On the way to the parking lot, I passed two caretakers in green jumpsuits taking a break from their work. They were leaning against a great oak tree, chugging a couple of tall energy drinks. Nearby was a large hole in the earth and a pile of dirt. I nodded at them, and they returned the greeting. Once they finished, they’d probably take their shovels up the hill to bury my friend.
I pulled out my phone to call a car service. The cemetery was full of bad memories, and I didn’t want to stay a second longer than I needed to. Too many souls, taken much too soon.
Before I could launch the app, I spied two men stepping out of a minivan. As we neared each other on the cemetery walkway, I could see they were both dressed in navy-blue Amtrak uniforms. One was the size of a water buffalo; the other was as thin as a railroad spike. The water buffalo was the Wilmington station manager, Grant. We’d been tight once upon a time. In my Senate days, if I’d been running late for the train, I would give him a call and, magically, the 7:46 a.m. Acela would be held up until I arrived.
The railroad spike I didn’t know.
“How’s it going, Grant?” I said, shaking his hand.
“Helluva lot better than it’s going for Finn.”
“It’s awful, just awful,” I said.
The skinny guy glanced away. There were beads of sweat on his upper lip. Finn was Amtrak—part of my “extended family,” as I liked to say. For these guys, though, Finn was family. Finn Donnelly’s membership in the railworker brotherhood ran deep. His grandfather had been a railworker, dynamiting canyons and laying rail for the old Trans-Atlantic Coast line during the Great Depression. Finn’s father had been a railworker as well, working the yards in Chicago for thirty-five years.
I looked up the pathway, following it with my eyes to the tent propped up over Finn’s coffin. “The service was at two. It’s over now, but there’s some family left up there.”
“We’ll wait until they leave,” Grant said. “Don’t want to cause a scene.”
“I’m sure it won’t be a problem—”
“We’ll wait.”
I nodded. Grant probably knew Finn’s family mostly through Finn’s stories. When you know somebody secondhand, it can be a shock to the system to meet them in person. Especially if the link between you has been severed.
The skinny guy whispered something to Grant that I couldn’t make out, and then he returned to the van. Grant didn’t say anything.
“Your friend, he’s…”
“An engineer,” Grant said quickly. “Al.”
Al. Alvin…Alvin Harrison. The engineer who’d been driving the train that hit Finn, according to the follow-up story I’d read in the News Journal earlier that morning. No wonder they wanted to avoid the family.
“How’s he taking it?” I asked.
“How would you take it?”
I stared back at the man in the passenger seat of the minivan. Alvin looked broken, haunted. Even though he hadn’t been responsible for Finn’s being on the tracks, he was being put through the wringer just the same. It was impossible to say how many test tubes of blood had been drawn from him, how many interviews he’d been submitted to. While the rest of us were trying to cope with losing Finn, Alvin was trying to cope with life under the microscope. I knew a little something about living under a microscope. Even if you’ve done nothing wrong, it’s easy to start believing you were somehow to blame.
“Listen, Grant, you knew Finn better than me. Ever get a sense that he was…depressed?”
Grant narrowed his hawklike eyes. “You think it was suicide.”
“I’m sorry if I misspoke.” I don’t know why I’d asked the question. I didn’t need to be digging around in other people’s business. It’s just that I’d made that promise to Grace.
Grant said, “It’s the first question people ask when somebody steps in front of a train. You know why?”
I shook my head.
“Because the answer is almost always yes,” he said. “There are plenty of other ways to kill yourself, but nothing’s more final than stepping in front of a train. Take some pills, there’s a chance you wake up. Hang yourself, someone could cut you down. But the Acela Express doing one-fifty?”
I waited for him to continue. After a few moments, he said, “Finn’s wife was sick—real sick. He never said a word to anyone. Not a word. I imagine that takes a lot out of a man. Was he depressed? How could he not be?”
Losing family was enough to wreck you. If it didn’t, there was a chance you’d already been wrecked.
“But he never would have killed himself,” Grant said. “Not like that.”
“How can you be so sure? You just said—”
“I said the man was depressed. Not in the right state of mind, or however you want to say it. That doesn’t mean he would hurt a fellow railroad man. People who step in front of trains because it’s the easy way out…they’re not thinking about how their actions affect the engineer who’s driving. It’s not even on their radar. But Finn would have known. He wasn’t going to burden anyone with his death. Not one of his own brothers or sisters at Amtrak.”
“I killed him,” a voice from behind us said.
Alvin had left the van. He was staring through me with dark eyes.
Those eyes scared me. I quickly glanced away.
“I was the one who killed him,” he said. There was no inflection in his voice. “He was lying on the tracks. I should have seen him sooner. I should have—”
“No, Al, we’ve been over this,” Grant said.
Alvin was shaking now. “I keep replaying it, over and over, trying to remember if I saw him twitch…Did he move, or was that just the rumbling of the tracks shaking his body? Was it—”
“Stop,” Grant said. He braced Alvin by the shoulders. “There was nothing you could have done. Nothing. We don’t know why he was on the tracks. We’ll probably never know. You braked as hard as you could. If you’d braked any faster, the train could have derailed. Think about how many lives you saved.”
Alvin closed his eyes and tilted his head toward the sky.
Grant pulled me aside. “This was a bad idea. I should get him home. He’s had a rough couple of days.”
“I can imagine,” I said, though of course I couldn’t. Nobody could.
“You need a ride?” Grant asked.
I started to say no, but I sensed there was more Grant wanted to tell me. Or maybe that was just wishful thinking.
“Where you headed?”
“Dropping Al off, then I’m heading on down to the station to finish out my shift,” Grant said. “I can drop you at your place or—”
“The station’s fine.”
“Catching a train somewhere?”
I climbed into the backseat. “Something like that.”
He eyed me in the rearview mirror. Getting dropped off at the station wasn’t going to get me any closer to home, but it might just net me another puzzle piece or two. I had more questions about Finn, questions that I thought Grant might be able to answer. On the drive to Alvin’s, however, neither of us said another word on account of the shattered man sitting in the passenger seat. Alvin’s quiet sobs filled the dead air. I kept waiting for Grant to turn the radio on, to drown out the haunted noises. He never did.