like to watch the sky.”

He hesitated but then got to his feet and pulled them back. Outside, the trees continued to sway with the wind, and though it was past sunrise now, the sky was a tapestry of gray clouds. The day had dawned dark.

49

CLAIRE WANTED TO COME along. She said he shouldn’t be alone, and when he told her that he wouldn’t be, she said that Kellen was a stranger and as far as she was concerned, being with a stranger was as good as being alone.

“Look,” he said, “you’re safe here, and you’re also here if I need you.”

“Yes. I’ll be here when you need me there. Wherever there might be.”

“We’re just going to look for a mineral spring. That’s all. Maybe take two hours. It could tell me something. Being there could tell me something.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“If it doesn’t, then we go home,” he said, although the idea left him uneasy, this place having wrapped him in its embrace now, made him feel like he belonged here.

She studied him, then echoed, “We go home.”

“Yes. Please, Claire. Let me leave to do this one thing.”

“Fine,” she said. “It’s not like I’m unused to you leaving.”

He was silent, and she said, softly, “I’m sorry.”

“You’re honest.”

She ran her hands over her face and through her hair and turned from him. “Go, then. And hurry, so we can go home.”

He kissed her. She was stiff, returned it with an uncomfortable formality. Tense with the effort of hiding those things she hid so well—anger, betrayal. She felt them now, and he knew it and still he was heading for the door. What did that make him?

“I’ll be right back,” he said. “Quicker than you think, I promise.”

She nodded, and then after an awkward silence, he went to the door and opened it and said, “Good-bye.” She didn’t answer, and then he was in the hallway, the door shutting softly behind him and hiding her from sight.

Kellen was waiting in the parking lot, the Porsche at idle. He had the windows down and his eyes shielded by the sunglasses even though the morning was dark with heavy cloud cover.

“Something tells me that ain’t Dasani,” he said, eying the bottle of water in Eric’s hand. It was only half full now, maybe a little less. The headache was whispering to him, the pain like a soft, malevolent chuckle.

“No,” Eric said, fitting the bottle into a cup holder. “It’s not Dasani.”

Kellen nodded and put the car into drive. “A word of warning, my man—this might be the definition of a goose chase we’re embarking on here.”

“I thought you knew where the spot was?”

“I know where the gulf is. That’s all. There’s a lot of fields and woods around it, and how in the hell we’re supposed to find a spring, I don’t know.”

“We’ll give it a shot, at least,” Eric said. “Think we can beat the rain?” he asked, eyeing the darkening sky.

“I drive fast,” Kellen said.

They were on their way out of town when Eric said, “Can I ask you something?”

“Go ahead.”

“Why are you hanging in the game?”

“What do you mean?”

“If I were you, I’d probably have driven back to Bloomington by now and stopped taking calls from the crazy white guy. Why haven’t you?”

There was a brief silence, and then Kellen said, “All those stories my great-grandfather told me about this place? All those crazy-sounding stories? Well, Everett Cage was a talker, I’ll admit that. He liked to captivate his audience. But, Eric? He also wasn’t a liar. He was an honest man, and I’m sure of one thing—whatever he said, well, he believed it. I guess I’ve always wondered how he could believe things like that.”

It was quiet again, and then he said, “I’m starting to understand.”

Josiah found himself watching the clouds. At first he’d taken to gazing out the window just because he wanted to be sure the old woman wasn’t up to something, that there was no way she could signal for help once those drapes were pulled back. But the window showed only a field and a view of the western sky. The clouds were massing, unsettled and swirling, layers seeming to shift from bottom to top and then back. The sky over the yard was pale gray, but out in the west it looked like a bruise, and the wind pushed hard at the house and whistled with occasional gusts. Something about the turbulent sky pleased him, made him smile, and he pulled his lips back and spat tobacco juice onto the window, watched it slide down the glass in a brown smear. Funny he couldn’t even remember putting a chaw in. Hadn’t ever taken to the habit, threw up when he sampled his first dip at fourteen and never went back to the stuff, but there it was.

He waited until nearly nine before kneeling beside Anne McKinney and passing her his cell phone. Late enough that Shaw and the woman would be awake; early enough that they probably weren’t ready to check out. He had Danny watching in case they did, and the phone had been silent.

“Time for your part in this,” he said. “It’s a most minor role, Mrs. McKinney, but critical nonetheless. In other words, it is a role that I cannot allow you to… what’s the phrase I’m looking for? Fuck up. That’s it. I cannot allow you to fuck this up.”

She held his eyes and didn’t so much as blink. She was scared of him—she had to be—but she wasn’t allowing herself to show it, and there was a part of Josiah that admired that. Not a large enough part to tolerate it, though.

“If you’re fixing to hurt people,” she said, “I won’t have a part in it.”

“You don’t have the faintest idea what I’m fixing to do. Remember that. But here’s what I can tell you—this call doesn’t go through, people will begin to get hurt. And there’s only one person nearby for me to start with, too.”

“You’d threaten a woman of my years. That’s the kind of man you—”

“You ain’t got the first idea the kind of man I am. But I’ll give you a start: you picture the darkest soul you ever seen, and then, old woman, you add a little more black.”

He hovered over her, the phone extended, his eyes locked on hers. “Now, all you got to do is make a phone call and say a handful of words, and say them right. That happens, I got a feeling I’ll find my way out of that front door of yours, and you’ll be sitting here watching your damn sky as you like. But if it doesn’t happen?”

He pursed his lips and shook his head. “I’m a man of ambition. Not of patience.”

She tried to keep her gaze steady but her mouth was trembling a bit, and when he pressed the phone into her wrinkled palm, he felt a fearful jolt travel through her.

“You call that hotel,” he said. “You said he wanted that water? Well, tell him now’s the time to come get it. You’ll give it all to him, but he’s got to hurry up and get out here, because you’re going to be leaving town for a few days.”

“He won’t believe that.”

“Well, you best make him believe it. Because if he doesn’t? We’re going to have to find ourselves a whole new tactic. And with the mood I’ve found myself in, I don’t believe anyone would like to see what happens should I be required to get creative.”

He slid the shotgun over and leaned it against the edge of the couch so the muzzle was looking her in the face.

“Anne, you old bitch,” he said, “it’s got nothing to do with you. Don’t change the way I feel on that front.”

“All right,” she said. “I’ll call. But whatever you think is going to happen, I can assure you it won’t work out as you’ve planned. Things never do.”

“Don’t you worry about me. I’m a man who’s capable of adjusting.”

She dialed, but he took the phone from her hand and put it to his ear to be certain she wasn’t calling anybody else. The voice that answered said, “West Baden Springs,” and Josiah, in a voice thick with easy charm, said, “I’m calling for a guest. Mr. Eric Shaw, please.”

“One moment,” the woman answered, and Josiah passed the phone back to Anne McKinney. Then he dropped to one knee on the floor in front of the couch and rested his hand around the stock of the shotgun, curled one finger around the trigger guard.

“Hello,” Anne said, and there was too much fluster in her voice. He shifted the gun as inspiration as she said, “I was, well, I was trying to reach Mr. Shaw.”

“Oh,” she said. A pause during which Josiah could hear a female voice, and then Anne said, “Oh, yes. Well… a message? I, um—”

Josiah gave an emphatic nod.

“Yes, I’d like to leave a message. My name is Anne McKinney. I’ve only just met… oh, he mentioned me? Well, you see, he wanted something from me. Some old bottles of Pluto Water. And I want him to have them but I need him to come get them soon because I have to go out of town.”

She was talking too fast, and Josiah moved the gun so the barrel was just inches from her chin.

“That’s all. Just tell him to come see Anne McKinney if he can. He knows where I live. Please tell him. Thank you.”

She shoved the phone away and Josiah took it and disconnected, regarding her with a sour expression. It hadn’t been the performance he’d needed. She was too shaky, too strange. He wanted to release some of the anger, but fear was already clear in her wrinkled old face and he didn’t have the energy for shouting, so he turned away instead and went to the window with gun in hand and looked out at those oncoming dark clouds.

“She said he was gone?” He spoke with his back to her.

“Yes. She told me she’d see that he got the message.”

“Ain’t that just dandy news,” Josiah said, thinking that Danny was even more worthless than assumed, had let Shaw walk right out of that hotel. Son of a bitch. Wasn’t nobody could be counted on in this world except himself…

He called Danny. Exploded on him before a word had been said, asking what in the hell he was doing up there, because Shaw was gone, damn it, and Danny hadn’t seen a thing because he was a useless piece of shit and—

“I’m following him, Josiah! Give me a break, I’m following him.”

“Why the hell didn’t you call and tell me that?”

“He didn’t leave but five minutes ago! I’m just trying to keep up, see where’s he going.”

Josiah reached up and squeezed the bridge of his nose, took a breath. “Well, damn it, next time tell me when they start moving, then call back. Where are they going?”

“Headed toward Paoli. The black kid picked him up in the Porsche. It was good work that I saw him go, since he didn’t take his own car.”

“Just follow them,” Josiah said, in no mood to offer Danny praise. “Hang back far enough that they don’t notice you, but don’t you lose them neither.”

“I’m doing best as I can but that black kid, he drives like—”

“Just stay behind them and let me know where they end up.”

They hadn’t made it more than a few miles out of town before Eric’s cell phone rang—Claire.

“Hey,” he said. “What’s up?”

“That old lady called. She wants you to get her Pluto Water.”

“Okay. I’ll call her back in a while. I don’t really have time to—”

“She said she’s leaving for a few days, and if you want the bottles, you have to get them now. She sounded upset.”

Leaving for a few days? It was odd that she hadn’t mentioned it.

“She say where she was going?”

“Nope. Just that if you want the water, today’s the day to get it.”

Damn it. He didn’t have time for a delay like this, but he also couldn’t afford to let the last supply of original Pluto Water he had access to close off. Not right now, not when his hands were shaking and his head was throbbing and even full bottles of the hotel water didn’t do a damn thing to help. By now Anne’s water might not help either, but it was better to have at least the chance of a net under your tightrope.

“Hang on,” he said and then lowered the phone and said to Kellen, “Hey, are we going to pass by Anne McKinney’s on our way to this place?”

“That’s the exact opposite direction. But we can turn around.”

He didn’t want to turn around. He wanted to see the site of the old Granger cabin, and the sky was turning forbidding, more storms certainly on the way. But it was worth a delay if he could get his hands on a few more bottles…

“I’ll go see her,” Eric told Claire. “I hate to slow down for it now, because I want to find this spot I told you about and it looks like rain.”

“I had the TV on. They’re predicting bad storms all day.”

“Great. I’d love to get caught out in the woods in those. But if she’s leaving—”

“I could go get them,” Claire said.

He hesitated. “No. We agreed that it was safest for you to stay—”

“She’s an elderly woman, Eric. I think I can handle her.”

“I don’t really like that idea.”

“Well, I’d like to see one of these bottles, honestly.”

He remembered the way she’d inquired about the bottle as soon as she got to the hotel, as if testing him, searching for tangible proof of his wild stories.

“Fine,” he said. “Let me give you directions to the house.”

50

ANNE SAT ON THE COUCH with her hands folded in her lap and watched Josiah Bradford pace and mutter and thought that it was clear he was no longer in his own mind. He still managed lucid exchanges, but whenever he drifted away from the moment, his head was taking him far from this house. It was almost like watching Eric Shaw the other day. Like that but different, because with Eric it had been obvious that his mind was traveling somewhere else. With Josiah, it seemed something was paying him a visit. He was holding entire under-the-breath conversations, grumbling about a strong back and a valley that needed to be reminded of a few things, other bits and pieces that seemed just as nonsensical. His eyes were bloodshot and rimmed by puffy, purple rings, the picture of exhaustion. She wondered if he was using the strange, terrible drug that did so much harm in this area, meth. She’d only read of it, had no sense of the symptoms, but surely something had invaded his body and mind.

When he wasn’t whispering to himself, he was spitting tobacco juice into an empty fruit cocktail can he’d dug out of the kitchen. He’d carry on in a whisper for a while, staring out the window, and then he’d peel his lips back from his teeth and—ping—spit into the can. Over and over he did that, and while watching a man spit tobacco was far more loathsome than fascinating, she found herself enthralled by it. Because, as far as she could tell, there was no tobacco in his mouth.

He’d never put any in his mouth, at least, and though she’d studied him hard, she could see no bulge in his cheek or lower lip. When he spoke, to her or to himself, he didn’t seem to be talking around anything either. Yet his supply of amber-colored spittle never seemed to run dry, and she could smell the tobacco, dusky and cloying, from where she sat.

Bizarre. But at least he was distracted from her. Whatever he had planned for Eric Shaw couldn’t be good, though she didn’t know what she could do to prevent it, or if she even should try. Perhaps it was best to wait him out. Maybe he’d leave eventually, or maybe he’d burn himself out and fall asleep. If he did that, she could get to the R. L. Drake. He’d felt awful good about himself for cutting the phone line, but he hadn’t counted on her having a shortwave. All she needed was the opportunity, but getting down those steep stairs into the cellar wasn’t something she could do quickly. Quietly, maybe, but not quickly.

At least she was still free to move. He’d carried a roll of duct tape inside with him and she’d expected from the start that he’d use it to bind her hands and, God forbid, seal her mouth. She had enough trouble taking calm breaths right now. Close off her mouth and she shuddered to think what it would be like. He never used it, though, never even tied her hands, as if he’d taken stock and determined her too old and feeble to do harm.

A crazy man pacing the living room should have held her attention, but after a time she found it drifting from Josiah Bradford to the big picture window and the tumultuous clouds blowing in from the west.

Today was going to be special. And not just because of the man with the gun who’d taken up residence in her home. No, today would have been special even without that. The air mass headed this way was unstable, and the ground wet and warm. That meant that as the day built and the heat rose with it, there’d be something called differential heating. A boring term, unless you understood what it did. Differential heating provided lift, allowing that moist, unstable air mass to take on an updraft. And once that started? Storms followed. Yes, they did.

All the basics were in play already today, but the clouds were showing Anne that another variable looked ready to join: wind shear. Specifically, the vertical sort. The stronger that was, the longer the storm front had access to the updraft, and that meant trouble. The banks of dark clouds to the west had an obvious tilt to them, seemed to be leaning forward from the top, a look that indicated high wind shear. Most anyone would notice that tilt, but few would see the secondary motion—a mild, almost undetectable clockwise shifting of the cloud layers. At first she hadn’t been sure because she was distracted by Josiah’s carrying-on, but then she squinted and focused and saw that she was right. The clouds in the lowest level of the atmosphere were turning with those at the bottom of the upper level, and the direction was clockwise. That was called veering. That was not good.

Veering was a form of rotation, and rotation was a hallmark of the supercell storm, the sort Anne had been watching for years. She wished she had the TV or the weather radio on. Ordinarily, she’d have not only reports from the surrounding area but readings on pressure and humidity. Now she was left with only the clouds. That was fine, though—they’d tell her plenty. They’d show her the storm’s development, and the trees in the yard would tell her the wind speed, and through those things alone she’d have a better sense of what was about to happen than most. Right now there were large limbs in motion on the trees and a clear whistling sound as the wind went through the branches and the power lines, which meant the speed was somewhere between twenty-five and thirty, up a bit from early morning. The way that cloud front looked, it wasn’t going to end there.

They passed cattle farms and a group of Amish men working beside a barn. The countryside here was rolling as if tossed by an unseen ocean, no flat fields as there were in Illinois and the northern half of Indiana. The terrain here was closer to what you’d find on the south side of the Ohio River, where Kentucky’s rolling bluegrass fields edged into foothills and then became mountains.

Kellen was doing about seventy down the county road, and he jerked his head to the left and said, “That’s where your buddy was killed.”

“This road?”

“Next one down, I think. That’s where his van was set on fire. I drove past it yesterday on my way back into town. I was… curious.”

Something about this knowledge made Eric uncomfortable. Not just considering the man’s death, but that it had occurred so close to where they were headed now. They were driving past low-lying fields and scattered homes and trailers, but in the distance the hills rose blanketed with centuries-old forests. They came into view of an old white church with a graveyard beside it, and Kellen hit the brakes hard. The Porsche skidded on the barely wet surface and they slid past the turn, so Kellen had to throw it in reverse.

“You always drive like this, then it’s a good thing your girlfriend is going to be a doctor,” Eric said. “You’re going to need one.”

Kellen smiled, backing up to the church and then making a left turn. They’d gone just far enough for him to build up his speed again when a sign and a gravel drive appeared to their left and he had to hammer the brakes again. This time he made the turn on one try, bounced them along the gravel until it ended in a circular turnaround.

“Now we got to walk.”

“Where in the hell are we?”

“Orangeville. Population around eleven, but double that if you count the cows. This spot is Wesley Chapel Gulf. We have to hike to get to it.”

They got out of the car and stepped into the brush. There was a trail of sorts leading away from the gravel drive, and they followed that. Fields showed on the high side to their left, and on the low side to the right, the woods were dense and pieces of limestone jutted out of the earth. It was evident that the slope fell off abruptly just past the tree line, but through all the green thickets Eric couldn’t see what lay beyond. He was trying to fit the place in with what he’d seen in his visions but so far could not.

They walked for about five minutes before the trail forked and Kellen, after a moment’s hesitation, went to the right, where the trail seemed to wind downward. They left the ridge and walked down into a sunken valley that was filled with waist-high grasses and reeds.

“Looks like this floods sometimes,” Eric said.

“When the gulf gets high enough.”

They followed the trail as it wrapped through the bottoms. Down here between the heavily wooded ridges any sun would have been screened, and on a morning like this there was a shadow-shrouded dark that felt almost like twilight, the day coming to a close instead of a start. At length the trail opened out of the weeds and thickets and they were standing at the top of a sandy, tree-lined slope facing a pool of water that was bordered on the far edge by a jagged stone cliff rising a good eighty or ninety feet above the water. The pool was of a shade Eric had never seen before—a bizarre aquamarine blend of deep green with streaks of blue, water that seemed to belong in a jungle river somewhere. There was a roiling spot in the far corner where water met rock, and out beyond that the pool seemed to swirl. All around them the sound of rushing water could be heard, but nothing flowed from the pool.

“Damn,” Eric said. “This place is crazy.”

“Yeah,” Kellen said. He’d come to a stop and was staring down at the water, entranced. “Water must be rising. It starts to swirl like that if it’s rising after a strong rain. Way it came down yesterday was enough, I guess.”

Long white limbs of fallen trees slid in and out of the water in places, and on the low ends of the surrounding slope other trees lay on their sides, uprooted but snagged before they’d tumbled all the way into the pool.

“They have some sort of windstorm go through here?” Eric said.

Kellen shook his head. “That’s from the water. It rises high enough to reach the trees, and then when it gets to swirling the force is strong enough to bring them down.”

Some of the downed trees were a good twenty feet above the current waterline.

“See that ridge?” Kellen said, pointing at the woods to the west of them. “That’s where they found Shadrach’s body.”

