So Cold the River(94)

“I don’t know,” he said, still taken aback by his own strange response. The water’s here? It had left his mouth as if of its own accord.

“What’s not to know? Have you even heard yourself tell me what’s been happening? You’re sick. That water is making you very, very sick.”

The idea was logical enough, sure, but it felt wrong. Leaving felt wrong.

“Anne’s water is different,” he said. “When I drink that, Campbell stays in the past. Stays where he belongs. As long as I don’t drink any more of the original bottle—and I don’t even have that one right now—I’ll be fine.”

“Listen,” Claire said, “either you come back here, or I go down there.”

“That’s probably not a good idea.”

“It’s a hell of a lot better idea than you staying down there alone, Eric. You really want to do that? With everything that’s happening to your body and to your mind, you want to be down there alone?”

No, he didn’t. And the idea of seeing her… that was an idea he’d been trying to keep out of his head for weeks. Stop wanting her, he’d told himself, stop needing her.

“I’m coming down,” she said, firm with conviction now. “I’m going to drive down in the morning, and we’re coming back together.”

He was thinking of the weeks of silence, the way he always waited her out, lasted until she called him so he wouldn’t have to show need or desire. Now here she came again, ready to get in the car and come after him while the incomplete divorce paperwork he had requested floated between them. Why, he wanted to ask, why are you still willing to do this? Why do you want to?

“I don’t know if you should be here,” he said. “Until we understand—”

“I’m going to leave in the morning,” she said. “And I don’t give a shit what we understand until then.”

That actually made him smile. She rarely swore, only when she got fired up about something, and he’d always made fun of her for both that restraint and the periods when she cast it aside. The Super Bowl when the Bears had lost to the Colts, for example.

“I’ll call you when I get close,” she said. “And until I do, can you please just stay around the hotel? Please?”

“All right,” he said, and he was fascinated and ashamed by the way their separation did not cast even a shadow over the conversations they’d had today, by the way she’d slipped so easily and completely back into the role of his wife. There when he needed her. Why?

“Good,” she said. “Stay there, and stay safe.”





40


HE TOOK CLAIRE’S ADVICE and ignored Brewer’s messages, called Kellen instead.

“You in town?” he asked.

“Yeah. Think you could come fill me in on this? I’ve had cops calling me.”

“I’m hanging tight to this hotel,” Eric said. “Preferably with witnesses present.”

It was supposed to be a joke, but Kellen’s silence confirmed that it was a bad one.

“Why don’t you come down here and meet me at the bar,” Eric said.

He agreed to that, and twenty minutes later Eric was sitting in the dark, contained side of the hotel bar when Kellen stepped through the door.

“My brother’s game is on now,” he said when he got to the table, “and I don’t miss those games. But this is a unique circumstance.”

“Sorry. If it helps, they got it on the TVs here. You heard anything on the water?”

Kellen shook his head, sliding into the chair across from Eric, then rotating it so he could see a TV. It was late in the first quarter and Minnesota was down six. Darnell Cage had gone to the bench. Eric hadn’t seen him hit a shot yet.

“So the cop wanted to know about you and that guy who stopped us in the parking lot,” Kellen said. “You can imagine my surprise when they told me he was dead.”

“You can imagine mine,” Eric said.

Kellen nodded, his eyes on Eric’s, and then said, “Did you kill him?”

“No. You don’t know me well, don’t have any reason to believe that, but I assure you, the answer is no.”

“I don’t think you did.”

“I did see a murder today, though.”

Kellen raised his eyebrows.

“Campbell Bradford committed it,” Eric said. “He killed the boy’s uncle. The boy with the violin. His uncle was a moonshiner, and Campbell murdered him.”

“You’ve gathered all this through your visions.”

“I know it sounds crazy, but you’ve seen that bottle, you’ve been around for everything’s that happened and—”