Lock and Key: The Gadwall Incident

by Ridley Pearson

  “Research. I’m basing this on research. I know what I’m doing.”

  A younger sister learns when to pick her fights. This was not one of them. Instead, I accepted that we were a team—I had caught the shoes, James the touch of the ticket. In fact, these were my favorite moments, when James and I teamed up to cook a meal, or washed the car with Ralph, or planned a picnic, or picked out a movie to watch together. Such moments defined sisterdom, made me feel part of something extraordinary, fulfilled me in a way nothing else fulfilled me. They created and continued my notion of what it was to be family. They made me smile.

  My feet gave way easily and I followed, my brother in the lead, my heart pounding, hoping this wouldn’t be the last we would see of Father and the Stranger.

  CHAPTER 4

  AT 11:50 A.M., FATHER STOOD WAITING ON THE platform for the Newburyport/Rockport commuter line. The electronic sign overhead advised that the next train was arriving in ten minutes.

  At 11:53, the Stranger bought a ticket at a vending machine and headed in the direction of the same platform.

  James carried an actual physical credit card, which caused me envy. I had a payment app on my phone that worked like a credit card. I could wave my phone at cashiers and magically pay for things. But only at some stores, most of which sold groceries or power tools. I wouldn’t be given an actual card until my fourteenth birthday, which seemed only a little less than an eternity away. More impressive, James seemed to know exactly what he was doing until it came time to decide how far we would be riding the train.

  “What do I put for our destination? We don’t know how far Father’s going.”

  “Do Gloucester.”

  “Never mind. It’s by zones. Eleven dollars each. That’s twenty-two dollars! I’ve got like twenty total left on my card.”

  Technically it was a cash/debit card. Father put fifty dollars a month onto it as allowance for James keeping his room neat and feeding and brushing Bath and London, our two dogs. I got twenty-five deposited into my phone app for making my bed and doing dishes. Wage discrimination. Try as I might—and I’d tried plenty—I had yet to propose a project to Father that he deemed worthy of an added allowance. This was one of the many not-so-small ways Father played preferential treatment to his son, a situation that went unmentioned though not unnoticed, at least by one of us.

  “So pick a zone we can afford. And don’t forget, we’ve got to get home. I have enough on my phone to get food in case this lasts all night.”

  “Such a planner,” he said, tapping the screen and working through menus at a much faster pace than I could have managed. “Zone Two,” he said. “If he’s still on the train by Zone Three we’re busted.”

  “No, we’re not. I can bat my eyelashes,” I said, mimicking the motion, though he wasn’t looking.

  “Good luck with that,” he said. “You think a flirting twelve-year-old with big hair and a round face is going to charm some conductor?”

  I hated him for that description. “I’m growing into my face,” I said. Both James and I had big ears. I hid mine in my big hair. Lois consoled me each time I cried about being related to Dumbo—a nickname that had stuck for second and third grades.

  “Sure you are. And I’m going to be six-six.” No male Moriarty had ever exceeded six feet, a part of his heritage James found unnerving.

  To avoid being seen, we hung back on the platform until the last second. We boarded the second car from the front at a light jog. James sat me in a seat facing backward, something he knew I detested, and headed off on reconnaissance. Compared to me, he could have had a merit badge in stalking. He understood the intricacies of patience, finesse, and masquerade. At times it seemed as if he’d been born with the genes of a cat burglar. Part Houdini, part Night Stalker.

  James returned a few minutes later looking smug. Nothing worse than a smug brother.

  “Two cars down,” he said. “The Stranger is facing back like you. Father is facing forward, second-to-last row of seats in that car.”

  “Facing each other?”

  “Evidently,” he said, his cynicism biting. “Doesn’t help us much, though. Because either Father recognizes him because he’s paying the man, or doesn’t recognize him because the man is following him and Father has no idea.”

  “What now?” I asked, having a plan of my own but knowing James owned the moment.

  “We wait, obviously. I check the car at every stop. You prepare to get off. I’ll signal you by waving. If I’m not waving, don’t get off.”

