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Quimby Pond

By Bruce C Judisch

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Thursday Night, August 20, 1896. Marble Falls, Maine. The Train Station.

Arthur Dunsley, reporter for The Lakes newspaper, tapped a stubby pencil against his chin as he circled the abandoned steamer trunk. It seemed sad, lonely, if such a thing could be. A bridal trunk with no bride? Just wasn’t right. He stooped and fingered a delicately inscribed card affixed to the lid, then jotted a word or two in his pocket notebook.
“So, what ya make of her?” Stationmaster Charlie Turner tipped up his billed cap and scratched behind an ear.
“Dunno. Suppose it was loaded on the wrong train?”
“On the line from Phillips?” Charlie shook his head. “Came off the one o’clock, nobody with it. Word got around town. Folks came for tonight’s train too. Still nobody.”
Arthur tugged on the hasp. “Locked.”
“Aye-uh. Already tried that.”
The reporter closed the notebook and rose with a half-smile. Finally, something more exciting than who-is-visiting-whom-in-the-lakes gossip and depressing obituaries. “I’ve got an empty corner in today’s edition. This oughta add a little mystery to the humdrum.”
“And I got an empty corner in the stationhouse where she’ll go ’till somebody comes ta fetch her.”
“Let me know if they do, would ya, Charlie?”
“Surely.” Charlie grasped one of the trunk’s leather handles and dragged it toward the stationhouse door.
Arthur pocketed his pencil and notebook, and strode toward town.
***
The dim glow of a cigar ember flared beyond the empty train platform. Among the shadows, a lone figure leaning against a knobby evergreen hacked a hoarse cough into his sleeve. A flick of his finger, and the stogie’s chewed stub arced onto the narrow-gauge railroad tracks, erupting sparks over their rough-hewn wooden ties.
The man pushed away from the tree and set a stealthy course toward the station. He drew up at the platform as the stationmaster’s bulky silhouette appeared in a window against the yellow glow of an oil lamp. The stranger backed against the station’s turret, one hand pressed against the rough stone, the other reaching toward his belt. When he withdrew it, the pitted steel blade of a hunting knife flashed in the weak lamplight.
The stationmaster moved from view.
The man palmed the knife and edged toward the door.

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