Page 116 of Whistle
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 wordstoy train smoke fluid.
Harry recognized her as the child who’d been at an upstairs window when Delbert Dorfman was smoking himself to death. Shestared 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.”
