The Middle Ground by Alex Scott

Author:Alex Scott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Into the Void via Indie Author Project
Published: 2019-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

During the night, a thunderstorm passed close by. It didn’t wake him or Elizabeth, but it found its way into his sleep. He could feel the shape of it, somehow familiar—a hand, he thought at first, but no; less distinct. It moved across the length of his body, cool and gentle, rustling the leaves outside his window, laying the thinnest veneer of stars across the night sky. The next morning, the smoke had lowered even further, obscuring everything taller than a house. The sun was a dim, amorphous glow behind it, but George felt awash in light. He would act, he’d decided, for once. He would telegraph the police in Martinez and report Dick Fleming missing.

“Did you know him?” Elizabeth asked over breakfast.

“Not well.”

“So then … ?”

“People need help sometimes.”

“Of course. But even so, would he ask you, of all people?”

“What’s wrong with me?”

Elizabeth puffed out an impatient breath.

“You have enough to worry about.”

George would have liked to hear her inventory; he didn’t think their lists would tally.

He’d found a picture of Dick Fleming in the Epitome, their yearbook. Some years would naturally have been added, his hair maybe flecked already with gray. Doubt might have found its way into his grin, but he would still be, for police purposes, identifiable. George looked at the picture again—was there something there, in that captured moment, that might have anticipated this present one? The smoke moved past his window like the underside of some foul sea; he could sense him out there, lost and wandering, waiting for someone to call out. Like a boy playing blind man’s bluff after everyone had gone home. All except George. George was still here, and he would call his name and lead him back.

A sudden scream of brakes threw him forward. He braced his arm against the seatback, the train shuddered to a stop. The porter did his best to calm everyone, but had little useful information to impart. Despite the ripple of panic passing through the car, for the first morning in some time George rose with confidence from his seat. The porter nodded to him, touched the brim of his cap. George smiled and nodded back. They were all on the same team, weren’t they? Though it was true that only one of them spent all day on his feet, and at the end of the day they went home to quite different neighborhoods.

They were just shy of Wye Station, Pitcall’s stop. George patted the porter on the shoulder as he passed, and stepped down onto the road bed. He could see the brakeman and engineer beside the engine up ahead. There was a smell of burned metal drifting back, and something else. George felt a current of dread push against him. He knew—he was unaccountably sure of it—that Tommy Pitcall was at the head of the train, dead on the tracks.

The porter was at his side, touching his sleeve.

“You’d better come to the front, Mr. Evans.”

George nodded, but didn’t follow the man stepping carefully along the tie ends toward what was surely a violent and bloody scene.

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