So Cold the River

by Michael Koryta

  Anne had been a weather spotter for decades now, and it was a job she took seriously. All the gauges in the world wouldn’t mean a thing if you couldn’t make contact, and in bad storms the phone lines went down. The radio in the cellar was nearly thirty years old, but it still worked just fine. It was an R. L. Drake TR-7, built by the first—and best—company that ever dealt with ham radio. Harold had bought it for her and set up a powerful antenna and showed her how to use it. He’d never been one who thought things like machinery and electronics were beyond the grasp of women, a trait that made him rare for a man of his time. It hadn’t been long until she understood the Drake better than he did.

  Her legs felt steady beneath her now, tingling with circulating blood, and she took her hand from the desk and moved for the door. The moonlight left a white streak across the floorboards, almost like a path in the darkness, and she followed it out of the bedroom and into the living room, crossed that, and opened the front door and stepped out onto the porch, still wondering what in the world had her up and wandering. Then she heard the chimes jingling, louder and faster than they had that evening, and she knew what had stirred her from sleep—the wind.

  It had risen while she slept, was still blowing out of the southwest but was firmer now, really pushing. Had itself some confidence again.

  Shuffling out to the end of the porch and taking the rail in her hands, she breathed the air in and shivered a little in its grasp. There was a barometer on the porch—there was a barometer in every room of the house—and it told her the pressure was 30.16. A rise from this afternoon.

  The shift didn’t make sense. Or maybe it did. Yesterday the gauges told her it would be another hot, peaceful day with steady pressure. But what her mind told her, a mind seasoned by eighty-six years of study and experience, was that it had been too hot and still, and for too long.

  So maybe this made plenty of sense. She just didn’t know what was coming next. The wind had blown up unexpectedly, and that was fine, but what was chasing on its heels?

  13

  THE SUN CAME INTO his room early, and it came in hot. Eric woke squinting against it, feeling the warmth on his face, and almost before he was fully coherent he knew the headache was back.

  Back like a bastard, too, a motorcycle gang passing through town and revving engines. He groaned and covered his eyes with the heels of his hands, pressed hard into his temples with his fingertips. This was as bad as any hangover headache he’d ever had, and it wasn’t from a hangover.

  When he was on his feet, he took three Excedrin with a glass of water, not feeling overly optimistic—the Excedrin hadn’t been effective yesterday—and then showered in the dark. Light seemed to be a problem. When he was out of the bathroom, he kept the lights off and the curtains pulled, then put on a pair of jeans and a short-sleeved button-down made from some sort of khaki-style material. It was a good-luck shirt. He’d worn it one afternoon in Mexico, where they were shooting a Western that flopped at the box office despite a terrific script and strong cast, and he’d gotten some of his all-time favorite film that day. The director on that one had been an absolute joy, one of the guys who was more focused on supervising the whole production than on telling his cinematographer how to do his job. Those were the directors of Eric’s dreams, guys who trusted you and let you shoot, and he’d found far too few of them in Hollywood. Particularly after he’d broken Davis Vassar’s nose.

  Vassar was the biggest name Eric had ever worked with—and a man who’d made certain that he was also the last big name that Eric ever worked with. They’d hit it off well enough at the start, the project something Eric truly liked, an on-the-road thriller involving a hitchhiker who witnessed the execution-style killing of a journalist. It was a great story, gripping as hell, and the day Eric was hired, he bought four bottles of champagne and drove with Claire up to a beautiful inn near Napa and they had sex five times in the first twelve hours. Wild, playful, laughing, gasping sex. Victory sex.

  There’d never been anything quite like that for them again.

  You had heavy-handed directors and then you had Davis Vassar, who evidently hired a cinematographer just so he had someone else to bark orders at. Talent meant almost nothing to him, professional judgments even less. Eric fought through a month of it before the first blowup, and two days after that, his fist was connecting with Vassar’s face and a waitress was screaming and Eric Shaw’s Hollywood career was ending.

  Temper, temper, temper. You have to watch your temper.

  The moment it had started to go south with them was crystallized in his memory. Eric had come to the production company office for a meeting with Vassar and two of the producers. They’d been sitting in a room that looked out onto Wilshire, and Vassar made the three of them wait on him for twenty minutes. There was a glass-topped coffee table in the middle of the room, and when he finally swaggered in, he plunked himself down in one of the black leather chairs and put his feet up on the table. Banged the heels of his shoes down on the glass with an unnecessarily loud flourish. The message: I’m a Big Fucking Deal.

  They’d talked for nearly an hour, and Eric still couldn’t remember what had been said. He was an image guy, and that image—Vassar’s shining black shoes on that glass tabletop—wouldn’t leave his mind. He stared at those shoes and listened and watched the producers cowering and sniveling with Vassar and thought, This is bullshit. They’re listening to you because of your damn name, not talent. Because you caught some breaks and rode somebody else’s phenomenal acting performance into an Oscar nomination. You don’t even see this story; you don’t have the first damn clue how it should be told. I do. I should be directing this, not you, but I don’t have the name. And so I have to sit here and watch you put your shoes up on somebody else’s table and mouth off while looking at your BlackBerry every two minutes to remind us all how important you are.

