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.
The bottles didn’t turn up until she’d reached the third box from the top, and by the time she got that one open, her joints were screaming and she felt exhausted and didn’t think she’d even be able to eat the soup, wanting only to get off her feet and shut her eyes. Then she got the tape off the third box and her spirits lifted, success bringing some energy back. There were nearly thirty different bottles in the box, all protected by the Bubble Wrap and labeled with a date. It took her only a few minutes to find a match for the one Eric Shaw had shown her. There was a piece of masking tape stretched across the wrapping, the year 1929 written on it. She’d been right.
She unwrapped the bottle and held it in her hand. It felt cool, but naturally so, the way glass was supposed to feel. Inside, the water was a little cloudy, but not so grainy and discolored as what she’d seen in Eric Shaw’s bottle.
She left the boxes on the floor. It was one thing to tug them down, another to lift them back up. With the bottle in hand she went back downstairs, checked on the soup, and then called the West Baden Springs Hotel and asked to be put through to Eric Shaw’s room. The phone rang several times, and then she got a machine.
“This is Anne McKinney. I have an idea… I’m not sure if it’ll be any help, but I don’t see where it could do any harm either. I found a bottle that’s the twin of yours. Only one I have from that year, and it’s still full. Never been opened. I’ll let you take it. My idea was that you could find a place to test the water. I don’t know who’d be able to do it, but surely there’s a laboratory somewhere that can. They could analyze both of them, and tell you what the difference is. There’s something in your Pluto Water that’s not in mine. It might be a help to you if you knew what that was.”
She left her number, hung up the phone, and went out to the porch. Her back throbbed when she pushed open the door. Outside the windmills were turning fast and steady, and the cluster of cirrus clouds that had stood in the western horizon at her last check were now directly overhead. The air was fragrant with the smell of rhododendrons and the honeysuckle that grew along the side of the house. An absolutely gorgeous day, but still that wind blew, and those clouds, they were warnings.