Free The Christmas Train by David Baldacci

for Christmas. The list was short and not very promising.
    Agnes Joe joined them. She was still wearing the nightgown, but she had a robe on over it.
    “We hit something,” she said.
    “Appears that way,” Tom replied, as he tried to get past her. However, he found that when Agnes Joe faced him head-on, the woman’s body actually spanned the entire width of the hall. Amtrak really needed to build its trains larger to accommodate the widening of Americans.
    She pulled an apple from her pocket, rubbed it on her robe, and started chomping. “I remember once three—no, four years ago—we were heading up right about here in fact, when, bam, we stopped dead.”
    “Really, what happened?” asked Tom.
    “Why don’t you come in my compartment, set yourself down, get comfortable, and I’ll tell you.”
    Father Kelly and Tom exchanged glances, and then the priest scooted into the safety of his rabbit hole, leaving the journalist all alone. So much for the support of the Church in times of crisis, thought Tom.
    “Well, I’d like to but I have to get ready for dinner. My reservation is at seven.”
    “Mine too.”
    With the look she gave him, Tom began to think she really had a thing for him. All he could do was give her a weak smile as he finally managed to squeeze past and into the safety of his compartment. He locked his door, drew his curtain, and would have slid the bed against the door had it not been bolted to the wall.
    He dressed for dinner, which meant he splashed water on his face, ran a comb through his hair, and changed his shirt. He peeked out the door, checking for roaming Agnes Joes, saw the coast was clear, and still ran for the safety of the mess car. Unfortunately, though not a world-class sprinter, he was still moving faster than the Cap. chapter ten
    As Tom surveyed the dining room, his mind once again drifted to his rail-travel touchstone, North by Northwest . In the film Cary Grant, on the run from the police and the train conductor—as a poor fugitive from justice, Cary had no ticket—comes into the elegant dining car. The splendidly attired maitre d’ escorts him past fashionably dressed diners, to the table of the ravishingly sexy Eva Marie. Turns out she’d tipped the waiter to seat Cary with her. Beautiful women were always doing that to poor Cary Grant. They order, they drink, they laugh; they conduct a sort of sophisticated verbal foreplay right there at the table, one of the more subtly erotic movie scenes ever Tom felt. Right now, in the role of Eva Marie, he could only see Eleanor. And wasn’t that pathetic, he told himself—pathetic that there was no possibility of it coming true.
    On Amtrak, diners were seated to encourage conversation and the forming of friendships, however fleeting. In this tradition, Tom was seated across from two people, a middle-aged man and a woman who, unfortunately, looked nothing like Eleanor, or Eva Marie for that matter. The guy was dressed in a suit and tie. Across the aisle from them at another table were Steve and Julie. They were drinking glasses of red wine, holding hands, talking in low voices, and still looked very nervous. Young love: There was nothing better or worse, Tom decided. Except perhaps old love, unrequited. Actually, after seeing Eleanor, he was sure of it.
    By what he could overhear from the other diners, the subject of the stalled train was dominating the conversation. At least the longer the train was stopped the longer he’d be on it with Eleanor. And how exactly did that help, Tom asked himself, since it was so clearly obvious how she felt. He’d held out some hope that she still loved him despite how it had ended. He’d kept that thought safely in his pocket all these years and it had carried him through some troubling times. Now that pocket was empty; actually, it had been ripped right off his pants.
    “This is the second train I’ve been on this week where something has happened,” said the woman across from Tom. She