So Cold the River (2010) (48 page)

“You going to shoot me?
Me?
”

“Don’t intend to. But I came here to finish a task, and ain’t nobody going to interrupt me. You least of all.”

Danny’s jaw slackened. He didn’t say a word. The wind was starting to gust again, another round of storms ready to chase the
one that had just left this place.

“We’re going to find those two,” Josiah said, “whether they’re out in those woods or up in a damn tree somewhere with their
necks broken. We’re going to find them.”

“Who is she?” Danny asked, staring at the woman in the bed of the truck.

“Shaw’s wife. Now tell me where they went.”

Danny jabbed a finger into the wind-torn woods. “Down to the gulf. Last time I saw them, they was walking down to the gulf.”

“That’s fine,” Josiah said. “Then we’ll take the same walk. You mind helping our friend here out of the truck? I’d like to
keep her at my side.”

Danny hesitated only a moment, but when he did move, it seemed to be more out of something exchanged in his stare with the
woman than in direct obedience to Josiah’s instruction. He leaned over the bed wall and tried to gather her up, but he was
handling her gently, not getting a thing done.

“Go on and pull her out of there!” Josiah barked. “She ain’t that fragile, boy.”

Danny ignored him and went to the back of the truck and climbed in the bed to help her to her feet. As he did that, he pushed
aside another tarp, glanced down to see what it had covered, and froze with his arms extended to the woman.

“Is that… dynamite?”

“Indeed,” Josiah said. “And it would take one squeeze of this trigger to blow the back of that truck into Martin County. Now
you want to hurry up?”

Danny got her upright and down out of the truck then, used his pocket knife to cut the tape free from her feet at Josiah’s
instructions, and then started down the trail. The woman was unsteady with her hands still bound, and he kept an arm on her
to help with balance. They’d gotten well into the trees now, the vehicles out of sight, and were crossing over familiar ground,
a path on which Josiah knew every root and stone. Trees were downed in every direction, some snapped in half, others torn
free at their bases, leaning crazily against one another, but somehow many had stayed upright and largely intact. Even now
they were tossing around in that freshening wind. Josiah couldn’t help but marvel a little as he watched them. Damn things
didn’t seem so flexible on a normal day, appeared stiff as the boards they produced, but look at ’em whipping around now.
Some would
break; some just bend. All depended on the tree and the storm. Some would break and some just bend…

He’d gotten lost in the trees and didn’t see what Danny and the woman saw. Didn’t understand what was happening until the
woman dropped to her knees in the middle of the trail, and when he turned to jerk her upright, he saw Danny was pointing ahead.
He looked back down the trail.

Eric Shaw was coming up it.

C
LAIRE
.

Eric saw her before anything else, focused on her so much that for an instant he was unable to see the rest of the frame.
The first thing that stood out was the tape: a bright shining silver X across her face. Then she dropped to her knees on the
trail and the rest of the pieces clicked into understanding in his brain—Danny Hastings at her side, Josiah Bradford behind
them with a gun in his hand. In that first moment, that first blink, they’d been insignificant pieces of scenery around his
wife. Now they stepped forward and joined the cast and became significant as hell. Particularly the shotgun.

He’d left Kellen beside the gulf not five minutes earlier and begun the trek back up the hill, thinking that help was a few
minutes away. His hands were shaking and his head throbbed but he’d told himself that he needed to think of Kellen, because
Kellen needed help of the kind that could be found—normal, human help, different from that required by Eric. So he’d walked
up the storm-ravaged slope, intent on finding rescue for Kellen, and now he was staring at his wife bound and gagged.

For a moment nobody moved or spoke. They all just froze there, looking back at one another, and then Eric started forward
at a run, and Josiah Bradford’s face split into a grin and he lifted the shotgun and laid the barrel against the crown of
Claire’s skull.

Eric stopped running.

“What are you doing?” he shouted. “What do you
want?
”

“Only what’s owed to me,” Josiah said. His voice didn’t sound anything like it had two days ago. It seemed to have gained
a deeper timbre, gained power. It was the voice of an old-time revival preacher, primed to stir the crowds into a frenzy.

“Take that gun away from—”

“You come on up here. Walk slow, but get closer. I don’t want to shout.”

No,
Eric thought,
I believe we
should
shout. Because Kellen’s back there and he isn’t going to hear us unless we’re shouting. Don’t know what he could do with a
broken ankle anyhow, but it’s something. I left him to get help. Now I need it.

He moved forward to join them.

Devastation. That was the word across the shortwave bands—reports coming in from around the area to Anne’s basement while
she waited for the police. The tornado that had passed overhead while Josiah Bradford was still in her home had touched down
just west of Orangeville and moved northeast into Orleans. Houses had been torn apart, cars overturned, utility
poles ripped from the ground. At least two fires started in the aftermath. Highway 37 was closed between Orleans and Mitchell,
keeping many rescue crews from reaching the scene.

A second tornado had touched down within minutes of the first, this one just to the southeast. It had flattened a group of
trailers and then moved back into farmland, taking a cellular phone tower out in its path. Early estimates said that one had
stayed on the ground for at least six miles.

She had no view of the sky from down in the cellar, but the spotters to the west were issuing frantic warnings that things
were not done yet. The supercell was shifting and realigning and, they warned, possibly preparing to spit out another funnel
cloud.

Tornado outbreaks generally spanned a wider area, sometimes putting up as many as forty or fifty or even a hundred tornadoes
spread out across a wide, multistate region. To have a cluster outbreak like this, so many tornadoes in one county, was rare
but not unprecedented. She remembered studying a similar event that occurred in Houston in the early nineties, when six tornadoes
spawned from four separate storms hit one county over the course of about two hours. At one point, three of them were on the
ground at the same time. Things like that could happen. You could never predict the behavior of a truly furious storm. All
you could hope to do was see the warnings.

