Death Train to Boston by Dianne Day Page A

had prevented him from going before. So long after the explosion, he had little hope of finding anything. It was a place to start, that was all, a place from which to begin and work outward in an ever-widening circle.
    Ostensibly Michael and Meiling would be continuing the work for which the J&K Agency had been hired: to ascertain if any one person or group could be held responsible for an escalating series of accidents on both the Union and Southern Pacific Railroads in recent months. Pinkerton, the railroads' usual detective agency, had been unsuccessful at putting a stop to the accidents, which in fact only continued to increase in number and severity. So J&K had been secretly called in, not to replace the Pinkertons but to supplement them.
    Had the explosion been a part of that pattern? The culmination of it, perhaps? No, Michael didn't think so. It wasn't accidental, for one thing; for another . . . well, Michael admitted to himself, as he lay in his bunk with all these thoughts crowding his mind, he didn't have another reason. He had only a hunch. A strong hunch, even if wildly improbable. He wished he could discuss it with Fremont—she was so good at providing reasons for his hunches. She could go into his thought processes, as it were, and insert the steps to fill in his intuitive leaps.
    Fremont. . . . Without her he felt as if an essential piece of himself were missing. It was not a good feeling.
    Michael grunted, swung his feet around abruptly, and stood up too fast, bumping his head on the luggage rack above. "Damnation!" he swore as he sat down hard on the edge of the bunk. He rubbed at his scalp furiously, as if to erase the pain. In this he had some success. Too bad he couldn't rub all the fears for Fremont out of his head as well.
    He would find Fremont held under some kind of restraint, he was certain of that much. Whether physical or mental, compelled by some failing on her own part or by malevolence on the part of another, he did not know. All Michael knew was that Fremont was an extremely resourceful woman. She would have managed somehow to get a message to him, or to Wish and Edna Stephenson back at J&K in San Francisco. Or to her father, who had been waiting for them in Boston, at the other end of their ill-fated train ride. But there had been no messages from her anywhere.
    Slowly this time, Michael stood up and began to dress in the dark. Like any fine club, the club car stayed open around the clock. He would go there, have a drink and a smoke, and hope the company of other people (who at this hour of the night were quite likely to be as morose and strange as he) would help him gain control of his demons.
    As Michael Kossoff tucked in his shirt and fastened up his trousers, those demons planted in his brain a picture of Fremont Jones, dazed and battered, wandering away from overturned train cars in a mindless fog, wandering into a wilderness of forest, wanting only to get away from the fire and the noise and the destruction. . . .
    He knotted his tie by feel and shook his head. "No," he said aloud. He had thought that at first, but no longer. He didn't believe she would wander off, not even if she had been the only person conscious after being thrown clear of the wreckage. One passenger was unaccounted for; surely this one was Fremont Jones. Unless someone had made a mistake, and she lay among the dead, after all.
    "No," said Michael again. He opened the door of his compartment and stepped out into the narrow passageway. After taking a moment to get the feel of the moving carriage, and to appreciate the fresh, cool air that flowed from an open window or door somewhere close by, he walked slowly, quietly back through the train to the club car. Steel-on-steel, wheels hummed over the tracks, clickety-clacking at every join, a marvel of engineering.
    And a monument to the fortitude of thousands of Chinese laborers, Michael thought.
    He realized he had passed Meiling's compartment without even noticing. Yet