thanked the good Lord for one more afternoon like this. Precious things. Precious.
Out the main doors and back onto the steps and what do you know—there was some wind to greet her. First she’d felt all day. Nothing of real notice, just a gentle, experimental puff, like the breeze wasn’t sure about it yet, but it was there all the same. She stood at the top of the steps and watched the bushes rustle and the leaves turn and flutter, saw that the wind was coming up out of the southwest now. Interesting. She hadn’t expected the shift today. The air was still hot, might’ve even pushed a few degrees past ninety by now, but she thought she could detect a chill to the wind, almost as if there was some cold trapped in it, surrounded by warmth but still there nevertheless.
She’d go home and take a few readings, see what sense she could make of it. All she knew now was that there was something in the air. Something on the way.
6
IT WAS A SIX-HOUR drive, the final third a hell of a lot more pleasant than the first two. Getting out of the city and into Indiana was a nightmare in itself, and then Eric was rewarded by only as bleak a drive as he could think of, Chicago to Indianapolis. South of Indy, though, things began to turn. The flatlands turned into hills, the endless fields filled with trees, the straight road began to curve. He stopped for lunch in Bloomington, left the highway and drove into town to see the campus, one he’d always heard was beautiful. It didn’t disappoint. He had a burger and a beer at a place called Nick’s, the beer something local, Upland Wheat. When in Rome, right? Turned out to be as good a warm-weather beer as he’d ever tasted, sort of thing made you want to stretch out in the sun and relax for a while. There was driving to be done, though, so he left it at just the one beer and got back into the Acura and pushed south.
Past Bloomington to Bedford, and then the highway hooked and lost a lane in a town called Mitchell and began to dip and rise as it carved through the hills. Everything was green, lush, and alive, and now and then flatbed trucks loaded with fresh-quarried limestone lumbered by. There weren’t many houses along this stretch of the highway, but if Eric had had a dollar for every one with a basketball hoop outside, he’d have been a rich man by the time he hit Paoli.
He knew from the map that Paoli meant he was close, and once he figured out what road to take away from the square—a mural covering the entire side of a building pointed the way to French Lick—he laid a little heavier on the gas, ready to have this drive done.
A dull, constant headache that had lodged in the back of his skull somewhere north of Indianapolis, then faded while he had his beer, now returned with a little stronger pulse to it, one that made him wince every now and then as it hit a particularly inspired chord. He had Excedrin in the suitcase, would have to take some as soon as he got to the hotel. He’d hoped things might turn a little more exotic as he neared West Baden and French Lick, but there was just more farm country. He ran past one white rail fence that seemed to stretch for a mile—would hate to paint that thing—and not much else that was worth notice. Then a few buildings began to show themselves, and a sign told him he’d reached West Baden, and he thought,
Because there was nothing here. A cluster of old buildings and a barbecue stand, and that was it. Then he felt his eyes drawn away from the road, up the hill to the right, and he let off the gas and felt his breath catch in his chest as the speed fell off.
There was the hotel. And Alyssa Bradford had used the correct word in describing it, because only one word came close—
A horn blew behind him, and Eric realized he’d coasted almost to a stop in the middle of the road. He pushed on the gas again, found a set of twin stone arches that guarded a long, winding brick drive that led up to the hotel.
The place gave him an immediate desire to reach for the camera, get this recorded now, as if it might soon disappear.
He wasn’t certain the brick road was a legitimate entrance, so he drove past the stone arches in search of the parking lot and, within the space of a blink and a yawn, found himself in French Lick. Out of one town and into the other, all in what felt like six city blocks. They were separate towns, but the reality was, they felt like one place, and the only reason they hadn’t merged into one town over the years was those hotels. They’d been rivals at one time, French Lick and West Baden, and many locals just referred to the area as Springs Valley.
He passed the French Lick Springs Resort, which held the grandeur of its West Baden partner but not the magic. The architecture was more traditional, that was all. A good-looking building, but a building nonetheless. The West Baden hotel, with its dome and towers, quickened the pulse more. The owner of the French Lick hotel, Thomas Taggart, had been a fierce rival of the West Baden Springs Hotel owner, Lee Sinclair—in business and politics, with Taggart a key Democrat in the state and Sinclair an equally powerful Republican. For decades those two had dueled for superiority in the valley, and while Sinclair’s hotel may have won out, Taggart created a million- dollar business with his Pluto Water, while Sinclair’s Sprudel Water—virtually the same product—had somehow failed, eventually forcing him to sell his interest in the water to Taggart.
Eric turned at the casino and drove up the road in search of the entrance for the West Baden hotel. The parking lot was set to the side and above the hotel, and he parked and took his bags out and walked toward the entrance, looking out at the grounds as he went. A creek cut through the middle, surrounded by flowering trees and flowerbeds and emerald-colored grass. The smell of the grass was in the air, freshly cut, and something about that drew him away from the parking lot entrance and around to the front of the building. He set his bags down on the steps and inhaled and looked off down the long brick drive.
“What a place.” He said it aloud, but softly, and was surprised when someone said, “Wait’ll you see the inside.”
He turned and saw an elderly woman heading down the steps toward him. She looked at least eighty but walked with a firm, steady stride and wore makeup and jewelry, a pocketbook held between her upper arm and her side.
“I’m looking forward to it,” he said, stepping aside so she could come down. “Have been for a while.”
“I know the feeling,” she said. “And don’t worry, it won’t disappoint.”
He picked up his bags and went up the steps and through the doors and into the atrium. Made it about twenty feet inside before he had to drop the bags again—not because they were heavy but because taking the place in called for energy.
The dome was three times as wide as he’d expected and twice as tall, a tremendous globe of glass resting on white steel ribs. The design had been truly ingenious in its time—hell, it still was. Harrison Albright, the architect who had conceived of the whole amazing design, came up with the umbrella-like supports to hold the dome up, but he had concerns that temperature changes would cause it to expand and contract at a different rate than the building below—a sure recipe for disaster, a collapse of the dome that would shower those beneath with glass and humiliate its creator. As a solution, Albright rested the steel support ribs on ball bearings, allowing the dome to expand and contract at a different rate than the building below. This idea in 1901.
There were ten thousand square feet of glass in the dome alone. More glass than in any other building in the world at the time of its construction, more even than London’s Crystal Palace. It was one thing to read details like that on the Internet, another to see it. One of the stories Eric had found said that when they removed the supports beneath the dome, many spectators, including Sinclair, weren’t certain the thing would avoid collapse. In response, Albright insisted on climbing to the roof and standing dead center on top of the dome when they removed the last of the scaffolding. He’d been sure of his math, even if nobody else was.
The atrium stretched out beneath the dome, shining floor and ornate rugs and potted ferns, lots of gold trim on the perimeter. They’d redone the tile—twelve
Some of the rooms had balconies that looked out over the atrium, and he hoped Alyssa Bradford had come through with one of those for him. He wanted to sit out there at night and have a drink and watch the place quiet
