Уильям Макгиверн - Summitt

“Brett, are you all right?”

“Yes, Harry. It’s hit me so hard. I was standing there waiting for a cab. I had presents for Shana and Davey and pictures of Chablis, that’s the puppy Kay gave me. Oh, Harry...”

“Brett, listen. Would you like me to call you back in a little while? You could sit somewhere and have coffee or a drink.”

“No, please. I want to be with you, Harry. There’s another train in an hour. Will you wait for me?”

“Yes, I’ll be here at St. Stephan, standing right on the platform. I’m just an hour away. We’re only an hour apart. But, Brett, don’t keep it all locked up inside you until then.”

“I’m sorry, Harry. I wasn’t thinking of you. But saying it was so hard. Hearing myself say the words made them true. Here’s all Mr. Lamb could tell me...”

Selby sat on the platform with his coat collar turned up. The station was empty, except for the stationmaster, who was inside at his desk posting accounts in a ledger and smoking one of his curved golden pipes.

Burt Wilger, Jonathan Lamb had told Brett, got a call at the Division toward the end of his shift. Something he had to check out, Wilger advised the sergeant who relieved him. He didn’t say who phoned or where he was going. But he’d given the impression it was a continuing case and that he was meeting someone that night.

There was a reminder on his desk pad to pick up some dry cleaning in the morning, and at the Mobil station in East Chester Wilger had stopped for gas around ten-thirty P.M. That was all they had at that end.

Approximately an hour later a man who wouldn’t give his name called the sheriff’s substation in Muhlenburg and reported that he’d seen a wrecked car on the riverbank at the foot of the Rakestraw bridge. There was somebody inside, but he wasn’t moving, the man told the sheriffs people. But he didn’t want to get mixed up in anything, he added, and hung up.

The sheriff dispatched a squad and they found Sergeant Burt Wilger dead at the wheel of his car, crushed against it when he went off Dade Road and smashed into the wooden timbers of the old covered bridge. Skid marks were inconclusive, and so were the dents and scratches on Wilger’s car. He could have been sideswiped and forced off the road. Or he could have fallen asleep at the wheel. There was no way to say for sure. But there was no trace of drugs or alcohol in his blood.

Selby stood and paced the platform, watching and listening for Brett’s train. He thought of her and he thought of the red-haired detective, crushed to death on Dade Road, a mile or so from Brandywine Lakes and Vinegar Hill, lands the Taggarts had owned for generations...

“... let me give you some free insight into cops,” he remembered Wilger telling him. It seemed strange to think of the detective on a snowy night in the hills of the Jungfrau while a stationmaster with waxed moustaches and a meerschaum pipe sat adding up his ticket sales. “We’re thieving bastards or knights on chargers keeping the jungle back from civilization. Take your pick. Some cases have mile-high no-trespassing signs around them. It hurts, so some cops take a drink and forget it.”

Selby thought he heard the far rumble of the Bern Exchange in the hills.

Then Wilger had said, “A case like Shana’s, that’s different. They shouldn’t stop us. Maybe you think you ought to thank me.” He looked at Selby with his mild, near-sighted eyes and said, “Don’t.”

Selby saw the lights of the Bern train flashing around the white flanks of the hills. He walked to the phone booth and picked Miss Culpepper’s letter from the blue-and-white trash can beside it. Typical of this immaculate country, it was the only waste paper in the receptacle.

Smoothing out the note, he held it up to the glowing light of the Christmas wreath, then folded it into a neat square and tucked it next to Senator Lester’s card in his wallet, a card with nothing on it but a priority number in Washington, D.C.

He put the wallet in his pocket and buttoned the flap over it. The snow was coming down harder, big, star-shaped flakes that had covered the tracks and the platform completely by the time the last Bern Exchange for that evening pulled into St. Stephan.

The windows of the coaches were warm yellow squares against the driving white darkness. Selby saw passengers rubbing mittened hands against the steamed glass and looking out. A wind rushed from the valley and made a metallic whine along the frozen rails.

He watched anxiously as the conductor studied his watch. He didn’t see anyone get off the train; the storm had become a blinding whiten-wall, like the snow in the village that had closed around Shana and Davey, sealing them off from him.

He called Brett’s name but heard only the conductor shouting orders and calling out the next stop: Zweisimmen.

As the train began to move, the snow seemed to part suddenly like an immense curtain and Brett came hurrying toward him, one hand raised high and waving, and her red scarf and dark hair tumbled and blowing about her in the bitter winds.

Her face and lips were numbed from the cold. He kept an arm around her shoulders as they collected her luggage, a leather overnighter, cheerily wrapped presents, a heavy coat and lined boots.

He stowed her things in the rented station wagon and got in beside her. She asked him how long they were from home, and they both smiled at that choice of word, because they knew it wasn’t a mistake, but the simple truth between them now. They would talk about that tomorrow. And then the rest of it. But not tonight.

On the narrow road through the white hills to St. Stephan, he watched the rear-view mirror and saw their tire tracks filling swiftly with snow and the road stretching out white and empty behind them.

When he saw the lights of the little town beyond the steepled church glowing like beacons through the darkness, he touched her shoulder and said, “We’re home, Brett.”