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A few days passed.

Harry sat in his office, leaning back in his chair and throwing darts at a board hanging on the wall, ruminating.

He had been thinking about a famous serial killer whose day job was as an installer of home security systems. This allowed

him to gain access to private residences, install locks and alarms, and in the process gain the trust of the individuals who

had engaged his services. The killer would select his victims from those he had met in his job, and when it came time to break

in and snuff the life out of one of them, he had the technical know-how to bypass whatever security measures he’d installed.

So what if, Harry thought, this Mr. Nabler had personally delivered the toy train sets to the homes where these tragedies

had occurred? Assembled the track, carefully taken the trains from their packaging, did all the wiring that connected the

power pack to the rails and an electrical outlet, gave everything a test run to make sure it was working. Then Nabler would

have gained a familiarity with the workings of the household. Know that they had a barbecue, a liking for baths, a normally

friendly dog.

And?

Suppose he had been in those homes. Did he sabotage the barbecue? Put that poor woman in the tub and drop in a live transformer? Drive a dog mad? How the fuck was he supposed to have done those things?

And yet, there was something about him that got under Harry’s skin. The fact that one day, his store was just there . Like he’d come out of nowhere. How these tragedies had all happened since his arrival. The fact that he was, well, at least

judging from the couple of times Harry had met him, kind of fucking weird.

Not what Melissa Cairns would call hard evidence.

Maybe, Harry thought, he was so ill-equipped to solve Angus Tanner’s murder and Walter Hillman’s disappearance that he was

grabbing at fantastical straws. There had to be logical answers to the questions he was puzzling over. He just lacked the

smarts to come up with them.

These weren’t commonalities that meant anything. They were coincidences , plain and simple. Maybe these families struck by tragedy all went to the same grocery store. Maybe they used the same toothpaste,

dined at the same restaurants. And plenty of families could have made purchases at Choo-Choo’s Trains. Nabler was doing a

brisk business the morning of the street sale. Who knew how many trains were chugga-chugging away in homes across Lucknow?

Take Delbert Dorfman. Harry had been in that house later, after the man’s body had been removed from the roof and taken away

in an ambulance. He had spoken with his mother, who had been at a loss to explain his behavior. Her son had no history of

mental illness, was not depressed, did not use, so far as she knew, hallucinogenic drugs. He was not in the care of a psychiatrist.

Sure, Harry thought to himself, he was a racist asshole, but that would seem to have no bearing on how he had taken his own

life.

Baffling, like the other recent events. But that was the only commonality. The Dorfmans had not spent any money at that new shop in town, so far as Harry knew, which kind of shot to hell his theory that Nabler was behind all these occurrences.

Unless Harry missed something.

It wasn’t like he’d actually searched the house. Why would he have? On what pretext?

This was going to nag at him. He had to know .

But as he got into his car, he had two other stops before going back to the Dorfman house. The first was at the Pidgeon home.

Darryl’s wife, Christina, came to the door after Harry rang the bell, opening it only a few inches.

“Oh, Chief Cook,” she said, opening the door wider upon seeing who it was.

“Ms. Pidgeon,” he said, nodding his head. “Forgive my coming unannounced.”

“It’s okay. Come in.”

He followed her into the living room, where they both took a seat. There was no longer a train setup on the dining room table.

He managed a quick glance through the kitchen doorway and saw a sheet of plywood where the sliding glass door once was.

Christina caught him looking and said, “The new door goes in tomorrow. It had to be ordered. It was some special kind of glass

that takes a week or more to get. The insurance people were a problem at first, but that got ironed out.”

“How’s Auden doing?”

“He’s back at school. Everyone’s been very supportive. His teacher’s been great and the kids have been pretty decent. But”—and

she clenched her fists, digging her nails into her palm—“he’s pretty devastated.”

“Of course. I had a couple of quick questions.”

“Um, okay.”

“Did they find out what caused the accident? Why the barbecue ignited?”

She sighed. “The fire department looked into it and the insurance company had an investigator come out, and whatever might

have been wrong with it, they can’t guess what it was. And it was relatively new. Darryl bought it only three or four months

ago and he was always very careful with the gas connections and everything. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Had there been someone here to service it?” he asked.

“No. Not since they brought it from the barbecue place.”

“Okay. Anyone else been in the house lately?”

“Like who?”

“Service people? Someone to fix a washer or dryer or the furnace or anything like that at all?”

Christina thought for a moment. “No.”

“Maybe that train set of Auden’s? Did someone come to the house to put it together?”

“Oh no. Auden and his father did that. It wasn’t very complicated.” Her eyes glistened, and she looked away momentarily. “What

makes you ask?”

“It’s routine. Whenever there’s an accident and the cause is undetermined, we like to know if there’s any likelihood that

it could have been tampered with, improperly maintained, anything like that.”

