The Insane Train

by Sheldon Russell

  Though Helms could hear the screams of her parents as they were consumed by the fire, she was unable to assist them. When the assailant heard the police siren, he quickly dressed and escaped into the darkness.

  Bria Helms’s description led to the arsonist’s arrest a short time later. He has since been identified as Bertrand Van Diefendorf, a pyromaniac who had committed a similar crime a few years earlier.

  An interview with Doctor Theo Baldwin, the psychiatrist in charge of the criminally insane ward at Fergus Falls, revealed that Van Diefendorf had pleaded insanity to the previous crime, subsequently escaping punishment.

  Doctor Baldwin and his colleagues had only recently found Van Diefendorf competent to rejoin society. Baldwin expressed sympathy for the family but maintained that a broken mind could not be held responsible for its deeds, regardless of how reprehensible they may be. He said that no matter how long it took, someday he would present Van Diefendorf as a functional member of society.

  Having no other relatives to assume guardianship, Bria Helms has been placed in the custody of the state. Van Diefendorf will most likely be returned to Fergus Falls Insane Asylum to resume treatment.

  Hook leaned back in the chair. At last his search for “why” may have come to an end. Revenge had driven crime since the beginning of time, and Bria Helms must surely have had need to avenge the death of her parents.

  But then Yager could just as easily have been the one responsible. He’d had opportunity in every situation: the fire, Elizabeth’s plunge from the trestle, even the food poisoning.

  Hook took out his pack of cigarettes again but then set it aside. He drummed his fingers on the desk. The destruction of the asylum had continued after Yager’s demise. In the end, only one person remained who might want it destroyed.

  Hook took the photograph from the folder and studied it again. Yager’s infatuation with Helms showed in his face, the way his arm drooped over her shoulders. Perhaps he had been no more than her dupe, an instrument of her retribution.

  Once Helms knew that Hook had exposed Yager’s past, she could have arranged Yager’s death. Maybe she had withdrawn Smith’s medication or replaced it with the placebo, allowing Smith the full force of his aggression against Yager. Hook had seen her take the green bottle from the cabinet that very day. In the end, maybe Bria Helms just didn’t like getting her hands dirty when it came to killing people.

  But could she have nourished such hatred for such an extended period of time? Could anyone? She would have had to overcome her situation, both parents gone, and she little more than a teenager at the time. There would have been an education to complete, and then she would have had to pursue Baldwin halfway across the country to destroy him.

  And what about Yager, a man of limited intelligence and appeal? She would have had to recruit him; given him whatever price he’d required to carry out her plan; and, in the end, have him brutally murdered. Why hadn’t she just killed Van Diefendorf at the outset? There had been ample opportunity. And through all this, she would have placed herself in danger of discovery.

  Could Bria Helms have held all this together over the years to destroy everything that her nemesis had tried to build?

  Hook turned and studied the moon, which had climbed into the blackness.

  It would never have been enough for Bria Helms to simply destroy the sick mind that had set the fire. She would have had to destroy the principle behind it and the man who had sworn to once again turn madness loose upon the world.

  And then the question came to Hook like a jolt of electricity. If Bria Helms had discovered Andrea’s involvement, would she retaliate with the same deliberate cunning as she had with the others?

  His heart beat in his ears at what he knew to be the answer.

  Lights flashed in the window. Closing the file, he stepped into the darkness and squeezed behind the door.

  The click of Helms’s footsteps were singular in the night.

  She paused. He could smell her perfume in the stillness and knew she must be standing in the office doorway.

  And then she turned to climb the stairs. Hook waited until he heard the door close. Outside, a breeze swept through the trees, and shadows danced in the moonlight, illuminating his pack of cigarettes still lying on her desk.

  39

  Hook slipped through the darkness to the front door of the guardhouse. He had to find Andrea, and he had to find her soon. Maybe he should have followed Roy’s suggestion and called the Barstow police, but he’d put himself on the wrong side of the law there. He could contact Eddie Preston, ask him to do it, but then he’d have a lot of explaining to do.

