Hunter was dead by the time he hit the ground. Campbell’s mistake was in trying to stand. He lurched up but his wounded right leg collapsed beneath him. He gave a howl of pain and then fell backward, hit the ground, and rolled. The gun came free from his hand and then he slid over the lip of the ridge and there was a long rustling of leaves and a cry of pain.
“Damn it, boy, help me!”
The boy walked over to Shadrach Hunter and stared down at him. Then he leaned down and picked up Campbell’s weapon and walked to the crest of the ridge.
“Boy! Get down here and help me!”
The boy wrapped one hand around a thin sapling and leaned out over the edge. Campbell had slid all the way down the slope and into the edge of a wide pool of water, was in water up to his chest. He had one hand wrapped around a hanging root, and now he grunted and tried to heave himself up out of the pool. He couldn’t make it. He slid back down into the water and only the hand on the root kept him from going under. His efforts had placed him only deeper in the pool.
“You got one chance to get down here and help me, boy. You waste another second and they’ll be picking you up in pieces for weeks to come. You hear me?”
The boy didn’t speak. He sat down on the top of the ridge and watched silently. The rain was still pouring down, and the water in the pool was rising and spinning. Campbell’s grip on the root loosened as the water tried to pull him away, but he caught hold again and splashed, fighting for his life.
“Get down here, boy. Get your worthless ass down here unless you want to end up like your uncle.”
Campbell’s voice was fading. His face was stark white. The boy remained silent.
“You don’t understand what you’re tangling with,” Campbell said. “You should by now. You been around me long enough to get a sense. You think I’m just another man? That what you think? I’ve got power you can’t even fathom, boy. This valley’s given it to me. You think you’ll be safe from me if I drown out here? You’re full of shit. There ain’t no hiding from me.”
The boy dragged the lantern closer to him. He held the pistol in both hands.
Campbell gave a howl of fury and tried once again to pull himself out of the water. This time the root tore, almost pulling free completely, and Campbell was submerged for a moment before he tugged himself high enough to get his face clear.
“You’re going to let me drown,” he cried. “You’re going to let me die!”
The boy didn’t answer.
“I’ll have you in the end,” Campbell said in a voice so soft it was hard to hear over the rain. “You will feel my fury, boy, everyone in this whole damn valley will. You think you’re safe if I’m dead? Boy, I promise you this—ain’t nobody safe from me unless they carry both my name and my blood. You understand that? Only my family will be spared, you little bastard. And you ain’t family. I’ll come for you. That’s a vow. I will come for you and anyone else who doesn’t share my blood and my name.”
The dangling root tore free. Campbell gave a harsh cry of surprise and pain, and then he slipped backward and was lost to the water. When he surfaced again, he was upside down and motionless. The boy sat and stared at him. After a while, he picked up a few sticks and threw them at the body. There was no response.
He stood and picked his way carefully down the ridge and out to the edge of the pool. Then he set the lantern down, took off his jacket and shoes and rolled his pants up above his knees, removed the green glass bottle from his pocket, and waded into the water with it in his hand.
Campbell continued to float facedown, thumping against the stone that surrounded the pool. The boy reached him and turned him over, exposed his white face. The eyes were still open.
He looked at the dead man’s face for a moment, and then he shifted the body and found the wound on Campbell’s left side. He pressed the bottle into the wound and watched as blood leaked out of him and joined the spring water that was already inside the bottle. He squeezed out blood until the bottle was full of the mixture, and then he took it away and fastened the stopper.
When the bottle was back in his pocket, the boy grasped Campbell’s shoulders and began to tug him through the water. He waded along the southern rock wall, waist deep, moving carefully. Here the lantern light was dim. He stopped moving at a point where water gurgled between rocks, slipping out of the pool and back below ground. He tried to push Campbell into the dark gap, but the dead man’s shoulders snagged and held. The boy turned him slowly, rotating him in the water, and slid him in feet-first. He went in more easily this time, up to the waist, and then the boy placed his hands above both shoulders and shoved hard, grunting with effort. The body hung up for a moment, but then the water rose up and slapped against the stone and pushed the corpse out of sight beneath the earth.