They’d begun walking again, circling toward the opposite end of the pool, where the best access seemed to be, and Eric pointed at his feet.

“It’s been up here before. That’s sand that got pushed up.”

He was right. The soil here was soft silt, clearly carried high above the waterline during some flood or another. They walked through it and then began to work their way down, using trees for handholds and turning their feet sideways to avoid slipping. As they got closer to the bottom, Eric looked up at the cliffs and saw the root systems of the trees dangling off the stone face like Spanish moss. The wind scattered leaves that fell around them in a whispering rush.

“If there isn’t a ghost down here,” Kellen said, “there should be.”

He laughed, but Eric was thinking that he was right. There was something strange about this place that went beyond the visual, an eerie vibe that seemed to rise from the water and meet the wind. That charge Kellen’s great-grandfather and Anne McKinney had agreed about.

“You can hear the water moving underground,” Eric said. “It’s flowing right under us.”

There was a steep, muddy slope between them and the water and no good way to get down to it. Beyond, the cliffs rose with jagged pieces of stone scattered in loose piles and dark crevasses looming, testaments to the cave that had collapsed here. Some of its passages clearly lived on.

Kellen came to a stop about ten feet above the waterline, but Eric kept going, attempting a careful climb that turned into a barely controlled slide, his shoes plowing through thick, slippery mud that coated the hill above the water. In the far corner the pool bubbled and churned.

“Is that a spring?” Eric called over his shoulder.

“I believe so. But it’s a well-known spring. My guess is the one we’re looking for is not, right?”

“I’m sure it’s not,” Eric said, but he picked his way over the slippery stones and down to the spring. Just as he neared it, some water shot forward, splattering off the rock and soaking his pants. He knelt and extended a hand and took a palmful of water and lifted it to his lips. Cool and muddy and with a whisper of sulfur. On the top of the ridge—which suddenly seemed a long way up—the wind gusted and sent a shower of leaves into a gentle downward spiral, scattering across the surface of the slowly spinning pool.

“So, uh, what am I supposed to do?” Kellen said. He was still standing on the hill above Eric. “You need me to leave, or say some sort of ghost chant, or…”

“No,” Eric said, his voice barely loud enough to carry. “You don’t need to do anything. This isn’t the right spring.”

“You know that?” Kellen said.

No, he didn’t. He assumed the water in the right spring would taste the way the Bradford bottle had, though, with that faint trace of honey. And Kellen was right—Granger’s spring wouldn’t have been well known. Still, there was something about this place that had power. As if they had the wrong spring, but not the wrong spot.

This is where Shadrach died. You’re close.

“So we keep looking?” Kellen said.

Eric gave a distracted nod, staring into the pool. A river coming from rock. Carrying along underground for miles, then surfacing abruptly in a strange whirlpool, then vanishing again. The Lost River. It would show you what it wanted to, and nothing more. A tease, a torment. Here I am; here I am not. The rest is up to you. Got to dig, friend, got to look deeper, got to see the parts I’ve hidden away because they are all that really matter, and in that way I am damn near human, don’t you think?

“If we climb back up and go into the woods, maybe you’ll get an idea or something,” Kellen said. “I’ve never heard of another spring near here, but there are dry channels—places the Lost River fills only during flood seasons. Some of the springs are dependent on high groundwater, I know.”

“If we can find the site of the old cabin, maybe we can work back from that,” Eric said.

“Think you’ll recognize it?”

Eric nodded. He was trying to imagine the cabin as he’d seen it in his mind, to picture it coming into view from behind the wheel of an old roadster with large domed headlights, but his mind wouldn’t cooperate, wouldn’t let him get into the image. His headache was a constant cackling menace, and he was sitting with his hands pressed against his legs to still the shaking. His left eyelid was doing that damned twitch again, as if it were trying to blink out a grain of dust, and his mouth was dry and chalky.

The spring beneath him churned into life again, spitting more water out as if angry about it, and Eric lifted his head and looked out to the deep portion of the pool, watched that gentle swirl and felt his eyes come unfocused. His hands began to shake violently then, and this time Kellen noticed.

“Hey, man, you all right?”

“Yeah.” Eric straightened abruptly, feeling a swift sense of dizziness overtake him and then pass. “Just getting a little… edgy.”

Kellen took a few steps farther down the hill, frowning. “Maybe we shouldn’t have you out in the woods right now. Anything happens—you have another one of those seizures or something—it’ll be a bad place for it.”

“I’m fine. Let’s find this thing before the storm hits.”

Back up the hill and away from the cliff, back in the direction from which they’d come. Just before they entered the trees again, Eric took one long look back at the gulf, blinked hard, and stared. He could’ve sworn the water was higher already.

51

TIME AND PLACE PLAYED tricks on Josiah’s mind, as they had a few times up at the timber camp. He’d been staring out at the incoming storm clouds for a long time before the light changed enough that he caught a glimpse of his own shadow in the window and saw that there was a figure behind him. He whirled and found himself facing old Anne McKinney. Of course that’s who it was. But for a moment there, he’d lost any memory of where he was or who he was with. For a moment there, he could’ve sworn he heard music, some sort of old-time strings number. He’d been sitting at a bar with a whiskey glass in his hand, laughing with some fat son of a bitch in a tuxedo, explaining that the economic shifts weren’t going to bring a thing to this country that couldn’t be solved with a bit of ambition…

A dream. But he’d been on his feet. He’d fallen asleep on his damn feet? What in the hell was going on? He was here to wait for Eric Shaw. Shaw would be coming for the water eventually, and when he did, Josiah would have him, and then the woman, and then he’d have answers. That’s what he needed to focus on. He was here to get answers. Why was that so hard to remember?

He shook his head, blinked, then mustered a glare and held it on Anne McKinney for a few seconds, enough to show her that he was still in control. It wouldn’t do to let his mind drift like that again, not with so many decisions to be made.

He turned back from Anne, thinking he’d steal another glance at that crazy damn cloud, but this time when he looked at the window, what he saw froze him.

Campbell was sitting where Anne McKinney had just been. He was staring dead on into the window, his face reflected clear as a bell, his dark eyes shimmering like the rain that splattered the glass.

You was told to listen, Josiah, he said. Said you wanted to go home and take what was yours, and when a ride was offered in exchange for a piece of work, you agreed to it. But you failed to listen, boy. Needs to be a day of reckoning come upon this valley. It was mine once, should’ve been yours, and they took it from us. Took it from me, took it from you. You going to let that stand, boy? Are you going to let that stand?

Josiah didn’t answer. He just stared into the glass, into Campbell’s reflected eyes.

I could’ve chose anyone for this task, Campbell said. Could’ve chose Eric Shaw, or his black friend, or Danny Hastings. You question my strength, boy, question the power of my influence? That’s foolish. It didn’t have to be you. But you were here, my own blood, and that meant something to me. Doesn’t mean a damn thing to you, though.

“It does,” Josiah said. “It does.”

Then listen, damn it. Do what needs to be done.

Josiah turned to him then, anxious to say that he was more than willing to do what needed to be done, that he was just having some trouble understanding what in the hell it was exactly. When he turned, though, Campbell was gone, the old woman there in his place, looking at Josiah with fearful eyes.

He looked back at the window. Campbell was there again, but he was silent.

“I’ll do your work,” Josiah said. “I’ll do it. Just show me what needs done.”

Anne’s fear had grown as the morning went on and Josiah Bradford’s ravings turned stronger and stranger. Those muttered conversations had become something else, and now she could tell that Josiah was no longer imagining an exchange with someone, he was seeing someone, speaking directly to him as if he were in the room with him. Wasn’t a soul in sight but Anne, and he sure wasn’t talking to her.

When he got to the last bit and said I’ll do your work in a voice that seemed untethered to his person, she squeezed her hands tightly together and looked away from him. He’d whirled on her once and she’d been afraid he might do something, but then he’d just turned back to the window and carried on with his conversation.

She wouldn’t watch him anymore. Better to pretend she wasn’t seeing or hearing any of this, better to pretend she wasn’t even in the room.

He took to pacing again, in and out of the room, and each time he came back, he’d look from her to the window, do it suspiciously, as if trying to catch her at something he thought he saw her doing in the reflection. Then he went all the way into the kitchen and began to rattle around, and when he stepped back into the living room, she stole a glance and felt her heart seize.

There was a knife in his hand now. One of her kitchen knives, with a five-inch blade, plenty sharp. She pulled back, fearing harm, but he just carried on past her like she wasn’t there and returned to the window.

Don’t look at him, she thought, don’t make eye contact. He’s as close to a rabid dog as anything now, and worst thing you can do with a dog like that is make eye contact.

So she kept her head turned and tried not to make a sound that would attract his attention, tried not to so much as breathe too loud.

She didn’t look at him again until she heard the squeaking noise. Even then she hesitated, but it kept up, sounding like he was polishing something with a damp cloth, and finally she turned to see what it was.

He was drawing on the window with his own blood.

The knife was on the end table beside him, and she could see that he’d cut his right index finger to draw blood and had then begun to smear it around the glass. His face was screwed into an intense frown, not from pain but from concentration, and he was moving his finger carefully, tilting his head from side to side occasionally to change the angle. It looked as if he was tracing something. Once he looked over his shoulder and then swore at himself and paused for a long time before beginning again, as if he’d ruined his image. She couldn’t see what he was drawing at first, but then he stepped to the side and leaned over and she got a glimpse.

It was the outline of a man. The head and shoulders of a man, at least, etched in blood over her window. The man was wearing a hat, and Josiah Bradford appeared to have spent most of his time on the hat—and the eyes. The outline of the face and shoulders looked like a child’s scribbling, but the hat and eyes were clear. He’d drawn a nice, smooth almond shape for the eyes and now, as she watched, he took his finger off the glass and stood there squeezing it to raise more blood. He was patient, waiting for a full, thick bead of it. When he was satisfied, he reached out with infinite care and touched his fingertip to the center of the eye, filled it in with blood.

He repeated the act for the second eye. Anne could hardly draw a breath, watching him.

When he had the second eye filled in with blood, he stepped back like a painter studying his canvas, cocked his head, and looked judiciously at the window.

“You see him now?” he said.

Anne didn’t speak, keeping that vow of silence she’d made for her own safety. He turned on her then, though, looked right at her with a hard stare and said, “Do you see him now?” and she knew that she had to answer.

“Yes,” she said. “I can see him.”

He nodded, pleased, and then turned back to the window, sidestepping so that he was out of the way of the blood drawing. Anne sat trembling on the couch and stared at the liquid crimson eyes and, beyond them, the storm.

They found what appeared to be an old road about a half mile from the gulf, overgrown with weeds but absent of trees, maybe eight feet across. In the distance, off to the east and west, farm buildings were visible, but then the old track curved away from the fields and roped back into the trees. There was an old barbed-wire fence lining the edge of the field, and from that point they could see for miles in three directions. Every direction except the one they were facing, southeast, into the trees.

Eric tried to pick his way through the barbed wire, promptly got snagged and tore his shirt, then felt an idiot’s flush of shame when he turned and watched Kellen step easily off the top of a stump and over the fence. Oh, well, he probably would’ve just jumped over it if the stump hadn’t been there. Guy that size wasn’t going under it.

On the other side of the fence the old track became even more overgrown, harder to follow, and it climbed gently but steadily. One of those hills that didn’t feel like so much until you were a ways up it and began to feel a tight burning in your calves. After about ten minutes the slope fell off abruptly and they went downhill for a bit and then came to a rounded ditch packed with old leaves, slabs of limestone protruding here and there. Water flowed through it, no more than a foot deep but moving swiftly.

“One of the dry channels?” Eric said.

“I’d say so.”

They slid down into the ditch and used one of the limestone pieces to cross the water, then got back to climbing. It was about five minutes before the ground flattened out and it was clear they’d reached the top. By now Eric was breathing hard—Kellen didn’t seem to be breathing at all—and if not for the sudden absence of slope, it wouldn’t have felt like much of an arrival. Everything up here looked pretty much the same as the hill had—thick with trees, tangled with brush and weeds, dark with shadows. Insects buzzed around them, and a pair of crows shrieked in discontent. The humidity seemed twice as high as when they’d started, and Eric lifted his shirt and used it to dry sweat from his face. When he lowered the shirt, he felt an odd tingle, like a ping of static electricity. The crows shrieked again and he winced at the sound.

“I feel like we’re just wandering now,” Kellen said. “We’ve got no idea where we should be looking.”

“I know it,” Eric said. A gust of wind blew up, and a thin branch from one of the young trees whipped into his face. When he lifted his arm to ward it off, his hand passed through a spider web, which stuck to him with wispy, sticky threads. He swore and wiped his hand off on his jeans and continued on as Kellen fell in behind him. They’d gone no more than twenty feet before Kellen’s phone began to ring. Eric didn’t turn at first, but when Kellen began to speak, his voice was low and serious in a way that brought Eric to a stop. When he looked back, he saw Kellen’s face knotted in an expression of disbelief.

“You’re sure?” he was saying, voice hushed. He was turned sideways, as if trying to retreat from Eric, attain privacy. “Thanks. Yeah, I know. Crazy. All right, baby. I’ll talk to you…. Look, yeah, I got to go. I’ll talk to you soon. Thank you. Okay? Thank you.”

He disconnected and slid the phone into his pocket, a thoughtful look on his face.

“Your girlfriend?” Eric said.

“Yeah.” He was looking at Eric with a frown of scrutiny.

“Why are you looking at me like I’m a test subject?”

“Danielle just got results on your water.”

“Really.” Eric’s eyelid twitched and fluttered again. “Were we right? Is there something in it besides the mineral water?”

Kellen nodded.

“Alcohol?” Eric asked. “Some sort of whiskey?”

Now Kellen shook his head. “Not even a trace of alcohol. It was, according to Danielle, a mixture of mineral water and blood.”

“Blood.”

“Yeah.”

“Just… blood. She has no idea where it might—?”

“Human blood,” Kellen said. “Type A human blood.”

Eric thought of the bottle, and his senses seemed to slam him right back into contact with it—he had a flash of the cold touch in his palm, the honey-tinged odor, the sickening-sweet taste…

“I feel like I should get sick,” he said.

“Brother,” Kellen said, “you already are. And there isn’t a doctor alive that’s going to know how to treat it, either.”

“What about the other bottle? Anne’s bottle.”

“Typical mineral content. Nothing special at all.”

“Not that shows up in a lab test, at least,” Eric said.

A few drops of rain fell around them as they stood and looked at each other.

“Wonder whose blood it was,” Eric said.

“Yeah,” Kellen said. “I’m a bit curious about that myself.”

52

JOSIAH WAS STANDING WITH his nose almost to the glass, staring out at the storm like a child. When he stepped back and looked at it from the right angle he could still see Campbell sitting there watching him, his face perfectly aligned with the silhouette Josiah had drawn in his blood. Campbell hadn’t spoken in some time, but Josiah hoped he’d been pleased by the gesture, the only thing Josiah had been able to think of that would show his loyalty, show that he would indeed listen, would indeed do the necessary work. He’d brought Campbell into this world, at least to the point that the old woman could see him, and he’d done it with his own blood. Surely Campbell saw that as indicative of respect. Of loyalty.

Now he couldn’t see Campbell, though, because he’d stepped too close to the glass. Couldn’t help himself—the storm was doing something strange. There was a massive cloud taking shape ahead of them now, shaped almost exactly like an anvil. It advanced slowly but steadily and seemed to carry both threat and calm at the same time. Like you could flip a coin and if it came up heads, the cloud would pass on by, or maybe offer a gentle shower. Came up tails, though, and God help you. God help you.

“You see the bubble?”

He twisted and stared back at the old woman, baffled both that she’d spoken at all and by what she’d said.

“Top of that big cloud,” she said, nodding, “the one you’re looking at that’s shaped like an anvil? It’s all flat across the top except for one part. You see it there? Looks like a little bubble up on top?”

He didn’t know why he would bother with this talk, but he couldn’t help himself. He said, “Yeah, I see it.”

“That’s called an overshooting top.”

Great, he wanted to say, now pardon me, but I don’t give two shits, old woman, but no words left his lips. He was staring at the cloud and thinking she was wrong. That aberration across the top of the anvil didn’t look like a bubble. It looked like a dome.

“What’s it mean?” he said.

“Will take a few minutes for me to know. But it’ll be the part that tells the tale. You see how the rest of that cloud is all hard-edged? Could be some serious weather in there. But that bubble just formed. If it goes away soon, this one’s no real bother. If it stays on for more than ten minutes, then we could have a gully-washer headed our way.”

“How many minutes has it been?”

“Six,” she said. “Six so far.”

Anne wished Josiah would stand back from the window, stop blocking her view. This thing rolling in was on the verge of being something special, something dangerous, and she needed to see it clearly. Instead he just stood there with his face to the window as the minutes ticked by and the storm front advanced.

She leaned to the left and looked around him, studying the cloud and trying to remember all of the signs she needed to remember. The bubble on top of the anvil formation was holding steady. That meant the updraft was strong. The storm was being fed. The body of the cloud had a soft cauliflower appearance but its edges were firm and distinct and that meant…

A shrill ringing broke the silence that had grown in the house, and Josiah gave a startled jerk before reaching into his pocket and retrieving a cell phone.

“Yeah, I’m here,” he said. “Speak loud, boy. Where in hell you been? You didn’t lose them, did you?”

Josiah bristled at the response, and when he said, “They looking ’round my property?” his voice was softer than it had been and drove a chill through Anne. She willed herself to try and ignore the words, focus on the storm again.

Josiah shifted away from his spot at the window then, and when he did, Anne saw what she’d been missing, knew that the cloud edges were no longer important. Josiah’s body had blocked the development of a new feature from her eyes. A lower formation, trailing beneath that bubble, long tapering wisps like an old man’s beard. It was called a—

“What do they think they’re doing?” Josiah hissed. “What are they doing in those woods?”

—wall cloud, and it was pulling in the rain-cooled surface air, sucking in that moisture and feeding it to the updraft. The tips were spinning, as if unseen hands were twisting the end of the beard. Behind the wall cloud—

“You got a knife on you? Then go back down there and put an end to that Porsche’s tires, Danny. All of them. Then you sit tight. I’m headed your way.”

—amidst all that purple and gray was a slot of bright white. Downdraft. It slid out of the dark clouds and dropped toward the earth, cutting right through the blood silhouette Josiah Bradford had drawn on her window. The white light seemed to turn those dark red eyes into a shimmering black.

Josiah Bradford disconnected the phone and lowered it slowly, put it back in his pocket. He’d just removed his hand again when the air split into a wailing all around them. At the sound, he lunged for his gun.

“Don’t need that,” Anne said. “It’s not the police. It’s the tornado siren.”

Part Five

THE GULF

53

ERIC STOOD IN SILENCE and stared back at Kellen as the wind bent the treetops and tore leaves loose and spun them into the air.

“If your experience has more to do with the blood and less with the water,” Kellen said, “maybe we’re wasting our time up here.”