  At the door, Hook looked out the window. The barracks’ lights were out, and things had settled in for the night. Mixer still slept on the porch, curled in a ball just outside the door.

  Hook turned the knob and eased open the door. Mixer rose, sniffed the air, and darted between Hook’s legs into the guardhouse.

  “Damn it,” Hook said under his breath.

  He peered into the dark, trying to spot Mixer before he alerted the whole damn fort.

  “Mixer,” he whispered. “Come here, boy, you son of a bitch.”

  Damn that dog. He was going to get a cat, a big fat one that slept twenty-three hours a day.

  And then the scratching came from out of the darkness, as if Mixer were trying to dig a hole in the floor. Hook stepped back indoors. He couldn’t leave him in there.

  He followed the sound through the darkness. Suddenly, Mixer touched his hand with his wet nose and then disappeared once more to dig at the floor.

  Hook paused at the stairwell. Looking up, he could see the door at the top of the stairs, a thin line of light seeping from under it. If Helms came out now, there would be no explaining.

  “Damn you, Mixer,” he whispered. “I’m going to chain you to the caboose.”

  When Hook reached out to snag him, his prosthesis clanked on the hinge of the door that led under the stairs. He stopped, his heart thudding in his ears. Maybe that was it. Maybe something or someone had been taken down there. Maybe Mixer had known it all along. Hook checked his P.38 and clicked off the safety.

  The second he opened the door, Mixer disappeared down the steps. Hook edged along in the darkness, the smell of damp and mold in the air. At the bottom, he paused, listening.

  “Hello?” he said. Silence rang in his ears. “Hello? Anyone here?” A voice came from the darkness. “Hook? Oh, Hook, is that you?”

  “Andrea? Jesus, Andrea, what are you doing down here?”

  The explosion in Hook’s head came as a flash of light, a white-hot point sizzling in the darkness. And when he came to, he lay on the floor, a sticky mass oozing from above his ear. He groaned and tried to move, his stomach seizing. He reached for his sidearm. It was gone.

  Through the bars of his cell, he could see Bria Helms sitting on a bench next to the stairwell, the kerosene lantern on a stand, its flame dancing on the ceiling of the chamber. Shorty’s axe handle lay across Helms’s lap, and in her hand she clasped a skeleton key on a ring.

  In the cell next to Hook, Andrea sat on the bunk, her hair matted, her eyes sunken and weary. Doctor Theo Baldwin sat in the corner on the floor, his legs pulled into his arms. He watched Hook over the tops of his knees. Baldwin’s beard had darkened with growth, and his eyes were drawn. The air reeked with the stink of sewage.

  Neither Baldwin nor Andrea spoke or acknowledged Hook’s presence. Helms rose to hang the key on its peg next to the door. She spoke then, her back toward them, as if speaking to herself.

  “Even though my charge is unfinished, all things must end, even this,” she said. “I would have followed this evil philosophy to its ruin.” She turned, her eyes afire with lamplight and hatred. She locked them on Baldwin. “I would have pursued you to the finish, Theo. I would have destroyed all that you are and that you have.”

  With that, she left, closing the door behind her. Hook struggled to stand. His ears rang, and his head whirled. An
drea reached through the bars, touching him.

  “Helms came from behind in the darkness,” she said. “There was no time, nothing we could do.”

  “What’s going on, Andrea?” he asked, leaning against the bars.

  “She caught me going through the files,” she said. “I’m lucky to be alive. I didn’t think I’d ever be found.”

  Baldwin pulled himself onto the bunk. He buried his face in his hands.

  “I realized I’d been drugged,” he said. “I also realized that it might be Bria. I came back to confront her. She told me about her parents and about how her life had been ruined. She confessed to having Andrea imprisoned. I demanded that she show me.” He looked up at Hook. “I’m a foolish man, Mr. Runyon. First thing I knew, I’d been locked in the cell with Andrea.”

  “No more foolish than me,” Hook said. “What do you think Helms will do?”