  “You promise you won’t ditch me.” James had done worse. I put nothing past him. I had no idea what I’d do if I found myself alone on a train bound for places I’d never been. I felt a little lump in my throat. “Seriously.”

  “Mo.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “You just said that. I won’t ditch you. If we lose Father, we lose him together. Deal?”

  I swallowed the lump away and nodded. Times like this I hated being twelve; I believed my courage would callous with age. I couldn’t wait to be at least a few years older. I wanted to thank James for what he’d said, but he would only have made fun of me for getting mushy, so I said something to him with my eyes and he nodded, and that was the end of it.

  I liked trains, enjoyed the landscape streaming past the windows, the people watching inside, the sense of doing something good for the environment by ride-sharing, the indelible rhythm of the train’s cars passing over the joints in the rails.

  Ten minutes passed. “Which do you think it is: Father knows him or doesn’t?”

  “Doesn’t,” James said without thought. “Makes it much more interesting, you know?”

  “Yeah. True.”

  “You think he saw us?”

  “I think he’s the kind of guy that sees more than you know. The kind that carries a gun or a walkie-talkie. I think he’s part of a team, for a company or the government, it doesn’t really matter. If he saw us, then he knows we’re on the train and that can’t be good. I doubt he knows we’re Father’s children, but who else could we be? So he’s probably figured it out.”

  “So you’re saying you’re as scared of him as I am.”

  “Or more,” James answered, “because I think he’d hurt a boy before he’d hurt a girl, and he doesn’t look like the talkative type, you know? A guy like that, the more you talk the more he slaps you around.”

  “All this because Father wants to date some woman?”

  “That theory isn’t holding up too well,” James admitted, a rare moment of modesty for him.

  “Father’s a spy? Like for the CIA?”

  “He travels a lot,” James said. “Doesn’t usually tell us where he’s going. So we can check that box.”

  “He’s brilliant. He has the help of being a professor. He has a reason to travel everywhere.”

  “That’s called a cover. Yeah. So, check that box as well.”

  “But it’s Father.”

  “I know. Impossible, right? But the disguise? Taking the train instead of having Ralph drive him? Something’s not right.”

  “I guess we’re going to find out,” I suggested.

  “I suppose. But what are we supposed to do when he gets in a taxi and drives away?”

  “Maybe he won’t. Maybe he’s meeting someone.”

  “A dead drop!”

  “A what?”

  “It’s where you leave something in a specific place. Like a note or a list or something. Like behind a rock in a stone wall. Like that. Someone else collects the thing so the two of you never meet. Neither knows the other so if you’re caught you can’t rat out the other guy.”

  “Father is not a spy.”

  “I know! I know! But what if he is? How cool would that be?”

  “Radi-cool,” I said.

  James laughed out loud, drawing attention to us. Just for a moment I wished the train ride would never stop.

  CHAPTER 5

  ALL RIDES EVENTUALLY COME TO AN END. JAMES and I
suffered through several false alarms. I waited on the deck connecting two train cars that allowed me to see James. I awaited his signal. Stop after stop, Zone 2, Zone 3, the signal didn’t come. We remained aboard at Beverly Farms. Technically, our tickets were now invalid. Given that we appeared to be the only two kids traveling by ourselves it seemed doubtful the conductor, a thin, wizened man with a chin as pointed as a tent stake, might forget us and our destination. In short, we were on borrowed time and might be thrown off any minute.

  Whenever I spotted the conductor coming, I hid in the washroom. I wondered if they arrested children for staying on a train past their destination. Maybe they called their parents, which would actually be worse.

  Having counted to 150, unable to tolerate the unbearable odor of the train car washroom another ten seconds, I popped out.

  “Hello,” said Ichabod Crane, the conductor.

  “Hel-lo?” I tried to hide my sense of shame and guilt, a practiced art and one I got a little bit better at each year, but I was still a rookie.

  “Everything okay?” I loved the guy’s accent. Bostonians from Southy, Dorchester, Worcester, points north and south of the city, spoke differently. Vowels, especially As, sounded like they had a couple Hs attached to them. Tar became tahhhr. Sister became sihhh-stahhr. Father had made sure we never picked up the accent. If anything, James and I sounded stuffy and snobby to my ear, which I didn’t care for but found difficult to shake.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Enjoying the ride?”

