So Cold the River

He’d made it out of that meeting peacefully. He didn’t make it out of the film the same way.

“And this,” Eric said aloud, “is how you ended up in Indiana. Well done.”

He could shake the memory off for the morning, but not the headache. Food might help, or some black coffee at least, so he left the room and walked down the steps and out into the atrium again. Made it only twenty paces across before the light shining in through the dome brought him to a halt, and he turned on his heel, gritting his teeth, and retreated to the darker corridor that circled the atrium. Found his way to one of the dining rooms, took a table, and ordered an omelet and coffee. Hurry on the coffee, please.

He drank two cups and felt no effect, picked at the omelet and got maybe three bites down before giving up, tossing cash on the table, and returning to his room. This was bad. Headaches like this one, so sudden, so blinding in their pain… they were harbingers. Eric knew enough to understand that, and the possibilities chilled him. Brain tumor, blood clot, cancer. Aneurisms and strokes and heart attacks.

Time to call Dr. Sharp in Chicago. That was all there was to it.

He called from his cell phone. Only when he reached the robotic-voiced menu did he remember that it was a Saturday, and therefore getting the good Dr. Sharp on the line was going to be impossible. His office was closed weekends, and the monotone message suggested Eric visit the emergency room if his condition was serious.

It felt awfully serious to him, but it was also only a headache. You didn’t walk into an emergency room with one of those. And where was a hospital around here anyhow?

He wasn’t sure if he looked at the Pluto Water because he thought of it, or if he thought of it because he looked at it. The chain of logic wasn’t clear, but somehow he found himself staring at the bottle on the desk and thinking, Why the hell not? It was supposed to cure headaches, wasn’t it? He was sure he’d seen that on the lists of ailments the mineral water boasted it could handle. Granted, damn near every other affliction of the early twentieth century had been on those lists, but the stuff couldn’t have gotten its reputation by being a pure placebo. It had to help some problems.

He walked over to the desk and reached for the bottle but stopped with his hand about six inches away, tilted his head, and stared at it. There was a glaze over the bottle now. It looked almost like…

Frost. Son of a bitch, it was frost. He wiped some of it off with his thumb, found it just like wiping clear a streak on the window on an early winter morning in Chicago.

“I’ve got to figure you out,” he said.

He wasn’t going to figure anything out if he had to hole up in this room, sitting on the floor and chewing Excedrin like they were Skittles. So why not give the water a try?

He unfastened the cap and took a small, hesitant swallow.

Not bad. If anything, the sulfuric taste was down and more of the sugary flavor was present in its stead. He took a full swallow, and the taste drove him on for another and then a third, the stuff going down like nectar now. It took a conscious effort to stop, and when he lowered the bottle he saw that more than half of the contents were gone—the same liquid that had made him gag back in Chicago at the smallest of tastes.

The flavor might have improved, but it had no effect. The headache pounded on, that motorcycle gang still circling through town, racing one another.

Okay, the Pluto Water wasn’t going to do the job. Dumb idea, fine, but he was willing to try a dumb idea if it meant he could go about his day.

He went back to the bed and stretched out on his stomach, slid his face under the pillows and held them to his head. Maybe he should go to the hospital. Probably was crazy not to. If Claire were here, it wouldn’t even be an issue; they’d be driving these rural highways right now, looking for the telltale blue- and-white sign. She was a worrier. Protective of him, too. Would defend him to the end.

Well, almost to the end. She’d stuck with him through it all in California, but once they were back in Chicago, back around her family and their judgmental whispers, her resolve had wavered. The questions started then, asking him what came next, saying that it was fine if he needed out of the movie business but what business was he going to find for the future, what would he do? He’d needed time, that was all, and she didn’t have enough of it for him, evidently. Didn’t have enough…

His thoughts left Claire, and, very slowly, he removed the pillows and lifted his head. Cocked it to the side, as if he were listening for something in the distance.

“It’s going away,” he said.

The damned headache was fading. Still present, but the biker gang was driving away now, heading uphill on the roads that led out of town.

14

HE DIDN’T TRUST IT at first, maybe didn’t want to trust it. He went onto the balcony and sat overlooking the atrium for fifteen minutes as the headache continued to fade and then was gone. No, he thought, it can’t really be gone. You’ve just adapted to the light.

So he went outside and walked the grounds for half an hour in the stark sunlight, waiting for the pain to return. It did not. The Pluto Water had done the job, done it with astonishing speed and efficiency.

He had to find out what the hell was in that stuff. And, why, if it was so incredibly effective, had the product vanished over the years? Did you build up a tolerance, or did it have unwelcome side effects? There had to be some problem, because anything that could obliterate a migraine like that would’ve been raking in billions a year by now.

The Pluto Water research would be a priority for the day, he decided as he walked back into the hotel and up to his room, feeling wonderful now, fit and energetic. But before he got to that, he had to call Alyssa Bradford.

He called from the balcony, looking down on a group of high school students on a tour, a man with a country drawl filling them in on the history of the hotel. Eric could catch pieces of his talk—“The first West Baden hotel was destroyed by fire, and Lee Sinclair was bound and determined to replace it with something incredible…. They built this place in under a year, and that was in an era without modern construction equipment…. If you laid the glass in that dome end-to-end you’d have a path sixteen inches wide and nearly three miles long”—as he located Alyssa’s number and dialed.

“Well, Eric, what do you think?” she said. “Pretty amazing, isn’t it?”

“It absolutely is,” he said, and right now, free of headaches and troubling tricks of the mind, he was able to say that and mean it again, to really feel happy to be here. “I’d seen pictures, but it still took my breath away. Because it just doesn’t seem to fit.”

“It doesn’t! That place belongs in Austria, not Indiana. Have you had much luck finding out about my father- in-law?”

“Only that there’s some dispute over his age,” Eric said. “Any chance he’s really one hundred and sixteen?”

“What?” she said and laughed. “No, I don’t think there’s any chance of that. How did you arrive at that question?”

He told her about his first day in town—at least the research end of it. No need to enlighten her about the vanishing train or the violins in his head. Professional reputation to uphold and all that. Hate to lose out on future wedding videos over rumors of insanity.

“Campbell Bradford isn’t a common name,” she said. “The other one has to be a relative.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” Eric said, “but my contact here assures me that the Campbell he knew of ran out on his family in nineteen twenty-nine. He left a son named William behind, but William stayed in town, and died in town.”

“I have no idea what to think of that,” she said, “only it can’t be my father-in-law. The age is too far off.”

“Right. Your father-in-law could have been a son this guy had after he left, but—”

“My father-in-law grew up in the town.”

“Yeah. As an aside, I might have found a cousin for you. But I don’t think he’s a guy you’ll be inviting to any family reunions.”

He told her about Josiah and the fight with Kellen Cage.

“I certainly hope he’s not family,” she said. “But if you find out he is some distant