Page 21 of Buck Baxter and the Mysteries of Love

Reaching inside the small compartment, I scraped out something hard and chipped.

“What is it?” Harry asked.

“It seems you were right, you could indeed break a nail turning those dials.” I showed him the chipped broken nail in my fingers. “Red nail polish.”

“That’s my mother’s,” Harry whispered. “She’s been through my father’s desk too.”

“I get the feeling she wasn’t exactly after your old man’s cigars. The question is, was she taking something… or returning it?”

I quickly opened the first drawer on the right and a map cylinder rolled into view.

Harry opened the first drawer on the left and gasped.

I turned to see him pulling a pistol out of the drawer with his thumb and forefinger as though he was holding up a dead fish by the tail. “A pistol? My father owns a pistol? God, I hate guns.”

“Then put it down before you shoot your goddamn toe off… or mine.” I could see he was about to toss it onto the desk before I added, “Carefully! Put it down carefully, would ya?”

Daintily he laid it on the desk.

I swiveled it around so it pointed away from us, then turned my focus back to the drawer.

I pulled out the map cylinder and opened it, unrolling several maps on the desk.

Meanwhile Harry continued fossicking.

“These are maps of Wilde City Harbor,” I muttered, baffled, staring down at a map that outlined the major landmarks of the city, including Wilde City Tower, the river running along the east side, and the city’s gasworks on the foreshore. It also included a large section of the ocean beyond Wilde City and the land leading up north, much of it farmland. There was a curved dotted linerunning through it from the city to the sea, crossing through large patches of red. “What are these?” I asked Harry.

He looked over at the map. “I think those are the sections of farmland that my father purchased so he could build his railroad. That’s part of the deal with the Governor.”

“Is this the railroad?” I pointed to the curved dotted line.

Harry nodded. “I’m pretty sure that’s it.”

“It runs straight to the sea. What kinda railroad goes nowhere but the sea?”

“It’s his test track. I guess we’ll find out exactly where it leads tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow is Saturday. It’s the maiden journey of theMillennium Express.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be on that train?”

Harry nodded.

Panic struck me. “You can’t be on that train, Harry.”

“I have to be. It’s what’s expected of me.”

“No, Harry. I’ve got a bad feeling about all this. And I’m not the only one.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Your mother. She’s not having an affair with her chauffeur. He’s not even a real chauffeur. He works for the FBI and your mother has been secretly filtering this information to the Bureau.”

“The FBI? Buck, are you serious?”

I nodded. “Something big is going down. Your mother has known about it all along, and now she’s trying to stop it from happening.”

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