Page 134 of Whistle

Annie went to her phone to see how long Google Maps calculated it would take to do that journey on a bicycle:twenty-two hours. And that was probably an estimate of how long it would take anadultto ride that distance. On a decent bike. Not a kid on a crappy bicycle found in the back of a junk shop.

There was no way.

Even if she accepted the premise that Charlie could actually ride his bike all the way to Lucknow, someone his age traveling along one of the interstates would attract attention. Charlie would get picked up. Annie would be notified. He would have to take secondary roads to avoid detection, and that would take even longer.

So there was no way he could be there yet.

In which case, Annie thought, she would be able to catch up with him. If he’d left in the middle of the night, he had a good twenty- to eighteen-hour head start, but in her SUV, she could be where he was in a couple of hours.

Except which route did he take? Sherpa offered only a couple of choices to get to her destination in a hurry, but there were a hundred less direct ways to go. Charlie could have taken any one of them.

If she went straight to Lucknow, the odds were good she’d be there well ahead of Charlie. She’d check out the train store, and if he wasn’t there, she’d start doubling back, intercept him on the most likely route at the end of his travels.

Unless, of course, she was justwrongabout all of it.

Suppose Charlie wasn’t even headed to Lucknow? Annie had rolled the dice and come to the conclusion that that was his intended destination because of the sticker on the bottom of a toy train. What had persuaded her was the manner in which that information had been delivered to her. The train spinning around and around that track on the floor of her studio, going so fast that the cars were scattered, one ending up at her foot with the address of Choo-Choo’s Trains in full view.

Ithadto be a message. How else could she interpret it? Annie was already convinced there was something very special—and not in a good way—about these trains Charlie had found in that shed. Annie had already seen things she could not explain. So when that address presented itself, she was ready to see it for what it was.

Aninvitation.

So now here she was on I-90 east, having put Syracuse in her rearview mirror, driving into the night, struggling to keep her eyes open.

She’d slept poorly the night before. Finnegan’s death had hit her hard, and she’d spent much of the night staring at the ceiling. She clearly had fallen asleep at some point. Otherwise, she would haveheard Charlie get up and try to slip out of the house. She’d have caught him in the act.

So it was little wonder that in the early hours of the next morning, she was having trouble concentrating on the road ahead. Twice her eyes closed for an instant, the SUV drifting toward the shoulder. Luckily, it was one of the newer models that sent a vibration through the steering wheel when a driver wandered off course.

Despite wanting to get to Lucknow as quickly as possible, Annie knew she wasn’t going to be much help to her son if she ran her car into the ditch and killed herself. On top of that, the car was down to less than a quarter tank. Once she had passed Herkimer, she promised herself she’d stop at the next service center along that stretch of the New York Thruway. She didn’t have long to wait.

She hit her blinker and exited. She parked, went inside and hit the bathroom, then bought herself a large coffee, black. Maybe that would keep her awake. She got back in the car, pulled ahead to the pumps, and filled the car up with premium unleaded. When she got back behind the wheel, she took a sip of her coffee, and keyed the ignition. But she had only driven a few car lengths when she began to feel woozy. She steered over to the far side of the lot, put the car in park, and took another drink from her take-out cup.

Could be the coffee wasn’t going to do the trick.

While she debated whether to surrender to sleep, even for the shortest of naps, she got out her phone and did a search on “Lucknow.” For a while now, she’d been thinking that the name of the town rang a bell, that it was known for something, but she couldn’t recall what. But she thought it had to be some time ago, when she was younger and paying as much attention to the six o’clock news as she was to her parents telling her what to do with her life.

Only a few hundred stories came up.

All of them were, in one way or another, about the “LucknowDisaster,” a catastrophic accident almost two months after the September 11 terrorist attacks. Annie scrolled through a few stories that laid out the basics of what had happened but zeroed in on a story from theNew York Timesthat had been written in only the last few months.

Under the headlinelucknowexplosion fallout continues after 23 yearswas a lengthy story by a reporter named Carol Hannigan. It began:

Nearly two and half decades after a freight train on the Albany & Bennington line derailed in Lucknow, Vermont, killing more than 4,000 people when a cloud of chlorine gas descended on the town, lawsuits continue to drag their way through the courts.

Several investigations conducted since the accident have cast doubt on whether the train went off the tracks because of an overheated bearing on one of the tanker cars, and have instead focused on whether defective track issues were at the heart of the catastrophe. But given that the Albany & Bennington railroad company went bankrupt in the wake of the disaster, just whom to sue and hold responsible for the damages, which run into the billions of dollars, has remained elusive.

What is not in question is the fact that Lucknow remains a ghost town. When the train went off the rails and several tanker cars exploded into a mushroom-type cloud that could be seen and heard miles away, a large number of homes situated near the event were destroyed. But even people who lived blocks away died from exposure to the chlorine gas.

The homes remain empty to this day, reminding manyof the fallout from the Love Canal disaster, near Buffalo, when an entire neighborhood had to be abandoned after 20,000 tons of chemical waste and pesticides leaked into homes and—

Annie stopped reading.

“Ghost town,” she said under the breath.

Lucknow was a ghost town. No one lived there. The place had been abandoned. There was, according to what she read, nothing there.

No. No, that wasn’t possible. What was the point of Charlie heading to Lucknow if there was nothing there to go to?

Annie rested her head on the top of the steering wheel and began to shake.

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