Page 30 of Whistle

Charlie came back up the stairs, flicking off the light before he returned to the main floor and reengaged the flashlight app. He walked to the front door, opened it noiselessly, and stepped onto the porch. No security pad to worry about here. Nothing to disarm.

No bad guys in this part of the world.

He closed the door behind him and descended the porch steps. Even with his running shoes on, he could feel the dampness in the grass. Nighttime dew blanketed everything. Using the phone’s light, he rounded the house and headed for the shed, the key gripped so firmly in the palm of his left hand that it was creating an impression in his skin.

Charlie reached the shed, set the phone on the ground, screen pointed up so the shed door was illuminated, and tried to insert the key into the padlock. He had it turned the wrong way the first time, figured out his mistake, and tried again. The key slid in nicely. Holding the lock firmly in his left hand, Charlie turned the key with his right.

The lock came undone.

Charlie slid it off the hook and opened the door. It was pitch-dark in the shed, and, feeling around the inside of the frame, Charlie could find no light switch. He picked the phone up off the ground and shined it inside.

As he’d already speculated, the shed was filled with various tools and garden-related items. Three rakes and two shovels. An old gas-powered lawn mower that, judging by the rust and the pull-cord that dangled from its housing, hadn’t been fired up in a very long time. Three bags of fertilizer and one of grass seed, some of it leaking out a hole that had no doubt been made by a mouse. There werefour folded lawn chairs with webbing so far into the disintegration process that no one could have sat in them without risking grievous bodily harm, an electric hedge trimmer, a couple of extension cords, gardening gloves, a seed-spreading machine.

None of this held any interest for Charlie.

He was focused on the box tucked into the back corner of the structure.

He stepped over to it, pointed the phone flashlight for a better look.

This was what had been calling to him. This was what had been demanding to be found.

A cardboard box about two-by-two-by-three feet. Probably had once held packages of detergent, judging by the word printed boldly on the side.

tide.

Part II

Harry

Eight

No one could remember when, exactly, the shop had opened.

One day, there was nothing there. And then, one day there was.

People would say, it’s like when you need your shoes repaired, someone recommends Mike’s Shoe Repair, and you ask, where’s that, and you find out it’s right there on the main drag; you’ve strolled past it a hundred times but never noticed it because you never needed your shoes fixed till now.

This new shop was like that, except there wasn’t a soul who could remember how long it had been there. A week? A month? Surely not longer than that.

Regardless of when it had opened, the town of Lucknow now had something it had not had before, at least not in anyone’s memory. It had a toy train shop, somewhat anachronistic in a time when the electronic game systems—Nintendos and PlayStations and Xboxes—were ubiquitous. What chance did something as classic as a toy train stand, only a couple years into the new millennium?

Time would tell.

The place certainly had a catchy, if too-cute, name: Choo-Choo’s Trains. It seemed designed to draw in the little ones, or at least prompt them to drag their parents in with them.

On this particular Tuesday morning, before the shop had even opened—the sign in the window saidour hours of fun are 9:30–5:00!—two boys on their way to school had stopped to admire thewindow display: a loop of track about five feet across with a New Haven diesel engine and three passenger cars going around and around, disappearing briefly on each loop into a tunnel built into a mountain prop. Even when the store was closed, the train was left to run twenty-four hours a day.

The boys, both eleven years old, stared at the train, one more transfixed than the other. “It’s kinda cool,” one said.

“It’s for little kids,” said the other dismissively. “Slot cars are better. You can race them. You can’t race trains.”

“My uncle’s got a big setup in his basement. He’s got a station and a water tower and signals and crossings and all kinds of other shit.”

“When’d this place open anyway?”

The other boy shrugged. They agreed the place was worth checking out on their way home once school was over.

One person who had, so far, shown not the slightest interest in the new shop was sitting behind the wheel of a plain white four-door sedan with a red light on the roof and the wordslucknowpolice departmentprinted on the side. It pulled into an angled parking spot out front of the Lucknow Diner. There were two other diners in town, but, as they had come later, they lost rights to name themselves after the town in which they did business. Not unlike the train shop, no one quite remembered when the Lucknow Diner first started serving up bacon and eggs and French toast and the best coffee in this corner of the state, but they did know it had more or less been here forever.

---