So Cold the River (2010) (2 page)

He was hardly aware of the rest of the film. When it ended, he disconnected the equipment and packed up to leave. He’d never
done that before—he always waited respectfully for the conclusion of the service and then spoke to the family—but today he
just
wanted out, wanted back into the sunlight and fresh air and away from that woman with the black dress and the intense stare.

He’d slipped out of the double doors with the projector in his arms and was headed through the foyer and toward the exit when
a voice from behind him said, “Why did you use that picture?”

It was her. The blond woman in black. He turned to face her, caught a blast of that stare again, able now to see that it came
from intense blue eyes.

“The cottage?”

“Yes. Why did you use it?”

He wet his lips, shifted the weight of the projector. “I’m not really sure.”

“Please don’t lie to me. Who told you to use it?”

“No one.”

“I want to know who told you to use it!” Her voice a hiss.

“Nobody said a word to me about that picture. I assumed people would think I was crazy for putting it up there. It’s just
a house.”

“If it’s just a house,” she said, “then why did you want to include it?”

This was Eve Harrelson’s younger sister, he realized. Her name was Alyssa Bradford now, and she was in several of the photographs
he’d used. Back in the main room someone was speaking, offering tribute to Eve, but this woman did not seem to care in the
least. All of her attention was on him.

“It felt special,” he said. “I can’t explain it any better than that. Sometimes I just get a sense. It was the only picture
of the place, and there were no people in it. I thought that was unusual. The longer I looked at it… I don’t know, I just
thought it belonged. I’m sorry if it offended you.”

“No. It’s not that.”

It was quiet for a moment, both of them standing outside while the service continued inside.

“What was that place?” he said. “And why are you the only one who reacted?”

She looked over her shoulder then, as if making sure the doors were closed.

“My sister had an affair,” she said softly, and Eric felt something cold and spidery work through his chest. “I’m the only
person who knows. At least that’s what she told me. It was with a man she dated in college and during a rough time she had
with Blake…. He’s a bastard, I’ll never forgive him for some of the things he did, and I think she should have left him. Our
parents were divorced, though, and it was an ugly divorce, and she didn’t want to do that to her kids.”

This sort of disclosure wasn’t all that uncommon. Eric had grown used to family members sharing more than seemed prudent.
Grief sent secrets spilling past the old restraints, and it was easier to do with a stranger sometimes. Maybe every time.

“That cottage is in Michigan,” she said. “Some little lake in the Upper Peninsula. She spent a week there with this man, and
then she came back, and she never saw him again. It was the children, you know, they were all that kept her. She was in love
with him, though. I know that.”

What could he say to that? Eric shifted the projector again, didn’t speak.

“She didn’t keep any pictures of him,” Alyssa Bradford said, and there were tears in her eyes now. “Tore apart the photo albums
she had from college, too, and burned every picture he was in. Not out of anger, but because she had to if she was going to
stay. I was with her when she burned them, and she kept that one, that single shot, because there was nobody in it. That’s
all she kept to remember him.”

“It just seemed to belong,” Eric said again.

“And that song,” she said, her eyes piercing again after she’d blinked the tears back. “How on earth did you select that song?”

They made love to it,
he thought,
probably for the first time, or if not that, then certainly for the best time, the one that she remembered longest, the one
that she remembered not long before she died. They made love to that song and he pulled her hair and she leaned her head back
and moaned in his ear and afterward they lay together and listened to the wind howl around that cottage with the deep red
paint. It was warm and windy and they thought that it would rain soon. They were sure of it.

The woman was staring at him, this woman who was the only person alive who knew of her dead sister’s affair, of the week she’d
spent in that cottage. The only person alive other than the lover, at least. And now Eric. He looked back into her eyes, and
he shrugged.

“It just felt right, that’s all. I try to match the music to the mood.”

And he did, on every project. That much was true. Everything else, that strange but absolute sense of the importance of the
song, couldn’t possibly be more than trickery of the mind. Any other notion was absurd. So very absurd.

