“Now, what did I tell you!” someone shouted, and Eric looked up to see the old man in the engineer’s cap standing just outside the depot, shaking his head. “I said watch your step coming out of there!”
Eric didn’t answer, just got to his feet and brushed the dirt from his jeans as he moved away from the train car. He took a few steps before turning to look back at it. After a few seconds he walked all the way back and dropped to one knee below the door.
The water marks were gone. The stones were pale and dry under the sun.
“You ain’t hurt, are you?” the old man yelled, and Eric ignored him again and took hold of the edge of the big cargo door, leaned his shoulder into it, and grunted and got it moving. He slid it all the way back as the old man yelled at him to go easy on the equipment, then stepped aside and looked in.
The sun caught the corners now, and there was nothing in sight, neither man nor water. He leaned in and stared into the far end, stared at the emptiness. Then he bent and picked up a small stone and tossed it inside, listened to it skitter off the dry floor.
The wind picked up and blew hard at his back then, swirling dust around the old boxcar. There was a high, giddy whistling as it filled the car, as if it had been working on the door for a long time and was delighted to find someone had finally opened it the rest of the way.
19
HE CALLED ALYSSA BRADFORD from the car, sitting with the air-conditioning blasting and the vents angled so the cold air blew directly into his face. The old man from the railway museum was leaning against the door frame, watching him with a frown.
“Alyssa, I did have a few follow-up questions I forgot to ask,” Eric said when she answered. “The bottle of water you gave me…. Can you tell me anything about it at all?”
She was quiet for a moment. Then said, “Not really. That’s why I wanted you—”
“I understand what you wanted. But I need a little help. It’s the only thing you brought me that first day. The only artifact of any sort you gave me. No photos, no scrapbook, just that bottle. I guess I’m wondering why you thought it was so special.”
He was staring at the Pluto boxcar, at the grinning red devil.
“It’s strange,” she said eventually. “Don’t you think it’s strange? The way it stays cold, the way it… I don’t know, feels. There’s something off about it. And it is the only thing—and I mean the only thing—that he had from childhood. My husband told me that he kept it in a locked drawer in his bedside table, and said the bottle was a souvenir from his childhood and that no one was allowed to touch it. As you can see, it meant a lot to him for some reason. That’s why I’m so curious.”
“Yes,” Eric said. “I’m curious, too.”
“When I talked to you at Eve’s memorial service,” she said, “and I saw how you intuited the importance of that photograph, I knew I wanted to give you the bottle. I thought you might see something, feel something.”
That damn photograph was why she had hired him, why she’d sent him here. He could have guessed it from the start but instead he’d chosen to believe her hollow assertions of being impressed by the film. Claire wouldn’t have been fooled.
“I think I need to talk to your husband,” he said.
“What? Why?”
“Because he’s the one who’s actually related to the guy, Alyssa. It’s his family, and I need to ask him what the hell he really knows about his father. What he’s heard, what he thinks. I need to ask—”
“Eric, the entire point of this film was that it would be a surprise for my husband and his family.”
I don’t care were the words that rose in his throat, but he needed to keep any touch of hysteria down, and he was close to shouting now, close to telling her that something was very deeply wrong with Campbell Bradford, and once he got started on that, it’d be rolling downhill faster than he could control, stories of phantom trains and whispering ghosts coming out, and then his reputation in Chicago would be crushed just as completely as the one he’d had in Hollywood.
“I’d like to ask you to rethink that,” he said. “I believe I’m going to need to find out a little more from him to make any progress.”
“I’ll consider it,” she said in a tone of voice that made it clear she would not. “But I’m heading out right now and I’m afraid I have to let you go.”
“One more thing, Alyssa.”
“Yes?”
“Is there any chance your father-in-law played the violin?”
“Yes, he played beautifully. Self-taught, too. I take it you’re having some luck finding out about him, after all.”