For a moment, the only sound in the lounge was the wind against the windows.
Ms. Alvarez held the empty box in one hand. She didn't look happy about it. Winnie thought she was a fair woman who'd been handed an ugly job at the end of a long shift.
"Ma'am," the conductor said, "I'm going to have to ask you some questions."
"Of course," Winnie said. "But you'll want to ask Mrs. Halvorsen first."
The woman from Iowa, at the card table, was already half out of her chair. She was seventy or so, in a red sweatshirt that said Decorah Vikings.
"She hasn't moved from that seat since dinner," Marlene Halvorsen said firmly. "I'd know. I've been looking at her across the aisle for two hours, wishing I'd brought a book as good as hers."
Her husband nodded. So did the man in the back who'd wanted to be snowed in.
Ms. Alvarez looked at the coat on the hook, and at the chair by the window, twenty feet away. Some of the stiffness went out of her shoulders.
"Then somebody put this in your pocket," she said.
"Yes," Winnie said. "May I talk with you and Mr. Coles for a minute? Not here."
They stood in the narrow passage at the end of the lounge car, out of earshot. Winnie opened her notebook.
"Mr. Coles," she said, "at 10:02, a gentleman complained about a draft. You went to check the doors. What did you find?"
Reggie took his little log out of his vest pocket. "The vestibule between the sleeper and the lounge," he said. "The outside door was shut and latched, but somebody'd had it open. There was fresh snow blown into the corner. A little drift, maybe a foot high. I wrote it down and figured a passenger wanted a look at the storm."
"Did you see who?"
"No, ma'am. They were gone."
Winnie nodded. "Four minutes later, at 10:06, Mr. Thorne came into the lounge from the sleeping car. He sat by my coat. He leaned over Mrs. Halvorsen's card table to admire her hand, and something dripped off his sleeve onto her discard pile. It left a water ring. You can still see it."
Ms. Alvarez frowned. "Snow."
"There's no snow inside a heated train," Winnie said, "except in that vestibule. And Mr. Thorne told you he was reading in his roomette from the end of dinner until a little after ten. A man reading in a warm roomette doesn't come out with a wet cuff."
"He could have stepped out for air."
"He could have," Winnie said. "But then he'd have said so. People don't lie about the big things, Ms. Alvarez. They lie about the small ones. He didn't need to lie about where he'd been unless where he'd been mattered."
She turned a page.
"At dinner, Mrs. Kessler told our table where the brooch was. The box and the roomette number. Three people heard her say it. Her husband, Mr. Thorne, and me. When the box turned up, it was going to turn up in one of our pockets. Mine was the coat hanging by the door."
Reggie let out a long, low breath.
"So the brooch is in the snow," Ms. Alvarez said. "Let's go dig."
"You could," Winnie said gently. "And you'd find it, I expect. But you'd find it without him. He'd say a thief from the sleeping car hid it there, and you'd have a librarian's notebook and a wet playing card."
The conductor looked at her for a long moment.
"What would you do?"
"I'd tell the whole train," Winnie said, "that at first light, the crew will open every vestibule door to shovel out. Then I'd turn off the vestibule light, and I'd wait."
At 11:00, Ms. Alvarez made the announcement over the speaker in her brisk, tired voice. The crew would be shoveling out the vestibules at first light, she said.
Passengers should please stay clear. She thanked them for their patience.
Then the lights went down, and the train went quiet, and the snow kept falling.
Winnie didn't sleep. She sat on a fold-down seat in the dark corridor of the lounge car, wrapped in her coat, with Reggie on a stool beside her and Ms. Alvarez standing by the window. Through the glass of the connecting door, they could see the dim shape of the vestibule and the pale drift in the corner.
At 4:52 a.m., the door at the sleeping-car end slid open.
A figure stepped into the vestibule, quiet and quick, in a navy blazer. He knelt by the drift and dug with both hands, the way a man digs who knows exactly where to dig. He came up holding a folded white dinner napkin.
Reggie clicked on his flashlight.
Julian Thorne froze on his knees in the bright circle, the napkin open in his palm. The sapphire flashed blue in the light.
"Good morning, Mr. Thorne," Winnie said through the open door.
For a second, he looked like he might try to charm his way out of it. Then he looked at Ms. Alvarez, and at Reggie, and at the small woman in pearls, and he seemed to decide it wasn't worth the effort.
"The coat," he said. "That was a mistake, wasn't it."
"It was the second one," Winnie said. "The first was telling us you'd been reading. I sat with you at dinner. You don't strike me as a reader."
The crews cleared the slide a little after sunrise. The train rolled down the valley into Granby at 8:40, where two Grand County sheriff's deputies were waiting on the platform in the snow.
They took Julian Thorne off in handcuffs, his blazer collar turned up against the cold. He didn't look back.
Hannah Kessler had wanted to say something to him. She'd stood at the window with her fists clenched while they walked him away. Winnie touched her arm.
"Let him go," she said. "He's had a worse night than you. And you've still got your grandmother's brooch, and a nice young man, and the whole rest of your life. He's got a lawyer."
Hannah laughed, a little wetly, and wiped her eyes.
They sat together in the lounge as the train climbed west out of the valley. The storm had blown through. Outside, the mountains stood white and enormous against a clean blue sky, and the sun came up over them and filled the car with light.
Winnie took the brooch out of the dinner napkin, where it had spent the night in the snow. She polished it once on her sleeve and pinned it to Hannah's sweater with her own careful fingers.
"There," she said. "Wear it. Don't keep it in a box. Your grandmother didn't marry in 1928 so it could live in a box."
Jake squeezed his wife's hand. Hannah looked down at the little blue stone, and then up at Winnie.
"How did you know?" she asked. "Really?"
Winnie thought about it.
"For forty years," she said, "people came to my desk with a question they didn't know how to ask. You learn to listen for the part that doesn't fit. That's all it is."
Then she picked up her library book, found her page, and opened her notebook to the back, where she kept her count. Under the last number, in her small, neat librarian's hand, she added one more.
Her husband, she thought, would have loved this trip.