Chapter 13 #3
"We found the car," David said.
"And?"
He let the pause sit a beat longer than it needed to, mostly because he knew it would annoy her.
"Seal's intact."
That landed the way he expected it to. Karen went quiet, working through what it meant before she trusted herself to say anything.
"Nobody opened it?"
"Doesn't look like it."
"Did you?"
"No."
She stared at him. "You found a sealed medical shipment and walked away from it?"
"Thank you," Curtis said.
"I already heard this," David said.
Karen explained, once the teasing settled, that a sealed door didn't guarantee much on its own. Months without climate control could ruin plenty regardless of whether anybody had broken in to steal it.
But a lot of what they were hoping for didn't depend on refrigeration to stay useful.
Dressings. Syringes. Gloves, if heat hadn't degraded the material.
Splints. IV tubing. Basic wound-care supplies that didn't spoil the way medication could.
Some of the medications themselves might remain viable.
Others wouldn't be. She wasn't going to know any of it until she saw labels, packaging, and condition with her own eyes.
"Worth going back?" David asked, already knowing the answer.
Karen gave him a look that answered before she spoke. "At first light."
Curtis checked Waylon and Willie again that evening, giving them an easy night ahead of what tomorrow might ask of them. Neither horse showed any sign the day's rest had been wasted on them.
They didn't move the wagon into the yard tonight. David explained the route he and Curtis had found, and Karen made clear she was coming in the morning — she needed to see the cargo herself before anybody decided what was worth loading.
The rough shape of tomorrow settled without much debate.
David would scout ahead on June. Karen would come in to assess the freight once the area was confirmed clear.
Curtis would bring the wagon and team once there was something worth hauling.
Whiskey stayed useful for Karen in the meantime, and Smokey went wherever David went, same as always.
Nobody tried to plan every detail of it tonight. There'd be enough to work out once they were standing in front of an open car instead of guessing at what might be inside it.
After supper, David looked at Daniel's records again, and they read differently to him now than they had that morning.
Yesterday they'd been a dead man's careful handwriting, numbers on paper carried hundreds of miles on faith that a stranger's diligence would mean something after his death.
Today those same numbers had led two men through a rail yard the size of a small town to one numbered car, sitting almost exactly where the paperwork said it would be.
"He was good," David said.
Karen looked over. "Daniel?"
David nodded. "That car was close to where he said it'd be. Closer than I expected, honestly."
"Rebecca will want to know that."
"She will."
Neither of them said more than that. Daniel hadn't survived to see any of it matter. But records he'd once kept because they were part of his job might now help people he'd never met and never would, and that felt like enough to sit with quietly rather than turn into a speech.
Later, David lay awake a while going over the moment he'd found the car, the way a person replays something that mattered more than it looked like it should from the outside.
Scavengers had opened cars across that whole yard, some burned, some stripped bare, evidence of desperate searching scattered across every accessible stretch of track. Yet one car, sitting quiet a few tracks over from where a dead man's records said it would be, remained closed.
He thought about Rebecca again, briefly — exhausted and barely recovered, sitting at Grace's table and showing them how to make sense of Daniel's records. She'd trusted the papers enough to send them hundreds of miles after what they promised.
David didn't let himself imagine what waited behind that door.
He'd learned better than that on the long road home — hope shaped too precisely had a way of costing more than it gave back.
Tomorrow Karen might open that seal and find ruined freight, wrong freight, medicine gone bad past any use.
Or she might find exactly what the Hollow needed.
Tonight, all he knew for certain was that Daniel's records had been right, the railcar existed, and nobody appeared to have touched it. The wagon stood ready. Waylon and Willie could pull it. Tomorrow would tell them whether the whole trip had been worth the miles.
"Think it's all there?" Curtis asked, from somewhere near the dark shape of the wagon.
David looked toward the yard, hidden now behind the black shoulders of the maintenance buildings. "The car is."
"That's not what I asked."
"It's all I know."
Curtis accepted that without pushing further.
"Tomorrow we'll know the rest," Karen said, from where she lay near the horses.
David didn't answer, because she was right, and there wasn't anything left to add to it tonight.