Page 50 of Whistle

“I’ll have a word,” Harry said, and walked up the drive to the front door, which was already open a few inches as the emergency workers continued to go in and out. No need to knock, so he tentatively went inside and found his way to the kitchen, saw the birthday cake with shards of glass sticking out of the frosting, felt more of them underfoot. There was no glass left in the doors that led to the deck, and all that remained of the barbecue were some scraps of metal bracing.

He heard voices nearby.

In the dining room, he found mother and son sitting in two chairs pulled closely together, their arms around each other, rocking slowly. Focused on the two, he barely glanced at what was on the table. Harry offered a solemn nod to the woman when she noticed he was standing there. She saw the badge pinned to his jacket, eyes narrowing for a moment.

“You’re Chief Cook.”

“I am.”

“Dylan’s dad,” she said quietly, her face lined with dried tears.

He nodded. “That’s right.” He went down to one knee to be on a level with Auden. “I’m so sorry about what happened to your father. It’s a terrible thing. I can’t begin to imagine what you’re going through.”

Auden turned. His eyes were red and looked as though they had cried a thousand tears. “He was making hot dogs. I should have asked for something else. I should have said pizza. It’s all my fault.”

“Don’t you be thinking that,” Harry said, laying a hand on the boy’s arm. “Not for a minute. This is going to be a tough time for you and your mom, and you’ll need to do everything you can to help her get through it. But I know you can do that. You can be there for her, am I right?”

“I guess,” he said, and his mother gave him a squeeze.

Harry noticed the train set atop the dining room table. “That’s a nice-looking train you got there. You get that for your birthday?”

The boy looked over to it, as though he’d forgotten it was there, and nodded.

“When the time’s right, I know Dylan would get a real kick out of seeing that. Looks like lots of fun.”

“It wasn’t working right,” Auden said. “It sped up all of a sudden and crashed onto the floor.”

Christina said comfortingly, “But we put it back on the track, didn’t we, Auden, and nothing looks broken.”

Auden didn’t appear to care one way or another.

“Think it works now?” Harry asked the boy.

Auden shrugged.

“Why don’t we see,” Harry suggested.

Auden slid slowly off his chair, checked to see that the transformer on the the table was still plugged into the wall outlet, and then gently turned the throttle.

An electric hum emanated from the locomotive, and a second later it began to move. The black engine and tender, and the cars linked to the back of it, made one circuit of the table, and then another, and then kept on going.

“That’s pretty cool,” Harry said, his palm on the boy’s back.

Auden appeared to take no pleasure in the train’s flawless operation, and Harry could hardly blame him.

Auden said, with no enthusiasm, “It’s working okay now.”

Sixteen

“I’m gonna do it,” Wendell Comstock said earlier that afternoon.

He was Edwin Nabler’s last customer of the day. He had been thinking it was almost time to switch the neon sign toclosedwhen the bell rang and in walked Wendell.

“That’s great,” Edwin said, and smiled. “I knew you’d be back. I just had a feeling. There was a woman in here a couple of days ago, and she had her eyes on that set, really wanted to buy it for her boy, but I said it was spoken for. When you’ve been in this business long enough, you know when someone’s hooked.”

“Yeah, well, I guess I am,” Wendell said.

He found the set on the shelf where he had last seen it, picked up the box, and brought it to the counter.

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