“Well, that sure was fun,” Kellen said as he backed out of the drive. “Made the trip down from Bloomington worth it.”
“Sorry.”
“No, no, I’m serious. I’d have driven an extra hour to see that. You get a look at his eye?” He laughed. “Ah, that made my day. You notice he seemed a little less brave today? No punches, no jokes.”
“I noticed.”
“Yeah, well, black eye can do that.”
There was a blue minivan pulled off on the side of the road not far from the house, and Kellen came dangerously close to sideswiping it, flying along at least twenty miles an hour over the limit.
Kellen looked over at Eric, eyes hidden by the sunglasses. “You mind my asking you something?”
“Go ahead.”
“Seeing as how your Campbell doesn’t seem to have existed in this town… have you stopped to consider that he might be a liar? Might have been pretending to be somebody else for his whole life?”
“Yeah.”
“In which case, he’s successful, rich, and has a family,” Kellen said, “but he assumed the identity of an asshole from a small town in another state. Why in the hell would anyone do that?”
“I think that,” Eric said, “is about to become a really important question. I got one other thing I could throw at you, too, but my guess is after you hear it, you’ll probably want to kick me out of your car.”
Kellen tilted his head, confused. “What?”
“It’s going to sound crazy, man.”
“I can dig crazy.”
“See the thing is… I’ve seen Josiah’s great-grandfather before. I’ve seen that Campbell. I’m almost sure of it. And he’s not the same guy as the one I met in Chicago.”
“Then, where did you see him?”
“In a vision,” Eric said, and Kellen pursed his lips and gave a slow, thoughtful nod—Oh, sure, in a vision, of course.
“You don’t have to believe that,” Eric said, “but before you make any judgments, I’ve got a bottle of water I’d like to show you.”
23
AT FIVE THE BAROMETER dropped a bit and the western sky began to fill with tendrils of clouds. They were cirrus, rode very high in the atmosphere, twenty, thirty, even forty thousand feet. The name was a Latin term for a lock of hair, and that’s exactly what they looked like today, fine wisps of white up there against a backdrop of cobalt blue.
They seemed almost stationary, trapped near the western horizon, but Anne knew that in reality they were moving along just fine. Problem was, they were so high that their speed didn’t show itself. They were serene clouds, looked still and peaceful, but they heralded a change, too. High cirrus clouds like that signaled a pending deterioration in the weather and stronger winds on the way. There was even an expression for it—See in the sky the painter’s brush, the winds around you soon will rush. Interesting thing about today’s clouds was that the wind was already rushing. Had been since yesterday. So if this meant something stronger was on the way…
She logged the changes in her notebook and then went inside and prepared a vegetable soup. The weather changes didn’t hold her mind as they normally would. Her thoughts were on the strange man from Chicago, Eric Shaw, and that bizarre bottle of Pluto Water. She’d never seen anything like it. So cold. And the man himself, well, he was scared. That much had been obvious.
She’d heard plenty of folklore about Pluto Water, but even the wildest tales had always claimed it to be a cure, not a curse. She couldn’t remember a single story about visions or premonitions. The town had its share of ghost stories, sure, but none connected to Pluto Water. She believed Shaw, though, believed at least that the visions hadn’t come until he’d tasted the water. And she wasn’t all that surprised.
This valley, her home for so many years, so many decades, was a strange place. It was a spot touched by magic, of that she was certain, but ill winds often followed the favorable ones here, ebbing flows of wealth and poverty, glory and tragedy. Everything about the valley seemed in a permanent state of flux unlike any other place she’d known. She had some ideas on it, too, but they weren’t the sort you told people about. No, ideas like that would get you laughed at mighty quick.
She put the soup on the stove and then left the kitchen and faced the stairs that had stood for weeks without supporting so much as a footstep. Well, time to go up. She used the railing and went slowly and tried not to think about a fall, got to the top, and then walked into one of the empty bedrooms, the one that had once been home to her daughter, Alice, and pulled open the closet door. A stack of cardboard boxes faced her, musty and dust-covered and taped shut. A few years ago she’d have remembered which box held the bottles, but it had been a long time since she’d opened them and now she had no idea. Nothing to do but start at the top then. They were heavier than she’d expected, the sort of thing she had no business trying to move by herself, but she knew all the contents were carefully wrapped and would hold up to a little jostling. She dragged the first one off the top until it started to fall and then got her foot out of the way just in time. It hit the floor with a loud thump, dust rising. She got her sewing scissors and set to work on the tape.