When the bottle was back in his pocket, the boy grasped Campbell’s shoulders and began to tug him through the water. He waded along the southern rock wall, waist deep, moving carefully. Here the lantern light was dim. He stopped moving at a point where water gurgled between rocks, slipping out of the pool and back below ground. He tried to push Campbell into the dark gap, but the dead man’s shoulders snagged and held. The boy turned him slowly, rotating him in the water, and slid him in feet-first. He went in more easily this time, up to the waist, and then the boy placed his hands above both shoulders and shoved hard, grunting with effort. The body hung up for a moment, but then the water rose up and slapped against the stone and pushed the corpse out of sight beneath the earth.
He waded back to shore and put on his shoes and jacket. He checked the bottle and placed it gingerly back in his pocket. He then took the lantern and the pistol, climbed the hill again and returned to Shadrach Hunter’s body, and knelt and removed the money clip with the fourteen dollars and put it in his pocket.
He rose again, with the lantern in one hand and the pistol in the other, and walked on into the dark woods. A train whistle was shrilling out over the hills. He walked toward the sound.
The lantern’s glow turned smaller and continued to fade until it was barely visible in the shadows, and there was nothing but darkness and the sound of rushing water. Then the lantern began to grow larger and brighter, as if the boy had stopped somewhere out in the woods and decided to return. The light grew and grew until the dark woods melted away entirely and there was nothing but that gleaming, flickering light and…
Sky.
Gray sky.
And a voice.
Claire’s voice.
EPILOGUE
These are the things he remembers. The lantern coming back through the dark woods, the warm flickering light, the gray sky, Claire’s voice.
He is told that he shouldn’t be able to remember a thing. That he had been under the water for fifteen minutes before they got him out.
He learns new terms in the hospitaclass="underline" apneic, which means not breathing; cyanotic, which means displaying a bluish discoloration; PEA, or pulseless electrical activity, which means an electrocardiogram test records some heart function although there is no pulse. The heart still lives, in other words, but it is incapable of completing its job.
These are the terms that were applied to him once he was in the ambulance.
Kellen was the first one in the water. He watched Eric leap, saw where he entered, splitting the water directly between two downed trees that could have impaled him. Kellen marked the spot, but with an ankle broken in two places, he couldn’t make his way down to the water quickly enough, and the body had disappeared.
One thing Eric definitely did not imagine-Claire’s voice on his downward plunge. She was coming down the trail with Detective Roger Brewer in tow. She’d forced the detective to go with her to the last place she’d seen him, stretched out there on the trail, and upon finding him missing, began to shout for him. Kellen heard the shouting. Kellen shouted back.
Brewer entered the water while Claire-with a dislocated shoulder and broken collarbone from her landing on the pavement after Josiah Bradford shoved her from his truck-stood on the bank and shouted at every ripple in the water and shadow over it, thinking they all might be Eric.
The way they all tell it now, Eric just floated up from the depths. Surfaced in the middle of the swirling pool, facedown. Like the Lost River had him, and then decided to give him back.
Brewer and Kellen brought him out. The detective began CPR, then turned it over to Claire and went for his radio when he could not get a response. Claire succeeded in getting a few wet, wheezing coughs.
They could not restore spontaneous breathing or a pulse.
In the ambulance, the electrocardiogram registered a bradycardic-unusually slow-heart rate. Thirty-seven beats per minute. There was still no palpable pulse. The heart’s electrical system was functioning, but the mechanical pumping system was not. The paramedics applied a ventilator to assist with breathing and then administered epinephrine. One minute later, Eric’s heart rate was up to one hundred beats per minute, and a pulse appeared at the carotid artery.
He was driven to Bloomington Hospital at speeds averaging ninety miles an hour, and there he was placed on a different ventilator, and steps were taken to warm his core temperature. Claire was with him for the ride and believed that he would be pronounced dead on arrival, that the epinephrine-induced heartbeat was nothing more than a tease.
It was not a tease. Within an hour of his arrival, his heart was functioning normally, and three hours after that, the lungs were deemed capable of unassisted breathing.
They kept him in the hospital for another twenty-four hours. Monitoring, they said, and there were other tasks to be done-putting stitches in his scalp, setting Claire’s collarbone, outfitting her with a sling, treating Kellen’s shattered ankle.
He does not remember anything of the ambulance ride, or much of his early hours in the hospital. At some point he grows clear-headed again, and soon the police are with him, statements being taken. Claire and Kellen have already offered theirs, and she is in the room with him now. He cannot take his eyes off her. He looks at her and he sees the pickup truck again, the melting, twisted metal and the flash of white bone amid ashes.
I thought you were dead, he tells her.
Likewise, she says.
She believes that Josiah hoped to kill her when he pushed her out of the truck. He had the shotgun in his lap but did not fire it, maybe because he couldn’t do that and control the vehicle, maybe because he was afraid of igniting the dynamite in the bed of the truck. Whatever the reason, he settled for shoving her out onto the road, and Brewer crashed into a fence trying to avoid her.
What were you thinking when you jumped into the water? she asks him. How could you let yourself do that?
You were gone, he answers. It does not seem enough for her; it remains more than enough for him. She was gone, and Campbell remained. Now she is here, and Campbell is gone.
He can hardly believe it. He can hardly trust it.
It isn’t until late that evening that they hear the news about Anne McKinney. When Detective Brewer shares it in a low, flat voice, Claire weeps and Eric leans his head back and closes his eyes.
Looks like it was fast, and painless, Brewer says. That’s something. Old as she was, it was just too much stress. Shouldn’t be surprising that she had a heart attack; it’s surprising that it happened then, after everything was pretty well resolved.
She saved me, Claire says. Saved us.
Yes, ma’am.
No one even got her out of that basement? She must have been terrified. She must have been so scared.
Brewer doesn’t know about that. Says Anne was on the radio with the dispatcher and sounded solid. Then there was a bit of weirdness right before the end.
Weirdness?
She reported a tornado sighting, Brewer explains. That was the last thing she said. Apparently she thought there was one right outside. But of course she was still down in the basement, couldn’t see a thing.
So she scared herself to death, Claire says.
Brewer spreads his hands and says that he can’t answer that. All he knows is that they said she sounded fine when she made the report. Real composed. Relaxed, even. She was still in the chair in front of the radio when the police got there.
Eric, listening to all this with his eyes closed, is saddened but believes that Claire’s worries are unnecessary. Anne was ready for the storm, real or imagined. She wouldn’t have been terrified by it. She’d have been ready.
