Elaine Investigates, One: The Forgotten

©1 January 2025 Levite
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1.
      Everybody hears voices in their head.

      Everybody does.

      Maybe just once in awhile. Maybe it is your own voice asking yourself what you're doing. My father said he could always hear his own grandmother telling him how to do certain things around the house. Me, I heard my father telling me to "slow down, girlie, think about it before you do it, Elaine." Things like that.
      But this was different.
      I only heard the voices when I was around certain people, in a singular place, and they seemed to always be saying the same thing. It started me on a journey that is still ongoing.

      At first I dismissed it as on the job stress. After all, I was only the third full time female detective in the Suffolk County Sheriff's Department, and the youngest one ever. My position there as an assistant detective was to investigate issues that occurred in our correctional facilities, anything that involved county operated buildings or other property, and if a personnel issue with a county employee involved possible legal issues. The matters I was assigned to fell into two camps, the first were the ones that were simply an administrative review to make sure that everybody else had done their job, the second was everything else, including witness interviews, site visits and even evidence collection. And all too often what started out as a case in the first category ended up deep in the second.

      I first noticed the voices when I was interviewing an employee who had wrecked a county owned vehicle on a section of road near where Main street, which is route 25 met River Road.
      He had come over to the offices at the Riverhead Center to meet me.
      Wayne Satterly seemed to be your normal, run of the mill, long term county employee. He had been with the public works division for some ten years, and before that he had worked for parks and recreation for a few years.
      He reacted the way most men I encounter in the course of my job react. They may be OK with the idea of a woman working the case, but they don't expect that woman to be in her... mid to late thirties.... and as pretty as I've been told that I am. But after he took a deep breath, the interview proceeded professionally. Which is how I conduct myself.
      We'd gone through the incident once and he cooperated to a point, "Yes, ma'am. If you promise me you won't put it in the report I'll tell you what got to me that day."
      "I can't promise that, but I won't put it in the report unless it has a direct bearing on the case."
      Wayne sat there for a minute, "You said you wanted to go out there and see where it happened again with me so I could tell you what went on."
      "Yes."
      "Can we go now? And I might be able to explain it better out there."
      "OK, my car's outside."

      I drove us out and around two of the traffic circles that you either hated or tolerated, then across the river and onto route 25 and followed it through town and then out along the river.
      As we passed the backside of the outlet mall Wayne became very quiet, and I began to hear somebody talking as if from a distance.
      At first I thought my car's radio was on. But it wasn't. Then I checked my windows to see if I was hearing it from another vehicle. They were up because it was drizzling rain.
      "Do you hear that?" I asked Wayne.
      It seemed to startle him.
      "Somebody's talking to us." I pulled into a truck entrance and put my hazard lights on.
      "Yes, ma'am, I hear them. They're talking about high water from the rain storm."
      "Yes, but I don't see anybody, and the radio isn't on."
      "I know, they're around here." He gestured out across the road, "They were yelling at me because it was raining the day I wrecked the truck," he said. "And it was raining a lot harder than it is today."
      "Who was yelling at you?"
      "I don't know, ma'am. People from over there by the railroad tracks along the lake." He shook his head, "I'm sorry, detective, it's happened before up here, but this time was the worst ever." He was shaking his head. "And then I thought I saw somebody right on the side of the road. And then.... I went off the road."
      "But you don't hear them, or see them, or anybody else, anywhere else."
      "No, ma'am. Just right around here, and when it's raining."
      "Maybe if you come up here in the rain again, take a detour."
      "Yes, ma'am. I'll do that."

      I got out of the car and stood and looked across the road at the thick bushes and trees between the road and Peconic Lake, there was nobody there, and now, I couldn't hear anything.
      Until Wayne walked up beside me, then I could hear them again, as if from a distance.
      "They're talking to you, but I can still hear them. This doesn't make sense," I said.
      "And that day, down on River Road That day they were yelling loudly at me to stop. And, I could kinda see somebody waving at me to stop the truck. Now, they're just talking."
      "Let's drive over there."
      "I'm OK with it. If you want to, ma'am."

      I turned south onto River Road and slowed down and looked out at the marshy fen that passed for the lower reaches of the creek that started on the other side of the highway near the water park and had about five different names depending on which old timer you talked to.
      Now I could hear somebody talking with what sounded like a slight German accent, but I couldn't quite make out what she was saying. It was like she was too far away.

      I'm a professional woman. A trained law enforcement officer. I've been with the department for twelve years. I've seen and heard a lot of things that didn't make a lot of sense. But having a woman talking to me with a German accent that I could not see was probably at the top of that list.
      "There's somebody else around here that they talk to, she came out that day after she heard them yelling at me. She lives over there in the trailer park."
      "Let's go see her."

