Derailed

by James Siegel

Genres: Crime Fiction; Suspense

Synopsis

Every day Charles Schine rides the 8:43 to do the job he has done for over a decade in a New York advertising agency. With a wife and an ill child who depend on him, Charles is not a man who likes changes or takes risks...until he is later for his regular train, and sits down across from the woman of his dreams.Her name is Lucinda. Like Charles, she is married. Like Charles, she takes the train every day to work in New York City. Her train is the 9:05, and tomorrow she will be on it again, and so will Charles. For there is something about Lucinda, the flash of thigh beneath her short skirt, the way every man on the train is eyeing her, something about this time of the morning that will make Charles take a chance he shouldn't take, break a vow he shouldn't break, and enter a room he should never enter.

In a matter of days, a flirtation turns to a passion, and Charles and Lucinda are drawn into the dark side of the American Dream. In a matter of weeks, Charles's life is in shambles. A man is dead. A small fortune is stolen. Charles's home is violated and everything violently spirals out of control.

But Charles is about to discover that once you leave the straight and narrow, getting back on track is the most perilous journey of all. And for Charles, that journey - of lies, terror, and deception - has just begun.

Release date: February 19, 2003

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 352

Sample

I spend five days a week teaching English at East Bennington High and two nights a week teaching English at Attica State Prison.
Which is to say, I spend my time conjugating verbs for delinquents and dangling participles for convicts. One class feeling
like they’re in prison and the other class actually being in one.


On the Attica evenings, I eat an early dinner with my wife and two children. I kiss my wife and teenage daughter goodbye and
give my four-year-old son a piggyback ride to the front door. I gently put him down, kiss his soft brow, and promise to look
in on him when I get home.


I enter my eight-year-old Dodge Neon still surrounded in a halo of emotional well-being.

By the time I pass through the metal detector at Attica Prison, it’s gone.

Maybe it’s the brass plaque prominently displayed on the wall of the visitors room. “Dedicated to the Correction Officers
who died in the Attica riots,” it says. There is no plaque for the prisoners who died.


I have only recently begun teaching there, and I can’t quite decide who’s scarier—the Attica prisoners or the corrections
officers who guard them. Possibly the corrections officers.


It’s clear they don’t like me much. They consider me a luxury item, like cable TV, something the prisoners did nothing to
deserve. The brainchild of some liberal in Albany, who’s never had a shiv stuck in his ribs or feces thrown in his face, who’s
never had to peel a tattooed carcass off a blood-soaked floor swimming with AIDS.


They greet me with barely disguised contempt. It’s the PHD, they mumble. “Pathetic Homo Douchebag,” one of them scrawled on
the wall of the visitors bathroom.


I forgive them.

They are the outnumbered occupiers of an enslaved population seething with hatred. To survive this hate, they must hate back.
They are not allowed to carry guns, so they arm themselves with attitude.


As for the prisoners who attend my class, they are strangely docile. Many of them the unfortunate victims of the draconian
Rockefeller drug laws that treat small purchases of cocaine like violent felonies. They mostly look bewildered.


Now and then, I give them writing assignments. Write something, I say. Anything. Anything that interests you.

I used to have them read their work in class. Until one convict, a sloe-eyed black named Benjamin Washington, read what sounded
like gibberish. It was gibberish, and the other convicts laughed at him. Benjamin took offense at this and later knifed one of them in the back
over a breakfast of watery scrambled eggs and burnt toast.


I decided on anonymity there and then.

They write what interests them and send it up to the desk unsigned. I read it out loud and nobody knows who wrote what. The
writer knows; that’s good enough.


One day, though, I asked them to write something that would interest me. The story of them. How they got here, for instance,
to Mr. Widdoes’s English class in the rec room at Attica State Prison. If they wanted to be writers, I told them, start with
the writer.


It might be enlightening, I thought, maybe even cathartic. It might be more interesting than the story “Tiny the Butterfly,”
a recent effort from … well, I don’t know, do I? Tiny brought color and beauty to a weed-strewn lot in the projects until
he was, unfortunately, crushed like a bug by the local crank dealer. Tiny, it was explained at the bottom of the page, was cymbollic.


I gave out the assignment on Thursday; by next Tuesday the papers were scattered across my desk. I read them aloud in no particular
order. The first story about an innocent man being framed for armed robbery. The second story about an innocent man being
framed for possession of illegal narcotics. The third story about an innocent man being framed …


So maybe it wasn’t that enlightening.

