So Cold the River

turning slowly in his skull, a blade that seemed to have found its way to a whetstone in the past half hour. Withdrawal, indeed—he craved that infamous hair of the dog.

“Likely your mind is just spinning out from whatever’s in the water,” Kellen said.

“I’m telling you,” Eric said, “that guy in the train, his eyes were a perfect match for Josiah Bradford’s.”

“I believe it. But you’d already seen Josiah’s eyes. Got an intense look at them last night. So they were already in your brain, something for your mind to fool around with when the water took you on a trip.”

Possible, but Eric wasn’t convinced. That man on the train had been Campbell Bradford. He was sure of that in the same way that he’d been sure they had the wrong valley on that film about the Nez Perce, and in the same way he’d been sure of the importance of that photograph of the red cottage in Eve Harrelson’s collection.

The phone on the desk began to ring. Kellen looked at him questioningly, but Eric shook his head. Let it go to voice mail. Right now he didn’t want an interruption.

“I guess if it’s more than a drug effect, you’ll know soon,” Kellen said.

“What do you mean?”

“If it’s a drug effect that gives you straight-up hallucinations, then they’ll stay random, right? You’ll start seeing dragons on the ceiling next. But if it’s something else, if you’re seeing… ghosts or something, well, it’ll be more of the same guy, right?”

More of the same guy. Eric remembered him in the boxcar, saw that water splashing around his ankles and the bowler hat he’d tipped in Eric’s direction. No, he did not want to see more of that guy.

“I’m having visions,” he said, “not seeing ghosts. Maybe that shit sounds one and the same to you, but it’s not. Trust me.”

Kellen leaned back, one shoe braced against the edge of the desk. Looked like about a size sixteen. “You know what got me interested in this place to begin with?”

Eric shook his head.

“My great-grandfather was a porter at this hotel back in the glory days. He died when I was eleven, but until then his favorite thing to do was tell stories about his time down here. He talked about Shadrach Hunter a lot. Had a theory that Campbell Bradford murdered the man, like I said earlier, and that it was over a dispute concerning the whiskey Campbell ran through this town. He talked about the casinos and the baseball teams and the famous folks who came down. All those stories about what it was like to be a black man in this town in those times are what gave me my original interest. But those weren’t the only tales he told.”

Eric said, “Don’t give me ghost stories.”

“Don’t know if you could call them ghost stories, really. The man did believe in spirits, though—he called them haints—and he thought there were plenty of them down here. An unusual number, according to him. And they weren’t all bad. He thought there was a mix of both, and that there were a lot of them here. What he told me was that there was a supernatural charge in this valley.”

“A charge?”

“That’s right, just like electricity. Way he explained it to me was to think of it as a battery. He said every place holds a memory of the dead. It’s just stronger in some than in others. A normal house, according to old Everett”—there was a smile on Kellen’s lips but his eyes were serious—“was nothing more than a double-A battery, maybe. But some places, he said, it’s more like they’ve got a generator going, working overtime.”

“This hotel is one of those places?”

Kellen shook his head. “Not the hotel. The whole valley. He thought there was more supernatural energy in this place than anywhere else he’d ever been.”

“That a place would hold a memory of the dead, I could believe,” Eric said. “Hell, I have to believe it, with the experiences I’ve had. But the idea of a ghost, of anything that can actually affect things in the world, I cannot buy.”

“This valley is a strange place in a lot of ways.”

“So it is. But there’s strange, and then there’s the idea of active ghosts. You don’t believe in the latter, do you?”

Kellen smiled. “I’m going to quote old Everett on this one, brother. ‘I ain’t a superstitious man, but I know better than to walk through a graveyard after dark.’”

Eric laughed. “It’s a good line.”

They looked at each other in silence for a while, as if neither one really knew how to redirect the conversation now that ghosts had become a focal point of it. At length, Kellen nodded at the phone, which was now blinking red.

“You got a message.”

Eric picked up the phone and played the message. Anne McKinney. He was listening with half attention at first, but then her words clarified and he focused. What the old lady was suggesting was a hell of an idea, actually. He wrote her number on the pad beside the desk, deleted the message, and turned back to Kellen.

“Remember the woman I told you about who came by to see the bottle? She’s got a match. Same bottle style, same year, never opened.”

“Let me guess,” Kellen said. “It ain’t covered in frost.”

“No. But her idea was that I could take that water and mine somewhere to have them compared. Chemically.”

Kellen tilted his head and pursed his lips in a way Eric was beginning to recognize as one of his habits and nodded slowly. “That could be worth trying. And I might be able to help. Well, my girl might. She was a chemistry grad student at IU, spent the last semester studying for the MCATs. If there’s somebody local who can run an analysis on it, she might know who.”

“Fantastic,” Eric said, and though this suggestion of Anne McKinney’s was a small thing, it felt bigger, because it gave him some kind of action to take. Because it gave him some sense—or some illusion, maybe—of control.

“You might not have the need for it, running on ghost-water the way you are, but I could stand to get a meal,” Kellen said.

“Actually, I need to eat. Haven’t had a damn thing all day. But do you care if I run up to get the bottle from this woman first? I’d like to have it.”

“Nah, man, I’ll drive.”

Eric called Anne McKinney back, thanked her for the offer, and said they’d be by to pick the bottle up. She told him that was fine, but she sounded different than she had that afternoon. Less spark. Tired.

The sun was low and obscured by the hills west of the hotel as they came outside and walked to the parking lot. There was a blue minivan beside Kellen’s Porsche. Eric didn’t pay it any mind until the driver’s door opened and a man in a sweat-stained polo shirt stepped out and said, “Slow down, Mr. Shaw. I’d like to have a word.”

The driver was a short but well-muscled guy of about forty, bald except for razor-thin sidewalls of dark hair above his ears. He stood ramrod straight and with his shoulders back, a military bearing. Cold blue eyes, a BlackBerry in a leather case clipped onto his belt.

“Should I know who you are?” Eric said, coming to a stop as Kellen walked on to his Porsche and leaned against the hood, watching them, curious. He had his sunglasses on, and when the stranger glanced in his direction, Eric could see his reflection on the golden lenses.

“Mr. Cage,” the guy said, nodding.

“Wow,” Kellen said, “he knows everybody.”

“Just need to take a minute of your time if I could.”

“Then you better tell us who you are,” Eric said.

The bald man took out a business card and passed it to Eric. Gavin Murray, Corporate Crisis Solutions, it said. Three phone numbers and a Chicago street address.

“I don’t have a corporation,” Eric said, “or a crisis.”

He moved toward Kellen’s car and when he did, Gavin Murray held up a hand, palm out, and said, “You may be headed toward a crisis, though, and I’d like to help you avert that. We should have a quick talk about what you’re doing for Alyssa Bradford.”

Eric stopped short and looked back at him, got a cool stare in response. Kellen slid his sunglasses off and clipped them to the neck of his shirt and looked at Eric with raised eyebrows.

“Like I said, he knows everybody.”