She shook her head.

“Those trains... I don’t see them on the dining room table this time,” Harry said.

“After what happened to his father, Auden didn’t want to play with them anymore. We boxed them up and put them in the garage.”

“Maybe you could return it.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “The man I bought it from, he was so nice. Auden might want to get it out again someday.”

“Well,” Harry said, putting his hands on his knees and pushing himself up. “I wanted to drop by and see how you were doing. I won’t take up any more of your time.”

She saw him to the door and closed it softly behind him as he went to his car.

So much for that theory, he thought, keying the ignition. Edwin Nabler hadn’t set foot in the Pidgeon house. But that didn’t

mean he was ready to abandon his hunch quite yet.

When he got to Wendell Comstock’s house, there was a moving van backed into the driveway. Two men were walking a couch up

the ramp and into the back of the truck when Harry wandered through the open door of the house. Save for a couple of chairs,

the living room was empty. He found Wendell in the kitchen, using a tape gun to seal a large cardboard box, one of several

on the counter. The table and chairs were gone, making the room seem larger than it normally would have.

“Mr. Comstock.”

The greeting startled the man. He turned, and when he saw the chief he put down the tape gun. “Oh, hello,” he said.

Harry waved a hand at the boxes. “I see you’ve made some big decisions.”

“I can’t be here any longer. Got a sister across the border in New York State, a lead on a job there in Fenelon. Need to put

some distance between me and this place. Something I can help you with?”

“Not... really. Bit of a follow-up.”

He asked Wendell basically the same questions he had asked Christina Pidgeon. Any service calls? Workmen in the house? Deliveries?

No, no, and no.

“Those trains that were set up in the basement? Someone do that for you?”

Another no.

“What are you getting at?” Wendell asked. “You think someone who’d been in the house came back and killed Nadine?”

“Not suggesting anything. Just asking.”

“Because they ruled it a suicide. That’s what the coroner said. You saying something different?” Wendell became agitated.

“Because if you think something different happened, then I have a right to know!”

Harry shook his head definitively. “No, Mr. Comstock. I have no evidence to suggest that.”

“Then what the fuck are you doing here?”

Harry raised a palm. “I’ll let you get on with what you were doing.”

As he walked out of the kitchen, he stepped aside to make way for one of the movers coming up the steps from the basement,

carrying a cardboard box with tide printed on the side. When they were outside, Harry heard one of the movers say to the other, “I think he said that wasn’t

going, but... you know what, just throw it in the truck.”

Neither the Pidgeons nor the Comstocks had been visited by Nabler. This so-called commonality wasn’t proving to amount to

much.

Harry had one last stop planned. He parked out front of the Dorfman house. There was, on the roof, a slightly darker patch

on the shingles where Dorfman’s body was immolated.

His mother, June, looking like someone who’d not slept since Harry’s last time here, came to the door after he rang the bell.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said, and began to cry. “Thank you for trying to save my son.”

She invited him into the kitchen and asked if he would like a drink. Scotch, a beer, vodka?

“Glass of water would be nice,” he said.

June ran the tap until the water was cold, held a glass under it, and put it on the table in front of Harry, then poured two fingers of scotch into a tumbler. Harry had the sense it was not her first drink of the day.

“Carvers say there’s nothing they can do,” she said.

One of the two funeral homes in Lucknow. Carvers & Sons. Always had struck Harry as an unfortunate name for an undertaker.

“Closed casket,” she said. “There was nothing left of his face.”

She knocked back half the drink, her eye going back to the bottle on the counter. “His father’s not even coming, the son of

a bitch. He’s over in Nigeria or Ghana or some other fucking place in Africa. He’s an engineer.”

“He’s away a lot?”

“Gone since January ninth, 1993, when he walked out that door and said he’d had enough, but you’d think the bastard would

come back for the funeral of his own son.”

“Must be tough, dealing with all this yourself.”

“You think?”

“Tell me about Delbert.” Harry already had his own opinion of the man.

The woman’s eyes appeared to glaze over, as though trying to recall whom she’d just been asked about. “I know he had a run-in

with you. He told me about that. You accusing him of hassling that man who runs the gas station. But he was a good boy. Always

good to me. He’d have moved out a long time ago but didn’t want to leave me on my own like his son-of-a-bitch father did.

Did you know he made me tea every morning?”

“I didn’t.”

“A boy who makes his mother tea in the morning has good in him, Chief.”

“You have any idea why Delbert did what he did?”

“What would make anyone do that?”

Harry had no answer.

“Did Delbert have friends?” he asked. “A girlfriend?”

“Not... really.”

“What’d he do in his off time? Interests? Hobbies?”

“I guess that car of his was the closest thing he had to a girlfriend. Always cleaning and polishing it. He watched a lot

of movies. On his VCR downstairs.” She leaned in, lowered her voice to a whisper, even though there was no one else there.

