Why, wasn’t but a month ago that some black kid from IU came to Josiah’s home in a damned Porsche Cayenne, just dripping money, and said he wanted to talk about Josiah’s great-grandfather, Campbell, the man who’d controlled this valley once. Granted, he’d run off and left his family, taking with him every dime they had—and according to the stories, plenty of dimes they didn’t have, too—but in his time he’d been as powerful as anyone who ever walked through that damn rotunda. A behind-the-scenes sort of influence, the kind you built with brass knuckles and brass balls, the only kind Josiah’d ever respected. Campbell’s legacy was an infamous one, but Josiah had always felt a strange kind of pride in him anyhow. Then the black kid showed up, some rich student, wanting to talk about the tales, put his own version of the Bradford family history down on paper. Josiah threw him the hell out of his house and hadn’t heard from him since, but the car was around often enough, a 450-horse motor in a frigging SUV, dumbest thing Josiah had ever seen, seventy thousand-some dollars’ worth of stupid.
Every insult was fuel for the fire, though. That’s what he told himself day in and day out, what kept him here, putting cigarettes out before he’d even had a chance to smoke them, saying yessir and nosir to that fat bastard Amos. It wouldn’t last forever. You could bet your sweet ass on that. There’d come a day when he’d walk back into this shit-hole town and make ’em stir, swagger into that casino and toss a few thousand on the table, look bored when he won and amused when he lost, have the crowd hanging on it.
You had to be ambitious. Josiah figured that out early, knew even when he dropped out of high school that he would rise above all this crap. He didn’t need high school, that was all. Had all As and Bs except for a C in chemistry when he quit. But what was he going to do, earn a scholarship, go up to IU or Purdue and get some bullshit degree that landed him a four-bedroom house with a thirty-year mortgage and a leased Volvo? Please. What he had his sights on was a good deal bigger than that, and you didn’t need the schooling to get it. What you needed was the hunger. And Josiah Bradford had that in spades. Fire in the belly, his old man had called it just before tying one on up in Bedford and wrapping his Trans Am around a tree on US 50, killing himself before Josiah had the pleasure.
Better believe it was a fire. Burned hotter every day, but Josiah was no idiot, knew that it required a touch of patience, required waiting for the right opportunity.
The puttering sound of the Gator’s little motor broke him out of his reverie, and he bowed his head and extended the weed eater again, let the sun scorch on his back as he began to make the slow trip back up the brick drive to the hotel.
The Bradford name had meant something in this town once.
It would again.
7
THERE WAS A COCKTAIL waitress at the bar who reminded Eric of Claire, the same willowy build and glossy dark hair and easy laugh, so he decided not to linger over that drink so long after all. He settled for one beer again and then went up to the room and took his shoes off and lay on the bed, thinking he’d rest for a few minutes. Evidently the drive and the beer were enough to coax sleep along, because when he opened his eyes again the bedside clock showed that he’d slept for nearly two hours. It was past five now. Time to get into action.
He sat up with a grunt, still feeling foggy with sleep, and swung his feet to the floor and went to get his briefcase. There was a legal pad in it on which he’d sketched a rough outline of what he wanted to get done first. All he had scheduled for today was an evening meeting with that graduate student who’d posted about Campbell on the Internet, but he’d like to get some film done, too, get things rolling as much as possible.
Inside the briefcase he found the legal pad and the bottle of Pluto Water, which reminded him that he needed to check on that, get an accurate date if possible.
When he took the bottle out of the briefcase, he could’ve sworn it was even colder than when he’d last touched it in Chicago. It had always been unnaturally cool, but now it felt as if it had just come out of a refrigerator. It was hard to believe, considering his last experience with it, but somehow the bottle looked almost tempting today. Almost refreshing.
“No way,” he said, thinking about another taste. He couldn’t ever stomach that again. Who knew what was wrong with it. Stuff would probably kill you.
