So Cold the River (2010) (11 page)

He’d met her at a deli in Evanston, where she was in her first year of law school at Northwestern and he was merely passing
through after visiting a friend, this the summer before he’d moved to L.A. He had finished a sandwich and was sitting at the
table with a newspaper, almost ready to go on his way, when she’d walked in with a friend and sat down across the room. He’d
watched her cross the room—something about the way the girl moved that loosened his jaw, left him staring with his mouth half
open—and she looked over and gave him the smallest of smiles, an awkward gesture more than anything, forced politeness in
response to the unanticipated eye contact.

What he’d read in the newspaper over the next twenty minutes, he couldn’t say. He kept his eyes on it only to avoid staring,
and he sneaked looks as often as he dared, watching her talk and laugh and eat a Caesar salad, gesturing with her fork every
now and then, waving bits of lettuce around in the air. She was facing him, caught his eye a few more times, gave him another
cursory smile. She was eating too quickly, though, and so was her friend, and both were nearly finished with their food and
ready to move on into the day before he ever said a word to her. He wanted so badly to say a word to her. He was not insecure
with women, had no trouble asking for dates, but approaching a strange woman at a deli at noon on Tuesday was a hell of a
lot different than approaching one in a bar at midnight on Friday. And with her friend there, there was that extra barrier
of potential eye rolls and laughter.

Then the friend stood up and left the table, walking to the bathroom. Fate, Eric decided, it had to be fate, because the friend
was the last excuse he was giving himself, and now she’d just checked out. He set the paper down and walked over to this
dark-haired girl with the wry smile and the amused eyes and said, “My name is Eric, and I would love to buy you a drink.”

What a breathtakingly original pickup line. She regarded him for a few seconds without speaking, then said, “It’s a deli.
They don’t serve alcohol here.”

To which Eric had responded, “Well, then, how do you feel about lemonade?”

They’d had the lemonade, and later that night the real drink, and a day later the first kiss and fifteen months after that
the wedding vows and the honeymoon.

“Shit,” he said now, lying on his back in a hotel room in Indiana, Claire a couple hundred miles away. He sat up and reached
for the remote, seeking distraction.
Don’t let this start. Don’t let these thoughts be the cap to the kind of day you already had.

He found the remote, then leaned back in bed again and kicked his shoes off and turned to look at TV. When he did, his eyes
caught the bottle of Pluto Water on the desk. He frowned, stood up, and walked over to it. The damn thing was sweating. Covered
in beads of moisture, a wet ring beneath it.

When he reached out and touched the bottle, he found it even colder than before. How was that possible? And while on that
topic, how was it possible for the thing to be so wet, like a frosted mug of beer sitting in the sun? Could it be leaking?
He ran his finger up the outside, collecting the moisture, then lifted his finger first to his nose and then to his lips and
dabbed it against them. There was the same faint sweetness, almost like honey. Nothing close to the terrible foulness that
had put him on his knees a few days earlier.

That had been the booze, though. Right? Wasn’t that what he’d told himself? He loosened the old cap again, took a sniff and,
yes, there was a touch of honey. It didn’t smell anything like what he’d remembered.

“Don’t even think about it,” he said aloud, looking at the liquid inside. He’d read enough about the mineral water to understand
that it was potent stuff, but nothing he’d read explained its behavior, particularly how it managed to stay so cold, let alone
its shifting smells and flavors.

There was still a Pluto Water plant in town, directly across from the French Lick Springs Resort. Tomorrow he’d have to drop
in and ask them for some details. That would be the second order of business if the visions kept up, though. If they did,
a call to the doctor would come first.

The black kid had given Josiah something to remember him by, a left eye that was already going purple by the time he got home
and studied himself in the mirror, holding a cold can of Keystone to his eye socket and burning with anger and shame.

He’d taken the only visible damage from the encounter, and that was as bullshit as bullshit got. He was supposed to put that
guy on his big black ass. Instead, he hadn’t even landed a real punch. Josiah had lost a fight or two along the way, but he’d
never failed to do some damage.

