So Cold the River (2010) (33 page)

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

“I can find a lawyer.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s probably not a good idea.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

H
E TOOK
C
LAIRE’S ADVICE
and ignored Brewer’s messages, called Kellen instead.

“You in town?” he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You can imagine
mine,
” Eric said.

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

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

“I don’t think you did.”

“I did see a murder today, though.”

Kellen raised his eyebrows.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Shoot.”

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

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

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

“Utilize it?”

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

“Right,” Kellen said slowly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Could be.”

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

“Yeah,” Kellen said. “Who knows.”

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

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

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

And below that, written larger and underlined:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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