So Cold the River(40)

“I see. Think she’ll mind me dropping in, or should I call first?”

“I don’t think she’d mind, but if you don’t want to bother her at home, you could go on by the West Baden Springs Hotel at about two. She goes there for a drink.”

“A drink? Thought you said she was in her late eighties?”

“That’s right,” the gray-haired woman said with a smile.





17


AT NOON THE BAROMETER showed a pressure of 30.20, up a bit from morning. The temperature was at eighty-one but Anne didn’t think it would touch quite so high today as yesterday, what with that light breeze and some cloud cover coming in out of the southwest. Thin white clouds, no storm. Not yet.

She spent the morning on laundry. Was a time when laundry was not an all-morning task, but the washer and dryer were in the basement, and those narrow wooden stairs gave her some trouble now. Oh, she could take them well enough, just a bit slower. That was true of so much these days. Just a bit slower.

She had the laundry done by eleven and then made some iced tea and went out onto the porch with the newspaper. The New York Times, which she’d taken for more years than she could count. It was important to know what was going on in the world, and last time she’d trusted TV was the last day Murrow had been on it.

At noon she got up and checked the temperature and wind direction and speed and the barometric pressure, wrote it all down in her notebook. She had logs going back more than six decades, five readings a day. Make a real interesting record, if anyone cared. She suspected not many would.

Her weather-watching habits had their roots in childhood. And in fear. She’d been petrified of storms when she was a young girl, would hide under her bed or in a closet when the thunder and lightning commenced. It had amused her father—she could still remember his soft, low laugh as he’d come in to fetch her from under the bed—but her mother had decided something needed to be done about it and had found a children’s book about storms, one with illustrations of dark thunderheads, swirling tornadoes, tossing seas. Anne had been seven when she got the book, had the binding split from countless readings by the time she was eight.

“You can’t be scared of them, because being scared of them won’t change a thing,” her mother had said. “Won’t make ’em stop, won’t make you any safer. You respect them and try to understand them. More you understand, less you’ll be afraid.”

So Anne had returned to the book for another reading and started forcing herself to stay at the window when storms blew in, watching the trees bend and the leaves whip through the air as rain lashed the house, drilling off the glass. She went to the library and found more books and kept studying. Had it been a different time, she’d have probably gone up to Purdue and studied meteorology. But that wasn’t how things worked then. She had a sweetheart, got married right out of high school, and then the war was on and he was overseas and she had to get a job, and then he was back and they had children to raise. Children she’d put in the ground already, hardest thing she could imagine anyone bearing, her daughter gone at thirty with cancer, her son at forty-nine with a stroke. No grandchildren left behind.

She was thinking about her son when she first saw the car approaching slowly up the road, remembering the time he’d fallen off this very porch and landed on a flowerpot below, breaking his wrist. Five years old at the time, and he was trying to stand on the rail to impress his sister. Goodness, how that boy had cried. The car came to a stop then and turned in her drive, and her thoughts left the past and she got to her feet. The wind had freshened a touch just as the car pulled in, got the chimes jingling on the porch and lifted some dust off the floorboards. She swept the thing twice a day, but the world never would run out of dust.

The visitor got out, a man with short hair of a color that had gotten confused somewhere between blond and brown. He needed a shave but seemed clean enough.

“Anne McKinney? They gave me your name down in French Lick,” he said, swinging the door shut and walking up the steps when she nodded. “I’m interested in Pluto Water. The old stories, the folklore. Think you’d be willing to talk about it?”

“Oh, I’m willing enough. Day I’m not willing to tell the old tales, you best call the grave digger—if nothing else just so he can hit me in the head with his shovel. Ought to issue a disclaimer before I get to it, though: time I get to storytelling, you best be comfortable. I’ve been known to go on.”

He smiled. It was a nice smile, warm and genuine.

“Ma’am, I’ve got plenty of interest and time.”