woman the conductor had already decided was guilty — and that it would cost him. It would cost him his run, very likely. It might cost him the company. Twenty-six years, and he would be spending them all on one sentence in a corridor at nine o'clock at night. He thought of Ellis in Kansas City. He thought of the extra board, and his knees, and the mortgage on the little house in Chicago that was paid off last spring — the first thing in his life that was entirely his. He thought of what Pruett would hear: not the facts, but the presumption. A porter's word against a passenger's. He had seen that arithmetic done before, and he had never once seen it come out in the porter's favor.
He looked at Mrs. Ellison. She was looking at the brooch, not at him, and her hands were still folded, and she was holding herself very still, the way people hold themselves when they are trying not to fall apart in front of strangers.
Thomas closed the roomette door softly behind him, and the search moved on to the last berths, and he said nothing. Not yet. But as he turned his passkey in the next lock, he was already counting the cost the way he counted everything — sheets, towels, pillowcases, years — and finding, to his own surprise, that there were some sums he was willing to pay. The key turned. The next door opened. And Thomas Avery, porter of Car Seven, twenty-six years in service, stepped through it with his testimony folded inside him like a clean sheet, waiting for the hour when it would have to be unfolded.
The knock came at twenty past nine, and Martha Ellison knew before she opened the door that it would not be good news.
She had been sitting in her roomette with her library book open in her lap, reading the same page for the third time without taking in a word of it. The train had settled into its night rhythm around her — the dining car closed, the corridor lights dimmed, the low murmur of the sleeping car preparing itself for the mountains. She had agreed to the search, along with everyone else in Car Seven, because she had nothing to hide, and because agreeing had seemed the quickest way to have the unpleasantness over and done with. Mrs. Vance's jewel case was missing, and that was dreadful for Mrs. Vance, but it had nothing to do with Martha Ellison, who had boarded at Chicago with one suitcase and a handbag and had spent the evening exactly where a woman of forty-seven with no one to talk to spends it: at dinner, and then in her berth, reading.
When she opened the door, the conductor was there, and the railroad's special agent, and Thomas Avery, the porter, standing a half-step behind them with his hands folded and his face carefully empty. Behind them in the corridor, drawn by the small electricity of trouble, were faces — Howard Vance, pale; a woman from the sections whose name Martha did not know; and further down, the Hendersons, standing very straight and close together, as people do when they are determined to witness something properly.
"Mrs. Ellison," Conductor Pruett said. "We are searching the berths, as agreed. If you'll step out."
She stepped out into the corridor with her book still in her hand, and Thomas Avery went past her into the roomette with the practiced economy of a man who has made up ten thousand berths. He lifted the pillow first, the way porters do, with one hand, and underneath it, in the fold of the blanket where the pillow had lain, something caught the light and threw it back blue.
It was a brooch. Gold, with a sapphire the size of a thumbnail, set in a surround of small diamonds. Martha had never seen it before in her life.
Nobody spoke for a long moment. Then Mrs. Vance, who had come up behind her nephew, made a small sound — not quite a cry — and put her hand to her throat.
"That is mine," she said. "That is my brooch."
Martha looked at the brooch. She looked at Thomas Avery, whose face had not changed at all, which frightened her more than anything else had. She looked at the conductor, and at the special agent, who was already writing in his notebook.
"It is not mine," she said. "I have never seen it before."
"Ma'am," Pruett said, in the tone of a man who has heard that sentence before and does not expect to hear anything different after it, "that brooch was in your berth."
"Yes. I see that it was. But I did not put it there."
Dillard looked up from his notebook. "Mrs. Ellison, when did you last touch your berth?"