Page 60 of Whistle

He was turning to walk away, but Nabler had something else to say.

“That’s a terrible thing that family’s going through.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Excuse my eavesdropping. This Dorfman man who’s victimizing them for something they had nothing to do with? What’s wrong with people?”

“Been doin’ this awhile and I still haven’t figured that out,” Harry said, then added, “But you know what? Most of the folks in this town? They’re good people.”

His stroll took him to the far end of Main Street, past the temporary barriers, and he spotted half a block away the old pickup he knew belonged to Gavin. He made his way to it and peered inside, expecting to find Gavin sprawled across the seat, sound asleep. But he wasn’t there, and when Harry tried the door, he found it locked.

He glanced down the street in both directions, hoping he might spot the man, but there was no sign of him.

Harry didn’t know that he needed to be concerned. Gavin had probably been scared off by the crowds downtown today. But Lucknow’d already had two men go missing. And the one who’d turned up wasn’t exactly in the best shape.

Twenty

Wendell Comstock hadn’t had this much fun since he was ten.

It had been several days since he’d made his initial purchases, but he’d returned to Choo-Choo’s Trains a few times since. What he had accomplished in such a short time was, in his own estimation, pretty goddamn amazing.

His intention, as he’d told Edwin Nabler, had been to use his Ping-Pong table in the basement as the base for his model train empire. He put down a roll of grass-like carpet, staple-gunned it into place, then assembled a large oval of track with two sidings. With some sheets of black cardboard he created a street, which he lined with several assembled building kits. The transformer was notched into a corner of the table, two wires running between it and the track, plus the cord that ran to the wall outlet.

Wendell had been spending most of his time, once he had come home from work and shoveled dinner down his throat, in the basement. It was, he soon realized, just what he had needed, because Wendell had been looking for more than something to entertain himself. He had been looking for a refuge.

Things were not all that great on the home front. He and Nadine had been married almost ten years now, and whatever spark there’d been in this marriage had fizzled some time ago. The truth was, they were never really meant for each other. They’d gone out a few times while both attending Middlebury College, had a few drinksone night, and a few weeks later Nadine broke the news to him that she was pregnant. They were both from religious families, and even though it was the nineties, supposedly a time when young people felt liberated from so many social conventions, they felt under pressure to do the right thing and get hitched. Wendell left Middlebury before getting his degree and found a job in Lucknow. With financial help from Nadine’s parents—her father ran a savings and loan—they bought a house. They had two cars in the garage and an apple tree in the backyard. A perfect couple, about to embark on life’s great adventure. They had it all except for the picket fence out front.

And then, in her third month, Nadine lost the baby.

It was a devastating time for Wendell and Nadine. They were enveloped in a great sadness, but that gave way over time to resentment.

But, as it turned out, Wendell discovered that he enjoyed being a husband. There was a sense of fulfillment in having someone to care for, in being part of a union. And if he didn’t love Nadine as deeply as he might have wished when they exchanged vows, he was hopeful that in time he would.

If only Nadine had felt the same.

She had married this man because she was having his child, and now she wasn’t. She never said out loud what she was thinking. That she wanted out. That she didn’t want to spend her life with this man if she didn’t have to. Some couples, desperate to have a child, would have tried again, but Nadine didn’t want to do that. But what could she do? Her parents had bought them this house. What would she say to them? She knew, at some level, she had disgraced them by getting pregnant, and to find a way to escape this marriage now would only make things worse.

Nadine resigned herself to this life. She would go through the motions, make the best of it. But she didn’t have to love this man. Shedidn’t even have to like him. She believed that she couldtoleratehim. Where was it written that you were entitled to be happy?

Wendell gradually resigned himself to a similar conclusion. It wasn’t so much that he gave up on the idea of one day loving Nadine. It was as though love had given up on him. While they shared quarters, while they slept in the same bed, they were strangers to one another. They both went off to work in the morning and both came home at night. They each had their assigned duties and stuck to them.

It was a life.

Nadine kept herself busy most evenings. If it wasn’t book club, it was a lecture series, or a Thai cooking class. Wendell would plunk himself in front of the television, eating microwaved popcorn, picking something from his library of VHS tapes, likeGhostbustersorJurassic Parkor the two Batman movies starring Michael Keaton. Movies Nadine had no appreciation for, movies she thought were, basically, stupid.

He was, he believed, living with a low-level depression, although he had not been clinically diagnosed. And he was pretty sure Nadine was, too.

Then came the trains. And the strangest, most wonderful thing happened.

Wendell had expected her to be, if not flat-out annoyed by his newfound interest, at the very least dismissive.You’re a grown man, he’d figured she would say.Am I married to a child?

But she turned out to beinterested.

She eyed him curiously the night he took his new purchases to the basement. She perched herself on the top of the stairs, out of sight, watching what he was up to. The second night, she came all the way down, pulled up a chair as he set about nailing track down to the table.

“You know,” she said, “I don’t know whether I’ve ever told you this, but I had a dollhouse when I was little.”

“Did you?”

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