So Cold the River (2010) (6 page)

The atrium stretched out beneath the dome, shining floor and ornate rugs and potted ferns, lots of gold trim on the perimeter.
They’d redone the tile—twelve
million
marble mosaics were hand-laid in the original floor—and matched the paint to the original color, matched the rugs, matched
damn near everything that could be matched. Eric had seen impressive renovations but nothing with such attention to detail.

Some of the rooms had balconies that looked out over the atrium, and he hoped Alyssa Bradford had come through with one of
those for him. He wanted to sit out there at night and have a drink and watch the place quiet down.
Probably see ghosts,
he thought, and smiled.

The hotel had that kind of feel, though. It started with that misplaced quality, floating out here in the middle of nowhere,
and then built on the astonishing design and a restoration job so carefully and perfectly completed that entering the building
was like walking out of one century and into another.

He took a few steps away from his luggage, more into the center of the room, and then tilted his head back to look directly
up at the dome. When he did that, the headache that had been momentarily forgotten bloomed bright behind his eyes, a swift,
jagged pain. He winced and dropped his eyes, shaded them with his hand. Bad idea, looking up into the light like that. Light
always exacerbated a headache.

He returned to his bags and brought them to the reception desk and checked in. Took the keycard for his room—418—and then
went up and got the luggage stowed. The room was a reflection of everything else—ornate, luxurious, reminiscent of times gone
by. And it had the balcony. Alyssa Bradford had done well.

He was distracted from enjoying the room, though, because the headache was getting to him now. He opened the suitcase and
took out the Excedrin, shook three tablets into his palm, and went into the bathroom and poured a glass of water and washed
them down.

That should help. A drink didn’t sound like a bad idea either. He wanted to sit down at the bar under the dome and sip one
slow. Give the Excedrin a little while to work, and then he’d come back up and get the camera and start the job.

Josiah Bradford had hardly gotten his cigarette lit before Amos came boiling around the corner, telling him to put it out.
Had one tantalizing puff and then he was smashing it under his foot and Amos was bitching at him.

“How many times I got to tell you, we don’t smoke on the job, Josiah. You think I want the guests to come outside to enjoy
the
day and have to breathe in the cigarette smoke from my landscaping crew? I swear, son, you get told and told again and it
don’t mean a thing to you.”

Josiah bit down his response, shoved past Amos’s wide paunch and threw the cigarette into the trash, and took his weed eater
and fired it up with a theatrical flourish, pumping the throttle trigger with his index finger to turn the thing’s whine into
a scream and drown out Amos’s voice. Shit, it was a cigarette, not an atom bomb. Amos needed to get his ass some perspective.

Josiah went off down the brick road, trimming edges that didn’t need trimmed, keeping his back to Amos until he heard the
Gator come to life and drive away. Then he let off the trigger, turned to Amos departing in the stupid little cart, and sent
a thick wad of spit in his direction. Didn’t come close, but it was the gesture that counted.

It was too damn hot for May. The skin on Josiah’s arms and the back of his neck had gone dark brown by mid-April, and now
he could feel the sweat soaking through his shirt and holding his hair to his neck in damp tangles. Had been a time, not all
that long ago, that he’d been griping about the cold. Now he wished fall would hustle along.

He worked all the way down the brick drive to the stone arches and the old building beside them that had once been a bank.
Then he crossed to the other side and paused before starting his return trip, looking up at the length of the drive at the
work yet to be done. Looking up at that damned hotel.

Oh, he’d liked it at one time. Had been excited, same as everybody, when word came down that the place was going to be restored,
that the casino was on its way. Jobs aplenty, that was the word. Well, he had his job now. Had his callused hands and sunburn.
Some fortune.

The resorts were supposed to be a big deal for the locals.
Provide a—what was the word that politician had said?—a
boon,
that was it. A boon. Shit.