  He’d made it out of that meeting peacefully. He didn’t make it out of the film the same way.

  “And this,” Eric said aloud, “is how you ended up in Indiana. Well done.”

  He could shake the memory off for the morning, but not the headache. Food might help, or some black coffee at least, so he left the room and walked down the steps and out into the atrium again. Made it only twenty paces across before the light shining in through the dome brought him to a halt, and he turned on his heel, gritting his teeth, and retreated to the darker corridor that circled the atrium. Found his way to one of the dining rooms, took a table, and ordered an omelet and coffee. Hurry on the coffee, please.

  He drank two cups and felt no effect, picked at the omelet and got maybe three bites down before giving up, tossing cash on the table, and returning to his room. This was bad. Headaches like this one, so sudden, so blinding in their pain… they were harbingers. Eric knew enough to understand that, and the possibilities chilled him. Brain tumor, blood clot, cancer. Aneurisms and strokes and heart attacks.

  Time to call Dr. Sharp in Chicago. That was all there was to it.

  He called from his cell phone. Only when he reached the robotic-voiced menu did he remember that it was a Saturday, and therefore getting the good Dr. Sharp on the line was going to be impossible. His office was closed weekends, and the monotone message suggested Eric visit the emergency room if his condition was serious.

  It felt awfully serious to him, but it was also only a headache. You didn’t walk into an emergency room with one of those. And where was a hospital around here anyhow?

  He wasn’t sure if he looked at the Pluto Water because he thought of it, or if he thought of it because he looked at it. The chain of logic wasn’t clear, but somehow he found himself staring at the bottle on the desk and thinking, Why the hell not? It was supposed to cure headaches, wasn’t it? He was sure he’d seen that on the lists of ailments the mineral water boasted it could handle. Granted, damn near every other affliction of the early twentieth century had been on those lists, but the stuff couldn’t have gotten its reputation by being a pure placebo. It had
to help some problems.

  He walked over to the desk and reached for the bottle but stopped with his hand about six inches away, tilted his head, and stared at it. There was a glaze over the bottle now. It looked almost like…

  Frost. Son of a bitch, it was frost. He wiped some of it off with his thumb, found it just like wiping clear a streak on the window on an early winter morning in Chicago.

  “I’ve got to figure you out,” he said.

  He wasn’t going to figure anything out if he had to hole up in this room, sitting on the floor and chewing Excedrin like they were Skittles. So why not give the water a try?

  He unfastened the cap and took a small, hesitant swallow.

  Not bad. If anything, the sulfuric taste was down and more of the sugary flavor was present in its stead. He took a full swallow, and the taste drove him on for another and then a third, the stuff going down like nectar now. It took a conscious effort to stop, and when he lowered the bottle he saw that more than half of the contents were gone—the same liquid that had made him gag back in Chicago at the smallest of tastes.

  The flavor might have improved, but it had no effect. The headache pounded on, that motorcycle gang still circling through town, racing one another.

  Okay, the Pluto Water wasn’t going to do the job. Dumb idea, fine, but he was willing to try a dumb idea if it meant he could go about his day.

  He went back to the bed and stretched out on his stomach, slid his face under the pillows and held them to his head. Maybe he should go to the hospital. Probably was crazy not to. If Claire were here, it wouldn’t even be an issue; they’d be driving these rural highways right now, looking for the telltale blue-and-white sign. She was a worrier. Protective of him, too. Would defend him to the end.

  Well, almost to the end. She’d stuck with him through it all in California, but once they were back in Chicago, back around her family and their judgmental whispers, her resolve had wavered. The questions started then, asking him what came next, saying that it was fine if he needed out of the movie business but what business was he going to find for the future, what would he do? He’d needed time, that was all, and she didn’t have enough of it for him, evidently. Didn’t have enough…

  His thoughts left Claire, and, very slowly, he removed the pillows and lifted his head. Cocked it to the side, as if he were listening for something in the distance.

  “It’s going away,” he said.

  The damned headache was fading. Still present, but the biker gang was driving away now, heading uphill on the roads that led out of town.

  14

  HE DIDN’T TRUST IT at first, maybe didn’t want to trust it. He went onto the balcony and sat overlooking the atrium for fifteen minutes as the headache continued to fade and then was gone. No, he thought, it can’t really be gone. You’ve just adapted to the light.

  So he went outside and walked the grounds for half an hour in the stark sunlight, waiting for the pain to return. It did not. The Pluto Water had done the job, done it with astonishing speed and efficiency.

  He had to find out what the hell was in that stuff. And, why, if it was so incredibly effective, had the product vanished over the years? Did you build up a tolerance, or did it have unwelcome side effects? There had to be some problem, because anything that could obliterate a migraine like that would’ve been raking in billions a year by now.

  The Pluto Water research would be a priority for the day, he decided as he walked back into the hotel and up to his room, feeling wonderful now, fit and energetic. But before he got to that, he had to call Alyssa Bradford.

