So Cold the River (2010) (20 page)

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

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

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

“Sorry.”

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

“I noticed.”

“Yeah, well, black eye can do that.”

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

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

“Go ahead.”

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

“Yeah.”

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

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

Kellen tilted his head, confused. “What?”

“It’s going to sound crazy, man.”

“I can dig crazy.”

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

“Then, where did you see him?”

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

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

A
T FIVE THE BAROMETER
dropped a bit and the western sky began to fill with tendrils of clouds. They were cirrus, rode very high in the atmosphere,
twenty, thirty, even forty thousand feet. The name was a Latin term for a lock of hair, and that’s exactly what they looked
like today, fine wisps of white up there against a backdrop of cobalt blue.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Uh-huh.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What do you mean?”

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

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

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

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

Eric shook his head.

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

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

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

“A charge?”

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

“This hotel is one of those places?”

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

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

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

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

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

Eric laughed. “It’s a good line.”

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