Should I ring for the porter? Ask him to intervene on behalf of sleepy passengers everywhere?
Maybe I should pretend to call someone, speaking really loudly, and then when she hears me, she’ll put two and two together, realize I can hear her, and shut up.
Or I could simply tap on her door and warn her. “I can hear everything you say,” I’d sheepishly reveal. Or maybe I could just indicate how I could kind of hear, so she wouldn’t be embarrassed, but so that she would stop the hell talking. We’d arrive in Boston’s South Station at 9:50 am.
She’d probably still be talking.
“My firm intuition, my firm intuition, is that come next week, after she walks across that stage, that’s the last we’ll hear of her.”
The last we’ll hear of her. And after that line, I counted my blessings that I did not have to deal with someone like this in my own office. I had one assistant, the woefully underpaid Hadley who could find anything on the computer, break any password, track down any elusive source, get a reporter’s private cell number or a police detective’s home address. Hadley, unfortunately, was on vacation in some paradise with white sand and no internet. And probably good pillows. People said provocative stuff like that, though, without meaning it. I’m going insane, I’m going to blow this place up, I’m gonna kill you. Hyperbole. Exaggeration for effect. Everyone on the planet does it.
I heard brittle laughter through our wall. “Bye bye, Shayla Miller, right, sweetie? And then the next steps are ours. And I know you are, my dear. I do know. And I cannot wait to hear all about it. Sure, I’ll hold on.”
If I sat up in bed, put my feet on the ground and twisted my shoulder a bit, I could plant my ear flat up against the wall. I felt the ridged wallpaper, the chill of what the wallpaper covered—metal? drywall?—and heard my new friend continue her conversation. She hadn’t—that I’d heard at least—apologized for the late hour, which told me she was the alpha in the convo, or her listener was in a different time zone. Or was just as invested in “getting it done” and “bye bye Shayla” as she was.
With a sigh and a glance heavenward, I gave up. I grabbed my little red notebook from my totebag, and scribbled down what I remembered. Rotherwood. Shayla Miller. Pattillo with 2 T’s, she’d said. The board doesn’t know. The board of Rotherwood? Doesn’t know. Doesn’t know—someone is a lush. Well, welcome to the real world.
Too bad this Shayla doesn’t have me to help her. Next week, I wrote. What this woman was planning would come to fruition next week. But no one can fix everything, I thought, closing my notebook and snapping the red elastic to keep it closed, and the stories of our lives have their own tracks. Separate tracks. I hope Shayla deserved it, whatever ‘it’ was, because it certainly was coming.
I guess Cruella, as I’d decided to call her, was still on hold, or had paced to the other side of her roomette, because I could no longer hear her. I settled back in, closed my eyes, and tried to imagine Shayla. What had she done, poor innocent thing, to incur the wrath of this viper next door? Was it an All About Eve thing, where Cru was worried the gorgeous and duplicitous Shayla was angling to take her place? I pictured Bette Davis, and who was the ingenue? Anne Baxter.
Or was Shayla a big shot? Even nastier than Cru, maybe, demanding and unreasonable, and covering up for her protector, the secret-drinking lush? Maybe Cruella was a good person, good with an unfortunate voice, but simply trying to make her way in the cutthroat world of academia where there were knives out around every corner. Maybe Shayla had it out for her, too.
I was only hearing one side of the story.
Damn it.
I grabbed my phone, googled Shayla Miller Rotherwood. Nothing. Shayla Miller Boston. Nothing. Shae Miller, nope. Shay Miller. About a million women are named Shay Miller. So much for that idea. Shay Pattillo? I rolled my eyes at myself for doing this, an insane example of spiraling curiosity that even if it went somewhere, would never go anywhere. There weren’t any helpful listings, anyway. My phone battery was on the verge of being under fifty percent, which makes me terrified, so I unplugged the lamp to make room and plugged it into the wall outlet. You’d think they’d have more plugs in these roomettes.
