So Cold the River (2010) (5 page)

Truth be told, there were times when she thought she might never see it either. See the real storm, the one she’d been counting
on since she was a girl. The last few years, maybe she’d let her eye wander a bit, let her interest dim. She still kept the
daily records, of course, still knew every shift and eddy of the winds, but it was more observation and less expectation.

But now it was ninety on the first Friday of May, the air so still it was as if the wind had lost its job here, headed elsewhere
in search of work. The barometer sat at 30.08 and steady, indicating no change soon. Just heat and blue skies and stillness,
the summer humidity yet to arrive, that ninety more tolerable than it would be in July.

All peaceful signs really. Anne didn’t believe any of them.

She went into the West Baden hotel at three and sat in one of the luxurious velvet-covered chairs near the bar and had her
afternoon cocktail. Brian, the bartender, gave a wink to one of his coworkers when he fixed Anne’s drink, as if she didn’t
know he put only the barest splash of Tanqueray in the tonic before squeezing the lime. A splash was all she needed these
days. Hell,
she was eighty-six years old. What did the boy think she was coming down here for, to end up three sheets to the wind?

No, it was the routine. A ritual of thanks more than anything else, an appreciation for continued health, health that she
couldn’t ask for at this age. She still made it up all those front steps, didn’t use a cane or a walker or a stranger’s arm.
Walked in under the dome and had herself a seat and a sip. The day she couldn’t do that, well, go ahead and pop the lid on
the pine box.

There wasn’t a soul in the world who would understand how it made Anne feel to come in here and see the place alive. The day
it had finally reopened, she walked into the rotunda beneath that towering dome of glass and burst into tears. Had to sit
down on a chair and cry, and people just smiled sympathetic-like at her, seeing an old woman having an old woman’s moment.
They couldn’t understand what it meant, couldn’t understand the way this place had looked when she was a girl, the most amazing
place she could ever have imagined in the world.

It had been mostly a ruin for years. Decades. She’d come and gone through the town daily, looking up to see the crumbling
stone and cracked marble, and with every day and every look, a little piece of her died a wailing, anguished death.

But she’d never lost hope either. The place was special, and she just couldn’t imagine that it would go on like that forever.
The hotel’s return, much like the big storm, was something she’d believed in without fail. You called that sort of thing faith.

Her faith had been rewarded. Bill Cook, the man’s name. Awful plain name, she thought, but he’d made a few billion dollars
on it with a medical company up in Bloomington, and then he’d found his way down here and not only seen what had to be done
but could afford to
have
it done.

So now they were back, both of them, the West Baden Springs Hotel and the French Lick Springs Resort, buildings that seemed
as out of place in this valley as a pair of giraffes at a dog show, and though she had no use for the ugly fake riverboat
casino that was built to draw people down, she understood its purpose. Most irksome part of that was that the thing wasn’t
really a riverboat, was nothing but a building with a moat around it, but evidently that was enough to please the legislators,
who wouldn’t allow anything but riverboat casinos in the state. You had to wonder what that said about the quality of brains
in the statehouse, that they could fool themselves into thinking a building was a boat just because you filled a ditch around
it with water, but Anne had been around for too many years to hold much hope for government anyhow. They could have declared
the thing a spaceship for all she cared as long as it allowed the hotels to come back.

She’d lived to see it. That was a special thing, and one that returned her faith in the storm. It was coming, someday, a dark,
furious cloud, and though she didn’t know what role she would play in that, she knew it was important that she be ready. Part
of her wanted the storm; part of her dreaded it. As much as she loved them—those brilliant flashes of lightning, the terrible
screaming winds—she feared them, too. They took all the powers of man and sneered at them.

A convention of some sort was in the hotel today, and the place was particularly active, echoing with voices and laughter
and footfalls on the parquet. It soothed her like a hand on the shoulder. She asked Brian for one more, smiled to herself
as she saw him fill the short glass with nothing but tonic and ice before adding the lime. He knew the rules. Anne was here
for the sounds and the sights, not the sauce.

