Death Train to Boston (16 page)

Slowly she raised her head, and as she looked me square in the eye the heightened color drained slowly from her now-solemn face. "I thought perhaps you would understand," she said, "but I wasn't sure. I
mean, I didn't know how I would ever be able to tell you—"

Before she could venture into that ever-awkward territory of too much gratitude, I urged, "Now let's please get on with the story of Urim and Thummim. I am so eager to hear it that I am all ears."

"Very well. My version is quite different from the one told to you by Sarah and Tabitha. No one knows which one is true."

Most likely neither,
I thought, but said nothing. I was once again eating, but slowly, as I hung on Selene's every word. The content of what she said was not so important as the fact that she had ferreted out and assimilated this material, and was eager to do more along the same lines.

"The Urim and the Thummim are part of a tradition that's very ancient, and it's Jewish, so in a way that makes it Christian too. The Hebrews far back in Old Testament times believed that certain jewels had magical properties. King Solomon was a great magician— that was how he got the reputation for being so wise— and he knew how to use the powers in the jewels. He had a breastplate made, called the Breastplate of Solomon—well, of course it would be, wouldn't it?"—a quick flush just along the cheekbones, just as quickly gone—"and he had all these magical jewels sewn into it. Among them were the Urim and the Thummim. This is in the Bible, and in some Jewish teachings called the Kabbala. I'm not sure what the specific qualities of the Urim and the Thummim were supposed to have been, but considering that the Angel Moroni gave them to Joseph Smith to help him read the hier— er, ah—"

Selene interrupted herself, momentarily looking troubled.

"What is it?" I asked.

"I don't like to be so contradictory—I've been told it's an unattractive quality I have. When someone says
something that seems to me wrong, often I have corrected them before I even realize the words are out of my mouth. I was just about to say something that might sound that way to you, Carrie."

"I assure you I do not mind in the least. I have often been accused of the same thing myself."

"Really?"

"Yes, really. So go right ahead."

"All right, but really you must remember, I don't mean to be critical."

"I promise I'll remember."

Selene took a deep breath and returned to her discourse. "The writings on the Tablets of Gold were not in hieroglyphics. They were in what is called hieratic writing, which is different. I am not sure exactly
how
it is different, as I have never seen it. But I have seen pictures in books of Egyptian hieroglyphs, and I should like very much to see hieratic writing someday, and to know how it is different."

Budding scholar indeed,
I thought.

She was continuing: "Because the Urim and Thummim were given to Joseph Smith to help him decipher the hieratic writing, one assumes these magical jewels might have been supposed to aid something like clear vision and increased understanding."

"Sounds reasonable to me," I said, putting my tray to one side with my dessert untouched. It took a great deal of will power to do this, despite my intense interest in Selene's story.

"So the other story of what happened with the jewels, the one I think more likely, is that they were actually made of a material like the clear quartz that is sometimes found in our Western mountains, polished to a high degree. And they could be held above the writing to make it come clearer, like a magnifying glass. Perhaps this magnification was all it took to make the symbols of the hieratics decipherable for Joseph Smith,
since he was a student of such mysteries anyway; he may have known this secret language. Or, as some say, since there were two stones, one may have made the writing seem bigger and then the other may have magically turned the symbols into the language of the one in whose hand it was held."

I murmured, "Fascinating!"

"Yes, isn't it. There's one version of the story I just can't believe, though." Selene shook her head, and I found my own head moving back and forth in the same horizontal plane, in sympathy with her.

"And what is that?" I asked.

"Some people say Urim and Thummim were ground and polished into lenses for a special pair of spectacles, and throughout the rest of his life Joseph Smith wore these spectacles whenever he needed special knowledge. I have even heard tell there's a family out West here somewhere, I forget where, maybe Texas, that owns these spectacles and will not let them out of their sight."

"You don't believe that," I stated, not phrasing it as a question. What I was really wondering was how she could believe
any
of it.

"No. Though it would explain what happened to the jewels."

