Breaking it had felt good, though. Watching it shatter, throwing his full strength into those smashes against the edge of the desk, seeing something else pay a price for his own pain, his own fear. Yes sir, that had felt nice.
He wondered how Claire would respond to that notion. Something told him it wouldn’t be with surprise.
The Pluto company was housed in a long stone building of a buttery color. There were two large holding tanks outside and banks of old-fashioned windows, some forty panes of glass in each one, a few of them opened outward to let the air circulate. The entrance led Eric to a flight of stairs, and at the top he found the office, went in, and explained what he wanted to a pretty, brown-haired woman behind one of the desks.
“You want to talk about the history of the company, your best bet is up at the hotel,” she said.
“I’m interested in the history, yes, but I’m also interested in the actual water. What’s in the water, and what it does.”
“What it does?”
“I’ve seen some of the old promotional materials, things that claimed it would fix just about anything.”
“There was only one thing that water ever fixed.” She waited for a response and didn’t get it, then leaned forward and said, “It made you shit, mister. That’s all it did. Pluto Water was nothing but a laxative.”
He smiled. “I understand that, but I’m trying to find out something about the legends that surrounded it, the folklore.”
“Again, we’re not going to be able to answer that. The only thing we’ve got in common with the original company is the name. We don’t produce that water anymore.”
“What do you produce, then?”
“Cleaning products,” she said. “Things for Clorox.” Then she smiled and added, “Well, I suppose that’s got something in common, after all. Cleansers, right? Because the old stuff would clean out your—”
“I got it,” he said. “Okay. Thanks for your time.”
There was an older woman at a desk in the back of the room, and she’d been listening and peering at Eric over her reading glasses. As he turned to go, she spoke up.
“You want to know about folklore, you should look up Anne McKinney.”
He paused at the door. “Is she a historian?”
“No, she’s not. Just a local woman, late eighties but with a mind better than most, and a memory that beats anybody’s. Her father worked for Pluto. She’ll answer every question you could think to ask and plenty more that you couldn’t have.”
“That sounds perfect. Where can I find her?”
“Well, you follow Larry Bird Boulevard—that’s the street we’re on—right on up the hill and keep going out of town, and you’ll find her house. Nice-looking blue house, two stories with a big front porch, bunch of little windmills in the yard, wind chimes all over the porch. Thermometers and barometers, too. Can’t miss that place.”
Eric raised his eyebrows.
“Old Anne’s waiting on a storm,” the gray-haired woman said.
“I see. Think she’ll mind me dropping in, or should I call first?”
“I don’t think she’d mind, but if you don’t want to bother her at home, you could go on by the West Baden Springs Hotel at about two. She goes there for a drink.”
“A drink? Thought you said she was in her late eighties?”
“That’s right,” the gray-haired woman said with a smile.
17
AT NOON THE BAROMETER showed a pressure of 30.20, up a bit from morning. The temperature was at eighty-one but Anne didn’t think it would touch quite so high today as yesterday, what with that light breeze and some cloud cover coming in out of the southwest. Thin white clouds, no storm. Not yet.
She spent the morning on laundry. Was a time when laundry was not an all-morning task, but the washer and dryer were in the basement, and those narrow wooden stairs gave her some trouble now. Oh, she could take them well enough, just a bit slower. That was true of so much these days. Just a bit slower.
She had the laundry done by eleven and then made some iced tea and went out onto the porch with the newspaper. The New York Times, which she’d taken for more years than she could count. It was important to know what was going on in the world, and last time she’d trusted TV was the last day Murrow had been on it.
At noon she got up and checked the temperature and wind direction and speed and the barometric pressure, wrote it all down in her notebook. She had logs going back more than six decades, five readings a day. Make a real interesting record, if anyone cared. She suspected not many would.
Her weather-watching habits had their roots in childhood. And in fear. She’d been petrified of storms when she was a young girl, would hide under her bed or in a closet when the thunder and lightning commenced. It had amused her father—she could still remember his soft, low laugh as he’d come in to fetch her from under the bed—but her mother had decided something needed to be done about it and had found a children’s book about storms, one with illustrations of dark thunderheads, swirling tornadoes, tossing seas. Anne had been seven when she got the book, had the binding split from countless readings by the time she was eight.
“You can’t be scared of them, because being scared of them won’t change a thing,” her mother had said. “Won’t make ’em stop, won’t make you any safer. You respect them and try to understand them. More you understand, less you’ll be afraid.”
So Anne had returned to the book for another reading and started forcing herself to stay at the window when storms blew in, watching the trees bend and the leaves whip through the air as rain lashed the house, drilling off the glass. She went to the library and found more books and kept studying. Had it been a different time, she’d have probably gone up to Purdue and studied meteorology. But that wasn’t how things worked then. She had a sweetheart, got married right out of high school, and then the war was on and he was overseas and she had to get a job, and then he was back and they had children to raise. Children she’d put in the ground already, hardest thing she could imagine anyone bearing, her daughter gone at thirty with cancer, her son at forty-nine with a stroke. No grandchildren left behind.
She was thinking about her son when she first saw the car approaching slowly up the road, remembering the time he’d fallen off this very porch and landed on a flowerpot below, breaking his wrist. Five years old at the time, and he was trying to stand on the rail to impress his sister. Goodness, how that boy had cried. The car came to a stop then and turned in her drive, and her thoughts left the past and she got to her feet. The wind had freshened a touch just as the car pulled in, got the chimes jingling on the porch and lifted some dust off the floorboards. She swept the thing twice a day, but the world never would run out of dust.
The visitor got out, a man with short hair of a color that had gotten confused somewhere between blond and brown. He needed a shave but seemed clean enough.
“Anne McKinney? They gave me your name down in French Lick,” he said, swinging the door shut and walking up the steps when she nodded. “I’m interested in Pluto Water. The old stories, the folklore. Think you’d be willing to talk about it?”
“Oh, I’m willing enough. Day I’m not willing to tell the old tales, you best call the grave digger—if nothing else just so he can hit me in the head with his shovel. Ought to issue a disclaimer before I get to it, though: time I get to storytelling, you best be comfortable. I’ve been known to go on.”