Chapter 2
An explosion rocked the bottles on the shelves behind the bar, and Alice Emmerson reached up to grab them before they could all fall on the floor. Smashed bottles would mean more cleaning, and frankly, the Cloudy Lemon didn’t need more mess than it already had on a daily basis.
“What the heck is that?” Mr. Benson, the owner of the saloon, asked.
He stared at her with wide eyes and a shocked expression on his jowly face.
He was probably in his fifties and his hair was thinning.
Even his mustache looked thin, as though someone had taken a pen and drawn a couple of lines across his upper lip.
That lip was currently quivering a bit.
“I don’t know,” Alice said.
“Well, of course you don’t know,” Mr. Benson barked, something he was good at, having the girth to produce a good burst of sound.
The saloon wasn’t very busy at this time of day, but a moment later, the door opened and six people came streaming in, along with a lot of mud.
“It’s the train,” a tall fellow in a bowler hat said. He was dripping a puddle on Alice’s newly mopped floor.
Alice sighed. She was never going to finish this floor, not in this weather, not with people constantly coming in and out.
“What happened?” Mr. Benson asked, shifting on his stool behind the bar. He wasn’t one for standing if he could sit.
“It’s the track,” another fellow said. He was wiry and short. “It kinda sank into the ground.”
“You mean a sinkhole?” Alice asked.
It seemed she was a little quicker on the uptake than some of the others listening in the bar because every head turned to her, and she swallowed, wondering if she had spoken out of turn.
Mr. Benson echoed her words in a booming voice. “Was it a sinkhole?”
The men nodded.
“And a train was on the track when—Oh goodness! We’d better hurry,” he said.
He lifted his bulk from his seat. For a moment he stared at Alice, who stood there with her mop still in hand.
“Well, don’t just stand there with your mouth full of teeth!
Come on! They’ll be bringing the wounded through here in a moment. You can bet on it. Hurry up, girl!”
Alice blinked. “What do you want me to do?”
Mr. Benson sighed. “I keep forgetting you’re not from around here. Whenever there’s a train accident, they pile the wounded everywhere, including here. We’re going to need bandages, blankets, and places for the injured to lie down. We need to move all this furniture out of the way. You got it?”
“Yessir,” she said hastily, heading into the kitchen with the bucket and mop. She had better put those away first.
“Alice, you got an inkling what’s going on?” Mrs. Benson asked. She was stirring something on the range. Looking over her shoulder at Alice, she frowned. “Good heavens, you’re white as a sheet.”
“The train,” Alice said. “It fell into a sinkhole.” She belatedly murmured a prayer for the safety of all those on the train.
Mrs. Benson was silent a moment and then nodded. “We’re going to need hot water—and plenty of it. Help me fill some pots and the kettle. We’re going to need water to clean injuries and probably will also be making a lot of chamomile tea for those who are overwrought.”
They filled every available pot with water, and Alice set as many as fit over the fire and on the range to heat up.
“Does this happen often?” Alice asked as she and Mrs. Benson went to the linen cupboard and began to take down the blankets from the top shelves.
Mrs. Benson was a plump woman with a bright, friendly smile.
She shook her head. “Not often, but it’s always a tragedy when it does.
And it’s always something silly that could have been avoided.
Either a mudslide, a sinkhole, or some stupid bandit trying to hold the train up. There’s always something.”
Alice nodded, thankful she’d made it to Grunnersberg without incident.
It was a strange little town in the middle of nowhere.
Mrs. Benson had told her it only existed because the farm folks got tired of having to ride miles and miles to find a post office or buy a bag of rice.
Now they had their town, and despite having the railway running so close by that it was a fuel stop now, the town itself was still tiny and struggling to stay alive.
Why had Chrissie decided to come here? Alice asked herself yet again, although she knew the answers.
It was Jason’s letters. They had swept Chrissie right off her feet from the moment she first read his advertisement in the Matrimonial News.
From the start, Alice had been worried about—oh, there was no time to think about that now.
Alice redirected her thoughts and hurried around, following Mrs. Benson’s directions to set up the room and returning every now and then to the fire and the range to rotate out pots of water.
Soon everything was as ready as it could be.
The tables and chairs were all stacked against the far wall, so there was space for stretchers and cots to be set up. Otherwise, folks could rest on the floor on blankets and whatever linen the saloon could supply.
