HE CALLED ALYSSA BRADFORD from the car, sitting with the air-conditioning blasting and the vents angled so the cold air blew directly into his face. The old man from the railway museum was leaning against the door frame, watching him with a frown.
“Alyssa, I did have a few follow-up questions I forgot to ask,” Eric said when she answered. “The bottle of water you gave me… Can you tell me anything about it at all?”
She was quiet for a moment. Then said, “Not really. That’s why I wanted you-”
“I understand what you wanted. But I need a little help. It’s the only thing you brought me that first day. The only artifact of any sort you gave me. No photos, no scrapbook, just that bottle. I guess I’m wondering why you thought it was so special.”
He was staring at the Pluto boxcar, at the grinning red devil.
“It’s strange,” she said eventually. “Don’t you think it’s strange? The way it stays cold, the way it… I don’t know, feels. There’s something off about it. And it is the only thing-and I mean the only thing-that he had from childhood. My husband told me that he kept it in a locked drawer in his bedside table, and said the bottle was a souvenir from his childhood and that no one was allowed to touch it. As you can see, it meant a lot to him for some reason. That’s why I’m so curious.”
“Yes,” Eric said. “I’m curious, too.”
“When I talked to you at Eve’s memorial service,” she said, “and I saw how you intuited the importance of that photograph, I knew I wanted to give you the bottle. I thought you might see something, feel something.”
That damn photograph was why she had hired him, why she’d sent him here. He could have guessed it from the start but instead he’d chosen to believe her hollow assertions of being impressed by the film. Claire wouldn’t have been fooled.
“I think I need to talk to your husband,” he said.
“What? Why?”
“Because he’s the one who’s actually related to the guy, Alyssa. It’s his family, and I need to ask him what the hell he really knows about his father. What he’s heard, what he thinks. I need to ask-”
“Eric, the entire point of this film was that it would be a surprise for my husband and his family.”
I don’t care were the words that rose in his throat, but he needed to keep any touch of hysteria down, and he was close to shouting now, close to telling her that something was very deeply wrong with Campbell Bradford, and once he got started on that, it’d be rolling downhill faster than he could control, stories of phantom trains and whispering ghosts coming out, and then his reputation in Chicago would be crushed just as completely as the one he’d had in Hollywood.
“I’d like to ask you to rethink that,” he said. “I believe I’m going to need to find out a little more from him to make any progress.”
“I’ll consider it,” she said in a tone of voice that made it clear she would not. “But I’m heading out right now and I’m afraid I have to let you go.”
“One more thing, Alyssa.”
“Yes?”
“Is there any chance your father-in-law played the violin?”
“Yes, he played beautifully. Self-taught, too. I take it you’re having some luck finding out about him, after all.”
Eric said, “I’m learning some things, yes.”
“Well, I’m amazed you learned that, because he hated to play in front of people.”
“Really.”
“Yes. As far as I know, he would only play when he was alone, with the door closed. Said he had stage fright and didn’t like to be watched when he played. But he could play beautifully. And there was a quality to it… maybe it was because of the fact that I never saw him play and only heard it, but there was something about the sound that was absolutely haunting.”
He drove back to the hotel then, leaving the Acura beneath one of the few trees in the parking lot for shade and avoiding the bright light of the rotunda, sticking to the perimeter hallway. The headache was showing itself again but not yet at full strength, a scout party sent ahead of the battalion.
The first thing he saw when he opened the door to his hotel room was the shattered camera on the floor. The cleaning people had been in here, but they’d left the camera on the floor, clearly unsure of what the hell to do with what was obviously expensive equipment, even if destroyed.
He’d never even wanted to use that damn camera, a gift that felt like a taunt from his father-in-law, a reminder that the days when he’d used first-rate studio equipment were long gone. A reminder of his failure.
“Claire tells me you’re going to be doing something on your own,” Paul Porter had said. “Thought this would help.”
