Campbell followed it with his eyes but said nothing.
“Okay,” Eric said. “Take care, Mr. Bradford.”
He left the hospital and drove back to the apartment, opened a beer and leaned against the refrigerator while he drank it, holding the bottle to his forehead between sips. What a weird guy. What a weird night.
It was the sort of story he’d have shared with Claire once, and that thought reminded him of the message he still hadn’t checked. Maybe it was her.
When he played the message, though, it wasn’t Claire’s voice.
“Eric, hey, I hope this catches you! This is Alyssa Bradford, and I’m calling to tell you not to waste your time driving to the hospital tonight. My father-in-law took a turn for the worse this week. I went down there yesterday and he couldn’t say a word, would just look at me and stare. The doctors said he hasn’t spoken since Monday. I’m so sorry it won’t work out. I wish you could have talked with him. He had such a sense of humor. I guess the last time he spoke, it was to tell the nurse she needed to get a new outfit. That was just like him. If those were his last words, at least they were a joke.”
She wished him luck in West Baden and hung up. Eric finished the rest of his beer in a long swallow and deleted the message.
“Hate to tell you, Alyssa,” he said aloud, “but those weren’t his last words.”
5
IT HIT NINETY ON the first Friday of May, and everyone Anne McKinney spoke with commented on the heat, shook their heads, and expressed disbelief. Anne, of course, had seen this coming about six weeks earlier, when spring arrived early and emphatically. It had been in the high sixties throughout the third week of March, and while the TV people were busy talking about when it would break, Anne knew by the fourth day that it would not. Not really, not in the way of a normal Indiana spring, with those wild swings, seventy one day and thirty the next.
No, this year spring settled in and put up its feet, and winter didn’t have much to say about it, just a few overnight grumblings of cold rain and wind. There had been five days in the eighties during April, and the rain that came was gentle. Nurturing. The entire town was in bloom now, everything lush and green and unpunished. The grounds around the hotel were particularly stunning. Always were, of course—full-time landscapers could do that for you—but Anne had seen eighty-six springs in West Baden, remembered about eighty of those pretty well, and this was as beautiful as any of them.
And as hot.
She couldn’t avoid the weather conversations even if she’d wanted to; it was her identity in town, the only thing most people could think to mention when they saw her. Sometimes the topic came up casually, other times with genuine interest and inquiry, and, often enough, with winks and smiles. It amused some people, her fascination with weather, her house on the hill filled with barometers and thermometers and surrounded by weather vanes and wind chimes. That was fine by Anne. To each his own, as they said. She knew what she was waiting for.
Truth be told, there were times when she thought she might never see it either. See the real storm, the one she’d been counting on since she was a girl. The last few years, maybe she’d let her eye wander a bit, let her interest dim. She still kept the daily records, of course, still knew every shift and eddy of the winds, but it was more observation and less expectation.
But now it was ninety on the first Friday of May, the air so still it was as if the wind had lost its job here, headed elsewhere in search of work. The barometer sat at 30.08 and steady, indicating no change soon. Just heat and blue skies and stillness, the summer humidity yet to arrive, that ninety more tolerable than it would be in July.
All peaceful signs really. Anne didn’t believe any of them.
She went into the West Baden hotel at three and sat in one of the luxurious velvet-covered chairs near the bar and had her afternoon cocktail. Brian, the bartender, gave a wink to one of his coworkers when he fixed Anne’s drink, as if she didn’t know he put only the barest splash of Tanqueray in the tonic before squeezing the lime. A splash was all she needed these days. Hell, she was eighty-six years old. What did the boy think she was coming down here for, to end up three sheets to the wind?
No, it was the routine. A ritual of thanks more than anything else, an appreciation for continued health, health that she couldn’t ask for at this age. She still made it up all those front steps, didn’t use a cane or a walker or a stranger’s arm. Walked in under the dome and had herself a seat and a sip. The day she couldn’t do that, well, go ahead and pop the lid on the pine box.
There wasn’t a soul in the world who would understand how it made Anne feel to come in here and see the place alive. The day it had finally reopened, she walked into the rotunda beneath that towering dome of glass and burst into tears. Had to sit down on a chair and cry, and people just smiled sympathetic-like at her, seeing an old woman having an old woman’s moment. They couldn’t understand what it meant, couldn’t understand the way this place had looked when she was a girl, the most amazing place she could ever have imagined in the world.
It had been mostly a ruin for years. Decades. She’d come and gone through the town daily, looking up to see the crumbling stone and cracked marble, and with every day and every look, a little piece of her died a wailing, anguished death.
But she’d never lost hope either. The place was special, and she just couldn’t imagine that it would go on like that forever. The hotel’s return, much like the big storm, was something she’d believed in without fail. You called that sort of thing faith.
Her faith had been rewarded. Bill Cook, the man’s name. Awful plain name, she thought, but he’d made a few billion dollars on it with a medical company up in Bloomington, and then he’d found his way down here and not only seen what had to be done but could afford to
So now they were back, both of them, the West Baden Springs Hotel and the French Lick Springs Resort, buildings that seemed as out of place in this valley as a pair of giraffes at a dog show, and though she had no use for the ugly fake riverboat casino that was built to draw people down, she understood its purpose. Most irksome part of that was that the thing wasn’t really a riverboat, was nothing but a building with a moat around it, but evidently that was enough to please the legislators, who wouldn’t allow anything but riverboat casinos in the state. You had to wonder what that said about the quality of brains in the statehouse, that they could fool themselves into thinking a building was a boat just because you filled a ditch around it with water, but Anne had been around for too many years to hold much hope for government anyhow. They could have declared the thing a spaceship for all she cared as long as it allowed the hotels to come back.
She’d lived to see it. That was a special thing, and one that returned her faith in the storm. It was coming, someday, a dark, furious cloud, and though she didn’t know what role she would play in that, she knew it was important that she be ready. Part of her wanted the storm; part of her dreaded it. As much as she loved them— those brilliant flashes of lightning, the terrible screaming winds—she feared them, too. They took all the powers of man and sneered at them.
A convention of some sort was in the hotel today, and the place was particularly active, echoing with voices and laughter and footfalls on the parquet. It soothed her like a hand on the shoulder. She asked Brian for one more, smiled to herself as she saw him fill the short glass with nothing but tonic and ice before adding the lime. He knew the rules. Anne was here for the sounds and the sights, not the sauce.
She took the tonic in slow, and by the time it was gone, that comforting noise and bustle and the soft velvet armchair were pulling her down to sleep, and she knew it was time to go. Start falling asleep down here and she’d begin to seem less charming to the staff. Right now, with her daily gin and her smiles and occasional barbed jokes, she was something of a local treasure. Valued, appreciated, even by the younger ones. She liked that role, and understood all too well that it could quickly be erased by one drooling nap.
She got to her feet, taking care to relish that tug of pain in her lower back, a tug that she wouldn’t have if she couldn’t still get to her feet. Left a few dollars for Brian—