Somewhere in Pennsylvania, I figured, as the green numbers on the bedside clock radio thing reorganized their little lines into two zero zero. If I had simply flown, like a normal person, I’d be home, long ago, with Dickens snuffling for food and in my comfy slippers and watching the last episode of the new Stephen King. But no, I wanted an adventure, a time to think and plan and be by myself. I’d told people I’d be off the grid, which is absurd, you never really are, but it was meant to be an excuse for why I wasn’t answering texts and emails.
The light changed outside, not that it got lighter, but somehow—darker. Wrapping my blue bathrobe more tightly around me, I got up to consult the framed route map displayed on the roomette’s wall. Lake Erie? Which might have been fun to see in the daylight. Which was approaching more and more quickly.
Cruella was talking again. Ooh. Better than Stephen King. I hustled back to my listening spot on the bed, ear to the wall.
“My mother-in-law is dying, thanks for asking,” she was saying. “But that’s a sidebar. Otherwise, life is good.”
“Well lovely,” I muttered to myself. “There’s an interesting life attitude.” But then I thought—mother-in-law. She’s married. Somehow it had to be that she was the bad guy, and Shayla the target. Well, Shayla was the target, for sure. But did she deserve targeting?
“Dud, dun, duuh,” I said out loud, imitating an old-time radio show.
The train lurched, with a yank and a stutter and a grabbing of the brakes on the rails so intense I felt my entire body clench in response. The clackety sound of the wheels stopped, a silence as intense as the noise had been only seconds before. Maybe we’d pulled into a station, my brain reassured me, maybe we were in Erie, like the dot on the map indicated, and maybe I’d be able to see if anyone was looking in. I peered out the window—but there was only darkness.
And then there was noise. Earsplitting, shrieking noise, like the scraping of ten million fingernails on ten million blackboards, the kind of high-pitched piercing whistle that had me clamping my hands over my ears and leaping up so fast I almost hit my head on the bottom of the upper bunk again.
“This is a fire alarm,” a weird disembodied robo-voice announced over a scratchy public address system. “Message 524. This is a fire alarm. All passengers must evacuate. All passengers must follow the signs to the closest fire exit.”
Kidding me? I thought. I sniffed, without thinking, as the voice continued to bellow instructions, and smelled nothing, and again rued my impetuous decision to take the train. How many false alarms must there be? When we had them in office buildings where I’d worked, first we’d always ignored it, figuring since it was surely a false alarm and the darn thing would stop, we’d think, so we’d amble our way toward the exit, dragging our feet, muttering about how annoying it was to have our work interrupted. I’d always take my laptop and phone, though, and handbag, just in case.
The robo-voice did not stop. I yanked down the heavy metal handle of my compartment door, and used all my strength to slide it open. The corridors were full of disheveled and bathrobed passengers, forced to march single file down the narrow space of the sleeper car hallway. They were all going the same direction, to my right.
“Anyone know anything?” I asked the passing group in general. The alarm interrupted my every word. “Is this a real—?”
“Ma’am?” A tall woman in a navy blue uniform and billed cap motioned me out of my room. “Right now, please, there’s a fire alarm. We must exit the train right now. Ma’am?”
She must have seen my reluctant expression, and my motion to go back in to get my stuff.
“No time for that,” she yelled over the still-demanding alarm.
I looked both ways as roomette doors slid open and more people filled the corridor. The passengers must have been coming fro
m other cars, too, since there were way more people than the sleepers could have accommodated.
“Okay,” I yelled in reply, pretending acquiescence but turning back into my room. I still didn’t smell smoke. “But I have to get my—”
“Now, ma’am,” the woman ordered, and eased me out the door. As I took two steps down the hall, she vanished, probably to roust any other reluctant occupants.
To my right, an open door. Cruella’s door. The roomette was empty. It crossed my mind to go in, like, really fast, look around, see what I could see, and go. Maybe—take her phone? But the pulsing clamor of the passengers behind me propelled me away from answers (and burglary) and down the corridor. Another porter was stationed at the open door of the train, helping bewildered and annoyed passengers clamber down the pull-out metal steps to the gravel below.
