Page 9

Eight

Anna waits in her room, watching the clock, her muscles coiled in both anticipation and dread.

For the thousandth time, she tells herself she’s doing the right thing, that nothing will go wrong, that in twelve hours this will all be worth it.

But then a nagging, negative part of her brain tells her—also for the thousandth time—that she’s not, that something will, that there’s no guarantee justice awaits at the end of the line.

But then Seamus knocks on her door and Anna stops thinking altogether. Instinct takes over.

“It’s time,” Seamus announces when she opens the door.

“Is everyone else off the train?”

Anna knew none of the invitees would willingly board an empty train, so she arranged for the crew members she’d paid off to act like they were going about their business until a minute before departure.

As for the passengers, they were friends and family members of the crew.

Anna made a point of throwing a little money their way as well.

“They are,” Seamus says. “I swept the train from front to back myself. It’s just you, me, and the six people in the lounge.”

Anna smooths her dress before doing the same to her hair. As she lifts the briefcase from the chair by the window, she says, “What about the wrinkle?”

“You’ll find out soon enough.”

The interior lights of the train flicker again as they leave the room, spilling into a corridor that alternates between darkness and light. Anna spends each millisecond of darkness to monitor the snowfall outside. Slow, but steady.

“Everything will be fine,” Seamus says. When the lights return to full brightness, he adds, “See?”

The first-class lounge is the car directly in front of theirs. So close that Anna can hear a murmur of voices and the unexpected sound of the piano. Knowing all six of them are inside, mere feet away, makes her suddenly queasy. When the train sways, she moves with it, practically swooning.

“You okay?” Seamus asks as he takes the briefcase from her hands.

Anna shakes her head. “Not in the least.”

But she needs to be. She can’t let nerves get the best of her. Not now. Not after so much planning and so much expense. Still outside the lounge, Anna pauses and closes her eyes, not yet ready to see the others through the circular window in the door.

In that darkness, she can only think of her father, her mother, Tommy. She even spares a thought for Aunt Retta, her father’s only sister, who’d loved him so much his fate had driven her insane.

They’re gone now.

All because of the six people on the other side of that door.

Anna inhales, exhales, opens her eyes. Through the window, she sees five of the six. Three have their backs turned to her. The other two are in profile. The sixth remains hidden behind them, seated at the piano, playing an inappropriately jaunty tune.

She’d often wondered how it would feel to see them again.

Long, sleepless nights in which every possible scenario from hurt to hate to rage stormed her thoughts.

But nothing conjured up by her imagination came remotely close to the reality of finally laying eyes on the people who had destroyed her life.

That hollow thudding in her chest? A surprise.

As is the heat coursing through her veins.

A fiery burn hotter than any fever. But the real shock is the memories that suddenly appear, many of them not unpleasant.

She knows these people, some better than others.

A few are practically strangers, met once or twice.

Others she had considered family. After years of rage, Anna assumed any trace of fondness she’d once felt for them was long gone.

Yet a small bit apparently remains, and now it rises to the surface, bubbling up among the anger and grief.

When she spots Edith Gerhardt, for instance, all Anna can think about is how, when she was younger, Edith had called her Schatzi.

Her little treasure.

Spoken when she woke Anna in the mornings and when she kissed her forehead at bedtime.

Edith, who had fed Anna, doted on her, put Band-Aids on her skinned knees, and once even threatened to break the arm of Matty Bernard, who had been picking on her at school.

A sign, Anna now knows, that despite her grandmotherly appearance, a darkness lurked within Edith.

As for Sally Lawrence, who in Anna’s mind will always remain Sal, there was no such darkness.

Not even a hint of it. In her view, Sal was perfect from the moment she became her father’s secretary at age eighteen.

As a girl, Anna had loved visiting her father at the office because it meant spending time with Sal.

When she grew older, precariously walking that tightrope between child and teenager, Anna considered Sal a surrogate older sister, confiding in her about things she’d never tell her mother. Boys, puberty, bras.

To young Anna, Sal was everything her mother was not.

Independent, opinionated, seemingly in no hurry to settle down or settle for less.

