KELLEN WAS WAITING IN the car with the windows down and music playing. He turned the volume down when Eric got in.
“So, who’s that guy working for?”
“Someone who offered me seventy-five grand to go home.”
Kellen leaned across the steering wheel, mouth agape. “What?”
Eric nodded. “Started with fifty, then bumped it up to seventy-five.”
Kellen said, “What?” again as if the answer had never been offered.
“I know,” Eric said. He was staring back down the hill, looking for Gavin Murray. He finally located him beside one of the gazebos, standing with a cell phone glued to his ear. Probably calling Chicago to provide the update and await instructions.
“Another family member would be my guess,” Eric said. “Or somebody from Campbell’s legal team. The old man’s dying, and he’s worth a few hundred million. Could be worried about Josiah.”
“You think?”
“Yeah. If Josiah’s close blood to the old man in the hospital, he could make a compelling legal claim to compensation. Campbell abandoned the family. A few generations ago, maybe, but there would be plenty of lawyers who’d be happy to argue for reparations on Josiah’s behalf.”
“But you don’t think the two Campbells are the same guy.”
“No, I don’t. Which makes this all the more interesting, don’t you think?”
“Sure. Also makes me wonder what your client will have to say.”
“Oh, yeah,” Eric said. “She’s getting a call. Right now.”
Down by the gazebo, Gavin Murray lowered the phone and put it back in the case at his belt and lit another cigarette. He was leaning against the rail, staring up at them.
“Think that’s a good idea?” Kellen said. “Telling her about this?”
“She has a better chance of understanding what the hell it’s about than I do. How can it be a bad idea?”
Kellen shrugged, then waited while Eric dialed Alyssa Bradford’s number. Cell first, then home. No answer. He left messages on both phones but no details, just a request to call him as soon as possible.
“Headache back?” Kellen said when he hung up, and Eric realized he’d been rubbing the back of his skull while he made the calls.
“Don’t worry about it. Let’s get moving. I told Anne we were on our way.”
As they drove away from the hotel, Gavin Murray lifted a hand in recognition. He was on the phone again.
Josiah left Danny at his grandfather’s and drove off without a word minutes after the Porsche pulled out of the drive. He considered following them, driving that polished piece of shit right off the road and hauling them out of it one at a time, administering the beating he should’ve issued at Edgar’s house. They were out of sight, though, no car visible ahead except for a blue minivan pulled into the weeds.
Josiah blew past that and on into town, stopped at the gas station and put twenty dollars’ worth into his empty tank and bought a six-pack, drank one down fast while he stood at the pump. Someone pulled in and tapped the horn, annoyed that Josiah was there blocking the pump while drinking a beer, but it only took one look to make the driver go on to the next available pump.
He threw his empty beer can into the trash and drove away from the station, heading home. His house was out in the wooded hills just east of Orangeville, surrounded by a few hundred acres of Amish farmland. They ran up and down the road in their buggies and sold vegetables in front of the farm, and early on, Josiah would hit the gas in his truck when he passed, let that oh-so-scary modern machinery roar at them. Made him laugh. Over time, though, he began to appreciate them despite himself. They were quiet neighbors, took care of their land, didn’t bother him with noise or forced-friendly conversation or gossip. Minded their own, let him mind his. As it should be.
The porch looked clean and bright when he pulled into the drive, but it no longer satisfied him. He’d taken a hell of a one-two punch. Seeing those guys sitting in Edgar’s living room was bad enough, but that had come right on the heels of Danny Hastings, old dumbass Danny, looking Josiah in the eye and telling him he thought Josiah’s plan was stupid. And being right to say so.
Yes, this day was spinning away from him in an altogether unpleasant fashion. Hell, the whole weekend was. Had gone south fast and furious, starting last night. Things had been fine Friday morning, fine as they ever were, at least.
That was the problem, though-things never were fine and never were going to change. Not unless he took some action. He’d be sitting on the porch drinking piss-water beer and matching wits with Danny for the rest of his pathetic life, till his reflexes went and he could no longer handle the truck with booze in his veins and he put it off the highway and into the trees just like his worthless father had before him.
