Chapter 4
It stood on rusty broken rails which were nearly covered with dead leaves.
—Gertrude Chandler Warner, The Boxcar Children
Dancy watched the car drive off. “Thanks.” She tossed the word at him as casually as if she were pushing away one of her hair
extensions and turned toward the house.
“Not that way.” Clint jabbed his finger in the general direction of a path across from the driveway. “Over there.”
She regarded him dubiously, stuck her nose in the air, then picked her way into the trees without once letting those sharp
heels sink into the woodchip path he’d laid a few weeks ago. The smell of pine and leaf mulch, the rustle of squirrels, the
dappled light coming through the aspen and sugar maples always made him feel as if he were in church. But not today.
They reached a small clearing, and she came to a dead stop in front of him. “You’re kidding.”
“Welcome to my guesthouse.”
The weathered, red wooden caboose with BNSF on the side, barely visible in faded white paint, sat on a set of tracks that
led nowhere. The Burlington Northern Santa Fe caboose had a cupola on top. There were four windows on each side, including
the small one in the cupola, and freshly painted black metal platforms at each end. “I’m sure you’ll be comfortable,” Clint
said. “There’s a bed inside and a compostable toilet. All the comforts of home.”
She stared at the train car. “Only if your home is a squatter’s shack!”
Her distress made him smile. “Now you’ve hurt my feelings.”
“What is this thing? Other than the obvious.”
“The previous landowners wanted to restore it but didn’t get far. They left it on the property, and I’ve been working on it
when I get a chance.”
“Why?”
“Why not?” He turned away. “It’s unlocked. If you need anything, be sure not to tell me.”
His conscience eased, he headed back to the solitude of his house.
Dancy had to hoist herself onto the car’s rear platform, since the caboose’s steps were missing. The door of the caboose squeaked
when she opened it. As she stepped inside, she was hit with the smell of paint and varnish. She hooked her sunglasses in the
neck of Clint’s T-shirt and drank in the perfect simplicity of it all.
The place was spartan, but bigger than it looked from outside.
A thin coat of white primer covered the planked walls and ceiling.
The living area had two bare windows on each side, a worn couch, and a matching easy chair.
A square table with a pair of Windsor chairs sat next to the potbelly stove that had once heated the car.
The refurbished kitchen space opposite the stove was evidence of Clint’s handyman skills.
The caboose couldn’t be more different from the big Tudor in Minnesota where she’d been raised by a succession of housekeepers,
babysitters, and the occasional au pair, while her parents were off exploring the world. Or from her small, Spanish colonial
home in LA’s Silver Lake neighborhood, the main asset she’d hung on to from her divorce. Her attorney had been apoplectic
when she’d insisted that the vast majority of her settlement go to setting up a foundation to benefit hospitalized kids, but
she wanted her life to be about more than spending money, and she wouldn’t risk becoming one more Hollywood ex-wife hiding
behind excessive wealth. All she needed was a house and enough to tide her over while she got back on her feet. Of course,
that had been before the miscarriage knocked her to her knees. She was hardly destitute, but her money was running out faster
than she’d like.
Dancy dropped her evening bag on the couch and slipped out of her heels. Through a half partition at the back of the car,
she spotted a double bed. She padded barefoot to investigate but stopped on the way to open the full-length closet in front
of the partition. The same fresh varnish that covered the scarred wooden floor also protected the old historic stains on shelves
that now held, among other things, board games, toilet paper, a first aid kit, crayons, drawing pads, and a backpack printed
with cartoon sharks. A tiny bathroom across from the closet had a new sink and toilet, the compostable one Clint had mentioned.
She turned back to the cupboard. A roughly stitched ragdoll baby, the kind that came in a child’s craft kit, lay abandoned
on the bottom shelf. The plain muslin body had no clothes, the arms and legs had no hands or feet, and five strands of brown
yarn had been sewn in for hair. A child had used markers to paint a lopsided face: green circles for eyes, a black squiggle
for a nose, and a crooked, red, semi-circle mouth. Dancy picked up the ugly doll, drew it to her chest, and carried it with
her toward the shiny black ladder that accessed the central cupola. She climbed the rungs in her bare feet.
