Page 101 of Whistle

Annie said, “Okay.”

“And you have my card. You can call me. Doesn’t matter when.”

Annie said nothing.

Standish started walking backward from the room. “So, tomorrow, then.”

And then she was gone.

A moment later, Annie walked out to the porch and watched the various police and other emergency vehicles depart. Feeling weak, she settled into a chair until the last of them was gone.

It was suddenly very quiet.

Annie bowed her head and began to weep. She was long overdue for a meltdown. She owed herself one. She cried and cried and cried.

“Oh, Charlie,” she said under her breath. “Charlie, Charlie, Charlie, where the fuck have you gone?”

She cried some more. And then she heard something over the sound of her own weeping. Something from inside the house.

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Thirty-Two

Charlie’s home, she thought.He’s upstairs playing with his trains.

Annie shot out of her chair and entered the house and ran up the stairs to her studio. “Charlie!” she shouted. “Charlie!”

Somehow, she figured, he had to have been home all this time, hiding so well that even the police had been unable to find him. Could he have been in the attic? Did this house evenhavean attic? If there was an access to it, she’d failed to discover it in the time they’d been here.

She burst into the studio, expecting to find her son on the floor, hand on the throttle of the transformer, guiding his train around and around the loop.

Charlie was not there.

“Stop it!” Annie cried. “Just stop it!”

But the little steam engine kept on going. In fact, rather than slowing down or stopping, the train began to move even more quickly. It was whipping around the loop and the village Charlie had made with greater speed than Annie had ever seen it go before, faster than she would have thought possible. It was traveling so swiftly that it was becoming a blur, as though it were a floor-level jet.

It was a wonder that the cars weren’t being flung from the tracks as they went into and out of the curves. And then that was exactly what happened.

A rail disaster on a small scale. The engine and the tender, as wellas the various attached freight cars and caboose, became uncoupled from each other and scattered, the centrifugal force sending them across the floor in all directions. The steam engine hit one of the legs of Annie’s drafting table and broke into several pieces. The red boxcar from which Annie had imagined seeing spiders emerge hit the baseboards on the far side of the room and broke apart.

The caboose flipped over onto its side and skittered across the floor and came to an abrupt stop when it hit the toe of Annie’s shoe.

She stared down at it.

Positioned as it was, she could see the sticker affixed to the bottom bearing the name and address of the store from which it had originally been purchased.

Annie bent over and picked up the caboose. She read aloud what was on the sticker.

“Choo-Choo’s Trains, 122 Main Street, Lucknow, Vermont.”

She thought back to what Charlie had said one day while playing with this train.

“This is the place where Daddy lives now.”

And then Annie recalled something else Charlie had said to her. When he had worked up a sweat riding his bike around and around the house for so long. Why was he doing that? she had asked him.

“Just in case I ever had to ride somewhere far one day.”

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