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Her voice was weary when she said it, and he lifted his head to look down at her.
“You sound like you’ve given up,” he said.
“On you? On us? Oh, please, Eric. I’m the only one who never will.”
“Then we can make it work. I know it will not be easy, or as pla
“You left,” she said. “You left. Don’t you remember that? And now I’m supposed to be thrilled with the idea of you coming back?”
“You don’t me want to?”
She snorted out a laugh of exasperation. “I didn’t want you to leave, Eric. But you did. So when you talk about making this work, forgive me if I’m a little hesitant.”
“I love you, Claire.”
“I know that,” she said. “The problem is, you’re going to have to figure out how to like Eric a little bit, too. Or at least be at peace with him. Until the two of you can sort that out, I’m afraid I’ll be lost in the middle.”
She fell asleep soon, her head on his chest and her hand curled around his side, and he watched her, feeling a sense of hope and possibility that had been absent for far too long. They would fix this. They would fix it all.
Though she did not yet know it, the water had saved him. It was the water that had returned her to him, that had her at his side right now. Without the water, he’d been alone. With it, here she was. It had revived his marriage and it would revive his career.
The thought returned his mind to Campbell and Lucas and Shadrach, to the story that could lift him to success. He was bothered that the water he’d bottled at the spa had not produced a vision or stopped the withdrawal pains, bothered that he’d required so much from A
It’s that spring, he thought, the spring that the boy’s uncle used for the moonshine. There was something different about it, and if I could find that spring…
If he could find it, the possibilities were damn near endless. If he could find that spring, the world would just about curl up in his palm.
But he could not find it tonight, and the headache was building and his hands were shaking and he needed to try to hold the dragon at bay if he could. He moved Claire gently, slipped out from beneath her, and went for the plastic bottle he’d filled at the spa. He’d had only a little before falling asleep the first time, and it had not been enough. He’d have to adjust, that was all. A little more, bit by bit, until he found the amount that worked. As the dark hours moved toward the light ones, he drank the water and watched his beautiful wife.
The pla
He’d hung up on Da
Lucas himself had confirmed that his wife had hired Shaw. Now a woman from Illinois had arrived in the middle of the night, and Lucas had chosen not to send the police after Shaw. Why not? There would be layers to that answer, Josiah was sure, but one of them had just landed at the West Baden Springs Hotel, Carlsbad of North America, Eighth Wonder of the Friggin’ World.
How to leverage that, though? The simple answer was that Josiah needed control of the situation, and that meant he needed control of both Shaw and Lucas’s wife. He went back to the dead detective’s briefcase and riffled through the papers until he came up with a name. Alyssa. Alyssa Bradford. Pretty name. Probably was a pretty girl. According to the detective’s files, she was thirty-six and Lucas was fifty-nine. Trophy wife.
The next step was getting control of Eric Shaw and Alyssa Bradford. It wasn’t something he could accomplish with them in that hotel, but luring them out of that hotel and into a place more suitable for his needs was going to be a difficult task. The only person he knew who had any ties to them was that big black kid.
Wait a second. Wait just one moment, Josiah, use that head on your shoulders.
He called Da
“Anything happening?”
“Nope. Nobody’s come. I wrote down the license plate of that-”
“Great,” Josiah interrupted. “Now tell me, Da
“Right. Got out of his car and left the engine ru
Josiah tuned him out, thinking now of the old woman’s house, that lonely, isolated place on the hill outside of town, no neighbors for a half mile in any direction.
“Okay,” he said. “Just needed verification. You stay awake and watching, hear? I’ll be in touch.”
He hung up in the middle of a question from Da
It would be a long hike, and there was a temptation to try and avoid that, but in the end Josiah relented. He didn’t want to run the risk of taking his truck out on the roads, not even for a short drive. He filled his pockets with shells and took his shotgun, was just out of the barn when he stopped and went back and opened the door to the truck and tossed the wad of cash he’d stolen from the detective onto the driver’s seat. He’d tell Da
It was begi
What Josiah wanted out of this was only what was owed to him. There was a dollar figure to it, and he’d settle upon one eventually, but it started with answers. He was damn sure owed some answers, and he had a feeling-no, an assurance by now-that they weren’t the sort of answers got offered up in conversation. They were the sort of answers got offered up when you had a gun barrel to someone’s head.
He worked his tongue around his mouth and spat, that taste of tobacco growing. No cars passed on the dark, empty highway, and though the shotgun was awkward to carry, he was making good enough time, tramping along through the wet underbrush and working up a sweat. He’d spent years bitching about this place, promising himself he’d get out of the town someday and never look back. But out here in the woods, no other people around, no buildings or houses or hotels, he could appreciate what it had. It was beautiful land, really, rich and filled with strange gifts. It was the valley of his birth, the valley of his ancestors. Wouldn’t be so terrible if it ended up being the valley of his death, too. No, that wouldn’t be so bad at all.
The whole place was supposed to be coming alive again, was supposed to be on the threshold of a grand return. There were those who doubted it would happen, but the groundwork had been laid, and those hotels shone beside their casino, and through it all nobody remembered the Bradfords, nobody recalled that Campbell had been the man that made it work for years. Hell with Taggart and Ballard and Sinclair. Some men had visions, others had deeds.