Sunlight spilling through the cupola windows fell on what was almost certainly the railway workers’ original bench. A meadow
lay beyond the trees to her left. On the right, the woods were too thick for her to see either the lake or Clint’s house.
She slipped her sunglasses on, settled on the cracked brown leather bench, and hugged the crude ragdoll to her breasts, her
fingers caressing the yarn strands.
Distorted images of her life fired tiny, radioactive mushroom clouds inside her brain. She’d been greedy to want both a child
and a career that would offer her more interesting roles than the bad girl, the bar girl, the beach girl. She’d played strippers
and traitorous bitches out to steal a best friend’s husband. Once she’d been cast as the bimbo mistress of a crooked Wall
Street tycoon. Legs wide open, that was her. Her breasts were too big, her hair too blond, her face too classically beautiful
for casting agents to give her a shot at anything more interesting.
Seven years ago, Dancy had booked her biggest role, as a Bond girl, one of the treacherous ones that 007 had eventually been
forced to kill. An outpouring of positive reviews had followed, and she had believed she’d finally be offered more challenging
roles. But her success had come too late. She’d already met Roth Hardy.
She hadn’t planned to fall in love with him, and she certainly hadn’t intended to give up her own career, but Roth was a superstar.
He wanted someone he completely trusted to keep his complicated schedule, deal with their financial affairs, and read scripts for him.
Dancy became his de facto acting coach—ironic considering her own limited screen roles, but she was better than Roth at creating a character’s backstory, unearthing themes, and finding “beats” or turning points.
He insisted she accompany him on location, and gradually she’d cast aside her own dreams for his.
She’d done so willingly, deferring to him on all but one thing—her desire for a child.
But the man who’d originally promised they’d have a family changed his mind.
By the time their marriage was over, she had no baby, no career, and no one to blame but herself.
The sunlight in the cupola shone too brightly for a woman with both a massive hangover and a shroud of grief that wouldn’t
let go. Thousands of women had miscarriages, and they recovered, so why couldn’t she? She climbed down the ladder and carried
the rag baby into the bedroom. An old armoire served as a closet, and an antique coverlet lay across the double bed, with
a small book propped on the pillows.
The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner.
When Dancy was a child, that hundred-year-old book had enchanted her. She’d wished with all her heart that she could be one
of the four self-reliant Alden children living unsupervised in an abandoned boxcar along with their dog, whose name she’d
forgotten.
She sat on the side of the bed with the book in her hands and considered the sweet innocence of the story.
Unlike Henry, Jessie, Violet, and Benny, she’d had no siblings to share chores with.
Her parents lived for their travels and had turned over to others the responsibility for overseeing their home and raising their daughter.
While the orphaned Alden children had dammed up the creek outside their boxcar to make a pool for themselves, Dancy had swum at the country club.
What would the Aldens think of the career she’d let languish, the marriage she’d failed at, the baby her body had rejected,
and the fresh new scandal about her that even now was setting the internet on fire? She couldn’t imagine them wasting an ounce
of sympathy on a woman who had so little to show for how much she’d been given.
Wrapping the fingers of one hand around the book and holding the doll to her heart with the other, Dancy closed her eyes and
made her apologies.
I’m sorry, Henry.
I’m sorry, Jessie.
I’m sorry, Violet.
I’m sorry, Benny.
I’m sorry . . . dog.
She uttered one last apology to the baby she’d lost before it could be born. The baby she would never hold, never nourish,
never forget.
Clint closed his computer in disgust. No wonder Dancy wanted to hide out. The video of her public breakdown was everywhere,
and speculation ran rampant that she’d checked herself into rehab. He seemed to be the only person who knew where she was.
She was too smart to have lost control in public like that.
In addition to beauty, Dancy had brains—or at least she used to.
She was the one who’d tutored him through junior year chemistry right up until April of her senior year when she’d fled their high school for an expensive boarding school that let her finish her year.
But after that, instead of using her brain to make a stable life for herself, she’d raced off to Hollywood, where she seemed to have dated every celebrity in town and landed a long series of bimbo roles before being cast in the Bond film.
Googling Dancy had been an hour-long trip down the celebrity gossip rabbit hole, something he generally avoided. Frowning,