He didn’t answer. Kellen said, “Maybe finding that spring isn’t worth anything, is what I’m saying. If there’s nothing about the water itself—”

“There’s something special about the water,” Eric said. “I think it was the balance to his blood. The counter.”

A steady rain was falling now, and he wiped the moisture off his forehead and turned away from Kellen, looked into the windswept trees. His head throbbed and his hands shook. The agony was approaching again, the fruit of poisoned water, of a dead man’s wrath, and he had nothing left to fight it with. The hell of it was that the sorrowful sense of defeat had little to do with fear of what was coming. No, it was the understanding of what would not be coming: a continuation of the story, an eerie insight into that hidden world, and the glory it could have brought him. He could see the foolishness of his idea now. All thoughts of the fame that would surround his strange gifts were bullshit; he’d have been a fifteen-minute tabloid freak show, a washed-up almost-was who drank a bottle of old blood and fancied himself a psychic.

“A counter?” Kellen said.

Eric nodded. “Everything changed with Anne’s water, with the water that didn’t have blood in it. The story it was showing me was a warning.”

“Of what?”

“Of what I did,” Eric said. “I brought him back.”

Campbell Bradford. His spirit, his ghost, his evil—pick your term, Eric Shaw had returned it to the valley, and the water allowed him to see that, caught his body with agonized cravings and forced him to drink more so it could force him to see more. He hadn’t understood in time, though. Somewhere along the line he’d lost all sense of purpose entirely, had begun to fantasize about what the water could do for him, to think of it as a gift instead of what it really was: a warning.

“Now they’ve stopped,” Kellen said. “Right? The visions are done.”

“Yeah. They’ve stopped.” Eric was thinking of the blood in the bottle and the way Campbell Bradford had looked right at him last night and said, I’m getting stronger.

There was a reason the visions had stopped. The past was not where it belonged anymore. The past was here.

Josiah needed that siren to stop. Damn thing was chewing into his brain, disrupting his focus, which needed to be on Danny’s message.

Wesley Chapel Gulf. That’s where Shaw was right now. In the sacred spot of Josiah’s boyhood. It made not a lick of sense but still felt as purely right as anything he’d ever heard. Of course that’s where they’d gone. Of course. There’d been something at work here for a while, something he couldn’t get his head around, and now he understood that it was time to stop trying. Let the chips fall. Stop trying to figure out the house rules—there were none, at least not any he’d ever understand. Wasn’t his place to lay plans now, was his place to listen to those that had been laid for him.

All you got to do is listen…

Yes, that was all. He was told that hours ago and still he’d been fighting it, making his own plans, trusting himself. Just listen, that was all he needed to do. He had a guide now, a hand in the darkness, and he wanted to listen but that frigging siren kept shrieking and screaming…

“Shut up!” he howled, tightening his hand on the gun as if he could put a few shells into the air and silence it all, silence the whole damn world.

“Won’t stop till the cloud passes over,” Anne McKinney said. “There’s rotation in that cloud. Could touch down.”

“A tornado?” he said. “A tornado’s coming here?”

“Won’t be here. Going to be well over our heads if it touches down. But it may hit the towns. It may hit the hotels.”

She said this as if it were the very definition of horror.

Josiah said, “I hope the son of a bitch does. I hope it spins right into the damned dome and leaves nothing but a pile of glass and stone behind.”

The idea thrilled him, drew him to the window. He looked off to the east as if he might actually be able to see the place.

I ought to be the one to take it down, he thought. No damn storm—me.

“You don’t think I could do it, do you?” he said. “Well, I got a truck full of dynamite parked out back would do the job. Bet your ass it’d do the job.”

Anne didn’t answer, and he blinked and shook his head and tried to get his mind back to the task before him. He had to force his mind back to that fact time and time again, like a man trying to cross the deck of a ship that was forever tilting him in one direction and then another. Never mind this pissing contest with some old bitch, he had to get moving. That required a decision on what to do with her, though. He stared at her and pondered as the window glass rattled in its frame beside him. Best tie her up. Problem with that was she was in front of the big window, visible to anyone who stopped by. There was a basement in the house. With no phone to use, she could holler her lungs out down there and never be heard. Tie her up and stick her ass down there.

He crossed the living room and pulled open one door, found it went to a bathroom, then tried a second and saw the steep wooden steps leading down into the dark, smelled the moisture. Yes, that would do fine. He’d get her to walk down there before he bound her, make things easier to handle.

He was just about to tell her to stand up when he heard a car door slam.

He crossed to the window fast, stared out into the rain, and saw the car that had pulled in. Not police, but a Toyota sedan, unfamiliar to him. The driver’s door opened and a tall, dark-haired woman stepped out, holding her arms up to shield herself from the rain. She ran out of sight, headed for the porch. For the front door.

“Who’s here?” Anne McKinney said.

“Not a word, bitch,” Josiah said. “Not a word. You speak, our visitor gets shot. It’ll be your choice.” Then he lifted the shotgun and walked out of the living room and down to the front door. He hadn’t even made it there before the doorbell rang. He pulled the door open, keeping the gun in his left hand and using the door to screen it from sight.

The woman didn’t give any real start or indication that she was expecting someone other than Josiah. She just said, “I hope I have the right address. I’m looking for Anne McKinney?”

She was even better-looking up close, the sort of woman Josiah wouldn’t be able to hit on until he was at least ten beers into the night because the odds were so great she’d shoot him down, and Josiah didn’t take rejection well. Raven-colored hair with some shine to it, damn near flawless face, body that would catch plenty of looks despite being a little on the skinny side. While Josiah studied her, she turned and looked over her shoulder at the howling storm and said, “Is that a tornado siren?”

“Yes,” Josiah said. “And you best come inside quick.”

“You don’t think I can make it back to the hotel if I hurry? I just stopped by to pick up a few bottles of water from Anne.”

A few bottles of water. He hadn’t been certain of her relevance until now, but this brought a smile to his face that was no longer forced, as authentic and genuine a grin as he’d had in some time, and he said, “Oh, you’re picking them up for Mr. Shaw?”

“That’s right.”

“I’ll get them for you, but come inside and visit with Mrs. McKinney until the siren stops. It’s the only safe thing to do. I insist.”

She took one last, hesitant look back at her car, and right then a good-size branch pulled down from one of the trees in the yard and broke into pieces on the ground. She turned away, said, “I guess I’d better,” and then stepped inside.

He had the door closed before she noticed the gun.

54

ANNE COULDN’T SEE THE front door from where she sat, and the wind and siren kept her from making out the words, but the sound of the unknown woman’s voice, gentle and kind, put a sickness through her so powerful she moved her hands to her stomach. It was a feeling she’d had only a time or two in her life, the last coming when they swung the ambulance doors shut with Harold inside and assured her that it wasn’t over yet, even though everybody knew that it was.

A minute later the stranger was standing there in the living room, a beautiful dark-haired woman with panicked eyes. Anne tried to meet those eyes and convey some sort of apology, but Josiah was shoving her over to the chair by the window and telling her there were two barrels to his gun, plenty to go around.

He had her sit in the old straight-backed sewing chair that Anne had upholstered herself some years back, then grabbed the duct tape he’d carried in originally and cut off a strip. She started to resist but he lifted the shotgun and pointed it at Anne and said, “You fight, that old bitch gets shot. Go on and test me. Go on.”

The woman gave Anne a long look, one that lifted tears to Anne’s eyes, and then she let Josiah tape her wrists together. Anne just stared back helplessly. The panic she’d done such a fine job of fighting when she’d been alone with Josiah was coming on strong, and she could feel it in her heart and stomach and nerves, everything going fast and jangly now, the way the wind chimes blew in a strong storm.

“Old Lucas will be answering phone calls now,” Josiah was saying as he cut off more tape and wrapped it in circles around her forearms, pinning them together. “Yes, he’ll take caution in his tone this time around.”

Lucas? Who on earth was Lucas? “I don’t know Lucas,” the new woman said.

“Bullshit! You’re his whore of a wife, sent people down here to spy on my home and ask questions of my family—”

“That’s not who I am.”

He struck her. It was an open-handed slap that raised a white imprint on her check but no blood, and the sound of flesh on flesh took Anne’s breath from her lungs and sent the tears spilling free. Not in my home, she thought. Oh, no, not in my home…

“There won’t be any more lies!” Josiah bellowed. Anne was mentally begging the other woman for silence—Josiah had been peaceable enough when he was agreed with—but instead she ignored the slap and objected again.

“I’m not who you think I—”

There was a second slap, and Anne gave a little shout, but the new woman was not moved to silence.

“I’m Eric’s wife—Eric Shaw’s. That’s who I am! I don’t know anything about Lucas Bradford. Neither does he. We’re both just trying to—”

This time he passed on the slap, choosing instead to take the woman’s hair in his fist and jerk it sideways. She gave a cry of pain and then the chair had overbalanced and she was on her side on the floor, still talking.

“We’re just trying to get away from here while the police figure out what’s going on. I don’t know Lucas Bradford! Do you understand that? I don’t know him and he doesn’t know me. He doesn’t care about me. I’m nothing to him.”

Josiah dipped sideways and came up with Anne’s kitchen knife in his hand, snatched it from her end table and held it at waist level with the blade pointed out.

“Josiah, no!” Anne shouted. “Not in my home, don’t you harm anyone in my home.”

He froze. She was taken aback, hadn’t expected any reaction, but he stopped his assault completely and swiveled his head to face her.

“I’ll ask you not to use that name any longer,” he said. “If you’d like my attention, you can call for Campbell. Understand?”

Anne didn’t know what to say. She just stared at him with her mouth agape, and he turned from her, dropped to one knee, and took a handful of the woman’s hair again and used it to lift her head, moved the blade toward her throat, and Anne could look no more, squeezed her eyes shut as warm tears beaded over the lids and chased wrinkles down her cheeks.

“Look in my purse,” the woman on the floor said in a ragged voice. “If you’re going to kill me, you ought to at least know who I am.”

For a long moment Anne didn’t hear a sound, and she was fleetingly afraid that he’d made a silent slice with the knife, leaving the poor woman bleeding her life out on Anne’s living room floor. Then she heard the boards creak as he rose and opened her eyes to see him crossing the floor to where a leather purse lay on its side, a lipstick and cell phone dumped out of it already. Josiah grabbed it and turned it upside down and a cloud of papers, coins, and cosmetics fluttered out and clattered onto the floor. In the center, landing with a dull, heavy thump, was a wallet. Josiah flung the purse at the wall and scooped the wallet up, tore the clasp open and flicked through it. For a long time, he stood staring in silence. Then he snapped the wallet shut and stared at the woman in the overturned chair.

“Claire Shaw,” he said.

“I told you.”

He seemed almost calm as he gazed at her, but somehow Anne was more afraid now than ever.

“You’re his wife,” he said. “Eric Shaw’s wife.”

“Yes. And we don’t know Lucas Bradford. We have nothing to do with the Bradfords. If you want money, I can get you money, but you have to believe that we have nothing to do with the Bradfords!”

“I can get you money,” she said again. “My family… my father… I can get…”

Her voice trailed off as he walked back to her. He still had the knife in his hand but now he knelt and picked up the roll of duct tape, pulled out a short strip and cut it free with the knife. She was trying to say more when he bent at the waist and smashed the tape roughly over her mouth, running his fist over it to make sure it was secure.

“Don’t hurt her,” Anne said softly. “Josiah, please, there’s no cause to hurt anybody. You heard what she said, they have no idea—”

“What?” he said. “What did you just say?”

It took her a second to realize he was upset about the use of his name. He actually wanted to be referred to as Campbell. He was standing there in front of the bloody drawing he’d left on her window, asking to be identified as a dead man. She’d never heard of anything so mad.

“Don’t hurt her,” she said in a whisper. “Campbell? Please don’t hurt her.”

He grinned. Showed his teeth in a wide smile, as if the use of Campbell’s name was something delicious to him, and Anne felt a bead of chilled sweat glide down her spine.

He turned from her, still smiling, to stare out the window. A moment later Anne realized he wasn’t staring out of it but at it, at the blood silhouette he’d drawn there that had now gone dry on the glass.

“Well,” he said, “what now? You told me to listen. I’ve tried. And this bitch isn’t worth a thing to me. Not a thing. I’m standing here holding a handful of nothing, same as I always was. But I’m ready to listen. I’m trying to listen.”

The wind rattled the glass against the old wood frame as he stood there and stared at it, stared as if there were something in it that could offer help. Down on the floor, Claire Shaw was silent, watching in obvious astonishment and horror.

“You’re right,” Josiah told the window. “You’re right. ’Course she’s not worth anything to me—none of them ever was. That isn’t what it’s about. I don’t need the dollars. I need the blood.”

Anne’s mouth had gone chalky and her heart was fluttering again.

“I’ll deal with them first,” Josiah said, voice softer now, thoughtful, musing. “Finish what needs to be finished, and then I’ll come back to that hotel. They’ll remember me when it’s done, won’t they? They’ll remember us when it’s done.”

He swiveled his head back and locked his gaze on Anne.

“Get up.”

“What? I don’t—”

“Get up and go down into the basement. Now.”

“Don’t hurt her,” Anne said. “Don’t you hurt that woman in my home.”

Josiah dropped the knife to the floor, stepped over it, and collected his shotgun. Lifted that and swung the barrel to face Anne.

“Go down into the damn basement. I ain’t got time to waste tying your wrinkled old ass up.”

It was only then, the second time that he said it, that she realized exactly what was being offered—the shortwave, the dear old R. L. Drake. A lifeline.

She stood up, legs unsteady after sitting for so long, and, with one hand braced on the wall, went to the basement door and opened it and started down the steps. There was a light switch mounted just beside the door but she didn’t reach for it, preferring to walk down into the dark rather than chance his seeing the old desk with the radio.

He didn’t even wait till she’d reached the bottom of the steps before slamming the door shut. That plunged her into real darkness, and she stopped and gripped the railing. She heard some banging around and then something smashed into the door and the knob rattled. He was blocking the door, locking her in.

She slid her hand along the railing and took a careful step down into the blackness, then another. A splinter bit into her palm and she gasped and stopped. Upstairs Josiah was saying something she couldn’t understand, and then she heard footsteps, too many to be just him. The front door opened and then banged shut. She stood still and listened and when she heard the motor of his truck start, she thought, Oh, no.

They were on the move. He was leaving, and he was taking that woman with him.

Anne had to hurry now.

She took another step, down into the dark.

55

KELLEN AND ERIC WERE still standing in the same spot in the woods when they saw the cloud. The rain was coming down in furious gales and the wind was howling now, sounded like something alive, like something wounded and angry, and it was Kellen who pointed up at a bank of purple clouds that seemed to be separating and joining and separating again, partners in some strange turbulent dance.

“I don’t like that,” he said. “We got to get out of here, man.”

“I need to find that spring,” Eric said, feeling numb as he watched the clouds. “I’m going to need that water, Kellen. It might be the only thing that will work.”

“Then we’re going to have to come back for it,” Kellen said. “We’ve got to leave now.”

Eric stared at the clouds but didn’t move or speak.

“Come on,” Kellen said, and when he pulled Eric away by the arm, it was with the ease of a grown man moving a child. Only when he realized Eric was finally cooperating and running alongside him did he loosen his grip.

“Gonna be slick!” he shouted in Eric’s ear. “Watch your ass. We run fast enough, we’ll be back at the car in a few minutes.”

They ran down the hill and found the dry channel and splashed through it. It was a dry channel no longer—the slab they had used to cross was a foot underwater now. The Lost River filling it from beneath even as the rain attempted to do the same from above.

Eric’s legs didn’t feel steady, seemed to be operating more out of momentum than muscle control, but he kept up with Kellen as best he could and kept moving. Finally the edge of the tree line was in sight, and from there it was maybe a half mile through a field of short scrub pine to get back to the car.

They broke out of the trees into a roar of wind and ran right up to the barbed-wire fence. Eric was ducking to his hands and knees again, thinking, the hell with looking graceful, he just wanted to be on the other side, when Kellen reached down and grabbed the back of his shirt and spoke in a hiss of awe.

“Look at that. Look at it.”

Eric straightened and followed his stare and felt his own breath catch.

From here they had a view out across open fields, and to the west, a ways off but not so far as to feel comfortable about it, a funnel cloud was lowering to the earth. The mass above it was black and purple but the funnel cloud was stark white. It eased to the ground almost peacefully, as if settling down for a rest, and then its color began to change, the white turning gray as it blew through the fields and gathered dirt, sucking soil and debris into its vortex. The air around them vibrated with the distant roar.

“Is it going to come this way?” Eric shouted.

“I think so.”

They stood without speaking for a moment and watched as the cloud churned through the field. The tight funnel shape morphed into something less distinct as it went, circles of debris ringing the base. It crossed the field with apparent leisure. There was a row of power lines just ahead of the road, and when the tornado reached them, the poles lifted from the earth and the lines snapped. When it crossed the road and went into the next field, something lifted it into the air, almost like a bounce. For a moment the base of the cloud seemed to hesitate, as if it might retreat altogether, but then it dropped again and there was another burst of dark gray when it tore back into the land.

“It’s definitely coming this way,” Kellen shouted. “We got to run!”

“We can make the car?”

“Hell, no. Can’t outrun a tornado, man! We got to get down in that gulf. It’s the only place low enough!”

He bent and grabbed the top strand of the rusted barbed wire and lifted, tugged it up and waved at Eric to climb through. Eric scrambled under, then turned to hold the wire for Kellen but saw that he was already across. He really could jump the damn thing.

The gulf was close and it was a downhill run, but the roar around them was getting louder, too. Out of the trees the wind was a stronger force, and Eric realized with a mixture of astonishment and fear that it was actually pushing him off course. They were running in a mad sprint now, and for a moment Eric didn’t even realize that Kellen had hold of his shirt again, was dragging him along. By the time they hit the ridge above the gulf, the horizon line across from them was a wall of black sky.

“Got to get down!” Kellen shouted, and then he put his hand in the middle of Eric’s back and shoved.

The drop-off was sheer and lined with trees, the sort of place you’d walk around carefully on a normal day. Today, Kellen just pushed Eric right out over the top of it and jumped after him.

For a moment Eric was airborne. Then his feet caught the hillside and his momentum sent him into a pinwheel down the slope, branches whipping at him. He was thinking that he’d fall all the way down into the water when he tumbled into the side of a tree. The impact exploded his vision into a burst of white light, but it also stopped him. He gasped and blinked and then he could see where he was—two-thirds of the way down the slope, a good sixty feet from the top of the ridge.

He looked for Kellen and found him fifteen feet farther down, covered in mud and leaves. He was crawling toward the stone cliffs, away from the trees. Trying to get lower. Eric followed, not even bothering to attempt getting to his feet, just sliding on his ass and using his hands and heels to push himself along.

They got most of the way down the slope, about five feet from the waterline, and pushed up against the loose stone wall, where there was an indentation that allowed them to pull back and find greater protection. There was no point in attempting to talk now; the roar had reached a thundering crescendo. It sounded exactly like the train that had blown past Eric on his first day in this place.

