The Christmas Train by David Baldacci Page A

it was. Maybe the Cap was growing on him.
    Max gripped Tom’s arm excitedly. “You understand exactly what I’m trying to get at here.” He suddenly smacked his forehead. “I just had an unbelievable brainwave. This is always happening to me, Tom, all the time. Look, you’re a writer, seen stuff all over the world, and you’re on this train trying to take the pulse of America over the holidays.”
    “Right, so?” Tom said cautiously. He had no idea where this was going, but Max Powers seemed to be floating in the clutches of his brainwave.
    “So, you and my writer should team up—I mean, for this trip, for the research part. Swap notes, stories you’ve heard, brainstorming, stuff like that. And I’m not talking for free. I’ll pay you, believe me.”
    “But I’m already working on a story.”
    “That’s the sheer beauty of it. You write your story, fine. But the same stuff you’re doing for your story can help my writer put the film plot together. It’s perfect. Two bangs for one. Get it?”
    Tom nodded. However, he wasn’t really looking forward to working with the ten-year-old with the headset. Tom was neither very young nor very hip, and if the guy called him “dude” just once or perhaps blurted out “Ciao!” instead of simply “goodbye,” it might get ugly.
    To Tom’s surprise, Max led him right past the compartment with the headset-wearing hipster and went to the first compartment and rapped on the glass.
    “You decent? It’s Max.”
    The door slid open, and in that instant Tom felt every bit of breath leave his body. He could no longer even hear the hum, hush, siss-boom-bah of the mighty Cap as Eleanor Carter stared back at him. chapter eight
    Max said, “Eleanor Carter, Tom Langdon. Tom, Eleanor.”
    Neither Tom nor Eleanor uttered a word. They just stared at each other for so long that Max finally said, “Um, do you two know each other?”
    “It was years ago,” Eleanor said quickly.
    She was even more lovely now than the last time Tom had seen her, and that bar had been set pretty high. She was tall and still slender, and hadn’t cut her auburn hair short as so many women closing in on forty do. It was still shoulder-length and sexy. Her face, well, there were a few more lines there, yet they possessed an attractiveness—a statement that the owner had actually lived —that smooth, unblemished skin could never match. And the big green eyes still packed a wallop and made Tom want to find a chair to sit in before he fell over. She was wearing gray wool slacks, stylish black, low-heeled shoes, and a white sweater with the collar of a blue shirt sticking out.
    Tom remembered vividly the first time he ever saw Eleanor on campus. She wore short shorts, showcasing those long legs, a red sleeveless sweater, flip-flops, and a yellow bandanna in her hair. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. For the next fifteen years he rarely had.
    Both journalism majors, they’d decided to be a team after graduation. Their first investigative assignment for a little newspaper in Georgia had been following the legendary Reverend Little Bob Humphries around the Deep South, from Anniston, Alabama, to Tupelo, Mississippi, and every backwater in between. Reverend Bob, dressed in his white suit, white shoes, and wide, wide white belt, could heal the sick, calm the angry, cheer the bereaved, and save the wicked, all in a night’s work, and for a very reasonable amount of money (namely, all that you’d brought). You could hide your last penny as well as you could, and Reverend Bob would find it and take it with a charm and manner that made you feel ashamed for holding out on him.
    The holy man drove a custom-built Impala, the biggest Tom had ever seen. It was mostly for the prodigious trunk space, he discovered, for the good minister unabashedly accepted everything from legal tender to salt-cured hams to the occasional spare relative to serve as an assistant. Tom had always thought that the Reverend must be