"Please," replied Pitt.

"How about some hot apple pie?"

"Sounds great. I haven't eaten since breakfast."

"Let me make you something, then."

"No, no, the pie will be fine."

As soon as she left, Magee continued the conversation. "I hope you understand what I'm driving at, Mr. Pitt."

"I have no reason to sell out your privacy," said Pitt.

"I shall trust you not to."

Feeling was beginning to return to Pitt's hands and they ached like hell. Annie Magee brought him the apple pie and he attacked it with the ravenousness of a farmhand.

"Your fascination with trains," Pitt said between bites. "Living practically on top of the bridge site, you must have an insight on the disaster that can't be found in old files."

Magee stared into the fire a long moment, then began speaking in a vacant tone. "You're right, of course. I have studied the strange incidents surrounding the wreck of the Manhattan Limited. Dug into local legends, mostly. I was lucky and interviewed Sam Harding, the station agent who was on duty the night it happened, a few months before he died at a rest home in Germantown. Eighty-eight he was. Had a memory like a computer bank. God, it was like talking with history. I could almost see the events of that fatal night unfold in front of my eyes."

"A holdup at the exact moment the train came through," said Pitt. "The robber refusing to let the station agent flag the engineer and save a hundred lives. It reads like fiction."

"No fiction, Mr. Pitt. It occurred just the way Harding described it to the police and newspaper reporters. The telegrapher, Hiram Meechum, had a bullet hole in his hip as proof."

"I'm familiar with the account." Pitt nodded.

"Then you know the robber was never caught. Harding and Meechum positively identified him as Clement Massey, or Dapper Doyle as he was called in the press. A natty dresser who had pulled off some pretty ingenious heists."

"Odd that the ground split and swallowed him."

"Times were different before the war to end all wars. The law authorities weren't nearly as sophisticated as they are now. Doyle was no moron. A few years behind bars for robbery is one thing. Indirectly causing the deaths of a hundred men, women and children is quite another. If he had been caught, a jury would have taken all of five minutes to send him to the gallows."

Pitt finished off the pie and leaned back in the sofa. "Any guesses as to why the train was never recovered?"

Magee shook his head. "Supposedly it sank in quicksand. Local scuba-diving clubs still search for artifacts. A few years ago an old locomotive headlamp was pulled from the river a mile downstream. Folks generally assumed that it came from the Manhattan Limited. I feel it is only a matter of time before the riverbed shifts and reveals the wreckage."

"More pie, Mr. Pitt?" asked Annie Magee.

"I'm tempted, but no, thank you," said Pitt, rising. "I'd best be leaving. I have a plane to catch at Kennedy in a few hours. I'm grateful for your hospitality."

"Before you go," said Magee, "I'd like to show you something."

The sculptor pushed himself from the chair and walked over to a door set in the middle of the far wall. He opened it to a darkened room and disappeared inside. He reappeared a few moments later, holding a flickering kerosene lamp.

"This way," he said, motioning.

Pitt entered, his nose sorting out the musty smells of aged wood and leather from the kerosene vapor, his eyes scanning the shadows that quivered under the soft flame of the lamp. He recognized the interior as an office furnished with antiques. A potbellied stove squatted in the middle of the floor, its flue sprouting straight through the roof. The orange glow revealed a safe backed into a corner, its door decorated with the painting of a covered wagon crossing the prairie.

Two desks sat against a wall of windows. One was a rolltop with an old-fashioned telephone perched on its surface, the other was long and flat and supported a large cabinet filled with pigeonholes. On the edge, in front of a leather-cushioned tilt back chair, there was a telegraph key whose wires angled up and through the ceiling.

The walls held a Seth Thomas clock, a poster touting the Parker and Schmidt traveling amusement show, a framed picture of an overripe girl holding a tray stacked with bottles of beer advertising the Ruppert Brewery on 94th Street in New York City, and a Feeney Company insurance calendar dated May 1914.

"Sam Harding's office," Magee said proudly. "I've recreated it exactly as it was on the night of the robbery."

"Then your house ..."

"Is the original Wacketshire station," Magee finished. "The farmer I bought the property from used it to store feed for his cows. Annie and I restored the building. A pity you haven't seen it in daylight. The architecture has a distinctive design. Ornate trimmings around the roof, graceful curves. Dates back to the eighteen eighties."

"You've done a remarkable job of preservation," Pitt complimented him.

"Yes, it's been given a better fate than most old railroad stations," said Magee. "We made a few changes. What used to be the freight area is now bedrooms, and our living room is the former waiting room."

"The furnishings, are they original?" Pitt asked, touching the telegraph key.

"For the most part. Harding's desk was here when we bought the place. The stove was salvaged from a trash pile, and Annie rescued the safe from a hardware store in Selkirk. The real prize, though, was this."

Magee lifted a leather dust cover revealing a chessboard. The hand-carved ebony and birch pieces were cracked and worn by the years. "Hiram Meechum's chess set," explained Magee. "His widow gave it to me. The bullet hole from Massey's pistol was never patched."

Pitt studied the board for a few moments in silence. Then he looked out the windows at the blackness. "You can almost sense their presence," he said finally.

"I often sit alone here in the office and try to visualize that fateful night.

"Do you see the Manhattan Limited as it roars past?"

"Sometimes," Magee said dreamily. "If my imagination flows freely." He stopped and stared at Pitt suspiciously. "A strange question. Why do you ask?"

"The phantom train," answered Pitt. "They say it still makes its spectral run over the old track bed."

"The Hudson valley is a breeding ground for myths," Magee scoffed. "There are those who even claim to have seen the headless horseman, for God's sake. What starts as a tall tale becomes a rumor. Embellished with age and exaggerated by local folklore, the rumor turns into a full-blown legend bending the outer fringe of reality. The phantom train hauntings began a few years after the bridge failure. Like a ghost of a guillotined man who wanders about searching for his head, the Manhattan Limited, so its disciples believe, will never enter that great depot in the sky until it finally crosses over the river."

Pitt laughed. "Mr. Magee, you are a card-carrying skeptic."

"I won't deny it."

Pitt looked at his watch. "I really must be on my way."

Magee showed him outside and they shook hands on the old station platform.

"I've had a fascinating evening," said Pitt. "I'm grateful to you and your wife for your hospitality."

"Our pleasure. Please come back and visit us. I love to talk trains."

Pitt hesitated. "There is one thing you might keep in mind."

"What's that?"

"A funny thing about legends," Pitt said, searching Magee's eyes. "They're usually born from a truth."