"I understand it well enough, sir. A steward doesn't accuse a passenger. I know that. But I keep this book, and the book says what it says, and I couldn't sleep with it under my pillow knowing what they'd done to that lady in Car Seven."
Dillard closed the chit book and handed it back, and then — to Cobb's lasting surprise — he stood up and shook Cobb's hand, hard, the way men shake hands when something has been settled between them that will not be unsettled.
"Your book is evidence now, Mr. Cobb. I'll need you to keep it safe and to say nothing of this to anyone on this train until I tell you otherwise. Can you do that?"
"I can, sir."
"Then go back to bed, steward. And thank you."
Cobb walked back through the sleeping cars with the chit book under his coat, and the train climbed on through the black Rockies toward Denver, and for the first time since Eddie had knocked on his bunk door, Henry Cobb felt that he had done the thing his twenty years of service had been preparing him to do all along — which was not to serve the passengers, in the end, but to serve the truth, whatever it cost, and let the book say what the book said.
The cold at Alder Creek had a weight to it, the way cold does at altitude, and it came through Martha Ellison's coat as if the coat were a suggestion rather than a garment.
She stood on the platform with her suitcase in one hand and her handbag in the other, and Dillard stood beside her with his hat in his hand, which surprised her — she had not expected the small courtesy, and she did not know what to do with it. Conductor Pruett had not come to the vestibule. She had seen him at the far end of the platform through the steam, talking to a man in a railroad cap, and then the train had begun to move, and Pruett had swung up into the vestibule without looking back.
The Rocky Mountain Limited pulled out of Alder Creek, Colorado, at 11:43 p.m. on Friday, October 17, 1952, and Martha Ellison watched it go.
The lighted windows slid past her one by one — the coaches, the dining car dark and shuttered, the sleeping cars with their curtains drawn against the night. Somewhere in the middle of the train was Car Seven, and somewhere in Car Seven was her roomette, and on the turned-down berth in that roomette lay her library book, open face-down on the blanket where she had left it when they knocked, with Thomas Avery's promise keeping it. She had thought, on the platform, of running after the train to ask for it — a ridiculous thought, born of the shock — and then the thought had been replaced by a stranger one: that the book was the only part of her still traveling west, still going where she had meant to go.
The red lights at the end of the observation car dwindled between the black shoulders of the mountains and were gone. As the sleeping cars went past, she thought she saw a face at one of the vestibule windows — Thomas Avery's, she believed, though it might have been a trick of the steam — and a hand raised just clear of the glass, not waving, just held there, the way a man holds his hand up to say: I see you. Then the steam closed over it, and the red lights went. The ticking of the cooling rails faded. The steam thinned and lifted, and the stars came out over Alder Creek in a density Martha had never seen from a city, and she stood alone on a strange platform in the middle of the night with nowhere to go and understood, with a clarity that was almost peaceful, that she had done nothing wrong and that it had not mattered in the slightest.
"Mrs. Ellison?" said a woman's voice behind her. "I'm Emma Lindqvist. I keep the night desk. Come inside out of the cold."
The station at Alder Creek was a low wooden building with a platform canopy and a single lamp burning over the door. Inside, the waiting room was plain and clean — long benches, a potbellied stove glowing through its grate, a timetable board, a framed photograph of a steam locomotive from another century. Behind a counter at one end was the agent's office, and in it a desk, and on the desk a telegraph key, and beside the key a pad of yellow message blanks, and a woman of fifty-five with gray hair pulled back in a knot and ink on the side of her right hand, watching Martha the way people watch a stray animal to see if it will bite.