“He had a lot of, you know, sex tapes. He didn’t think I knew. So when he was down there, I didn’t disturb him, if you know

what I mean.”

“Sure,” Harry said.

June downed the rest of her drink, pushed back her chair, and went for a refill. She was unsteady on her feet. “I need to

sit down in the living room,” she said.

“Okay,” Harry said.

He led her out of the kitchen and settled her onto a sofa. She took a sip of her drink, set it on the coffee table, then rested

the back of her head on the top of the cushion.

Harry said, “Would you mind if I looked around?”

Her eyes closed, she waved a hand and said, “Whatever.”

The basement seemed like a good place to start. There was a couch, a rowing machine, bookcases loaded with old sets of encyclopedias,

a large TV, and the videocassette recorder June had mentioned. Atop the TV was a stack of VHS tapes. Three Die Hard movies, some James Bond flicks, and a number of cassettes that had been used to tape programs. Labels taped to the side indicated,

in marker, what shows had been recorded, including Buffy the Vampire Slayer , The X Files , and Beverly Hills 90210 . In a box tucked behind the set Harry found the porn stash.

No trains.

He came back upstairs, checked in on June, who was snoring, and went up to the second floor to find Delbert’s bedroom. There wasn’t much there Harry wouldn’t have expected to find. Some Penthouse magazines, a few paperback novels based on Star Trek , clothing, shoes, a stack of textbooks in the closet left over from high school days.

And again, nothing that might have come from Choo-Choo’s Trains.

Harry told himself he shouldn’t be surprised. His theory was too outlandish to be serious. What Lucknow had endured, he was

coming to accept, was a series of bizarre, tragic events that had nothing to do with one another.

There was a door to the garage off the kitchen. In there, Harry found the red Torino and a VW Golf, presumably the mother’s

car. He hoped she wasn’t doing any driving these days, considering how hard she was hitting the bottle. He made a mental note

to keep an eye out for the car when he was driving around town.

Harry gave both vehicles, which were unlocked, a quick search. Not a caboose to be found.

He checked in on June before leaving. She was out cold, snoring, her head resting at an awkward angle on the cushion. He quietly

slipped out the front door.

Harry was getting back into his car when he noticed something.

Smoke.

It was rising from a basement window of the house next to the Dorfman residence. The base of the window, which consisted of

two panes with a bar down the middle, was at ground level. One pane had been slid behind the other, and the smoke was wafting

out through the screen.

It wasn’t a lot of smoke. But for all Harry knew, if this was the early stages of a fire, those wisps of smoke would soon

turn into billows.

He ran first to the window, went down on one knee, and peered inside, but it was too dark to make anything out. But he did hear something.

Chuffchuffchuffchuffchuffchuff

“Hello!” he shouted.

There was no reply. Just more:

Chuffchuffchuffchuffchuffchuff

He stood, ran around to the front door, and banged on it. When there was no answer after ten seconds, he banged on it again,

this time shouting: “Police!”

A startled woman swung open the door. Before she could say anything, Harry pushed past her.

“How do you get to the basement?” he asked.

“What is this?”

“The basement. Something’s burning.”

“There!”

He was, it turned out, standing by the door that led downstairs. He opened it and was down the steps in seconds, finding himself

in a finished rec room, wood paneling on the walls, a pool table, a TV set, and a couch. At the far end of the room, near

the slightly opened window, was a child sitting cross-legged on the floor.

He stopped short, quickly assessing that there was no fire.

A little girl was sitting within a large oval of toy train track, and whizzing around her at high speed was a steam engine

pulling three cars. Whiffs of smoke were puffing continuously from the locomotive’s chimney, much of it drifting upward and

out the window. In the girl’s hands was a small plastic bottle, about the size of a container of nasal spray. On the side

were the words toy train smoke fluid .

Harry recognized her as the child who’d been at an upstairs window when Delbert Dorfman was smoking himself to death. She stared straight ahead, rocking her body slowly frontward and backward. She was oblivious to Harry’s arrival.

The woman came up behind him. “There’s no fire,” she told him.

He turned slowly. “I’m sorry. I saw smoke outside.”

The woman rolled her eyes at him. “It’s just pretend. It’s some special stuff that goes into the engine. It’s not toxic or

anything. I checked. Allison loves it when the train puffs out the smoke. She finds it calming.”

Harry glanced back at the girl, then said to the mother, “She’s, like, in a trance or something.”

The woman sighed, annoyed. “She has autism. Don’t they teach you police anything?”

Harry sighed. “I’ll let myself out.”

As he moved past the woman, he stopped and asked, “When did you get those trains for her?”

“A week ago,” the woman said. “That new shop in town.”

“He seems to be doing a bang-up business,” Harry said.