They didn’t have to wait long. Thirty seconds, maybe a minute. It felt longer, though, felt like a damn eternity, the way time passed when you were sitting in a hospital watching an ER surgeon approach from down the hall to provide the status of a loved one. Then the storm finally caught them, and the world exploded.

A full-size birch, fifty feet tall at least and with a wide spread of branches, tore out of the earth on top of the ridge and shot into space. It didn’t fall straight down, bound by the laws of gravity, but blew forward before catching on another tree and splashing into the swirling, roiling pool. The water sprayed up and showered them and then another tree was sliding down the cliff face, scattering loose stones in its wake. The woods were crackling with the sound of thick, powerful limbs and trunks snapping in two, and the wind was such that Eric could no longer hold his eyes open against it. He covered his face with his arms and pressed his body back into the indentation Kellen had found in the limestone wall and above them the world screamed in fury.

Then it was gone.

That something so terrible could pass so swiftly seemed impossible. There were still rumblings in the woods as uprooted trees and fallen branches slid down the hillsides and found resting places, but the raging wind was gone and the roar faded at its heels. Eric lowered his arms and stared out at the gulf. The water tossed and spun and in its midst were a half dozen trees now. When he looked up, he could see a line carved through the treetops on the east side of the ridge, as if trimmers had come through and topped them and then had gone on, leaving the limbs behind in careless piles. On level ground, the damage had been devastating. Would have been deadly. But they’d gotten down here into what was essentially a pit, ninety or a hundred feet below the surface, and the tornado had not been able to find them there.

“That would have killed us,” he said. “If we’d been on level ground, that would have killed us.”

Kellen nodded. “Yeah. We might still be airborne. In pieces.”

His voice was as tight as if someone had a hold of his throat, and Eric finally turned and looked at him. Kellen’s face and neck and arms were a mass of tiny cuts, and there was one good-size gash above his left eye that oozed a thick band of blood that ran along his jaw and curled out toward his chin like a sideburn, and Eric knew he couldn’t look any better. Kellen’s face was locked into a grimace, though, and he was rocking back and forth, hands squeezed into fists.

“You okay?” Eric said, and then he followed Kellen’s eyes down his leg to his foot and whispered, “Oh, shit.”

Kellen’s right foot hung unnaturally beneath the leg, twisted almost backward, and there was a distended bulge just above his shoe, pushing at his skin. The ankle was clearly broken. Not just broken, he realized after a closer study—destroyed. The bone had snapped, but clearly some ligaments had torn loose as well to let his foot hang like that.

Kellen’s face had drained to a gray pallor and he kept up that gentle rocking, but he didn’t moan or gasp or shout with pain.

“You’re hurt bad,” Eric said. “We’ve got to get you out of here.”

“Shoe off,” Kellen said through gritted teeth.

“What?”

“Get the shoe off. It’s swelling so fast… I don’t think it should be in the shoe.”

Eric slid down the slick rock and reached for the laces of Kellen’s shoe. When he gave one a gentle tug, it shifted Kellen’s foot. This time he shouted with pain. Eric dropped the shoelace and pulled back, but Kellen shook his head and said, “Get it off.”

So he untied the shoe. He did it as quickly and gently as possible, but Kellen hissed with pain, and when Eric slid the shoe off, he could see the bone move under the skin and felt a cloud of sickness move through him, leaving him dizzy. He dropped the shoe and it slid down the rock and into the water. Kellen didn’t seem to care.

They waited for a moment, Kellen sucking in deep breaths and staring at the treetops. He reached into his pocket and slipped out his cell phone, handed it to Eric.

“See if one of them works?”

Kellen’s didn’t, and wouldn’t—the face was cracked and it was soaked with water, wouldn’t even turn on. Eric’s still functioned but couldn’t find a signal. No surprise down here in the hole, and who knew if it would change once they got to higher ground. The tornado might have taken out a tower or two.

Eric’s left arm was shaking now and the pain buried in his head made it hard to focus, his vision starting to swim. He blinked and stared down at the gulf.

“I think it’s still rising.”

“Coming up fast,” Kellen said without even giving it a look. “We’re going to need to get me over to the other side.”

“No way you’re walking on that,” Eric said, looking at Kellen’s massive frame and wondering if he’d be able to carry him.

“No, but you get me up, and I can hobble.”

It took three tries and some intense pain to get him upright. Then Eric dipped under his arm and tried to drag him along, but Kellen was large and heavy and the going was awkward. Every time they took a step, Kellen gave an unwilling gasp. His right foot just dangled below the ankle. They made it around the rim of the gulf, into the tall grass that grew along the flat bottomland near the trail, and then Kellen told Eric to stop.

“Any chance you can make it to the car?” Eric said.

“Maybe. But I doubt there’s much left of the car.”

Shit, he was probably right. Both of Eric’s hands were shaking again. Behind them the water in the gulf gurgled and boiled around one of the fallen trees.

“You need to get to the road,” Kellen said. “Going to be police and firefighters out checking on the farms. Tell somebody I’m down here.”

He’d lowered himself down into the grass and leaned back on his elbows, grimacing and studying his unresponsive right foot. Eric saw he was digging into the mud with his fingers. The pain had to be brutal.

“That water comes up much higher, it’ll drown you,” he said.

“I can get up higher if I need to. But I’m not making it back to the road.”

“All right,” Eric said. “I’ll get help.”

He went on up the hill alone.

56

JOSIAH FOUND THE STREETS of town damn near deserted, everyone taking heed of that storm siren and seeking shelter. He blew through a red light, not giving a shit because wasn’t anybody out to notice, and then hammered the accelerator when he cleared town, sped past the West Baden hotel without so much as a look. He’d be back for it.

At Anne McKinney’s house Campbell’s instructions had finally clarified, the reality of this whole fucking mess becoming crystal clear: Josiah didn’t need anyone’s money. Didn’t need their explanations either, didn’t need a damn thing from a soul in the whole valley, the whole world.

What he needed was to listen. And now, finally, he was starting to. He heard the goal now, warm as a whisper in the ear. Take this place down, and watch it burn. They’ll know your name when it’s done, better believe that. They’ll know it, and remember it.

Eric Shaw’s wife was in the bed of his truck, bound with tape and wrapped in a tarp and pushed up next to the dynamite. Way that rain was coming down, the bitch was probably a tad uncomfortable. The wind was coming at him strong enough that it was hard to hold the truck in the proper lane, and he thought it was a damn good thing the roads seemed to be deserted. Fact was, this looked like a hell of a storm. He punched on the radio.

… Once again, we have a confirmed tornado touchdown just west of Orleans and there are reports of significant damage. Unconfirmed reports of another touchdown just south of Paoli are coming in. A critical reminder: this is only the leading edge of this storm front, and it’s already produced tornadoes in Missouri and southern Illinois. We have more activity on the way in, and the National Weather Service has declared that the tornado warning will remain in effect for at least another hour, if not more. We’re being advised that there is a strong possibility of multiple tornadoes associated with this front. Please seek shelter immediately.

He punched the power button and shut it back down. Hell with that shit. Storm would be the last thing anyone spoke of by evening.

The fastest way out to the gulf was to take US 50, but he’d barely gotten on the highway before he heard police sirens. He turned off onto one of the back roads just as a pair of cruisers shot by with lights going, doing at least eighty. Out on some sort of storm-related call, surely, not looking for his truck, but it was better to avoid the risks when you had a kidnapped woman and a stack of dynamite under tarps in the bed.

This detour north was pulling him far from the hotel, but he knew it was necessary, felt that in his bones. Eric Shaw was a part of this, had been from the start and needed to be at the finish. Campbell had placed the man’s wife in Josiah’s hands just as he had the dynamite, and both would have their role by the day’s end. The course was already charted, and now it was merely a matter of listening to the directions as they were issued.

The route change that was forced by the police sighting would have him approaching the gulf from the south now, which would take him right past his own home. He opened the truck up again, curving along through Pipher Hollow. The storm seemed to have died off a bit now, at least here. Out to the northeast the sky still looked fierce, but here things were settling.

He was on his own road and a half mile from his house when he started to see the damage. The first thing that caught his eye was a great gray gouge ripped through the earth in the fields ahead of him, and then he saw downed power lines sparking on the side of the road and a steel farm gate that had been torn loose and bent as easily as if it had been made out of aluminum foil.

He let off the gas and stared around himself as the truck coasted. The row of trees that had grown here was gone, obliterated, the trunks split and the bases pulled from the ground, their mud-covered roots pointing at the sky. He looked past the grove and up toward his home and then he took his foot off the gas completely and put it on the brake.

His house was gone. Any sense that it had been a house was gone, at least. The foundation and portions of two of the walls lingered but the rest was scattered in chunks across his yard and the field beyond. Pieces of his roof littered the yard. His couch was some eighty feet from the foundation, upside down, rain drumming down onto it. The old aerial antenna, no longer functional but never removed, was lodged in the upper branches of a tree in the backyard. The rest of the tree was adorned with pink bits of insulation. Amidst the litter of debris across the yard he saw flashes of bright, stark white. Pieces of the porch railing he’d painted.

He sat there in the middle of the road and stared at it. Couldn’t find a thought, really, couldn’t do anything but look. This place shouldn’t matter—he’d already known he could never return to it—but still, it had been home. It had been his home.

The sirens finally broke him out of it. They were wailing behind him, to the south, coming this way. Somebody coming to see if anyone needed rescuing.

He punched the accelerator and the truck fishtailed on the wet pavement and then found purchase and sped on. He swerved around one downed limb in the road and drove right over the top of another and on toward the gulf. He gave the house one last look in the rearview. It was the only thing out there, the only physical structure in most of a mile in any direction, and it had been destroyed. In the distance, the Amish farm looked solid, everything still standing. Something like that, it seemed almost personal. Seemed like the damn storm had been hunting him.

“Well, guess what?” he said aloud. “I wasn’t home. And tell you something else? I am the storm.”

There you go, boy. There you go.

The voice floated out of the air beside him and Josiah looked to the right and saw Campbell Bradford in the passenger seat, just as he had been at the timber camp. Campbell gave a tight-lipped smile and tipped his hat. His suit looked soaked, clinging to his shoulders as if he’d just climbed out of a swimming pool.

That ain’t home, he said. That place ain’t even close to home for you, Josiah, never was. You deserved better, boy, deserved a piece of what I’d carved out for you. I was building a kingdom down here, and you’re my rightful heir. It was taken right from your hands. Time to take it back. They’ll come to know your name, boy. They’ll know it.

“The work will be done,” Josiah told him. “You can count on that.”

I know it. I’m stronger than ever now, boy, and it’s thanks to you. Stronger than I’ve been in a long time, at least. And that’s all I needed—was for you to listen, and let me get my strength back. It’s coming now, son. Yes, sir, it is.

“I should have started with the hotel,” Josiah said.

No. We’ll go back for it, but we have to start with Shaw. You see that, don’t you? He’s the one who brought me back, then thought he could control me, hold power over me. With water, can you believe it? With water. It’s time he sees who’s won. Ain’t a force in this valley like me, and he’ll know it. He’ll be the one to tell the others.

Another limb was across the road, this one big enough to do some serious damage, and Josiah saw it out of the corner of his eye at the last possible instant and whipped the wheel sideways. The truck skidded away, branches raking at it, bending the sideview mirror back and pounding dents and scratches into the paint, but it stayed upright. By the time Josiah had it straightened out, Campbell was gone again. He took a deep breath, exhaled, and saw a cloud of cold fog in front of his mouth. That made him smile. Campbell wasn’t gone. Hadn’t been gone in a long time, in fact, was with Josiah constantly now.

He was suddenly glad that his house had been destroyed and that he’d happened across it. Hell, he hadn’t happened across it—Campbell had guided him there, and the message he intended to send was clear: there wasn’t anything of Josiah Bradford left now. Not the old Josiah, the one these people knew. What remained of him belonged to Campbell now, and that was as it should be. The Josiah that had been known in this valley would vanish completely by the day’s end, vanish as swiftly as the cloud that had leveled his house, and with a similar trail left behind.

The R. L. Drake fired up without hesitation. The power in the house was still on, so it didn’t need to go to the backup generator, and seconds after Anne found the desk, she had the microphone to her lips. Most of the bands she dealt with were weather-spotter frequencies, but like any quality ham radio operator, she had the local emergency bands programmed as well. These days, some of the communications were encrypted, but there was still access for distress calls. She explained her situation to the dispatcher in as calm a tone as she could manage. Her nerves were rattled and her body felt unsteady but she held it all in check and spoke slowly and clearly. This was what she’d been training for all her life—a real emergency. She’d always known she could keep her poise during one, and while she’d imagined it would be during a tornado and not a kidnapping, her preparation didn’t fail her now.

The dispatcher was a woman who sounded at first harried, no doubt from fielding constant storm-related calls, then astonished.

“Ma’am, I need to understand this situation: Are you alone in the house now?”

Anne had specified that at the start. She took a deep breath and willed herself to find patience in the face of panic.

“That is correct.”

“But you were held hostage for several hours this morning by a man with a gun—”

“Not just some man. His name is Josiah Bradford. He’s a local. Works down at the West Baden hotel, I believe.”

“Yes, and your understanding is that he now has another woman in his control and that he has left your house with her and the weapon, correct?”

Anne felt a surge of frustration building, wanted to slap her hands down on the desk and shout, Of course he still has the weapon, now would you please stop asking me to repeat myself and do something about it! But poise counted in a situation like this, calm counted, and that woman who was with Josiah right now needed Anne’s help.

“That is all correct,” she said, speaking carefully. “The woman with him is named Claire Shaw. She’s from Chicago. Her husband came down here to make a movie and somehow he crossed Josiah. And I would say that time is of the essence. He has a gun, and if he is to be believed, then he is driving a truck full of dynamite. You need to find that truck.”

“There’s already a bulletin out for that truck. Went up yesterday. A state police detective requested it. I’m going to get in touch with him now.”

“All right,” Anne said, wondering what Josiah had already done to earn this attention. “He’s in the truck now, and so is she. He was taking her somewhere. I don’t know where, but it’s near his home. I could tell it was someplace near his home.”

“Okay,” the dispatcher said, “but right now I’ve got to find someone to come get you out of that basement. Things are out of control… we’ve got a tornado that hit Orleans, another that went through Paoli not five minutes later, and every one of my units was headed to assist. I’ll find one to send back for you.”

“No, don’t send one of them for me. Please don’t. I’m fine. But send one of them to find that truck.”

“Of course, that’s the priority. Be advised there’s a bit of chaos right now, though. Got parts of highways closed and all sorts of major storm damage. There’s a fire—”

“I know it’s chaos out there,” Anne said. “But I’m telling you that he could make the storm look gentle before this is done.”

The wind was freshening again as Josiah neared the gulf, and here there were so many trees down that the road was nearly impassable. If he’d given the slightest damn about his truck he would have stopped, but at this point the Ranger meant about as much to him as the heap that had once been his house, so he plowed ahead, driving over limbs and fence posts and one snarl of barbed wire wrapped around a stump. All of it deposited in the middle of the road, left behind by a cloud, of all damn things. It was hard to believe.

Up ahead the old white chapel was still standing and seemed little worse for wear; the storm must have passed just south of it. He saw the blinking lights of a rescue truck out across the fields, a volunteer fire department outfit, but they had pulled into one of the farm driveways and were paying him no mind. The gravel track into the gulf was empty, and he drove onto it and through the brush and saw two vehicles parked at the end of the lane: Danny’s Olds and a black Porsche Cayenne that was sitting upside down. The roof was caved in and glass lay all around it. Pointing skyward were four flat tires. That got Josiah laughing as he stopped the truck and got out to see Danny emerge from the bushes behind the cars, his ruddy, freckled face drained of color, his red hair dripping wet.

“You see it?” he said, walking toward Josiah. “You see it? Oh, shit, I never seen anything like it. Damn it all, I never even imagined seeing anything like that.”

Josiah nodded at the upended Porsche. “Guess you didn’t need to worry ’bout them tires.”

Danny stared back at him blankly.

“How’d you miss it?” Josiah asked.

“Drove away, is how I missed it. I was waiting down here like you said, and then I heard the noise. I mean to tell you it really does sound like a train, just the way you always hear folks say it does. I heard that noise and I saw the sky going black as oil and I said, I got to get away fast. So I drove out of here and had hardly hit the road before I saw it. Big old funnel cloud, all white at first, then turning black. And I just hit the gas on this old car like I never have before in my life. Was up at the church when the tornado came in, and I pulled behind the building and set to prayin’. I’ll tell you, I was prayin’ and cryin’ like a little kid, and I think it was that church that saved me because that thing passed by not a hundred yards from me, but I was safe and—”

“Where are they?” Josiah said.

“Huh?”

“The ones I’m here for, damn it! Where are they?”

Danny blinked, then wiped at his face, leaving a streak of dirt behind.

“I don’t know. They were in the woods. Right there, where it blew through, Josiah. Far as I know, they’re somewhere out there now.” He waved his arm off to the east, in the direction the storm had gone.

“You think they’re dead?” Josiah said, and he felt a cold, seething rage nestle into his belly. That storm better not have taken them. He’d come here to settle up, not to collect bodies.

“I have no idea, Josiah. I just want to get out of here. I’m done, all right? I’m—”

“Shut up,” Josiah said. “I got a piece of work left to do, and ain’t nothing or nobody done until that work’s been completed. You don’t understand the weight of this task, Danny, you don’t understand the heft of it at all. Ain’t a thing done yet.”

“Josiah—”

“Stop using that name.”

“What?”

“You call me Campbell now. Understand? Call me Campbell.”

Danny said, “I think you’re crazy.”

He was staring Josiah in the face, and when he said it, he meant it.

“I don’t know what the hell you’re thinking anymore,” Danny said. “Don’t even seem like yourself, and now you’re calling yourself Campbell…. It’s like you’re possessed.”

“What I am,” Josiah said, “is focused.”

He turned away from Danny and walked back to the truck, reached inside the cab and withdrew the shotgun. Then he stood beside the bed and tore the tarps loose and exposed Eric Shaw’s wife.

“Josiah! What in… oh, hell. You are crazy! You’ve lost your ever-lovin’—”

“I’m going to ask one more time for you to keep silent,” Josiah said, and Danny’s eyes registered for the first time that the gun in Josiah’s hand was pointed at him.

“You going to shoot me? Me?”

“Don’t intend to. But I came here to finish a task, and ain’t nobody going to interrupt me. You least of all.”

Danny’s jaw slackened. He didn’t say a word. The wind was starting to gust again, another round of storms ready to chase the one that had just left this place.

“We’re going to find those two,” Josiah said, “whether they’re out in those woods or up in a damn tree somewhere with their necks broken. We’re going to find them.”

“Who is she?” Danny asked, staring at the woman in the bed of the truck.

“Shaw’s wife. Now tell me where they went.”

