Part 5
The criminal case ended in stages, none of them as cleanly as the newspaper accounts suggested. Kevin Doyle pleaded guilty and testified against Ray. His cooperation reduced his sentence; it did not erase the fact that he had opened the roomette, held Ellen’s arm, and lifted when Ray told him to lift. Ray was convicted after the government connected the stolen attaché, the missing witness pages, the passenger records, and Kevin’s testimony. The sentence meant that Grace would be grown before he could leave federal prison.
Ellen watched none of it from counsel table. She had been removed from the prosecution and reassigned to another section. In the spring, the promotion she had expected went to someone else. Martin told her the decision was part discipline and part doubt about her judgment. Ellen said she understood. She did not ask him to call it unfair.
The evidence clerk returned the locket in June. It came in a sealed brown envelope with the broken chain, two photographs, and a receipt Ellen had to sign. Mud remained in the hinge. The silver heart carried a diagonal dent where it had struck stone.
Ellen took it to the same jeweler Tom had used before the trip. He replaced the hinge pin, joined the chain, and warned that polishing out every mark would thin the silver.
“Leave the marks,” Ellen said.
Grace examined it that evening at the kitchen table. “It still opens.” Inside, her school photograph had been stained dark at one corner, but her uneven front teeth were visible.
“Do you want a new picture?” Grace asked.
“Not yet.”
By then Tom had moved back into their bedroom. That fact did not mean the marriage had returned to what it had been. Some questions still made him pause before he believed the answer. Ellen still sometimes mistook his need for facts for suspicion and felt anger rise before she recognized its source.
In August, Ellen placed a Vermonter timetable on the kitchen table. She had marked a weekend in September but had bought nothing.
“I want to take the train through Vermont,” she said.
Tom did not answer immediately. He turned the timetable around and studied the route. “Why?”
“Because I still choose every trip by how far it keeps me from a vestibule. I don’t want to do that forever.” She kept both hands flat on the table. “But I’m not choosing this one for all of us before you know what it is.”
Tom asked where they would stay, how long they would be aboard, and what Grace knew. Ellen answered each question. When she did not know, she wrote it in the margin instead of guessing.
“Show me the whole plan before you buy the tickets,” he said.
The following September, the three of them boarded the daytime Vermonter at Washington Union Station. The Montrealer was gone from the timetable. The new train ran north only as far as Vermont, which was as far as they intended to go.
The trip had been Ellen’s suggestion, but not a surprise. For two weeks, the complete itinerary had been clipped to the refrigerator: train number, seat assignments, stops, hotel address, telephone numbers, and the time they expected to return. Tom carried a copy folded inside his wallet. Grace had decorated the refrigerator copy with a purple star.
On the platform, Ellen’s legs trembled before the train arrived. Tom noticed and said nothing. He simply took the suitcase while Grace reached for Ellen’s hand.
Grace sat by the window with Ellen beside her. Tom took the aisle seat directly across from them. Before sitting down, Ellen looked once toward the vestibule at the end of the coach.
She did not look again.
The repaired locket rested beneath her collar. When the train moved, Ellen felt each change in speed through the floor. She knew when they entered a curve before she saw it. She noticed every uniform that passed through the coach and every door opening between cars.
South of New York, Grace read for a while and fell asleep against the window. Tom worked a crossword puzzle. Ellen watched the ties pass beneath them and began to count without deciding to. At one hundred, she stopped and looked across the aisle.
Tom held out his hand. Ellen placed hers in it. Neither of them said what the gesture meant, because it did not have to mean more than he was there and she had told him where they were going.
In Connecticut, Grace woke and opened her book again. By Massachusetts, she was reading aloud whenever the motion made her tired. Near the Vermont line, she came to a sentence she could not follow and passed the book to Ellen.
“I know all the words,” Grace said. “I just don’t know what they’re doing together.”
Ellen read the sentence once, then again. She showed Grace where the subject had been separated from its verb and waited while she tried it aloud.
Outside the window, the woods drew close to the railroad. The river flashed between bare trunks. Ellen did not notice when the number in her head disappeared.
The train rounded the curve and gathered speed beside the river. Sunlight moved across the open page on Grace’s knees, and the ties went on beneath them, uncounted.