  Baldwin peered at him through the lamplight. “Her anger is consuming and irrational. We must get out of here. I’m afraid we are in grave danger.”

  Hook looked about the dungeon, its ponderous stone walls, its hand-forged bars that in the past had caged so many.

  “Hook,” Andrea said, clutching his arm through the bars. “I smell smoke.”

  Hook hung his head and closed his eyes. “Fire,” he said.

  “Oh, God,” Andrea said.

  Baldwin grabbed the cell door, shaking it. “She’s killing us,” he yelled. “She’s burning us alive.”

  Even as he spoke, smoke rolled down the stairwell, a black wave that dimmed the lantern light in its wake. Andrea dropped to the floor. Baldwin coughed and shook his head.

  “The key,” Hook said, rubbing at his eyes. “The key on the wall.”

  Andrea said, “It can’t be reached. We’ve tried and tried.”

  “Tear strips off your skirt,” Hook said.

  “What?”

  “Strips,” he said. “Do it now. The smoke is going to snuff out our lantern any second.”

  Andrea stepped out of her skirt. Starting each strip with her teeth, she ripped them off one by one and pushed them through the bars to Hook.

  Hook shed his shirt and pulled off his prosthesis. He knotted the strips together and threaded one end through the prosthesis, the opposite end to the cell bars.

  Baldwin now lay on the floor, gasping for air, mucus dripping from his nose. Andrea covered her face with her hands. The caustic smoke had deepened about them in an ominous black cloud.

  Hook squinted the tears from his eyes and pitched the prosthesis at the ring on the wall. It fell short. Gathering it up, he pitched it again, this time knocking the ring from its mooring. But even as it clattered onto the floor, the lamplight fluttered and went out.

  40

  Hook dropped to his knees and peered into the blackness. The key could be anywhere. He could hear Baldwin wheezing on the floor next to him.

  “Hook,” Andrea said. “I can’t breathe.”

  “Hang in there,” Hook said, carefully pulling in the prosthesis. “I think I have the key.”

  When it clanked against the bars, he reached through and felt along the floor. His lungs were aflame, and sweat trickled down his neck.

  “I’ve got it,” he said.

  Working the key into the lock, he heard it click, and the door gave way. He slipped his prosthesis back on, and within moments he’d freed Andrea and Baldwin. They groped their way up the stairwell, the smoke growing warmer and thicker as they climbed.

  Mixer met them at the top of the stairs, his tail thumping.

  “Go get the others,” Hook said to Andrea. “Call the police and the fire department.”

  “Where are you going?” she asked, holding on to him.

  “There are men trapped up there.”

  “But those men are dangerous.”

  “Hurry, Andrea,” he said. “Hook,” she said. “She might be waiting.”

  “Andrea, we don’t have much time.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Baldwin said to Hook.

  “I’ll need you both down here when we come out,” Hook said. “Now go, and take Mixer with you.”

  Andrea squeezed Hook’s arm and turned for the door.

  When they’d gone, Hook crawled up the stairs, keeping beneath the heat and smoke. He ran his hand over the door, warm but not yet hot. He took out his handkerchief, covered his face, and opened the door.

  At the far end of the cell block, flames licked up the walls, crackling and hissing as they consumed the aging structure. The inmates howled from their cells. Some hid behind their mattresses. Others lay under the bunks to escape the scorching smoke that drifted down the hallway. Hook could hear the wail of sirens coming from somewhere in the distance.

  When he spotted Shorty sprawled on the floor, Hook knelt at his side and turned him over. Brain matter oozed from the wound in his head, and his eyes stared off into space. By the looks of things, Helms had turned Shorty’s axe handle against him with fatal results.

  He took the keys from Shorty’s belt and opened the cells. He pointed to the exit, motioning for each inmate to keep as low as possible. On another day, any one of them could have killed him, but even madness could not bear the flames that now raged about them.

  Only then did Hook see Van Diefendorf in the last cell. He sat on his bunk, his hands folded in his lap. Flames lapped up about him, a gathering inferno, its belly blue with heat, its flames crackling and churning up the walls.