Danny jabbed a finger into the wind-torn woods. “Down to the gulf. Last time I saw them, they was walking down to the gulf.”

“That’s fine,” Josiah said. “Then we’ll take the same walk. You mind helping our friend here out of the truck? I’d like to keep her at my side.”

Danny hesitated only a moment, but when he did move, it seemed to be more out of something exchanged in his stare with the woman than in direct obedience to Josiah’s instruction. He leaned over the bed wall and tried to gather her up, but he was handling her gently, not getting a thing done.

“Go on and pull her out of there!” Josiah barked. “She ain’t that fragile, boy.”

Danny ignored him and went to the back of the truck and climbed in the bed to help her to her feet. As he did that, he pushed aside another tarp, glanced down to see what it had covered, and froze with his arms extended to the woman.

“Is that… dynamite?”

“Indeed,” Josiah said. “And it would take one squeeze of this trigger to blow the back of that truck into Martin County. Now you want to hurry up?”

Danny got her upright and down out of the truck then, used his pocket knife to cut the tape free from her feet at Josiah’s instructions, and then started down the trail. The woman was unsteady with her hands still bound, and he kept an arm on her to help with balance. They’d gotten well into the trees now, the vehicles out of sight, and were crossing over familiar ground, a path on which Josiah knew every root and stone. Trees were downed in every direction, some snapped in half, others torn free at their bases, leaning crazily against one another, but somehow many had stayed upright and largely intact. Even now they were tossing around in that freshening wind. Josiah couldn’t help but marvel a little as he watched them. Damn things didn’t seem so flexible on a normal day, appeared stiff as the boards they produced, but look at ’em whipping around now. Some would break; some just bend. All depended on the tree and the storm. Some would break and some just bend…

He’d gotten lost in the trees and didn’t see what Danny and the woman saw. Didn’t understand what was happening until the woman dropped to her knees in the middle of the trail, and when he turned to jerk her upright, he saw Danny was pointing ahead. He looked back down the trail.

Eric Shaw was coming up it.

57

CLAIRE.

Eric saw her before anything else, focused on her so much that for an instant he was unable to see the rest of the frame. The first thing that stood out was the tape: a bright shining silver X across her face. Then she dropped to her knees on the trail and the rest of the pieces clicked into understanding in his brain—Danny Hastings at her side, Josiah Bradford behind them with a gun in his hand. In that first moment, that first blink, they’d been insignificant pieces of scenery around his wife. Now they stepped forward and joined the cast and became significant as hell. Particularly the shotgun.

He’d left Kellen beside the gulf not five minutes earlier and begun the trek back up the hill, thinking that help was a few minutes away. His hands were shaking and his head throbbed but he’d told himself that he needed to think of Kellen, because Kellen needed help of the kind that could be found—normal, human help, different from that required by Eric. So he’d walked up the storm-ravaged slope, intent on finding rescue for Kellen, and now he was staring at his wife bound and gagged.

For a moment nobody moved or spoke. They all just froze there, looking back at one another, and then Eric started forward at a run, and Josiah Bradford’s face split into a grin and he lifted the shotgun and laid the barrel against the crown of Claire’s skull.

Eric stopped running.

“What are you doing?” he shouted. “What do you want?”

“Only what’s owed to me,” Josiah said. His voice didn’t sound anything like it had two days ago. It seemed to have gained a deeper timbre, gained power. It was the voice of an old-time revival preacher, primed to stir the crowds into a frenzy.

“Take that gun away from—”

“You come on up here. Walk slow, but get closer. I don’t want to shout.”

No, Eric thought, I believe we should shout. Because Kellen’s back there and he isn’t going to hear us unless we’re shouting. Don’t know what he could do with a broken ankle anyhow, but it’s something. I left him to get help. Now I need it.

He moved forward to join them.

Devastation. That was the word across the shortwave bands—reports coming in from around the area to Anne’s basement while she waited for the police. The tornado that had passed overhead while Josiah Bradford was still in her home had touched down just west of Orangeville and moved northeast into Orleans. Houses had been torn apart, cars overturned, utility poles ripped from the ground. At least two fires started in the aftermath. Highway 37 was closed between Orleans and Mitchell, keeping many rescue crews from reaching the scene.

A second tornado had touched down within minutes of the first, this one just to the southeast. It had flattened a group of trailers and then moved back into farmland, taking a cellular phone tower out in its path. Early estimates said that one had stayed on the ground for at least six miles.

She had no view of the sky from down in the cellar, but the spotters to the west were issuing frantic warnings that things were not done yet. The supercell was shifting and realigning and, they warned, possibly preparing to spit out another funnel cloud.

Tornado outbreaks generally spanned a wider area, sometimes putting up as many as forty or fifty or even a hundred tornadoes spread out across a wide, multistate region. To have a cluster outbreak like this, so many tornadoes in one county, was rare but not unprecedented. She remembered studying a similar event that occurred in Houston in the early nineties, when six tornadoes spawned from four separate storms hit one county over the course of about two hours. At one point, three of them were on the ground at the same time. Things like that could happen. You could never predict the behavior of a truly furious storm. All you could hope to do was see the warnings.

That was her role—to see the warnings and hope that people heeded them. She had frequencies for the security outfits with both the French Lick and West Baden hotels, and she contacted them immediately after finishing her initial conversation with the sheriff’s department, explained the threat, and suggested they post some guards at the property entrances. She couldn’t say whether they believed her, but she’d done what she could. She’d issued the warning.

Fifteen minutes after she’d made initial contact, the Orange County Sheriff’s Department dispatcher came back to Anne to report that a detective named Roger Brewer from the Indiana State Police had arrived at Josiah Bradford’s home.

And found it missing.

It appeared, the dispatcher said, as if the tornado had in fact touched down almost on top of Josiah’s house before beginning its path into Orleans.

“No sign of the truck?” Anne asked.

No sign of the truck. The state police were reaching out to the FBI for assistance—with every available unit out on storm-related calls, the kidnapping called for focused attention that the locals could not provide. But the nearest FBI contact was in Bloomington, which was a forty-five-minute drive in the best of conditions, and these weren’t the best of conditions. So there was one detective on the search.

One.

The dispatcher, who was talking to Anne with detached calm, which was of course part of the job but which was also frustrating beyond measure to someone trying to convey a sense of urgency, said that the detective was “making a sweep.” Then she told Anne that there were too many other emergency calls going on to prolong this one.

“He was headed toward his property,” Anne said. “Some area of woods near his property. Keep looking. And remember that he said his truck was full of—”

“I remember. I’ve advised our officers. They understand the threat.”

No, Anne thought, they do not. I’m not sure anyone could.

She couldn’t say what she knew to be true: that the storm and Josiah were linked, that something evil had come to town today, and it wasn’t leaving soon.

“What do you want?” Eric Shaw repeated, advancing up the trail toward Josiah. “This doesn’t have anything to do with us. Not with her, not with me.”

“I think you’re wrong on that score,” Josiah said. “It has much to do with you.”

“How?” Shaw said.

“You give my name to another,” Josiah said. “The one who took me from my home, who shed my blood and took me from my home, and you honor him with my name. Don’t even see that you brought me back home, you dumb son of a bitch. You brought me home, and there’s scores to be settled.”

The words had left his mouth without a beat of hesitation, and though they were not his own words, he believed them.

“Brought me home and then thought you could control me,” he said. “Hold me back with water. A fool’s notion, Shaw. There’s not a force in this valley stronger than me.”

Shaw tilted his head and blinked at Josiah. “He’s in you,” he said. “Isn’t he?”

Josiah didn’t answer.

“What do you mean?” Danny said, and Josiah didn’t care for the intense interest in his voice.

“Campbell,” Shaw said to Josiah. “You sound just like him now.”

Above them the sky had darkened to near black, the wind rising to a howl though the rain had ceased altogether. The next wave of storms was here.

“How would you know the sound of his voice?” Danny said.

“Trust me, I know it. I’ve been listening to him for a few days now. Seeing him and hearing him.” He turned back to Josiah. “You don’t look like him yet but you carry his voice. He’s in you now.”

“Always was,” Josiah said. “Did you not hear what I said? We’re of shared blood, you ignorant son of a bitch. The years don’t matter—we’re linked, and always have been.”

“No,” Shaw said, “not like this. He’s in your mind, damn it, he’s turned you into something—”

Josiah stepped forward and swung the shotgun, caught Shaw in the temple with the barrel and knocked him down into the wet grass. Danny gave a little grunt and stepped forward and Josiah turned and stared at him.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“Nothing. I’m not—”

“You move toward me again, and I’ll shoot you just as fast as either of them.”

“Damn it, Josiah, he just told you the truth.”

“Hasn’t been a word of truth left his mouth since he set foot in my valley.”

“Bullshit. Campbell’s infecting your damn brain just like he says.”

Shaw spoke up again, his voice thick with pain. “Let Claire go, at least. Let her go, and whatever problem you’ve got with me, we’ll figure it out. But she’s not a part of this.”

Josiah stared down at him and watched blood seep out of a wound near his hairline and trickle down the side of his face and drip into the grass. The blood looked black in the shadows, but then the lightning flashed again, and in that instant he saw the bright red of the blood stark against the white of Shaw’s face.

“Think for a minute,” Shaw said, speaking as if his tongue were hard to move. “Think about what you want, and what you can actually get. You want some money? Okay, I’ll get you money. But what else can you hope to get out of this? Why do you have her tied up like that? What does it bring you?”

“It’ll bring,” Josiah said, “what’s been owed.”

“What’s owed to you?”

“This valley,” he said.

“I don’t know what that means. And I don’t know how hurting my wife can help you get it.”

“It’s a matter of power,” Josiah said. “I would not expect a man of your dull mind to conceive of just what that means. I ran this valley once, held it in the palm of my hand. I’ll do it again.”

There was blood still dripping off the side of Shaw’s head. Josiah must have hit him a good one; his left arm was shaking as if caught by palsy.

“Stop letting him talk for you!” Shaw shouted. “Just think for a minute, think about what’s real. You’ve got police after you. If you stay here, you’ll be arrested. But I can get you some money and then you can leave—”

“Shut your damned mouth,” Josiah said. “If I required a suggestion from you, I’d let you know with my gun.”

But Shaw’s words were getting to him, crawling in his head and clouding his sense of purpose. What did he want? Why was he here? He turned away from the others, toward the western woods, and let the wind fan hard into his face. He could smell the storm on it, could taste its anger. He wanted to be alone with that wind for just a moment. Just one long blink.

Shaw went for him when he closed his eyes. Josiah hadn’t been paying attention to the gun; it hung loose at his side, leaning against his thigh, and Shaw almost got to it. Got a hand on it, in fact, clawed at the stock and almost tore it from Josiah’s grip.

Almost.

Josiah snatched it away from him and swept his left fist down like a hammer, caught Shaw square in the forehead. He hung on, though, keeping one arm wrapped around Josiah’s waist and throwing punches with the other. Josiah staggered backward and got his free hand on Shaw’s belt and heaved. Then he had space to lift the gun as Shaw came back at him a second time. Josiah twisted it so the butt was pointed down and slammed it at Shaw’s face, missing and hitting his shoulder. There was a snapping sound and a cry of pain and Shaw fell back into the grass and the mud. Josiah lifted the gun again, hoisting it high this time, and as the woman gave a choked scream against the tape over her mouth, he had a flash of memory, saw himself down in the ditch with that detective again, swinging the cinder block. This time he tempered the blow. Brought the stock of the gun down with wounding force but not killing force. He caught Shaw on the top of the head and he dropped and stayed down. Conscious still, groping around in the dirt as if he intended to rise but eliminated as a threat for the moment. Josiah wanted to hit him again, full strength, but he held back, thinking of the man he’d killed too early last time.

He wouldn’t make the same mistake now. The dead couldn’t remember you, and Josiah wanted this son of a bitch to remember him. Long may he live and remember. That was Campbell’s instruction. Shaw had wanted to tell tales about the family? Wanted to exploit the Bradford name? Let him tell this story.

Josiah dropped to one knee beside Shaw, felt through his pockets. No weapon, but there was a phone. Two phones, in fact; one looked already ruined by water. Josiah set both of them on the ground and smashed them with the butt of the shotgun while Shaw lay at his feet and moaned, writhing. Josiah knelt again, took him by an ear, pulled his head back, and looked down into the faltering eyes.

“You ever heard a dynamite blast? Up close, in person?”

Shaw’s lips moved but no words came. His eyelids fluttered, then jerked open again when Josiah twisted his ear.

“Picture a full case of it going up, with fifteen gallons of gasoline to help it along. Think you got an idea of what that’ll sound like? I hope you do, because you’re not going to be there to listen. Won’t hear the sound itself, but you’ll hear plenty about it. Might start hearing it in your dreams. I’d imagine you will. When they take her bones out of the fire, you won’t be able to stop imagining just what it was like. Be imagining for a long time, I expect. Enjoy that.”

He slapped Shaw’s head back down and straightened up, walked over to the wife, wrapped his hand in her long dark hair, and jerked her to her feet. Danny made another sound of disapproval, and Josiah turned the gun barrel toward him.

“Back up the trail, Danny boy. We’re going back up the trail. You walk ahead now. I’ve got a sense you can no longer be trusted to stand behind me.”

“Damn it, Josiah, leave her here. Leave her with him. Ain’t no reason to take this thing any farther. We’ll get in my car and get you out of this town. Wherever you want to go, man, we can get you there.”

“That’s where you’re confused,” Josiah said. “You think I want to go somewhere else. That’s not the case. I just got home.”

He moved his finger onto the trigger and tilted his chin up the trail, spitting a stream of tobacco juice in its direction.

“Start walking. We got a piece of work left to do.”

58

THERE WAS NO WORD of Josiah Bradford or his pickup truck. Anne sat alone in the cold basement that smelled of trapped moisture and dust and scanned the shortwave bands, trying to stay hopeful, trying not to remember the sound his palm had made on that poor woman’s face.

Nothing came in to reward her hope.

There were plenty of reports—she couldn’t remember a day with this level of activity, in fact—but they were all storm-related. The damage in Orleans was severe. Just to the north, in Mitchell, line winds had brought down trees and blown windows out of buildings, and in the tiny speed bump town of Leipsic, there were reports of a fire that started when a power line came down on a pole barn. The second tornado, in Paoli, had scattered a cluster of trailers, some probably with people inside.

Urgent problems, sure, but what held Anne’s attention now were not reports of damage to the north and east, but those of clouds to the south and west. They were accompanied by savage lightning that had been missing in the day’s first round—a school nine miles away had been struck—and the area beneath the storm was being raked with nickel-size hail. Two spotters whom Anne knew and trusted called in observations of a beaver’s tail, a trailing cloud formation that indicated a supercell with rotation.

Even more alarming, though, were the reports from spotters just outside this new storm. In regions around it, the storms that had been building were dissipating. That might please the novice, but it was anything but a good sign, suggesting that the energy from those outlying storms was being absorbed by the larger front. Feeding it.

The storm was moving swiftly to the northeast. Right back into Anne’s valley.

She made contact with the dispatcher again, was informed curtly that Detective Brewer still had no sign of the truck.

“Tell him to make another drive through that area. He’s out there.”

The dispatcher said she’d ask him to make another pass.

The world would not hold still. Eric blinked and squinted and tried to find steady focus, but it kept shifting, the trees and the earth and the sky undulating around him. Frequently the dark woods were lit with flashes of lightning, and thunder crackled in a way that made the ground seem to tremble, but there was no rain.

He ran his tongue over his lips and tasted blood, tried to sit up and felt a bolt of pain in his collarbone. He reached for the head wound but his shaking hand could not find it, sending his fingers rattling over his face like a blind man searching for recognition.

He was alone.

That meant that Claire was gone.

He gave a grunt and shoved himself onto all fours, then crawled over to a tree and used it to pull himself to his feet. The world tilted again but he held firm to the tree.

Where had they taken her? They’d just left; it could not be far. And he had to follow. Had to follow quickly, because Josiah had a gun and hadn’t he said something about—

Dynamite. With fifteen gallons of gasoline to help it along…

He’d heard those words, hadn’t he? Was it true? Did Josiah Bradford have dynamite in the back of that truck?

When they take her bones out of the fire…

There was no one there who could help. Kellen was back at the gulf and his car was probably destroyed and Claire was with that man, who was no longer himself. He was infected by Campbell now, Eric was certain of that, had heard it in his voice and seen it in his eyes.

He had to catch up.

He had to catch up fast.

Finally Josiah had a purpose, understood it, and knew how to carry it out. He felt like a man who’d long been searching in the dark and finally realized he’d been carrying a matchbook in his pocket the whole time.

His detour to this place, one that had taken him far from the hotel and his ultimate goal, had been puzzling but necessary for reasons he couldn’t entirely comprehend. Now, after seeing Shaw, he understood it well—Shaw and Campbell were linked, a part of one another in a way that differed from Josiah and Campbell’s bond. Shaw had returned Campbell’s spirit to this place, and, somehow, he understood that. Understood the significance. Campbell needed him to be left to tell the tale; nobody else was capable of giving true credit where credit would be due. Eric Shaw was the exception. In the question of Campbell Bradford’s legacy, Eric Shaw was critical.

They moved swiftly up the trail, with Josiah dragging the woman along and keeping the gun pointed forward, toward Danny. The loyalest of friends he’d been for years, and yet Josiah had looked into his eyes and seen the deceit that lurked there and knew well that Danny Hastings was an ally no longer.

That was fine. Josiah was not alone on this day and in this struggle. Campbell rode with him, and the valley knew no fiercer ally. They’d finish this piece of work together, all opposition be damned.

They reached the trailhead and pushed through the fields and back toward his truck. Now that they were out of the trees he could look across the farmland and to the road, and he saw that the flashing emergency lights that had been there when they arrived were gone. Called elsewhere to some other crisis. He reckoned wherever they’d headed, it was the wrong damn direction.

The truck was where he’d left it, covered with dents and scratches but still ready to run. All he needed out of it was one last drive, a handful of miles.

“Here is where we part,” he told Danny as they passed the overturned Porsche. “You’ll hear the rest of the story soon enough, I expect.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s not something I have the time or desire to clarify.” He shoved the woman toward the back of his truck, but for the first time she began resisting, twisting against his grasp. Her hands were still bound but her legs were not, and she kicked at his knee. He slapped her hard, wrenched her arm, and slammed her up against the side of the truck. Her sudden show of fight told him that the bed of the truck might not be the place for her. He’d put her in the cab instead, keep her close.

He found the roll of duct tape in the bed of the truck and held her while he wrapped some around her lower legs. Then he dragged her around to the passenger side, paying no mind to Danny, and jerked the door open. She was still struggling, thrashing around so much that she caught his face with the back of her head and he tasted blood in his mouth. He grabbed her by the neck and shoved her forward, slamming his knee into her ass as he did it, and got her inside. He’d just shut the door when Danny said, “No more, Josiah.”

Josiah turned back to look at him and saw the knife in his hand.