But then.

Another story. Hardly a story at all (although it had a title); a kind of introduction to a story. An invitation to one, really.

About another innocent man.

Who walked on the train one day to go to work.

When something happened.

The morning Charles met Lucinda, it took him several moments after he first opened his eyes to remember why he liked keeping
them closed.


Then his daughter, Anna, called him from the hallway and he thought: Oh yeah.


She needed lunch money, a note for the gym teacher, and help with a book report that was due yesterday.

Not in that order.

In a dazzling feat of juggling, he managed all three between showering, shaving, and getting dressed. He had to. His wife,
Deanna, had already left for her job at P.S. 183, leaving him solely in charge.


When he made it downstairs he noticed Anna’s blood meter and a used syringe on the kitchen counter.

Anna had made him late.

When he got to the station, his train had already left—he could hear a faint rumble as it retreated into the distance.

By the time the next train pulled in, the platform had been repopulated by an entirely new cast of commuters. He knew most of
the 8:43 crowd by sight, but this was the 9:05, so he was in alien territory.


He found a seat all by himself and immediately dived into the sports pages.

It was November. Baseball had slipped away with another championship for the home team. Basketball was just revving up, football
already promising a year of abject misery.


This is the way he remained for the next twenty minutes or so: head down, eyes forward, brain dead—awash in meaningless stats
he could reel off like his Social Security number, numbers he could recite in his sleep, and sometimes did, if only to keep
himself from reciting other numbers.


Which numbers were those?

Well, the numbers on Anna’s blood meter, for example.

Numbers that were increasingly and alarmingly sky high.

Anna had suffered with juvenile diabetes for over eight years.

Anna wasn’t doing well.

So all things being equal, he preferred a number like 3.25. Roger-the-Rocket-Clemens’s league-leading ERA this past season.

Or twenty-two—there was a good round number. Latrell Sprewell’s current points per game, accumulated, dreadlocks flying, for
the New York Knicks.


Numbers he could look at without once feeling sick.

The train lurched, stopped.

They were somewhere between stations—dun-colored ranch houses on either side of the track. It suddenly occurred to him that
even though he’d ridden this train more times than he cared to remember, he couldn’t describe a single neighborhood it passed
through. Somewhere along the way to middle age, he’d stopped looking out windows.


He burrowed back into the newspaper.

It was at that exact moment, somewhere between Steve Serby’s column on the state of the instant replay rule and Michael Strahan’s
lamentation on his diminishing sack total, that it happened.


Later he would wonder what exactly had made him look up again at that precise moment in time.

He would ask himself over and over what would have happened if he hadn’t. He would torture himself with all the permutations,
the what ifs and what thens and what nows.


But he did look up.

The 9:05 from Babylon to Penn Station kept going. Merrick to Freeport to Baldwin to Rockville Centre. Lynbrook to Jamaica
to Forest Hills to Penn.


But Charles clearly and spectacularly derailed.

Two nights later after dinner, my four-year-old climbed onto my lap and demanded I do treasure hunt on his back.


“We’re going on a treasure hunt,” I whispered as I traced little steps up and down his spine. “X marks the spot …” as he squirmed and giggled. He smelled of shampoo and candy and Play-Doh, the scent that was clearly and
uniquely him.


“To get to the treasure, you take big steps and little steps,” I murmured, and when I finished he asked me where this treasure
was exactly, and I answered him on cue. This, after all, was our routine.


“Right here,” I said. And hugged him.

My wife smiled at us from the other side of the table.

When I kissed them all good-bye, I lingered before stepping out into the driveway. As if I were attempting to soak up enough
good vibes to last me through the night, straight through the redbrick archway of Attica and into the fetid rec room. Like
a magic aura that might protect me from harm.


“Be careful,” my wife said from the front door.

*   *    *

When I went through the metal detector, it went off like an air raid siren.

I’d forgotten to take my house keys out of my pocket.

“Hey, Yobwoc,” the CO said while patting me down. “Keys are like … metal.” Yobwoc was Cowboy backward and stood for Young
Obnoxious Bastard We Often Con.


PHD was just one of my monikers here.

“Sorry,” I said, “forgot.”

As soon as I entered the classroom, I could see there was another piece of the story waiting for me at my desk. Eleven pages,
neatly printed.


Yes, I thought. The story is just getting started.


Other sections soon followed like clockwork.