      Miss Clara Bostock lived what may well have been the oldest mobile home in the park between the lake and the interstate highway along the old creek.
      "How can I help you Detective?" Miss Bostock said after a round of pleasantries under her front awning to keep us out of the continuing light rain.
      "Wayne said you hear the same voices he hears out on the road."
      She nodded, "Yes, I do. And there are others. My cousin's son hears them as well. And a lady that used to come to bingo night heard them as well."
      "Oh, yeah, I forgot about her," Wayne said, "she's my aunt."
      Something clicked, "Is everybody that hears these voices related to each other?"
      Miss Bostock and Wayne exchanged looks, she answered, "Well, not to each other, but they're all Islanders."
      Wayne nodded, "As far as I know."
      "Oh, Detective Elaine, Ben said they were the loudest out on the causeway."
      "The railroad causeway?" I asked and pointed across the road and through the bushes.
      "Yes, ma'am. He'd go out there fishing in the lake, and if the weather changed they'd get really loud, and then he'd even hear kids crying."
      I glanced at Wayne, "Do you want to take a walk with me?"
      "Yes, ma'am."

      I drove down the lane across the road to a private residence.
      A gentleman looked up from where he was working on a large lawnmower under a pole shed and then walked our way. I took out my ID and smiled.
      "Can I help you officer?" he said after he looked at my badge and card.
      "I'm doing an investigation into an accident and we just wanted to walk out onto the causeway."
      He nodded, "you looking into the train derailment back, oh, back during the Depression?" He pointed to a clearing next to the road that was essentially part of his driveway. "They brought a couple of the cars right back up here, and my grandfather said they still had bodies in them."

2.
      One of the things I did during my early days with the sheriff's department was to read about Long Island history in general and history specific to Suffolk County.
      I'd spent a week reading a book about the Long Island Railroad and all the mergers and acquisitions and buyouts that had happened to give us what we had today. And there was a full chapter about accidents and incidents on what was otherwise one of the safer railroads in the country given passenger miles traveled. While there had been a few derailments mentioned, I didn't recall any significant accidents around Riverhead, especially not one with any lives lost.

      But the gentleman who had been working on the mower and was now walking us down the path toward the railroad was emphatic that "back in the thirties, they had an accident out on the trestle".
      "Out there on the causeway?" I asked him when he stopped walking just before the drainage ditch that ran along the right of way.
      "Yes, ma'am. That's what my grandfather always said. One train ran into the back end of another during a bad Nor'easter."
      "Which way were they going?" Wayne asked.
      He pointed to the northeast, "Out to the end of the line I guess." Then he shook his head, "I don't know much else. Maybe he could have given you more information, but he died in the seventies."
      I needed him to remember just a bit more, "Do you remember what year it was?"
      He thought about it, "Late thirties. Just before the war. Maybe like thirty eight or so."
      "That might be close enough. I want to walk out there and look around. Do you want to join us?"
      "Nah, I have to get that machine running, if it ever quits spitting on me," he looked up at the clouds, "I think it's the float in the carburetor. It's always sticking." He looked down the track, "won't be a train along here for an hour or so, can you find your way back?"
      "I think so, thank you for your help."

      As soon as he was gone I looked at Wayne, "do you still hear them?"
      "Yes. A few of them. But they're speaking softly. Except one of them keeps saying 'liar, liar'."
      I nodded, I could hear a whispering, but nothing else. I picked a less muddy spot and crossed the ditch and climbed up onto the raised roadbed of the tracks. Wayne followed me in a moment.

      I looked well down the tracks before I began walking along toward the lake, then I stopped and took a couple of photographs looking both ways along the tracks. Wayne was a few steps behind me.

      "It wasn't my fault."

      "I didn't say it was, but you were driving." I said suddenly, then I realized that it hadn't been Wayne's voice that had said that.
      "Detective?" He answered from behind me.
      "Did you hear somebody say it wasn't their fault?"
      "I thought I heard a woman's voice, but I couldn't understand what she was saying."
      "Just like I hear the ones talking to you."
      He shrugged, "I suppose."
      "I heard a woman say 'It wasn't my fault', clearly, just like she was standing right here." I gestured to one side of the tracks. "She wasn't shouting, or whispering, it was a normal speaking voice. She sounded middle aged, with a German accent, and maybe a bit of a Boston as well. She said 'waasn't' with the long 'ah' sound."
      "But what did she mean that it wasn't her fault?"
      "She had to be referring to the accident. But that doesn't answer the question. There were no female engineers at the time."
      Wayne just stood there.
      I looked around, whatever answer I was looking for as to why victims of a train accident would be yelling at Wayne wasn't out there. "Let's head back." Then I had an odd feeling, I turned around and looked back across the causeway over the lake to where the culvert was. "I'll come back and talk to you." I said softly. Then I nodded and turned and walked back to the path back to the car.

