Before She Was Found(90)

Far down the tracks the six-thirty train comes into view. Right on time.

The earth shivers beneath Thomas’s feet and the clickity-clack of the approaching train crescendos and Thomas has to raise his voice. “You’re wrong about Jordyn. She’s a good girl.”

“A good girl?” Dover cries, his face so close that Thomas can smell the Cold Press Ale on his breath. “I’ve watched your granddaughter bully and tease Cora Landry all year long and for some reason she’s accusing me of stabbing a twelve-year-old girl! I’m a teacher, for God’s sake.”

The headlight from the oncoming engine floods the train yard and Dover’s face is distorted with disbelief, rage. “Jordyn was only pretending to be Cora’s friend. Now she’s trying to blame me.

“What did I ever do to her?” Dover steps toward him with each word, forcing Thomas backward until his heels bump against the iron rails. Thomas cries out, his left knee buckling. Sent off balance on the loose gravel he falls and lands on his back perpendicular across the tracks. The men lock eyes, both registering first shock then fear as the train inches closer. Thomas reaches for Dover’s hand, the slick fabric of his down coat slipping through his fingers as he tumbles and falls backward onto the tracks.

His spine strikes the metal rails and the breath is knocked from his lungs, momentarily stunning him. He struggles to sit up but his coat is snagged on a rusty railroad spike. He looks to Jordyn’s teacher for help and for a minute Thomas is afraid that John Dover will simply allow him to be crushed by the train. Afraid that he will just walk away. Suddenly Dover steps into view and is standing over him, his mouth open in a twisted scream.

“Get up!” Dover shouts, his voice drowned out by the screech of the train. “Get up!” Dover reaches down and grabs onto Thomas’s legs and tries to pull him from the tracks but his coat is hopelessly ensnared. “Please.” Dover furtively glances to the right and at the coming engine. “Please get up!” He stands upright and waves his hands over his head, trying to get the conductor’s attention. The train doesn’t slow but continues its steady progress toward them.

Again, Thomas tries to right himself but he is pinned to the tracks like an insect mounted on a specimen card. Dover steps over the tracks and bends over to wrestle with the zipper on Thomas’s coat. His fingers are stiff from the cold and the zipper doesn’t budge. “Please, God, please,” Dover breathes as he tries to unthread Thomas’s arms from the coat and pull it over his head.

The world goes black and he feels like his arms are being torn from his body. A deafening roar thunders through his ears. Thomas thought that he’d be terrified. That death would be just about the hardest thing he’d face. But now he knows it’s not the hardest. Losing Betsy, being separated from Tess, what’s happening to Jordyn are all the hardest. The hardest in different ways. He can’t leave them, not when they need him the most.

But dying doesn’t sound so bad, he thinks, and not so scary. Maybe Donny would come home. Maybe even Randy would come home to take care of Jordyn and Tess, take over the bar. He’d like to have seen that. Thomas is tired, so very weary. He feels Dover give him one final yank as the train brays its arrival, low and insistent, filling Thomas’s ears with its somehow soothing, dizzying wails.



Case #92-10945


Excerpt from the journal of Cora E. Landry


Apr. 15, 2018

I tried to cancel the overnight. I don’t want to do this. I tried everything. I told my mom I was sick. But she told me that I’d used that excuse one too many times. She said that it was good that I was spending time in the land of the living again. If she only knew.

Violet and Jordyn will be here in a little bit. It makes me sick that I’m going to have to spend the next few hours with them and I can’t believe that the first time I see Joseph they are going to be there, too. I’m nervous. Scared.

What if he doesn’t show up? What if he does? What if he does and he doesn’t pick me?



Beth Crow


Thursday, April 19, 2018


Max and I spent another night sleeping in the family waiting area but we were both so tired at the time we could have slept standing up. Once Dr. Gideon discharges Violet we can all go home.

On the couch next to me Max is scrolling through his cell phone while I mentally try to balance my nearly nonexistent checking account. “Mom.” Max turns to me. His eyes are wide and his face is a sickly shade of white.

“What?” I ask and he holds out his phone to me. I take it and look at the screen to find a series of text messages from a group of kids. Only Nikki’s and Clint’s names are familiar.

“Oh, my God,” I whisper and thrust the phone back into Max’s hands.

“What’s happening?” Max asks me, sounding like a small boy.

“I don’t know,” I say, pulling him in for a hug, and for the first time in a very long time my son doesn’t pull away from me.



Text Message Exchange
Between Nikki Dobric, Max Crow, Clint Phelps and Ryan Moren


Thursday, April 19, 2018


Nikki: Someone got hit by a train at the old depot
Max: Does anyone know who it was?

Clint: I heard it was the old guy who owns Petit’s
Max: Jordyn’s grandpa? What happened?

Ryan: I heard he jumped in front of the train because of what Jordyn did