"I asked her not to come," Eunice said, her brown vinyl purse clutched firmly in her lap. "But she stamped her foot and said she was going to see you whether I liked it or not."
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"I saw him again," Sandra said. "The So-Scary Man." "You did? Where?"
"I saw him at the station. He was going through the door."
"You mean Main Street Station?"
"That's right," Eunice said. "She says he crossed East Main Street and walked straight across the sidewalk and into the entrance."
"Do you think he might have seen you?"
Sandra shook her head. "I don't think so. He looked like he was in a big hurry."
"What time was this?"
"About 4:45 yesterday afternoon," Eunice said. "Sandra wanted to call you right away but I tried to persuade her not to. I'm sorry, maybe I'm wrong, but I really don't want her to get mixed up in this."
Decker sat down and pried the lid off his coffee. "I don't blame you, Ms. Plummer. But this kind of information could be really helpful. It means that whoever he is—whatever he is—he's still in the downtown area. If we can work out his behavior patterns . . . well, maybe we can find him, and find out how he manages to make himself unnoticed."
Sandra nodded enthusiastically and said, "We should go look for him."
"No you shouldn't," Eunice said. "You should go back home and finish your schoolwork. You've told Lieutenant Martin what you wanted to tell him, and now we should leave him in peace."
"I think your mom's right," Decker told her. "This is a city with nearly a quarter of a million people living in it. Where are we going to start looking?"
"The station," Sandra insisted.
"Just because you saw him at the station yesterday that
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doesn't mean he's going to be there now. And what would he be doing there? It's all building work and renovations. There wouldn't be any place for him to stay."
"That's where he comes from," Sandra insisted. "I just know."
Decker suddenly remembered the drawing of Main Street Station hanging by the fireplace in Eunice Plummer's apartment. The dark cloud over it, which looked more like tangled black snakes. And what had Eunice told him? "She calls it the Fun House."
"How do you know?" he asked her.
Sandra touched her fingertips to her forehead. "I can see it. I can see him going up the stairs."
"You did a drawing of the station, didn't you? A very
good one. But it had some kind of a cloud hanging over it." "I saw it. Only it wasn't a cloud. It was a bad thing." "A bad thing? What do you mean by that?"
"When people do wrong. When people hate people. That's what it's like."
Eunice said, "I'm sorry, Lieutenant. I really think that this is enough."
"You wouldn't consider letting me take Sandra down to the station for a look around?"
"You've said yourself that this man could be vengeful, especially if he knows that Sandra can see him, and identify him."
"Well, you're right, of course. And the last thing I want to do is expose Sandra to any danger."
"I want to look for him," Sandra said, drumming her heels on the floor. "It would be like hide-and-go-seek."
Decker shook his head. "I'm sorry, Sandra. If Mom says no, then it's no. But I'll go check the station myself, and if I find anything I'll tell you."
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* * *
Decker and Hicks climbed the dark stone stairway from East Main Street to the second-floor lobby of Main Street Station, deafened at every step by weird, distorted banging and hammering.
They reached the lobby itself, where workers in hard hats were digging up the flooring and chipping the walls back to the bare brick. In spite of the noise and the dust and the snaking hydraulic hoses, the lobby was still awesome, with its tall columns and its high arched windows and its coffered ceiling. From here, Virginia's soldiers had departed for two world wars and Vietnam, and vacationers boarded for Buck-roe Beach, as well as students bound for northern colleges and salesmen heading to new territory out West.
A short sandy man in blue overalls came over to greet them, carrying two red hard hats. "Lieutenant Martin? How do you do. Mike Verdant, I'm the project engineer. Have to ask you to put these on, I'm afraid."
"Thanks," Decker said. "Quite an operation you've got going here."
"It's going pretty good. We should have trains running by December on the eastern side, on the old Chesapeake and Ohio tracks, and then we can open up the Seaboard Line."
"History, huh?"
"Oh, for sure. Amtrak closed this station down in 1975 and shifted all of their rail operations out to the suburbs, because they thought that the interstate was going to kill off rail travel. But . . . here we are again. Opening it all up. Here, let me show you something."
He led them across the echoing lobby to the western side of the station, where workmen in white overalls were drilling up the floor. He picked up a piece of flooring and crumbled it between finger and thumb.
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"You see this flooring? Black cinder ash, from the old coal-burning locomotives. You add water and it holds up pretty well."
Decker sniffed and looked around. "Any place here that somebody could hide?"
Michael Verdant stood up, dusting his hands. "Not sure what you mean. We've had a couple of down-and-outs in here lately."
"No, I mean any place that somebody could actually live in."
"I don't see how. There's too much work going on. During the day we're renovating the walls and the flooring. Over there—you see over there?—we took down all of the terracotta sculptures and we're having them molded and recast. Then we're stripping out all of the asbestos, we have to do that during the night, because of safety regulations. Nobody could set up camp here, wouldn't be possible."
Decker breathed in the smell of old plaster and pulverized brick. The lobby echoed with hammer drills and pickaxes, but he was sure he could sense something else here too. The Old South, which had depended on tobacco and cotton and slavery and free opinion, breathing its defiant last.
Richmond had once been the Secessionist capital. Now it was a tourist attraction, with antique stores and teddy-bear shops and plantation cruises on riverboats, lunch and dinner included, and the only men in gray were the guides at the National Battlefield Park.
Michael Verdant said, "Come on, follow me." He led them upstairs, to the fourth and fifth levels, through sheets of dusty plastic and sanded-down doors, until they came to a metal ladder in the corner. He climbed it as swiftly as a big sandy ape, and Decker and Hicks followed. They found themselves out on the balcony of the clock tower, their hair blown by the warm midday wind. Below them, traffic
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streamed along the interstate, which curved beneath the station only twenty feet away. But off to their right, they could see all the way down the Shockoe Valley, where the James River glittered, and ships were moored, and the woody hills were hazed with summer blue.
"Finest view of the city there is."
Decker turned around. Above him the four clock faces were creeping closer to noon, and he could hear the stealthy creeping of their automated movement.
"How about the lower levels?" he asked. "Any chance that somebody could be hiding themselves there?"
Michael Verdant led them back down to the gloomy, echoing train shed, 530 feet long, the size of a zeppelin hangar, with a gable roof. "This is where the Greyhound buses are going to be coming in. Not sure about the second level, though. It's like three football fields put together."
They went back down the stairway to the East Main Street entrance, and Michael Verdant unclipped a flashlight from his belt and showed them a deep excavation of rubble and old brickwork. "We're putting in a ramp here, for wheelchair users, and people who lug their bags on wheels. We found this old brick foundation when we started to excavate, and at first we thought it could be a wharf, because the old Shockoe Creek used to come in here."