and he was trying to stand on the rail to impress his sister. Goodness, how that boy had cried. The car came to a stop then and turned in her drive, and her thoughts left the past and she got to her feet. The wind had freshened a touch just as the car pulled in, got the chimes jingling on the porch and lifted some dust off the floorboards. She swept the thing twice a day, but the world never would run out of dust.
The visitor got out, a man with short hair of a color that had gotten confused somewhere between blond and brown. He needed a shave but seemed clean enough.
“Anne McKinney? They gave me your name down in French Lick,” he said, swinging the door shut and walking up the steps when she nodded. “I’m interested in Pluto Water. The old stories, the folklore. Think you’d be willing to talk about it?”
“Oh, I’m willing enough. Day I’m not willing to tell the old tales, you best call the grave digger—if nothing else just so he can hit me in the head with his shovel. Ought to issue a disclaimer before I get to it, though: time I get to storytelling, you best be comfortable. I’ve been known to go on.”
He smiled. It was a nice smile, warm and genuine.
“Ma’am, I’ve got plenty of interest and time.”
“Then come on up here and have a seat.”
He walked up the steps and offered his hand. “Name’s Eric Shaw. I’m down from Chicago.”
“Oh, Chicago. Always loved that city. Haven’t been there in years. I can remember riding the Monon up more than a few times, though. In fact, that’s where my husband and I went on our honeymoon. Spring of ’thirty-nine. I was eighteen years old.”
“When did the Monon stop making that run?”
“Monon stopped making any runs, period, in ’seventy-three.”
Thirty-five years ago. She didn’t consider dates all that much, but she’d just rattled two of them off, and they both sounded impossibly long ago. She remembered the day the Monon made its final run quite well, actually. She and Harold went up to the Greene County trestle and watched it thunder on across, waving good-bye as it went. Hadn’t realized exactly all they’d been waving good-bye to. An era. A world.
“Each of the hotels here had its own train station for years,” she said. “Doesn’t that seem hard to believe now? But here I go—talking away from the topic before we even got started. What was it you wanted to know about Pluto Water?”
He sat down on the chair across from her and pulled out one of those tiny tape recorders and held it up, a question in his eyes.
“Oh, sure, if you actually want to listen to me go on about this a second time, you’re more than welcome to it.”
“Thank you. I was wondering if you could tell me what you’d heard about the… more unusual effects of the water.”
“Unusual?”
“I know that eventually people realized it was nothing more than a laxative, but in the early days the stuff had a reputation that went well beyond that.”
She smiled. “It certainly did. For a time, Pluto Water was reputed to do just about anything short of put a man on the moon. The popular response to your question, of course, would be that as the years passed, people got smarter, learned more about science and health and figured out that all of that had been nothing more than snake oil sales. That the company survived for a time by toning down the claims, advertising it as a laxative, but the world’s finest laxative. Then people saw through that, too, or found a better product, and Pluto Water went the way of a lot of old-fashioned things. Quickly forgotten, and then it disappeared entirely.”
“You said that would be the popular response,” Eric Shaw said. “Are you aware of a different one?”
That got her to grinning again, thinking about what her daddy’s reaction to this man would be if he were still here. Why, he’d be coming up out of his chair by now, taking his pipe from his mouth and waving it around to emphasize his point. All the poor man had ever wanted was an audience for his Pluto Water theories.
“Well, sure, I’ve heard a few,” she said. “My father worked for the company, understand. And the way he told it, the water changed over the years. Originally, they’d just bottle it fresh out of the springs and what you drank was essentially direct from the source. Problem they ran into with that was, the water didn’t keep. They tried putting it into kegs and casks, but it went bad quickly. Unfit to drink. That wasn’t any real dilemma until people realized how much money could be made from shipping the water all over. Then they had to do something about it.”
“Pasteurization?”
“Of a sort. They boiled the water to get rid of some of the gasses that were in it and then added two different kinds of salt that fortified it, allowed it to keep. Once they had that process figured out, they bottled it and shipped it all over the world.”
Eric Shaw nodded but didn’t speak, waiting on more. She liked that. So many people were impatient these days, hurried.
“The company and most of the people involved with it swore up and down that nothing changed in the water during that boiling and salting.”
“Your father disagreed,” he said, and she chuckled.
“He suspected the preservation process changed what the water could do.”
“You didn’t believe him.”
“I’d be willing to believe, maybe, that water fresh from the springs had more effect than the stuff they bottled and shipped. Isn’t that true of most things? You eat a tomato from your own garden, it tastes different than the one you buy from the store.”
“Sure.”
“He also had a notion,” she said, “that your standard-issue Pluto Water was a special thing, capable of startling healing powers, but that there were some springs in the area that went a touch beyond that. This area is filled with mineral springs. Some large, some small, but there’s a lot of them.”
“Did you ever hear rumors that the water caused hallucinations?”
That lifted her eyebrows. She shook her head. “I never heard that, no.”
He looked positively disappointed but was trying to conceal it, nodding his head and rushing out another question.
“What about the temperature? I’ve, uh, I’ve heard that it would stay unusually cold. That there was some sort of… a chemical reaction, I guess, and you could leave the bottles out in a warm room but they’d stay cold, even get a little frost.”
“Well,” Anne said, “I don’t know who you’ve been getting stories from, but they sound like a colorful source. I’ve never heard of anything like that.”
He was silent for a moment, eyes concerned, and seemed to be groping for something.
“But you had the water that had been preserved or fortified, right?” he said eventually.
“Yes.”
“What if it had been fresh water, bottled back before they did that process?”
“That would require the water being from before eighteen ninety-three, I think,” she said. “I really couldn’t say much about that, but I never heard anything about any unusual coldness.”
“What might happen if you drank Pluto Water that hadn’t been preserved?”
“Well, the way I was always told, it simply wasn’t fit for human consumption after much time had passed.”
“And if someone
“If they could actually choke enough of it down,” Anne said, “I do believe it would be fatal.”
That seemed to rock him. He wet his lips and dropped his eyes to the porch floor and looked a little queasy. She frowned, watching him, wondering about all these questions now, about what exactly she had on her hands here.
“You mind my asking what you’re working on?”
“A family history,” he said.
“Someone that worked for Pluto?”
“No, but I’m trying to put as much area history into it as I can. I’ll be making a film, eventually, but today I’m just doing some preliminary work.”
