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Charlie’s home , she thought. He’s upstairs playing with his trains .

Annie shot out of her chair and entered the house and ran up the stairs to her studio. “Charlie!” she shouted. “Charlie!”

Somehow, she figured, he had to have been home all this time, hiding so well that even the police had been unable to find

him. Could he have been in the attic? Did this house even have an attic? If there was an access to it, she’d failed to discover it in the time they’d been here.

She burst into the studio, expecting to find her son on the floor, hand on the throttle of the transformer, guiding his train

around and around the loop.

Charlie was not there.

“ Stop it! ” Annie cried. “ Just stop it! ”

But the little steam engine kept on going. In fact, rather than slowing down or stopping, the train began to move even more

quickly. It was whipping around the loop and the village Charlie had made with greater speed than Annie had ever seen it go

before, faster than she would have thought possible. It was traveling so swiftly that it was becoming a blur, as though it

were a floor-level jet.

It was a wonder that the cars weren’t being flung from the tracks as they went into and out of the curves. And then that was

exactly what happened.

A rail disaster on a small scale. The engine and the tender, as well as the various attached freight cars and caboose, became uncoupled from each other and scattered, the centrifugal force sending them across the floor in all directions. The steam engine hit one of the legs of Annie’s drafting table and broke into several pieces. The red boxcar from which Annie had imagined seeing spiders emerge hit the baseboards on the far side of the room and broke apart.

The caboose flipped over onto its side and skittered across the floor and came to an abrupt stop when it hit the toe of Annie’s

shoe.

She stared down at it.

Positioned as it was, she could see the sticker affixed to the bottom bearing the name and address of the store from which

it had originally been purchased.

Annie bent over and picked up the caboose. She read aloud what was on the sticker.

“Choo-Choo’s Trains, 122 Main Street, Lucknow, Vermont.”

She thought back to what Charlie had said one day while playing with this train.

“This is the place where Daddy lives now.”

And then Annie recalled something else Charlie had said to her. When he had worked up a sweat riding his bike around and around

the house for so long. Why was he doing that? she had asked him.

“Just in case I ever had to ride somewhere far one day.”

Annie put the caboose down, took out her phone, opened up the map app, and looked up Lucknow. If it was in Vermont, then it

could be relatively close, depending on what corner of that state it was in. She found it in seconds, saw that it was in the

southwest. A hike, to be sure, but could a determined little boy, desperate to find a father he refused to believe was dead,

get there on his bicycle?

“He could,” Annie said to herself. “I believe he could.”

She looked at the caboose resting on her table, at the remains of Charlie’s trains scattered across the floor.

“You were trying to tell me, weren’t you?” she said.

The train was silent.

There was no point in calling Standish. First of all, Annie was sure she viewed her as a suspect. And second, if Annie told

her she believed she knew where Charlie was, and how she’d come to this conclusion, the officer would have her committed.

Annie was on her own here.

She ran down the stairs, grabbed her car keys, and was gone.