“Why wouldn’t he? He doesn’t know he’s on the hook for killing his parents. How could he, when he doesn’t know they’re dead?”
“Even if he doesn’t know, he suspects. He’s very bright, Trevor, it won’t do for you to forget that. If I were him, you know the first thing I’d do if I did get off a train in Sturbridge, Massachusetts, at . . .” She looked at the pad. “. . . at four or five in the afternoon? I’d beat feet to the library and get on the Internet. Get current with events back home.”
This time they both looked at the locked drawer.
Stackhouse said, “Okay, we need to take this wider. I don’t like it, but there’s really no choice. Let’s find out who we’ve got in the vicinity of Sturbridge. See if he’s shown up there.”
Mrs. Sigsby sat down at her desk to put that in motion, but the phone rang even as she reached for it. She listened briefly, then handed it to Stackhouse.
It was Andy Fellowes. He had been busy. There was a night-crew at Sturbridge, it seemed, and when Fellowes represented himself as an inventory manager for Downeast Freight, checking on a shipment of live lobsters that might have gone astray, the graveyard shift stationmaster was happy to help out. No, no live lobsters offloaded at Sturbridge. And yes, most of 4297 went on from there, only with a much more powerful engine pulling it. It became Train 9956, running south to Richmond, Wilmington, DuPray, Brunswick, Tampa, and finally Miami.
Stackhouse jotted all this down, then asked about the two towns he didn’t know.
“DuPray’s in South Carolina,” Fellowes told him. “Just a whistlestop—you know, six sticks and nine hicks—but it’s a connecting point for trains coming in from the west. They have a bunch of warehouses there. Probably why the town even exists. Brunswick’s in Georgia. It’s quite a bit bigger. I imagine they load in a fair amount of produce and seafood there.”
Stackhouse hung up and looked at Mrs. Sigsby. “Let’s assume—”
“Assume,” Mrs. Sigsby said. “A word that makes an ass out of you and—”
“Stow it.”
No one else could have spoken to Mrs. Sigsby in such an abrupt way (not to mention so rudely), but no one else was allowed to call her by her first name, either. Stackhouse began to pace, his bald head gleaming under the lights. Sometimes she wondered if he really did wax it.
“What do we have in this facility?” he asked. “I’ll tell you. Forty or so employees in Front Half and another two dozen in Back Half, not counting Heckle and Jeckle. Because we keep our wagons in a tight circle. We have to, but that doesn’t help us tonight. There’s a phone in that drawer that would get us all kinds of high-powered help, but if we use it, our lives will change, and not for the better.”
“If we have to use that phone, we might not have lives,” Mrs. Sigsby said.
He ignored this. “We have stringers nationwide, a good information network that includes low-level cops and medical people, hotel employees, news reporters on small-town weeklies, and retirees who have lots of time to spend scanning Internet sites. We also have two extraction teams at our disposal and a Challenger aircraft that can get them to practically anywhere fast. And we have our brains, Julia, our brains. He’s a chess player, the caretakers used to see him out there playing with Wilholm all the time, but this is real-world chess, and that’s a game he’s never played before. So let’s assume.”
“All right.”
“We’ll get a stringer to check with the police in Sturbridge. Same story we floated in Presque Isle—our guy says he thinks he saw a kid who might have been Ellis. We better do the same check in Portland and Portsmouth, although I don’t believe for a minute he would have gotten off so soon. Sturbridge is much more likely, but I think our guy will draw a blank there, too.”
“Are you sure that’s not just wishful thinking?”
“Oh, I’m wishing my ass off. But if he’s thinking as well as running, it makes sense.”
“When Train 4297 became Train 9956, he stayed on. That’s your assumption.”
“Yes. 9956 stops in Richmond at approximately 2 AM. We need someone, preferably several someones, watching that train. Same with Wilmington, where it stops between 5 AM and 6. But you know what? I don’t think he’ll get off at either place.”