The Delta Pelican

There is a filing cabinet in the records room of the Ferrier Railway Bureau that nobody opens.

It stands in the far corner, behind Rosco Bascombe's long table, under the window that looks out on the fire escape and the brick wall of the building next door: a tall oak cabinet with four drawers and brass handles gone brown, older than anything else in the room. The bottom three drawers hold the Bureau's earliest files, 1912 to 1920, in brittle manila folders tied with faded red tape. The top drawer holds one file only. It has a lock of its own, and the key hangs on a nail inside Corinna Ferrier's rolltop desk, and in the nine years Mara had worked at the Bureau, Mara had never once seen the drawer opened.

Everyone at the Bureau knew what was in it, the way everyone in a family knows which closet holds the thing nobody talks about. File 12-01. The first case the Colonel ever took, the year he founded the Bureau. And the only one he never closed.

On Friday the twenty-fourth of October, 1958, at a little after four in the afternoon, Corinna Ferrier stood in the door of the records room with the key in her hand.

"Mara," she said. "Come here, please. Rosco, you too."

It was a gray, gusty Chicago afternoon, with the first real cold of the autumn in it and the leaves blowing down South Clark Street past the window, and the radiators had come on that week for the first time and filled the office with the smell of hot dust. Corinna was sixty-four now, and looked it a little more than she had a year ago; she had been ill in the summer, and had come back to the office thinner and grayer and drier than ever, with her spectacles on their chain and her pencil in her hand. She handed Mara a telegram before she said anything else.

MOBILE ALA OCT 24 1958 1102A FERRIER RAILWAY BUREAU CHICAGO PRIVATE CAR PINECREST MUSEUM MOBILE STATION ENTERED SATURDAY NIGHT LAST STOP ONLY ITEM TAKEN 1912 MOBILE DIVISION TRAIN ORDER BOOK STOP DELTA PELICAN LAST RUN FRIDAY OCT 31 STOP COMPANY WISHES BOOK RECOVERED BEFORE THEN WITHOUT PUBLICITY STOP UNDERSTAND YOUR BUREAU HAS PRIOR KNOWLEDGE OF THIS ITEM STOP REQUEST AGENT W R KINCHEN GENERAL COUNSEL GULF AND PINE BELT RR

Mara read it twice. Rosco, reading over Mara's shoulder, let out a long, slow breath.

"The Gulf and Pine Belt," he said softly. "Well, I'll be."

"Prior knowledge," said Mara. "What does he mean?"

Corinna did not answer at once. She crossed the room to the old oak cabinet, and fitted the key into the lock of the top drawer, and turned it. It was stiff. It had not been turned, Mara thought, in a very long time. The drawer came out with a groan of dry wood, and inside it, alone, lay a thick folder of brown card, bound with red tape that had faded nearly to pink, with a typed label on its tab: 12-01. GULF & PINE BELT R.R. Robbery, Express, Train No. 5, Egret Bayou, Miss. Feb. 15-16, 1912. And under it, in ink, in a big, square, forceful hand: OPEN. L.F.

Corinna lifted it out and held it in both hands, the way one holds something that might break.

"My father founded this Bureau in January of 1912," she said. "With a room on this floor, and a desk, and a typewriter, and me, aged eighteen, to work it. He'd been chief of police on the Illinois Central for eleven years. The first railroad that ever hired him on his own account was the Gulf and Pine Belt, out of Mobile, a little line along the Gulf Coast. A train was robbed. Twenty-eight thousand dollars out of the express car in the middle of the night, in a marsh in Mississippi." She laid the folder on Rosco's table. "He worked on it for four months. He went south three times. He came home the last time in June of 1912 and put this folder in that drawer and locked it, and wrote open on it, and never spoke of it to me again in thirty-two years."

"Did he know who did it?" said Mara.

Corinna looked down at the folder for a long time.

"I've never read it," she said. "I was his secretary for thirty-two years. I typed half of what's in it. But he took it out of my hands in June of 1912, and I've kept it as he left it ever since." She untied the faded tape slowly. "The book they've lost in Mobile is in this file. He asked for it. He was refused. Mr. Kinchen's grandfather, or someone like him, will have written it down somewhere. That's what he means by prior knowledge."

"What do you know about the Gulf and Pine Belt, Rosco?"

Rosco had already pulled the Official Guide off its shelf, and a thinner, older book beside it, and was turning pages with the quickness of long practice.

"Gulf and Pine Belt Railroad. Mobile to New Orleans, a hundred and forty-one miles, right along the coast: Pascagoula, Biloxi, Gulfport, Bay St. Louis, across the Pearl River marshes into Louisiana. Founded 1889 by a lumber man called Noble Tarrant, to haul his pine down to the Gulf ports. Never big. Never rich. Always independent; it's one of the last little roads in the South that nobody's bought." He found the page. "And here's your train. The Delta Pelican. Mobile to New Orleans, evening train, sleeper and diner and an observation car, since 1926. They put on a new streamlined set after the war. Famous for the gumbo in the diner and the view of the Sound at sunset." He put his finger on a notice at the bottom of the page, in small type. "Discontinued, by authority of the Interstate Commerce Commission, effective after the run of October 31, 1958. That's the new act this summer. Any railroad can take off any train that loses money now, and the Commission has to let it unless somebody fights." He looked up. "The Pelican's been losing money since 1950. Everybody rides the highway now."

"So next Friday is the last run."

"Next Friday is the last run." Rosco closed the book gently. "And last Saturday, somebody broke into the founder's own car to take a book from 1912." He glanced at the faded folder in Corinna's hands. "Mind how you go, Mara. That's a family railroad, and old families keep old secrets the way old houses keep damp."

The City of New Orleans left Central Station at eight the next morning, and Mara was aboard it, in a coach seat by the window, with a suitcase and a briefcase and, in the briefcase, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string, the thick folder with OPEN. L.F. written on its tab.

It was a long way south. All day the train ran down the length of Illinois through the harvested corn, flat and gold and empty under a high pale sky, through Champaign and Effingham and Centralia, and crossed the Ohio at Cairo in the late afternoon, where the two great rivers met in a wide brown sheet of water, and ran on into Kentucky and Tennessee as the sun went down. Mara ate supper in the dining car, catfish and hush puppies and pecan pie, and watched the cotton country go by in the dusk, the fields white in the last of the light, the shacks and the gins and the little towns with their water towers.

After supper Mara went back to the window seat and untied the string.

The folder smelled of dust and old paper and, faintly, of something else that Mara realized after a moment was pipe tobacco, the Colonel's tobacco, forty-six years old, still caught in the card. On top lay a sheet of the Bureau's first letterhead, the address on South Clark Street and the Colonel's name, and on it, typed, a list of the file's contents: statements, train sheets, train orders, correspondence, notes. Under the list, in the same square forceful hand as the label, a single line in ink:

Whoever reads this after me: the answer is in the book they would not give me. L.F.

Mara sat for a long time with the sheet in her hand, while the train ran on south through the Mississippi night, and the crossing bells rang and faded, and somewhere far ahead, past the cotton country and the pine woods, the Gulf of Mexico lay waiting in the dark.

Then Mara turned the page, and began to read.