      I heard something, then I heard it again, a different voice, and something made sense. I turned and looked at Wayne. "They're not saying 'liar'. It's 'L.I.R.R.'"
      "The name of the railroad."
      "Yes."

      Then in a moment he said, "They're still talking about water."
      "Maybe that's what caused the train accident, it's going to take some digging to figure out."
      Wayne had a different idea, "Maybe the engineer thought he saw somebody on the tracks like I did on the road."
      "I'll see if I can find out."

      I took Wayne back to the county building then I headed back to the corner cubical that was my 'office' in the Sheriff's office. I got a mug of hot tea and started digging through old newspapers in the microfilm archives.
      Some of the articles had been indexed for searching from the main index, others had been listed in a topical index, and still others I had to read a scans of the front pages of Depression era newspapers.
      It took hours, then I found an article about a train accident south of Riverhead on April 10, 1937, it mentioned a few fatalities, and that one of the engines derailed into the lake. The cause was a late season "nor'easter" that caused some serious flooding on the Island. But there wasn't any more information.
      I checked the next two editions of the local paper, and found a note that the LIRR had anchored some of the cars from the second train to keep them from washing out further into the lake, including the private car that had become mired in the silt from the flood. The article said that they would attempt to raise the two passenger cars from the first train that come off the rails in the coming days when a heavy lift crane arrived.
      Other than the mentioning of a few fatalities in the first article there was no other discussion of deaths.
      I kept looking through the next several editions to see if there was ever any statement about the cause of the accident, or any more about the fatalities, and found nothing. So I had to take the dates of the information I'd found and go to the actual paper archives and start digging the old fashioned way.
      There was a paragraph in another Long Island paper from the time about the accident, but this one didn't mention any deaths at all. Just that the coastal storm had flooded out a section of track and two trains derailed. Then it mentioned the size of the breakdown wrecker crane that had been dispatched to recover the derailed engine and cars.
      I felt suspicious because of the small amount of information that I could find. It did confirm that there had been a rail accident on the main line southwest of Riverhead, but that was it.

      I went to the local historical society and asked about the accident.
      And that's when it got very interesting indeed. All due to a thick matched set of personal journals.

3.
      Even though it was a bright and warm spring day, I felt chills and slightly dirty.

      I was sitting and reading a ninety year old diary written by a woman I'd never heard of that, answered most of the questions I had about the accident.
      The lady that had written the diaries in a small but elegant hand, had even included a couple of very stiff, very formal looking black and white photographs of herself in the inside front and inside back covers of the second book. In the inside front cover photo she was posing in an office, complete with a typewriter and an old telephone, she was wearing a very smart business outfit with her hair up and a pair of reading glasses on a chain around her neck. She looked to be in her mid-thirties and was surprisingly attractive for the time and place. The inside back cover photo was almost comical. The same pretty woman was wearing what was then a beach outfit, a long one piece suit that covered her from shoulders to mid thigh. But it did reveal a nice figure and that her hair, when down and back reached her shoulders. She appeared to be either a natural blonde, or that her stylist was an expert, there were no darker roots visible in her hairline.
      But it was what was inside in the entries that filled in the void in the story.
      She addressed almost every entry to "Mnemos", which had sounded familiar but I had to look it up. She was writing her diary to Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory. And she signed them "Enie". It took flipping through the older first book to find out that her real name was Helenie. And instead of being from the Island, she, like me, was from a family that was originally from Connecticut. But unlike my family, hers had stayed on the mainland. It was only Enie that had moved to New York City where she worked a couple of secretarial jobs until she landed the prize spot that put her dead center of my investigation into the railroad accident on our causeway.
      In an entry in the first journal I found out that she would sometimes lapse into German, both in speech and in writing. In the journal she apologized to Mnemos for writing part of her entry in German. She explained that she had just spoken to an old friend of the family at the delicatessen, and was still thinking in German when she came upstairs to write about her day, which she seemed to do about two or three times a week, using about a third to half a page for each entry. Then she'd skip one line and start the next entry there.