“Something’s got to change,” he whispered to himself, sitting there in the cab of the truck with sweat trickling along his neck and the beer warming in the sun while horses walked in circles at the Amish farm next door, turning some sort of mill wheel, their heads down the whole time, step after step after step. “Something has got to change.”
He got out of the truck but didn’t want to go in the house, didn’t want to sit on the stained couch and look at the cracks in the wall and the sloped floor. The porch rail glinted under the sun, sure, but now he realized just how damn little the porch rail meant. The house was still a dump, with sagging gutters and a stain-streaked roof and mildew-covered siding. Sure, those things could be addressed, but it took money, and even then, what the hell was the point? Could only accomplish so much with polish on a turd.
Instead of going inside, he took the beer and set off on foot, walked through the backyard and into the field beyond, picking his way through the barbed-wire fence that separated the properties. He’d walk up into the wooded hills, have a few more beers.
He was halfway across the field, head bowed against the sun and the warm western wind, when he remembered the second half of his dream, the man waiting for him at the edge of the tree line. The thought was enough to make him look up, as if he’d see the old bastard standing out there. Wasn’t anything in sight, but the memory chilled him just the same, thinking of the way the guy had been shaking his head at Josiah as the day faded away and the night came on. Weird damn dream. And that after the one on the train, the same man standing in the boxcar with water around his ankles.
We’re going home to take what’s yours.
There were those who believed dreams meant something. Josiah had never been of that breed, but today he couldn’t help it, thinking about the man in the bowler hat. Take what’s yours, he’d said. Wasn’t much in the world that belonged to Josiah. Funny, though, him having a dream like that just when everyone was asking questions about his family. Who the hell would possibly care about Campbell at this point? Had been damn near eighty years since the thug hopped a train and disappeared.
Hopped a train. An old-fashioned train, with a steam locomotive and a caboose, like the one in his dream.
“Was that you, Campbell?” Josiah said softly, tramping across the field, and he smiled. A bunch of crazy, stupid thoughts, that’s what he was lost to today. Setting fires and stealing gems and seeing his great-grandfather in dreams? He was coming unhinged.
The sun was hot and the beer cans clanged awkwardly against his leg as he walked, but he didn’t mind. His shirt was soaked with sweat and gnats buzzed around his neck but that was fine, too. It felt good to be outside, good to be moving, good to be alone. He’d grown up in the woods and fields out here, spent more time in them than in his home. Field runners, Edgar used to call him and Danny. Old Edgar had done well by Josiah. Josiah’s own family had been such a damned disaster that he’d as good as taken in with the Hastings instead. He and Danny had been close as brothers, and while Danny wasn’t much in the brains department, Josiah had never minded that so much as he did lately. Fact was, he’d always liked Danny fine, just looked down on him a touch. Danny was a good man, but not one who was going to do anything with his life. Even when they’d dropped out of high school on the same day, it had felt like Danny was playing out his fate while Josiah was making a choice. Josiah was the half of the pair who would accomplish something, the half with ambition.
That had always been the notion in his head, at least. Now, though, he felt as if he’d sobered up and took a blink and realized there was nothing separating him from Danny at all, nothing that anybody else would see, at least, nothing tangible. They were both still in town, living in shitty houses and driving shitty cars and swinging weed eaters and hedge clippers and drinking too much. How in the hell had that happened?
The place he was headed today was a spot he’d found when he was a kid, twelve years old and hiking alone. Well, not hiking as much as running, with the sting of the old man’s belt still on his back. They’d lived only two miles from where he did now, two miles separated by the fields he’d just come through.
That day he ran until his lungs were clenched tight as fists and his hamstrings were screaming, and then he’d slowed to a stumbling walk, moved through another field and into the woods, and found himself scrambling across the face of a steep hill. It was a difficult climb, overgrown and pockmarked with slabs of limestone. He’d heard a gurgling noise and frozen, listening and growing progressively creeped out because the sound was coming from beneath him. From right under his feet, he was sure of that, yet there wasn’t so much as a puddle in sight.