All the same, he loosened the cap again. Lowered his nose to it and took a quick sniff, bracing for that noxious, stomach-turning scent.
He didn’t get it. A trace, maybe, but nothing so foul as last time. In fact, it smelled mild now, almost sweet. That was odd. Must have released the worst of the smell as soon as it was opened. Maybe that’s how they did it in the old days, let the stuff sit open for a while before consumption.
Oh, hell, he thought, go on and get a little on your tongue.
He poured a few drops into a cupped palm, then held it to his face and dipped the tip of his tongue into it, expecting the worst.
It wasn’t so bad at all. Just a barely perceptible sweetness. It must have needed to breathe a little. No way he was going to brave an actual swallow of it again, though. No way.
He put the cap back on and left the room.
That first afternoon it felt right to just wander. He opened with a few shots of the dome and the atrium and the rest of the interior splendor, then moved on outside and explored the grounds. There were a handful of beautiful but small stone buildings that had once housed some of the mineral spas. A fountain highlighted the center of the garden, and Eric discovered there was a small cemetery on the hill above, looking down at the dome. He took a few experimental shots from the ground, shooting at the hotel past the tilted gravestones, and was pleased with the results. This spot needed to be incorporated into whatever he did—anytime you could shoot down on something so grand with gravestones in the forefront, you should.
He went back down the hill, amazed at the heat on this first weekend of May, his shirt already clinging to his back, his forehead wet with perspiration, and then walked to the end of the brick drive—past an even more sweat-soaked man with a weed eater, who returned Eric’s nod with a surly look—and then stood beneath the stone arches and shot back up at the hotel. The sun was still high, glaring off the dome, and he thought that it would probably be pretty powerful if he could catch it at just the right stage of twilight some night, as the sun fell and those old-fashioned lamps came on.
There was no shortage of options and angles here; the place offered a sort of visual potential he hadn’t seen anywhere else. He took some shots up from outside the arches, using a slow zoom up the brick drive, trying to create the effect of walking up on the place, then went back to the car and headed toward French Lick. It was within walking distance, but not when lugging his equipment under the scorching sun.
Once inside, he had to give the French Lick hotel a bit more credit—it was pretty amazing in its own right. It would have seemed extraordinary in this little town were it not for the big brother up the road. As he walked through, Eric felt a mild sense of sympathy for Thomas Taggart. He’d built a hell of a place here, only to have it outshined by something a mile away. That’s how it could go, though—there was always somebody a little bit better.
He shot video in the hotel and the casino, wandering, and found himself drinking another beer in a basement bar, where the walls were adorned with antique electrical switchgear. The Power Plant, they called it. Whatever—the beer was cold, and the lights were dim, and that helped his headache. He wasn’t sure what that was all about. Eric had never been prone to headaches, but this persistent little bastard had been with him all day. Could be he was coming down with something.
He ate dinner at the casino’s buffet, taking his time, nothing left to do until nine, when he was supposed to meet the graduate student. The kid had told Eric he’d be driving down from Bloomington that night, so they’d agreed to meet late and grab a drink at the hotel bar. Not much else had been said in the e-mail exchange, so Eric had no idea how helpful the kid mig
ht be.
When he got back outside, the grounds were bathed in long shadows, the sun fading behind the tree-covered hills above. There was a back road connecting the two hotels and the casino, used by shuttles to ferry gamblers back and forth, and he took that on the return trip. Ahead of him was an old Chevy Blazer with a worn-out muffler, steep tree-lined hills on the left, a low valley with train tracks on the right. Four deer stood grazing in the valley, regarding the cars curiously but not fearfully. He had the windows down and his arm resting across the door and his mind was on Claire, disconnected from his surroundings, until he saw the leaves.
They were down on the right, in a short field that ran between the railroad tracks and a creek. A cluster of dead leaves soaked by winter snows and spring rains and then baked to parchment under this unseasonable sun. He looked away from the road as the Blazer in front of him crackled and roared and pulled away, put his foot on the brake and turned the wheel, and brought the Acura to a stop on the side of the road, watching.