It was a folding knife, with a blade no more than four inches long, one of those that had a little metal nub so you could flick it open fast with your thumb and fancy yourself a badass. Josiah looked down at it and laughed out loud.

“You going to cut me?”

“Going to do what needs to be done. You can decide what that’ll be.”

Josiah laughed again and lifted the gun and wrapped his finger around the trigger.

“Knife at a gunfight,” he said. “If that doesn’t describe your entire pathetic life, I don’t know what does, Danny boy.”

“Whatever you’re fixing to do, you’ll do it without her.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Danny, I squeeze this trigger, I end your life. What don’t you understand about that? This bitch hasn’t a thing to do with you.”

“It ain’t right, and I won’t stand for it.”

“Well, aren’t you a noble bastard.”

“What her husband told you back there, it was the truth,” Danny said. “This ain’t you anymore. I don’t understand what’s going on, but you aren’t yourself, Josiah. Not even close.”

“What did I tell you about using that name?”

“That’s what I mean—it’s Campbell’s ghost has got in your head, just like he said. You been talking so damn strange, talking about Campbell like he’s sitting at your side. The man’s dead, Josiah, and I don’t know what in the hell has gotten into you, but that man is dead.”

“Right there’s a mistake that’s been made for far too long,” Josiah said. “Ain’t nothing dead about Campbell.”

Danny had shuffled a little closer. There wasn’t but five feet separating them now. Josiah was enjoying this little exchange, amused by Danny’s attempted show of heroism, but he didn’t have time to waste.

“Stand down and step aside,” he said. “Me and the missus have to be getting on.”

“She’s not going with you.”

“Danny…”

“I’m telling you as a friend, Josiah, best friend you ever had in your life, that you’ve lost your damn mind.”

“That may be,” Josiah said, “but I’ll tell you something: I’m not going to ride into the fire alone. That bitch is coming with me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We’re leaving. Go on and get in your car.”

Danny paused for a long time, and then he looked at the woman in the truck and pushed his fat pink tongue out of his mouth and wet his lips.

“Anybody going to take this ride with you, it ought to be me.”

“You’d take her place?”

Danny nodded.

“And I’m the crazy one? She ain’t nothing to you, boy.”

“And she ain’t to you neither.”

Josiah felt unsteady again, his mind shifting on him as it had been all day, and that angered him. He didn’t have time for it, knew exactly what he had to do and had been on his way to do it until Danny’s fat freckled ass slowed him down with this bullshit.

“Get in your car,” he said again, emphatically this time.

“All right,” Danny said, “but she’s getting in with me.”

He held Josiah’s eyes for a moment, like he was searching for the bluff in them, and then he wet his lips a second time and stepped toward the woman and Josiah squeezed the trigger.

It had been a long time since he’d fired the shotgun, and he’d forgotten the sheer force of it. It bucked in his arms and sent a tremor through his chest and cut Danny Hastings damn near in half.

Eric Shaw’s wife let out a low, anguished wail under the tape and pushed herself down to the floor of the truck, squeezing against the dashboard as if she expected him to put another round into the window. Josiah ignored her completely, staring at what he’d done. Danny had been at such close range that the damage was catastrophic. There was blood on the truck and on Josiah’s shirt and on his face, hot and wet as tears against his skin.

He wiped at his face with a shirtsleeve and stared down at the corpse.

Best friend you ever had in your life…

Something trembled inside him, a weakening of the resolve that had filled him on the way up the trail, and he swallowed hard and ground his teeth together as Danny’s blood ran through the grass and formed pools at Josiah’s feet.

He hadn’t wanted to do this. Danny had forced his hand, yes, but he hadn’t wanted to shoot. Not at him. Anybody else but not him.

“Damn you,” Josiah said and dropped to one knee, staring at Danny’s left side, where his torso had almost been freed from his legs. Would have been different if he’d had a handgun; he could have put a bullet into his leg or something and just backed his ass off without killing him. That shotgun had no such option; fired this close, it didn’t just kill, it destroyed.

He reached out and touched the grass near his feet, dipped his fingertips into Danny’s blood.

Ain’t your blood, Campbell’s voice whispered to him. And ain’t your concern.

But it was hard to focus now, hard to listen. The warm, wet touch of his old friend’s blood held him like cinder blocks strapped to his feet. He couldn’t move away.

He’s no kin to you, boy, and you got work left to do.

Campbell’s voice, so steady and strong throughout most of this day that it had become Josiah’s own at times, suddenly seemed softer. It was hard to hear him, hard to hear anything but the echoing roar of the shotgun.

Josiah had no recollection of having met Danny. They went back that far. Had just walked through their shitty world together from the start, more like family than friends. And the dumb son of a bitch had never stopped walking with him. Not even through this. Shit, he’d come driving up to that timber camp, bringing supplies long after he knew Josiah had killed a man. Had come out here following Eric Shaw at Josiah’s command, had waited on him through a damned tornado.

Had offered to take the woman’s place in the truck right now.

Who in the hell would do that? And why?

Damn it, boy, get your hands out of his blood and step back! You were to listen. That’s all. Only thing you’re required to do is listen, and now you’re not doing it.

He didn’t want to listen, though. Campbell would tell him to go, to leave this spot, and it didn’t feel right to leave Danny where he’d fallen. No, he couldn’t leave him alone…

It was the woman who jarred him loose. He’d taped her wrists together behind her back, but her fingers were free, and somehow she’d managed to reach the door handle. He heard the click of the latch opening, and with it his mind spun away from Danny Hastings and he turned to see her feet go flying through the cab as she fell backward and out of the truck.

He got up quickly and ran around the bed of the truck, found her down there in the dirt. She had nowhere to go, was just thrashing around like a fish on the sand, but he had to give her credit for trying. Josiah reached down and grabbed her by the back of her jeans and got her upright, then dropped the shotgun long enough to use both hands to shove her back inside. He hadn’t gotten the door closed yet when he heard an odd, faraway cry.

He slammed the door and snatched the shotgun with both hands, then turned and looked at the woods around him. He heard the cry again, understood the word this time: don’t. Eric Shaw was on his feet and had reached the trailhead, was just across the field from them. Josiah’s finger went to the trigger and for a moment he considered letting it blast in Shaw’s direction. He held off, though.

“You watch!” he bellowed. “You watch, and you listen! Isn’t a thing you can do to stop this!”

He walked around to the driver’s door and jerked it open and climbed inside, setting the shotgun between his legs, muzzle pointed down. The engine roared to life as Shaw continued on his drunken stagger through the field. Josiah threw it into gear and pulled away. In the rearview mirror, he could see the man begin to scream.

At the end of the gravel drive he turned left and pushed the pedal down to the floor, the worn tires howling on wet pavement. He drove south, figuring to return to town the same way he’d come. It would require passing the wreckage that was left of his home again, but he was determined to speed past it without a pause or even a sidelong glance.

That was the idea for the first mile at least, until the house came into view and he saw there was a car pulling out of the driveway. A police car. Josiah hesitated but didn’t touch the brake pedal. They were looking at the damage, not looking for him.

That idea held until the cruiser pulled all the way out, blocking the road, and hit the lights.

59

ERIC WAS TRYING TO hurry, but his legs were prone to buckling. He fell twice and got back to his feet, reeling, and pushed on. Toward the middle of the field his head began to clear and his legs steadied. There was a terrible burning just above his shoulder and he could feel a wet, pulsing heat along his scalp where bleeding continued—wounds left behind by Josiah’s shotgun butt. The pain in his skull was lost between the headache that had been building all morning and the impact of the gun.

He was a hundred yards from Josiah Bradford’s truck when the tires spun and it pulled down the gravel drive and toward the road with Claire inside. Eric stopped moving and screamed at them to stop, but the truck flashed through the trees and was gone from sight for a moment. Then it appeared again, marked by a shriek of tires as Josiah made a left turn out onto the road and sped south. Eric stood in the field and screamed until the truck was gone.

The wind blew up in a sudden commanding gust and pushed him sideways, and that got him moving again. The air temperature seemed to have dropped ten degrees, and it was as dark in the field now as it had been in the trees.

Up ahead he could see two vehicles remained—a white sedan and a twisted black mess that had once been Kellen’s Porsche. It was upside down now, demolished, but the white car was upright and looked functional. He ran toward it. Made it to within thirty feet before his eyes took in the splash of red across the hood and then dropped to the grass below it. What he saw there took his legs. He stumbled and fell, landing on his hands and knees in the mud.

There was a body in front of the white car. A huddled, blood-soaked mass.

He got up and moved forward, unable to take a breath, the world seeming to go still and silent around him despite the raging wind. There was so much blood. So much…

It was Josiah’s partner. Edgar Hastings’s grandson. He’d been shot in the left side of his torso, had a massive, ragged hole blown out of him. It looked nothing like a gunshot wound. More like something chopped away with an axe. After he’d gotten close enough for recognition, Eric stumbled away from the body as if it could stand up and hurt him.

Not Claire. That is not Claire. And you only heard one shot…. You saw him put her in the truck, and she was alive. She had to be, because there was only one shot…

There had been only one shot. Right? He felt sure of that, and now he was sure of what that shot had accomplished. But Claire wasn’t here, which meant that she was in the truck with Josiah Bradford—a man who’d just murdered his own friend.

Dynamite. With fifteen gallons of gasoline to help it along. When they take her bones out of the fire…

“No,” he said aloud. “Damn it, no.”

He circled around the body and came to the white car, jerked the door open, and looked inside. No key in the ignition. Who had driven it here? Josiah was gone in the truck, so that probably meant the dead man, Danny, had driven this car.

No time to hesitate. He had to move fast, just do it without thinking.

He crossed to the body and knelt beside it, felt bile rise in the back of his throat, squeezed his eyes shut and reached with one of his shaking hands toward the blood-soaked jeans. He felt for the pocket, almost shouting when his fingers touched warm, wet blood, and pushed his hand inside.

The keys were there.

Forty minutes after the first tornado of the day touched down near Orangeville, the third made contact in Martin County, at the point where the Lost River emptied into the east fork of the White River. The funnel cloud tore into the riverbank and then blew northeast, cutting a straight line across the Lost River’s snaking course, as if it intended to follow it all the way upstream. Then the storm ran into the hollows of the Hoosier National Forest, two natural wonders colliding, and lost its strength in the uneven wooded terrain. It was as if, one spotter said, the forest had swallowed it.

Anne had been focused on the storm reports, listening to the arrival of this third tornado and quite certain that it would not be the last, that the valley was in the midst of a cluster outbreak now, when the Orange County dispatcher cut in on her.

“Ma’am? Mrs. McKinney? Detective Brewer thinks he has the truck.”

“He does?”

“A white Ford Ranger? That sound right? It’s a little pickup truck?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it came up to Josiah Bradford’s house and then pulled a U-turn. The officer is following it now. He’s got the lights and siren on but the driver isn’t responding.”

“That’s it,” Anne said excitedly. “That’s him. Tell him to be careful. There’s dynamite in that truck!”

“He’s been advised.”

“Is there anyone else in the truck?”

“He can’t tell.”

“She should be with him. She should be inside.”

“I understand that. I’ve advised to exercise caution.”

“I don’t know if that’s a strong enough word,” Anne said. “It’s going to be hard to stop that truck without…”

Her words trailed off. She didn’t want to voice the possibility.

“I understand,” the dispatcher said.

Josiah barely pulled the U-turn off. The right-side wheels slid off the pavement and into the grass but the four-wheel drive spun him free and then he was moving again, away from the cop.

Maybe this guy was intending to stop Josiah just to ask what he knew about the house. Maybe he was just going to offer a warning about the storm…

The siren came on then, and such thoughts disappeared. The cop was in pursuit, had gone into it immediately, and that meant he was reacting to the sight of Josiah’s truck, and not simply to his behavior.

He was going to have to think fast now, damn it, because his little Ranger was not going to outrun that Crown Vic. If the dumb son of a bitch started shooting at him or tried to force a collision, he’d be in for one hell of a surprise when the truck blew a mile into the sky. Only problem with that, Josiah’s load was intended for another target, and he was going to get it there. It was the last task he had, and he could not fail.

That was going to require some time, though, time he couldn’t buy as long as this damn cop stayed in pursuit. He dropped his hand to the stock of the shotgun, considering his options. He couldn’t fire the shotgun from the moving truck with any accuracy and he wasn’t sure that it wouldn’t blow the dynamite. Far as he knew, the stuff required a direct electrical charge to safely detonate, but he figured a fire would do the rest. You didn’t set dynamite on fire and expect it to quietly burn out. Gunfire might do the job, too, and Josiah wasn’t ready to blow this truck up just yet. Had a few miles to go first.

He needed time. That was all he needed—a little bit of time.

He took the truck up to seventy, and now he was aware that the cop was trying to speak to him through the cruiser’s loudspeaker. Dumbass didn’t even turn his siren off for the attempt, and even if he had, the wind would have washed the words away. It was blowing fierce now, the sky gone coal black, sporadic lightning flashes making the world beneath carry an odd green glow.

The cruiser was keeping pace and not attempting to close the gap, which was surprising. Probably the cop was on the radio right now, explaining the situation and asking for advice. How much did he know? Odds were, a description of the truck had been issued after the detective was murdered on this road, but there was a chance—however slim—that the damned old lady had somehow found a way to contact help from her basement. And if that was the case, this guy knew Josiah had a hostage.

There you go, Campbell whispered, and Josiah caught a glimpse of his face in the mirror again, shadowed but eyes aglow. He’ll stop for her. He’ll have to.

Yes, he would. Protect and serve, that was the motto, that was the promise, and the dumb bastard would have to obey the oath, wouldn’t he? He’d have to attempt to protect and serve the dead bitch that Josiah was about to pitch out onto the road.

He lifted the shotgun clear, steering with his left hand, and set it across his lap, the barrel pointed at Claire Shaw’s terrified face. He grinned as he leaned across her body and fumbled for the door handle.

“You were going to die sometime today,” he said. “A shame it has to be so early.”

The Orange County dispatcher had patched Anne through directly to the police officer who’d sighted Josiah Bradford’s truck, a state cop named Roger Brewer. He wanted to confirm that it was the right vehicle and understand the situation from her as best he could, he said.

She listened as he described the truck and said, “Yes, yes, that’s it,” and then began to warn him, as she’d warned the dispatcher, about the dynamite. She hadn’t gotten ten words out when he cut in and said, “Shit, something’s happening,” and there was a half-second pause before he said “Shit!” again and then Anne heard the scream of tires searching for traction, followed by the muffled sound of impact and a shattering of metal and glass.

“What happened? What happened?”

“He threw something out onto the road,” the officer said. “Dispatch, we’re going to need more cars. He just threw… I think he threw a body out into the road.”

60

THE DEAD MAN’S CAR started on the third try, groaning to life on the spark of a nearly exhausted battery. Eric, dropping the gearshift into drive, had the sudden, stupid thought: It’s the Fargo car. White Cutlass Ciera. You saw that movie with Claire and predicted it would be nominated for a bunch of Oscars…

He had to back up to get around the body. He made a wide pass to stay clear of it, and he did not look down. The splash of blood across the white hood trembled against the engine’s vibrations.

Trees bordered the gravel lane on each side, and only when he came out to the road did he have a clear look at the sky. The black clouds seemed to be drifting away from the center in all directions, isolating a pale circle. The wind that had blown so violently as he’d run through the field just minutes ago had died off completely, and ahead of him the fields looked strangely peaceful.

It can’t happen again, he thought, staring up at the separating clouds. You can’t have two of them in the same place.

He swung out into the road, turned left, in the direction Josiah Bradford’s truck had gone, and hit the gas. If another tornado actually did form, it was good that Kellen was still down in the gulf. The gulf had already saved them once.

He had the car up to fifty and was fumbling for the windshield wipers, wanting the crimson smear of drying blood off the glass, when another vehicle appeared down the road. He didn’t take his foot off the gas right away, but then the distance closed to the point that he could see it clearly: a white Ford Ranger with dents in the hood and a snarl of fence wire mashed into the front grille and dragging along under the car.

Josiah.

He was coming back.

Stop him, he thought, you have to stop him. But the Ranger was flying along, had to be doing seventy at least, and Claire was inside. If Eric swung the car across the road to block the truck and took the impact broadside, they’d probably all be killed. And that was discounting the potential explosion.

Indecision froze him. He slowed the car down to twenty, then ten, hands tight on the wheel, a hundred potential maneuvers floating through his head, all of them dismissed as too risky. The truck was in motion, and the only way to stop an object that wanted to stay in motion was with impact. Simple rules of physics that would be simple rules of disaster today.

And so he sat there helplessly, impotently, as the Ranger roared up and then passed him. Eric was staring inside the cab, trying to catch a glimpse of Claire, but what he saw when the truck shot by him made him give a low shout of fear and slam on the brake pedal, bringing the Oldsmobile to a stop in the center of the road.

Campbell Bradford was driving the truck. Not Josiah, but Campbell, hunched over the wheel in his dark brown suit and bowler hat, his mouth twisted into a grin in the quarter second when Eric had met his eyes.

Josiah saw the Oldsmobile pull out onto the road and he was so stunned, so momentarily hopeful, that he almost hit the brakes. Danny? But then he got it, understood what must have happened, and tightened his hands on the steering wheel, laid his foot heavier on the gas pedal.

He ain’t stopping us, boy, Campbell whispered. We’re going home, and that son of a bitch is not strong enough to stop us. He doesn’t have the will for it.

Indeed, he did not. Josiah kept the speed up and the wheel held dead-on center and clenched his teeth, ready for a collision, but Shaw stayed in his own lane and let the Ranger thunder right by him. Didn’t even try to do anything, just sat there behind the wheel of Danny’s Olds and watched Josiah pass by.

Told you, boy. Told you. He doesn’t have the will, and neither does anyone else. You think those police can stop us right now? Not a chance. They ain’t strong enough. Ain’t nobody in this valley strong enough.

There surely was not. Josiah was flying now, open road ahead, the world yielding to him in the way he’d always known it would.

Dumping the woman in the road had freed him from the first pursuit car, and he’d avoid those that would attempt to join the chase. He’d drive west and take the back roads, a no-brainer as there would be more police near Orleans, and if he drove toward them, he’d make it easier for them. Drive away from them and they’d have to give chase.

He was back on the road to the gulf now, Wesley Chapel a white speck beneath black sky in the distance. Down to the chapel, then bang another left, and keep pushing west at as fast a speed as he could manage. That was all he had to do.

Lightning flashed again, and around him the fields shone with the deep, lush green you could only ever see beneath a storm. He couldn’t believe just how green everything looked. Above him, something seemed to be opening in the dark clouds. The storm breaking up, maybe. Yes, even the wind had died off. Everything around him was still. That expected furious storm wasn’t going to come to life after all.

But something was happening in the sky. He had only a sense of it at first, some swirl of light, and then he blinked and looked up and to the left and saw that something strange was happening in that clear circle that had formed in the center of the clouds. Something was… lowering. Yes, a cloud of pure white was dropping down from the center of the dark swirling ring above it.