From that first day on, there would be another piece of the story waiting for me every time I entered the classroom.

Sometimes just a page or two—sometimes what would constitute several chapters. Placed flat on my desk and all, like the first
one, unsigned. The story unfolding piecemeal, like a daytime serial you just can’t pull your eyes away from. After all, it
would end up containing all the staples of soap opera—sex, lies, and tragedy.


I didn’t read these installments to my class. I understood they were solely for me now. Me and, of course, the writer.

Speaking of which.

There were twenty-nine students in my class.

Eighteen blacks, six Hispanics, five pale-as-ghosts Caucasians.

I was reasonably sure that none of them had ever ridden the 9:05 to Pennsylvania Station.

So where was he?

An expanse of thigh—that’s all at first.


But not just any thigh. A thigh taut, smooth, and toned, a thigh that had obviously spent some time on the treadmill, sheathed
by a fashionably short skirt made even shorter by the position of the legs. Casually crossed at the knees. All in all, a skirt
length that he’d have to say fell somewhere between sexiness and sluttiness, not exactly one or the other, therefore both.


This is what Charles saw when he looked up.

He could just make out a black high-heeled pump jutting out into the aisle, barely swinging with the motion of the train.
He was directly facing her, his seat backward to the city-bound direction of the train car. But she was blocked by the front
page of The New York Times, and even if she wasn’t blocked by the day’s alarming if familiar headline—mid-east burning—he hadn’t yet looked up toward her face, only peripherally. Instead he was focusing on that thigh and hoping against hope
she wouldn’t turn out to be beautiful.


She was.

He’d been debating his next move: whether to turn back to his sports stats, for instance, whether to stare out the grime-streaked
window, or scan the bank and airline ads lining each side of the car, when he simply threw caution to the wind and peeked.
Just as The New York Times strategically lowered, finally revealing the face he’d been so hesitant to look at.


Yes, she was beautiful.


Her eyes.

They were kind of spectacular. Wide and doe shaped and the very definition of tenderness. Full, pouting lips she was ever
so slightly biting down on. Her hair? Soft enough to cocoon himself in and never, ever, come out.


He’d been hoping she’d be homely or interesting or simply cute. Not a chance. She was undeniably magnificent.

And that was a problem, because he was kind of vulnerable these days. Dreaming of a kind of alternate universe.

In this alternate universe, he wasn’t married and his kid wasn’t sick, because he didn’t have any kids. Things were always
looking up there; the world was his oyster.


So he didn’t want the woman reading The New York Times to be beautiful. Because that was like peeking into the doorway of this alternate universe of his, at the hostess beckoning him to come inside and put his feet up on the couch, and everyone knew alternate universes were for kids and sci-fi
nuts.


They didn’t exist.

“Ticket.” The conductor was standing over him and demanding something. What did he want? Couldn’t he see he was busy defining
the limitations of his life?


“Ticket,” he repeated.

It was Monday, and Charles had forgotten to actually walk into the station and purchase his weekly ticket. The time change
had thrown him off, and here he was, ticketless in front of strangers.


“Forgot to buy one,” he said.

“Okay,” the conductor said.

“See, I didn’t realize it was Monday.”

“Fine.”

Another thing had just occurred to Charles. On Mondays he stopped at the station ATM to take out money he then used to purchase
the weekly ticket. Money he also used to get through the week. Money he didn’t, at the moment, have.


“That’s nine dollars,” the conductor said.

Like most couples these days, Charles and Deanna lived on the ATM plan, which doled out cash like a trust fund lawyer—a bit
at a time. Charles’s wallet had been in its usual Monday morning location, opened on the kitchen counter, where Deanna had
no doubt scoured it for loose cash before going off to work. There was nothing in it.


“Nine dollars,” the conductor said, this time impatiently. No doubt about it; the man was getting antsy.

Charles looked through his wallet anyway. There was always the chance he was wrong, that somewhere in there was a forgotten
twenty tucked away between business cards and six-year-old photos. Besides, looking through your wallet was what you were
supposed to do when someone was asking you for money.


Which someone was. Repeatedly.

“Look, you’re holding up the whole train,” he said. “Nine dollars.”


“I don’t seem …” continuing the facade, sifting through slips of wrinkled receipts and trying not to show his embarrassment
at being caught penniless in a train of well-to-do commuters.


“You got it or don’t you?” the conductor said.

“If you just give me a minute …”

“Here,” someone said. “I’ll pay for him.”

