the boy had stopped somewhere out in the woods and decided to return. The light grew and grew until the dark woods melted away entirely and there was nothing but that gleaming, flickering light and…
Sky.
Gray sky.
And a voice.
Claire’s voice.
EPILOGUE
These are the things he remembers. The lantern coming back through the dark woods, the warm flickering light, the gray sky, Claire’s voice.
He is told that he shouldn’t be able to remember a thing. That he had been under the water for fifteen minutes before they got him out.
He learns new terms in the hospital: apneic, which means not breathing; cyanotic, which means displaying a bluish discoloration; PEA, or pulseless electrical activity, which means an electrocardiogram test records some heart function although there is no pulse. The heart still lives, in other words, but it is incapable of completing its job.
These are the terms that were applied to him once he was in the ambulance.
Kellen was the first one in the water. He watched Eric leap, saw where he entered, splitting the water directly between two downed trees that could have impaled him. Kellen marked the spot, but with an ankle broken in two places, he couldn’t make his way down to the water quickly enough, and the body had disappeared.
One thing Eric definitely did
Brewer entered the water while Claire—with a dislocated shoulder and broken collarbone from her landing on the pavement after Josiah Bradford shoved her from his truck—stood on the bank and shouted at every ripple in the water and shadow over it, thinking they all might be Eric.
The way they all tell it now, Eric just floated up from the depths. Surfaced in the middle of the swirling pool, facedown. Like the Lost River had him, and then decided to give him back.
Brewer and Kellen brought him out. The detective began CPR, then turned it over to Claire and went for his radio when he could not get a response. Claire succeeded in getting a few wet, wheezing coughs.
They could not restore spontaneous breathing or a pulse.
In the ambulance, the electrocardiogram registered a bradycardic—unusually slow—heart rate. Thirty-seven beats per minute. There was still no palpable pulse. The heart’s electrical system was functioning, but the mechanical pumping system was not. The paramedics applied a ventilator to assist with breathing and then administered epinephrine. One minute later, Eric’s heart rate was up to one hundred beats per minute, and a pulse appeared at the carotid artery.
He was driven to Bloomington Hospital at speeds averaging ninety miles an hour, and there he was placed on a different ventilator, and steps were taken to warm his core temperature. Claire was with him for the ride and believed that he would be pronounced dead on arrival, that the epinephrine-induced heartbeat was nothing more than a tease.
It was not a tease. Within an hour of his arrival, his heart was functioning normally, and three hours after that, the lungs were deemed capable of unassisted breathing.
They kept him in the hospital for another twenty-four hours. Monitoring, they said, and there were other tasks to be done—putting stitches in his scalp, setting Claire’s collarbone, outfitting her with a sling, treating Kellen’s shattered ankle.
He does not remember anything of the ambulance ride, or much of his early hours in the hospital. At some point he grows clear-headed again, and soon the police are with him, statements being taken. Claire and Kellen have already offered theirs, and she is in the room with him now. He cannot take his eyes off her. He looks at her and he sees the pickup truck again, the melting, twisted metal and the flash of white bone amid ashes.
I thought you were dead, he tells her.
Likewise, she says.
She believes that Josiah hoped to kill her when he pushed her out of the truck. He had the shotgun in his lap but did not fire it, maybe because he couldn’t do that and control the vehicle, maybe because he was afraid of igniting the dynamite in the bed of the truck. Whatever the reason, he settled for shoving her out onto the road, and Brewer crashed into a fence trying to avoid her.
What were you thinking when you jumped into the water? she asks him. How could you let yourself do that?
You were gone, he answers. It does not seem enough for her; it remains more than enough for him. She was gone, and Campbell remained. Now she is here, and Campbell is gone.
He can hardly believe it. He can hardly trust it.
It isn’t until late that evening that they hear the news about Anne McKinney. When Detective Brewer shares it in a low, flat voice, Claire weeps and Eric leans his head back and closes his eyes.
Looks like it was fast, and painless, Brewer says. That’s something. Old as she was, it was just too much stress. Shouldn’t be surprising that she had a heart attack; it’s surprising that it happened then, after everything was pretty well resolved.
She saved me, Claire says. Saved us.
Yes, ma’am.
No one even got her out of that basement? She must have been terrified. She must have been so scared.
Brewer doesn’t know about that. Says Anne was on the radio with the dispatcher and sounded solid. Then there was a bit of weirdness right before the end.
Weirdness?
She reported a tornado sighting, Brewer explains. That was the last thing she said. Apparently she thought there was one right outside. But of course she was still down in the basement, couldn’t see a thing.
So she scared herself to death, Claire says.
Brewer spreads his hands and says that he can’t answer that. All he knows is that they said she sounded fine when she made the report. Real composed. Relaxed, even. She was still in the chair in front of the radio when the police got there.
Eric, listening to all this with his eyes closed, is saddened but believes that Claire’s worries are unnecessary. Anne was ready for the storm, real or imagined. She wouldn’t have been terrified by it. She’d have been ready.
That evening, with Josiah Bradford confirmed dead, Lucas Bradford makes an official statement to the police, explaining the reason he hired Gavin Murray. Seems his father, the recently deceased Campbell Bradford, had written an odd letter just before his passing. In the letter, he took credit for the death of a man of the same name in 1929. He did not murder him, he wrote, not exactly, but he did nothing to help him either. He let the man drown and felt that it was the right thing to do. He was saving not only himself but others. The man, he wrote, was evil.
He identified his fortune as having been built on fourteen dollars removed from a dead man’s money clip, all that he had when he hopped a Monon freight train and rode to Chicago. While he felt no guilt over letting Campbell drown, he felt plenty for the widow and orphaned son left behind to suffer both poverty and Campbell’s legacy. But he was afraid. For so many years, he was afraid of so many things.
Along with the letter was a revised will—Campbell had designated half of his substantial wealth to be split among any direct descendants of the man he’d let drown. He knew only that there was a son. The rest would have to be tracked down. It was important, he wrote, that he look after the family. That was very important.
Josiah Bradford, the only direct descendant of the Campbell Bradford who had drowned in the Lost River, had
