“Eric? It’s Kellen. I got in touch with Edgar Hastings, the old guy who knew Campbell’s family, and he’s willing to see you. Should be able to straighten out this confusion.”
“Great.”
“I’m actually up in Bloomington right now, seeing my girl. Was going to stay overnight, but if I head on back down we can go together.”
“You don’t need to do that.”
“No, it’s cool. She’d just as soon throw me out anyhow.”
Eric could hear a laugh in the background, a sweet female sound that cut him.
“That’s your decision, Kellen. I’m not going anywhere.”
“I’ll give you a call when I get down there.”
Eric hung up. The clock told him almost an hour had passed since he left Anne McKinney, which meant she’d probably be at the bar by now. He took a deep breath and picked up the bottle, felt its cold wetness against his skin.
“Okay,” he said. “Routine sanity check coming right up.”
She was in an armchair not far from the bar, with a short glass of ice and clear liquid in her hand, a lime perched on the rim. She’d added jewelry since he left her porch, two bracelets and a necklace, and her blouse was different. She’d gotten dressed up to head into town and have her cocktail, evidently. He was hardly into the atrium before she lifted a hand and waved. Good eyes. Eric’s own mother was twenty years younger and wouldn’t have noticed him from this far away if he’d been riding in on a camel.
The bottle sweated more once it was in his hand, and as he crossed the atrium, a few drops of water fell from it and slid down his wrist and dripped onto the rug beneath.
Anne’s eyes were already fixed on the bottle as he pulled up a chair, and she set her drink on the table and said, “Well, let’s have a look.”
He passed her the bottle, and when she took it, her eyes first widened and then narrowed as she frowned, and she shifted it quickly from one hand to the other. A streak of moisture glistened on her wrinkled palm.
“You’ve been keeping it in ice?” she said, and Eric felt an explosion of relief, almost sagged with it.
“No,” he said. “That’s just how it is.”
She stared at him. “What?”
“That bottle hasn’t been anywhere other than the desk in the room since I got here. Before that, it was in my briefcase in the car. It hasn’t been near a refrigerator, a freezer, or an ice bucket.”
“Are you having me on? I don’t understand the trick.”
“It’s no trick, Mrs. McKinney. This is why I asked about the cold. I thought it was very strange.”
She was studying his face, looking for some sign that he was the sort of asshole who’d get a kick out of playing a game with an old woman’s mind. Apparently she found none, because she gave an almost imperceptible nod and then dropped her eyes and looked at the bottle again, rolling it over in her hands.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” she said, her voice soft. “Or heard of it. Even Daddy never said anything like this, and he was full of stories about Pluto Water.”
“Could it be so old that it never went through that boiling and salting?”
She shook her head. “No. This bottle isn’t anywhere near that old.”
She used her thumb to wipe some of the frosty condensation clear, then traced the etching of Pluto at the base.
“This one couldn’t be any earlier than ’twenty-six or ’twenty-seven. I’ll double-check, of course, but this color and this design… no, this would have to be from the late twenties. I’ve got a dozen like it. They made millions of them.”
He didn’t say anything, just watched her turn that bottle over again and again.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” she repeated, and then, without looking up at him, said, “You drank some of it, didn’t you.”
“Yes.”
She nodded. “I thought maybe you had. You seemed so worried about what it would do. Looks like you’ve had a good deal of it, too.”
Yes, by now he’d had at least two-thirds of the bottle.
“I think there’s something else in here,” she said. “That colored look, the sediment, that shouldn’t be there.”
“Go ahead and open it,” he said, “and tell me if it smells like Pluto Water to you.”
She opened it and held it to her nose and shook her head almost immediately.
“That’s not Pluto Water. It would smell-”
“Terrible,” he said. “Sulfuric.”
“Yes.”
“That’s how it smelled when I opened it originally. Since then-”
“It’s almost sweet.”
“Yes,” he said, again feeling that relief, this old woman confirming now with multiple senses what he’d feared was a trick of his mind.
“You asked about hallucinations,” she said, speaking carefully and gently.
“I think I’ve had a few, all since tasting it.”
“What do you see?”
“It’s varied, but I imagined a conversation with a man in Chicago, and then I got down here and thought I saw an old steam train…”
“That’s the kind they run for the tourists.”
“It wasn’t that train,” he said. “It was the Monon, the same one you talked about, and it came out of a storm cloud of pure black, and there was a man in a hat hanging out of a boxcar filled with water…”
He spit all this out in a breath, hearing the lunacy in it but watching her eyes and seeing no judgment.
“And I’ve had headaches,” he said, “awful headaches that go away quickly when I have another taste.”
She looked down at the bottle. “Well, I wouldn’t try any more of it.”
“I don’t intend to.”
She fastened the cap again and then passed him the bottle. He didn’t really want it back in his hands; it was nice to see somebody else handling it. He set it on the table beside her drink, and they both eyed it with a mix of wonder and distrust.
“I just don’t know what to think,” she said.
“Nor do I,” Eric said. Then he reached into his pocket and withdrew the microrecorder, rewound it without comment, and pressed play. Their voices came back, discussing the water, repeating all of those things that had just been said. He played about thirty seconds of tape, then shut it off and put the recorder back in his pocket. Anne McKinney was watching him with both knowing and astonished eyes.
“That’s why you’re taping everything. You want to be sure you’re not imagining it. You want to be sure it’s real.”
He managed a weak smile and a nod.
“Son,” she said, “you must be scared to death.”
20
DANNY CAME BY IN midafternoon, and Josiah was feeling fine, having spent the day sanding and painting the porch rails, with a beer or three for company. Funny, too, because those porch rails had needed paint for years, and he’d never gotten around to it. He’d bought the paint damn near a year ago, figured on tackling the job the next day, but the next day got away from him and soon the paint cans were covered with dust and cobwebs and the porch rails looked worse than ever.
Today, though, he got to the job simply because he needed something to busy himself with. It was a fine day, warm and filled with promise, one that called for doing something beyond sitting on your ass. Most weekends, Josiah was more than content to sit on his ass; he spent Monday through Friday working for other people, figured he’d earned himself a couple days of doing jack shit. Something was different today, though, in his mind and in his body, as if that evening wind that blew up while he slept on the porch had carried some sort of energy right through his skin. Mark it on your calendars, folks-as of May 3, Josiah Bradford was no longer content to bide his time.
It was a shame to involve somebody like Danny Hastings in such a plan as this, but fact was, there were some things you couldn’t do alone. Some things called for a bit of help, and though Danny wasn’t ideal in a lot of ways, he was loyal to a fault. They’d been brought up near as family, though they weren’t blood-related, and Josiah had spent much of his childhood kicking the shit out of Danny and then watching the little freckled bastard come ambling along for more, like a dog that doesn’t know how to stop loving its master regardless of the whip. Danny was fire tested by now.