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Harry was thinking about a cartoon he watched as a kid.

Bugs Bunny has conned gangster Rocky into thinking his moron henchman, Mugsy, has been tormenting him. Mugsy’s tied up in

a closet while Bugs cuts a hole in the floor under Rocky’s chair. Rocky plunges into the basement, and when he finds Mugsy,

there’s a saw planted into his bound hands, courtesy of Bugs.

And Rocky says, before giving Mugsy a whoopin’: “I don’t know how ya’s done it, but I know ya’s done it!”

Which was exactly how Harry felt about Edwin Nabler. Except where Nabler was concerned, not only did Harry not know how he’d

done it, he wasn’t entirely sure what he’d done.

But in each of those households where tragedy had struck recently, there was a train set from Nabler’s store. It was more

than that. There were, at least in some of these instances, freakish parallels. While Auden struggled to make his new Santa

Fe train run, his father could not start his barbecue. As Delbert Dorfman smoked himself to death, a toy train pumped out

smoke only a few feet away. A dog went wild when a whistle button was depressed on a transformer at the Wilford home.

If Harry had felt in over his head over the Tanner murder, he was now at the bottom of the pond with these new developments.

So who was Edwin Nabler?

As a law officer, Harry had access to numerous government data bases. If he wanted to know whether someone had a police record, he entered a name and a date of birth and a Social Security number and waited to see what popped up. And if this grand and glorious Internet that everyone was so excited about turned out be everything it was cracked up to be, the day would come when Harry could find out even more personal information on someone.

And in the wake of September 11 and the Patriot Act that President George W. Bush had pushed through Congress, getting details

on a suspect faced fewer roadblocks than in the past, especially if you dropped even the slightest hint that said suspect

might be involved in a terrorist act.

Harry didn’t have Edwin Nabler’s Social Security number or date of birth, but he did have something to start with. He had

wandered the alley that ran behind the Main Street stores. It was there he found a van with choo- choo’s trains printed on the side. He made a note of the letter and numbers on the green Vermont license plate.

A good place to start.

Back at the station, he logged in to the Vermont Department of Motor Vehicles and entered the plate from Nabler’s truck.

And nothing came back.

Harry wondered whether he had copied it down wrong. Did he mistake a lowercase letter l for the numeral 1? No, he hadn’t, because the plate contained neither. He had written it down clearly, legibly. So he entered

the plate into the system again.

And again, nothing came back.

He put in a call to someone he knew at the DMV. “I got a plate that when I enter it I’m coming up with nothing,” he told the

woman who took his call after identifying himself.

“Let me try it,” she said. He could hear her tapping away on a keyboard. “Chief, there is no such plate.”

“Yes, there is. It’s on the guy’s van.” Harry had encountered stolen plates plenty of times, but never ones that were outright fake.

“Well, there’s no plate that’s been issued by the state of Vermont that matches what you’ve given me. You sure it was a Vermont

plate?”

Harry sighed. “I can read. It said Vermont on the plate. I’ve done this before. And to the best of my knowledge, there’s not

another state in these United States of America that has green plates like Vermont’s.”

“You don’t have to get snippy, sir.”

“Forget the plate. Run a name for me. I want to see if this guy I’m looking at has a driver’s license more legit than his

plate.”

“Go ahead.”

“Edwin Nabler.” He spelled it.

“Middle name or initial?”

“Don’t know.”

More tapping in the background.

“There’s no one in Vermont with a driver’s license by that name,” the woman said.

Harry said nothing.

“Chief?”

“Thanks,” he said, and ended the call.

He tried some non-vehicle-related databases, entering the name Edwin Nabler. When one came up short, he tried another, and

then another.

Until he gave up. As best Harry could tell, there wasn’t a single governmental agency in the US that knew one damn thing about

Edwin Nabler, because Edwin Nabler did not exist.

If he wanted to nail Nabler for something, all he’d have to do is spot him driving that van around town one day, pull him

over, ask for his license and registration, and when he couldn’t come up with anything, bring him in. Ask him who the fuck

he really was.