That was her role—to see the warnings and hope that people heeded them. She had frequencies for the security outfits with
both the French Lick and West Baden hotels, and she contacted them immediately after finishing her initial conversation with
the sheriff’s department, explained the threat, and suggested they post some guards at the property entrances. She couldn’t
say whether they believed her, but she’d done what she could. She’d issued the warning.

Fifteen minutes after she’d made initial contact, the Orange County Sheriff’s Department dispatcher came back to Anne to report
that a detective named Roger Brewer from the Indiana State Police had arrived at Josiah Bradford’s home.

And found it missing.

It appeared, the dispatcher said, as if the tornado had in fact touched down almost on top of Josiah’s house before beginning
its path into Orleans.

“No sign of the truck?” Anne asked.

No sign of the truck. The state police were reaching out to the FBI for assistance—with every available unit out on storm-related
calls, the kidnapping called for focused attention that the locals could not provide. But the nearest FBI contact was in Bloomington,
which was a forty-five-minute drive in the best of conditions, and these weren’t the best of conditions. So there was one
detective on the search.

One.

The dispatcher, who was talking to Anne with detached calm, which was of course part of the job but which was also frustrating
beyond measure to someone trying to convey a sense of urgency, said that the detective was “making a sweep.” Then she told
Anne that there were too many other emergency calls going on to prolong this one.

“He was headed toward his property,” Anne said. “Some area of woods near his property. Keep looking. And remember that he
said his truck was full of—”

“I remember. I’ve advised our officers. They understand the threat.”

No,
Anne thought,
they do not
.
I’m not sure anyone could.

She couldn’t say what she knew to be true: that the storm and Josiah were linked, that something evil had come to town today,
and it wasn’t leaving soon.

“What do you want?” Eric Shaw repeated, advancing up the trail toward Josiah. “This doesn’t have anything to do with us. Not
with her, not with me.”

“I think you’re wrong on that score,” Josiah said. “It has much to do with you.”

“How?” Shaw said.

“You give my name to another,” Josiah said. “The one who took me from my home, who shed my blood and took me from my home,
and you honor him with my name. Don’t even see that you brought me
back
home, you dumb son of a bitch. You brought me home, and there’s scores to be settled.”

The words had left his mouth without a beat of hesitation, and though they were not his own words, he believed them.

“Brought me home and then thought you could control me,” he said. “Hold me back with water. A fool’s notion, Shaw. There’s
not a force in this valley stronger than me.”

Shaw tilted his head and blinked at Josiah. “He’s in you,” he said. “Isn’t he?”

Josiah didn’t answer.

“What do you mean?” Danny said, and Josiah didn’t care for the intense interest in his voice.

“Campbell,” Shaw said to Josiah. “You sound just like him now.”

Above them the sky had darkened to near black, the wind rising to a howl though the rain had ceased altogether. The next wave
of storms was here.

“How would you know the sound of his voice?” Danny said.

“Trust me, I know it. I’ve been listening to him for a few days
now. Seeing him and hearing him.” He turned back to Josiah. “You don’t look like him yet but you carry his voice. He’s in
you now.”

“Always was,” Josiah said. “Did you not hear what I said? We’re of shared blood, you ignorant son of a bitch. The years don’t
matter—we’re linked, and always have been.”

“No,” Shaw said, “not like this. He’s in your mind, damn it, he’s turned you into something—”

Josiah stepped forward and swung the shotgun, caught Shaw in the temple with the barrel and knocked him down into the wet
grass. Danny gave a little grunt and stepped forward and Josiah turned and stared at him.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“Nothing. I’m not—”

“You move toward me again, and I’ll shoot you just as fast as either of them.”

“Damn it, Josiah, he just told you the truth.”

“Hasn’t been a word of truth left his mouth since he set foot in my valley.”

“Bullshit. Campbell’s infecting your damn brain just like he says.”

Shaw spoke up again, his voice thick with pain. “Let Claire go, at least. Let her go, and whatever problem you’ve got with
me, we’ll figure it out. But she’s not a part of this.”

Josiah stared down at him and watched blood seep out of a wound near his hairline and trickle down the side of his face and
drip into the grass. The blood looked black in the shadows, but then the lightning flashed again, and in that instant he saw
the bright red of the blood stark against the white of Shaw’s face.

“Think for a minute,” Shaw said, speaking as if his tongue were hard to move. “Think about what you want, and what
you can actually get. You want some money? Okay, I’ll get you money. But what else can you hope to get out of this? Why do
you have her tied up like that? What does it bring you?”

“It’ll bring,” Josiah said, “what’s been owed.”

“What’s owed to you?”

“This valley,” he said.

“I don’t know what that means. And I don’t know how hurting my wife can help you get it.”

“It’s a matter of power,” Josiah said. “I would not expect a man of your dull mind to conceive of just what that means. I
ran this valley once, held it in the palm of my hand. I’ll do it again.”

There was blood still dripping off the side of Shaw’s head. Josiah must have hit him a good one; his left arm was shaking
as if caught by palsy.

“Stop letting him talk for you!” Shaw shouted. “Just
think
for a minute, think about what’s real. You’ve got police after you. If you stay here, you’ll be arrested. But I can get you
some money and then you can leave—”

“Shut your damned mouth,” Josiah said. “If I required a suggestion from you, I’d let you know with my gun.”