“What’s the—”
“Please keep moving, ma’am,” he said, as he released my elbow. “Please continue walking across the grass and over at least as far as the trees over there.”
Lights from the train—emergency lights, I guessed—illuminated the way in front of us, and somehow someone had made a path of blue train blankets across the grass. Good thing. Even though the summer night was mild, starlit, and with only the softest of summer breezes, many of the people I saw had bare feet, or like lucky me, only socks.
I needed my phone. I needed my phone. If that train burned up and my phone was on it I would be so mad. Silly, but that’s what I thought.
We all padded toward the stand of trees, looming dark and fairytale-like ahead of us. Two little kids, both in white terry bathrobes and slippers that made their feet look enormous, clung to the hands of a woman in what looked like a knee-length sweatshirt. Men in shorts and tank tops, a few in jeans and unbuttoned shirts, stood in clumps, arms crossed in front of them. Everyone stared at the train. We could see the engine, and a few cars, but the rest of the train was hidden in darkness down the tracks.
No smoke, no fire, no anything. I took a deep breath, smelling pine, and the loamy softness of a summer night in the woods. I was grateful for the blankets on the ground, imagining all kinds of mud and bugs and creepy things underfoot. Woods were not my favorite. But, I figured, I’d have a good story to tell, and as long as the train didn’t explode or go up in flames, and as long as we got back onto the train, and as long as we got back to Boston, it would just be part of my impetuous adventure.
“Where are we, anyway?” I asked a twenty-something guy wearing sweatpants and a backwards UMass ballcap.
“Lake Erie over there,” he said, pointing. “See down there, just past the front of the locomotive? On the same side of the tracks as us, not too far away. And I know we already passed Erie, the city, and Buffalo is next, so, we’re like somewhere between there. Middle-a-nowhere.”
“Lovely,” I said.
“You think there’s a fire? Million bucks says no.” He cocked his head toward the darkened train. All we could see was the open doors, and inside, bobbing lights—maybe people with flashlights?—moving across the windows.
“Hope you’re right,” I said. “Looks like there’s not much activity. Or any flames.”
“Or phone servers,” he held up his cell. “My phone’s a brick. Looks like everyone else’s, too. Can’t even tweet.”
Many of the passengers, I could see by the emergency lights flicking shadows over their faces, were realizing they were cut off from civilization. Some people wandered farther away, holding their cells high in the air, as if somehow a signal would drop from the wispy clouds streaking the night sky above. Maybe they’d gone down to look at the lake. Chittering sounds came from the woods behind me, squirrels maybe, or birds, or some predatory creatures I’d rather not imagine. Looking at stranded us, and thinking: dinner.
“Excuse me.”
I’d know that voice anywhere. But Cruella was not talking to me.
“Do you have service?” She gestured her phone toward ballcap guy. It was the woman with the steely hair, now pulled back in a ponytail, her face difficult to describe in the mottled light, but she looked super thin, especially in black yoga pants, a black tank top and flipflops. Ninja bitch, the unworthy thought went through my mind. Not exactly Bette Davis-looking, but who knows what the modern Bette would wear? She didn’t acknowledge phoneless me. Clearly I knew nothing and could not help her.
“No bars,” the guy said. “You?”
“This is unacceptable,” she said. As if the universe cared what she thought or wanted. “I’m going to—” She paused, conjuring. “Ask for my money back.”
Conversation starter. “Yes,” I said, and then added, to show how much I admired her, “That’s brilliant.”
She eyed me up then down, assessing, dismissing, then defeated. “All my belongings are inside. Can you imagine? Our doors are open? What if there’s a…a…someone. Who robs us? Maybe this is a planned robbery, there’s no real fire, and it’s all a set-up to get us out here, in the middle of hellish nowhere, and distract us, and all the while, inside, they’re going through everything that…”
Good story, I had to admit. “I’m sure it’s fine,” I said. “You have a vivid imagination. But it seems a bit—elaborate, doesn’t it?”