  “I . . . immensely! I love to watch the buildings blur past. The towns.”

  “Never get tired of it,” he stated. I found his smile genuine and comforting, and I felt all the worse for deceiving him. “Have a good one,” he said, moving on up the car. He glanced back at me, his expression telling: he knew I should have been off the train by now. Maybe that was my guilt talking. Maybe he was letting me know he was in on the secret. Whichever, he just stared, not calling me out, but making me feel all the worse about it. “Manchester-by-the-Sea!” he called, pivoting and returning to his duties.

  I’d spent too long with the conductor. By the time I looked into the next car, James’s right arm was practically coming out of the socket from waving. Even from a distance I could see that his face shone scarlet and he’d risen onto tiptoe in an effort to be seen.

  The signal meant Father was preparing to leave the train. Possibly the Stranger was as well. I was to do the same.

  The train slowed. Outside, adorable New England cottages gave way to the backs of brick buildings, stores, shops and restaurants, all festooned with gray satellite dishes, lilting TV antennas, tied to smiling black power lines that ran to wooden phone poles black with a coating of protective tar.

  An elderly woman shuffled out and stood behind me. When I looked at her she winced a matronly smile, the kind our school librarian flashed at me when I was checking out a book. The train ground to a stop.

  “Well, it won’t open itself, sweetie pie,” she said to me. “You push that big—”

  But I cut her off by getting the idea and applying pressure to the large red plate on the door that read Open When Train Has Come to Full Stop. How I’d missed that, I had no idea.

  The door hissed open. I moved aside, allowing her to go first. By the time I stepped out onto the station platform I turned an immediate about-face. Father was heading right for me!

  I caught up to the grandmother and hooked my arm through hers.

  “Do you mind?” I asked.

  “Not at all, dearest. You are most considerate.” She thought I was thinking of her, which I should have been. In fact, the dozen people disembarking the train were headed toward the century-old station building, a structure out of Hansel and Gretel. They included Father, who was behind me rather than in front. By speaking with the woman I hoped to divert attention from myself and therefore lessen the chance that Father might happen to notice his own daughter. I hadn’t had time to catch sight of James; I could imagine him back there shadowing the Stranger as the man followed Father.

  What now? I wondered as the woman steered me toward the gingerbread station house. Once Father was into a car or a cab, what were James and I supposed to do?

  “Thank you, dearie,” she said, releasing my grip. A man equal to her in age stood smiling widely enough to light a darkened alley. The woman didn’t wear a wedding ring. Imagining the two as sweethearts, a chill ran through me, precipitating misty eyes, as I thought about Mother and Father, wondering what had been bad enough to cause Mother to abandon me and James, not to mention Father.

  “No problem,” I said, moving quickly to duck behind a standing postcard carousel. The cards were of the New England shore, some bearing black-and-white images from the 1960s when women beachgoers wore strange-looking swimsuits and rubber caps over their hair, others in color and contemporary, shining black seals on seaweed-encrusted rocks with a white, chalky lighthouse in the background. I spun the rack lazily, awaiting sight of Father.

  He walked past and, a moment later, so did the Stranger. Finally, here came James, whom I snagged and pulled off-balance into my hiding place.

  “There you are!” he said.

  “Here I am,” I agreed.

  “I thought you’d been busted.” I must have looked confused. “The conductor,” James said.

  “Oh, yeah. That! What now?”

  “No clue, but we have to check it out, right? We’ve come this far.”

  “Agreed.”

  By the time we showed ourselves, Father and the Stranger had already left the station house. James and I hurried to see whom Father was meeting or what came next, pressing our faces to a pair of grimy windowpanes.

  “To the right,” James said with astonishing speed.

  A small, waist-high blue sign on a pedestal read Taxi. Our biggest nightmare. Father looked around, not simply enjoying the sights, but inspecting his surroundings. James and I instinctively jumped away from the window—there was little that terrified us like the searching glare of a curiously suspicious father.

