Page 50 of With a Vengeance

To Anna, that cryptic grin seems like an invitation. As if Edith, knowing what’s coming, wants to be put out of her misery just like Judd Dodge was. And Anna’s tempted to oblige her. So very tempted that she thrusts her still-twitching hands behind her, fingers intertwined.

She needs to leave.

Right now.

Before she loses all control again.

“Killing my brother and framing my father helpednothing,” she says. “I hope you eventually understand that. In the last moments of your life, I hope you realize it was a mistake. That everything you did was a waste. And when you take your final breath, I hope the only things you feel are pain, fear, and regret. Because that’s all you deserve.”

Anna turns and hurries out of the observation car before Edith can respond. She refuses to give her the last word.

In Car 13, the light fixture that had been flickering across from Room C has gone out, casting that end of the corridor in thick shadow. Standing in the gloom, Anna sees someone exiting through the door at the front of the car.

A man. All she catches is the back of his head and the breadth of his shoulders. Enough for her to think that his frame doesn’t match anyone else on the train. Seamus, Lapsford, and Herb Pulaski are broader, Dante and Reggie narrower.

Now it’s too late to see more. Whoever it was is gone.

Worried by the prospect of someone else roaming the train, Anna surges through the otherwise silent hall. The door to Room A opens a crack as she passes, giving Anna a glimpse of Herb Pulaski peering nervously into the corridor.

“Stay in your room,” she tells him. “Keep your door locked.”

She keeps moving, pleased to see that no doors are open in Car 12. Hopefully everyone is where they should be.

Locked in their rooms.

Alone.

Safe.

When Anna enters Car 11, she again sees the door at the opposite end just beginning to shut. This time, she runs through the car, trying to catch up to the man in the lounge.

It turns out to be completely empty. Yet the car feels only recently vacated. As if someone had just been there seconds earlier. So Anna moves on, into the dining car, which despite being fully lit contains a similar shiver of another person’s recent presence.

It goes on like this as Anna progresses to the front of the train, pushing through car after car. Galley. Club car. Coach lounge. Each one is empty. By the time she reaches the coach cars, all hope that she might be following someone is gone. No one is here, a factAnna realizes when she reaches the cavernous luggage car. She even tries the door to the locomotive, thinking the person she saw might have been Burt Chapman, the engineer.

It wasn’t. The door is still locked.

And whoever it was has completely vanished.

Anna backtracks, returning to the second half of the train. When she enters the dining car, she comes to a stop just beyond the door. The car, which had been lit when she passed through minutes earlier, is now pitch dark. And while she considers the idea of an electrical malfunction of some sort, Anna knows in her gut that someone turned the lights off on purpose.

Someone just now moving through the door at the back of the car. Through the quickly closing gap, Anna spots the same person she half saw leaving Car 13. It’s only a partial glimpse. A sliver of a second in which the man looks to the side, revealing his profile before slipping from view.

Anna stops in her tracks, overcome by a sudden, startling chill.

She recognizes the man, even though his presence on the train is impossible.

He’s been dead for a dozen years.

And while she knows it could be a trick of the light or exhaustion clouding her vision or even a lingering scrap of nightmare, Anna can’t shake the feeling that—despite all logic and reason and laws of nature—she’s just seen her brother.

Twenty

Still in theobservation car, Edith Gerhardt stares up at the snow-filled sky through the window in the ceiling and thinks about the past. Looking at the snowfall always had that effect on her, even when she was a little girl on the rooftop of her family’s ramshackle apartment building, her eyes aimed skyward.

Watching the snow now makes her think of her childhood, her parents, her husband, and a hundred other things. Friends and pets she’d completely forgotten about now appear so vivid in her mind it’s as if she’d seen them minutes earlier.

And she thinks about Anna and Tommy, the closest thing she’s ever had to a son and daughter. They were good children. Well-behaved. So devoted to each other that they couldn’t see how different they were. Anna took after her father. Smart, astute, prone to bouts of quiet, but always with a dreamy look in her eyes. Tommy was clearly his mother’s child. How handsome he’d been. How effortlessly charming.

---