Page 66 of Whistle
He blinked a few times. “Yeah, okay, okay. I’ll leave it for now.”
“These trains,” Harry said. “You’ve always had these?”
“No, I bought everything this week. A few days ago. Nadine... she was really taken by them. I thought she’d think they were stupid but she liked them. She helped assemble the buildings and everything.”
“Where did you buy all this?”
“That store on the main street. Oh God, I don’t know what I’m going to tell her family.”
Harry thought about that barbecue accident. That birthday gift for young Auden.
And then it hit Harry for the first time. The conversation he’d had with Nabler at the sidewalk sale. Nabler had known his son’s name was Dylan.
Harry was sure he hadn’t told him.
Part III
Annie
Twenty-Two
A little more than a week after moving into their summer place, things were really starting to click for Annie and Charlie.
She was generally up an hour or more before Charlie, in the kitchen by seven, putting a pod into the Nespresso machine, dropping a slice of whole wheat bread into the toaster while her coffee percolated, then taking her drink and her toast and jam to the table and savoring it while she read theNew York Timeson her tablet.
She and Charlie were only using one end of the kitchen table because half of it was covered with five hundred jigsaw puzzle pieces that, when done, would be a cover fromTheNew Yorkermagazine—this one featuring dozens of dogs in various comical activities—that she had brought with her from the city. So far, she’d only managed to put together the edges and part of the masthead (“The” and “ew” and “ork”) and turned all the other pieces face up, clustering them by color. During the pandemic, she and John had ordered several puzzles to get them through their periods of isolation, but, after completing only one, had sworn off them. John said being hunched over the dining room table for hours on end was killing his back, and Annie began to feel she was wasting her whole day even when she had nothing else pressing.
But out here with nothing else to do, she was willing to give the pastime another chance, and so far enjoyed it.
When she heard Charlie stirring, she would take a break from reading theTimesand set a place for him. Pour him a bowl ofcereal, get the milk and orange juice from the fridge. Once he was down, they would discuss what they wanted to do that day. Go into Fenelon? Drive around randomly and see what they might discover? Hang out on the porch and read their books?
No, no, and no, Charlie would reply.
He had a project of his own that was as engrossing as his mother’s jigsaw. Charlie was building an empire.
It had been several days since he had discovered, in the shed out back of the house, an old Tide detergent box filled with toy trains. And not just trains, but track and building kits and little trees. He’d told his mother he’d been racing past the shed on his bike when he decided, on a whim, to try that padlock one more time. He said he’d given it a good yank and it came apart. Just like that.
“I think it was rusted or something,” Charlie said.
The box had been too heavy to carry, so he had been bringing the contents into the house a few items at a time. Before letting him get too far along in the process, Annie had put in a call to the leasing agent, Candace, to ask who the toys belonged to and if they should be returned to their rightful owner.
It was the first Candace had heard anything about a box of toy trains.
“Finders keepers,” she said. “Let your boy have fun with them.” There was a pause, and then she said, “Would today be good if I dropped by with Stacy? She’s dying to show you her drawings.”
“Why don’t we revisit that later in the week,” Annie said. “We’re still settling in.”
Charlie had been awaiting the results of the conversation anxiously. “Go nuts,” his mother said, and he shrieked with delight. He had already brought in so many items from the box, including the heaviest ones like the engine and the transformer, that Annie was able to carry it from the shed to the house.
She put it down on the porch, so there would be room to empty the contents, spread them out, and see just what they had.
“What a haul,” Annie said. “That was some dumb luck, that lock falling apart.”
“I know, right?” said Charlie as he examined the pieces of track and started to arrange them on the porch without connecting them, seeing what kind of configuration he could make.
“Looks like all this stuff has been in the box a long time,” Annie said. “Hope the engine still works.”
“It will.”
