Twice a Bride (12 page)

The stock car buzzed with chatter. Speechless, Ida breathed a prayer for the injured, then for wisdom and skill for all the helpers.

“Remain calm, and don’t get in the way.” Morgan’s voice boomed above the buzz. “We’ll assist passengers with the greatest need first, according to the severity of their condition.”

As their transport drew closer to the wreckage below the bridge, Ida couldn’t stop blinking. The disturbing image didn’t go away. The locomotive lay in a heap, twisted, some of its pieces detached. Two passenger cars lay behind it, having slid several feet down the embankment. Three freight cars and the caboose lay in a zigzag, bringing up the rear of the calamity. Talk was that a rail on the downhill side had given way.

When their train came to a shuddering halt, one of the miners on board flipped the latch and slid open the door. Chaos erupted as people crowded the exit. So much for Morgan’s directive to remain calm. They were all in the way, some risking injury by jumping to the ground. Others sat on the threshold to lower themselves to the gravel roadbed.

As Ida and Hattie allowed Morgan to lower them to the ground, the cries for help assaulted their ears. How would they know where to begin? With Hattie at her side, Ida picked her way down the embankment behind Morgan. Medical bag in hand, her brother-in-law took long strides toward the passenger cars.

“I’m a doctor,” Morgan shouted.

“Over here!” The woman’s cry came from under a rock overhang, several feet away from the far passenger car.

Hattie tapped Ida’s arm and pointed to a young woman with antsy children. “I’m going to check on those families.”

Ida nodded.

Morgan picked up his pace, and so did Ida. A wisp of a woman stood over a motionless man with no obvious injuries. He lay in the dry creek bed as if in blessed slumber.

“You have to help my husband.” She blew at a strand of white hair that dangled from beneath her bonnet. “Harold was resting so peacefully until the train bumped off the tracks. He helped me out of the train and to the shade here, then said he needed to finish his nap.” She wrung her feeble hands. “Now he won’t wake up.”

Ida met Morgan’s stoic gaze, and her breath caught. The elderly man lay motionless. Placing her arm around the woman’s back, Ida watched as her brother-in-law reached to the man’s collar and placed two fingers on his neck.

Morgan stood. “I’m sorry, ma’am. Your husband is gone.”

Narrowing her cloudy blue eyes, the new widow shook her head. “No, that’s Harold, all right. Harold Sweeny. Look at his big nose.”

Morgan looked at Ida. “I’d say his heart gave out. I need to help the injured.”

“Go. I’ll see to her.”

“Doctor!” The call came from between the two passenger cars, where a groaning man sat on the ground, holding his leg.

Morgan answered the call, and Ida returned her attention to the confused woman at her side. “My name is Ida.”

Smiling, the woman looked at her deceased husband. “Missus … I’m Harold’s wife.”

Her blank expression pierced Ida’s heart. This poor woman was alone now. Ida fought the tears stinging her eyes and clasped Mrs. Sweeny’s hand. “There is someone I’d like you to meet. Do you see that nun there by the bridge?”

Ten minutes later, Ida left Mrs. Sweeny with Sister Mary Claver Coleman. She looked for Morgan but spotted Hattie first, a gaggle of children gathered around her. It looked as if she’d chosen to distract them with her storytelling. It didn’t look like help was needed there, so Ida started toward the group of folks milling about near the second passenger car.

“Cherise! Cherise!”

The distant plea came from behind her, the man’s voice reminding her of the suppertime call from her childhood.

But it couldn’t be him; he wasn’t here.

She walked toward another of the nuns, thinking Morgan may be nearby.

“Ida! Ida, is that you?”

Her heart racing, Ida spun around and stared into the ashen face of her father. “Father! Why are you here? You’re supposed to—” She stared at the knot on his forehead. Other than that, he didn’t look injured, but she’d never seen him so agitated. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine, but you have to help me, daughter.”

Where was Aunt Alma? What were they doing on this train? By this time, her sisters had gone to meet them at the Midland Terminal depot.

“Is it Aunt Alma? Is she hurt?”

Father frowned as if her question confused him and shook his hatless head. “No. I can’t find Cherise.”

“Cherise? Who—”

“She came with me from Paris. I’d gone into the lavatory. I never should have left her side. We have to find her.”

He’d brought a woman with him to Cripple Creek?

Ida followed her father back to the farthest passenger car. She’d never seen him move this fast. Nor had she seen him this uneasy. Not since the night her mother succumbed to pneumonia. This woman who had accompanied him from France couldn’t be as important to him as their mother, could she?

Her father darted around a cluster of people, shouting the name
Cherise
. In pursuit, Ida picked up her skirts. Harlan Sinclair wasn’t much for corresponding, but he
had
sent a handful of letters over the past two years. Not once had he mentioned having met a woman named Cherise.

But then during the past several months his only communication had been a brief telegram stating the date and time of his arrival on the Midland Terminal Railroad. Not on the Florence and Cripple Creek Railroad. Nor had he mentioned a guest. Hattie had been the one to tell her Father had telephoned the boardinghouse and asked for two rooms. That meant he and this Cherise weren’t
married, at least not yet. Since he hadn’t said for whom he’d reserved the second room, Hattie had assumed the guest was Aunt Alma.

Prior to today, Ida would’ve chosen the word
logical
as an adjective befitting her father. Now he raced toward a fallen train car, pushing people aside like a madman.

“Father!”

