* * *
The train got to the station at Parkside before his dad did; home was a fifty-minute drive away. There were a couple of station staff members around, but apart from them the place was deserted. The coffee shop in the hut on the platform was all shut up and locked. But at least it was a real station, not some cold slab of concrete in the middle of nowhere.
He sat outside the closed ticket office, wrapped his coat around him, and waited—watching the minutes tick past on the big station clock. But if he closed his eyes he could hear the man’s voice again—see that dark platform against the insides of his lids—so he got up and walked around instead, and even then when he turned around he half expected to see the man with his lantern and his dog coming along the platform toward him.
When his dad finally got there, the boy wanted to tell him what had happened, but the first words his dad said were “You’d better have a good reason for this one, son,” and the way he said it sealed up everything inside the boy. He tried to tell him about the stories and the game, but it was as though his dad didn’t hear. The only part his dad heard was that he’d gotten on the wrong train and that there’d been an old man walking his dog, and that wasn’t what the boy had wanted to tell him at all. And he didn’t get to say anything else, because his dad told him how stupid he’d been, and asked whether he thought he’d like to drive halfway across the country in the middle of the night just because someone couldn’t be bothered to get on the right train, and he said it so sharply that there wasn’t an answer, and they got in the car and drove home in silence.
His mom was still up when they got in, but it was the small hours and the house felt strange-shaped and empty. She sat with him at the big kitchen table, and he tried to tell her what had happened, but he was too tired. He could barely put one word next to another by then, and finally he realized that his mom and dad weren’t angry, they were just happy to sit there with a cup of tea because he was safe, and that’s all that mattered to them.
As he climbed the stairs, his dad called after him.
“Who’s stupid, then?”
But his dad had a smile on his face as he said it.
“Got a surprise for you,” his dad said.
The boy frowned.
“Go on, you get to bed. I’ll show it to you in the morning.”
He undressed, almost dead to the world, all the familiar, homey things of his room around him. He fell into bed and pulled the duvet over his head. But as he closed his eyes, he could see the old man again—tapping his feet, popping a mint into his mouth.
“Nice bit of fish.”
And he couldn’t get those stories out of his head. They filled the darkness of his room, chasing him around and down into a dreamless sleep.
By the time he woke, half the day had gone. The winter sunlight was bright across his room. When he went downstairs, he knew at once there was a secret in the house that his mom and dad weren’t telling. He could see it in their sideways looks. His little brother almost gave whatever it was away, and their dad had to hold up a finger to him and go “whoa, whoa, whoa!” before he let it slip.
“If you’d gotten home on time yesterday, you’d have seen it then,” his dad said. “But you have to get on trains that go to the right places to do that.”
They took him outside, made a big thing of it, only there was nothing to see, just the backyard. It was such a bright day, and so far from the night before, that the boy wasn’t sure anymore if that had even happened. His dad made him close his eyes, made him promise not to open them till he was ready. Then he steered him by his shoulders across the grass and down the path to the garage, and then he stopped.
The boy stood for a long moment with his eyes shut, waiting. He heard his little brother laugh and his mom shush him.
He heard his dad lift up the garage door.
“You can open your eyes now,” his mom said.
They were standing there, the three of them, smiling like there was no tomorrow, and inside the garage behind them—
inside the garage behind them was a ’59 Cadillac Eldorado, all bright red paint and shining chrome—
“Rock and roll!” said his dad.
I would like to thank Linda Sargent and Andy Barnett for their never-failing friendship and support; the calm and resourceful Jenny Savill, who deserves golden medals for calmness and resourcefulness; Bella Pearson and Hannah Featherstone for editing and copyediting; Dave Shelton for cover and illustration; and the whole team at DFB, who took my story and made it into the book you are holding in your hand. I would also like to thank my newly found friends Nick Thomas, Joy Simpkins, and the team at Scholastic US for their help and work in bringing this book to life in the United States of America.
Jeremy de Quidt lives in Somerset, England with his wife and three children. He is the author of The Toymaker and The Feathered Man.
Also by Jeremy de Quidt
The Toymaker
The Feathered Man
Text copyright © 2017 by Jeremy de Quidt
Illustrations copyright © 2016 by Dave Shelton
All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920, by arrangement with David Fickling Books, Oxford, England. SCHOLASTIC and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc. DAVID FICKLING BOOKS and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of David Fickling Books.
First published in the United Kingdom in 2016 by David Fickling Books, 31 Beaumont Street, Oxford OX1 2NP.
www.davidficklingbooks.com
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
ISBN 978-1-338-12125-4
First edition, August 2017
Jacket art © 2017 by Dave Shelton and Nina Goffi
Jacket design © 2017 by Nina Goffi
e-ISBN 978-1-338-12126-1
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