So Cold the River(15)

He returned to his bags and brought them to the reception desk and checked in. Took the keycard for his room—418—and then went up and got the luggage stowed. The room was a reflection of everything else—ornate, luxurious, reminiscent of times gone by. And it had the balcony. Alyssa Bradford had done well.

He was distracted from enjoying the room, though, because the headache was getting to him now. He opened the suitcase and took out the Excedrin, shook three tablets into his palm, and went into the bathroom and poured a glass of water and washed them down.

That should help. A drink didn’t sound like a bad idea either. He wanted to sit down at the bar under the dome and sip one slow. Give the Excedrin a little while to work, and then he’d come back up and get the camera and start the job.


Josiah Bradford had hardly gotten his cigarette lit before Amos came boiling around the corner, telling him to put it out. Had one tantalizing puff and then he was smashing it under his foot and Amos was bitching at him.

“How many times I got to tell you, we don’t smoke on the job, Josiah. You think I want the guests to come outside to enjoy the day and have to breathe in the cigarette smoke from my landscaping crew? I swear, son, you get told and told again and it don’t mean a thing to you.”

Josiah bit down his response, shoved past Amos’s wide paunch and threw the cigarette into the trash, and took his weed eater and fired it up with a theatrical flourish, pumping the throttle trigger with his index finger to turn the thing’s whine into a scream and drown out Amos’s voice. Shit, it was a cigarette, not an atom bomb. Amos needed to get his ass some perspective.

Josiah went off down the brick road, trimming edges that didn’t need trimmed, keeping his back to Amos until he heard the Gator come to life and drive away. Then he let off the trigger, turned to Amos departing in the stupid little cart, and sent a thick wad of spit in his direction. Didn’t come close, but it was the gesture that counted.

It was too damn hot for May. The skin on Josiah’s arms and the back of his neck had gone dark brown by mid-April, and now he could feel the sweat soaking through his shirt and holding his hair to his neck in damp tangles. Had been a time, not all that long ago, that he’d been griping about the cold. Now he wished fall would hustle along.

He worked all the way down the brick drive to the stone arches and the old building beside them that had once been a bank. Then he crossed to the other side and paused before starting his return trip, looking up at the length of the drive at the work yet to be done. Looking up at that damned hotel.

Oh, he’d liked it at one time. Had been excited, same as everybody, when word came down that the place was going to be restored, that the casino was on its way. Jobs aplenty, that was the word. Well, he had his job now. Had his callused hands and sunburn. Some fortune.

The resorts were supposed to be a big deal for the locals. Provide a—what was the word that politician had said?—a boon, that was it. A boon. Shit.

Thing these damn hotels provided, so far as Josiah was concerned, was torment. Rich folks coming in again, the way they had so long ago, and all of a sudden you were more aware of your place in the world. More aware of your fifteen-year-old Ford pickup when it was idling next to a Mercedes with Massachusetts plates, waiting for a green light. More aware of the Keystone Ice you bought in thirty-packs when you saw somebody in an Armani suit throw down a twenty for a Grey Goose martini and then wave off the change.

They said all this was going to boost the local economy, and they’d been right. Josiah made eight thousand dollars more per year now than he had before the restorations began. But he did it trimming weeds in front of people who made eighty grand more than that. Eight hundred grand more than that. Worse than the money was the anonymity—people coming and going right past you all day and never giving you so much as a blink. Wasn’t that they disrespected you outright; they didn’t even realize you were there.

It vexed him. Had almost from the day the hotel doors opened and he saw all that gold and glitter, from the first time he’d walked through the casino with his hand wrapped tight around the ten-dollar bill that was all he could afford to gamble with. Because Josiah Bradford’s family had been in this valley for generations, and there was a time, back when the resorts were flourishing in the Prohibition days, when they were powerful. Noticed and known. Somehow, seeing the place come back to life while he held a weed eater in his hands felt beyond wrong—felt intolerable.

Why, wasn’t but a month ago that some black kid from IU came to Josiah’s home in a damned Porsche Cayenne, just dripping money, and said he wanted to talk about Josiah’s great-grandfather, Campbell, the man who’d controlled this valley once. Granted, he’d run off and left his family, taking with him every dime they had—and according to the stories, plenty of dimes they didn’t have, too—but in his time he’d been as powerful as anyone who ever walked through that damn rotunda. A behind-the-scenes sort of influence, the kind you built with brass knuckles and brass balls, the only kind Josiah’d ever respected. Campbell’s legacy was an infamous one, but Josiah had always felt a strange kind of pride in him anyhow. Then the black kid showed up, some rich student, wanting to talk about the tales, put his own version of the Bradford family history down on paper. Josiah threw him the hell out of his house and hadn’t heard from him since, but the car was around often enough, a 450-horse motor in a frigging SUV, dumbest thing Josiah had ever seen, seventy thousand-some dollars’ worth of stupid.