So Cold the River(47)
“I’m actually up in Bloomington right now, seeing my girl. Was going to stay overnight, but if I head on back down we can go together.”
“You don’t need to do that.”
“No, it’s cool. She’d just as soon throw me out anyhow.”
Eric could hear a laugh in the background, a sweet female sound that cut him.
“That’s your decision, Kellen. I’m not going anywhere.”
“I’ll give you a call when I get down there.”
Eric hung up. The clock told him almost an hour had passed since he left Anne McKinney, which meant she’d probably be at the bar by now. He took a deep breath and picked up the bottle, felt its cold wetness against his skin.
“Okay,” he said. “Routine sanity check coming right up.”
She was in an armchair not far from the bar, with a short glass of ice and clear liquid in her hand, a lime perched on the rim. She’d added jewelry since he left her porch, two bracelets and a necklace, and her blouse was different. She’d gotten dressed up to head into town and have her cocktail, evidently. He was hardly into the atrium before she lifted a hand and waved. Good eyes. Eric’s own mother was twenty years younger and wouldn’t have noticed him from this far away if he’d been riding in on a camel.
The bottle sweated more once it was in his hand, and as he crossed the atrium, a few drops of water fell from it and slid down his wrist and dripped onto the rug beneath.
Anne’s eyes were already fixed on the bottle as he pulled up a chair, and she set her drink on the table and said, “Well, let’s have a look.”
He passed her the bottle, and when she took it, her eyes first widened and then narrowed as she frowned, and she shifted it quickly from one hand to the other. A streak of moisture glistened on her wrinkled palm.
“You’ve been keeping it in ice?” she said, and Eric felt an explosion of relief, almost sagged with it.
“No,” he said. “That’s just how it is.”
She stared at him. “What?”
“That bottle hasn’t been anywhere other than the desk in the room since I got here. Before that, it was in my briefcase in the car. It hasn’t been near a refrigerator, a freezer, or an ice bucket.”
“Are you having me on? I don’t understand the trick.”
“It’s no trick, Mrs. McKinney. This is why I asked about the cold. I thought it was very strange.”
She was studying his face, looking for some sign that he was the sort of asshole who’d get a kick out of playing a game with an old woman’s mind. Apparently she found none, because she gave an almost imperceptible nod and then dropped her eyes and looked at the bottle again, rolling it over in her hands.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” she said, her voice soft. “Or heard of it. Even Daddy never said anything like this, and he was full of stories about Pluto Water.”
“Could it be so old that it never went through that boiling and salting?”
She shook her head. “No. This bottle isn’t anywhere near that old.”
She used her thumb to wipe some of the frosty condensation clear, then traced the etching of Pluto at the base.
“This one couldn’t be any earlier than ’twenty-six or ’twenty-seven. I’ll double-check, of course, but this color and this design… no, this would have to be from the late twenties. I’ve got a dozen like it. They made millions of them.”
He didn’t say anything, just watched her turn that bottle over again and again.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” she repeated, and then, without looking up at him, said, “You drank some of it, didn’t you.”
“Yes.”
She nodded. “I thought maybe you had. You seemed so worried about what it would do. Looks like you’ve had a good deal of it, too.”
Yes, by now he’d had at least two-thirds of the bottle.
“I think there’s something else in here,” she said. “That colored look, the sediment, that shouldn’t be there.”
“Go ahead and open it,” he said, “and tell me if it smells like Pluto Water to you.”
She opened it and held it to her nose and shook her head almost immediately.
“That’s not Pluto Water. It would smell—”
“Terrible,” he said. “Sulfuric.”
“Yes.”
“That’s how it smelled when I opened it originally. Since then—”
“It’s almost sweet.”
“Yes,” he said, again feeling that relief, this old woman confirming now with multiple senses what he’d feared was a trick of his mind.
“You asked about hallucinations,” she said, speaking carefully and gently.