Danny had purchased, as instructed, two prepaid cell phones and a battery charger that Josiah could plug into the truck’s cigarette lighter. He got the first phone out of the package now and started charging it.
“I don’t understand why you needed two of them.”
“If I’m going to be calling these people in Chicago, you think it’d be a real good idea to call you from the same number?”
“Oh,” Danny said. “That’s good thinking. This guy you’re going to call, his number was in the briefcase you stole?”
“Yes.”
“I still don’t understand how you’re going to get any money out of him.”
“Fact is,” Josiah said, “a man can get awful lost in details if he dwells too much on them. I don’t intend to have such a hindrance. The man paid someone thousands of dollars to drive down here and sit outside my home, Danny. Paid another man to come down and talk to Edgar. Hell, might have been paying that one that told me he was a student. But the paperwork I got suggests something about me was worth a dime or two to this old boy. If it was worth something last night, it still will be tonight.”
“Last night his detective wasn’t dead.”
“Now, that is a fair observation.”
“Josiah, why don’t you just take the money I got and get-”
“You gone down to the hotel yet to check on Shaw?”
“No. You told me to get the phone first.”
“Right. Well, now I got it.”
Danny frowned. “All right. I’ll go. You just want to know if he’s there?”
“And where he goes if he leaves, yes. You got the numbers off the phones you bought, right?”
“Yes.”
“Well, use the first one. Don’t even think about calling the second one, just the first, got it? Call if you see him move.”
Danny hesitated and then gave a short nod and moved toward the door. He stopped when he was just on the other side, turned back, and looked at Josiah, his face a pale moon in the lantern light.
“So you’re going to call this guy and ask for money? Like that’s all there is to it?”
“That’s all there’ll be to the start of it,” Josiah said. “I figure there could be a twist or two along the way.”
Evening came on and settled and the rain fell soundlessly but unrelenting. Anne sat in the living room with a book in her lap but didn’t read. The depth of her desire was surprising to her, the sense of urgent anticipation she had as she watched the clock tick minutes off the day and waited for the water to take effect.
Come on, she thought, let me see what he is seeing. Let me go back to those times I never appreciated enough when I was in them, let me see those faces and hear those voices again.
Nothing happened. The short hand found seven and then eight and then nine, and she saw nothing but the achingly familiar walls of the house. She considered going for more water, but the stairs seemed so steep and the results so uncertain that she stayed in her chair. She’d seen how much Eric Shaw had to drink before the visions came for him and was sure she’d had at least an equal amount. Why, then, was he allowed to see the past and she was not?
She went to bed after taking her last round of readings, turned off the light, and watched the shadows shift as the moon struggled for a space amidst the clouds. The water had not worked for her. She’d felt vaguely nauseated since taking it, but she had seen nothing. A wasted risk. How could she have allowed herself to do such a thing? The water could have poisoned her. Or, worse, wreaked the sort of havoc it had with Eric Shaw, putting her into the throes of pain and addiction.
Logical as all those thoughts might be, she couldn’t make herself care about them. She’d understood the risk well enough at the start, but the reward had seemed so tantalizing… and still did.
Maybe it started with his bottle, the bottle he claimed came from Campbell Bradford. Maybe you wouldn’t see anything until you’d tried some of that. She’d have to call him in the morning, see if he’d gotten the Bradford bottle back yet, hope it would work with her as it had with him. It seemed worth a try.
She had a sense, though, that it would not work. She could drink his water and still see nothing, still be trapped here in the present, the lonely present of this empty house, and the ones she’d loved would continue to exist merely as memories and fading photographs. Why was Eric Shaw allowed to see the past and she was not? Why was some of the world’s magic presented to only a few and hidden from others?
The visions would not come to her, no matter how much of the water she drank. She would wait for them without reward, just as she’d waited for the big storm, waited with faith and patience and a confidence of purpose that she would be needed, that there was a reason she remained here. They’d need her someday; they’d need her knowledge and her trained eye and her shortwave radio. She had been certain of it.
But maybe not. Maybe it was all a charade, a silly girl’s notion that she’d never let die. Maybe the storm was never coming.
“Enough,” she whispered to herself. “Enough of this, Annie.”
Sleep swept over her then, descending with the speed and weight of a long day filled with unusual activity. She had a dim realization, just before it took her, of a light whistling sound.
The wind was coming back.
44
I’M GETTING STRONGER, and you can’t stop it. All the water in the world ain’t going to hold me back now.
The memory chased Eric up the stairs and back to his room, the words echoing through his brain.
He’d been real again. Without so much as a drop of the Bradford water passing through Eric’s lips, Campbell had been made real again. This time the vision had been a sort of hybrid, actually-a moment from the past again, yes, but this time Eric had been a participant as well as a spectator.
What in the hell had happened? What had changed?
He called Kellen. The first thing he said was, “He spoke to me again.”
“Campbell?”
“That’s right.”
“He spoke to you in a vision?”
“Well, it wasn’t on the elevator.”
Quiet again. Eric said, “Sorry, man. I’m just a little-”
“Forget it. What did you see?”
Eric told him about the murder of the nameless man in the mineral bath. He was sitting in the desk chair in the room, hair still damp, muscles still tight and stomach trembling from what he had seen.
“At first it was like they have been recently, you know, a scene from the past. Only there wasn’t any distance; I was right there for it. It didn’t involve me, though. Not in the beginning. When it was done, after he’d killed that guy… he turned and spoke to me. He spoke directly to me and spit tobacco juice into the water, and the tobacco juice was still there after he was gone. It was real, damn it. It was-”
“Okay,” Kellen said, his voice soft, calming. “I get it.”
“I don’t know why it changed,” Eric said. “I can’t figure out why it would have changed. Maybe because I was in the water, you know, immersed? But the only times I’ve seen him like that before were after drinking from the original bottle, and that thing’s nowhere near me now.”
“He said he was getting stronger?”
“Yeah. And that all the water in the world wasn’t going to stop him.”
“So the water’s been helping you.”
“Helping me?”
“You know, protecting you.”
From what? Eric thought. What in the hell is going to happen if I stop drinking the water? And what if he wasn’t lying-what if he is getting stronger? Does that mean the water won’t work anymore?
“You said that was your second vision,” Kellen said. “What was the first?”
So he told him about the Shadrach vision, realizing halfway through that he’d completely forgotten that he’d been given the name of the boy’s uncle. Somehow such details seemed insignificant after the scene in the spa.