“Whoa,” Kellen said. “Slow down, man. Slow down. All I did was ask a question. Didn’t make a single accusation that I can recall.”
“All right,” Eric said. “Sorry. I just hear how it sounds when it leaves my mouth, and I know what you must think.”
“A lot of what I’d usually think has changed in the last day or two, hanging around your weird ass. So while I’m not dismissing one crazy word that comes out of your mouth, I’d also like to hear you tell me what the hell’s been happening down here.”
It took them almost an hour, Eric explaining what he knew and Kellen offering the same, arriving at a total that was just as empty as its parts. Kellen said Brewer had told him that while Josiah Bradford was “historically fond of trouble, but not the murdering sort of trouble,” detectives were indeed looking for him. Eric knew he should care more about that, but it was hard to right now. Ever since the latest vision, it was hard to keep his mind on the present, in fact. Strange.
“I’ve got a question for you,” Eric said.
“Shoot.”
“You’re the student of the area, you’re the one who knows so much about the history of this place. Do you believe that the moments I’ve seen after drinking Anne’s water have been real? Those scenes with Campbell and the boy?”
Kellen thought on it for a long time, and then he nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I do. Obviously, I can’t speak to the details you’re seeing. But in general terms, they fit with history. Could be you’re making the whole thing up, of course. I can’t imagine a reason you’d do that, though, and after seeing you collapse in the dining room the other day, I’m pretty damn convinced that whatever is happening to you is real.”
“Okay,” Eric said. “That’s what I think, too. That the moments I’ve seen are real. And I’ve started to think about ways to utilize it.”
“Utilize it?”
“Think about it, Kellen-I’m seeing an untold story, but a true one. If I can keep seeing it… if I can get a sense of the whole, then we can try to document it, right? Document it and tell it.”
“Right,” Kellen said slowly.
“You’re thinking that the average person would write it off as crazy,” Eric said. “People love this sort of shit, though. If I could make a film out of this? Oh, man. We could be on every talk show there is, telling this story.”
Kellen gave a slow nod, no response showing, and Eric had to swallow his annoyance. Get excited, he wanted to shout, don’t you see what this could do? It could bring me back, Kellen. It could give me my career back.
There was no need to push that idea yet, though. He could take it slow. There was plenty of water.
“Anyhow,” he said, “I’m just thinking out loud, sorry. I really would like to try to find that spring, though. The one they used for the alcohol. If the boy’s uncle was really murdered, there must be some record of it, right? Some way to put a name with him, to identify him.”
“Probably. I’ve been wondering about that spring, though. You said Campbell claimed it was different from the rest, and that’s the same thing Edgar told us about Campbell’s liquor. Remember? He said it made a man feel like he could take on the world.”
“You’re thinking that’s what is in my bottle?” Eric said.
“Could be.”
“And there might be a whole spring of that shit somewhere out in the woods around here?” Eric laughed. “Who knows what would happen if I tasted that one.”
“Yeah,” Kellen said. “Who knows.”
The rain returned about an hour after Eric Shaw left Anne’s house, but it was gentler and without the theatrics. Hardly any wind at all, but she remembered that fading thunder that had reminded her of a retreating dog and she knew that it would be back. Probably these were lines of storms coming in from the plains, a prelude to a cold front. It wasn’t an unpleasant prelude to her, though. This was what she watched for. What she did, now that there was no job and no children to raise, no husband to care for. She watched over the valley instead. They didn’t know she was there, maybe, didn’t pay her any mind as she sat up here with an eye to the skies, but still she watched for them.
She had a card taped to the refrigerator with a few handwritten excerpts from the National Weather Service’s advanced spotter’s field guide.
As a trained spotter, you perform an invaluable service for the NWS. Your real-time observations of tornadoes, hail, wind, and significant cloud formations provide a truly reliable information base for severe weather detection and verification. By providing observations, you are assisting NWS staff members in their warning decisions and enabling the NWS to fulfill its mission of protecting life and property. You are helping to provide the citizens of your community with potentially life-saving information.
And below that, written larger and underlined:
The most important tool for observing thunderstorms is the trained eye of the storm spotter.
This claim made in an era of Doppler radars and high-tech satellites. They were the experts, too. So if they said it, she figured it was true. Besides, that statement was the sort of thing that had always made sense to her. It gave science its due while warning that humans hadn’t yet developed a science that could understand, encompass, or predict all the tricks of this wild world. Nor, she knew, would they ever.
She turned the television on and saw they still had a thunderstorm warning active for Orange County. Well, they could pull that down. The storm was gone now and wouldn’t be back for a bit. They might want to keep the flash flood warnings handy, though, because if this rain fell all night, the creeks would be high come tomorrow, when the thunderstorms returned.
There was nothing on TV worth watching. A basketball game, but while she’d been raised on basketball, she didn’t care for the pro game. Still followed the Hoosiers, of course, and went to the high school sectional, but that had never been the same since they broke the legendary tournament into classes. Thank heaven Harold had been gone before that happened.
The phone rang just as she was making dinner, startled her, and she went to it, wondering if it was Eric Shaw, fearful he was having trouble again. Instead it was Molly Thurman, a young woman-well, forty-from church who was calling to tell Anne she’d been right about the weather again. Anne had guaranteed a storm after the service this morning, and it was nice to see somebody had remembered and thought to call. Molly had two boys, five and seven, and it wasn’t but a minute after she called that she had to hang up to tend to some crisis with them.
The phone was silent then, as was the house around it, just the hissing of the gas flame on the stove and the dripping of water down the gutters and off the porch roof to keep her company. She was glad the phone call hadn’t been Eric Shaw, having another spell, but she also would have been interested to know what was happening with him. If he were to be believed, things would remain normal for a few hours, at least. Then the pain would come back, and then he’d need some more of her water, and then he’d take to seeing things… seeing the past.
That’s what he’d said this afternoon, at least. What were you seeing? she had asked, and he’d said, The past. Moments from the valley’s history. And people from it. He’d seen the hotel in its glory, and then some old whiskey still up in the hills, seen it just as vividly as if it were real, seen the people as if they were in the room with him.
She thought on that while she ate her dinner and cleaned up, and when she was done, she went to the stairs again, sighed, and took the railing and started up.
When she got up to the empty bedroom, she unwrapped another bottle-her supply was dwindling fast this weekend-and held it in her hand. She hadn’t tasted the stuff in years. Decades. Surely nothing would happen, though. Whatever Eric Shaw was experiencing had to be unique, or unrelated to the water at all.