It was her.

Holding up a ten-dollar bill and showing him a smile that completely threatened his equilibrium.

Of all the things they talked about—and they talked about all sorts of things—there was one thing they didn’t talk about.


Commuting to work? Yes.

I was thinking the other day, she said, that if the U.S. government was run like the Long Island Rail Road, we’d all be in trouble. And then I realized that maybe
it is, and we are.

The weather? Of course.

Fall’s my favorite season, she said. But where did it go?

Baltimore, Charles answered.


Jobs? Absolutely.

I write commercials, Charles said. I’m a creative director.

I cheat clients, she said. I’m a broker. After which she added: Just kidding.

Restaurants dined in … colleges attended … favorite movies. All spoken of, discussed, mentioned.

Just not marriages.

Marriages, the plural, because she wore a wedding band on her left ring finger.

Maybe marriage wasn’t considered an appropriate topic when flirting. If flirting was what they were doing, of course. Charles
wasn’t sure; he was kind of rusty at it and had never been particularly at ease with women to begin with.


But as soon as she’d pressed the ten-dollar bill into the conductor’s hand, Charles protesting all the while—Don’t be silly, you don’t have to do that—as soon as the conductor gave her one dollar in return, Charles still protesting—No, really, this is totally unnecessary—he’d gotten up and sat in the empty seat next to her. Why not—wasn’t it the polite thing to do when someone helped you out?
Even someone who looked like her?


Her thighs shifted to accommodate him. Even with his eyes glued to her heartbreaking face, he’d managed to notice the movement
of her legs, a memory that stayed with him as he spoke to her about the banal, trivial, and superfluous—a good name, he thought,
for a law firm specializing in personal injury suits.


He asked her, for example, which brokerage house she worked for. Morgan Stanley, she answered. And how long she’d been there. Eight years. And where she’d worked before that.


McDonald’s she said.


My high school job.

She was just a little younger than he was, she was reminding him. Just in case he hadn’t noticed.

He had. In fact, he was trying to think of just the right word for her eyes and thought it was probably luminous. Yeah, luminous was just about perfect.


“I’ll give you your money back as soon as we get to Penn Station,” he said, suddenly remembering he was in her debt.

“Tomorrow’s fine,” she said. “Ten percent interest, of course.”

“I’ve never met a woman loan shark before. Do you break legs, too?”

“Just balls,” she said.

Yes, he guessed they were flirting after all. And he didn’t seem half-bad at it, either. Maybe it was like riding a bicycle or having sex, in that
you never actually forgot how. Although it was possible Deanna and he had.

“Is this your usual train?” he asked her.

“Why?”

“So I know how to give you your money back.”

“Forget about it. It’s nine dollars. I think I’ll survive.”

“No. I’ve got to give it back to you—I’d feel ethically impugned if I didn’t.”

“Impugned? Well, I wouldn’t want you to feel impugned. By the way, is that an actual word?”


Charles blushed. “I think so. I saw it in a crossword puzzle once, so it must be.”

Which got them onto a discussion about what else? Crossword puzzles. She liked them—he didn’t.

She could make it through Monday’s with both eyes closed. He needed both eyes and a piece of brain he didn’t possess. The one that provided focus and fortitude. His brain liked to
roam around a little too much to sit down and figure out a five-letter word for … say … sadness. All right, all right, so that was an easy one. Grief. That place where his brain insisted on spending so much of its time these days. Where it had set up house and resolutely
refused to budge. Except, of course, when it was imagining that alternate world of his, where he could flirt with green-eyed
women he’d just met not five minutes before.


They kept talking about other mostly inconsequential things. The conversation a little like the train itself, moving along
at a nice, easy clip, if briefly stopping here and there to pick up some new topic of discussion before gathering steam once
again. And then suddenly they were under the East River and almost there.


“Well, I’m lucky you were here today,” he said, entombed in darkness as the fluorescent train lights flickered off and all
he could see was the vague shape of her body. It seemed like he’d just got on, like he’d just been asked for nine dollars
he didn’t have, and she’d just untangled her thighs and paid for him.


“Tell you what,” he said. “Take the same train tomorrow and I’ll pay you back then.”

“You’ve got a date,” she said.

For the rest of the day, even after he’d shaken her hand goodbye and watched as she disappeared into the Penn Station crowd,
after he’d waited ten minutes for a cab uptown and was greeted with his boss, Eliot, telling him to brace himself just two
feet into the office, he’d think about her choice of words.


