Part 2
Bernice Hall read the name twice, stepped into the corridor, and called for the conductor.
Leonard arrived first. When he saw the blood beside the latch, he stopped with one hand still raised to knock. Conductor Frank Malloy came from the coaches carrying a ring of service keys and a clipboard.
“Nobody touches anything else,” he said.
He checked the printed sleeping-car manifest. Ellen Marie Ward had boarded in Washington, had been assigned roomette six, and was ticketed beyond Bellows Falls. Her suitcase, coat, handbag, and one slipper were still on the train. No crew member had helped her change rooms, and she had not been seen leaving at Brattleboro or Bellows Falls.
The credential did not tell Malloy who had occupied the roomette; his paperwork already did that. It told him why a missing passenger with blood beside her door might be more than a medical emergency.
He sent Leonard to search the washrooms and empty berths, secured roomette six with his service key, and used the train radio to contact the engineer and the railroad dispatcher. The train was held at the first safe point north of Bellows Falls while crew members accounted for passengers.
Ray Sutter was already off the train.
Bernice told Malloy what she had heard. A blow. A woman’s voice. Two men supporting someone toward the vestibule. One man had worn a uniform, though she had seen only his back and a silver flash where a nameplate would be. Until she found the blood and slipper, she had thought they were helping an ill passenger. Kevin Doyle stood at the end of the car with his ticket punch in his fist.
“Where were you between Brattleboro and Bellows Falls?” Malloy asked.
“Helping in the coaches. Passenger got sick.”
“Which passenger?”
Kevin looked down the aisle as if the answer might be sitting there. “I didn’t get the name.” Malloy wrote that down.
The dispatcher began building the last twenty minutes backward. The engineer supplied the times for Brattleboro, the slow curve, and Bellows Falls. Bernice placed the noise after the Brattleboro stop. A freight train was ordered to reduce speed through the segment, and the dispatcher notified Vermont State Police, railroad police, local rescue crews, and track personnel. When DOJ confirmed the identification card, an FBI duty officer joined the call. By then the sky over the Connecticut River was beginning to turn gray.
Ellen woke with rain on her face.
For several seconds she could not understand why the ceiling above her had branches. Then pain arrived in separate places: the back of her head, her left shoulder, two ribs, her right ankle. When she tried to sit up, the trees tilted and a black wave passed through her vision. She lay still until the wave receded.
The railroad was above her. She could hear the hum of steel cooling after a train had gone, and farther off, water moving over stone. Wet leaves had collected against her cheek. One slipper remained on her left foot. Her right foot was bare and bleeding along the side.
The silver locket was gone.
“Grace,” she said, to make sure she could still speak.
Her voice came out thin but recognizable.
She rolled to her knees and crawled toward the embankment. The first attempt to climb ended when her right ankle folded. She slid backward through the leaves, biting her sleeve to keep from screaming. On the second attempt, she used saplings as handholds and reached the ballast shoulder. The rails ran black in both directions.
Her father had worked thirty-one years as a track foreman in Pennsylvania. When Ellen was a child, he had taught her never to walk between the rails, never to trust quiet track, and never to assume a train could stop because its engineer saw you. He had also taught her to read the railroad: river, grade, milepost, station order.
The Montrealer had been moving north. Bellows Falls was ahead, and Ray would expect her—if he expected anything—to move toward the next station. Brattleboro lay behind her to the south. Ellen turned south and kept to the outside shoulder of the ballast. She did not imagine she could walk there; she needed only to reach a place where a crew could see her.
After twenty steps, she forgot whether she had taken twenty or thirty. She began counting the ties instead. One, two, three, four. The numbers gave her something smaller than the night to cross.
At sixty, she vomited in the weeds and rested on one knee. At one hundred, the sky lightened enough for her to see blood on the front of her nightshirt. At two hundred, she heard a locomotive horn far to the south.
