So Cold the River(139)

He moved forward to join them.


Devastation. That was the word across the shortwave bands—reports coming in from around the area to Anne’s basement while she waited for the police. The tornado that had passed overhead while Josiah Bradford was still in her home had touched down just west of Orangeville and moved northeast into Orleans. Houses had been torn apart, cars overturned, utility poles ripped from the ground. At least two fires started in the aftermath. Highway 37 was closed between Orleans and Mitchell, keeping many rescue crews from reaching the scene.

A second tornado had touched down within minutes of the first, this one just to the southeast. It had flattened a group of trailers and then moved back into farmland, taking a cellular phone tower out in its path. Early estimates said that one had stayed on the ground for at least six miles.

She had no view of the sky from down in the cellar, but the spotters to the west were issuing frantic warnings that things were not done yet. The supercell was shifting and realigning and, they warned, possibly preparing to spit out another funnel cloud.

Tornado outbreaks generally spanned a wider area, sometimes putting up as many as forty or fifty or even a hundred tornadoes spread out across a wide, multistate region. To have a cluster outbreak like this, so many tornadoes in one county, was rare but not unprecedented. She remembered studying a similar event that occurred in Houston in the early nineties, when six tornadoes spawned from four separate storms hit one county over the course of about two hours. At one point, three of them were on the ground at the same time. Things like that could happen. You could never predict the behavior of a truly furious storm. All you could hope to do was see the warnings.

That was her role—to see the warnings and hope that people heeded them. She had frequencies for the security outfits with both the French Lick and West Baden hotels, and she contacted them immediately after finishing her initial conversation with the sheriff’s department, explained the threat, and suggested they post some guards at the property entrances. She couldn’t say whether they believed her, but she’d done what she could. She’d issued the warning.

Fifteen minutes after she’d made initial contact, the Orange County Sheriff’s Department dispatcher came back to Anne to report that a detective named Roger Brewer from the Indiana State Police had arrived at Josiah Bradford’s home.

And found it missing.

It appeared, the dispatcher said, as if the tornado had in fact touched down almost on top of Josiah’s house before beginning its path into Orleans.

“No sign of the truck?” Anne asked.

No sign of the truck. The state police were reaching out to the FBI for assistance—with every available unit out on storm-related calls, the kidnapping called for focused attention that the locals could not provide. But the nearest FBI contact was in Bloomington, which was a forty-five-minute drive in the best of conditions, and these weren’t the best of conditions. So there was one detective on the search.

One.

The dispatcher, who was talking to Anne with detached calm, which was of course part of the job but which was also frustrating beyond measure to someone trying to convey a sense of urgency, said that the detective was “making a sweep.” Then she told Anne that there were too many other emergency calls going on to prolong this one.

“He was headed toward his property,” Anne said. “Some area of woods near his property. Keep looking. And remember that he said his truck was full of—”

“I remember. I’ve advised our officers. They understand the threat.”

No, Anne thought, they do not. I’m not sure anyone could.

She couldn’t say what she knew to be true: that the storm and Josiah were linked, that something evil had come to town today, and it wasn’t leaving soon.


* * *

“What do you want?” Eric Shaw repeated, advancing up the trail toward Josiah. “This doesn’t have anything to do with us. Not with her, not with me.”

“I think you’re wrong on that score,” Josiah said. “It has much to do with you.”

“How?” Shaw said.

“You give my name to another,” Josiah said. “The one who took me from my home, who shed my blood and took me from my home, and you honor him with my name. Don’t even see that you brought me back home, you dumb son of a bitch. You brought me home, and there’s scores to be settled.”

The words had left his mouth without a beat of hesitation, and though they were not his own words, he believed them.

“Brought me home and then thought you could control me,” he said. “Hold me back with water. A fool’s notion, Shaw. There’s not a force in this valley stronger than me.”