Chase

Thirteen

“This is awesome!” Jeff said. “Unbelievable!”

When Emily led him into the acres of woods between Flo’s Cabins and Shady Acres Resort, he really wasn’t expecting to see a train station. He thought she had to be telling him a crazy story.

But there it was.

Emily’s secret fort really was a train station. In the middle of the forest.

It was missing, however, the single most important ingredient for any successful train station.

Tracks.

There were none. Not only that, there was no platform where the passengers would have waited. The building was propped up on concrete blocks, so you could see right under it.

In addition to no tracks and no platform, there were no boxcars, no passenger cars, not one caboose and not a single engine.

But of all the things that were not here, it was the absence of tracks that puzzled Jeff the most. There wasn’t even a straight pathway through the forest where tracks might have once been.

“Pretty cool, huh?” Emily said.

The station was about twenty by forty feet, built of wood, and had small dormer windows poking out of the sloped, shingled roof. Hanging from below the eaves at one end was a sign that said CANFIELD, the name of the closest town.

“Where did the tracks go?” Jeff asked.

“There never were any.”

“Why does somebody build a train station where there are no train tracks?”

“They didn’t. It got moved here,” she said. She pointed to an opening in the trees. There was a road, little more than two ruts, heavily overgrown with grass. “They brought it in from the main road that way. The station used to be in town, but years ago they stopped passenger service and ripped up the tracks, so this rich guy bought it and had it moved into the woods here so he could make it into a cottage. But then he died, and the place has just sat here for years.”

“Doesn’t anybody know about it?”

Emily shook her head. “Nope. I mean, almost nobody. I found it when I was hiking. I asked my dad about it, and he told me about its history, but hardly anybody comes around here. It’s my own special place. Come on, let’s go inside.”

Several concrete blocks had been arranged into three steps that led up to the main door. Emily gave it a strong push — it was sitting crooked in the frame, which made sense, since the whole building was listing slightly to one side on the blocks — then took one huge final step to get inside.

Jeff followed her.

“Wow,” he said. “This is very cool.”

The old wooden benches where passengers sat and waited for their trains were still there. So were the ticket windows, and printed schedules on the walls. But the place was a mess! The wallpaper was peeling, there were holes in the walls, bulbs in the lamps shattered. Old, yellowed newspapers were scattered across the floor, and there were marks in the ceiling where rain had seeped through.

“It’s in pretty bad shape,” Emily conceded. “The animals have gotten into it over the years. Birds have made nests, and—”

“Holy crap!” Jeff shouted.

Something had run over his foot.

“It’s just a squirrel,” Emily said. “You’re a real outdoors person, aren’t you?”

Jeff turned red with embarrassment. “I just didn’t see it.”

“And you kind of have to watch your step, because the floor is rotting in places. Like, when we go to the second floor, watch the steps. Some of them are pretty weak.”

She led him up a narrow stairwell, pointing along the way. “Don’t step on that one, or that one.”

Jeff was careful to follow in her exact footsteps.

The upstairs was only a fraction of the size of the first floor. The wall, following the rooflines, angled down, so a person could only stand upright in the middle of the room. There was still plenty of ripped wallpaper and stains in the ceiling, but there was one new thing, too. A big, cushy beanbag chair in the middle of the room. On the floor next to it, a stack of books and magazines and a deck of playing cards.

“This is my special place,” Emily said. “Where I come to get away.”

“Get away from what?”

Emily sighed. Jeff was clearly exhausting her. “Don’t you ever just want to go someplace where no one can find you? So you can think, or read, or just do absolutely nothing?”

“I guess,” he said. “Living with Aunt Flo, I feel that way every single day.”

“Right!” she said. “This is that place for me.” She plopped herself down into the beanbag. “This is my spot.”

“I’ll be careful not to sit there,” he said.

“We could look for another chair, and that could be yours.”

Jeff liked that idea. “Okay.”

He reached into his pocket for his cell phone to see what time it was. “I really, really have to get back. Aunt Flo is going to be looking for me.”

“Well, she’d never find you here,” Emily said.

He grinned. He liked the idea of a place where Aunt Flo couldn’t find him. He just wished there was a place he could go and find his parents.