"Ah yes," I said, fascinated again. "But I thought the Angel Moroni reclaimed them and took them back to heaven, or wherever he came from."

"Nobody knows for sure. It's another mystery." Selene smiled and rose from her chair. "And I've been boring you for far too long."

"But look here"—I gestured to my tray beside me— "and you'll see I kept my side of the bargain. Your story was so involving that I quite forgot how poor my appetite has been, and my dinner disappeared." I winked. "As if by magic."

Selene laughed.

Quickly I added, as she reached out to take up the
tray, "I would like to keep my dessert to eat later, if you don't mind. When Mr. Pratt returns I want to be strong enough to make a good impression on the doctor."

It was a lame excuse, but Pratt's youngest wife didn't seem to notice. Instead, with my mention of his name that all-consuming presence came back into the room just as if he had already returned to the house. "Why do you call him Mr. Pratt?" Selene asked. "Because his given name, Melancthon, is rather . . . one might say
unwieldy
upon the tongue." "Why not call him Father, as we all do?" "Because I'm not yet one of the wives." "But you don't have to be. The title Father acknowledges his priesthood."

"I am not yet a Mormon either, Selene." "Oh." She looked profoundly disappointed at being reminded of my differences, but covered it by removing the slice of apple pie that constituted my dessert and placing it on the bedside table, where I could reach it. Then she carefully covered it with my folded napkin.

And I heard myself say, I swear it was entirely without forethought, "There may be a higher authority than Pratt's angel that has brought me here."

MICHAEL DID NOT LIKE to admit it even to himself, certainly not to Fremont Jones, but his hearing was not particularly acute. Likely it was in the normal range, but for a man accustomed to push himself out onto the edge of everything in life, merely normal was not enough. Fremont's hearing was exceptional: She could pick up sounds long before he heard them.

So, apparently, could Meiling—because at her words of caution he stood stock still but heard nothing. Nothing except the interminable clacking of the train's wheels, which seemed capable of masking many other sounds.

Then, as if to add insult to injury, the train's whistle let off a blast so shrill he grimaced. An animal on the tracks, he supposed, or the train was approaching a blind curve. At any rate, his ears were not giving him the kind of information he needed.

Michael had a sixth sense, a kind of body consciousness that let him know when another body was in close
proximity, whether he could see the person or not. This sense, for some reason unknown to him, did not function as well through closed doors. And so although he thought he sensed someone outside the compartment, he was unsure, and this uncertainty led to hesitation.

How long he stood waiting he did not know. Thoughts tumbled through his mind, primarily the thought that he was unarmed and it was probably no longer a good idea to go about the train that way. He felt it begin to round a curve, registered that this would have been the reason for the whistle, and at that moment knew it was time to open the door—knew it was time, but not how or why he knew this.

Quickly Michael shot a piercing, silent message from his eyes to Meiling, held up a brief monitory hand, then jerked open the compartment door.

There was no one there.

But someone
had
been there until just a moment before; Michael was as certain of it as if that person had left behind his shadow or a trail of scent. Michael scanned the doorframe rapidly, then his eyes moved over the corridor floor just to either side of the door, with explosives on his mind. His hearing might not be hyper-acute but his eyes missed nothing. Printed material closer than an arm's length might be getting blurry, but for distance and in the midrange, he could see like a hawk. There were no explosives, not so much as a length of fuse taped to the seam in the wall.

So why, then, did he have such a vivid picture in his mind of someone lurking outside a train compartment's door, swiftly taping slender sticks of dynamite in place, lighting a fuse, and then running like hell?

"Wait here," he commanded Meiling, then took off at a lope toward the front of the car, where in his peripheral vision he'd glimpsed the connecting door slowly swinging closed. He'd gone no more than three steps before he heard confirmation of his assumption—the door shut with a hollow metallic thump—and he knew that was the way his quarry had gone.

The chase was on. Follow and be followed in your turn: one of the most ancient games in the world, one that humans share with the animals, one that reduces a human all too often to not much more than an animal. Unconsciously, as he loped on, Michael bared his teeth.