She took the tonic in slow, and by the time it was gone, that comforting noise and bustle and the soft velvet armchair were
pulling her down to sleep, and she knew it was time to go. Start falling asleep down here and she’d begin to seem less charming
to the staff. Right now, with her daily gin and her smiles and occasional barbed jokes, she was something of a local treasure.
Valued, appreciated, even by the younger ones. She liked that role, and understood all too well that it could quickly be erased
by one drooling nap.

She got to her feet, taking care to relish that tug of pain in her lower back, a tug that she wouldn’t have if she couldn’t
still get to her feet. Left a few dollars for Brian—
Thank you, Mrs. McKinney, have a good day and we’ll see you tomorrow
—and walked away from the bar and back into the rotunda. Stood in the middle and looked up at the dome, with the sun shining
down and the place glittering, took a deep breath, and thanked the good Lord for one more afternoon like this. Precious things.
Precious.

Out the main doors and back onto the steps and what do you know—there was some wind to greet her. First she’d felt all day.
Nothing of real notice, just a gentle, experimental puff, like the breeze wasn’t sure about it yet, but it was there all the
same. She stood at the top of the steps and watched the bushes rustle and the leaves turn and flutter, saw that the wind was
coming up out of the southwest now. Interesting. She hadn’t expected the shift today. The air was still hot, might’ve even
pushed a few degrees past ninety by now, but she thought she could detect a chill to the wind, almost as if there was some
cold trapped in it, surrounded by warmth but still there nevertheless.

She’d go home and take a few readings, see what sense she could make of it. All she knew now was that there was something
in the air. Something on the way.

I
T WAS A SIX-HOUR
drive, the final third a hell of a lot more pleasant than the first two. Getting out of the city and into Indiana was a nightmare
in itself, and then Eric was rewarded by only as bleak a drive as he could think of, Chicago to Indianapolis. South of Indy,
though, things began to turn. The flatlands turned into hills, the endless fields filled with trees, the straight road began
to curve. He stopped for lunch in Bloomington, left the highway and drove into town to see the campus, one he’d always heard
was beautiful. It didn’t disappoint. He had a burger and a beer at a place called Nick’s, the beer something local, Upland
Wheat. When in Rome, right? Turned out to be as good a warm-weather beer as he’d ever tasted, sort of thing made you want
to stretch out in the sun and relax for a while. There was driving to be done, though, so he left it at just the one beer
and got back into the Acura and pushed south.

Past Bloomington to Bedford, and then the highway hooked
and lost a lane in a town called Mitchell and began to dip and rise as it carved through the hills. Everything was green,
lush, and alive, and now and then flatbed trucks loaded with fresh-quarried limestone lumbered by. There weren’t many houses
along this stretch of the highway, but if Eric had had a dollar for every one with a basketball hoop outside, he’d have been
a rich man by the time he hit Paoli.

He knew from the map that Paoli meant he was close, and once he figured out what road to take away from the square—a mural
covering the entire side of a building pointed the way to French Lick—he laid a little heavier on the gas, ready to have this
drive done.

A dull, constant headache that had lodged in the back of his skull somewhere north of Indianapolis, then faded while he had
his beer, now returned with a little stronger pulse to it, one that made him wince every now and then as it hit a particularly
inspired chord. He had Excedrin in the suitcase, would have to take some as soon as he got to the hotel. He’d hoped things
might turn a little more exotic as he neared West Baden and French Lick, but there was just more farm country. He ran past
one white rail fence that seemed to stretch for a mile—would hate to paint that thing—and not much else that was worth notice.
Then a few buildings began to show themselves, and a sign told him he’d reached West Baden, and he thought,
You’ve got to be kidding me
.

Because there was nothing here. A cluster of old buildings and a barbecue stand, and that was it. Then he felt his eyes drawn
away from the road, up the hill to the right, and he let off the gas and felt his breath catch in his chest as the speed fell
off.

