Chapter Six The Locked Closet #2
Gregory stared around him with the helpless fury of a man watching his own carefully constructed life come apart in a stranger's front hall, then wheeled and fled back to his cab, shouting the station's name at the driver as though volume alone might close the distance.
He arrived with less than a minute to spare — he, who had planned every detail of that departure time down to the last careful minute himself — and could make no sense at all of what he found.
Had Calie gone through with some sham wedding without him, to save face before her guests?
Had she run, and married someone else out of pure spite?
He had no room left in his reeling mind for reasoned thought, only the single animal urge to reach that train before it pulled away entirely, and he charged down the platform with his overcoat streaming behind him, hat crushed low, chalk-dusted trouser legs pumping beneath a body never built for this kind of exertion.
He passed Jefferson and his mother without either of them so much as glancing his way, both still watching the departing train with damp eyes.
Jeff, catching sight of the ridiculous, chalk-smeared apparition barreling past, laughed outright, while his mother only murmured, half to herself, "I do think he'll be good to her, don't you, Jeff?
He has such nice eyes. I don't recall his eyes ever being quite so — gentle — before. "
They turned back toward their own car as the train gathered speed, leaving two very different pursuers to face each other on the emptying platform — the thick-set man from Halifax's table, and Gregory Hostetler himself, both of them, in this single strange instant, wanting the very same impossible thing.
The thick-set man made his decision first, sprinting alongside the accelerating train and swinging himself, with more nerve than sense, onto the railing of the last car.
Gregory, lunging after him in desperate imitation, misjudged both his own speed and the width of the gap, and went sprawling flat across the platform boards to the open delight of two trainmen standing nearby.
He lay there for a long moment, winded and stunned, watching the train's tail lights shrink toward the dark mouth of the tunnel.
Even if he had caught it — what then? He could hardly have dragged Calie bodily off her own wedding trip in front of a train full of strangers.
It occurred to him, slowly, through the fog of his own fury, that she likely wasn't married at all — that the household had simply been deceived somehow, that she'd run, perhaps with her mother and brother's help, and that the same old leverage that had once brought her to heel would find her again, wherever she'd gone.
She would marry him yet. She would pay for this humiliation a hundred times over.
He shook a trembling fist at the vanishing red signal lights and turned, at last, to limp back toward the station gates — dishevelled, chalk-smeared, utterly unrecognizable as the polished bridegroom who'd stood at that altar a few hours before, though of course he hadn't stood there at all, not really, though he did not yet know that.
He was still turning over his next move, and fighting a thirst that no amount of brandy seemed able to touch, when a hand closed on his shoulder from behind, and a voice with a familiar edge to it said, quietly, "You'll come with me, sir."
Gregory turned — and looked into a pair of eyes that stopped his breath entirely. They were the same eyes that had haunted him in the dark closet not four hours before, grown young again, and filled with something far past reproach.
Your time is over, those eyes seemed to say, exactly as they had said it in the darkness. You have sinned, and now you will answer for it.
He recoiled, certain for one wild moment that his nerves had simply given out entirely — that no real man could carry a dead man's eyes in his living face. He glanced around, half hoping to find no one else saw what he saw, and found instead a small, curious crowd already gathering.
The man before him wore plain, unremarkable clothes, but there was nothing at all uncertain in his grip. Gregory could not shake free of it, however he twisted.
"Who—" Gregory managed, his voice gone thin and strange in his own ears, "—who are you? What right have you—"
The stranger opened his coat, and a detective's badge caught the platform light with a hard, final gleam.
"My name is Norman Brand," he said. "You forged my father's name on a note fifteen years ago and let him die in prison for it.
I've been waiting a long time for this. I saw your engagement notice in the papers and I've been tracking you ever since.
It's the reason I joined the force at all. Come with me."
Gregory cried out and wrenched backward, but three service revolvers came up in the same instant, and two uniformed officers he had not even noticed closed in from behind. Wherever he turned, there was a gun leveled steadily at him, and no direction left to run.
They led him away to the waiting patrol car — the bridegroom who had spent an entire evening searching frantically for the perfect white collar — and in place of the fine linen he'd fretted over, they fitted a pair of handcuffs to his wrists instead.
He sat alone in a cell that night, the old man's eyes and the son's voice for company, begging for a drink that never came, and understood, for the first time in a life built entirely on avoiding the reckoning, that the account had finally, fully come due.