Alice placed the blankets on the bar as Mr. Appleby, the apothecary, came into the saloon with his large black medical bag in hand.
His store was three down from the saloon and so packed with shelves and bottles that, Alice realized abruptly, there was no room to treat a mass of sick or wounded there.
“I think I have everything,” he said. A moment later, a boy of about thirteen came through the door, carrying a large box that clinked and tinkled with glass bottles. “And here is Christopher, my helper for today.”
Christopher was his son. Alice had met him when he cleaned Mr. Appleby’s store after school.
“How are you?” Alice asked as she and Christopher set to work lining the bottles up on the bar in alphabetical order. It made it easier to find what Mr. Appleby was looking for when he called for a certain medication.
“I’m good,” Christopher said, his blue eyes shining. “It’s exciting. Horrible, but exciting.”
“Hopefully no one got too hurt.”
Christopher frowned at her. “You haven’t seen a lot of train wrecks, have you?”
She shook her head.
He patted her arm in a very condescending manner for one so much younger than she was. “You’re in for a shock,” he said.
Alice swallowed hard. There was no time to worry about what she might see because, at that moment, the door opened, and the first of the wounded came limping and hobbling in.
One woman held a red handkerchief to her head, and it was only once Alice took it from her to see the state of her wound that she realized it was a white handkerchief, stained red with blood.
The woman’s cut was deep, but Christopher and his father worked well together and in no time, with Alice fetching basins of hot water and clean towels, they had the woman and another five people stitched, bandaged, and resting by the fire.
“Can I bring them some soup?” Alice asked Mr. Appleby. “Or chamomile tea?”
He looked at her through his round glasses as though she had spoken a foreign language.
“What?” he asked.
“Soup. Can I give the patients you’ve treated some?” she asked. “Or tea?”
The apothecary shrugged, distracted. “If they want it.” He was stitching a man’s arm that had a long, horrible gash in it. “The only people who shouldn’t have food are those with stomach injuries, but I haven’t seen any of those so far.”
Alice went over to the woman with the head wound and bent to talk to her. She was about the same age as Alice herself, perhaps a few years older. She looked very pale, and she was shaking from head to toe.
“Would you like some chamomile tea?” she asked.
“He was kind to me,” the woman said, her gaze unfocused. “I sent the conductor.” She turned to Alice. “I didn’t think he’d get in trouble!” And then she turned green in the face and, leaning forward, threw up all over Alice’s shoes.
Alice recoiled, and then, realizing the futility of it all, her feet covered in the noxious stuff, she sighed. It had been that kind of day. That kind of month, if she was honest about it.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” the woman said, wiping her mouth on her sleeve.
“It’s okay,” Alice said. “I know where they keep the mop.”
Alice did the best she could to clean up the vomit from her shoes and the floor, but a faint whiff of it seemed to follow her around. Still, she moved from person to person, handing out cups of chamomile tea, bowls of soup, and chunks of bread.
The flow of wounded coming in had risen to a crescendo at one point and now seemed to be tapering off as fewer and fewer were dragged from the wreckage. It was getting quite dark in the Cloudy Lemon as the day began to fade away, and Alice began to light the lamps.
As she walked past a dark-haired man, he reached out and grabbed her arm. “Miss, do you know if this is everyone?” he asked. His whole chest was covered in bandages, and she could see purple bruises peeking out over the top of them.
“I …” she began. “I’m sorry, I don’t know.” She looked from him to the man who lay beside him. That man was in a railway uniform, and he was burly and unconscious.
“Your apothecary said he should be fine,” the man said, following her gaze. “He bumped his head. That’s all.”
“Lucky him,” she said. “And you?”
“Broken ribs,” he said. “But I was flung into a table, so I guess I should have expected as much.” He winced and held out his hand. “I’m Kyle, by the way. And you are?”
“Um—” It struck Alice that he was really handsome under the dirt and blood and bruises. His smile was shockingly wide in spite of his injuries. “I’m?—”
“Alice! Come on! We need you!” Mr. Benson gestured her over.
Alice looked from Kyle to Mr. Benson and then back again. She shook his hand quickly and then ran off to her boss.
“Yes, sir?” she asked when she reached him.
