So Cold the River(53)

“Excuse me?”

“He was worthless as worthless gets, ran around with every gambler and crook ever came to town, didn’t pay any mind to his family at all. Used to keep a hotel room just for fornicating, drank all hours of the day, never met a truth he wouldn’t rather turn into a lie. When he ran off, he left his wife without a cent, and then she died and my parents had to take in the child. Those days, that’s what folks would do. My parents was Christian people and they believed that’s what they ought do, so that’s what they done.”

He offered the last part like a challenge.

“He doesn’t sound impressive, I’ll grant you that,” Eric said.

“Campbell even went beyond all that,” Edgar answered. “Like I told you, that man went beyond bad. There was the devil in him.”

“You’re telling me he was evil?”

“You say that like it’s funny, but it ain’t. Yes, he was evil. He was, sure as I’m sitting here. It’s been damn near eighty years since the man left. I was a boy. But I remember him like I remember my own wife, God rest her. He put the chill in your heart. My parents saw it; hell, everybody saw it. The man was evil. Came to town in the middle of the high times, started in with the gamblers and the whiskey runners, made the sort of money doesn’t come from honest work.”

Eric felt an unpleasant throb in his skull, the headache level jumping on him.

“You told me Campbell didn’t have any family left but Josiah,” Kellen said.

“That’s right. Josiah is Campbell’s great-grandson, last true member of Campbell’s line that there is, least as far as anyone around here knows. I’m as good as a grandfather to him myself, I suppose, though there’s plenty days when I wouldn’t want to claim that. Josiah’s got him a streak of difficult.”

Kellen hid a laugh by coughing into his fist, looking at Eric with amusement.

“I mean, we was all like family, you know, even though I’m not blood relation to that side,” Edgar Hastings said. “Josiah’s mother, she called me Uncle Ed, and I thought of her as a niece. We was close, too. We was awful close.”

The room seemed smaller to Eric now, as if the walls had sneaked in on him during a blink, and he was more aware of the heat, felt perspiration worming from his pores and sliding along his skin. How in the hell could Edgar Hastings possibly wear a flannel shirt in here? He took his hand away from the dog’s head and got a whine in response, one that sounded less like a complaint and more like a question.

“Like I told you, I just don’t know who’d want to bother with a man like that in some sort of movie,” Edgar said. “Not that I think most movies are worth anything anyhow, I got that TV set on from sunrise to sunup and don’t never find anything a normal person would want to watch.”

That one seemed to amuse Kellen again, but the smile left his face when Edgar flicked his eyes over, and Kellen said, “Um, so there’s just no way the Campbell who left this town could still be alive up in Chicago?”

“No. He left in fall of ’twenty-nine, and he was in his thirties then.”

Eric said, “Could it be he had another son after he left? Gave the son his name?”

“Hell, anything’s possible after he left.”

“And is there any chance that he came back to town, or brought his son back…?”

“None.” Edgar gave an emphatic shake of his head.

“You met the man personally,” Eric said. “Correct?”

“Yes. I was only a boy when he left, but I remember him, and I remember being scared to death of him. He’d come by and smile and talk to me, and there was something in that man’s eyes like to turn your stomach.”

“You told me he was involved with bootlegging,” Kellen said.

“Oh, sure. Campbell was supposed to provide the best liquor in the valley, and the valley was waist-deep in liquor during Prohibition. My father didn’t drink much, but he said Campbell’s whiskey made a man feel like he could take on the world.”

“They still make booze that will do that,” Eric said with a grin that Edgar wouldn’t match.

“I’ve seen liquor turn good men sour,” he said. “I used to have a glass or two, but truth is, I stayed away from it much as I could. It takes things from a man. You look at my grandson, he’s thirty year old and can’t even get off my property. Good boy, means well, but he lets the liquor take him. Wasn’t for me, who knows where he’d be now, though. My wife had the best luck with him but she passed nine years ago.”

“So he was a bootlegger,” Eric said. “Illegal, yes, but not evil. I don’t see—”