A thin white rope descended almost all the way to the field ahead, then held. Hesitated. The top end of it whipped around a little and the bottom rose with it, and Josiah was sure the thing was about to retreat when it dropped with sudden strength and a spray of brown soil shot into the air. The windows on the truck were vibrating now, and the trees alongside the road were bending with the force of the wind once again. Only they were bending the wrong way, he realized, they were leaning in toward the cloud instead of away from it.

For a moment he let off the gas. He was beside Wesley Chapel now, where Danny had pulled in and watched a tornado go by, and now Josiah was staring down another one. He’d heard plenty about such storms—they weren’t uncommon in southern Indiana—but he’d never seen one himself. The thing looked nothing like the funnel shape you always heard of. No, it was just a rope. A white rope connecting earth to sky, and moving forward. Moving east. Moving toward him.

He raised his eyes to the rearview mirror and saw Danny’s car coming on down the road. Shaw had turned around and started in pursuit of him. What in the hell did he think he could do?

Still, he was catching up. The tornado sat no more than a half mile away now to the west, the direction Josiah needed to go. It was moving but without great speed. Seemed relaxed, almost. Low-key about the way it was tearing through the land. He watched it come up on one lone tree, saw the treetop bend toward it, and then the cloud was over it and the tree disappeared from sight. An instant later it had cleared the tree, and the trunk remained, but almost all of the branches that had made up the top were gone. The cloud chewed back into the farmland.

It looks like a power washer, Josiah thought, it looks exactly like a damn power-washer jet. A thin white rope with an invisible and incredible chisel at the end of it, blasting that field away like it was so much dirt on a deck board.

He looked in the rearview again and saw Danny’s car closing in fast.

Can’t just sit here, boy. Work left to be done, isn’t there? You bold enough to do it? You got the strength, the will?

Sure he did. Sure. Josiah turned left, away from the chapel, and laid into the Ranger’s accelerator once again. Ahead of him, the tornado was nearing the road. The base of the white rope had turned brown, and Josiah could see an outer ring of debris circling it. Some awful large objects in that outer ring. All around him the air hummed with a mighty locomotive’s roar.

Danny was right, he thought, damn things really do sound just like a train.

He could see the spot where the cloud was likely to cross the road, and he knew that if he made it there first, he’d be fine, and Shaw, still trailing behind, would likely be dead. It was a teenage boy’s game, nothing more, a bit of that old chicken run. Wasn’t nobody else had Josiah’s nerves in the game back then, and wasn’t nobody else who had them now. He eyed the likely intersection between storm and road and put the full weight of his right leg into the gas pedal, heard the overextended six-cylinder moaning.

You make it through, boy, you are home free. That storm will block everybody trying to come at you from the east, don’t you see? The road will be yours. Just got to make it, just got to show the strength and will, keep those hands steady on the wheel and the foot heavy on the gas…

He was right alongside it now, and when he chanced a final glance up at the rearview, he saw Eric Shaw was falling back. Slowing down, afraid to take this run.

“We knew that,” he said. “He don’t have the strength of will, does he, Campbell? Man doesn’t have what we have.”

The truck was at eighty-five now and no more than two hundred feet from clear of the storm. The driver’s window clouded over with brown dust and then the windshield was covered, too, and Josiah couldn’t see a damn thing but that didn’t matter, because he knew the other side would be clear. He let out a howl of pure pleasure and bent over the wheel, knowing that he’d made it. Wasn’t another man alive would have taken this drive, but he’d not only taken it, he’d made it.

That taste of pure victory was the last thing he knew in the instant before the truck began to slide to the left, and he had time for just one more thought, a final, unspoken question: Why am I moving this way? This isn’t the way I wanted to go…

This tornado didn’t have the funnel shape of that first one, looked like an angry white whip, and Eric could not believe it when he saw the pickup turn left and head directly toward it.

“What are you doing?” Eric said. “What are you doing, you crazy bastard?”

The Ranger was accelerating, speeding into the storm, which was now almost to the road. Eric blew through the stop sign and swung left as well, sped up for a moment, and then saw what would happen and let his foot off the gas pedal, saying, “Don’t let it, no, don’t let it…”

The cloud crossed the field and met the road and enveloped Josiah Bradford’s truck. For one instant, there was nothing but the cloud, and Eric had time to form a they-can-survive-this hope and then the truck exploded.

The blast was muted by the roar of the storm, but even so, Eric heard it and felt it. The whole car shook and the pavement vibrated beneath its wheels and a burst of orange flame showed itself in the center of the cloud. The wind took the heat and sucked it upward, the flame climbing the center of the white rope into the sky like it was a fuse dangling from the heavens. Then the cloud was past and the flame within it was gone and Eric could see the truck again.

It was upside down on the side of the road, at least forty feet from where it had met the funnel cloud. The roof supports had caved in and it rested flat on the ground, the white paint blistered off to reveal charred metal beneath. Flames crackled across the chassis and licked out of the cab.

Eric couldn’t scream. He stared at the burning wreck and wanted to scream but could not. His jaw worked and his breath came almost against the will of his body, but he was silent. He was hardly aware that his car was being dragged until he felt the right wheels slip off the road, and then he realized the storm had been pulling him toward it. Then it was too far away and its grip loosened and left the car sitting half on the road.

He fumbled the driver’s door open and got out and ran to the truck. A light rain had started to fall again, a sprinkle that had not the slightest effect on the flames. He got within fifteen feet before the heat drove him back, and he heard himself sobbing now, looking down at the smoldering metal.

No one could have survived it.

He stood there for a long time, with his hands held up to shield his face from the heat. The flame roared and crackled and then burned down, and there seemed to be nothing left of the cab at all. He stepped closer and saw a thin rod of white amidst all the black char, knew it was bone, and fell to his knees and vomited in the grass.

He was down there on his hands and his knees when he heard the voice. Not the scream from Claire that he’d been fearing, but a whisper that now felt familiar.

You brought me home. Been a long time coming. Too many years I was gone. But you brought me home.

He jerked up and stared at the smoldering truck and saw nothing inside, just all that ash and heat and thin black smoke, and then his eyes rose and he saw Campbell Bradford standing just beyond, close enough to the truck that he could touch it but unaffected by the flames.

Think that would kill me? You don’t understand the first thing about me, about what I am. I’m strong here, stronger than you can believe, stronger than you can stop. I don’t die. Not like your wife.

Eric staggered backward, up to the road. Campbell smiled and ducked his head and then crawled through the burning cab and out onto the other side, following. Eric turned and ran.

There was another car parked beside the Oldsmobile now. A heavyset guy in an Indianapolis Colts baseball cap was climbing down out of a large Chevy truck.

“Buddy, you okay? Shit, did that tornado get it? Man, there ain’t nothing left of it, is there. You see what happened? Was anyone inside?”

Eric stumbled past him and around the open door of Danny Hastings’s Oldsmobile and got into the driver’s seat. The guy was following him, and over his shoulder, Campbell Bradford walked leisurely down the road.

“Buddy… you need to wait for help. I’ve called the fire department. You can’t drive, man, not after something like this.”

Eric slammed the door and put the car in reverse and backed up, feeling the jar when the right-side wheels popped back onto the surface of the road. He kept it in reverse as the heavyset guy closed in and Campbell Bradford walked toward them in the middle of the road. The stranger was talking and just a few feet away, but now Eric couldn’t hear his voice. He could only hear Campbell’s.

She’s dead, and I’m still here. Forever. Thought you could control me, contain me, defeat me? She’s dead and I’m still here.

Eric backed up all the way to the intersection beside Wesley Chapel. The old white church was still standing, oblivious to the two tornadoes that had snaked through on either side of it today. He cut the wheel then and swung the front of the car around so it was pointing south. He looked in the rearview mirror as he accelerated down the road and saw Campbell just behind, strolling along but somehow keeping pace with the car. Eric dropped his eyes and hit the gas pedal, tore up the road. Ahead he could see police lights flashing, maybe a half mile away. He ignored them and banged a left turn back into the gravel lane, drove all the way to the end, and parked the car beside its dead owner’s body. He got out and leaned over and placed the keys in the dead man’s hand. This time he did not recoil at the touch or the sight of the wound.

You’ve left people dead all over today, haven’t you? Campbell said. He was no more than five feet behind Eric now. How many have died today? I can hardly keep the tally. We’ve got this one, Josiah, your wife…

There were flashing lights through the trees now, back toward the road, and a police car blew past and continued on toward the wrecked Ford Ranger. Eric watched it go, and the lights set off a blinding pain in his skull, a single burst like all of the headaches of the past days combined into one extravagant stroke of agony. He gasped and dropped to his knees in the wet, bloody grass.

So many dead people, Campbell said. So many. But guess what? You’re still here, and so am I. So am I.

Eric looked up at him, into the horrible shadowed face beneath the bowler hat, and thought, He is right. The blood is on me, Claire’s is, at least. She came for me, came to help me, to save me, and I left her behind. Went out into the storm in search of that spring and left her behind.

It was all gone now, everything he’d ever needed and loved was lost because he was too selfish, too stupid, to know what he needed or how to love.

Only Campbell remained with him now.

The muscle tremors in his hands had worked into his forearms, and his left eyelid was fluttering constantly. His skull ached as if someone were piping in additional air pressure; it was hard to walk in a straight line once he got back to his feet and pointed toward the trail, Campbell following him with a strange whispering laugh.

The hell with it—let him follow. All that mattered had been lost; all that was left did not matter.

Eric walked on for the gulf.

61

ERIC WENT LEFT INSTEAD of right at the first fork in the trail, ignoring the path that would have taken him down to Kellen and walking instead along the top of the ridge. Soon he left the trail entirely and climbed down into the trees, went out right to the precipice and looked down.

The gulf still swirled. It was higher now than it had been, still climbing those cliff walls. He could hear a churning sound and saw that on the low end it had crested the hill and begun to pour into the dry channel. He could not see Kellen, but that was a good thing. He’d probably climbed farther away, into a safe place.

The truly dark clouds had moved away, passing to the northeast, and the sky now was a winter gray with a light rain falling from it. Eric worked along the rock rim, using trees to keep his balance as he moved toward the far end of the gulf, where the cliff walls were highest.

He circled around to the back, and now he could see Kellen. He wasn’t far from where Eric had left him, maybe five feet back. The water wasn’t near him yet, though. He was on his back with his hands pressed over his eyes, and he didn’t see Eric.

From where Eric stood right now, at the top of the cliff edge above the gulf, there was nothing but trees and farmland to his back and nothing ahead but open air and a damn long drop. He hung on to the trunk of a thin tree that had somehow survived the ravaging that had claimed so many of its bigger, stronger peers, and stared down into the swirling water. Such a bizarre shade… that water belonged somewhere deep in South America, not rising out of an Indiana sinkhole.

You’ve given up, Campbell said. You aren’t strong enough to go on. Not strong enough to face me, even. I can give you strength. I can purge everything you lost and replace it with the strength you don’t have. All you have to do is listen.

Someone was calling his name, the sound barely audible over Campbell’s whispered promises. Eric heard that and realized that Kellen must have seen him, and that was no good because he didn’t want to be delayed or distracted. Did not want, certainly, to be stopped. He didn’t allow himself to look for Kellen; he focused instead on that whirlpool of blue-green water and the ghostly white limbs that protruded from it at all angles.

Last words. That was what the moment called for, and they should matter—it was the end of the final act, and the last words counted then. It was all you left the audience with. He had none.

I can turn your pain into strength, your loss into power. Don’t you want that? All that’s required of you is an ability to take instruction.

He heard his name again, louder this time, and he stepped forward so he could see over the edge and down to the rock wall below. When he moved, a loose stone pushed over the edge and fell. It swung back in against the cliff, hit the rock wall, and broke into two pieces and then tumbled into the water. Better remember that, make sure he got a strong enough push to carry him clear.

Last words. Give ’em something, buddy.

“I’m sorry,” he said, in a voice so soft no one else could have possibly heard it, and then he stepped to the edge and spread his arms wide, bent once at the knees and closed his eyes and pushed. Pushed hard, a good, powerful jump that sent him into the air and over the cliff and then he was falling toward the water below. He twisted as he fell and the world spun around him and he could see Campbell Bradford standing atop the cliff. Beneath the bowler hat, his face looked almost sad.

He heard his name called once more as he fell, and this time, tumbling through the air, he was almost certain it was Claire’s voice. How beautiful, he thought, that he could hear her voice one last time. She was waiting for him.

The last thing he felt was the shock of cold.

Anne was close to tears after the dispatcher cut her off from Roger Brewer of the Indiana State Police.

A body in the road. He’d dumped a body in the road.

It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t right. Anne had been trying to help, trying so hard to play out this role that she had always believed she would have. And they’d been close. They’d been so close…

It was a full five minutes before the dispatcher made contact again to tell Anne that Brewer had recovered the hostage, who was alive but injured, appearing to have suffered a broken arm or collarbone or something. Anne could hardly follow those words. The woman was alive. She was out of that truck, and she was alive. How terrible things might have turned if she were dead. It could have become an absolutely tragic day.

“It seems someone else was killed, though,” the dispatcher said. “There’s a lot of confusion out there. We’re sending more officers to the scene. You did well, Mrs. McKinney. Thank you.”

“What about Josiah?”

“Detective Brewer had to stop pursuit when he saw the woman in the road, but there are reports that his truck was destroyed by a tornado just to the north of that spot. That appears to be accurate. Now, Mrs. McKinney, I’ve got to deal with my officers. I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Anne said. And it was. She was desperate for updates, but the dispatcher was overwhelmed and she knew she had to be silent for a while. Silent and patient. They’d give her the news eventually, and they’d remember to send someone down here to get her out of the basement. There was no rush on such things. She’d done what she could.

She looked at the old ham radio and felt tears crest in her eyes. How she wished Harold could have known the role it had played today. The role she had played today.

Her only regret was that she hadn’t seen the storms. So long she had waited to see a tornado. She was afraid of tornadoes, yes, but always in awe. Captivated by what they were and what they could do. She’d read so much about them, studied them so carefully, and still she’d never seen one. Now four had blown through the valley in under an hour and all she’d gotten to see of them was that first trailing wall cloud.

That was all right, though. People had been saved today. Josiah Bradford was apparently dead, and that was tragic in its own way because she knew that something had been in the boy’s head today that wasn’t right. But he’d died alone, without taking any innocents with him, without striking at her beloved hotel as he’d threatened. That hotel was beauty that had outlasted darkness and sorrow, and she’d been determined to do whatever she could to protect it.

A storm spotter, that’s what she was. Ever vigilant, determined to spot the warning signs and relay them in enough time to help the people in this valley. Well, she’d certainly done that today. It wasn’t the sort of storm she’d envisioned, but she’d gotten the chance to help that she always knew she would. For so many years she’d watched the skies and waited with quiet assurance that she would be needed.

Today she had been.

It felt good.

Around the area, storm reports were still coming in, but it looked as if the tornado that had struck just west of Wesley Chapel would be the last of the cluster outbreak. That put it at four total, not a staggering number for such a storm, but not insignificant either. They’d be clearing up damage for a long time to come. She hadn’t heard of any deaths yet besides Josiah’s, and that was good. You could put buildings back up. Couldn’t restore a life.

She might have dozed a little at the desk. Must have slipped off for just a minute. The sound was what woke her—a hum that seemed to be growing louder, getting closer.

She turned in her chair and looked up at the little windows mounted at the top of the western wall and was shocked to realize that she could see through them. Always before they’d been useless to her except to filter in a tiny bit of sunlight; they were no more than ten inches tall, placed right at ground level, and made of thick block glass. Somehow, from this angle, they offered a perfect look toward the west. She could see the fields rolling away downhill, and at the horizon a band of dark clouds.

The humming increased to a roar, and something white descended from the dark clouds, and Anne realized with utter astonishment that she was facing a tornado.

First things first—the radio. Do your job, Annabelle. Do your job.

She made a dispatch, curt and to the point—gave her coordinates and said a funnel cloud was on the ground, moving north-northeast. Several of the spotters fired off responses, asking if she was safe, urging her to get as far from the exterior walls as possible. She said thank you and then turned the radio off and rose from her chair.

The cloud seemed to have held almost stationary while she completed the dispatch. Now that she turned back, it was moving again, as if it had been waiting for her.

She got to her feet, thinking that she wanted to walk over to the windows and see if she could get a closer look. The walls of the house were trembling now, and when she walked past the base of the steps, she saw a shaft of light fall across her feet and looked up to see that the door was open. The shaking of the house had evidently knocked away whatever Josiah Bradford had placed as an obstacle up there.

Safest place to be was in the basement, of course, but suddenly that didn’t seem to matter. She wanted to see this storm. She’d been waiting so long to see one, and it was fitting that on a day like today, when she’d finally been able to play the role she always knew was hers, she would have the opportunity. It felt like a gift, almost, like this one was intended just for her.

She took the steps slowly at first, hand on the railing, but halfway up she realized how firm and strong her stride was. Her legs hadn’t felt this way in years. She dropped her hand from the railing.

Up in the living room she turned and looked out the wide picture window. The cloud was closer now, and she could see its movement clearly, the fascinating swirling layers. Everything in the lower portion was pure white, the kind of white that hurt the eyes, like sun on a snow-covered field.

She had a notion that it would be easier to see it from outside. There was an odd sense of celebration to the storm’s arrival, and she wanted a toast. Her memory must be slipping; though she didn’t remember having had booze in the house in years, there was a bottle of gin on the counter. Tanqueray, her favorite. A glass with ice beside it, with a sliced lime already positioned on its rim.

She poured the gin and tonic into the glass, sure somehow that there was no rush, that the storm would wait for her. She squeezed the lime into the drink and lifted it to her lips, took a few swallows.

Delicious. You could never get too old for a taste like that.

She set the glass down, licked her lips, and walked to the front door. There was not so much as a twinge in her knees or hips, and her back felt strong and supple, ready for heavy lifting. In fact, her walk felt supple, felt like the old head-turning walk of her youth. She hadn’t forgotten how to move.

She’d left a pair of heels beside the door, beautiful black heels that she hadn’t seen in years. What they were doing down here, she didn’t know, but given how steady her legs were this afternoon, she’d rather have them on than those silly white tennis shoes.

Off with the tennis shoes and on with the heels, then out the door and onto the porch. Down the steps and into the yard, and then she turned to the left and walked past the house and toward the empty field beyond. All around her the clouds were dark but the funnel remained white. Odd, because it should have been picking up debris by now, lots of it, absorbing the dirt to change into that fierce gray you always saw in the photographs.

It roared just as she’d known it would—the sound of a train. It wasn’t a frightening sound, though. Familiar, really. Took her mind back to other places. Why, it sounded just like the old Monon, the train of her youth.

She walked to the edge of the yard and waited for it, and she couldn’t keep the smile off her face now or the tears off her cheeks. Silly, to stand here and cry as she faced it, but the cloud was just so beautiful. There was magic here, and she’d been allowed to see it.

