So Cold the River (2010) (14 page)

“I believe you.”

He hesitated. Said, “What?”

“I believe that it’s not booze or pills,” she said. “Because this has happened before. You’ve had visions like this before.”

“Not like this,” he said. “You’re thinking of that time in the mountains, but—”

“That’s one of them, but there were others. Remember the Infiniti?”

That stopped him. Shit, how could he have forgotten about the Infiniti? Maybe because he’d wanted to.

They’d been looking for a new car for Claire, back in California when things were good and the job offers were rolling in,
and had gone to an Infiniti dealership to test-drive a red G35 coupe she’d liked. The car was brand-new, and she hadn’t wanted
to spend that kind of money, but Eric was feeling cocky and flush and insisting cash wasn’t an issue. So they’d taken the
car out, the two of them in front and a paunchy salesman with effeminate hands wedged into the back, jabbering on about the
car’s amazing and apparently endless features: navigation, climate control, heated seats, pedicures, tranquilizers, a hand
that came right out from under the dash and powdered your balls when you needed it. His voice was grating on Eric, but Claire
was driving and it was her car to choose anyhow, so Eric had leaned back and closed his eyes for a moment.

He swore, even hours later, that he’d heard metal tear. He believed that in his heart. He’d heard the jagged, agonized rip
of metal from metal, a sound that belonged at junkyards or disaster sites, and jerked up in his seat and opened his eyes to
see the windshield splintered and spider-webbed, turned to Claire and
saw ribbons of blood spreading across her forehead and over her lips and down her chin as her neck sagged lifelessly to the
right.

He’d gotten out some sort of gasp or grunt or shout and Claire had hit the brakes and turned to him as the guy in back finally
shut up, and then Eric had blinked and the freeway spun around him and then he focused again and could see that they were
all fine, that the car was intact and the windshield was whole and Claire’s face was smooth and tan and blood-free.

The excuse he manufactured at the time—something about a sudden stomach cramp—had satisfied the salesman but not Claire, and
when they got back to the lot she pulled him aside and asked him what was wrong. All he’d said:
Don’t you even
think
about buying this car
. He couldn’t tell her any more than that, couldn’t describe the way her face had looked in that terrible flash.

Five days later, she’d brought him a copy of the
Times
as he drank coffee at the kitchen table, dropped it in front of him and pointed to an article detailing how a music executive’s
daughter had wrapped her fresh-off-the-lot Infiniti G35 around a utility pole, doing about a hundred and ten. The car was
red and had just been purchased from Martin Infiniti, the same dealership they’d visited. Eric had finally told her, told
her what she already knew. Then he’d tried to convince her it could easily be a different car.

“I actually forgot about that,” he told her now. “But even that can’t touch what I’ve been seeing lately, Claire. That conversation
with the old man, and then the train… they felt real. During those moments, they were absolutely real.”

“But in the past you’ve had psychic—”

“Oh, stop, I don’t want to hear that word.”

“In the past you’ve had
odd visions
—better?—that have been very real, too. You’ve been able to connect objects or places
with things that had happened or were going to happen. So why wouldn’t you believe this is similar?”

“This is so much more intense…”

“And those other experiences were from outside contact,” she said. “You ingested that water, Eric. You put it inside you.”

“The water.”

“Of course. Don’t you think that’s what you’re reacting to?”

Actually, I suspected your dad’s camera. Had to beat the thing to death, in fact. How’s that for a logical reaction?

“I haven’t really had time to consider it yet,” he said. “But that trip to see the old man in the hospital, that was days
after I first tasted the water. Seems like a long time for a drug to stay in your system.”

“It’s not a drug, Eric. It’s
you
.”

“What?”

“You’re connecting to it, just like you have to things before. The car, the old Indian camp in the mountains, things like
that. And I’m not surprised you think this experience is stronger, more intense, because those were just things you
looked
at. This stuff, you consumed.”

They talked for a while longer, and it was amazing how much better he felt after he finally hung up with her. Claire had not
only accepted his version of what was going on but had also offered a memory that validated it. Sane once again. How lovely
to be back.

He felt a mild tug of shame at the way he’d gone to her with this, and the way she’d listened. After all his recent coldness,
he’d turned to her quickly in a moment of need, and she had allowed him to.

It was, he realized, the longest conversation they’d had since he left. The first long one, in fact, that hadn’t involved
heavy arguing or his shouting or her tears. They’d talked like companions once again. Almost like husband and wife.

That didn’t change anything, of course. But she’d been there when he needed her, and that was no small thing. Not at all.

There when she was needed, that was Claire. Always and forever, that had been Claire. Until the return to Chicago, until he
had no work and no clear prospects. Then where had she been?

There. In your home. And you walked out and never went back, and she’s still there, she’s still there and you’re the one who
left
…

Hell with it. One phone call did not a marriage fix, but it had been good to talk with her and he felt far better now than
he had before, shaken but relieved. It was the way you felt after getting sick to your stomach—unsteady, but glad
that
was over.

The water made sense. The water applied some element of logic to what had, an hour ago, seemed utterly illogical. And terrifying.

All right, then, time to move on into the day. There was research to be done, and he figured it would be a damn good idea
to start with the mineral water. At any rate, he didn’t need to stay in this room, cowering and questioning his own sanity.
The headaches would be gone for a while now. Might as well get to work. Too bad he no longer had a camera with which to do
his job.

Breaking it had felt good, though. Watching it shatter, throwing his full strength into those smashes against the edge of
the desk, seeing something else pay a price for his own pain, his own fear. Yes sir, that had felt nice.

