"Mr. Pruett, my sister will be at the station on Monday morning. She will wait, and wait, and not know where I am."
"Eleven-forty, Mrs. Ellison. Pack your things."
He turned away, and Dillard gestured toward the roomette. "Your suitcase, ma'am. I'll need to watch you pack it. That's procedure. Nothing personal."
Nothing personal. She went into the roomette and knelt before the suitcase rack and opened her case, and began to fold her things with hands that she kept deliberately steady — the spare blouse, the nightdress, the small bag with her toilet things, the photograph of her husband in its leather frame, which she wrapped in the blouse as she always did. Dillard stood in the doorway with his notebook closed now, watching, and she was grateful, obscurely, that he at least watched without satisfaction. Thomas Avery waited in the corridor with a sheet over his arm, saying nothing, being the invisible thing a porter is paid to be.
Her library book lay open, face-down, on the turned-back blanket where she had left it when they knocked. She reached for it — and Thomas Avery said, very quietly, "Leave it, ma'am. I'll keep it on the berth for you."
She looked up at him. His face was still carefully empty, but his eyes met hers for one second, and in that second she understood two things: that he did not believe she was a thief, and that he could not say so.
"Thank you, Thomas," she said, and closed the suitcase, and snapped the catches herself, because no one was going to do it for her.
At twenty minutes to eleven, Dillard walked her to the vestibule at the rear of Car Seven, carrying her suitcase as if it were any passenger's luggage on any ordinary night. The train was slowing. Through the vestibule windows she could see the lights of Alder Creek coming up out of the blackness of the Rockies — a scatter of yellow windows, a water tower, the long low shape of the division-point roundhouse. Snow on the high slopes caught the headlight and threw it back white.
Pruett was waiting at the vestibule with her handbag, which an unseen hand had brought from the roomette. He handed it to her without meeting her eyes.
"Eleven-forty on the dot, Mrs. Ellison. The night agent will look after you till the sheriff comes. I'm sorry for the inconvenience."
Inconvenience. She took the handbag. She buttoned her coat to the throat and pulled on her gloves, because the night air coming through the vestibule door was knife-cold, and because keeping her hands busy was the only thing standing between her and something she did not intend to do in front of these men.
The brakes sighed. The train stopped. Dillard set her suitcase down on the platform and handed it to her, and then the great long train that had been her world for a day and a night began, impossibly, to move without her.
She stood on the platform at Alder Creek, Colorado, at 11:40 p.m. on Friday, October 17, 1952, with her suitcase in one hand and her handbag in the other, and watched the lighted windows slide past — the dining car dark now, the sleeping cars with their shades drawn, her own roomette somewhere in the middle of it all, her library book lying face-down on the blanket where Thomas Avery would keep it. She watched until the red lights at the end of the observation car dwindled into the dark toward the west, toward Sacramento, toward her sister and her new post and everything she had been traveling toward, and then there was only the platform, and the cold, and the ticking of the cooling rails, and a woman's voice behind her saying, "Mrs. Ellison? I'm Emma Lindqvist. I keep the night desk. Come inside out of the cold."
Henry Cobb kept his chit book the way some men keep a diary and other men keep a grudge: faithfully, and in pencil.
Every seating in the dining car of the Rocky Mountain Limited went into it — the table number, the time the party sat down, the time they rose, the waiter's initials, and any small thing worth remembering, because a steward who could not remember faces was a steward who could not run a car. Twenty years of dining-car service had taught Cobb that the book never lied, even when everyone in the car was lying their heads off. The book did not know how to.
Friday the seventeenth had been a full night. Two seatings, both packed, the second called at eight sharp to clear the queue that had been building since half past seven. Cobb had stood at the door himself with the seating list, the way he always did, and he remembered every party that came through it, because that was his work and he was good at it.