Treacherous by Barbara Taylor Bradford Read Free Book Online

the list of bridges that crossed the Delaware River from
New Jersey into Pennsylvania. But nothing was going to keep her from getting to
that crash site.
    She begged
Mikey to go with her, but he had to “see a man about a dog,” which in
Mikey-speak meant he had to make a payment on one of his many outstanding loans.
    It was nine o’clock
before she was ready to flag down a taxi, and head for the West Side and her
rental car. She had planned to pay for the car with the cash she had taken from
the bank, meant for gratuities for the serving staff from last week’s event.
But when she looked in her checkbook at the garage, she realized she was four
hundred dollars short.
    “Damn you,
Mikey,” she muttered to herself, remembering how he had refused a sandwich
because he didn’t want to spend her money.
    She got out
her credit card. She had no time to deal with him right now; she had to get to
Pennsylvania. She must find Fiona and Luke. When she finally got in the car and
headed for the West Side Highway, she was determined nothing and no one would
stop her.
    The lights from
the oncoming traffic were blurred by tears of frustration and regret. How could
she have been so stupid! How could she have been jealous of Fiona, her best
friend in the whole world? Of course there was nothing going on between Fiona
and Luke. She’d never even met him before today.
    “You’re turning
into a psycho,” she shouted at herself, as she sped through the Lincoln Tunnel,
heading for Morrisville, PA, wherever that was. She just hoped the GPS on this
heap was working.

FIFTEEN
    It
was dark. Nonetheless, the massive lights set up by the rescue teams gave the
crash scene an eerie luminosity.
    Helicopters
swept up and down the river, focusing their searchlights on the water and the
shoreline, looking for any sign of life. Or anything to indicate there had been
more loss of life.
    So far, there
had been no sign of the train carriage. Nor of the two passengers, who were on
board when its long, terrifying slide into the water began.
    The last of a
fleet of ambulances were making their way to area hospitals with the injured.
They had to travel on narrow, rarely used country roads, which offered the only
access to the remote site. The more seriously injured were helicoptered to the
nearest trauma centers.
    A giant crane,
brought in to right the overturned train cars, was lumbering through a barley
field, crushing the early crop.
    Scores of
investigators from the NTB, AMTRAK, the FBI, as well as the National Guard, plus
dozens of state police, were milling around the scene. The local police were
trying, mostly in vain, to keep the burgeoning press corps at bay.
    Train traffic
on the entire Northeast Corridor had been suspended, with the usual
consequences. There were traffic jams on the roads, and crowds at the airports,
as stranded passengers searched for alternative transportation to their
destinations. Experts were trying to work out a route for trains that would bypass
the crash site, but that could take days.
    The casualty
list was long and disturbing: eleven dead, fifty-four injured, twenty seriously.
The missing passengers, Fiona Chambers and Luke Thompson, were being credited,
by those on the scene, with saving nine passengers who had been trapped in the
ill-fated first-class railcar. These acts of heroism took place before the carriage
had plunged over the cliff into the Delaware, with Luke and Fiona presumably still
on board.
    There had been
reports, unsubstantiated as of yet, of two people jumping, or falling, from the
car as it hurtled toward the river. But it was feared that even if the two had
survived the force of the fall, the cold swirling waters of the Delaware would
have swept them away.
    The outside temperature
had dropped to forty-two degrees, typical for this part of the country in
April. Hayley, wearing only a light jacket, was oblivious to the cold as she
hiked through the barley field. She was heading toward the site of