A horn blew behind him, and Eric realized he’d coasted almost to a stop in the middle of the road. He pushed on the gas again, found a set of twin stone arches that guarded a long, winding brick drive that led up to the hotel. West Baden Springs-Carlsbad of America, the arches said. He knew from his research that referred to a famed European mineral spa.
The place gave him an immediate desire to reach for the camera, get this recorded now, as if it might soon disappear.
He wasn’t certain the brick road was a legitimate entrance, so he drove past the stone arches in search of the parking lot and, within the space of a blink and a yawn, found himself in French Lick. Out of one town and into the other, all in what felt like six city blocks. They were separate towns, but the reality was, they felt like one place, and the only reason they hadn’t merged into one town over the years was those hotels. They’d been rivals at one time, French Lick and West Baden, and many locals just referred to the area as Springs Valley.
He passed the French Lick Springs Resort, which held the grandeur of its West Baden partner but not the magic. The architecture was more traditional, that was all. A good-looking building, but a building nonetheless. The West Baden hotel, with its dome and towers, quickened the pulse more. The owner of the French Lick hotel, Thomas Taggart, had been a fierce rival of the West Baden Springs Hotel owner, Lee Sinclair-in business and politics, with Taggart a key Democrat in the state and Sinclair an equally powerful Republican. For decades those two had dueled for superiority in the valley, and while Sinclair’s hotel may have won out, Taggart created a million-dollar business with his Pluto Water, while Sinclair’s Sprudel Water-virtually the same product-had somehow failed, eventually forcing him to sell his interest in the water to Taggart.
Eric turned at the casino and drove up the road in search of the entrance for the West Baden hotel. The parking lot was set to the side and above the hotel, and he parked and took his bags out and walked toward the entrance, looking out at the grounds as he went. A creek cut through the middle, surrounded by flowering trees and flowerbeds and emerald-colored grass. The smell of the grass was in the air, freshly cut, and something about that drew him away from the parking lot entrance and around to the front of the building. He set his bags down on the steps and inhaled and looked off down the long brick drive.
“What a place.” He said it aloud, but softly, and was surprised when someone said, “Wait’ll you see the inside.”
He turned and saw an elderly woman heading down the steps toward him. She looked at least eighty but walked with a firm, steady stride and wore makeup and jewelry, a pocketbook held between her upper arm and her side.
“I’m looking forward to it,” he said, stepping aside so she could come down. “Have been for a while.”
“I know the feeling,” she said. “And don’t worry, it won’t disappoint.”
He picked up his bags and went up the steps and through the doors and into the atrium. Made it about twenty feet inside before he had to drop the bags again-not because they were heavy but because taking the place in called for energy.
The dome was three times as wide as he’d expected and twice as tall, a tremendous globe of glass resting on white steel ribs. The design had been truly ingenious in its time-hell, it still was. Harrison Albright, the architect who had conceived of the whole amazing design, came up with the umbrella-like supports to hold the dome up, but he had concerns that temperature changes would cause it to expand and contract at a different rate than the building below-a sure recipe for disaster, a collapse of the dome that would shower those beneath with glass and humiliate its creator. As a solution, Albright rested the steel support ribs on ball bearings, allowing the dome to expand and contract at a different rate than the building below. This idea in 1901.
There were ten thousand square feet of glass in the dome alone. More glass than in any other building in the world at the time of its construction, more even than London’s Crystal Palace. It was one thing to read details like that on the Internet, another to see it. One of the stories Eric had found said that when they removed the supports beneath the dome, many spectators, including Sinclair, weren’t certain the thing would avoid collapse. In response, Albright insisted on climbing to the roof and standing dead center on top of the dome when they removed the last of the scaffolding. He’d been sure of his math, even if nobody else was.
The atrium stretched out beneath the dome, shining floor and ornate rugs and potted ferns, lots of gold trim on the perimeter. They’d redone the tile-twelve million marble mosaics were hand-laid in the original floor-and matched the paint to the original color, matched the rugs, matched damn near everything that could be matched. Eric had seen impressive renovations but nothing with such attention to detail.
Some of the rooms had balconies that looked out over the atrium, and he hoped Alyssa Bradford had come through with one of those for him. He wanted to sit out there at night and have a drink and watch the place quiet down. Probably see ghosts, he thought, and smiled.
The hotel had that kind of feel, though. It started with that misplaced quality, floating out here in the middle of nowhere, and then built on the astonishing design and a restoration job so carefully and perfectly completed that entering the building was like walking out of one century and into another.
He took a few steps away from his luggage, more into the center of the room, and then tilted his head back to look directly up at the dome. When he did that, the headache that had been momentarily forgotten bloomed bright behind his eyes, a swift, jagged pain. He winced and dropped his eyes, shaded them with his hand. Bad idea, looking up into the light like that. Light always exacerbated a headache.
He returned to his bags and brought them to the reception desk and checked in. Took the keycard for his room-418-and then went up and got the luggage stowed. The room was a reflection of everything else-ornate, luxurious, reminiscent of times gone by. And it had the balcony. Alyssa Bradford had done well.
He was distracted from enjoying the room, though, because the headache was getting to him now. He opened the suitcase and took out the Excedrin, shook three tablets into his palm, and went into the bathroom and poured a glass of water and washed them down.
That should help. A drink didn’t sound like a bad idea either. He wanted to sit down at the bar under the dome and sip one slow. Give the Excedrin a little while to work, and then he’d come back up and get the camera and start the job.
Josiah Bradford had hardly gotten his cigarette lit before Amos came boiling around the corner, telling him to put it out. Had one tantalizing puff and then he was smashing it under his foot and Amos was bitching at him.
“How many times I got to tell you, we don’t smoke on the job, Josiah. You think I want the guests to come outside to enjoy the day and have to breathe in the cigarette smoke from my landscaping crew? I swear, son, you get told and told again and it don’t mean a thing to you.”
Josiah bit down his response, shoved past Amos’s wide paunch and threw the cigarette into the trash, and took his weed eater and fired it up with a theatrical flourish, pumping the throttle trigger with his index finger to turn the thing’s whine into a scream and drown out Amos’s voice. Shit, it was a cigarette, not an atom bomb. Amos needed to get his ass some perspective.
Josiah went off down the brick road, trimming edges that didn’t need trimmed, keeping his back to Amos until he heard the Gator come to life and drive away. Then he let off the trigger, turned to Amos departing in the stupid little cart, and sent a thick wad of spit in his direction. Didn’t come close, but it was the gesture that counted.