49
CLAIRE WANTED TO COME along. She said he shouldn’t be alone, and when he told her that he wouldn’t be, she said that Kellen was a stranger and as far as she was concerned, being with a stranger was as good as being alone.
“Look,” he said, “you’re safe here, and you’re also here if I need you.”
“Yes. I’ll be here when you need me there. Wherever there might be.”
“We’re just going to look for a mineral spring. That’s all. Maybe take two hours. It could tell me something. Being there could tell me something.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“If it doesn’t, then we go home,” he said, although the idea left him uneasy, this place having wrapped him in its embrace now, made him feel like he belonged here.
She studied him, then echoed, “We go home.”
“Yes. Please, Claire. Let me leave to do this one thing.”
“Fine,” she said. “It’s not like I’m unused to you leaving.”
He was silent, and she said, softly, “I’m sorry.”
“You’re honest.”
She ran her hands over her face and through her hair and turned from him. “Go, then. And hurry, so we can go home.”
He kissed her. She was stiff, returned it with an uncomfortable formality. Tense with the effort of hiding those things she hid so well—anger, betrayal. She felt them now, and he knew it and still he was heading for the door. What did that make him?
“I’ll be right back,” he said. “Quicker than you think, I promise.”
She nodded, and then after an awkward silence, he went to the door and opened it and said, “Good-bye.” She didn’t answer, and then he was in the hallway, the door shutting softly behind him and hiding her from sight.
Kellen was waiting in the parking lot, the Porsche at idle. He had the windows down and his eyes shielded by the sunglasses even though the morning was dark with heavy cloud cover.
“Something tells me that ain’t Dasani,” he said, eying the bottle of water in Eric’s hand. It was only half full now, maybe a little less. The headache was whispering to him, the pain like a soft, malevolent chuckle.
“No,” Eric said, fitting the bottle into a cup holder. “It’s not Dasani.”
Kellen nodded and put the car into drive. “A word of warning, my man—this might be the definition of a goose chase we’re embarking on here.”
“I thought you knew where the spot was?”
“I know where the gulf is. That’s all. There’s a lot of fields and woods around it, and how in the hell we’re supposed to find a spring, I don’t know.”
“We’ll give it a shot, at least,” Eric said. “Think we can beat the rain?” he asked, eyeing the darkening sky.
“I drive fast,” Kellen said.
They were on their way out of town when Eric said, “Can I ask you something?”
“Go ahead.”
“Why are you hanging in the game?”
“What do you mean?”
“If I were you, I’d probably have driven back to Bloomington by now and stopped taking calls from the crazy white guy. Why haven’t you?”
There was a brief silence, and then Kellen said, “All those stories my great-grandfather told me about this place? All those crazy-sounding stories? Well, Everett Cage was a talker, I’ll admit that. He liked to captivate his audience. But, Eric? He also wasn’t a liar. He was an honest man, and I’m sure of one thing—whatever he said, well, he believed it. I guess I’ve always wondered how he could believe things like that.”
It was quiet again, and then he said, “I’m starting to understand.”
Josiah found himself watching the clouds. At first he’d taken to gazing out the window just because he wanted to be sure the old woman wasn’t up to something, that there was no way she could signal for help once those drapes were pulled back. But the window showed only a field and a view of the western sky. The clouds were massing, unsettled and swirling, layers seeming to shift from bottom to top and then back. The sky over the yard was pale gray, but out in the west it looked like a bruise, and the wind pushed hard at the house and whistled with occasional gusts. Something about the turbulent sky pleased him, made him smile, and he pulled his lips back and spat tobacco juice onto the window, watched it slide down the glass in a brown smear. Funny he couldn’t even remember putting a chaw in. Hadn’t ever taken to the habit, threw up when he sampled his first dip at fourteen and never went back to the stuff, but there it was.
He waited until nearly nine before kneeling beside Anne McKinney and passing her his cell phone. Late enough that Shaw and the woman would be awake; early enough that they probably weren’t ready to check out. He had Danny watching in case they did, and the phone had been silent.
“Time for your part in this,” he said. “It’s a most minor role, Mrs. McKinney, but critical nonetheless. In other words, it is a role that I cannot allow you to… what’s the phrase I’m looking for? Fuck up. That’s it. I cannot allow you to fuck this up.”
She held his eyes and didn’t so much as blink. She was scared of him—she had to be—but she wasn’t allowing herself to show it, and there was a part of Josiah that admired that. Not a large enough part to tolerate it, though.
“If you’re fixing to hurt people,” she said, “I won’t have a part in it.”
“You don’t have the faintest idea what I’m fixing to do. Remember that. But here’s what I can tell you—this call doesn’t go through, people will begin to get hurt. And there’s only one person nearby for me to start with, too.”
“You’d threaten a woman of my years. That’s the kind of man you—”
“You ain’t got the first idea the kind of man I am. But I’ll give you a start: you picture the darkest soul you ever seen, and then, old woman, you add a little more black.”
He hovered over her, the phone extended, his eyes locked on hers. “Now, all you got to do is make a phone call and say a handful of words, and say them right. That happens, I got a feeling I’ll find my way out of that front door of yours, and you’ll be sitting here watching your damn sky as you like. But if it doesn’t happen?”
He pursed his lips and shook his head. “I’m a man of ambition. Not of patience.”
She tried to keep her gaze steady but her mouth was trembling a bit, and when he pressed the phone into her wrinkled palm, he felt a fearful jolt travel through her.
“You call that hotel,” he said. “You said he wanted that water? Well, tell him now’s the time to come get it. You’ll give it all to him, but he’s got to hurry up and get out here, because you’re going to be leaving town for a few days.”
“He won’t believe that.”
“Well, you best make him believe it. Because if he doesn’t? We’re going to have to find ourselves a whole new tactic. And with the mood I’ve found myself in, I don’t believe anyone would like to see what happens should I be required to get creative.”
He slid the shotgun over and leaned it against the edge of the couch so the muzzle was looking her in the face.
“Anne, you old bitch,” he said, “it’s got nothing to do with you. Don’t change the way I feel on that front.”
“All right,” she said. “I’ll call. But whatever you think is going to happen, I can assure you it won’t work out as you’ve planned. Things never do.”
“Don’t you worry about me. I’m a man who’s capable of adjusting.”