The leaves were spinning in a circle, rising several feet off the ground but remaining tightly packed, swirling in a perfect vortex. It was the sort of thing you’d see during the fall in Chicago, where the winds eddied between buildings, trapped by tons of concrete and steel and forced into unusual patterns. But out here, in an open field, when the wind seemed to blow only out of the west and had nothing to redirect it, that circle was unusual. Even the wind itself seemed tremulous, lending an uneasy quality to the way those leaves danced and spun. Yes, that was the word. Uneasy.
He put the car in park and opened his door and stepped out into the wind, felt it wrap his shirt around his body and lift warm road dust to his nostrils, a smell that reminded him of summer labor during college, when he’d hauled wheelbarrows around construction sites for a Missouri masonry company. He left the road with the car running and the door only half closed, an electronic chime pinging after him, and walked down the short hill and into the tall grass on the other side. Up the little ridge and onto the tracks, and then he stopped, looking down at those leaves.
The vortex had thickened now, attracting more leaves. It was at least eight feet tall and maybe four feet in diameter at the top and one foot at the bottom. Swirling clockwise, a little rise and fall in the motion, but generally a perfect circle.
For a moment he was completely captivated, holding his breath and staring, but then his mind kicked into gear and he thought, Get the camera, dumbass.
He hurried back to the Acura and dug the camera and tripod out, sure that when he turned his back, the leaves would have settled, this rapturous moment gone. They were still turning, though, and he walked up to the gravel ridge where the train tracks ran and got the camera set up and turned on.
For this he wanted the zoom reduced as much as possible, a wide-angle shot that captured the bizarre look. The light was poor, the gray gloom of twilight, but it was enough to work with. Behind the swirling leaves the deer stood at the edge of the tree line and stared at him. He’d been standing with his eye to the viewfinder for a few seconds before their ears rose and, one after another in a silent sequence, they took quick leaps into the trees and vanished. It wasn’t until the last one disappeared that he became aware of a sound, faint at first but building rapidly. Wind was part of the sound—more wind in his ears than there was in the air, heavy and roaring. There was something else over the top of it, though, light and lilting. A violin.
Now a third sound joined in, lower than both the violin and the wind, and at first he thought it was the steady plucking of a cello or bass. Then it grew louder and he realized it wasn’t an instrument at all, but an engine, the sound of heavy gears straining, pounding along in constant rhythm. The violin rose to a frantic shrieking and then vanished abruptly, and the wind died down and the leaves fell out of the vortex and scattered over the ground, one blowing across the grass and trapping itself against Eric’s leg.
The engine sound was louder than ever, approaching fast, and Eric turned from the camera and looked up the railroad tracks and saw the cloud. It was a roiling, midnight-colored mass sitting low on the horizon and blowing in fast. He stood in the middle of the tracks and stared up at it, feeling the fading sun on the back of his neck but seeing nothing but darkness ahead, and then the clouds parted and fell back and a train emerged from the center.
It was a locomotive, and that malevolent dark cloud was boiling out of its stack, thick snakes of black steam. A whistle screamed, and Eric could feel the vibrations under his feet now, the rails trembling with the approaching weight, loose gravel rattling.
The train was moving faster than any he’d ever seen, and he was standing right in its path. He stepped to the side and caught the tip of one shoe on the rail, stumbled and almost fell as he lifted the tripod and scrambled down off the tracks and into the grass where the fallen leaves lay. When the locomotive thundered by him, he had to turn from the tracks and lift one arm to shield his face. Then the whistle split the air again and he looked up at the boxcars whirling by and saw that the train was colorless, all shades of black and gray except for one white car with a splash of red in the Pluto Water logo. The door of this car was open and a man hung from it, his feet inside the car and his torso extended, weight resting on the hand clasped to the edge of the door. He wore an old-fashioned suit with a vest and a bowler hat. As the car approached he looked at Eric and smiled and tipped his hat. It seemed like a gesture of gratitude. His dark brown eyes held a liquid quality, shimmering, and Eric could see that he was standing in water, some of it splashing over the side, glistening in the darkness that surrounded the train.
