There was a pause. Martha felt the corridor's attention shift the way a compass needle shifts, and she realized, with a slow coldness, that it was shifting toward her — the woman traveling alone, the quiet one, the one nobody knew.
"I was in my roomette," she said. "I had the first seating. I came back at seven and I've been reading." It sounded thin, even to her. The truth so often did, she thought, when you had to say it aloud to people who had already begun to doubt you. She was a schoolteacher; she had watched children lie and children tell the truth for nineteen years, and she knew that the innocent fidgeted just as much as the guilty. She made herself stand still.
Pruett looked at her for a long moment. Then he looked at Dillard, and Dillard made a small note in a small book, and said nothing.
"Mrs. Vance," Pruett said, "I want you to be sure about this. Is it possible the case was moved? Packed somewhere?"
"It was on the shelf," Mrs. Vance said, and her voice had gone imperious now, the fright underneath it like a current. "It has been on that shelf since Chicago. Someone has taken it, and I want it found."
Pruett nodded slowly. He looked down the corridor — at the Hendersons, at the Marchettis, at the closed roomette doors, at Martha.
"Here's what we're going to do," he said. "We're going to search the berths. Every berth in this car, mine and Mr. Dillard's watching, Mrs. Vance or her nephew present. If the case is on this train, we'll find it. If it's in this car, we'll find it tonight."
Nobody objected. Dot Marchetti whispered something to Paul and nodded. Arthur Henderson said, "Of course, Conductor. Anything to help." Grace Henderson put her hand on her husband's arm. "Search everything," Mrs. Vance said. She had recovered her imperiousness like a coat. "I don't care whose berth. I want my brooch." "We'll start at the forward end and work aft," Pruett said. "Porter, your key. Mr. Dillard, you watch the berths. Mrs. Vance, you or Mr. Howard with us to identify." It was all arranged in thirty seconds, the railroad's efficiency brought to bear on a lady's jewel case, and Martha — standing in her robe in the corridor with her book still in her hand — felt the first true lurch of fear. Not of the search. Of the certainty in Pruett's voice, as if the outcome were already written somewhere and they were only turning the pages.
Martha said, "Certainly. I have nothing to hide."
She said it simply, because it was true, and because she believed — she truly believed, standing there in her robe with her library book in her hand — that a search could only help. The case would be found somewhere it had been mislaid, or in some other passenger's luggage by mistake, and the whole unpleasant business would be over, and she would go back to her book.
Pruett's eyes rested on her a moment longer than on anyone else. Then he turned to Avery.
"Porter. You'll open the roomettes. Ladies and gentlemen, I'll ask you to wait in the observation lounge while we work. Mrs. Ellison —" He paused. "You come with us. Your berth first. Get it over with."
It was said kindly enough. It was the kindness of a man disposing of a formality. Martha nodded, and went back into her roomette for her slippers, and followed the little procession into the corridor — Pruett, Dillard with his notebook, Mrs. Vance clutching Howard's arm, Avery with his passkey.
Her berth had been turned down at six, the sheets crisp, the blanket folded. She had slept in it last night and made nothing of it this morning beyond folding it back. There was nothing in it but the bedclothes, and her nightgown case, and the book she had left on the pillow. She thought of Thomas's hands drawing those sheets tight at six o'clock, while she was at dinner and the car was his alone, and how little she had noticed him then, and how much she noticed everything now.
"Go ahead," she said to Avery, and stood aside in the corridor with her hands folded, while the train climbed through the dark toward the high country, and the search of Car Seven began.
Thomas Avery had been a Pullman porter for twenty-six years, and in twenty-six years he had learned that there were two kinds of work on a sleeping car: the work of the hands and the work of not being seen. The hands made the berths, brushed the suits, shined the shoes left out in the corridor, carried the ice and the telegrams and the morning coffee. The rest of him — the opinions, the memory, the noticing — stayed folded away like a blanket in the linen closet, brought out never. A porter who was noticed was a porter who was not doing his job.