He’d emphasized the something, two unspoken questions-what and when?-clear in the word. And Eric had to thank him with false gratitude and put on a show of marveling at the camera, Claire standing beside him, watching it all with a smile.
She’d been on his ass for months, prodding him along when all he needed was some patience, and if she thought he missed the connection between all that and her father’s gift, she was crazy. Ever since they’d left L.A. she’d been after him for his plans, and though he’d satisfied her with them at first-write a script himself, get some financial backing, direct his own indie film and use that as a springboard back to the big time-it wasn’t long before she was dissatisfied with his efforts.
His efforts. In truth that wasn’t the best phrase, maybe. He hadn’t done all that much. Had not, for example, directed the film or sought financing or even written the script. Started the script, for that matter. It wasn’t something you could rush right into, though, you had to have the right idea first, and it was going to need to be a big idea, with the right scope and ambition, and then you had to let it gestate for a time…
Yes, he’d been slow. Or totally stagnant. And gradually the gentle prodding turned to full-on accusations and demands and then things were spiraling down fast and deadly. They’d had one terrible blowup when she happened into a bar and grill downtown for lunch with a friend and found him camped out there with three whiskeys already gone, this at noon. It had been a sighting that led to an unfair conversation later that night, a conversation that quickly turned angry, and when Eric stormed out of the house with a string of expletives and an upended coffee table in his wake, he’d done so with an expectation of returning in a few hours. He’d ended up in a hotel room instead, though, refusing to give her the satisfaction of surrender and one night in the hotel quickly turned to ten and then he was looking for an apartment.
The bullshit “career” he was involved with now had been as much a guilt trip as anything. He’d wanted to find something so pathetic she had to feel the weight of it. Instead, she’d just told him how glad she was to hear he was working again. Oh, and she was happy to know he could make use of her father’s camera.
“Made good use of it, Paulie,” he said and let the door to the hotel room swing shut as he got down on his hands and knees and began cleaning up the mess.
It was no good to be without a video camera, not with these circumstances, when he needed something to tell him what the hell had been real and what hadn’t. He still had the micro-recorder, though. He took that out when he had the camera cleaned up and played a few minutes of his talk with Anne McKinney, enough to verify that everything on the tape progressed as he’d experienced it. He was still listening to it when his phone rang, and he turned off the recorder and looked at the phone, hoping for Claire but instead finding a number he didn’t recognize.
“Eric? It’s Kellen. I got in touch with Edgar Hastings, the old guy who knew Campbell’s family, and he’s willing to see you. Should be able to straighten out this confusion.”
“Great.”
“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.
“I think I’ve had a few, all since tasting it.”
“What do you see?”
“It’s varied, but I imagined a conversation with a man in Chicago, and then I got down here and thought I saw an old steam train…”
“That’s the kind they run for the tourists.”
“It wasn’t that train,” he said. “It was the Monon, the same one you talked about, and it came out of a storm cloud of pure black, and there was a man in a hat hanging out of a boxcar filled with water…”
He spit all this out in a breath, hearing the lunacy in it but watching her eyes and seeing no judgment.
“And I’ve had headaches,” he said, “awful headaches that go away quickly when I have another taste.”
She looked down at the bottle. “Well, I wouldn’t try any more of it.”
“I don’t intend to.”
She fastened the cap again and then passed him the bottle. He didn’t really want it back in his hands; it was nice to see somebody else handling it. He set it on the table beside her drink, and they both eyed it with a mix of wonder and distrust.
“I just don’t know what to think,” she said.
“Nor do I,” Eric said. Then he reached into his pocket and withdrew the microrecorder, rewound it without comment, and pressed play. Their voices came back, discussing the water, repeating all of those things that had just been said. He played about thirty seconds of tape, then shut it off and put the recorder back in his pocket. Anne McKinney was watching him with both knowing and astonished eyes.
“That’s why you’re taping everything. You want to be sure you’re not imagining it. You want to be sure it’s real.”
He managed a weak smile and a nod.
“Son,” she said, “you must be scared to death.”