He waded back to shore and put on his shoes and jacket. He checked the bottle and placed it gingerly back in his pocket. He then took the lantern and the pistol, climbed the hill again and returned to Shadrach Hunter’s body, and knelt and removed the money clip with the fourteen dollars and put it in his pocket.
He rose again, with the lantern in one hand and the pistol in the other, and walked on into the dark woods. A train whistle was shrilling out over the hills. He walked toward the sound.
The lantern’s glow turned smaller and continued to fade until it was barely visible in the shadows, and there was nothing but darkness and the sound of rushing water. Then the lantern began to grow larger and brighter, as if the boy had stopped somewhere out in the woods and decided to return. The light grew and grew until the dark woods melted away entirely and there was nothing but that gleaming, flickering light and…
Sky.
Gray sky.
And a voice.
Claire’s voice.
EPILOGUE
These are the things he remembers. The lantern coming back through the dark woods, the warm flickering light, the gray sky, Claire’s voice.
He is told that he shouldn’t be able to remember a thing. That he had been under the water for fifteen minutes before they got him out.
He learns new terms in the hospital: apneic, which means not breathing; cyanotic, which means displaying a bluish discoloration; PEA, or pulseless electrical activity, which means an electrocardiogram test records some heart function although there is no pulse. The heart still lives, in other words, but it is incapable of completing its job.
These are the terms that were applied to him once he was in the ambulance.
Kellen was the first one in the water. He watched Eric leap, saw where he entered, splitting the water directly between two downed trees that could have impaled him. Kellen marked the spot, but with an ankle broken in two places, he couldn’t make his way down to the water quickly enough, and the body had disappeared.
One thing Eric definitely did not imagine—Claire’s voice on his downward plunge. She was coming down the trail with Detective Roger Brewer in tow. She’d forced the detective to go with her to the last place she’d seen him, stretched out there on the trail, and upon finding him missing, began to shout for him. Kellen heard the shouting. Kellen shouted back.
Brewer entered the water while Claire—with a dislocated shoulder and broken collarbone from her landing on the pavement after Josiah Bradford shoved her from his truck—stood on the bank and shouted at every ripple in the water and shadow over it, thinking they all might be Eric.
The way they all tell it now, Eric just floated up from the depths. Surfaced in the middle of the swirling pool, facedown. Like the Lost River had him, and then decided to give him back.
Brewer and Kellen brought him out. The detective began CPR, then turned it over to Claire and went for his radio when he could not get a response. Claire succeeded in getting a few wet, wheezing coughs.
They could not restore spontaneous breathing or a pulse.
In the ambulance, the electrocardiogram registered a bradycardic—unusually slow—heart rate. Thirty-seven beats per minute. There was still no palpab
le pulse. The heart’s electrical system was functioning, but the mechanical pumping system was not. The paramedics applied a ventilator to assist with breathing and then administered epinephrine. One minute later, Eric’s heart rate was up to one hundred beats per minute, and a pulse appeared at the carotid artery.
He was driven to Bloomington Hospital at speeds averaging ninety miles an hour, and there he was placed on a different ventilator, and steps were taken to warm his core temperature. Claire was with him for the ride and believed that he would be pronounced dead on arrival, that the epinephrine-induced heartbeat was nothing more than a tease.
It was not a tease. Within an hour of his arrival, his heart was functioning normally, and three hours after that, the lungs were deemed capable of unassisted breathing.
They kept him in the hospital for another twenty-four hours. Monitoring, they said, and there were other tasks to be done—putting stitches in his scalp, setting Claire’s collarbone, outfitting her with a sling, treating Kellen’s shattered ankle.