Eve Harrelson’s sister gave him a hundred-dollar bill before she left to return to the service, a fresh wave of tears cresting
in her eyes. Eric wasn’t sure if it was a tip or a bribe for silence, and he didn’t ask. Once his equipment was packed up
and he was sitting in the driver’s seat of the Acura MDX that Claire had paid for, he transferred the bill from his pocket
to his wallet. He tried not to notice that his hands were shaking.

I
T WASN’T THE FIRST
time. Over the years, Eric had grown used to sensing some unexplained tug over a specific sight. It was one of the reasons
his finest work came on historical projects. The last film of note that he’d worked on was an HBO historical drama about the
flight of the Nez Perce in 1877, an amazing and tragic story, and one Eric connected with from the start. They’d been shooting
in the Bear Paw Mountains in northern Montana, at the spot where the fifteen-hundred-mile retreat had ended about forty miles
from the Canadian border, which the Indians were trying desperately to reach. There was a team of historians along, people
who’d devoted countless hours to the story and believed they had an accurate sense of the key locations. The crew spent about
six hours getting things set up and was nearly ready to shoot when Eric rode to a rise that looked down on another valley.
This one was smaller and on the surface less visually appealing. A little bit of snow was blowing and
the sun was losing a struggle with the clouds. It was as that last shaft of sunlight receded that he looked down at the smaller
valley and knew that this was where they’d been. The Nez Perce. Chief Joseph and about seven hundred exhausted and starving
followers, fewer than two hundred of them warriors. General William Tecumseh Sherman and two
thousand
well-equipped U.S. soldiers on their heels.

Eric spent a few more minutes up on the ridge, then rode back down and embarked on a furious argument to pack everything up
and move the upcoming scene into the smaller valley. The director was Douglass Wainberg, a short Jewish guy who insisted on
wearing cowboy hats throughout the whole project, and while he had plenty of faults, he also had a trust in talent. He relented
after Eric went on a tirade about light and horizon lines that was total bullshit—the only reason he wanted to move was that
he knew they were in the wrong valley—and they wasted most of a day relocating. One of the historians took issue with the
decision, said it was sad to see accuracy sacrificed for lighting concerns, and Eric had ignored him, confident that the guy
was wrong. The Nez Perce had never been in his damn valley.

That was the strongest sense he’d ever had about the significance of a single shot until the picture of the red cottage. And
his previous senses had always seemed to be closer to illusions, something that vanished as soon as you tried to close your
fist over it.

Eve Harrelson’s sister called a week after the service, around the time he’d begun to smile ruefully at the way his imagination
had gotten away from him.

“I hope that you won’t let the… odd moment from Eve’s service discourage you from working with me” were Alyssa Bradford’s
first words when they met the day after her call. They were sitting on the patio outside a coffee shop on Michigan Avenue,
and she had two shopping bags on either side of her chair and
wore probably two thousand dollars’ worth of clothes, carefully styled to seem casual. The woman reeked of money. Eric had
no idea where it came from. He’d gotten to know the Harrelson side of the family, and they were middle class at best. Evidently,
Alyssa had married up.

“Of course not,” he said. “I understand your reaction.”

“I called you only because of the quality of your film,” she said. “The way you worked it all together, and the music… just
wonderful. Everyone who was there was touched by it.
Everyone
.”

“I’m glad.”

“It triggered something in my mind. Something I could do for my husband. My father-in-law—his name is Campbell Bradford—is
in extremely poor health, close to the end, I’m afraid. But he’s a remarkable man, and has a remarkable story, and after seeing
your film I thought,
This would be perfect.
An absolutely perfect tribute, something lovely for his family to have.”

“Well, I’m glad it made a favorable impression. After seeing that one, you have a pretty good idea of what I’ll need, and—”

He stopped talking when she held up a hand.

