Page 15 of With a Vengeance
Absorb your pain.
Control your hatred.
Hone your stillness until it becomes dagger sharp.
The people who flail and rage rarely accomplish anything. But those who control their emotions even in the most fraught of situations?
They get results.
So Anna pushes the memories away and refocuses on the task at hand.
“By now, you’ve recognized each other,” she continues. “Maybe you’ve even had a chance to chat a bit. Likely long enough tosuspect that you’ve been brought here under false pretenses. That suspicion is correct. The reason for this journey is simple. I’m here to get justice. Because I have irrefutable proof that the six of you are responsible for destroying my family.”
Indignant murmurs rise from the crowd, muted by the rattle-clack of the train in motion and a forlorn toot of the locomotive’s horn as they approach a strip of highway. The crossing is heralded by a clanging train signal that flashes red as it slides past the lounge windows. The lights and the noise feel to Anna like an alarm, warning her that there’s no predicting how others in the car will react to her announcement. They might be furious. They might try to fight. They might even try to kill her. Maybe in the next second or two. She drops her hand to her side, ready to reach for the knife under her dress.
Once they clear the crossing, Anna takes a deep breath and continues.
“On June seventeenth, 1942, a troop transport train left Philadelphia on its way to Fort Benning in Georgia. The train, from locomotive to caboose, was brand new, manufactured by my father’s company specifically to transport troops and supplies. Onboard were more than two hundred American soldiers off to fight in the war, including my brother, Thomas Adam Matheson.”
Saying her brother’s full name wallops Anna with another memory. She and her parents on the platform, clinging to Tommy, silently begging him not to go, even though they knew he would. He enlisted the day he turned eighteen, eager to be on the right side of history. No amount of crying and pleading would have kept him from getting on that train.
“Be good, Annie,” he whispered in Anna’s ear after kissing her on the cheek. “Take care of Mom and Dad for me.”
Then he was off, leaping onto the train as it lurched into motion with a steam-filled gasp. Before disappearing inside, Tommylingered in the doorway to wave good-bye. Even though she assumes her memory is colored by what happened later, Anna can’t recall a moment when her brother had looked more handsome, more dashing, morealive.
It was the last time she saw him.
Anna swallows hard, bracing herself for what comes next, forcing out the words she needs to say.
“What no one on that train knew was that the engine in the locomotive had been designed to fail. Its construction was purposefully shoddy, the materials it was made of weak. The iron couldn’t contain the sustained force it took to pull a fully loaded train hundreds of miles. In short, it was a bomb. And outside Raleigh, North Carolina, it went off.”
Anna pauses, overwhelmed by images of the resulting disaster. The charred earth, the derailed train, the rail cars ripped open like sardine cans. For a time, pictures of the tragedy were everywhere, inescapable. A cruel reminder of what she had lost.
“Thirty-seven men were killed in that explosion,” she says. “Including my brother. All that remained of him was a piece of charred uniform. Investigators believe the impact of the explosion ripped it from his body.”
A sob bubbles up from deep in Anna’s chest. Thinking about Tommy still does that to her. Every damn time. He was so young, so kind, so vibrant. Even when they were young, at ages when most brothers and sisters battled for their parents’ attention, he never once let her feel less than extraordinary.
On Anna’s birthday, Tommy would make her a bouquet of paper flowers, each one more elaborate than the year before. When she was six and fell from a tree and broke her arm, Tommy wore a makeshift sling so she wouldn’t feel like an outcast. He took her to movies, taught her how to drive, always took the smaller piece of dessert so she could have the bigger.
Growing up, Anna had tried to repay him with kindnesses of her own, often coming up short. Tommy never seemed to mind, which made the last thing he asked of her all the more gutting.
Take care of Mom and Dad for me.
Anna promised that she would—and then she had failed spectacularly.
“I loved my brother,” she says. “I miss him every day. He was good to me. He was good to several of you.”
She gives Sal and Edith pointed looks. Other than Anna, they’re the only two people in the lounge who knew Tommy well, who had watched him grow and flourish. They’d been the ones to comfort Anna during his funeral, her parents too shell-shocked by grief to pay attention to their now-only child. She remembers standing between Sal and Edith, weeping, as an empty coffin was lowered into the ground. Now she stares at the women, wondering if they remember, too.
If they do, they don’t show it. Edith looks past her, focused on the door behind Anna, her expression stoic. Sal, on the other hand, stares at the floor.
“Immediately following the tragedy, blame fell to my father.” Anna absently touches the silver locomotive pinned to her dress. Because it’s one of the few things that remains of her father, she treats it like a talisman. Touched rarely, and only when she needs extra strength.
“You all know what happened after that.”
She skips the reminder because she doesn’t want to be reminded herself. Not that she could ever forget the events that occurred two weeks after Tommy was laid to rest. First, both federal and military authorities came to the house to question her father. They did the same the next day with all his employees. The day afterthat,they raided the house for evidence, leaving with an armful of incriminating documents and her father in handcuffs.
Anna will never forget how bedraggled he looked. Hair askew, graying stubble on his chin, his bare feet shoved into the first pair of shoes he could find. Polished black loafers, the patent leather shining in the morning sunlight as he was hauled away. Nor will she forget his last, desperate words.