Then the train was by, an all-black caboose at the end, and the accompanying cloud lifted and Eric stood staring into the sky, looking at nothing. A car came down the road, swerving into the oncoming lane briefly as it passed the Acura, and the woman behind the wheel gave Eric a curious look but didn’t slow, went on toward West Baden Springs on the heels of a train she clearly hadn’t seen.
8
THE SENSE THAT CREPT over him then was unlike anything he’d ever experienced before, reality and the world he knew separating and speeding away from each other. He’d seen the train so clearly, had smelled the heat and felt the earth shudder. It had been real, damn it.
But now it was gone. Faded into the evening air like an apparition, and he was sure that the woman who’d just passed by had not seen a thing. There was not so much as a trace of smoke in the sky.
Even the wind was gone. That thought brought the spinning leaves back into his mind, and he turned to the camera and flicked open the display window. The leaves had been real. He had that crazy shit on tape.
He punched the rewind button and then play, jumped through some film from the casino until he reached the gloomy field and train tracks and the…
empty sky.
There were no leaves in the air on this tape. Nothing except the tracks and the trees and the tall grass waving in the wind.
He went back to the casino shots again, played the video all the way through, squinting at the screen, and again saw no trace of the spinning leaves.
“Bullshit,” he said aloud, staring at display. “Bullshit, you are so full of shit…”
“I thought a camera could never lie,” someone said from above him, and Eric lifted his head and looked up to see a young black guy watching him. He’d pulled up behind the Acura and gotten out of his car and Eric hadn’t noticed any of it as he stood there staring obsessively at a camera that was calling him a liar.
“I’m not certain,” the guy said, “but I think I was on my way to meet you.”
Eric cocked his head and gave a closer look. The guy was tall, probably six four at least, and very dark, with short hair and wide shoulders. Dressed in jeans and a white button-down shirt that hung loose and untucked.
“Kellen Cage?” Eric said. This was not who he’d expected to be doing a thesis on the history of a rural Indiana town.
“Ah, so you are Eric.”
“How did you figure that out?”
“In your e-mail you said you were working on some sort of film project. And I’m no detective but I can’t imagine there are many people walking around here with a camera like that.”
“Right.”
“What are you shooting?” Cage said, surveying the area.
“Ah, nothing. Landscape, you know.”
“Yeah? Well, you ought to park somewhere else, man, or at least close the door. Somebody’s gonna take it off, you leave it like that.”
Kellen Cage had walked closer, all the way down the hill, and he looked even younger now. Maybe twenty-five, twenty-six at best. His size was more evident down here, too. Eric wasn’t a small guy—six feet and one hundred and eighty pounds that had been pretty hard pounds before he’d left L.A.—but this Kellen Cage, taller and broader and knotted with muscle, made Eric feel tiny.
“So what’s the problem with your camera?” Cage said when Eric didn’t respond.
“Nothing, man. Nothing.”
“You were giving it one hell of a lecture over nothing.” He had his head leaned to the side, was studying Eric with a skeptical look. Eric didn’t answer, just set to work removing the camera from the tripod and replacing it in its case.
“So what kind of film are you doing?” Kellen Cage asked.
“Oh, just a minor thing, nothing worth talking about but something that pays, and considering doing more. What about you?”
He was struggling with the camera because his hands were shaking, and he hoped Cage hadn’t noticed.
“Been coming down here for months,” Cage said. “Working on a thesis for my doctorate up at Indiana. I’d like to get a book out of it, though. Came down and thought, man, there’s a lot here. Hate to waste it.”
So Cold the River Page 5