Джеффри Дивер - Nothing Good Happens After Midnight - A Suspense Magazine Anthology

“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 conversation 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.