“Did you ever hear rumors that the water caused hallucinations?”
That lifted her eyebrows. She shook her head. “I never heard that, no.”
He looked positively disappointed but was trying to conceal it, nodding his head and rushing out another question.
“What about the temperature? I’ve, uh, I’ve heard that it would stay unusually cold. That there was some sort of… a chemical reaction, I guess, and you could leave the bottles out in a warm room but they’d stay cold, even get a little frost.”
“Well,” Anne said, “I don’t know who you’ve been getting stories from, but they sound like a colorful source. I’ve never heard of anything like that.”
He was silent for a moment, eyes concerned, and seemed to be groping for something.
“But you had the water that had been preserved or fortified, right?” he said eventually.
“Yes.”
“What if it had been fresh water, bottled back before they did that process?”
“That would require the water being from before eighteen ninety-three, I think,” she said. “I really couldn’t say much about that, but I never heard anything about any unusual coldness.”
“What might happen if you drank Pluto Water that hadn’t been preserved?”
“Well, the way I was always told, it simply wasn’t fit for human consumption after much time had passed.”
“And if someone did drink it?”
“If they could actually choke enough of it down,” Anne said, “I do believe it would be fatal.”
That seemed to rock him. He wet his lips and dropped his eyes to the porch floor and looked a little queasy. She frowned, watching him, wondering about all these questions now, about what exactly she had on her hands here.
“You mind my asking what you’re working on?”
“A family history,” he said.
“Someone that worked for Pluto?”
“No, but I’m trying to put as much area history into it as I can. I’ll be making a film, eventually, but today I’m just doing some preliminary work.”
“Who was it filled your head with all those ideas about the water?”
“An old man in Chicago,” he said, and then, before she could respond to that, he asked, “Hey, is there a river around here?”
“A river? Well, not right here in town, no. There’s the creek.”
“I was told about a river.”
“The White River’s not far. And then there’s the Lost River.”
The wind kicked up then, set the chimes to work, a sound Anne would never tire of, and she tilted her head to look past Eric Shaw and out to the yard, where the blades were spinning on the windmills. Spinning pretty good, too, a decent breeze funneling through. Still nothing but sun and white clouds, though, no hint of a storm. Odd for the wind to be picking up like this with no storm…
“The Lost River?”
His question snapped her mind back. It was mildly embarrassing to be caught drifting off like that, but this wind was strange, grabbed her attention.
“Yes, sorry. I was listening to the chimes. It’s called the Lost River because so much of it is underground. More than twenty miles of it, I believe. Shows itself here and there and then disappears again.”
“That’s pretty wild,” Eric Shaw said, and Anne smiled.
“Everything that built these towns came up from underground. I walk into those hotels and just shake my head, because when it comes right down to it, they wouldn’t be there except for a little bit of water that bubbles out of the ground around here. If you don’t think there’s a touch of magic to that, well, I don’t know what to tell you.”
“That’s what Pluto was supposed to represent, right?”
“Right. He’s the Roman version of Hades, which isn’t all that pleasant a connotation to most folks now, but there’s a difference between Hell and the underworld in the myths. My father did some studying on those myths. Way he understood it, Pluto wasn’t the devil. He was the god of riches found in the earth, found underground. That’s why they named the company after him, see? Thing my father always found amusing was that in the myths all Pluto was in charge of, really, was keeping the dead on the banks of the River Styx before they crossed it to be judged. So Pluto was essentially an innkeeper. And what followed the water in this town?”
She waved her hand out across her valley, the springs valley. “Inns. Beautiful, amazing inns.”
She laughed and folded her hands, put them back in her lap. “Daddy probably overthought a lot of these things.”
They were quiet for a time then. Her visitor seemed to have something else on his mind, and she was content to sit and watch the windmills spin, listen to the chimes.