So Cold the River (2010) (12 page)

Temper, temper, temper. You have to watch your temper.

The moment it had started to go south with them was crystallized in his memory. Eric had come to the production company office
for a meeting with Vassar and two of the producers.
They’d been sitting in a room that looked out onto Wilshire, and Vassar made the three of them wait on him for twenty minutes.
There was a glass-topped coffee table in the middle of the room, and when he finally swaggered in, he plunked himself down
in one of the black leather chairs and put his feet up on the table. Banged the heels of his shoes down on the glass with
an unnecessarily loud flourish. The message: I’m a Big Fucking Deal.

They’d talked for nearly an hour, and Eric still couldn’t remember what had been said. He was an image guy, and that image—Vassar’s
shining black shoes on that glass tabletop—wouldn’t leave his mind. He stared at those shoes and listened and watched the
producers cowering and sniveling with Vassar and thought,
This is bullshit. They’re listening to you because of your damn name, not talent. Because you caught some breaks and rode
somebody else’s phenomenal acting performance into an Oscar nomination. You don’t even see this story; you don’t have the
first damn clue how it should be told. I do. I should be directing this, not you, but I don’t have the name. And so I have
to sit here and watch you put your shoes up on somebody else’s table and mouth off while looking at your BlackBerry every
two minutes to remind us all how important you are.

He’d made it out of that meeting peacefully. He didn’t make it out of the film the same way.

“And this,” Eric said aloud, “is how you ended up in Indiana. Well done.”

He could shake the memory off for the morning, but not the headache. Food might help, or some black coffee at least, so he
left the room and walked down the steps and out into the atrium again. Made it only twenty paces across before the light shining
in through the dome brought him to a halt, and he turned on his heel, gritting his teeth, and retreated to the darker corridor
that
circled the atrium. Found his way to one of the dining rooms, took a table, and ordered an omelet and coffee. Hurry on the
coffee, please.

He drank two cups and felt no effect, picked at the omelet and got maybe three bites down before giving up, tossing cash on
the table, and returning to his room. This was bad. Headaches like this one, so sudden, so blinding in their pain… they were
harbingers. Eric knew enough to understand that, and the possibilities chilled him. Brain tumor, blood clot, cancer. Aneurisms
and strokes and heart attacks.

Time to call Dr. Sharp in Chicago. That was all there was to it.

He called from his cell phone. Only when he reached the robotic-voiced menu did he remember that it was a Saturday, and therefore
getting the good Dr. Sharp on the line was going to be impossible. His office was closed weekends, and the monotone message
suggested Eric visit the emergency room if his condition was serious.

It felt awfully serious to him, but it was also only a headache. You didn’t walk into an emergency room with one of those.
And where was a hospital around here anyhow?

He wasn’t sure if he looked at the Pluto Water because he thought of it, or if he thought of it because he looked at it. The
chain of logic wasn’t clear, but somehow he found himself staring at the bottle on the desk and thinking,
Why the hell not?
It was supposed to cure headaches, wasn’t it? He was sure he’d seen that on the lists of ailments the mineral water boasted
it could handle. Granted, damn near every other affliction of the early twentieth century had been on those lists, but the
stuff couldn’t have gotten its reputation by being a pure placebo. It had to help
some
problems.

He walked over to the desk and reached for the bottle but
stopped with his hand about six inches away, tilted his head, and stared at it. There was a glaze over the bottle now. It
looked almost like…

Frost. Son of a bitch, it was frost. He wiped some of it off with his thumb, found it just like wiping clear a streak on the
window on an early winter morning in Chicago.

“I’ve got to figure you out,” he said.

He wasn’t going to figure anything out if he had to hole up in this room, sitting on the floor and chewing Excedrin like they
were Skittles. So why not give the water a try?

He unfastened the cap and took a small, hesitant swallow.