He wondered how Claire would respond to that notion. Something told him it wouldn’t be with surprise.

The Pluto company was housed in a long stone building of a buttery color. There were two large holding tanks outside and banks
of old-fashioned windows, some forty panes of glass in each one, a few of them opened outward to let the air circulate. The
entrance led Eric to a flight of stairs, and at the top he found the office, went in, and explained what he wanted to a pretty,
brown-haired woman behind one of the desks.

“You want to talk about the history of the company, your best bet is up at the hotel,” she said.

“I’m interested in the history, yes, but I’m also interested in the actual water. What’s in the water, and what it does.”

“What it does?”

“I’ve seen some of the old promotional materials, things that claimed it would fix just about anything.”

“There was only one thing that water ever fixed.” She waited for a response and didn’t get it, then leaned forward and said,
“It made you shit, mister. That’s all it did. Pluto Water was nothing but a laxative.”

He smiled. “I understand that, but I’m trying to find out something about the legends that surrounded it, the folklore.”

“Again, we’re not going to be able to answer that. The only thing we’ve got in common with the original company is the name.
We don’t produce that water anymore.”

“What do you produce, then?”

“Cleaning products,” she said. “Things for Clorox.” Then she smiled and added, “Well, I suppose that’s got something in common,
after all. Cleansers, right? Because the old stuff would clean out your—”

“I got it,” he said. “Okay. Thanks for your time.”

There was an older woman at a desk in the back of the room,
and she’d been listening and peering at Eric over her reading glasses. As he turned to go, she spoke up.

“You want to know about folklore, you should look up Anne McKinney.”

He paused at the door. “Is she a historian?”

“No, she’s not. Just a local woman, late eighties but with a mind better than most, and a memory that beats anybody’s. Her
father worked for Pluto. She’ll answer every question you could think to ask and plenty more that you couldn’t have.”

“That sounds perfect. Where can I find her?”

“Well, you follow Larry Bird Boulevard—that’s the street we’re on—right on up the hill and keep going out of town, and you’ll
find her house. Nice-looking blue house, two stories with a big front porch, bunch of little windmills in the yard, wind chimes
all over the porch. Thermometers and barometers, too. Can’t miss that place.”

Eric raised his eyebrows.

“Old Anne’s waiting on a storm,” the gray-haired woman said.

“I see. Think she’ll mind me dropping in, or should I call first?”

“I don’t think she’d mind, but if you don’t want to bother her at home, you could go on by the West Baden Springs Hotel at
about two. She goes there for a drink.”

“A drink? Thought you said she was in her late eighties?”

“That’s right,” the gray-haired woman said with a smile.

A
T NOON THE BAROMETER
showed a pressure of 30.20, up a bit from morning. The temperature was at eighty-one but Anne didn’t think it would touch
quite so high today as yesterday, what with that light breeze and some cloud cover coming in out of the southwest. Thin white
clouds, no storm. Not yet.

She spent the morning on laundry. Was a time when laundry was not an all-morning task, but the washer and dryer were in the
basement, and those narrow wooden stairs gave her some trouble now. Oh, she could take them well enough, just a bit slower.
That was true of so much these days. Just a bit slower.

She had the laundry done by eleven and then made some iced tea and went out onto the porch with the newspaper. The
New York Times,
which she’d taken for more years than she could count. It was important to know what was going on in the world, and last
time she’d trusted TV was the last day Murrow had been on it.

At noon she got up and checked the temperature and wind direction and speed and the barometric pressure, wrote it all down
in her notebook. She had logs going back more than six decades, five readings a day. Make a real interesting record, if anyone
cared. She suspected not many would.

Her weather-watching habits had their roots in childhood. And in fear. She’d been petrified of storms when she was a young
girl, would hide under her bed or in a closet when the thunder and lightning commenced. It had amused her father—she could
still remember his soft, low laugh as he’d come in to fetch her from under the bed—but her mother had decided something needed
to be done about it and had found a children’s book about storms, one with illustrations of dark thunderheads, swirling tornadoes,
tossing seas. Anne had been seven when she got the book, had the binding split from countless readings by the time she was
eight.

“You can’t be scared of them, because being scared of them won’t change a thing,” her mother had said. “Won’t make ’em stop,
won’t make you any safer. You respect them and try to understand them. More you understand, less you’ll be afraid.”

So Anne had returned to the book for another reading and started forcing herself to stay at the window when storms blew in,
watching the trees bend and the leaves whip through the air as rain lashed the house, drilling off the glass. She went to
the library and found more books and kept studying. Had it been a different time, she’d have probably gone up to Purdue and
studied meteorology. But that wasn’t how things worked then. She had a sweetheart, got married right out of high school, and
then the war was on and he was overseas and she had to get a job, and then he was back and they had children to raise. Children
she’d put in the ground already, hardest thing she could imagine anyone bearing, her daughter gone at thirty with cancer,
her son at forty-nine with a stroke. No grandchildren left behind.

She was thinking about her son when she first saw the car approaching slowly up the road, remembering the time he’d fallen
off this very porch and landed on a flowerpot below, breaking his wrist. Five years old at the time, and he was trying to
stand on the rail to impress his sister. Goodness, how that boy had cried. The car came to a stop then and turned in her drive,
and her thoughts left the past and she got to her feet. The wind had freshened a touch just as the car pulled in, got the
chimes jingling on the porch and lifted some dust off the floorboards. She swept the thing twice a day, but the world never
would run out of dust.