Even though Anna had adored her mother, Sal proved to her there was more to life than gowns and glamour and being a perfect hostess.

If there was any darkness evident in Sal’s behavior, Anna had completely missed it.

She assumes that’s why Sal’s and Edith’s betrayals hurt more than the others. She had once loved both women, which makes her subsequent hatred all the more acute.

Make no mistake, though. Anna hates everyone in that lounge, even those she doesn’t know well or only in passing.

Her experiences with Judd Dodge and Herb Pulaski, for instance, were limited to the annual Christmas party her father threw for employees.

God, he loved those parties. Anna did, too, because it brought out the best in her parents.

Her father spent weeks planning them, going all out to make sure everyone got into the holiday spirit.

He’d spike the punch bowl and hang mistletoe and hire a big band to play jazzed-up versions of carols.

Each year, Anna’s mother bought a new dress for the occasion.

Something satiny and sparkling that caught the light when she inevitably got up to dance.

Anna would watch, rapt, as she put on lipstick, rouged her cheeks, applied perfume to her neck and wrists.

She’d then offer Anna a single spritz before taking her and her brother downstairs for the festivities.

Some of Anna’s fondest memories were of Edith tucking her into bed as the party continued downstairs.

Snug under the covers, she’d fall asleep to the sounds of swing music and clinking champagne glasses, the lingering scent of Chanel No. 5 still on her wrist.

When Anna first met Judd Dodge at one such party, he proclaimed he was a bit of an amateur magician and proceeded to make a candy cane suddenly appear in his previously empty right hand.

A dazzled Anna accepted it in awe. From that point on, Judd insisted on calling her Candy Cane whenever they met, and Anna insisted on seeing another magic trick, even after she should have outgrown such things.

Judd always obliged. His last trick, at the final Christmas party, was to turn a sprig of holly into a rose at full bloom, which he presented to Anna with a chivalrous bow.

Herb Pulaski was equally memorable—for all the wrong reasons. Anna always felt a shiver of apprehension when he entered the party, brought on by the way he took in the surroundings with envy so palpable it bordered on disgust.

At that last-but-no-one-knew-it-yet party, Herb had backed Anna into a corner, his breath hot and stinking of scotch.

“You have no idea how lucky you are,” he said.

“No idea at all. Nice house. Nice clothes. But without your rich daddy, you’d have nothing.

Just like me.” It was Tommy who’d eventually come to the rescue, guiding Herb away with delicate tact.

As for Lt. Col. Jack Lapsford, Anna knows him the least, having only met the man once.

When he came to dinner to discuss the railroad’s importance to the war effort with her father, she had found him haughty, self-important, and dreadfully dull.

Ironic, considering how that dinner set the stage for everything that came after.

Then again, maybe it didn’t. Anna suspects that, had that dinner not taken place, her family’s downfall would have happened anyway.

Kenneth Wentworth would have seen to it.

His father’s chief competitor was, after all, the man behind everything.

The one who made all the plans and pulled all the strings.

It’s why, of all the people involved, Anna hates him the most. And it’s why she’s relieved that Kenneth Wentworth, still seated at the piano behind the others, is the one person she can’t yet see.

She fears what she might do once he comes into view.

The cluster of five starts to break up. Sal moves to one of the plush chairs near the bar, looking startlingly different than Anna remembers.

The unadorned realness she had admired as a girl has been replaced by cool elegance.

Fancy dress, blond updo. Sal wears neither comfortably, looking instead like someone hiding behind a disguise.

Edith, on the other hand, hasn’t changed a bit.

Watching her drift to the opposite side of the car, Anna is struck by a memory from her childhood.

Shopping at Gimbels and getting lost in the holiday crowd, prompting several minutes of panic.

But then she heard her name being called, turned around, and saw Edith across the sales floor.

Anna beamed, then, because she knew she was lost no more.

Anna pushes the memory aside, focusing on the three men whose backs had been turned to the door. Lapsford, Pulaski, and Dodge. They part, finally revealing the man at the piano.

Anna freezes at the sight of him. In that stillness, she chokes out a gasp.

Instead of Kenneth Wentworth, the man idly playing the piano is his son.