A String of Beads (Jane Whitefield, #8)(20)

“Yep,” he said.

“Stay low. When we see the one we want, we’ll run for it. You get aboard, and then I will.”

He looked at her. “Are you sure you don’t want to go first?”

“I’m being sensible. If you get up there first, you’ll be able to pull me up. If I’m there first, I won’t be strong enough to pull you up.”

“What you’re really afraid of is that you’ll make it and I won’t,” he said. “But that’s okay. We’d better get going before that cop catches up and sees us.”

They watched the cars coming past, and then Jane said, “I see one coming. It’s a hopper with an open top. Black. See it?”

“I see it.” Jimmy began to trot, then sped up a little to match the speed of the car, jumped to grasp a vertical bar at the back that formed part of a ladder, and then stepped onto the small level space just before the rear coupling.

Jane ran in right behind him, grasped the bar, and pulled herself up. She clung there for a few seconds, and then they looked at each other and smiled as the engines pulled them around the first curve into deeper woods. “Let’s see if we can get up there on top,” Jane said, and sidestepped to the ladder. She climbed up, stepped over the rim of the hopper, and disappeared.

Jimmy climbed up after her, looked over the rim into the hopper, and climbed in beside her. The hopper was loaded with tiny, coarse stones like the gravel under the railroad ties. It was mounded in the center and shallower along the sides, so if they stayed near the outer areas, they were well hidden. Jimmy gave her a high five, and then lay back to look up at the sky. There were a few wispy white clouds very high up, each like a single brushstroke, but most of the sky was a pure blue.

The train stopped. A moment later, it began to back up. It went about twenty feet, and then stopped with a jolt, as though something had collided with the rear of the train. “They must be adding more cars,” said Jimmy. In a moment, the train started moving ahead again, very slowly overcoming its inertia and immense weight, and making its way up the first hill.

Jimmy started to sit up, but Jane put her hand on his chest. “Please don’t sit up yet. Let’s wait until we’re at least a few miles farther on, where there’s zero chance Tech Sergeant Isaac Lloyd will see us.”

Jimmy smiled. “You certainly have gotten cautious as a grown-up.”

Jane didn’t smile. “Sometimes the difference between sort of safe and absolutely safe is pretty unpleasant, so I lean toward absolutely safe.”

The train climbed the hill slowly, tugging its long string of cars up the gradual incline until it reached a gap in the hillside and sped up to twenty-five, then about thirty-five miles an hour.

Jane and Jimmy both unrolled their bedrolls and spread them on the gravel, their heads slightly inclined toward the mound. They used their packs as pillows and rested from their long, hard run. They passed through areas where the tall trees and the cuts through the hillsides kept them in shade much of the time, and then through rolling farmland. After a half hour they were both asleep, rocked gently in their hopper, hearing only the constant clacking of the wheels and feeling the fresh breeze passing over them.

They woke when the train blew its whistle to signal its approach to the first crossing at the next town, and they remained alert but out of sight until it regained its full speed on the way out of town.

As Jane lay on the gravel bed she decided riding the train was like lying in a boat. The hopper was open to the sky, and traveled at a nearly uniform slow speed, almost never stopping. Even twenty miles an hour felt like a huge luxury after so many days of traveling on foot.

Jane had been trying to keep herself persuaded that her wounded leg had recovered completely from the gunshot. She had certainly proven that it was strong enough to do what she had needed to do. Over a year of hard, steady training had brought back enough strength to travel on foot for two hundred miles or more in hilly country. But she wasn’t so sure the injuries nobody could see had healed.

The four men who had captured her in California had wanted desperately to find out where she had sent James Shelby, the man she had rescued from the courthouse. She would not tell them. For years, whenever she had taken on a new runner, she had promised, “I will die before I reveal where you are to anyone.” To make sure her promise would never be a lie, she had always carried in her purse a cut-glass perfume bottle containing the distilled and concentrated juice of the roots of Cicuta maculata, the water hemlock plant. Swallowing two bites of hemlock root was the traditional Seneca method of committing suicide. The common name for water hemlock in Western New York was cowbane, because now and then a foraging cow would try some. A single root would kill a fifteen-hundred-pound Holstein. But Jane had lost her purse in the fight before she’d been captured.

She’d had no way to kill herself, and so they had gotten the chance to torment her, to inflict enough suffering to make her want to trade James Shelby’s life, not for hers—she’d known they would kill her anyway—but for simple relief, the chance to make the pain stop. She had not told them. She had been preparing for death when her captors realized that Jane had helped victims to escape many times before, and so she had enemies who would pay millions to interrogate her themselves.

The four men who held her were all dead now. But in her dreams sometimes they would come back, and she would have to kill them again. It was as though she hadn’t yet been able to make their deaths final. She knew that the dream meant something. It meant that what had happened to her was not over. This afternoon, if she stretched and ran her own hand up her back from the waist to the shoulder blade, she could still feel the rows of horizontal scars. They had heated steel barbecue skewers with a propane torch and laid them on her back. She knew that in a few years the scars might be level with the rest of her skin, or even be hard to see, but they would never be gone. The puckered scar on her thigh from the bullet would never be smooth again.