Death Train to Boston (8 page)

I have never been very fond of mountains; given the choice of a trip to the mountains or to the seashore, I
would always choose the sea. So, to have those mountains as the only view available to me was exceedingly oppressive. More oppressive still was the sense of hopelessness that continually threatened to take me over. In a way, I might have been happier if I hadn't recovered my memory.

"No, no," I muttered aloud, "I mustn't think like that."

Silently I recited;
I am Fremont Jones. I live in San Francisco. Michael Kossoff is my partner, in life and in work. We are the J&K Agency, private investigators. Our telephone number is 3263.

The Pratts had no telephone. I had inquired, of course, on the second day after regaining my senses. I'd asked Verla, who had frowned at me and said, "What a notion!"

Being unwilling to give up so easily, I'd approached Norma, who came in later that day to sit with me for a while. I had asked her if she would send a telegram for me the next time she was in town. I needed to let my business partner know that I was all right, I said. She had replied, "You don't have any business anywhere anymore except right here, so I reckon there won't be any telegrams sent. If God wants you here, who are you to argue that? And we know God wants you here, because Father says so."

Hm,
I'd thought,
God may want me here, but you do not.
That was as plain to me as the nose on her saucy face. Then I'd filed that observation away in my mind, along with all the others I was accumulating.

Someday, surely, all these observations would be of use.

I sighed. What was taking Tabitha so long to return with Sarah? Why couldn't I hear footsteps in the hallway outside my door when people came and went? Surely there was a hallway outside the door, and in a
simple farmhouse, no more than a cabin really, it would not be carpeted. . . .

Suddenly I could not get my breath, my heart began to pound, and my hands dripped cold sweat. Down to the very marrow of my bones I understood the origin of the phrase "scared to death," because I was. Surely one could not live long and feel this way?

Oh, dear God, I was trapped in this one room! Trapped, without knowing where I really was, knowing nothing of the layout of the house, in or near what town it was situated, knowing nothing at all except these four walls and the view from this one window. I could not bear it! My heart fluttered like a bird in the cage of my ribs.

When I was a child in Boston, one of my mother's friends had kept canaries in her house around the corner from us, in Louisburg Square. She had a whole room full of the tiny little yellow birds, each in its single, separate cage. I couldn't say how many cages, because I'd been too young to count them, but the day had come when I couldn't stand anymore to see those caged birds singing their pretty little hearts out. I had opened the doors of all the cages; and then I'd run away myself. I hadn't stayed to watch and see if they would fly away or not, but I knew what I would have done if I had been a bird. . . .

I shifted in the chair to get my legs right under me. The chair had no arms, but I braced my hands against the seat. Did I dare to let my legs take my weight? Were they really broken and mending? I had only Pratt's word for it. I didn't remember the doctor's visit. What if my broken legs were as much a construction of Pratt's grandiose imagination as his angelic visions? What if my injuries were far less severe than he'd led me to believe?

Oh please,
I thought,
I
must get away. . . .

I slowly lifted myself from the chair, keeping most of my weight on my hands. I felt pain; beads of moisture popped out on my forehead. My breath came in shallow bursts and I was dizzy, but the cold dread of absolute terror passed, because
now I was doing something.
The pain was not so bad . . . until I tried to straighten my knees.

So early in the morning that the sky was still dark, Michael waited on the platform of San Francisco's train station for Meiling to arrive from Palo Alto. He had engaged an auto-taxi for the trip from the station to the Ferry Building; there they would cross the Bay to Oakland, and from Oakland their main journey eastward would begin.

He was alone on the platform. Two porters in their red-capped uniforms leaned against the walls, perhaps catching forty winks. If they had been on duty all night, and they probably had, Michael did not begrudge the hard-working men their sleep. He preferred to be alone anyway.

Michael's footsteps clicked on the cement platform as he walked back and forth, back and forth. He took off his bowler hat and ran his hand through his hair once, twice; then put the hat back on again. He didn't like to admit it, but Edna Stephenson had shaken his confidence. Was he doing the right thing by involving Meiling?

She'd changed.
Well, people do that, especially when they're young, they change,
he thought. The thing was, though: Meiling had changed so much, and in ways that Michael did not understand. Ways that would have been mysterious to most Chinese, and were incomprehensible to him. Her grandmother's magic, she'd said, had changed her.

Meiling had gone to Stanford with the goal of studying geology, or, as she herself had called it, "the science of the earth." But after receiving the gift of her grandmother's chest, her eyes had been opened to much, much more. Meiling now claimed to understand more about the earth than science alone could teach. She talked of
chi,
the life force that runs through all living things, and through the earth and sky as well. She talked of maintaining a healthful balance, of the ways good energy moves, and of things that block the movement of energy. Her wind chimes and the colored banners outside the tiny house in Palo Alto had something to do with all this. So did the colors that accented her clothing, and so many other things it made Michael's head spin.

Also in that chest, Meiling's grandmother had left a very old book, full of secret teachings and recipes for magic, a kind of Chinese
grimoire.
Bells, incense, combs and mirrors, silk ribbons and satin ropes, bones and beads and shells—all that and more came from the chest. With the book and her recollection of lessons from childhood, Meiling was teaching herself to be a Chinese magician.

This would have been fine with Michael if not for two things. First, she had abandoned her studies at Stanford in order to follow this questionable pursuit; and second, Meiling had begun to talk of demons and malevolent spirits. Michael did not believe in demons and malevolent spirits, he believed that man was evil enough already and did not require any help from the spirit world.

