Chapter Five The Ten-Oh-Three to Chicago #2
Something tender moved across the boy's face, and he turned back toward the stateroom where mother and daughter were sharing their wordless goodbye.
Graham dropped from the train and strode quickly down the platform, feeling meaner than he had ever felt in his life, a strange heaviness settling behind his ribs.
For one entire block of platform he forgot Halifax's men, forgot the cipher against his chest, forgot everything but the fact that his feet did not want to carry him away from that lit window.
She is not mine to want, he told himself sternly.
I will never see her again after tonight, and that is exactly as it should be.
He knew, even as he told himself so, that some part of him would go on wondering about her for a long time to come.
He was nearly to the gate when a man in evening dress turned to look at him too sharply for comfort — a face he half recognized from Halifax's table, though he dared not look twice and risk being known in turn.
Before he could decide which way to run, a hand fell on his shoulder and a voice he was startled to find himself glad to hear called out:
"This way — checking counter's just there!"
It was Jeff, breathless and grinning. "Mother wanted a private word with Calie, so I made myself scarce and came to find you instead.
Gee, you move fast — we've got ten whole minutes yet.
Say, are you really set on Chicago for good?
I do wish you'd talk her into coming back East. Mother's going to take it awfully hard. "
Walking easily at Graham's side, chattering without apparent notice of his companion's tension, Jeff seemed entirely unaware of the anxious glance Graham threw over his own shoulder — where, unmistakably, the same thick-set man from Halifax's table had fallen into step some yards behind, watching him with an intensity that left no room for doubt.
Graham felt every other worry of the evening — the marriage, the deception, even his own exhaustion — drop suddenly away, replaced by the single, clean, familiar shape of his real duty.
Get the paper home. Whatever strange and unchosen detours the night had forced on him, he had never once, beneath all of it, lost sight of that.
If he had been waylaid by thieves in an alley, he thought, he would have felt no shame at the delay.
He felt none now, either — only a fierce, simple resolve to see this through.
His only real regret, the one thing that would not settle quietly beneath the weight of duty, was the marriage itself, and the girl he could not now warn, and could not now explain to, without risking everything the Director had trusted him to carry.
The danger sharpened as they reached the gate.
The thick-set man had turned again, walking parallel to them now, glancing their way often enough that Graham no longer doubted he was being watched and measured.
There was a moment's delay at the checking counter while an attendant hunted for his suitcase, and Graham felt certain the man had stopped nearby for no other purpose than to observe him closely.
He dared not look around again. He was certain, all the same, that the man followed them back toward the train — could feel his presence as surely as if he'd had eyes in the back of his skull.
But something in Graham had gone very still and very clear.
It was as if the whole tangled, mortifying comedy of the last two hours had been wiped from the record, and he stood once more exactly where he'd stood leaving the Halifax house — a man with a mission, being hunted by men who would not hesitate to silence him for good if they caught him.
He knew it now with perfect, cold certainty.
But he understood, too, that his disguise, and the presence of the wedding party around him, had bought him more confusion than the man behind him could easily untangle.
There were very possibly other watchers scattered through the station as well — hired eyes, paid in haste, with no scruple at all about seizing a man on suspicion alone.
He marveled that he could walk so steadily, swinging his suitcase in one gloved hand, answering Jeff's cheerful questions with only half his attention, making promises to a boy he genuinely liked that he now saw no honest way of keeping.
They reached the car where Calie and her mother waited.
Calie's eyes were bright with unshed tears, and she turned quickly to the window to hide them.
Graham's gaze followed her, and through the double glass, unnoticed by her averted eyes, he caught sight of the watching man's face again, sharp and patient on the platform below.
Understanding that his hat gave him at least some small cover, Graham kept it on despite the ladies present, coloring faintly at his own apparent rudeness, and offered at once to hand Calie's mother down to say her final goodbye — deliberately putting himself back in view of the man who hunted him, because there was, he told himself, no other decent way to behave.
On the platform, while Jeff murmured comfort to his weeping sister inside, the small silver-haired woman looked up at Graham with an expression that undid him more thoroughly than any threat from Halifax's men could have managed.
"You'll be good to my girl," she said softly. "She's always been so carefully guarded. She'll miss us terribly, even with you beside her."
The words went through him like a blade. He could not have borne much more of this without confessing everything on the spot. Nor could he keep his hat lowered in the face of a mother's plain, trusting love — a thing he had wanted all his life and never known.
He lifted his hat slightly, angling his face away from the watcher on the platform as best he could, and said, in a voice that came out low and strangely solemn: "I will guard her — as though I were—" He faltered, then finished, gently, "—as though I were you. Mother."
Impostor, some cold voice inside him whispered even as he said it, for he knew he had no earthly way of making that promise good.
And yet his heart had spoken the words before his judgment could stop them, and he found he could not call them false, whatever practical impossibility stood behind them.
The train's whistle sounded, and the conductor's call of "All aboard!
" rolled down the platform. Graham helped the elderly woman down the last step, and she reached up unexpectedly and kissed his cheek — the first time, he realized with a small shock, that a woman's lips had touched his face since he was a small boy.
"Mother," he whispered, surprising himself, "I won't let any harm come to her."
"My boy," she said, "I believe you."
He handed her into Jeff's keeping and swung back aboard as the wheels began, at last, to turn, and hurried down the car toward his weeping bride.
Through the window he could still see the watching man on the platform, pacing to keep pace with the slow-moving train.
Graham bent over Calie, touched her shoulder gently, and drew the shade down against the glass.
The last thing he saw outside was the man's face, baffled, turning away — but turning to do what?
Report to others? Signal ahead to some further stop where real trouble might be waiting?
He had no answer, and no time to seek one, for in the very next instant Calie — who had stood these last minutes with her handkerchief pressed to her eyes exactly where her brother had left her — swayed, and went white, and fell without a sound into his arms.
Every other thought in Graham's head scattered at once.
The watching man on the platform, the cipher against his chest, the fact that this train was carrying him not toward Washington but toward Chicago and a life he had no claim on — all of it vanished, driven out entirely by the sight of the loveliest, saddest face he had ever seen, gone utterly still and pale in his arms.
Outside, unnoticed, the thick-set man had turned back and was now running alongside the moving train, straining to see through the glass — and behind him, not ten yards further down the platform, came another figure entirely: a heavyset, red-faced man in a rumpled traveling coat, sporting a heavy mustache and goatee and a pair of shaggy, ill-fitting eyebrows, striding after the departing train with the particular fury of a man who has just discovered he is, by every account but his own, already married.
But Graham saw none of it at all.