  “Our biggest nightmare,” I blurted out. “A taxicab! I knew it!”

  “Well, at least he’s still waiting.”

  “How many taxicabs can there be? One? Two? That means one for Father and one for the Stranger and none for us.”

  “I’m not saying it doesn’t complicate things,” James admitted, stretching to peek out once more. “Still no car. The Stranger’s in line behind him. They can’t be three feet apart.”

  “Talking?”

  “No. Just standing there.”

  “Do they know each other?”

  “Can’t tell. Doesn’t look like it.”

  “So strange. I’m starting to think we should just go home and forget about it.” I’d spoken that aloud without meaning to. “He is going to be so cross if he catches us.” “Cross” was what Father called angry, ticked-off, furious. If he said, “I’m getting cross,” it was akin to a light drizzle about to go full-on hurricane.

  “Cross? You think?”

  “So? What now? Back home?”

  “No way! Zero chance of that happening! And you’re not going without me, because I’m not going to be responsible for losing you on top of everything else.”

  “I didn’t really mean it,” I lied. “I was just giving you the chance if you wanted out.”

  “Sure you were,” he said, oozing sarcasm. “And I’m profoundly grateful! Taxi pulling up.” Eye to the window.

  “What?”

  “Brilliant!”

  “What is?”

  “Father’s walking away!” he repeated. “Don’t you see?”

  “Apparently not. You’re the one watching him,” I reminded.

  “Let’s say Father isn’t as clueless as he appears. Or maybe he’s just plain suspicious of everybody.” I recalled Father taking in his surroundings from the taxi stand. I nodded. James whispered, “And let’s say he worried someone might be following him.”

  “That e
xplains the disguise,” I said, giving up my last hope that this adventure had something to do with Father’s dating habits.

  “If he is being followed, he either needs to figure out who it is or find a way to force the person into revealing himself.”

  “Or herself,” I corrected.

  James did not appreciate my political correctness. “One way is to wait in a taxi line until a taxi arrives, which is exactly what just happened.”

  “And?”

  “And walk away just as the taxi pulls up! If someone is following him and has the nerve to stand in the taxi line, which is now four people, I might add, that other person has no choice but to take the taxi. He—or she—can’t step out of line. Father bails out, trapping the other person.”

  “Oh, my,” I said.

  “What?”

  “He’s good at this,” I said. “You’re saying he’s good at this.”

  “I guess I am.” James sounded as disappointed in himself as I did in Father. Neither of us wanted to imagine Father as something he’d never been.

  “But if he’s walking away, we can follow him!” I’d quickly given up all thought of returning home. Tracking Father was now a matter of pride and necessity. If he was living a secret life, as his children we deserved to know about it.

  James continued to press his face to the glass. “Crossing the street. Get this: the Stranger just got into a taxi.”

  “We were wrong about him? How could that be? How could it possibly be coincidence he was at the university?”

  “I’m just telling you what I’m seeing.”

  “We can’t possibly follow Father. This town is tiny. It’s not like following him in Boston.”

  “True, but we’ve got to try,” James said.

  CHAPTER 6

  JAMES CROSSED AT THE CROSSWALK. FATHER WAS on the other side of Main Street, headed in the same direction the train had been traveling—north. I marked his progress measuring against a large sign for the Palace, which I took to be a movie theater. James and I passed an old stone church with a prominent steeple. The picturesque town deserved all the postcards, lived up to the images. If I squinted my eyes just so, removing the power lines and the automobiles, I could imagine horse-drawn carriages, women in stiff petticoats, and well-dressed gentlemen carrying canes. I could smell horse manure on cobblestone streets and see boys wearing suspendered gray flannel shorts with yo-yos in hand. James held close to the storefronts, occasionally ducking into a doorway in hot-blooded anticipation of Father checking behind himself. I trailed James by five to six feet, mimicking his every move while wondering why I did so. My hands shook from terror, my breath shallow and short. My pulse raced. Father passed the theater and disappeared down a street to the right. Judging by the abundance of road signs it was some kind of major intersection. Among them, a green sign reading Public Beach Access.