He does not remember anything of the ambulance ride, or much of his early hours in the hospital. At some point he grows clear-headed again, and soon the police are with him, statements being taken. Claire and Kellen have already offered theirs, and she is in the room with him now. He cannot take his eyes off her. He looks at her and he sees the pickup truck again, the melting, twisted metal and the flash of white bone amid ashes.
I thought you were dead, he tells her.
Likewise, she says.
She believes that Josiah hoped to kill her when he pushed her out of the truck. He had the shotgun in his lap but did not fire it, maybe because he couldn’t do that and control the vehicle, maybe because he was afraid of igniting the dynamite in the bed of the truck. Whatever the reason, he settled for shoving her out onto the road, and Brewer crashed into a fence trying to avoid her.
What were you thinking when you jumped into the water? she asks him. How could you let yourself do that?
You were gone, he answers. It does not seem enough for her; it remains more than enough for him. She was gone, and Campbell remained. Now she is here, and Campbell is gone.
He can hardly believe it. He can hardly trust it.
It isn’t until late that evening that they hear the news about Anne McKinney. When Detective Brewer shares it in a low, flat voice, Claire weeps and Eric leans his head back and closes his eyes.
Looks like it was fast, and painless, Brewer says. That’s something. Old as she was, it was just too much stress. Shouldn’t be surprising that she had a heart attack; it’s surprising that it happened then, after everything was pretty well resolved.
She saved me, Claire says. Saved us.
Yes, ma’am.
No one even got her out of that basement? She must have been terrified. She must have been so scared.
Brewer doesn’t know about that. Says Anne was on the radio with the dispatcher and sounded solid. Then there was a bit of weirdness right before the end.
Weirdness?
She reported a tornado sighting, Brewer explains. That was the last thing she said. Apparently she thought there was one right outside. But of course she was still down in the basement, couldn’t see a thing.
So she scared herself to death, Claire says.
Brewer spreads his hands and says that he can’t answer that. All he knows is that they said she sounded fine when she made the report. Real composed. Relaxed, even. She was still in the chair in front of the radio when the police got there.
Eric, listening to all this with his eyes closed, is saddened but believes that Claire’s worries are unnecessary. Anne was ready for the storm, real or imagined. She wouldn’t have been terrified by it. She’d have been ready.
That evening, with Josiah Bradford confirmed dead, Lucas Bradford makes an official statement to the police, explaining the reason he hired Gavin Murray. Seems his father, the recently deceased Campbell Bradford, had written an odd letter just before his passing. In the letter, he took credit for the death of a man of the same name in 1929. He did not murder him, he wrote, not exactly, but he did nothing to help him either. He let the man drown and felt that it was the right thing to do. He was saving not only himself but others. The man, he wrote, was evil.
He identified his fortune as having been built on fourteen dollars removed from a dead man’s money clip, all that he had when he hopped a Monon freight train and rode to Chicago. While he felt no guilt over letting Campbell drown, he felt plenty for the widow and orphaned son left behind to suffer both poverty and Campbell’s legacy. But he was afraid. For so many years, he was afraid of so many things.
Along with the letter was a revised will—Campbell had designated half of his substantial wealth to be split among any direct descendants of the man he’d let drown. He knew only that there was a son. The rest would have to be tracked down. It was important, he wrote, that he look after the family. That was very important.
Josiah Bradford, the only direct descendant of the Campbell Bradford who had drowned in the Lost River, had been dead for fifteen hours before this was revealed.
The letter made no mention of an odd green glass bottle, or of the reason the old man had for taking Campbell’s name as his own.
Eric lets everyone wonder about this. He does not tell them about Campbell’s final threat, that anyone who did not share his blood and his name would feel his wrath.
Claire urges him to tell the doctors about his addiction to the mineral water and the ravaging effects it may have on his body. He tells her this is unnecessary. It is done, he says. It is over.
She asks how he can know this, and it is difficult to answer.
Just trust me, he says. I’m sure.
And he is. Because the water gave him back. His heart had stopped, his breathing had stopped. Those things began anew. He began anew. The old plagues will not return for him.