Thing these damn hotels provided, so far as Josiah was concerned, was torment. Rich folks coming in again, the way they had
so long ago, and all of a sudden you were more aware of your place in the world. More aware of your fifteen-year-old Ford
pickup when it was idling next to a Mercedes with Massachusetts plates, waiting for a green light. More aware of the Keystone
Ice you bought in thirty-packs when you saw somebody in an Armani suit throw down a twenty for a Grey Goose martini and then
wave off the change.

They said all this was going to boost the local economy, and they’d been right. Josiah made eight thousand dollars more per
year now than he had before the restorations began. But he did it trimming weeds in front of people who made eighty grand
more than that. Eight hundred grand more than that. Worse than the money was the anonymity—people coming and going right past
you all day and never giving you so much as a blink. Wasn’t that they disrespected you outright; they didn’t even realize
you were there.

It vexed him. Had almost from the day the hotel doors opened and he saw all that gold and glitter, from the first time he’d
walked through the casino with his hand wrapped tight around the ten-dollar bill that was all he could afford to gamble with.
Because Josiah Bradford’s family had been in this valley for generations, and there was a time, back when the resorts were
flourishing in the Prohibition days, when they were powerful. Noticed and known. Somehow, seeing the place come back to life
while he held a weed eater in his hands felt beyond wrong—felt intolerable.

Why, wasn’t but a month ago that some black kid from IU came to Josiah’s home in a damned Porsche Cayenne, just
dripping money, and said he wanted to talk about Josiah’s great-grandfather, Campbell, the man who’d controlled this valley
once. Granted, he’d run off and left his family, taking with him every dime they had—and according to the stories, plenty
of dimes they didn’t have, too—but in his time he’d been as powerful as anyone who ever walked through that damn rotunda.
A behind-the-scenes sort of influence, the kind you built with brass knuckles and brass balls, the only kind Josiah’d ever
respected. Campbell’s legacy was an infamous one, but Josiah had always felt a strange kind of pride in him anyhow. Then the
black kid showed up, some rich student, wanting to talk about the tales, put his own version of the Bradford family history
down on paper. Josiah threw him the hell out of his house and hadn’t heard from him since, but the car was around often enough,
a 450-horse motor in a frigging SUV, dumbest thing Josiah had ever seen, seventy thousand-some dollars’ worth of stupid.

Every insult was fuel for the fire, though. That’s what he told himself day in and day out, what kept him here, putting cigarettes
out before he’d even had a chance to smoke them, saying yessir and nosir to that fat bastard Amos. It wouldn’t last forever.
You could bet your sweet ass on that. There’d come a day when he’d walk back into this shit-hole town and make ’em stir, swagger
into that casino and toss a few thousand on the table, look bored when he won and amused when he lost, have the crowd hanging
on it.

You had to be ambitious. Josiah figured that out early, knew even when he dropped out of high school that he would rise above
all this crap. He didn’t
need
high school, that was all. Had all As and Bs except for a C in chemistry when he quit. But what was he going to do, earn
a scholarship, go up to IU or Purdue and get some bullshit degree that landed him a four-bedroom house with a thirty-year
mortgage and a leased Volvo? Please.
What he had his sights on was a good deal bigger than that, and you didn’t need the schooling to get it. What you needed was
the hunger. And Josiah Bradford had that in spades.
Fire in the belly,
his old man had called it just before tying one on up in Bedford and wrapping his Trans Am around a tree on US 50, killing
himself before Josiah had the pleasure.

Better believe it was a fire. Burned hotter every day, but Josiah was no idiot, knew that it required a touch of patience,
required waiting for the right opportunity.

The puttering sound of the Gator’s little motor broke him out of his reverie, and he bowed his head and extended the weed
eater again, let the sun scorch on his back as he began to make the slow trip back up the brick drive to the hotel.

The Bradford name had meant something in this town once.

It would again.

T
HERE WAS A COCKTAIL
waitress at the bar who reminded Eric of Claire, the same willowy build and glossy dark hair and easy laugh, so he decided
not to linger over that drink so long after all. He settled for one beer again and then went up to the room and took his shoes
off and lay on the bed, thinking he’d rest for a few minutes. Evidently the drive and the beer were enough to coax sleep along,
because when he opened his eyes again the bedside clock showed that he’d slept for nearly two hours. It was past five now.
Time to get into action.