From away in the darkness the train's locomotive gave its haunting whistle. Michael stopped pacing to stand near the edge of the platform and look down the tracks. He could see the lamps on either side of the engine glowing like eyes in the dark. His imagination,
fired by thoughts of Meiling and her magic, could easily turn the train into a dragon belching steam.

Dragons are good luck to the Chinese,
he thought, forcing the corners of his mouth into a grim smile.
And Meiling and I will need all the good luck we can gather for the time ahead.

WHEN I LET my legs take most of my weight, something both quite remarkable and perfectly awful happened: My body simply would not support me. With a painful protest, it gave way all at once. Being woefully without medical knowledge, I could not have said whether it was the musculature of the legs that would not perform, whether the bones beneath those muscles were fractured, whether my blood had simply grown too thin, or what. Add to that the shortness of breath that had me gasping once I'd collapsed back into the chair, and altogether it made for a genuinely bad experience. As I have seldom been sick in my life, I did not know what to think of this—other than to try not to let it make me feel too much worse than I already did.

I was thinking how much I should like the doctor to come back and see me again, now that I was in my right mind and could question him, when Tabitha returned with her sister Sarah. Once again I did not hear them approach—it was Tabitha's light knock followed by the
opening of the latch that alerted me to their imminent appearance.

"Come in, please," I called out, very glad of the distraction.

"I'm back," Tabitha announced excitedly and unnecessarily. "Here's Sarah too, and we've brought some of our things to show you!"

The sisters did indeed look much alike, though seeing them side by side I thought Sarah seemed more than just the three years older that Tabitha had mentioned. Sarah's dress was blue-gray rather than brown, and her collar and cuffs bore delicate cutwork instead of lace. There were other differences as well: Sarah lacked her younger sister's gentleness. In fact, it was very interesting to see how their similar features had been influenced, molded one was tempted to say, by their individual personalities.

Sarah was just a little taller, a bit thinner. Her hair was the same light brown, and she wore it the same way, parted in the middle and pulled back into a bun shaped like a figure eight turned sideways. Also, from the tiny new hairs she had above her ears as we all do, I could tell that Sarah's hair had that charming tendency to curl—a tendency I always notice and envy in others, on account of mine being so utterly straight. But Sarah's hair was not escaping from its arrangement, no indeed; she had pulled it back so tightly that the corners of her eyes turned up. I winced inwardly to look at her.

Yet, hard as Sarah seemed (if that hairdo was any indication) to be on herself, she was easy with others. The smile she bestowed on me had the same sweetness as her sister Tabitha's, and that went a long, long way.

"Carrie," Sarah said, "I'm so glad Tabitha suggested I come along to see you. I've brought some of the things she and I are currently working on. I thought we could talk while we sew. Tabitha and I, I mean; we don't expect
you
to sew! We have a quota to meet but we can
certainly talk at the same time. That is, if you aren't too tired."

"Not at all," I agreed heartily, "but what is this about a quota? I certainly wouldn't want to distract you from meeting it."

The two sisters glanced at each other, as if deciding which one of them should answer. Tabitha spoke up: "We sew for the family, of course, but we also make things for sale. These are, well, rather special. We promise delivery times and so on."

"I cannot wait to see! But before we proceed, either we shall need an additional chair from the next room, or I must get back in bed so that one of you may have this one."

Sarah put down the large basket she was carrying. "Since there is no 'next room,' I expect we'd best help you back to bed."

"By all means," I agreed, after a slight hesitation due to the fact that I knew I'd soon need to relieve myself, and so was thinking of asking for their help. But no, I would not; the procedure under my present circumstances was so laborious—and rather humiliating—that I preferred to postpone it as long as I could. I smiled at each of the sisters in turn and said, "I'm ready when you are."

Tabitha and Sarah each draped one of my arms over their shoulders and linked their hands behind my back. "I'll count three," Tabitha said. "One, two, three!"

On "three" they lifted me by their linked hands until my toes barely skimmed the floor, and the first thing I knew I was back in bed. I thanked them both, and submitted to a lot of quilt-smoothing and pillow-plumping before they pronounced themselves satisfied that I could be as comfortable as I claimed.

"Now then," I said, glancing from one to the other of their similar yet different faces, "which one of you will tell me what you meant when you said there was
no room next door. For surely in a household this size, there must be more rooms on one side or the other?"

Sarah did not look up from her unpacking of the basket, which she balanced on one knee while her lap received its contents. I did not pay much attention, being far more interested in this opportunity to learn what, exactly, lay beyond my always-closed door. It was again Tabitha who answered me.

"I suppose no one has told you. We forget you haven't had the freedom to look around. Um, er—" she darted a sidewise glance at her sister, whose head was studiously bent over the basket, as if she had discovered some new species in there. Not gaining any help from that quarter, Tabitha bit her bottom lip briefly and then said, "Father is the only one who
lives
in the Big House. And actually, the truth is it really isn't all that big, not compared to some I've seen. In Provo, for instance."

"Mmm, that's true," Sarah commented. She steadied the basket on her knee with one hand while the other rested atop a small pile of folded cloth, most of it bleached white, but some left a natural ivory color. "Still, for here it's large."

I frowned, the questions in my mind showing, I should imagine, on my face.

Tabitha said, "Each wife has her own cabin. This one that you are in is for guests. When you're well, Father will build you one of your own. You'll get to choose your own furnishings, what color curtains, and so on. You might even get a rug. Oh, and best of all, a ride to town to pick them out yourself!"

"Really," I said dryly. I thought,
How extraordinary!