What more could you ask?

62

CAMPBELL STOOD WITH A lantern in his hand and Shadrach Hunter at his side as the rain poured down around them. The boy worked in a shallow ditch below them, pulling aside broken slabs of limestone.

“See there!” Campbell shouted. “There it is, Shadrach. The spring, just as I promised.”

The lantern light cast a white glow on the shallow, softly bubbling pool that was exposed as the boy removed the rocks. When Campbell held the lantern directly over the top of it, the pool seemed to absorb the light and hide it.

“Boy, get him a bottle of it.”

The boy took a green glass bottle from his coat pocket. He removed the stopper and held it upside down so Shadrach could see that it was empty, and then he knelt and dipped the bottle into the pool. When it was full, he straightened and handed it to Shadrach, who took a drink.

“You tell me,” Campbell said.

“Tastes like honey,” Shadrach Hunter said. His deep voice sounded uneasy. “Like liquid sugar.”

“I know it. This is what the boy’s uncle put into that liquor, and there ain’t never been any other liquor like it. You know that, Shadrach. You know that.”

“Yes,” Shadrach said and returned the bottle to the boy.

Campbell grinned, then shoved the boy with his free hand and said, “Cover it.”

The boy went back down into the ditch and replaced the stones. When he was done, the water could no longer be seen, and scarcely heard.

“Well, there you go,” Campbell said, switching the lantern from one hand to the other. It hissed when rain hit the glass. “You said you wouldn’t give me a dime unless you saw the spot, knew that it was real. You seen it now, haven’t you? It’s real enough.”

“It is, yes.”

Campbell tilted his head back, his face lost to the shadows. “Well, then. My part of the bargain is complete. Yours is not.”

Shadrach shifted, brought a hand out of his coat pocket and wiped it across his face, clearing some of the moisture away.

“Let’s bargain while we walk,” he said. “I want to get out of this rain.”

He started away from the spring without giving Campbell a chance to argue. There was a hill leading away from the spring, and as he walked up it, Campbell and the boy fell in behind him. They walked into the woods.

“What’s your plan?” Shadrach said.

“My plan? You know what it is! There’s a fortune sitting here, a fortune pooling out of the rocks. That old man never made more than a dozen jugs of whiskey at a time. He was a fool. Lacked the ambition to see what could be gained from this, the fortune that was waiting. Well, the boy knows how to make the liquor, too.”

“So you intend to… expand.” Shadrach had his face turned away from Campbell, walking through the woods with a brisk stride.

“Expand?” Campbell stared at Shadrach as if he’d spoken in Greek. “Hell, that’s too soft a word. I’m going to make more money than anybody in this valley ever dreamed of. I’ve got contacts in Chicago—Capone and all the rest of them. The network is there. All we need to do is handle the supply.”

“And you want me as an investor.”

“That’s all you need to be. You’ll get your share returned tenfold by the end of the year. Believe that.”

“Why me?” They’d crested the hill now and were walking along the spine of a wooded ridge. Campbell was on the left, closest to the brink.

“Hell, boy, everybody else is busted! You ain’t figured that out yet? You’re the last man left in the valley with dollars to his name.”

Shadrach Hunter smiled. “You want to see my dollars?”

“I’d like to utilize them, yes.”

Hunter stopped walking. He reached in his jacket and removed a silver money clip. Peeled the bills off and counted them. Fourteen bills—all ones.

“There you go,” he said, replacing the money in the clip and offering it to Campbell. “That’s my stockpile, Bradford.”

Campbell looked at him in disbelief. “What in the hell is the matter with you? I always heard you was cagey smart for a colored. Ruthless. You think I’m making a joke here? There’s a fortune to be made!”

“I believe you,” Shadrach Hunter said. “But I don’t have any money. That’s what I got—fourteen dollars.”

“Bullshit.”

Hunter shrugged and put the money clip back into his pocket. “Ain’t no shit but true shit, Bradford.”

“Everyone knows you been skimming for years. Just sticking it away somewhere. A damned miser, that’s what you are.”

“No, that’s what the gossiping old fools in this valley say I am. Truth is different.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Don’t have to, but refusing to believe ain’t going to line your pockets with dollars that I simply do not have.”

It was silent for a while. Then Campbell said, “You could have told me that days ago, you son of a bitch.”

“Wasn’t going to see the spring if I did that, was I? I wanted to know if there was anything to your talk. Now, look here, we can work on this. Find a way to raise a stake. I’ve tasted that liquor, and I believe what you say—there’s gold to be made from it. I just don’t have the cash you need. But I’ll work with you to see if—”

“Now you know where it is,” Campbell said. His voice had dropped in volume and darkened in tone. He’d turned to face Hunter, and his back was to the drop-off of the ridge now, no more than a few steps away. “You played me for a fool, got me to show you where it is.”

“Yes, and now that I know it’s real, we can try and figure out a way to raise—”

Campbell had to move the lantern again to go for his gun. He’d been holding the lantern in his right hand and he clearly didn’t like to shoot with his left, because he switched the lantern before he drew the weapon. That gave Shadrach Hunter enough time to see what was coming, and he actually fired first.

He shot through his coat pocket, and the gun was caught pointing down. The first bullet drilled Campbell square in the knee and dropped him, and the second went through his left side. Campbell finally cleared his gun then and returned fire from the ground, one shot that caught Shadrach Hunter in the forehead.

Hunter was dead by the time he hit the ground. Campbell’s mistake was in trying to stand. He lurched up but his wounded right leg collapsed beneath him. He gave a howl of pain and then fell backward, hit the ground, and rolled. The gun came free from his hand and then he slid over the lip of the ridge and there was a long rustling of leaves and a cry of pain.

“Damn it, boy, help me!”

The boy walked over to Shadrach Hunter and stared down at him. Then he leaned down and picked up Campbell’s weapon and walked to the crest of the ridge.

“Boy! Get down here and help me!”

The boy wrapped one hand around a thin sapling and leaned out over the edge. Campbell had slid all the way down the slope and into the edge of a wide pool of water, was in water up to his chest. He had one hand wrapped around a hanging root, and now he grunted and tried to heave himself up out of the pool. He couldn’t make it. He slid back down into the water and only the hand on the root kept him from going under. His efforts had placed him only deeper in the pool.

“You got one chance to get down here and help me, boy. You waste another second and they’ll be picking you up in pieces for weeks to come. You hear me?”

The boy didn’t speak. He sat down on the top of the ridge and watched silently. The rain was still pouring down, and the water in the pool was rising and spinning. Campbell’s grip on the root loosened as the water tried to pull him away, but he caught hold again and splashed, fighting for his life.

“Get down here, boy. Get your worthless ass down here unless you want to end up like your uncle.”

Campbell’s voice was fading. His face was stark white. The boy remained silent.

“You don’t understand what you’re tangling with,” Campbell said. “You should by now. You been around me long enough to get a sense. You think I’m just another man? That what you think? I’ve got power you can’t even fathom, boy. This valley’s given it to me. You think you’ll be safe from me if I drown out here? You’re full of shit. There ain’t no hiding from me.”

The boy dragged the lantern closer to him. He held the pistol in both hands.

Campbell gave a howl of fury and tried once again to pull himself out of the water. This time the root tore, almost pulling free completely, and Campbell was submerged for a moment before he tugged himself high enough to get his face clear.

“You’re going to let me drown,” he cried. “You’re going to let me die!”

The boy didn’t answer.

“I’ll have you in the end,” Campbell said in a voice so soft it was hard to hear over the rain. “You will feel my fury, boy, everyone in this whole damn valley will. You think you’re safe if I’m dead? Boy, I promise you this—ain’t nobody safe from me unless they carry both my name and my blood. You understand that? Only my family will be spared, you little bastard. And you ain’t family. I’ll come for you. That’s a vow. I will come for you and anyone else who doesn’t share my blood and my name.”

The dangling root tore free. Campbell gave a harsh cry of surprise and pain, and then he slipped backward and was lost to the water. When he surfaced again, he was upside down and motionless. The boy sat and stared at him. After a while, he picked up a few sticks and threw them at the body. There was no response.

He stood and picked his way carefully down the ridge and out to the edge of the pool. Then he set the lantern down, took off his jacket and shoes and rolled his pants up above his knees, removed the green glass bottle from his pocket, and waded into the water with it in his hand.

Campbell continued to float facedown, thumping against the stone that surrounded the pool. The boy reached him and turned him over, exposed his white face. The eyes were still open.

He looked at the dead man’s face for a moment, and then he shifted the body and found the wound on Campbell’s left side. He pressed the bottle into the wound and watched as blood leaked out of him and joined the spring water that was already inside the bottle. He squeezed out blood until the bottle was full of the mixture, and then he took it away and fastened the stopper.

When the bottle was back in his pocket, the boy grasped Campbell’s shoulders and began to tug him through the water. He waded along the southern rock wall, waist deep, moving carefully. Here the lantern light was dim. He stopped moving at a point where water gurgled between rocks, slipping out of the pool and back below ground. He tried to push Campbell into the dark gap, but the dead man’s shoulders snagged and held. The boy turned him slowly, rotating him in the water, and slid him in feet-first. He went in more easily this time, up to the waist, and then the boy placed his hands above both shoulders and shoved hard, grunting with effort. The body hung up for a moment, but then the water rose up and slapped against the stone and pushed the corpse out of sight beneath the earth.

He waded back to shore and put on his shoes and jacket. He checked the bottle and placed it gingerly back in his pocket. He then took the lantern and the pistol, climbed the hill again and returned to Shadrach Hunter’s body, and knelt and removed the money clip with the fourteen dollars and put it in his pocket.

He rose again, with the lantern in one hand and the pistol in the other, and walked on into the dark woods. A train whistle was shrilling out over the hills. He walked toward the sound.

The lantern’s glow turned smaller and continued to fade until it was barely visible in the shadows, and there was nothing but darkness and the sound of rushing water. Then the lantern began to grow larger and brighter, as if the boy had stopped somewhere out in the woods and decided to return. The light grew and grew until the dark woods melted away entirely and there was nothing but that gleaming, flickering light and…

Sky.

Gray sky.

And a voice.

Claire’s voice.

EPILOGUE

These are the things he remembers. The lantern coming back through the dark woods, the warm flickering light, the gray sky, Claire’s voice.

He is told that he shouldn’t be able to remember a thing. That he had been under the water for fifteen minutes before they got him out.

He learns new terms in the hospital: apneic, which means not breathing; cyanotic, which means displaying a bluish discoloration; PEA, or pulseless electrical activity, which means an electrocardiogram test records some heart function although there is no pulse. The heart still lives, in other words, but it is incapable of completing its job.

These are the terms that were applied to him once he was in the ambulance.

Kellen was the first one in the water. He watched Eric leap, saw where he entered, splitting the water directly between two downed trees that could have impaled him. Kellen marked the spot, but with an ankle broken in two places, he couldn’t make his way down to the water quickly enough, and the body had disappeared.

One thing Eric definitely did not imagine—Claire’s voice on his downward plunge. She was coming down the trail with Detective Roger Brewer in tow. She’d forced the detective to go with her to the last place she’d seen him, stretched out there on the trail, and upon finding him missing, began to shout for him. Kellen heard the shouting. Kellen shouted back.

Brewer entered the water while Claire—with a dislocated shoulder and broken collarbone from her landing on the pavement after Josiah Bradford shoved her from his truck—stood on the bank and shouted at every ripple in the water and shadow over it, thinking they all might be Eric.

The way they all tell it now, Eric just floated up from the depths. Surfaced in the middle of the swirling pool, facedown. Like the Lost River had him, and then decided to give him back.

Brewer and Kellen brought him out. The detective began CPR, then turned it over to Claire and went for his radio when he could not get a response. Claire succeeded in getting a few wet, wheezing coughs.

They could not restore spontaneous breathing or a pulse.

In the ambulance, the electrocardiogram registered a bradycardic—unusually slow—heart rate. Thirty-seven beats per minute. There was still no palpable pulse. The heart’s electrical system was functioning, but the mechanical pumping system was not. The paramedics applied a ventilator to assist with breathing and then administered epinephrine. One minute later, Eric’s heart rate was up to one hundred beats per minute, and a pulse appeared at the carotid artery.

He was driven to Bloomington Hospital at speeds averaging ninety miles an hour, and there he was placed on a different ventilator, and steps were taken to warm his core temperature. Claire was with him for the ride and believed that he would be pronounced dead on arrival, that the epinephrine-induced heartbeat was nothing more than a tease.

It was not a tease. Within an hour of his arrival, his heart was functioning normally, and three hours after that, the lungs were deemed capable of unassisted breathing.

They kept him in the hospital for another twenty-four hours. Monitoring, they said, and there were other tasks to be done—putting stitches in his scalp, setting Claire’s collarbone, outfitting her with a sling, treating Kellen’s shattered ankle.

He does not remember anything of the ambulance ride, or much of his early hours in the hospital. At some point he grows clear-headed again, and soon the police are with him, statements being taken. Claire and Kellen have already offered theirs, and she is in the room with him now. He cannot take his eyes off her. He looks at her and he sees the pickup truck again, the melting, twisted metal and the flash of white bone amid ashes.

I thought you were dead, he tells her.

Likewise, she says.

She believes that Josiah hoped to kill her when he pushed her out of the truck. He had the shotgun in his lap but did not fire it, maybe because he couldn’t do that and control the vehicle, maybe because he was afraid of igniting the dynamite in the bed of the truck. Whatever the reason, he settled for shoving her out onto the road, and Brewer crashed into a fence trying to avoid her.

What were you thinking when you jumped into the water? she asks him. How could you let yourself do that?

You were gone, he answers. It does not seem enough for her; it remains more than enough for him. She was gone, and Campbell remained. Now she is here, and Campbell is gone.

He can hardly believe it. He can hardly trust it.

It isn’t until late that evening that they hear the news about Anne McKinney. When Detective Brewer shares it in a low, flat voice, Claire weeps and Eric leans his head back and closes his eyes.

Looks like it was fast, and painless, Brewer says. That’s something. Old as she was, it was just too much stress. Shouldn’t be surprising that she had a heart attack; it’s surprising that it happened then, after everything was pretty well resolved.

She saved me, Claire says. Saved us.

Yes, ma’am.

No one even got her out of that basement? She must have been terrified. She must have been so scared.

Brewer doesn’t know about that. Says Anne was on the radio with the dispatcher and sounded solid. Then there was a bit of weirdness right before the end.

Weirdness?

She reported a tornado sighting, Brewer explains. That was the last thing she said. Apparently she thought there was one right outside. But of course she was still down in the basement, couldn’t see a thing.

So she scared herself to death, Claire says.

Brewer spreads his hands and says that he can’t answer that. All he knows is that they said she sounded fine when she made the report. Real composed. Relaxed, even. She was still in the chair in front of the radio when the police got there.

Eric, listening to all this with his eyes closed, is saddened but believes that Claire’s worries are unnecessary. Anne was ready for the storm, real or imagined. She wouldn’t have been terrified by it. She’d have been ready.

That evening, with Josiah Bradford confirmed dead, Lucas Bradford makes an official statement to the police, explaining the reason he hired Gavin Murray. Seems his father, the recently deceased Campbell Bradford, had written an odd letter just before his passing. In the letter, he took credit for the death of a man of the same name in 1929. He did not murder him, he wrote, not exactly, but he did nothing to help him either. He let the man drown and felt that it was the right thing to do. He was saving not only himself but others. The man, he wrote, was evil.

He identified his fortune as having been built on fourteen dollars removed from a dead man’s money clip, all that he had when he hopped a Monon freight train and rode to Chicago. While he felt no guilt over letting Campbell drown, he felt plenty for the widow and orphaned son left behind to suffer both poverty and Campbell’s legacy. But he was afraid. For so many years, he was afraid of so many things.

Along with the letter was a revised will—Campbell had designated half of his substantial wealth to be split among any direct descendants of the man he’d let drown. He knew only that there was a son. The rest would have to be tracked down. It was important, he wrote, that he look after the family. That was very important.

Josiah Bradford, the only direct descendant of the Campbell Bradford who had drowned in the Lost River, had been dead for fifteen hours before this was revealed.

The letter made no mention of an odd green glass bottle, or of the reason the old man had for taking Campbell’s name as his own.

Eric lets everyone wonder about this. He does not tell them about Campbell’s final threat, that anyone who did not share his blood and his name would feel his wrath.

Claire urges him to tell the doctors about his addiction to the mineral water and the ravaging effects it may have on his body. He tells her this is unnecessary. It is done, he says. It is over.

She asks how he can know this, and it is difficult to answer.

Just trust me, he says. I’m sure.

And he is. Because the water gave him back. His heart had stopped, his breathing had stopped. Those things began anew. He began anew. The old plagues will not return for him.

He returns to Chicago for two weeks before he can convince Claire to go back to the valley with him. He has a purpose there, he explains, and for the first time he understands it. There’s a story that needs to be told—so many stories, really—and he can be a part of that. A documentary, though, a historical portrait of this place in a different time. It will not be the sort of thing that makes it to the theaters, but it is an important story, and he believes the film can be successful in a modest way.

She asks him if he will write the script, and he says he will not. That isn’t his role. He’s an image guy, he explains, he can see things that need to be included in the story but he cannot tell its whole. He wonders if her father would be interested in writing it. His name could help secure some interest. She suspects that he would.

Kellen meets them in the hotel, his foot encased in an Aircast, crutches by his side. He says he has a green glass bottle to return to Eric but left it in Bloomington. He didn’t think it should be brought back to this place. Eric agrees.

They eat a celebratory dinner in the ornate dining room of the beautiful old hotel, and Eric explains the documentary and asks Kellen if he would consider being part of it. Kellen is enthusiastic, but it’s obvious something else is on his mind. He doesn’t address it until Claire has gone to the restroom and left the two of them alone. Then he mentions the spring, the one from the visions, and asks Eric if he believes it is really out there.

Yes, Eric tells him. I know that it is.

Kellen asks if he will search for it.

He will not.

Do you think Campbell is gone? Kellen asks.

Eric thinks for a moment and then offers a quote from Anne McKinney—You can’t be sure what hides behind the wind.

Claire and Eric stay the night, make love in the same room, and then she sleeps and he lies awake and stares into the dark and waits for voices. There are none. Beneath him, the hotel is peaceful. Outside, a gentle wind begins to blow.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The idea for this story came wholly from the place itself. The towns of French Lick and West Baden are very real, as is the astounding West Baden Springs Hotel, as is the even more astounding Lost River. I grew up not far north of these places and saw the West Baden hotel when I was a child and it was little more than a ruin. It was a moment and a memory that lingered, and over the years, I continued to learn about the place and its remarkable history. In 2007, when I saw the restoration of the West Baden Springs Hotel near completion, I felt the storyteller’s compulsion revving to a high pitch. This book is the result, and because the places and the history are important to me, I’ve tried to present them accurately whenever possible. Still, this is a work of fiction, and I’ve taken some liberties—and no doubt made some mistakes.