He sat up with a grunt, still feeling foggy with sleep, and swung his feet to the floor and went to get his briefcase. There
was a legal pad in it on which he’d sketched a rough outline of what he wanted to get done first. All he had scheduled for
today was an evening meeting with that graduate student who’d posted about Campbell on the Internet, but he’d like to get
some film done, too, get things rolling as much as possible.

Inside the briefcase he found the legal pad and the bottle of Pluto Water, which reminded him that he needed to check on that,
get an accurate date if possible.

When he took the bottle out of the briefcase, he could’ve sworn it was even colder than when he’d last touched it in Chicago.
It had always been unnaturally cool, but now it felt as if it had just come out of a refrigerator. It was hard to believe,
considering his last experience with it, but somehow the bottle looked almost tempting today. Almost refreshing.

“No way,” he said, thinking about another taste. He couldn’t ever stomach that again. Who knew what was wrong with it. Stuff
would probably kill you.

All the same, he loosened the cap again. Lowered his nose to it and took a quick sniff, bracing for that noxious, stomach-turning
scent.

He didn’t get it. A trace, maybe, but nothing so foul as last time. In fact, it smelled mild now, almost sweet. That was odd.
Must have released the worst of the smell as soon as it was opened. Maybe that’s how they did it in the old days, let the
stuff sit open for a while before consumption.

Oh, hell,
he thought,
go on and get a little on your tongue
.

He poured a few drops into a cupped palm, then held it to his face and dipped the tip of his tongue into it, expecting the
worst.

It wasn’t so bad at all. Just a barely perceptible sweetness. It must have needed to breathe a little. No way he was going
to brave an actual swallow of it again, though. No way.

He put the cap back on and left the room.

That first afternoon it felt right to just wander. He opened with a few shots of the dome and the atrium and the rest of the
interior splendor, then moved on outside and explored the grounds.
There were a handful of beautiful but small stone buildings that had once housed some of the mineral spas. A fountain highlighted
the center of the garden, and Eric discovered there was a small cemetery on the hill above, looking down at the dome. He took
a few experimental shots from the ground, shooting at the hotel past the tilted gravestones, and was pleased with the results.
This spot needed to be incorporated into whatever he did—anytime you could shoot down on something so grand with gravestones
in the forefront, you should.

He went back down the hill, amazed at the heat on this first weekend of May, his shirt already clinging to his back, his forehead
wet with perspiration, and then walked to the end of the brick drive—past an even more sweat-soaked man with a weed eater,
who returned Eric’s nod with a surly look—and then stood beneath the stone arches and shot back up at the hotel. The sun was
still high, glaring off the dome, and he thought that it would probably be pretty powerful if he could catch it at just the
right stage of twilight some night, as the sun fell and those old-fashioned lamps came on.

There was no shortage of options and angles here; the place offered a sort of visual potential he hadn’t seen anywhere else.
He took some shots up from outside the arches, using a slow zoom up the brick drive, trying to create the effect of walking
up on the place, then went back to the car and headed toward French Lick. It was within walking distance, but not when lugging
his equipment under the scorching sun.

Once inside, he had to give the French Lick hotel a bit more credit—it was pretty amazing in its own right. It would have
seemed extraordinary in this little town were it not for the big brother up the road. As he walked through, Eric felt a mild
sense of sympathy for Thomas Taggart. He’d built a hell of a place here,
only to have it outshined by something a mile away. That’s how it could go, though—there was always somebody a little bit
better.

He shot video in the hotel and the casino, wandering, and found himself drinking another beer in a basement bar, where the
walls were adorned with antique electrical switchgear. The Power Plant, they called it. Whatever—the beer was cold, and the
lights were dim, and that helped his headache. He wasn’t sure what that was all about. Eric had never been prone to headaches,
but this persistent little bastard had been with him all day. Could be he was coming down with something.