  Hook edged toward Van Diefendorf, but the heat drove him back, the stink of scorched hair and flesh. Van Diefendorf looked out from the heart of the firestorm, his features melting like wax, and he smiled.

  When Hook exited the guardhouse, a cheer rose up from the crowd that had gathered. The staff took charge of the inmates, and Andrea rushed forward to hold him. The fire chief waited and then stepped forward.

  “Anyone else in there?” he asked.

  “Not alive,” Hook said.

  Hook looked back at the guardhouse. Embers lifted into the night, and the old building creaked and moaned as it surrendered to the flames.

  “Hook,” Andrea said, pointing to where the firelight gave way to the darkness. “Out there.”

  Hook turned to see Helms watching the fire from the shadows of the fort cemetery. She stood naked, her arms wrapped about herself against the morning chill.

  41

  Hook and Andrea sat on the steps of the caboose and watched the birds bank in the rising sun. A train whistle rose and fell in the distance, and Andrea leaned her head on Hook’s shoulder.

  “Doctor Baldwin should be back from Helms’s preliminary hearing by now,” she said.

  “In a way, he can’t let her go,” Hook said. “They’ve been together a long time when you think about it.”

  “I’m going to miss you,” Andrea said.

  “You could still come along,” he said.

  “They need me now more than ever,” she said.

  Black smoke from Frenchy’s engine broke on the horizon, and the thud of its drivers rode down the rails. Within minutes, Frenchy brought her in, the brakes screeching, the heat of the boiler quivering off into the morning cool.

  Frenchy leaned out of the cab, rolling his cigar into the corner of his mouth.

  “There’s a reefer icing in Waynoka. She’s headed south. We might catch her if we don’t wait too goddang long.”

  “Thought you were going to retire?” Hook said over the chug of the engine.

  “Someone’s got to look out for you,” Frenchy said, grinning.

  “Bring her in, Frenchy, and don’t scatter my books all over hell.”

  “Look who’s coming,” Andrea said.

  Roy, Santos, Oatney, and Doctor Baldwin were all walking down the tracks toward them. Behind them were Lucy, Ruth, Anna, and Bertha. They were waving with large swings of their arms like schoolgirls.

  Hook realized how fond he had grown of all of them. The world had left them behind because they didn’t fit the mold. He, too, had
come to their aid reluctantly, with doubts and fears of his own. He’d dismissed them as nutty and looney and smiled knowingly at their antics. But in the course of things, something had changed. He’d gotten to know them, as had Roy, Santos, and Oatney, to know their names, their desires, and their fears.

  Now he understood Andrea’s dedication to them, as people to care for and to protect. The world had failed them. It should have been there to mourn when those boys were sent, anonymous and abandoned, into a mass grave.

  The group gathered behind the caboose. Oatney pulled Ruth’s skirt down and slipped her arm over her shoulder.

  “You might be needing this,” Roy said, handing Hook’s sidearm up to him. “They found it where Doctor Helms had been hiding.”

  “Who’s running the shop?” Hook asked, dropping his sidearm into its holster.

  “We’re letting the new folks have a go at it,” Roy said. “Figured the worst that they could do is burn the place down.”

  “Seth called,” Oatney said. “Tulsa turned out.”

  Doctor Baldwin came around and reached up to shake Hook’s hand.

  “Many lives were saved,” he said. “We’ve been given a second chance here in this place.”

  Frenchy signaled with three short blasts of the whistle. Andrea looked up at Hook, her eyes filling. He kissed her and lowered her off the steps.

  Steam shot out of the sides of the bullgine as Frenchy took up the coupler slack.

  Hook turned to Doctor Baldwin. “About Helms’s charges?”

  “Premeditated murder,” he said.

  The caboose lurched and edged forward, picking up speed. Hook leaned out on the grab iron.

  “How’d she plea?”

  As the train pulled away, Baldwin cupped his mouth with his hands.

  “Innocent,” he said, shouting over the din of the engine. “By reason of insanity.”

  Also by Sheldon Russell