“What were you doing over there?” he asked.
“Lighting the lamps,” she said. “And that man asked if this was everyone and I said I didn’t know.”
“I think the last of them will be coming in soon,” Mr. Benson said. “My wife needs you in the kitchen.”
Alice rushed through the swing door and soon found herself chopping more vegetables for more soup.
Working here wasn’t too bad. She had to keep telling herself that.
Mr. and Mrs. Benson were good people, if demanding and strict, and although Alice had to bite her tongue sometimes, she needed to keep this job.
Without it, she couldn’t look for her little sister.
All the scrubbing, mopping, and chopping would be worth it when she tracked Chrissie down and rescued her from whatever terrible thing had happened to her.
All she had to do was hold on to how happy she and her little sister would be when they were together again, and Alice could survive just about anything.
The evening turned to night, and Alice made a lot more soup. There were more men coming in, but these seemed to be less broken. They had been well enough to help with the rescue of a lot of the others.
One carried a pair of broken glasses and was blood-smeared when he came through the door.
“Is this where they took everyone?” he asked her.
“Of course it is, Walter; look,” his sandy-haired companion said as he pointed at the room beyond.
“You realize that without my glasses, I can’t see a thing,” Warren said. “Where are we, Michael? Do you see Kyle?”
“Oh, I met Kyle,” Alice said, the man’s brilliant smile and warm eyes coming immediately to mind. “Follow me.”
Warren really was blind without his glasses, which were horribly cracked. He needed to be led and kept tripping over people, apologizing constantly. Eventually she managed to get him to where Kyle sat propped up against the wall, wrapped up in a blanket.
Kyle’s green eyes opened, and he smiled when he saw the men. “Oh, there you are,” he said. “I was worried that I would have to tell Emily you died bravely in the dining car of a train.”
“You joke, but we went looking for you and I think that saved us,” Michael said.
“The dining car was compacted between the ladies’ sleeping car and one of the other sleeping cars,” Warren said. “It was a mess.”
For a brief moment, Kyle’s mile-wide grin wavered. Then it returned, full force. “Praise God, you’re all right. Where were you?”
“On the way to our room,” Michael said. “We saw the engine blow up and when we couldn’t find you, we panicked. Glad to see you’re in one piece. I hate to think how upset the horses would be back home.”
“Yes, they would pine if I died,” Kyle joked.
Really, the man was indomitable, Alice thought in awe.
“Well, his sense of humor is at least intact,” Warren said. “How does he look?”
“Bruised,” Michael said.
Alice walked away then, not wanting to intrude more than she had already.
Anyway, if she lingered too long anywhere, Mr. Benson would yell, and she could really do with less of anybody yelling now.
What she wanted was something to eat and a hot bath and then to climb into her bed and sleep for a week.
There was no chance of any of that. She and many volunteers from Grunnersberg were in for a long night.
By the time it was so late that it might as well be called early, the search for survivors was called off. They had retrieved several of the dead, mostly those who were working close to the engine, and finally, the story of what happened reached Alice.
The train hadn’t had any warning of the large sinkhole that swallowed the engine. It was massive, more like a doorway to another world than something as innocent-sounding as a sinkhole. If it filled with water, it could be a large and very deep pond.
Someone suggested it might have opened up a natural cave and that was how it was so deep, the roof essentially having fallen in and left the cavern beneath now open to the sun, stars, and, of course, at the moment, the rain.
This area was full of limestone, which was eaten away by water, and with the recent downpours, the ground wasn’t terribly stable.
The train had hit the hole, then the engine dropped in and blew up, taking the staff car with it.
The luggage car was only just spared, and then the rest of the train crumpled in on itself with cars smashing into other cars one after the other as they left the rails and careened out of control.
It was a miracle that anyone had survived.
Alice whispered a prayer of thanksgiving for that mercy.
Someone had sent a message to the railway company, and they would no doubt send a reply shortly.
“What can they do?” Alice asked.
“They’ll send another train, of course,” Mrs. Benson said. “They’ll have to. All these folks were hoping to go somewhere. They can’t all stay here forever.”
No, they couldn’t, and neither could she. What she really needed was a day off to find Chrissie and get out of here before something more terrible happened to either of them.
Alice steeled her nerves and did the unthinkable: she asked for a day off.