"An old woman," James said. He was breathing hard. "Eighty-seven. Tan coat, little hat. She followed that cart down here. She's got dementia. She doesn't have a ticket. I think she got on your train."
Ms. Dobrev did not waste a single second on disbelief. He would always be grateful to her for that. She looked at him, and at his badge, and at the empty cart, and she thumbed her radio and said, flat and level, "Engineer, conductor. Hold departure. I've got a possible unticketed vulnerable passenger on board, looking now." The radio crackled back something James couldn't make out. Ms. Dobrev's mouth tightened. "Copy. I know what time it is." She let go of the button and looked at James. "You know her?"
"Sort of. Since about forty minutes ago."
"That's sort of more than me. You've got three minutes. After that she's going to Denver with my crew looking after her and the Nebraska state police meeting us in Omaha, and that is not a better day for anybody. Go. I'll take the sleepers and the diner. You take the coaches. Upstairs, mostly. People go upstairs."
James went.
He went up into the nearest coach past the attendant and the little yellow step stool, through the narrow lower level and up the tight curving stairs, and there was the long aisle of high-backed blue seats full of Saturday travelers settling in for fifty-one hours: a college girl with a neck pillow already on, a Mennonite family in plain dress unpacking sandwiches from wax paper, a man with a fishing rod case, a grandmother with a baby. No Iris. Through the hissing vestibule door to the next car, faces turning up at him, face to face to face, the way Petra had searched the Great Hall. No Iris. Next car.
He thought of her following the red cap down the ramp. He thought of what Petra had said: That's me. That's what I taught her. You could build a whole safe world for someone out of one color, and the world was full of that color, stop signs and fire trucks and Santa Claus and the caps of porters, and any one of them could lead her anywhere. And he thought, unwillingly, of Ruby's purple hat, which he had chosen because purple was easy to find from up a ladder, and how many purple hats there must be in Chicago, and how he had believed for four Saturdays that seeing that hat meant seeing his daughter.
The door to the next car slid open, and it was the Sightseer Lounge.
The whole upper deck of the car was glass, great curved windows sweeping up into the roof, so that even in the gloom of the train shed it felt like standing in a lantern. The seats swiveled toward the windows, and almost nobody was there yet; the lounge didn't fill until the prairie began. There was a teenage boy with enormous headphones slouched in one of the swivel chairs. And in the chair beside him, sitting very upright with her hands folded on her knees and her little hat with the pin in it slightly askew, looking out through the great glass windows at the concrete columns and the pigeon wire and the yellow lights as if they were the Rocky Mountains, was Iris.
She had stopped crying. Her face was calm and set, the face of a woman who has made a decision.
James did not run to her. He had learned that much from Petra. He stopped in the doorway and let his breathing settle, and pulled his jacket straight, and then he walked down the car at an ordinary pace and sat down in the swivel chair on her other side.