Harry could do that.

But it wouldn’t get him any further ahead in trying to figure out how—and if—Nabler was linked to those bizarre events. Harry

couldn’t move precipitously. He needed to watch the guy first, see what he was up to, learn his routine.

He’d like to enlist Stick’s help, or maybe Nancy’s. A twenty-four-hour surveillance couldn’t be conducted solo. But what would

he give for a reason? What would Harry say when Stick asked whether Nabler was a suspect? Yeah, well, maybe. And what was

it he was suspected of doing?

It would be a short conversation.

Nor would Harry get authorization to tap Nabler’s phone. Not when all he had was a gut feeling that was impossible to articulate.

Harry was going to have to do this alone, at least for now. And there wasn’t a damn soul he could talk to about this, not

even Melissa, because instead of trying to help him out, they’d be picking up the phone and calling the guys in the white

coats to take him away.

Harry was going to have to do this on his own. He’d start tomorrow.

Through the day, keeping tabs on Edwin Nabler was simple.

When his shop was open, he was there. He had no employees, so it wasn’t like he could take off for a couple of hours without

closing.

In the morning, Harry went into the diner for a take-out coffee and sat on the bench where Gavin had once been a fixture.

He’d wait until the open sign came on in the window of Choo-Choo’s Trains, finish his coffee, and then go about his duties, checking back occasionally

to make sure Nabler hadn’t closed early or taken a long lunch.

What struck Harry was that Nabler didn’t come from some other location when it was time to open up. The man was living in his store, sleeping in his store, presumably in some room at the back. All he’d need, Harry figured, was a bed, a bathroom with a shower, a mini-fridge, and a hot plate. The question was why Nabler chose to live that way.

A man that age—and now that Harry thought about it, he really had no sense of how old Nabler was—would at the very least have

an apartment, wouldn’t he? It was true some people chose to live frugally. They were not concerned with material things. Maybe

Nabler was like that. There was no sign of a significant other. He had what he needed, and no more.

Nabler’s shop had been open for fifteen minutes and, so far, had attracted no customers. Harry drank the last of his coffee,

tossed the paper cup into a nearby trash bin, got in his car, and backed out of the angled spot. Rather than head to the station,

he opted to patrol. Drive around with no particular goal in mind, although he was always hoping he might come upon Gavin,

that maybe he’d been on a bender, had busted into a vacant house, taken a few days to sober up, and finally decided to rejoin

the world. But in his gut, Harry didn’t expect to see Gavin again. Not alive, anyway.

After half an hour of wandering, he made it to the station and dealt with the paperwork piling up on his desk. Figured out

the next three weeks’ worth of schedules for the staff. When it got to be eleven, he walked down the street to the deli and

bought a tuna sandwich with a dill pickle on the side and a Diet Coke and brought it all back and ate lunch at his desk.

At half-past the hour, he got back in his car, found a parking spot on Main Street, and found a spot on a bench across, and

a little ways down, from Nabler’s shop.

Just as he put his butt on the bench, the sign at Choo-Choo’s went from open to closed .

Hello.

If Nabler was closing for lunch, was he staying there to eat it, or heading out? Harry got back into his car, backed out of the spot, drove a block, and turned around, waiting to see whether Nabler’s van would appear from the alley that separated his business from Featherstone’s next door.

After two minutes, the front of the van nosed out onto the street, made a right, and drove up Main. Harry followed, staying

well back. He wasn’t too worried about losing Nabler. This wasn’t like tailing a car in New York City—not that he’d ever done

that, but he could imagine. There wasn’t dense traffic in Lucknow. There weren’t stoplights every block.

Nabler made a right, heading north. Harry stopped for a moment at the turn, waiting for Nabler to get far enough ahead that

he wouldn’t notice Harry in his rearview mirror. Nabler’s van rumbled over the same railroad crossing where Harry had been

delayed the other day. This time, Harry made it through without having to take any chances. But as he crossed the tracks,

he glanced to the west and saw the distant headlight of an approaching freight. Once he was through, he heard the familiar

clang and, looking into his driver’s-door mirror, saw the lights begin to flash and the gates descend.