      Enie had first worked in the secretarial pool for the Long Island portion of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Then a man she only referred to as Mister Azuro hired her out of the pool to be his private secretary.
      I could find no record of a corporate officer of the line by that name. But then doing some cross referencing on the word I found there was an investment partner who had bought into the line that lived further out on the northern peninsula of the Island whose surname was related to the color azure.
      During some quite tedious legwork I found out that the mysterious Mr. Azuro was heavily invested in several other Island businesses (which used the railroad to move goods), who all advertised in the local papers, one of which he owned outright, and, incidentally, he was also quite married to the heiress of another Island family. So his having a young, pretty, private secretary, who traveled out to work for him in Greenport a couple of times a month, in his private car no less, and once in awhile on a special train. Where she might wear that swimsuit at the beach. Was probably not something he wanted in the papers.

      I found out that Miss Enie had been working directly for Mister Azuro for just over five years at the time of the accident. I did see an entry from March of 1937 where she had gotten birthday gifts from both Mr. Azuro and the girls in the apartment, but she did not mention her own age in the entry.
      In her last entry to Mnemos, the evening of April 9, 1937, she mentioned that Azuro had installed a new printing telegraph machine in the office in the railcar that would be hooked up on the siding in Greenport. She seemed to be quite excited to use it there to send work back to the office in the city.
      I had to stop and laugh. Here she was, excited to be sending emails back to the office from the beach in 1937, while now I dreaded having to do the same thing.

      Her language was always formal, and somewhat vague, but as I read it I could see that she was probably in love with her boss, and was hoping that he would find a way to divorce his wife and then marry her.

      The rest of the second diary was blank.

      She had most likely gotten up the next morning and gone to the train station. It was probably raining as the Nor'easter was blowing up the coast. The scheduled train had left on time and was running about an hour ahead of the special train with Mister Azuro's private car.
      Neither train made it to their destination.
      Evidently the first train cleared part of the causeway, but then the weight and vibration from the cars caused the saturated soil under the tracks to give way and the last few cars came off the track. The engineer of the second train probably never saw the accident in the storm, or did see it but couldn't stop in time, and either hit the crippled cars causing his own engine to come off the rails and land in the lake, or derailed on the same soft roadbed that caused the first accident to end up there. Either scenario worked.
      In any case, Miss Enie's car ended up in the lake, with her in it, and she didn't make it out of it.

      Her diary was sent with the rest of her personal effects from the apartment she shared with a couple of the other women from the Railroad to her boss to be relayed to her family.
      It would seem that Mister Azuro didn't want them to know about that either. So they ended up in a box, which was later delivered to the museum, where they sat in a storage room, until the lady in the museum remembered the connection and showed them to me.

      The accident, Miss Enie, a handful of others, and even the storm itself were simply forgotten because a railroad executive didn't want his illicit relationship with his employee to come to light.
      The engine was recovered, the accident was blamed on the storm, the railroad paid for the burial services for the victims out of one slush fund or another. And the entire matter was closed.

      Until Wayne thought he saw somebody waving at him during a rain storm.

4.
      I wrote up two reports.
      The first, about my conclusions about whether or not Wayne had been criminally negligent resulting in minor injuries to him and some damage to the county truck, and a road sign, was that the weather conditions and an overgrowth of the bushes and weeds along the road were significant contributors to the incident. And then I recommended that the county clear the right of way along the road which would also make it safer for the public to walk along.

      Then I wrote up another report. At the end of which I asked for a memorial plague to be erected in a clearing between the causeway and the road, without naming any names that the railroad might still find embarrassing, to commemorate the accident and its victims.
      Then one rainy morning I parked a department car along the railroad and took a walk out along the causeway. My department raincoat kept the falling rain off me, but did nothing for the moist breeze that was blowing.

      I was damp and chilly when I got out over the lake.
      "Helenie." I said softly. "Enie."
      I never saw anything. I never heard anything. But I could feel that I wasn't alone.
      "I read about the telegraph printer. In the rail car. I have to do the same thing, send a work message when I'd rather be at the beach."
      I heard a distant "yes".
      "I work for the Suffolk County Sheriff's Office, and I now know about the accident. It wasn't your fault. The storm out over the ocean washed out the tracks and caused the derailment. Even if your train hadn't been running for Mister Azuro, the cars on the first train would have come off the tracks."
      It was still damp and chilly. But I thought I heard a sigh.
      "I wrote a report to the Sheriff, and he's going to take it to the county board. I asked for a memorial to be put over in the park to tell everybody that comes out there to picnic or walk their dog or whatever about the accident. So the people of Long Island will remember like Mnemos would want."
      It was still damp and chilly.
      Then, somewhere on the breeze I know I heard a "thank you".

-end forgotten-

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[NOTE: The above story were written as adventure fiction, and is to be taken as such. While most of the geographical features of Suffolk County exist, including the lake causeway, the rest of the setting is fictional.
      Thank you, Dr. Leftover, TheMediaDesk.com]

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