Not bad. If anything, the sulfuric taste was down and more of the sugary flavor was present in its stead. He took a full swallow,
and the taste drove him on for another and then a third, the stuff going down like nectar now. It took a conscious effort
to stop, and when he lowered the bottle he saw that more than half of the contents were gone—the same liquid that had made
him gag back in Chicago at the smallest of tastes.

The flavor might have improved, but it had no effect. The headache pounded on, that motorcycle gang still circling through
town, racing one another.

Okay, the Pluto Water wasn’t going to do the job. Dumb idea, fine, but he was willing to try a dumb idea if it meant he could
go about his day.

He went back to the bed and stretched out on his stomach, slid his face under the pillows and held them to his head. Maybe
he
should
go to the hospital. Probably was crazy not to. If Claire were here, it wouldn’t even be an issue; they’d be driving these
rural highways right now, looking for the telltale blue-and-white sign. She was a worrier. Protective of him, too. Would defend
him to the end.

Well, almost to the end. She’d stuck with him through it all in
California, but once they were back in Chicago, back around her family and their judgmental whispers, her resolve had wavered.
The questions started then, asking him what came next, saying that it was fine if he needed out of the movie business but
what business was he going to find for the future, what would he do? He’d needed time, that was all, and she didn’t have enough
of it for him, evidently. Didn’t have enough…

His thoughts left Claire, and, very slowly, he removed the pillows and lifted his head. Cocked it to the side, as if he were
listening for something in the distance.

“It’s going away,” he said.

The damned headache was fading. Still present, but the biker gang was driving away now, heading uphill on the roads that led
out of town.

H
E DIDN’T TRUST IT
at first, maybe didn’t want to trust it. He went onto the balcony and sat overlooking the atrium for fifteen minutes as the
headache continued to fade and then was gone.
No,
he thought,
it can’t really be gone. You’ve just adapted to the light
.

So he went outside and walked the grounds for half an hour in the stark sunlight, waiting for the pain to return. It did not.
The Pluto Water had done the job, done it with astonishing speed and efficiency.

He had to find out what the hell was in that stuff. And, why, if it was so incredibly effective, had the product vanished
over the years? Did you build up a tolerance, or did it have unwelcome side effects? There had to be some problem, because
anything that could obliterate a migraine like that would’ve been raking in billions a year by now.

The Pluto Water research would be a priority for the day, he
decided as he walked back into the hotel and up to his room, feeling wonderful now, fit and energetic. But before he got to
that, he had to call Alyssa Bradford.

He called from the balcony, looking down on a group of high school students on a tour, a man with a country drawl filling
them in on the history of the hotel. Eric could catch pieces of his talk—“
The first West Baden hotel was destroyed by fire, and Lee Sinclair was bound and determined to replace it with something incredible….
They built this place in under a year, and that was in an era without modern construction equipment…. If you laid the glass
in that dome end-to-end you’d have a path sixteen inches wide and nearly three miles long”
—as he located Alyssa’s number and dialed.

“Well, Eric, what do you think?” she said. “Pretty amazing, isn’t it?”

“It absolutely is,” he said, and right now, free of headaches and troubling tricks of the mind, he was able to say that and
mean it again, to really feel happy to be here. “I’d seen pictures, but it still took my breath away. Because it just doesn’t
seem to fit.”

“It doesn’t! That place belongs in Austria, not Indiana. Have you had much luck finding out about my father-in-law?”

“Only that there’s some dispute over his age,” Eric said. “Any chance he’s really one hundred and sixteen?”

“What?” she said and laughed. “No, I don’t think there’s any chance of that. How did you arrive at that question?”

He told her about his first day in town—at least the research end of it. No need to enlighten her about the vanishing train
or the violins in his head. Professional reputation to uphold and all that. Hate to lose out on future wedding videos over
rumors of insanity.

“Campbell Bradford isn’t a common name,” she said. “The other one has to be a relative.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” Eric said, “but my contact here assures me that the Campbell he knew of ran out on his family
in nineteen twenty-nine. He left a son named William behind, but William stayed in town, and died in town.”

“I have no idea what to think of that,” she said, “only it can’t be my father-in-law. The age is too far off.”

