So Cold the River

“Hey,” he said. “What’s up?”

“That old lady called. She wants you to get her Pluto Water.”

“Okay. I’ll call her back in a while. I don’t really have time to—”

“She said she’s leaving for a few days, and if you want the bottles, you have to get them now. She sounded upset.”

Leaving for a few days? It was odd that she hadn’t mentioned it.

“She say where she was going?”

“Nope. Just that if you want the water, today’s the day to get it.”

Damn it. He didn’t have time for a delay like this, but he also couldn’t afford to let the last supply of original Pluto Water he had access to close off. Not right now, not when his hands were shaking and his head was throbbing and even full bottles of the hotel water didn’t do a damn thing to help. By now Anne’s water might not help either, but it was better to have at least the chance of a net under your tightrope.

“Hang on,” he said and then lowered the phone and said to Kellen, “Hey, are we going to pass by Anne McKinney’s on our way to this place?”

“That’s the exact opposite direction. But we can turn around.”

He didn’t want to turn around. He wanted to see the site of the old Granger cabin, and the sky was turning forbidding, more storms certainly on the way. But it was worth a delay if he could get his hands on a few more bottles…

“I’ll go see her,” Eric told Claire. “I hate to slow down for it now, because I want to find this spot I told you about and it looks like rain.”

“I had the TV on. They’re predicting bad storms all day.”

“Great. I’d love to get caught out in the woods in those. But if she’s leaving—”

“I could go get them,” Claire said.

He hesitated. “No. We agreed that it was safest for you to stay—”

“She’s an elderly woman, Eric. I think I can handle her.”

“I don’t really like that idea.”

“Well, I’d like to see one of these bottles, honestly.”

He remembered the way she’d inquired about the bottle as soon as she got to the hotel, as if testing him, searching for tangible proof of his wild stories.

“Fine,” he said. “Let me give you directions to the house.”

50

ANNE SAT ON THE COUCH with her hands folded in her lap and watched Josiah Bradford pace and mutter and thought that it was clear he was no longer in his own mind. He still managed lucid exchanges, but whenever he drifted away from the moment, his head was taking him far from this house. It was almost like watching Eric Shaw the other day. Like that but different, because with Eric it had been obvious that his mind was traveling somewhere else. With Josiah, it seemed something was paying him a visit. He was holding entire under-the-breath conversations, grumbling about a strong back and a valley that needed to be reminded of a few things, other bits and pieces that seemed just as nonsensical. His eyes were bloodshot and rimmed by puffy, purple rings, the picture of exhaustion. She wondered if he was using the strange, terrible drug that did so much harm in this area, meth. She’d only read of it, had no sense of the symptoms, but surely something had invaded his body and mind.

When he wasn’t whispering to himself, he was spitting tobacco juice into an empty fruit cocktail can he’d dug out of the kitchen. He’d carry on in a whisper for a while, staring out the window, and then he’d peel his lips back from his teeth and—ping—spit into the can. Over and over he did that, and while watching a man spit tobacco was far more loathsome than fascinating, she found herself enthralled by it. Because, as far as she could tell, there was no tobacco in his mouth.

He’d never put any in his mouth, at least, and though she’d studied him hard, she could see no bulge in his cheek or lower lip. When he spoke, to her or to himself, he didn’t seem to be talking around anything either. Yet his supply of amber-colored spittle never seemed to run dry, and she could smell the tobacco, dusky and cloying, from where she sat.

Bizarre. But at least he was distracted from her. Whatever he had planned for Eric Shaw couldn’t be good, though she didn’t know what she could do to prevent it, or if she even should try. Perhaps it was best to wait him out. Maybe he’d leave eventually, or maybe he’d burn himself out and fall asleep. If he did that, she could get to the R. L. Drake. He’d felt awful good about himself for cutting the phone line, but he hadn’t counted on her having a shortwave. All she needed was the opportunity, but getting down those steep stairs into the cellar wasn’t something she could do quickly. Quietly, maybe, but not quickly.

At least she was still free to move. He’d carried a roll of duct tape inside with him and she’d expected from the start that he’d use it to bind her hands and, God forbid, seal her mouth. She had enough trouble taking calm breaths right now. Close off her mouth and she shuddered to think what it would be like. He never used it, though, never even tied her hands, as if he’d taken stock and determined her too old and feeble to do harm.

A crazy man pacing the living room should have held her attention, but after a time she found it drifting from Josiah Bradford to the big picture window and the tumultuous clouds blowing in from the west.

Today was going to be special. And not just because of the man with the gun who’d taken up residence in her home. No, today would have been special even without that. The air mass headed this way was unstable, and the ground wet and warm. That meant that as the day built and the heat rose with it, there’d be something called differential heating. A boring term, unless you understood what it did. Differential heating provided lift, allowing that moist, unstable air mass to take on an updraft. And once that started? Storms followed. Yes, they did.

All the basics were in play already today, but the clouds were showing Anne that another variable looked ready to join: wind shear. Specifically, the vertical sort. The stronger that was, the longer the storm front had access to the updraft, and that meant trouble. The banks of dark clouds to the west had an obvious tilt to them, seemed to be leaning forward from the top, a look that indicated high wind shear. Most anyone would notice that tilt, but few would see the secondary motion—a mild, almost undetectable clockwise shifting of the cloud layers. At first she hadn’t been sure because she was distracted by Josiah’s carrying-on, but then she squinted and focused and saw that she was right. The clouds in the lowest level of the atmosphere were turning with those at the bottom of the upper level, and the direction was clockwise. That was called veering. That was not good.

Veering was a form of rotation, and rotation was a hallmark of the supercell storm, the sort Anne had been watching for years. She wished she had the TV or the weather radio on. Ordinarily, she’d have not only reports from the surrounding area but readings on pressure and humidity. Now she was left with only the clouds. That was fine, though—they’d tell her plenty. They’d show her the storm’s development, and the trees in the yard would tell her the wind speed, and through those things alone she’d have a better sense of what was about to happen than most. Right now there were large limbs in motion on the trees and a clear whistling sound as the wind went through the branches and the power lines, which meant the speed was somewhere between twenty-five and thirty, up a bit from early morning. The way that cloud front looked, it wasn’t going to end there.

They passed cattle farms and a group of Amish men working beside a barn. The countryside here was rolling as if tossed by an unseen ocean, no flat fields as there were in Illinois and the northern half of Indiana. The terrain here was closer to what you’d find on the south side of the Ohio River, where Kentucky’s rolling bluegrass fields edged into foothills and then became mountains.

Kellen was doing about seventy down the county road, and he jerked his head to the left and said, “That’s where your buddy was killed.”

“This road?”

“Next one down, I think. That’s where his van was set on fire. I drove past it yesterday on my way back into town. I was… curious.”

Something about this knowledge made Eric uncomfortable. Not just considering the man’s death, but that it had occurred so close to where they were headed now. They were driving past low-lying fields and scattered homes and trailers, but in the distance the hills rose blanketed with centuries-old forests. They came into view of an old