Of course I'd had an underhanded plan in asking Pratt to go for the doctor. That is, in addition to a true concern that I was not getting over my injuries as fast as I should have. The great irony was that as soon as Pratt had gone from the house I started to feel better. And since I'd taken the risk of asking Norma to help me get away, I had been making daily progress.

It was not all that difficult therefore—one did not need a medical degree or one of those new-fangled psychiatric degrees—to deduce that my major obstacle to a healthy convalescence was the feeling that I was being kept a prisoner by the very folks who seemed so dedicated to making me well.

A conundrum indeed!

When the doctor at last came through my bedroom door in the company of Melancthon Pratt, my heart rose with hope. But even as they began to cross the room, doubt set in. Certainly initial impressions can be deceiving, but was this severe-looking stranger a man who could help me?

Verla came in behind them and somehow managed, in what was for her a miracle of self-assertion, to slip around her husband and arrive at my bedside before him. She stood with her hand holding the headboard in a proprietary manner.

"Husband," Verla said, staking her claim to him with a precision I'd never heard before, "and Doctor.
Carrie's done good. She's eating a mite better. She feels some better too, don't you, Carrie?"

I felt her glance down at me but I couldn't meet her eyes, for I was about to let loose a powerful spate of lies. Verla had been good to me and I didn't want to hurt her feelings or to cast aspersions on her in any way. And so, for the moment, a reprieve as I managed to avoid the issue.

Glancing from Pratt to the doctor and back, I said, "Thank you for bringing the doctor, Mr. Pratt. Your wives have taken their usual excellent care of me while you were absent."

He nodded gruffly but offered no smile or even the attempt at one.

It was late afternoon and I did not doubt that he and the doctor both must be tired. They had to have been riding all day, but the dust of the road was not upon them. So, they must have arrived long enough ago to have cleaned up, perhaps even bathed, yet I'd heard nothing. Not even the sounds of their arrival, which made me all the more curious about the layout of this most unusual household.

"You'd best introduce us, Melancthon," the doctor said. "She'll not remember me. You recall that last time I was here she was unconscious."

"Grmph," Pratt said, a sound that seemed to combine throat-clearing with acknowledgment. "Carrie, this here is Dr. Arnold Striker. Doc, her name's Caroline James. We call her Carrie. She's to join the family soon's she can stand on her own two feet to take the vows."

In a pig's eye!
I thought, but I smiled and held out my hand to the doctor for a formal handshake. "How do you do, Dr. Striker."

His hand felt hard and cold. If his appearance was any indication, I suspected his personality was likewise. And he was devious too: Instead of gripping my hand in
the hearty shake I was both offering and expecting, he slid his fingers up my wrist and deftly turned it over so that he was taking my pulse instead.

This man was young, probably not much older than I, yet everything about him appeared to belong more to the previous century than to our new one. With a constrictively narrow black suit he wore a white shirt with one of those stiff, high collars that have been falling out of the male fashion—at least in San Francisco—for nigh onto a year. He was excessively thin, so much so that I wondered if he had enough natural padding to sit a horse without injury. His face was long, expression grave, hair sparse on top despite his relative youth. His eyes, which he kept focused on a pocket watch held in his left hand while he took my pulse with his right, were an opaque mid-brown, like muddy water.

The longer I contemplated Dr. Striker, the more my hopes plummeted. This man was a very poor candidate for helping me in the way I'd had in mind. He exuded narrow authoritarianism—I can sense one of those fellows a mile off, and he was much, much closer than that.

He dropped my wrist.

I looked away, idly rubbing my wrist as if to remove his touch, and did not bother to repress a disappointed sigh.

Dr. Striker frowned, and addressed not me but Verla, as if she were the nurse. Of course she
had
been my only nurse for many days. "Symptoms?" he inquired.

"I don't rightly know. Happened she was comin' right along, gettin' stronger ever week, till maybe a couple of weeks ago she took a turn."

"Describe this turn," the doctor ordered.