Shit, he hadn’t even gotten in the better insult. The black kid’s line about Josiah’s pecker was better than that dumb nigger
joke. Funny thing was, Josiah wasn’t even racist. Oh, he supposed he could be considered so, but he could be considered anything
that was accompanied by a bad attitude and a chip on the shoulder. Didn’t matter if you were white or black or Mexican or
whatever. It was a disrespectful world, he’d seen that clear enough since he was a kid, and wasn’t nobody disrespected the
world better than Josiah Bradford.

He used to have some patience. He’d done a good job of waiting, went through each day knowing he’d leave his mark
and trying to wait on the right opportunity. Today, though, the patience had slipped away, pulled from his soul by some unseen
force the way the moon ebbed the tides back from the beach. It had started with the heat and been furthered by Amos before
draining away altogether when Danny Dumb-shit Hastings hit a twenty-five-hundred-dollar jackpot and took to squealing and
hollering and drawing a crowd of people who stared at his fat ass like he was somebody special.

No, Josiah Bradford didn’t have any patience left. And something told him, something in the humid, black night, that it wasn’t
going to be coming back anytime soon either.

He still had the white guy’s blood on his hand, he realized, as he went for another beer. A long streak of it, dried to a
rust color. He went to the sink and ran warm water, scrubbed his hand with a bar of soap, and put it under the water to rinse
it clean.

Strangest damn thing happened then—the water went cold. As the blood rinsed off his hand, the warm water went cold, then drove
the blood down the drain in a pink-tinged swirl. Soon as the last trace of blood was gone, the water was warm again. It had
been a quick thing, an instantaneous shift.

“Old pipes,” Josiah muttered. Made sense that the plumbing, like everything else in this house, was turning to shit.

He went ahead and washed his hand a second time.

Anne McKinney woke just after two a.m., sat up in bed, and blinked against the darkness, short of breath, her chest tight.
Heart attack,
she thought.
Eighty-six years of good health and now death is going to steal in like the proverbial thief in the night, take me in my bed
.

But her breath came back then, and when she laid her palm beneath her left breast she felt her heart thumping along slow
and steady. She pushed up on the pillows, wincing as her back howled in pain, and then swung her feet down to the cool floorboards,
keeping both hands on the bed as she stood up. Out in public, Anne walked with her hands free as much as possible, but here
at home it was different. Here she had to use a higher level of caution, because she’d lived alone since the heart attack
that took Harold back in March of ’ninety-two, middle of that Duke ballgame with the Hoosiers, the refs making one more terrible
call than Harold’s poor sweet heart could take. That was almost twenty years past, and nobody but Anne had spent a night in
the house since. She knew it would be a long time before anybody found her if she took a fall in here.

Originally her bedroom had been a library of sorts, or at least that had been the idea. Mostly, it had been used by the children
for games and by Harold for storing odds and ends that Anne wouldn’t tolerate in the living room. She’d stayed in their old
bedroom until she was eighty-one, but then the daily back-and-forth on the stairs began to wear on her. She hadn’t admitted
it at the time—stubbornness was her most deeply ingrained trait—choosing instead to tell herself that it was simply time for
a redecorating and, what the heck, might as well move downstairs for a change of scenery. Now she hadn’t been upstairs in
more than a month.

She stood with her hand resting on the desk beside the bed, giving her legs a few seconds to warm up. Just like a car in cold
weather, that’s how you had to look at it. Wasn’t that the car was
done
if it did a bit of grumbling on a winter morning, it just needed some time. Once you gave it that, it would run as good as
ever. Or close to it, at least. Well, it would run. That was the point. It would still run.

The surface of the little desk was empty except for the things she needed most: her pills, divided into one of those seven-day
containers, a wicker basket for mail that was generally empty (nobody wrote Anne much these days), and one of her weather
radios. This one wasn’t but a scanner; the ham radio was down in the basement. There were times that she wished to have it
upstairs, close at hand, but she wouldn’t ever allow herself to seriously entertain such a notion. The shortwave needed to
be in the most stormproof room of the house, and that was the basement. Concrete block walls and only two small windows up
at the top of the western wall, right at ground level. When a big one blew in, the basement was the place to be, which meant
that was where the radio needed to be.

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?

T
HE 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.