The burnt orange sunrise

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“I am only going to tell you this one more time,” she said to him in a quiet, determined voice. “That mean old woman just has to die. You know it, I know it, we both know it. Do you get what I’m telling you?”

“I get it,” he responded irritably. “I’ve gotten it every single time you’ve said it, and this is, like, the third time.”

She watched him carefully as they idled there in the Old Say-brook train station parking lot, hearing the icy pellets go tappity-tap-tap on the roof of the car. “Well, what do you say? That’s what I want to know.”

What he said was, “We should get back before the roads get any worse.” Though he made no move to put the car in gear. Just sat there behind the wheel, his gloved hands gripping it loosely. “We’ll be missed.”

“Not until we talk this out,” she insisted, staring out at the floodlit rail platform, which gave off a ghostly yellow glow in the frigid night.

The dashboard clock said it was only a few minutes past nine. It might as well have been three in the morning. Absolutely no one else was out. It was a weeknight. The wind was blowing. A steady frozen rain was falling, and it was supposed to turn to snow overnight. There were only a half dozen cars in the parking lot, left behind by Amtrak passengers who would be real unhappy when they returned in a day or so to find them encased in an impenetrable shell of ice. The station was a tiny one, situated almost exactly midway between New York and Boston on the Northeast Corridor. The much-hyped high-speed Acela did not even stop here. Only the occasional local train, none this time of night. The station office was shuttered. Old Saybrook was a shoreline town popular with summer people.

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