He stopped just short of the tipped car and faced her. “I’ve searched everywhere else.” He pressed his palm to the side of his head as if it pained him.

He wasn’t all right. Morgan needed to look at him. Ida stared at her father while she listened for sounds in the car. She didn’t hear any noises coming from inside. “I’m sure others have searched the car.”

“I wasn’t with her. She could’ve been hurt … buried by baggage and overlooked.” He pressed his right foot to a frame rail and looked at her. He’d aged. The laugh lines that once framed his blue eyes had been replaced by worry lines. He clamped onto a brake line and started to pull himself up the exposed underside of the car.

“Your head hurts. You shouldn’t be doing that.” Sighing, Ida pushed up the sleeves of her linsey-woolsey dress. “I’ll go in and look for her.”

He stepped down, his shoulders sagging. “Thank you.”

She decided to attack the end of the car, hoping the door could be opened. She checked the laces on her boots, then tucked the ruffled hem of her skirt into her stockings and started climbing. Using the pickets as ladder steps, she made her way up the railing, muttering to herself.

This Cherise must have been very important to Father, because there hadn’t been so much as an embrace before he put her to work. He’d left Portland in April of ’96. Ida hadn’t seen him in two years and five months. A “glad-to-see-you” would’ve been nice.

The door was open. As gently as possible, Ida lowered herself into the car. Crouching on the lavatory door, she peered into the clutter. The bolted seats stood on end, looking like rows of vacant confessionals. Carpet bags, boxes,
and other personal belongings lay strewn on the windows now facing the ground. Light streamed in through the windows that now served as a ceiling. Ida stepped carefully on the window frames, wending her way past the seats and through the mishmash.

A shuffling sound stopped her. Had she heard someone, or had she only imagined the sound in her desperation to find Cherise and appease her father?

“Is someone in here?”

Silence.

“Cherise?” Ida stepped over a broken lamp. “Cherise, I am Mr. Sinclair’s daughter. Are you in here?”

Dark eyes peered at her from around a seat. As a tentative child emerged from her hiding place, Ida saw a curtain of long black hair. Red rimmed the young girl’s eyes. Tears streaked her round face.

“You are Cherise?”

“Oui
, Cherise.
Vous connaissez mon Monsieur Sinclair?”
The child sniffled. “Pardon. You know my Monsieur Sinclair?” Her accent was thick, but understandable.

Father had brought a little girl with him from France?

The man waiting outside wasn’t the father she knew.

T
renton set up his tripod on a hillock in the dry wash above the twisted train. He’d received news of the derailment by telephone from the president of the Florence and Cripple Creek Railroad, who had asked him to take pictures for their investigation. Before Trenton had gotten out of the studio door with his equipment, Bart Gardner, editor of the
Cripple Creek Times
, nearly ran him down. Bart had come to ask Trenton to capture a couple of crisp photographs for display in the newspaper office.

Folks from nearby farms had come to help. At least one doctor had come out to treat the injured. He’d heard of at least one death already, an elderly man whose wife was frail and confused. He’d seen two Catholic nuns comforting the frightened and handing out food to the hungry. He’d watched a matronly woman gather children about her. She’d soon had them laughing at her stories. He’d even witnessed a young woman climbing into one of the tipped passenger cars to rescue a panicked little girl.

Trenton positioned the cape on the camera and inserted the frosted glass. Perhaps his choice to photograph people rather than landscapes wasn’t completely driven by his need to make a dollar. He’d all but forgotten there were benevolent people in the world. The photographs he planned to take of the participants here today would champion the human spirit—their tenacity and their compassion.

Some folks who knew his struggle would say he had spirit. Others would
call him hopeless. Swallowing his mother’s bitter indictment once again, he ducked under the cape and framed the scene before calling for all to be still.

“After that day, I didn’t want to see another cow. Ever.”

Hattie watched as the eight children gathered around her waited for another story. Their laughter was sweet music to her heart.

“Another one, Miss Hattie.” The request came from Bucky, the oldest of three siblings. “Tell another one.”

Hattie glanced up the tracks. The switch engine had started its descent toward them. “I’d love to, but it’ll soon be my turn to go home.”

“Me too!” A pigtailed girl clapped and ran to her mother. The children began to scatter, reuniting with their families.

Hattie’s smile was bittersweet. She loved telling the tales of her younger self—Adeline Pemberton. Soon the Sinclair sisters’ sons and daughters would be old enough to gather at her knee for a story.

She glanced around the wreckage for any sign of Ida, who was probably more than ready to head back to town and join her sisters in welcoming her father to Colorado. The last time Hattie had seen the oldest Sinclair sister, Ida was handing a little girl down from a train car.

Even if Mr. Sinclair didn’t like frills or making a fuss over things, he should be proud of his daughters.

“Group Two.” Mr. Updike stood on the bridge, shouting into a megaphone. “Group Two: line up here.” Using the megaphone as a pointer, the banker directed the crowd already forming.

The stock car creaked as it was pulled around the corner, ready for its second run into town. The first load included the two Sisters of Mercy and Mrs. Sweeny—the poor dear who’d lost her husband today—and those passengers who’d been most severely injured. Bruises, scrapes, and frayed nerves accounted
for most of the maladies, although one man had suffered a broken leg and an older woman had swooned and cut her head.

Hattie heard her name and turned around. Ida walked toward her beside the man Hattie had seen outside the passenger car. Ida’s hand rested on his arm while the little girl Ida had rescued clung to his other arm.