She could’ve said fine, sure, meet you tomorrow. She could’ve said good idea. Or bad idea. Or just mail it to me.


But she’d said: You’ve got a date.

Her name was Lucinda.

Something was up.


Eliot informed him their credit card client was coming in to speak with them. Or, more likely, to scream at them.

Blown deadlines, poor tracking studies, unresponsive account executives—they could take their pick.

Even though the actual reason was the same reason it always was these days.

The economy.

Business simply wasn’t good; there was too much competition, too many clients with too many options. Groveling was in, integrity
out.


This was going to be a visit to the principal’s office, a sit-down with Dad, an audience with the IRS. Where he’d have to
stand and assume the position and say thank you, sir, too.


One look at Ellen Weischler’s sour expression when he walked into the conference room pretty much confirmed this.

She looked as if she’d just tasted curdled milk or sniffed something odious. He knew what, too. The last commercial they’d done for her company was a triumph of mediocrity.


Badly cast, badly written, and badly received. It didn’t matter that they’d recommended another one to them. That they’d begged
and pleaded and, yes, even groveled in an attempt to get them to choose a different board. It didn’t even matter that the
first cut of the commercial had been almost good—clever, even hip—until the client, Ellen in particular, had meddled with
it, changing copy, changing shots, each succeeding cut more bland than the previous one, until they’d ended up with the current
dog wagging its tail five times a day on network buys across the country. It didn’t matter because it was their spot, and the buck—or to be perfectly accurate, the 17 percent commission on the $130 million account—stopped there.


There being, of course, Charles.


He greeted Ellen with a chaste kiss on one cheek he thought better of halfway into his lean—thinking you should probably shake
hands with she who was about to deck you.


“So … ,” Ellen said when they’d all taken their seats. All being Charles, Eliot, two account people—Mo and Lo—and Ellen and
hers. So, the way Charles’s mother used to say it when she’d found a Playboy under his bed. So. A so that demanded explanation and certainly contrition.


“I guess you’re not here to raise our commission,” Charles said. He’d meant it as a joke, of course, only no one laughed.
Ellen’s expression stayed sour; if anything, she looked worse than before.


“We have some serious issues,” Ellen said.

We have some serious issues, too. We don’t like you telling us what to do all the time. We don’t like being repudiated, belittled,
ignored, screamed at. We actually don’t like sour expressions. This is what Charles wanted to say.


What he actually said was: “I understand.” And he said it with a hangdog expression he was perfecting to the point of artistry.

“It seems like we talk and talk but no one listens,” Ellen said.

“Well, we—”

“This is just what I mean. Listen to me. Then speak.”


It occurred to Charles that Ellen had transcended angry and gone straight to rude. That if she were an acquaintance, he would
have already walked out of the room. That if she were a client worth significantly less than $130 million, he would’ve told
her to take a hike.


“Of course,” Charles said.

“We all agree on a strategy. We all sign off on it. And then you consistently go off in other directions.”

Those directions being wit, humor, entertainment value, and anything else that actually might make a consumer sit up and watch.

“This last commercial is a case in point.”

Yes, it is.

“We agreed on a board. We said it was going to be done in a certain way. Then you send us a cut that’s nothing like what we
agreed to. With all this New York humor in it.”


If she’d uttered a profanity, c—t, say, she couldn’t have looked more distasteful.

“Well, as you know, we’re always trying to make it—”

“I said listen.”


She’d definitely entered rude and might actually be edging into humiliating. Charles wondered if this was something one was capable of recovering from.


“We have to send cut after cut back to you just in order to get it to the board we originally bought in the first place.”
She paused and looked down at the table.


Charles didn’t like that pause.

It wasn’t a pause that was finally inviting a response. It wasn’t even a pause meant to let her catch her breath. It was a
pause that portended something worse than what preceded it. The kind of pause he’d seen from girlfriends before they dropped
the ax and dashed all hope. From unscrupulous salesmen about to get to the fine print. From emergency room interns about to
tell you exactly what’s wrong with your daughter.


“I think maybe we need a change of direction,” she looked up and said.

Now what did that mean? Other than something bad. Was it possible she was firing the agency?

Charles looked over at Eliot, who, strangely enough, was looking down at the table now, too.

Then he understood.

Ellen wasn’t firing the agency.

Ellen was firing him.

Off the account. Ten years, forty-five commercials. . .