He’d followed the sound, fought down through the trees, and found a cliff face, a good hundred feet of sheer rock leading to a strange pool of water below that had an eerie, aquamarine glow. The pool was still as a farm pond, but all around it the gurgling, churning noise of water in motion persisted. Birch trees had tumbled off the ridge and lay half in and half out of the water, their ghostly white limbs fading into green depths. All along the top of the cliff face, root systems dangled free, hanging across the stone like something out of one of those slasher movies set in the swamps.
The ridge ran around all sides of the pool, forming a giant bowl, and it took some effort for him to pick his way down to it. At the bottom the place seemed even more ominous than at the top, because here there was no getting out fast, and the wind picked leaves off the trees that rimmed the ridge and sent them tumbling down on you. Now and then one corner of the pool would seem to snarl, spitting water into more water, and beneath the rocks water trickled, always audible but invisible.
Josiah had never imagined such a place.
He’d risked another beating that night by telling his father about it, swearing the place was something magic, and the old man had laughed and told him it was the Wesley Chapel Gulf, or the Elrod Gulf if you were an old-timer, one of the spots where the Lost River broke the surface again, coughed up by the caves that held it.
“You stay away from there in flood season,” the old man had warned. “You know where the water was today? Well, it’ll rise up thirty feet or more along that cliff when the underground part of the river fills up, and it’ll spin, just like a whirlpool. I’ve seen it, boy, and it’s made for drowning. You go there in flood season and I’ll tan your ass.”
Naturally, Josiah had gone back to the gulf during the spring floods. And son of a bitch if the old man wasn’t telling the truth for once-the water did climb the cliff face, and it did spin like a whirlpool. There was a shallow spot in the bowl-shaped ridge that held it, and the water broke through there and found a dry channel and filled it, rushing along for a piece and then disappearing into one of the swallow holes only to resurface a bit farther on.
It was one strange river, and it held Josiah’s attention for most of his youth. He and Danny traced the dry channels and located the swallow holes, found more than a hundred of them, some drinking the water down in thirsty, roiling pools, others spitting it back to the surface as if disgusted. There were springs, too, some of them so small as to be missed unless you were standing beside them, springs that put off a potent odor of eggs gone bad. They even found traces of old dwellings scattered along the river and through the hills, rotted timbers and moss-covered slabs of stone.
The gulf became a regular spot for Josiah, but one he’d never hiked to with anybody but Danny until he was sixteen, when he brought a girl named Marie up to it one night. She’d bitched the whole way, said the place was creepy, then stopped him from putting his hand up her skirt and had been with another guy not a week later. After that, Josiah never took anybody else back.
Sometimes people came by and dumped trash down the slope and into the pool, and that incensed Josiah in a way few things ever could. He’d hauled countless beer cans and tires out of there, once an entire toilet. When he was in high school, the national forest claimed the property, realizing it was something special, and they cleaned it out and put up a sign and took to monitoring the place.
Today he climbed up to the east side of the ridge and picked his way down to a jutting limestone ledge that looked out over the pool below. He sat with his feet dangling off the ledge and cracked open a beer. It was lukewarm by now.
If he were on the opposite side of this same hill and the leaves were off the trees, he’d be able to look out to the house he’d grown up in, what was left of it, at least. Place had been vacant for ten years, and last spring a tree had come down and bashed a hole in the roof above the kitchen, letting the rain come in. He was surprised the county hadn’t knocked the house down when they came to remove the tree.
The gulf was within walking distance of his childhood home, and within walking distance of his adult home. He was all of two miles from the place of his birth.
Two miles. That was how far he’d gotten in life. Two fucking miles.
He drank another beer as the sun sank behind the trees and the air began to cool. Down in the gulf, long trunks of fallen trees weathered to bone white faded into the shadows, the blue-green of the water edging toward black. Now and then there was a churlish splashing at the edge of the pool as the Lost River gave up more of its hidden water, and the wet whispering of it moving through the stone below ground was always present. He opened one more beer but didn’t drink any, just set it beside him and stretched out on his back. He wanted to close his eyes for a piece. Try not to think about the man from Chicago or the one from the dream. Try not to think about anything.