The sound did not mean rescue. A freight moving on wet rail could take more than a mile to stop.
Ellen pulled herself down the slope, well clear of the track. She tore a pale strip from the inside hem of her nightshirt and tied it to a dead branch. When the headlight appeared around the curve, she raised the branch with her good arm.
The locomotive came on with a low mechanical thunder. The horn sounded once, then again—short, urgent blasts. Ellen kept waving until the lead engine passed. The engineer’s face flashed behind glass; beside him, the freight conductor was already reaching for the radio. The train did not stop beside her. Her knees gave way.
In the locomotive cab, the engineer reported a woman in light clothing on the river side of the line, roughly four-tenths of a mile south of a numbered grade crossing. The dispatcher stopped opposing movements, held the following freight, and established track authority for a hi-rail vehicle to enter the segment.
Amos Bell was a signal maintainer with twenty-six years on the line. He drove the hi-rail truck from the nearest access point while Vermont State Trooper Carla Ruiz rode beside him with a medical bag between her boots. Other troopers followed by road toward the crossings.
“There,” Ruiz said.
At first Amos saw only the pale cloth moving near the brush. Then he saw Ellen on the ground beneath it.
He stopped short of her. Ruiz climbed down before the truck had fully settled on its suspension and crossed the ballast with the bag.
“Ma’am, can you hear me?”
Ellen opened her eyes. The trooper’s face moved in and out of focus.
“Ellen Ward,” she said. “Roomette six.”
“We know your name. Help is coming.”
Ellen caught the sleeve of Ruiz’s jacket. “Tan case. Ray Sutter. Bellows Falls.”
Ruiz repeated the words into her radio while Amos took off his canvas work coat and laid it over Ellen’s legs.
“My father worked track,” Ellen whispered.
Amos looked at the bloody bare foot, the single slipper, and the branch with its strip of cloth. “I can tell.”
Local paramedics stabilized her at the access road. Her falling blood pressure, head injury, and possible internal bleeding led them to request helicopter transport to the trauma center in Lebanon, New Hampshire.
At the curve, a state police evidence team followed the scuffed leaves back toward the place where she had landed. They found broken branches, a torn length of silver chain, and the locket half-buried in mud. The heart was dented along one edge, but it was still closed. It went into an evidence envelope.
Tom and Grace reached the hospital late that afternoon. Grace walked into Ellen’s room holding Tom’s hand and stopped when she saw the bandage around her mother’s head, the sling, and the bruising above the blanket. Ellen had rehearsed several things to say. None of them survived Grace’s face.
“I’m here,” she said.
Grace crossed the room carefully, as if the floor might hurt Ellen too, and placed both hands around her mother’s uninjured fingers.
“Where’s the heart?”
“The police found it.”
“Did you open it?”
Ellen looked at Tom. He stood at the foot of the bed with his coat still on.
“Before I went to sleep,” she said. “I saw you.”
Grace nodded once. That was enough for her. She pulled a chair close and began reading aloud from the library book she had carried from Washington.
Tom waited until Grace went with a nurse for hot chocolate. “Nora Walsh called me,” he said.
Ellen’s mouth went dry. Tom went on: “She said she was supposed to be on tomorrow’s train.”
Before Ellen could answer, Martin entered with an FBI agent and a Vermont state investigator. Martin looked as if he had not slept. He put no file on the bed and asked no questions about her decision. Not yet.
“Ray Sutter left the train at Bellows Falls,” he said. “We have alerts out. The attaché is still missing.”
“Kevin Doyle?”
“Railroad police have him. He lied about where he was.” Tom heard the name and looked from Martin to Ellen.
The FBI agent’s pager sounded. She stepped into the corridor to return the call from a wall phone. When she came back, she addressed Martin, but her eyes stayed on Ellen.
“Assistant Conductor Doyle has asked for a lawyer,” she said. “And after he speaks with one, he says he wants to tell us how Ellen Ward left the train…”
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