Free The Railroad by Neil Douglas Newton Page B

bit of solace: the TV channel; all my old childhood memories were there. Then I got up and poured myself a bit of the single malt scotch I’d purchased a couple of days before. It felt good going down. Fuck it , I told myself.
     
    *
    Cassie Jenz walks with her daughter through a park set on a hill somewhere in Rockland County. The young girl proudly wears a canteen around her neck, knowing that she carries an important contribution to the afternoon. Her mother leans on an old walking stick as she walks. She adjusts the sweater she wears against the late fall cold.
    The young girl keeps up a flow of conversation; she is clearly excited about the outing. Her mother listens with half an ear and has to squelch the desire to tell her daughter to be quiet. She is thinking of other things that consume her attention.
    The daughter has just begun a story about a girl in her class when a man steps out on the path. He smiles at both Cassie and her daughter, but despite the friendliness of his smile the mother stops short, staring at him nervously. Behind him other men can be seen indistinctly between the trees.
    “Oh God,” Cassie says softly.
    The man shakes his head. “You knew that this would happen.”
    Cassie shakes her head in return, but seems cowed. The man leans forward and takes her hand. At that, the little girl runs forward and swings the canteen at his head, connecting with a resounding thud.
    The man rocks back and grabs his head. His hand comes away with blood on it. “Shit!” he screams, taking one step toward the little girl.
    “No!” her mother shouts. She leans down toward her daughter. “Stop, Melissa.” She looks back at the man who is grimacing. “I’ll take care of this. Don’t make him any angrier.”
    Melissa stands stock still as the man walks up to her mother and grabs her hand, much more roughly this time. He looks around, searching for something, and his eyes come to rest on a whitewashed boulder by the path. He  pulls Cassie down so she’s standing at an awkward angle above the boulder. From his pocket he removes a surgical scalpel. Making a clean incision across her fingertip, he leans forward and begins to write on the boulder in her blood. Only a few feet away, Melissa’s hands clench and unclench as he works.
    “Mom?”  Her voice trembles.
    When his work is finished, the man drags Cassie along the path. Melissa scans the area, looking for help. She turns to find her mother and her captor moving along the path, away from her. As she debates whether to simply run away, a hand grabs her arm. She looks into the face of a man who has just come out of the trees; he seems almost amused.
    As she’s hustled away, Melissa catches sight of the numbers written on the rock in her mother’s blood:
    4-5-1
    *
    I watched the news that night. I’d realized that turning off the parade of old comfortable TV shows was good for me. I could get lost in shows that I’d watched as a kid and disappear down the rabbit hole, never to return. The Trade Center though mentioned often, had receded father into the background than it had when I’d been in Manhattan. Now all the emphasis was on Afghanistan itself and the new war. I watched with a strange detachment; getting Bin Laden was everyone’s dream but I knew it wouldn’t change what had happened to all of us.
    I watched for a while, feeling vaguely uneasy. Finally they came to the domestic news. Most of it was pretty standard and didn’t catch my attention. But then there was one item that reminded me of a news story I’d seen a few weeks before.
    Tonight, police are searching for Cassie Jenz and her daughter Melissa. They were reported missing yesterday following a trip to Reisler Park in Rockland County. A search revealed one of Melissa’s sweaters in some bushes just off the main path in the south end of the park. On a nearby rock the numbers 4-5-1 were found written in blood.
    Jenz had been a fugitive for the past few weeks, leaving home with her