Terror at the Fair

Chapter Forty-Two

I got more stares as I showed my pass and entered the grounds, heading straight for the nearest men’s room. With face scrubbed reasonably clean, I shuffled into the empty pressroom and dropped into my chair. I stretched my limbs, feeling whatever energy I had left was about to make an exit and that I was powerless to stop its exodus.

I probably hadn’t dozed off for more than a minute or two when my phone rang. Expecting it to be Murray on the city desk, I picked up the receiver and growled “Yes, yes, I’m back, I’m back. What do you need now?”

“Oh Steve, I’m so glad I got you,” Catherine said breathlessly. “I’ve been—”

“Ouch, sorry for the rude greeting, my darling. I thought for sure somebody at the Tribune was bugging me again.”

“That’s perfectly okay, I’m just glad to hear your voice. I’ve been calling you all afternoon, hoping you were all right. As I know you can imagine, the explosion and fire in Whiting is all over the news on the radio.”

“I’m not surprised. It was like nothing I’ve ever seen—or ever hope to see again.”

“You are all right, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, a little on the sooty side, you might say, and my face feels like I fell asleep on my back on a tropical beach, but otherwise, all my moving parts seem to be in good working order.”

“Good. There’s... another reason I’m calling, though.”

“Oh?”

“I’ve been thinking over all the things you’ve said to me about the people and the goings-on at the fair, and about one name in particular. Anyway, I had a lull at the library early this afternoon, and something just jumped out at me while I was daydreaming. I don’t know whether I ever told you this, but for no particular reason, I took a couple of years of German at the good old Oak Park and River Forest High School.”

“No, you never mentioned it, but what’s the point here?”

“Well, it may really be nothing, but I went back into the stacks at the library to see if my memory was correct.”

“Go on. You’ve got my attention.”

“It was correct—my memory, I mean,” Catherine said. She then proceeded to lay it out for me. At first, the whole thing seemed preposterous and unlikely, but on the other hand…

“That’s... interesting,” I said, digesting what she had told me.

“Steve, you’ll take it to the police, right?” Her voice had an edge.

“I’ll tell them, of course, but they may just brush it off. Hell, Fahey already thinks I’ve lost some of my marbles, the way I’ve been tossing off theories about the killings.”

“Well, this may just be a weird coincidence, but I thought I had better tell you.”

“I’m glad you did, and I am going to pass it along to Fergus.”

“Will you be coming home soon, Steve?”

“Because of the fire, I’ve got some catching up to do here. I’ll call when I’m leaving.”

“Be careful,” she said with a quiet intensity, as if sensing there might be more to my “catching up” than I let on.

After hanging up, I chewed some more on her “German-English” discovery, and I really did briefly consider telling Fahey about it before discarding the finding as a bizarre coincidence—maybe. I then turned my thoughts to the evening ahead.

Twilight settled over the fairgrounds as I left the pressroom and grabbed a cup of coffee and a roast beef sandwich on rye at the counter of Leo’s Grubstake Diner in Gold Gulch, the southern terminus of the Deadwood Central Railroad. I even got a kosher dill, the quality of which would have pleased Pickles Podgorny.

The faux-Western town, with its hitching posts and raised wooden sidewalks and a main street of false-front frontier-style buildings including the Silver Dollar Saloon, a nickelodeon silent movie house, shooting gallery, and “Dutch Annie’s” waffle shop, was crowded with fairgoers enjoying the balmy evening.

As I left the diner in near darkness, a train filled to capacity with passengers steamed into the Gold Gulch station, meaning it would be making the return trip north within the next half hour. That particular run concerned me on this tenth anniversary of the deaths of three pre-teen boys on their bicycles.

It was completely dark by the time I walked north on a path paralleling the railroad track. About two blocks north of Gold Gulch, the track diverged from the path, which I left, moving over to the rails.

I turned on my flashlight and played it back and forth across the rails and crossties, wondering whether Fahey had indeed sent more men to the neighborhood of the railroad line because of what I had told him. So far, I hadn’t seen anyone who looked remotely like a detective, which probably meant he had dismissed my theory—or Walt Disney’s, really—as a crackpot idea.

I continued on for one city block, then another, and another. The tracks were clear. I began to think Fahey was right, that I was on a fool’s errand, the victim, not for the first time, of my own overactive imagination, further fueled in this particular case by the fertile mind of one Walt Disney.

I now had reached the darkest stretch of the Deadwood Central. The nearest streetlights, more than a block away at the North Western Railway’s Paul Bunyan exhibit, did not penetrate the trees in this seeming wilderness-within-a-city. I found the footing uneven on the graveled roadbed of the line, and I stumbled and nearly fell twice but recovered my balance.

The second time I righted myself, my flashlight beam caught something on the track ahead. Numerous iron bars several feet long, reinforcing bars like those used in building construction, had been lashed together by metal cable into bundles of two and three each. They had been wedged in at angles between and on the rails. I’m no expert on this sort of thing, but they looked like they could easily force a train off its tracks.

I knelt and pulled one of the bundles of bars off the track, heaving it over against the base of the stockade fence separating the fair from Lake Shore Drive just to the west. Then as I tossed a second bundle off the tracks, I heard my name.