“I’d say not,” Eric agreed. “But you’ve got to figure my guy is related to him.”
“I know it. And that’s why I’ll be interested to see what Edgar Hastings has to say. He’s the only person I’ve found in town who has any clear memories of Campbell. But he’s also something of a foster father to Josiah, so best not to mention what happened tonight, I guess. You free tomorrow if I get something set up with him?”
“Sure.” Eric was touching his face with his fingertips, assessing damage. His lip would be a little swollen in the morning, but he’d kept a cool beer to it, so he wouldn’t look too much the worse for wear.
“I’ve never heard of another Campbell Bradford,” Kellen said. “It’s strange.”
“We’ll figure it out,” Eric said, thinking that the least strange thing in his day was confusion over the man’s identity. That didn’t come close to the black train or the leaves or that man in the bowler hat, no.
Kellen dropped him off with a handshake and a promise that he’d call Edgar Hastings the next day. Eric was almost nervous going back into the hotel alone and felt a childish desire to run back into the parking lot and flag Kellen down, ask him to have one more drink. Just stay with me for twenty minutes, buddy, enough so I can look around and make sure the place is an ordinary hotel again and not the friggin’ Overlook.
For some reason, thinking of Stephen King’s hotel horror story made him smile as he walked back into the atrium and looked around. Yeah, Kubrick would’ve salivated over shooting in this location. It had everything a filmmaker desired-beauty, grandeur, size, history, and, at least for Eric tonight, a King-size dose of creepy.
“Couldn’t ask for anything more,” he said under his breath. The hotel had quieted a bit, with just a handful of people left at the bar, the piano player gone, and the piano itself covered up. He didn’t see anything out of place, didn’t hear anything out of place. The hotel seemed sane again.
He headed upstairs to his room, where he put on every light and then immediately went around turning them back off when the brightness made his headache flare. It was past eleven now. The strangest day of his life was almost done. He felt a powerful need to call Claire, tell her every weird and frightening detail and hear her responses. No, the hell with calling Claire, he wanted to talk to her face-to-face, to see her in this bedroom. And the hell with talking to Claire, he wanted to take her right here on this large, luxurious bed. Wanted to be tugging her jeans off those long legs, wanted to feel them catch on the rise of her ass the way they always did.
Damn, but he missed her. Felt it the way old people feel arthritis in their bones, an unrelenting agony carried every day, every hour, every minute.
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.