Up ahead, the white van’s right blinker had come on. Nabler steered the vehicle into the parking lot of the Lucknow Community

Center and Arena, a multifunctional municipal structure where everything from bake sales to hockey games to day care took

place.

What the hell was he doing here? Or was he using the parking lot to turn around, see whether he was being followed?

Harry kept on driving. As he went past, he saw Nabler getting out of the van and heading for the front door. Another hundred

yards on, Harry slowed, did a U-turn, and idled on the opposite shoulder.

Fifteen minutes passed before Nabler’s van reappeared, during which time a multi-engine freight train of mostly tanker cars passed by up ahead. The van headed back in the direction it had come from. Harry followed. Nabler drove back down the alley to the rear of his shop. Harry waited until he saw the sign go back to open , then turned around and went back to the community center.

At the office he found someone he recognized, a woman in her forties named Pam, sitting at an electric typewriter.

“Hey, Pam.”

She looked up and smiled. “Hey, Harry. What’s up?”

“You had a guy in here a little while ago? Engineer’s hat, railroad patches all over his vest?”

“Yeah, right. He met with Susie.” She pointed a thumb over the shoulder. Susie Mince was the general manager. “Just go on

in. She’s not doing anything so important she can’t be interrupted.” She flashed a sly grin.

Harry made his way past Pam’s desk and rapped on the open door of Susie’s office. She looked up from the latest edition of

the Lucknow Leader and smiled when she saw who it was.

“Am I under arrest, Harry?” she asked.

“Dunno. What’d you do?”

“Put someone else’s parking ticket under my windshield so I wouldn’t get one.” She smiled mischievously.

Harry considered that. “Left the cuffs in the car. Back in a sec.”

Susie grinned. “And why are you darkening my door today?”

“That guy who came in to see you? Nabler?”

“That train nut?”

Harry smiled. “That’d be the guy.”

“I could see wearing a getup like that in your store, but going out in public? It’s like having an i’m a nerd flashing sign on your head. You know, last year we rented the arena to an organization holding a huge model train flea market. That was an interesting group, let me tell you. Mostly old men with questionable fashion sense. Tables set up selling everything from old Lionel and American Flyer trains to electronics to books full of railway trivia. I thought they could have done with just one vendor offering deodorant.”

“You mind my asking what Nabler wanted?”

Susie nodded. “I guess I can’t make fun when he’s well-intentioned.”

“How so?”

“He was talking about making a contribution, being a sponsor, something like that. Buying new jerseys or skates or sticks,

say, for the Bobcats.” The Lucknow Bobcats, the local kids’ hockey team. “And putting an ad on the jerseys, or maybe one on

the boards.”

“Oh,” Harry said.

“Kind of goofy, but nice of him. He was saying he’s relatively new here and wanted to make a contribution, be more involved

in the community.”

“What’d you decide on?”

“Nothing yet. I said I’d think about it, see where whatever funds he wanted to donate could be put to the best use. Truth

be told, this whole place could use a coat of paint. I keep telling the mayor and his band of numbnuts we need more funds

for upkeep, but they’ve got their heads so far up their asses it’s like trying to explain France to a chicken. Why?”

“Why, what?”

“Why you asking me about the train geek?”

Harry smiled. “He’s been putting other people’s parking tickets under his wiper so he won’t get one.”

“Bastard,” she said.

Harry spent much of the afternoon going through the annual budget he would present to the town. The community center wasn’t the only municipal operation looking for more money. Harry wanted to hire another person to keep the station running smoothly, plus one more officer. They were stretched too thin to cover the town’s needs twenty-four hours a day.

When it got to be close to five, Harry left the station and returned to his Main Street bench. Choo-Choo’s Trains closed at

five. What did Nabler do once his workday was over?

Harry sat there, glanced at this watch: 4:55 p.m.

Waited. Looked again: 4:58 p.m.

The sign in the window of Choo-Choo’s Trains went from open to closed .

Harry looked at his watch. Exactly 5:00 p.m.

Game on.