Page 33 of Whistle

He still left a five on the counter when Jenny turned away, then slid off the stool and went outside. He was heading toward the benchto give Gavin the sandwich, figuring he might not accept a cash donation but would find it hard to turn down something to eat, when he saw that there was someone already there, handing Gavin a paper cup of what Harry guessed was coffee.

“That’s mighty decent of you,” Gavin said. “And you remembered how I like it, too.”

“Two cream, one sugar,” said the man cheerfully. “You only have to tell me once.”

Harry could not recall ever seeing this character before. A short man, almost pixieish. Bit of a tummy, probably bald on top judging by the lack of hair around his ears, which stuck out like handles, but it was hard to be sure because he wore a hat. One of those caps engineers on old steam engines wore. White with blue pinstripes. His jacket, or, more accurately, a vest, was railroad-themed as well, almost entirely covered with patches depicting various railroads. Santa Fe, Boston & Main, New York Central, Canadian National, and Canadian Pacific.

“Don’t need the cup back,” the man said. “Got plenty more just like it.” As he was turning to go back across the street, he caught sight of Harry, gave him a quick, respectful nod, and said, “Chief.” Then he made his way across the street, waiting for traffic to pass.

Harry stepped closer and handed Gavin the bag. He took it, peered inside, and said, “Aw, man, you shouldn’t have.”

“Ordered it along with some pancakes and couldn’t finish it, so I thought, no sense wasting it.”

Gavin dug out one half of the sandwich and took a huge mouthful of it in his first bite.

“Who’s that?” Harry asked.

Gavin swallowed some of what was in his mouth. “That’s Mr. Choo. Like choo-choo. Like a train. Look at the sign.”

And that was when Harry noticed that there was a business intown he’d not been aware of until this very moment. “Choo-Choo’s Trains,” he said, reading the sign. “When did that place open?”

“Fuck if I know,” Gavin said. “Nice enough guy, though. And I don’t know much about him, before you ask. All I know is his first name. Edwin. I don’t think Choo’s his last name. He doesn’t look like a Choo, if you get my meaning. It’s probably a kind of, whaddya call it, stage name? ’Cause of his business.”

“He looked like some kind of nut. That hat and the vest and all.”

“Kinda nerdy,” Gavin agreed. “Harry?”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks for the sandwich.”

“No problem.”

It was time to move on, get in touch with the coroner, and try to determine whether that body they’d found was Angus Tanner or Walter Hillman or even somebody else, and whoever it was, why this corpse was missing most of its bones, its teeth, and the hair on its head.

Nine

Edwin Nabler crossed the street, unlocked the front door of his shop, went in, closed the door, and set the lock again. He retrieved from a small pouch on the front of his vest a Waltham pocket watch and noted that the store was not due to open for another five minutes, and if there was anything Nabler believed, it was that if said you opened at 9:30 a.m., you didn’t open at 9:29 and you didn’t open at 9:31. You opened the store at 9:30, like it said on the sign. It was just like the railroads. They had schedules, and they were expected to keep them. Take that rail line that ran straight through the center of Lucknow, dividing the north side of town from the south. You could count on the Albany & Bennington passenger service to Stowe to blow its whistle every day at 2:23 p.m.

Without schedules, you had chaos.

He decided to spend these last five minutes quietly, contemplatively, thinking good thoughts about the day to come. The new people he would meet, the train sets he would sell. But it wasn’t about the money. It had never been about the money. It was about making a difference in people’s lives.

Oh yes.

There was a sheet of reflective glass behind the cash register, and Nabler used it to admire his vest, which was currently unbuttoned. There were still a few places for more railroad patches. He didn’t have one for the Bangor & Aroostook Railroad in Maine, or CentralVermont, or the north-of-the-border Ontario Northland. All in good time.

He buttoned the vest, wanting to look his most presentable when potential customers entered.

Choo-Choo’s Trains was not a big shop, at least not the floor space that was open to clientele. Narrow, not more than twenty feet wide, some forty feet deep; it was a niche, a specialty store, but that didn’t mean Nabler’s ambitions weren’t grand. He believed his offerings carried broad appeal, that there was something about toy trains that bordered on the intrinsic. In Nabler’s experience, almost everyone was captivated by toy trains—menandwomen, despite the perception that the hobby was a largely male interest—even if they didn’t collect them or set up displays in their home. People were entranced by worlds replicated in miniature. Toy soldiers, dollhouses, model cars and boats and planes. They marveled at the minutiae, how upon examining a simple steam engine they would suddenly discover that inside the cab was an engineer sitting at the controls, or a mom and her son sitting at a table in the window of a passenger train’s dining car, sharing an ice-cream sundae.

And what set toy trains apart from so many other miniatures was that theymoved. And as if that weren’t enough, they madesounds. Once those wheels started turning, the train wentchuffchuffchuffchuff. Press a button, and a whistle would blow or a bell would clang.Woowoo! Dingding!

Who could resist such wonders? Nabler was confident that once word spread about his new shop—word of mouth was everything in this business—the train sets displayed so artfully on the shelves would be hard to keep in stock. Which was why Nabler had been preparing for several weeks to have sufficient stock before opening. Because Nabler was more than a straightforward seller and distributor of trains made by major manufacturers. No, everything thatNabler sold had been customized by him personally. While the front of the store was small, the back end was grandiose, deceptively so. From the street, no one could have guessed the space taken up by Nabler’s workshop, the place where all the magic happened. It was there that Nabler had been constructing, with his own innovative techniques, an elaborate model railroad with mountains and tunnels and bridges and stations, and it was on these tracks that every train Nabler sold was put through its paces to make sure it met his particular, exacting standards.

He pulled out his pocket watch again. It was 9:29 a.m.

Nabler walked to the front door, waited for the second hand to make one more sweep of the face, then flipped the switch to bring the neonopensign to life and unlocked the door.

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