Light as a Feather, Silent as the Grave

Chapter 25

The scent in the air seemed to change when we crossed the border from Arizona into California two nights later. Even though it was dark as the train chugged its way into Riverside County, our passage was marked by a floral fragrance on the breeze that was a new element on our journey. I sat up from where I'd been laying on my side on the dusty wood floor of the boxcar to look through the open door. The sapphire sky twinkled with stars that looked entirely different from the ones that hung over Weeping Willow at night. We were in the desert. It was the first time in my life I'd ever seen long stretches of dry earth completely devoid of trees and buildings for miles at a stretch. The volume of the train rattling on its track over the sand seemed intrusively loud as we barreled through the otherwise silent landscape.

A few feet behind me, Trey slept. We'd barely spoken since leaving Arkansas. There'd been little reason to communicate, since our trip had been suspiciously worry-free. Even when we'd had to switch train lines in Texas, our train from Arkansas pulled up right alongside the Epsilon Plastics cargo train that Candace had told us we could ride the rest of the way to Long Beach. We were able to tiptoe across the tracks, slip into an open boxcar, and overheard someone who worked on the railroad announce that the train wasn't scheduled to leave for another two hours. That gave us a comfortable window of time to use bathrooms at the modest railway station and restock our food supply from a vending machine.

It was just like we'd suspected when we'd slipped aboard the train in Arkadelphia: some unseen force was helping us safely get to California.

But at sunrise as the train rolled past the sleepy town of Barstow, California, I got the distinct feeling that our luck had run out. As if a shadow fellow over me, a chill ran down my spine and suddenly the creepy hunch that I was being watched-the same uncomfortable sensation that had become so familiar back at home in the fall-returned. Whatever benevolent force had been safeguarding our trip had been disabled. There was no doubt in my mind: we were on our own again, and something was definitely plotting against us.

"Whoa," Trey said when he woke up a few minutes later. He propped himself up on his elbow and rubbed his left eye with the back of his hand. "Do you feel that?" He waited a few seconds for my response, but I couldn't summon adequate words to confirm that it sure did feel like we were doomed. "Why do I get the feeling that either this train is about to derail or paratroopers are about to burst into this boxcar to arrest us?"

"You feel that, too?" I asked. Cold dread had already flooded my circulatory system and settled into my organs, making me feel awful in a familiar way that was strangely also kind of comfortable. Being paranoid enough to remain on the defensive gave me the sense that we were making progress again. We were on a mission in California, and the danger was still very real.

Trey stood and stretched. "Yeah. Totally. It was like I felt a switch flip while I was asleep just now. It actually woke me up. Do you think maybe something happened and suddenly now they're going to start throwing obstacles at us again?"

I stared out at the landscape. Mountains were visible in the distance. Without replying to Trey, I withdrew my phone from my bag on an impulse to try to contact Candace for guidance. It shouldn't have come as any surprise to me that I didn't have any cellular service. I hadn't done a very good job of studying the route that our train was taking across the state, and now in retrospect I realized I should have snapped a picture of my phone's screen the last time I'd pulled the route up on the map so that I'd be able to reference it in a moment like this. It would have been good to know where the train would next be stopping.

"I don't know," I admitted. "Maybe Henry and Laura reached out to Mischa and now she knows we're on our way?" In my mind's eye, I pictured Mischa Portnoy. Even in kindergarten she'd been the tiniest kid in our class, so compact and spry. When we were little girls, back in elementary school, she was the girl everyone wanted as their field trip partner, on their volleyball team, and for their best friend. It just didn't seem possible that Mischa would turn whatever dark energy she'd inherited from Violet against me. "But I don't think that's the reason."