“We won’t be doing quite the same thing. See, I want to contract your services for a longer period of time. I’d like to send
you somewhere.”

“Send me somewhere?”

“If you’re willing. You have experience with bigger projects is my understanding.”

Experience with bigger projects
. He looked at her with a small smile and managed a nod, the shame landing on him again, almost enough to drive him from the
chair.

“I’ve done a lot of work in film,” he said. It was as difficult a sentence as he’d ever uttered.

“That’s what I thought. I read about you online, and I was so surprised to see that you’d come back to Chicago.”

The sidewalk was calling to him now, screaming at him.
Get up, get your ass out of that chair and walk away from this disrespect. You were big once. Big, and ready to be
huge.
Remember that?

“I thought that it was probably a family decision,” Alyssa Bradford said.

“Yes,” he said. A family decision that when your career imploded, it was time to come home.

“Well, this is a family matter, too. My father-in-law has an extraordinary story. He ran away from home in his early teens,
came to Chicago in the midst of the Depression, and made a success of himself. A
massive
success. He’s worth well over two hundred million today. It was a quiet fortune, too. Until very recently, no one in the
family knew exactly what he was worth. We knew he was rich, but not
that
rich. Then he got sick and the legal discussions started and it came out. Now can you see why I’d like to tell his story?”

“What did he do to make the money?”

“Investments. Stocks, commodities, bonds, real estate, you name it. He’s just had a golden touch.”

“I guess so.” Eric was having trouble looking her in the eye for some reason. Her stare, that intense blue-eyed stare, reminded
him of the way she’d cornered him during the memorial service.

“The town where he was born, and where I want to send you, is in southern Indiana, a truly odd place, and beautiful. Have
you ever heard of French Lick?”

“Larry Bird,” he said, and she laughed and nodded.

“That’s the general response, but at one point it was one of the great resorts in the world. There are two towns there, actually,
West Baden and French Lick, side by side, and they each have a hotel that will take your breath away. Particularly the one
in West Baden. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen, and yet it’s built out in the middle of nowhere, this tiny town in farm
country.”

“You want me to go there?”

“That’s what I’m hoping, yes. It’s where my father-in-law is from, and he grew up in the era when it was really alive, when
people like Franklin D. Roosevelt and Al Capone were visitors. That’s what he saw in his childhood. I visited the place for
the first time last year after reading that they had restored the hotels. I was there only for a day, but long enough to see
that the place is just surreal.”

“Are you looking for a video history of the place, or of his life, or—”

“A combination. I’m prepared to pay for you to be down there for two weeks, and then take whatever time you need to finalize
it once you’re back.”

“Two weeks sounds like an inordinate amount of time. Not to mention cost.”

“I don’t think so. My father-in-law didn’t speak much of his childhood, or his family. He’d talk about the area, all these
stories about the town and times, but hardly anything about his own life. All we know is that he ran away from home when he
was in his teens. His relationship with his family ended then.”

“If that’s the case,” Eric said, “he might not enjoy seeing me present the family history on video.”

“You could be right. This isn’t just for him, though—it’s for my husband and the rest of the family.”

“I’m certainly interested,” he said, “but I do think two weeks sounds a bit—”

“Oh, I forgot to tell you the price. I’d pay twenty thousand dollars for the completed product. I’ll give you five of that
in advance.”

It was amazing that his first instinct was to think that dollar figure unimpressive. His mind still went to real film budget
numbers initially. Then he considered it again and realized that
twenty thousand dollars was half of what he’d made all last year. And twenty thousand
more
than he’d made the year before that. He closed his mouth on the hedging
I don’t know if I can invest all that time
argument that had been forthcoming, leaned back in his chair, and raised his eyebrows at Alyssa Bradford.

“I don’t see how I can turn it down.”

“Excellent. Once you see the town and the hotels and learn about the history, I think you’ll find the whole project very suited
to you. Suited to someone of your gifts.”