“Right. Your father-in-law could have been a son this guy had after he left, but—”

“My father-in-law grew up in the town.”

“Yeah. As an aside, I might have found a cousin for you. But I don’t think he’s a guy you’ll be inviting to any family reunions.”

He told her about Josiah and the fight with Kellen Cage.

“I certainly hope he’s
not
family,” she said. “But if you find out he is some distant relative, let’s go ahead and leave him off the film.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t be asking him for any interviews.”

“Have you spent any time with the bottle yet?” Alyssa asked.

“Spent time with it?”

“Yes. Or, you know, tried to find anything out about it.”

“No,” Eric said slowly, “not yet.”

He’d spent some time with it, certainly, but that level of research wasn’t something he wanted to disclose.

“It seemed to upset him when I brought it to the hospital,” he said.

“What? You went to the hospital?”

“Yeah. I didn’t get your message until Thursday night. I went down to see him that evening, tried to talk with him. He got
upset when I showed him the bottle, so I left.”

There was a moment of silence and then she said, “Eric… the
doctors told us he hasn’t spoken a word since Monday. He hasn’t been able to communicate with family, and the doctors don’t
think he will. He’s very close to the end now. The mind is already gone, but the body is hanging on.”

“Well, he talked to me. Showed a little of that sense of humor, too, tried to play a trick on me.”

But even as he said it, he felt a cold shroud settle around him.

“A trick? I can’t believe that. And you have it on video?”

“Yes,” he said. Tried to say.

“What was that?”

“Yes,” he said. “I should have it on video.”

“That will be very special to us. I just can’t believe it. Thursday night, you said? That was three days after he stopped
speaking.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. “Hate to cut you off, Alyssa, but I’m going to have to go. I’ve got… one of my sources
is calling. So I’ll need to let you—”

“Of course, take it. Keep me updated, and enjoy your stay down there.”

“I’m going to try real hard to do that,” he said and disconnected. Below him the tour guide droned on. The kids in the group
looked to be around sixteen, the classic bored-with-everything age, yet they were quiet, staring around almost in awe. Eric
understood that. It was the kind of place that could grab your attention and hold it.

He stood up slowly and went into the room and got the camera out. It used miniature DVDs, and he’d put in a fresh one before
he set out on foot the previous day. The DVD he’d removed from the camera then had been the one from his visit to Campbell
Bradford. Now he took the West Baden DVD out and replaced it with the Bradford disc. He took a long, deep breath and looked
up at the ceiling.

“He talked, and it’s going to be on here,” he said. “It is going to be on here.”

He pressed play.

There was Campbell Bradford in the hospital bed. His face looked as Eric remembered—haggard, weary, fading. None of the spark
in his eyes yet, but that had taken a moment. Eric turned up the audio volume, heard his own voice.

You going to talk to me?

On the screen, Campbell Bradford blinked slowly and took a hissed breath.

Are you going to talk to me tonight?

This was where he’d responded, right? Eric had dropped his eye to the viewfinder after asking that question, and Bradford
had spoken for the first time.

But now as he watched, nothing happened. Bradford stayed silent. Okay, maybe Eric had the wrong spot. Maybe he’d talked for
a while before the old man embarked on his game.

His own voice continued:

Great. Where would you like to start? What would you like to tell me?

Oh, shit. He was responding to Bradford now, wasn’t he? Had to be. On the screen, though, the old man hadn’t said a word,
hadn’t lifted his head or moved his lips.

Can I ask you something off topic?

Pause. No response from Bradford.

Are you going to talk to me only when I’m looking through the camera?

In his memory, clear as anything, Eric recalled the old man smiling here. On the screen, his mouth didn’t so much as twitch.

That is one wicked sense of humor
.

“No, no, no,” Eric said. “He was talking. He was
talking
.”

But he wasn’t talking. Hadn’t said a word, hadn’t moved a muscle. And there in the background was Eric, gibbering along, carrying
on a conversation with no one, sounding like… a crazy person.