There was the hotel. And Alyssa Bradford had used the correct word in describing it, because only one word came close—
surreal
. The place was that, and then some. Pale yellow
towers flanked a mammoth crimson dome, and the rest of the structure fell away beneath, hundreds of windows visible in the
stone. It looked more like a castle than a hotel, something that belonged in Europe, not on this stretch of farmland.

A horn blew behind him, and Eric realized he’d coasted almost to a stop in the middle of the road. He pushed on the gas again,
found a set of twin stone arches that guarded a long, winding brick drive that led up to the hotel.
West Baden Springs—Carlsbad of America,
the arches said. He knew from his research that referred to a famed European mineral spa.

The place gave him an immediate desire to reach for the camera, get this recorded now, as if it might soon disappear.

He wasn’t certain the brick road was a legitimate entrance, so he drove past the stone arches in search of the parking lot
and, within the space of a blink and a yawn, found himself in French Lick. Out of one town and into the other, all in what
felt like six city blocks. They were separate towns, but the reality was, they felt like one place, and the only reason they
hadn’t merged into one town over the years was those hotels. They’d been rivals at one time, French Lick and West Baden, and
many locals just referred to the area as Springs Valley.

He passed the French Lick Springs Resort, which held the grandeur of its West Baden partner but not the magic. The architecture
was more traditional, that was all. A good-looking building, but a building nonetheless. The West Baden hotel, with its dome
and towers, quickened the pulse more. The owner of the French Lick hotel, Thomas Taggart, had been a fierce rival of the West
Baden Springs Hotel owner, Lee Sinclair—in business and politics, with Taggart a key Democrat in the state and Sinclair an
equally powerful Republican. For decades those two had dueled for superiority in the valley, and while Sinclair’s hotel may
have won out, Taggart created a million-dollar business
with his Pluto Water, while Sinclair’s Sprudel Water—virtually the same product—had somehow failed, eventually forcing him
to sell his interest in the water to Taggart.

Eric turned at the casino and drove up the road in search of the entrance for the West Baden hotel. The parking lot was set
to the side and above the hotel, and he parked and took his bags out and walked toward the entrance, looking out at the grounds
as he went. A creek cut through the middle, surrounded by flowering trees and flowerbeds and emerald-colored grass. The smell
of the grass was in the air, freshly cut, and something about that drew him away from the parking lot entrance and around
to the front of the building. He set his bags down on the steps and inhaled and looked off down the long brick drive.

“What a place.” He said it aloud, but softly, and was surprised when someone said, “Wait’ll you see the inside.”

He turned and saw an elderly woman heading down the steps toward him. She looked at least eighty but walked with a firm, steady
stride and wore makeup and jewelry, a pocketbook held between her upper arm and her side.

“I’m looking forward to it,” he said, stepping aside so she could come down. “Have been for a while.”

“I know the feeling,” she said. “And don’t worry, it won’t disappoint.”

He picked up his bags and went up the steps and through the doors and into the atrium. Made it about twenty feet inside before
he had to drop the bags again—not because they were heavy but because taking the place in called for energy.

The dome was three times as wide as he’d expected and twice as tall, a tremendous globe of glass resting on white steel ribs.
The design had been truly ingenious in its time—hell, it still was. Harrison Albright, the architect who had conceived of
the whole amazing design, came up with the umbrella-like supports to
hold the dome up, but he had concerns that temperature changes would cause it to expand and contract at a different rate than
the building below—a sure recipe for disaster, a collapse of the dome that would shower those beneath with glass and humiliate
its creator. As a solution, Albright rested the steel support ribs on ball bearings, allowing the dome to expand and contract
at a different rate than the building below. This idea in 1901.

There were ten thousand square feet of glass in the dome alone. More glass than in any other building in the world at the
time of its construction, more even than London’s Crystal Palace. It was one thing to read details like that on the Internet,
another to see it. One of the stories Eric had found said that when they removed the supports beneath the dome, many spectators,
including Sinclair, weren’t certain the thing would avoid collapse. In response, Albright insisted on climbing to the roof
and standing dead center on top of the dome when they removed the last of the scaffolding. He’d been sure of his math, even
if nobody else was.