“I’m a school administrator,” she told me. She addressed the train instead of me, but that was fine.
“Oh, such a small world,” I said, so chatty. “My little daughter, Tassie, she’s quite the student, and a piano prodigy, and well, we’re just ready to look into schools. Walter and I are thinking private. And there are so many fabulous ones in Boston. Her trust fund of course will pay for all of it, so we’re—”
“Clarissa Madison,” she said. She had turned, and was now looking at me in a different way.
“Oh, is that the name of a school?” I pretended to misunderstand.
“No dear, that’s my name,” she said. “And you are?”
“Looking for a private school.” I pretended to misunderstand again.
“Ladies and gentlemen!” A man’s voice interrupted my playacting. A stocky guy in a blue uniform — how many of those were on this train? — clapped his hands out in front of him, trying to get the passengers’ attention. By this time, some had scattered off the blankets, probably the ones with shoes, and strayed farther into the woods or drifted along the length of the train, curious or frightened or bored. Or looking for phone signals.
The alarm from the train had stopped. Good.
I gestured toward the porter. “This sounds promising,” I said.
“Better be,” Cru — I guess, Clarissa, said.
I chortled to myself. I’d been close on the name.
Those of us who responded to him moved closer, a huddled group of displaced bleary-eyed passengers in various rumpled stages of haphazard clothing and bedhead hair. People mostly keep to themselves on trains, knowing if you strike up a conversation with the wrong person, they’ll talk your ear off from here to Peoria. And too much physical scrutiny is rude, and likely to get you an accusatory look in return. But here we all were, this random pod of passengers or, what Kurt Vonnegut might have called a granfalloon — a group of people connected by a thing that doesn’t really matter. We’d all go home, sooner or later, and this would be a hazy memory, an adventure in some of the retellings, fraught and dangerous. In others, an amusing entr’acte, an unexpected but insignificant detour.
“Ladies and gentlemen!” the porter called out again. We looked at him, I at least was, trying to make sense of this all, suddenly in the woods, strangers on a train, immersed in this shared experience. Blah, blah, the porter said, please be patient, we’re checking, making sure, all fine.
Bottom line, fifteen minutes.
The crowd dispersed like Brownian molecules, aimless and adrift. Not me. I stuck by Cruella. I’d considered a plan, actually thought it through, that I would casually suggest we take a walk to see the lake. Why not on a summer night, we’d never get to see it otherwise. We’d talk about my (imaginary) Tassie and her trust fund and then I’d get her to spill about the turmoil at Rotherwood, and then I’d get some nugget of usable info and call Shayla when I got back to Boston. Maybe even anonymously.
I was just tired enough, I thought, as we stood there, silent in the throng, to imagine I could also lure her to the lake, knock her out, push her in the water, like, forever, and then pretend I’d never seen her. Would they even do a head count before the train pulled away? And even if they did, how could it be my fault? Poor Clarissa, must have lost her way in the dark.
And Shayla would be saved by the vagaries of mortality.
That plan did have a few complications, morality for one. And the law. And the unlikelihood of murder being the most reasonable solution to save a person I didn’t even know.
“You know, Clarissa,” I finally said. “I’m not really an actuary.”
“Oh?” She seemed infinitely uninterested in that. Apparently not being an actuary is just as boring as being one.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m actually, well, what my staff calls a fixer.”
“I see,” she said, which from her tone I was obviously supposed to translate to I don’t care. Then she did. “Why did you tell me about — do you really have a daughter?”
I took another deep breath, spooled it out. “I’m so embarrassed. No. That was a lie.”
I went on, not looking at her, but we were both observing the random walks of the passengers, who now reminded me of those zombie movies, faceless pale creatures in tattered clothing, lurching through the forest on the determined hunt for brains. Or in this case, trains.
“I’m actually a public relations person, someone who can help harried executives when they have a particularly thorny issue in their office, something they’d like to get accomplished without letting the public know they had a hand in it. All very confidential, of course, but sometimes, things being how they are, there needs to be a fine hand making sure things go as they... should.”
Oh, so now she was interested. Tentatively, carefully, interested, just a quarter turn toward me.
“I see,” she said.
The lights on the train all came back on with a flare and a loud hum of power. The crowd cheered, inspired to delight by the promise of bathrooms and light and shoes, and maybe a massive glass of wine. Of cell service, and internet, and normalcy.
And the light dimmed again, and the crowd sighed, as one, and stood staring at the train, as if their collective longing would power it up again.
I pursed my lips, seeming to make a momentous decision, even though it was almost too dark to see each other clearly. “So, Clarissa, I’m embarrassed to tell you this. But — here we are, and it doesn’t seem fair if I keep this a secret.” I added some optimistic enthusiasm to my voice. “And maybe this is all for the best. If not for this apparently false alarm, we’d probably never have met.”
“You’ve lost me,” she said. She looked at the screen of her phone, still an opaque black rectangle, then stashed it into the waistband of her yoga pants.
“Clarissa? Full disclosure. My roomette is next to yours, and apparently you were on the phone this evening. Tonight? Before the alarm?”
Oh, yeah. Now I had her full attention.
“And?”
“And I heard every word.”
“You listened to—”
“It was impossible not to, I’m afraid. The walls must be — well, who knows, but yes. ‘The board doesn’t know’? And ‘he’s a lush,’ and well.” I shrugged. “‘Shayla.’”
It would have been funny, really, if it hadn’t been the middle of the night in the woods outside of wherever Pennsylvania, with a massive broken train in front of us and a scatter of zombies loitering around us. I guess it was still funny.
Her chin came up, and even in the gloom I could see her wheels turning.
“I can help you,” I said. “As a professional, I can tell you it’s silly, and even — and this is just between us, trust me — misguided for you to take matters into your own hands. Whatever the matters are. Why get your hands dirty? Tell me the situation. I’ll make it all work. And you, with a clear conscience, can go on with your life. Without Shayla in the way.”
Her eyes got wide, then narrow. Strange to watch her think, in the random half-light of the emergency lighting and the occasional bloom of moonlight from behind the drifting clouds.
“Do I sound melodramatic? I apologize,” I said. “It’s not like you’re planning, you know,” I paused. “To actually harm her. Physically.”
“Of course not,” she said.
“Okay, then. You’d simply like her to do whatever she does, shall we say, somewhere else. Just guessing here. She’s good at it, maybe too good?”
Clarissa nodded.
“And — to give you deniability, don’t say anything — it doesn’t appear that whoever is protecting her — the lush? Has any inclination to change the situation himself.”