Martha nodded. She asked, after a moment, whether Emma thought her sister in Sacramento would have heard anything yet, and Emma said no — the railroad kept its troubles to itself until it couldn't, and Clara Whitaker in Sacramento would know nothing until there was something worth knowing. That seemed to ease the woman more than any of the wires had, and Emma understood that too. Nineteen years at the counter had taught her that people could bear their own disgrace far better than they could bear the thought of it reaching the people they loved.
Martha nodded. She picked up her library book from the cot — she had carried it off the train in her handbag, Emma noticed, the way some people carry a talisman — and she opened it, and she began to read, and Emma went back to her desk.
The afternoon freight went through at three. Emma copied the manifest. She swept the platform. She banked the stove for the evening, because the nights came on fast at nine thousand feet, and she put the kettle on, because tea was the beginning and the end of her station's hospitality, and she had kept this desk for nineteen years by never letting a traveler go cold.
When she looked in behind the partition, Martha was asleep at last, the book open on her chest, rising and falling with her breathing. Emma stood a moment in the doorway, and then she went back to her key, and she oiled it, and she waited — because waiting was her trade, and because the wire, when it spoke again, would be for the woman asleep behind the partition, and Emma intended to be there to hear it.
Frank Dillard woke on Saturday morning with his notebook open on the compartment table and the train running hard beneath him, and for a moment he did not know, with the honest confusion of a man roused too fast, which of the last twelve hours he was supposed to be sorry for first.
He was forty-four years old, a special agent of the Continental Pacific, and he rode the trains in a passenger's clothes because the railroad had had a season of thefts from its sleeping cars and wanted a man aboard who was not in uniform. He was methodical rather than kind. He kept his notebook in columns — time on the left, fact on the right, inference nowhere at all — and he had built his whole professional life on the belief that a man who wrote things down in order could not be hurried into being wrong.
He had been hurried into being wrong.
He sat up, splashed water from the compartment basin on his face, and opened the notebook to last night's pages. The entries were there in his own hand, neat as ledger lines. KESSLER, R. — STATES ASLEEP BERTH SINCE FIRST SEATING. That was the entry that had decided him. A man asleep in his berth could not be in the dining car, could not be in a corridor, could not be anywhere but where he said. Dillard had accepted it. He had accepted it the way he had accepted the conductor's choice of the quiet woman traveling alone — quickly, because it was convenient, because it closed the matter, because a special agent who rode in passengers' clothes was still, in the end, a man who wanted the night to be over.
He turned the page. There was nothing written there yet. He picked up his pencil.
The knock came at half past seven. It was Cobb, the dining-car steward, and he was carrying his chit book the way a man carries a Bible into a courtroom — held against his chest with both hands, as if it might be taken from him.
Dillard knew what a chit book was to a steward. Forty-three years old, Henry Cobb, and his whole standing with the company rode on the exactness of that book: every seating to the minute, every table, every face. A steward did not accuse a passenger. A steward presented his book, and the book accused or it did not, and the steward's hands were clean either way.
"Sir," Cobb said. "I heard after midnight what was done to the lady in Car Seven."
Dillard gestured him in and closed the door.
Cobb laid the book on the table and opened it to Friday's pages. His finger found the entries without searching.
"First seating, sir. Mr. Kessler present." The finger moved down the page. "Second seating. Eight oh five to eight forty. Mr. Kessler present again — full seating, sir, under the press of a full car, unremarked at the time." Cobb looked up. "And at that second seating, sir, he asked me for a plaster. For a scratch on his right hand."