  He called from the balcony, looking down on a group of high school students on a tour, a man with a country drawl filling them in on the history of the hotel. Eric could catch pieces of his talk—“The first West Baden hotel was destroyed by fire, and Lee Sinclair was bound and determined to replace it with something incredible…. They built this place in under a year, and that was in an era without modern construction equipment…. If you laid the glass in that dome end-to-end you’d have a path sixteen inches wide and nearly three miles long”—as he located Alyssa’s number and dialed.

  “Well, Eric, what do you think?” she said. “Pretty amazing, isn’t it?”

  “It absolutely is,” he said, and right now, free of headaches and troubling tricks of the mind, he was able to say that and mean it again, to really feel happy to be here. “I’d seen pictures, but it still took my breath away. Because it just doesn’t seem to fit.”

  “It doesn’t! That place belongs in Austria, not Indiana. Have you had much luck finding out about my father-in-law?”

  “Only that there’s some dispute over his age,” Eric said. “Any chance he’s really one hundred and sixteen?”

  “What?” she said and laughed. “No, I don’t think there’s any chance of that. How did you arrive at that question?”

  He told her about his first day in town—at least the research end of it. No need to enlighten her about the vanishing train or the violins in his head. Professional reputation to uphold and all that. Hate to lose out on future wedding videos over rumors of insanity.

  “Campbell Bradford isn’t a common name,” she said. “The other one has to be a relative.”

  “That’s what I was thinking,” Eric said, “but my contact here assures me that the Campbell he knew of ran out on his family in nineteen twenty-nine. He left a son named William behind, but William stayed in town, and died in town.”

  “I have no idea what to think of that,” she said, “only it can’t be my father-in-law. The age is too far off.”

  “Right. Your father-in-law could have been a son this guy had after he left, but—”

  “My father-in-law grew up in the town.”

  “Yeah. As an aside, I might have found a cousin for you. But I don’t think he’s a guy you’ll be inviting to any family reunions.”

  He told her about Josiah and the fight with Kellen Cage.

  “I certainly hope he’s not family,” she said. “But if you find out he is some distant relative, let’s go ahead and leave him off the film.”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t be asking him for any interviews.”

  “Have you spent any time with the bottle yet?” Alyssa asked.

  “Spent time with it?”

  “Yes. Or, you know, tried to find anything out about it.”

  “No,” Eric said slowly, “not yet.”

  He’d spent some time with it, certainly, but that level of research wasn’t something he wanted to disclose.

  “It seemed to upset him when I brought it to the hospital,” he said.

  “What? You went to the hospital?”

  “Yeah. I didn’t get your message until Thursday night. I went down to see him that evening, tried to talk with him. He got upset when I showed him the bottle, so I left.”

  There was a moment of silence and then she said, “Eric… the doctors told us he hasn’t spoken a word since Monday. He hasn’t been able to communicate with family, and the doctors don’t think he will. He’s very close to the end now. The mind is already gone, but the body is hanging on.”

  “Well, he talked to me. Showed a little of that sense of humor, too, tried to play a trick on me.”

  But even as he said it, he felt a cold shroud settle around him.

  “A trick? I can’t believe that. And you have it on video?”

  “Yes,” he said. Tried to say.

  “What was that?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I should have it on video.”

  “That will be very special to us. I just can’t believe it. Thursday night, you said? That was three days after he stopped speaking.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. “Hate to cut you off, Alyssa, but I’m going to have to go. I’ve got… one of my sources is calling. So I’ll need to let you—”

  “Of course, take it. Keep me updated, and enjoy your stay down there.”

  “I’m going to try real hard to do that,” he said and discon
nected. Below him the tour guide droned on. The kids in the group looked to be around sixteen, the classic bored-with-everything age, yet they were quiet, staring around almost in awe. Eric understood that. It was the kind of place that could grab your attention and hold it.

  He stood up slowly and went into the room and got the camera out. It used miniature DVDs, and he’d put in a fresh one before he set out on foot the previous day. The DVD he’d removed from the camera then had been the one from his visit to Campbell Bradford. Now he took the West Baden DVD out and replaced it with the Bradford disc. He took a long, deep breath and looked up at the ceiling.

  “He talked, and it’s going to be on here,” he said. “It is going to be on here.”

  He pressed play.

  There was Campbell Bradford in the hospital bed. His face looked as Eric remembered—haggard, weary, fading. None of the spark in his eyes yet, but that had taken a moment. Eric turned up the audio volume, heard his own voice.

  You going to talk to me?

  On the screen, Campbell Bradford blinked slowly and took a hissed breath.

  Are you going to talk to me tonight?

  This was where he’d responded, right? Eric had dropped his eye to the viewfinder after asking that question, and Bradford had spoken for the first time.

  But now as he watched, nothing happened. Bradford stayed silent. Okay, maybe Eric had the wrong spot. Maybe he’d talked for a while before the old man embarked on his game.

  His own voice continued:

  Great. Where would you like to start? What would you like to tell me?

  Oh, shit. He was responding to Bradford now, wasn’t he? Had to be. On the screen, though, the old man hadn’t said a word, hadn’t lifted his head or moved his lips.