He returns to Chicago for two weeks before he can convince Claire to go back to the valley with him. He has a purpose there, he explains, and for the first time he understands it. There’s a story that needs to be told—so many stories, really—and he can be a part of that. A documentary, though, a historical portrait of this place in a different time. It will not be the sort of thing that makes it to the theaters, but it is an important story, and he believes the film can be successful in a modest way.
She asks him if he will write the script, and he says he will not. That isn’t his role. He’s an image guy, he explains, he can see things that need to be included in the story but he cannot tell its whole. He wonders if her father would be interested in writing it. His name could help secure some interest. She suspects that he would.
Kellen meets them in the hotel, his foot encased in an Aircast, crutches by his side. He says he has a green glass bottle to return to Eric but left it in Bloomington. He didn’t think it should be brought back to this place. Eric agrees.
They eat a celebratory dinner in the ornate dining room of the beautiful old hotel, and Eric explains the documentary and asks Kellen if he would consider being part of it. Kellen is enthusiastic, but it’s obvious something else is on his mind. He doesn’t address it until Claire has gone to the restroom and left the two of them alone. Then he mentions the spring, the one from the visions, and asks Eric if he believes it is really out there.
Yes, Eric tells him. I know that it is.
Kellen asks if he will search for it.
He will not.
Do you think Campbell is gone? Kellen asks.
Eric thinks for a moment and then offers a quote from Anne McKinney—You can’t be sure what hides behind the wind.
Claire and Eric stay the night, make love in the same room, and then she sleeps and he lies awake and stares into the dark and waits for voices. There are none. Beneath him, the hotel is peaceful. Outside, a gentle wind begins to blow.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The idea for this story came wholly from the place itself. The towns of French Lick and West Baden are very r
eal, as is the astounding West Baden Springs Hotel, as is the even more astounding Lost River. I grew up not far north of these places and saw the West Baden hotel when I was a child and it was little more than a ruin. It was a moment and a memory that lingered, and over the years, I continued to learn about the place and its remarkable history. In 2007, when I saw the restoration of the West Baden Springs Hotel near completion, I felt the storyteller’s compulsion revving to a high pitch. This book is the result, and because the places and the history are important to me, I’ve tried to present them accurately whenever possible. Still, this is a work of fiction, and I’ve taken some liberties—and no doubt made some mistakes.
Two dear friends helped with my research and encouraged the undertaking—Laura Lane and Bob Hammel—and a few people I’ve never met also deserve credit. Chris Bundy has chronicled the history of the area better than anyone, and his books were wonderful resources. Bob Armstrong, the late Dee Slater, and the members of the Lost River Conservation Association have been dedicated protectors and proponents of an underappreciated natural wonder for many years, and they piqued my interest in the river several years ago while I was working as a newspaper reporter. And to Bill and Gayle Cook, who brought the hotels back from near extinction, I’d like to say a most heartfelt thanks on behalf of the people of Indiana.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It is such a tremendous pleasure to work with the people at Little, Brown. My deepest thanks to Michael Pietsch, editor and publisher without peer, for his efforts and above all else his faith. Thanks also to David Young, Geoff Shandler, Tracy Williams, Nancy Weise, Heather Rizzo, Heather Fain, Vanessa Kehren, Eve Rabinovits, Sabrina Callahan, Pamela Marshall, and the many other key players on the Hachette team.
My agent and friend, David Hale Smith, patiently listened to my wild explanation of an idea for a novella about haunted mineral water and then, with an astounding level of calm, watched it turn into a five-hundred-page manuscript. What can I say, DHS? Oops. An important note of gratitude is due the extraordinary violinist Joshua Bell. This fellow Bloomington native’s violin work on the haunting song “Short Trip Home” (written, I must add, by another Indiana University product, renowned bassist and composer Edgar Meyer) pushed me toward an unexpected but rewarding place. It was a melody that needed a story, I thought, and from that grew a large portion of this book.
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