“How would they get away?” Ballcap had been listening to this with some interest. Then shook his head, deciding. “Nope. Probably some jerk smoking dope in the bathroom. Probably dumped his doobie in the trash, forgot to put it all the way out. Smoke alarm goes off, everyone goes nuts.”
“Probably,” I said. Wondering if Ballcap was “some guy.” His eyes were red, and he did smell kind of like pot. But maybe there was a skunk back in the woods. And none of my business, anyway. “At least it’s not raining or snowing. Right? And we’ll be all aboard and underway soon.”
“I’m gonna check out the woods,” the guy said. And he ambled off into the trees.
“Are you from Boston?” I asked Cruella, just making polite conversation in the middle of the night on the edge of a forest in wherever Pennsylvania. “Or going there to visit?”
“I work there,” she said.
“I do, too,” I said. “I’m an actuary.” I’d just read a thriller where someone said that was the profession you should choose if you didn’t want to talk about what you did. No one thinks an actuary is interesting. “How about you?”
“I’m a school administrator,” she told me. She addressed the train instead of me, but that was fine.
“Oh, such a small world,” I said, so chatty. “My little daughter, Tassie, she’s quite the student, and a piano prodigy, and well, we’re just ready to look into schools. Walter and I are thinking private. And there are so many fabulous ones in Boston. Her trust fund of course will pay for all of it, so we’re—”
“Clarissa Madison,” she said. She had turned, and was now looking at me in a different way.
“Oh, is that the name of a school?” I pretended to misunderstand.
“No dear, that’s my name,” she said. “And you are?”
“Looking for a private school.” I pretended to misunderstand again.
“Ladies and gentlemen!” A man’s voice interrupted my playacting. A stocky guy in a blue uniform—how many of those were on this train?—clapped his hands out in front of him, trying to get the passengers’ attention. By this time, some had scattered off the blankets, probably the ones with shoes, and strayed farther into the woods or drifted along the length of the train, curious or frightened or bored. Or looking for phone signals.
The alarm from the train had stopped. Good.
I gestured toward the porter. “This sounds promising,” I said.
“Better be,” Cru—I guess, Clarissa, said.
I chortled to myself. I’d been close on the name.
Those of us who responded to him moved closer, a huddled group of displaced bleary-eyed passengers in various rumpled stages of haphazard clothing and bedhead hair. People mostly keep to themselves on trains, knowing if you strike up a conversat
ion with the wrong person, they’ll talk your ear off from here to Peoria. And too much physical scrutiny is rude, and likely to get you an accusatory look in return. But here we all were, this random pod of passengers or, what Kurt Vonnegut might have called a granfalloon—a group of people connected by a thing that doesn’t really matter. We’d all go home, sooner or later, and this would be a hazy memory, an adventure in some of the retellings, fraught and dangerous. In others, an amusing entr’acte, an unexpected but insignificant detour.
“Ladies and gentlemen!” the porter called out again. We looked at him, I at least was, trying to make sense of this all, suddenly in the woods, strangers on a train, immersed in this shared experience. Blah, blah, the porter said, please be patient, we’re checking, making sure, all fine.
Bottom line, fifteen minutes.
The crowd dispersed like Brownian molecules, aimless and adrift. Not me. I stuck by Cruella. I’d considered a plan, actually thought it through, that I would casually suggest we take a walk to see the lake. Why not on a summer night, we’d never get to see it otherwise. We’d talk about my (imaginary) Tassie and her trust fund and then I’d get her to spill about the turmoil at Rotherwood, and then I’d get some nugget of usable info and call Shayla when I got back to Boston. Maybe even anonymously.
I was just tired enough, I thought, as we stood there, silent in the throng, to imagine I could also lure her to the lake, knock her out, push her in the water, like, forever, and then pretend I’d never seen her. Would they even do a head count before the train pulled away? And even if they did, how could it be my fault? Poor Clarissa, must have lost her way in the dark.
And Shayla would be saved by the vagaries of mortality.
Nothing Good Happens After Midnight: A Suspense Magazine Anthology Page 9
