Nancy was a sleuth who could solve any mystery, even the ones that baffled all the adults. She had “Titian” hair, a best friend named Bess, and drove a convertible. I wanted to be just like her. I could think of a few mysteries that I would have liked to clear up in my own life, such as why Mommy didn’t take care of us the way other mothers did. And why we always seemed to have more money when Daddy was home than when he was away at work. And why Daddy hadn’t figured this out by now and quit going away for months at a time. I wanted to read every Nancy Drew mystery in the Riverside Public Library so I could become a super-sleuth like her. But my brothers discovered trains that summer. The railroad tracks angled through the vacant lot a block and a half from our house, and we’d grown up with freight trains rumbling though our neighborhood three times a week, whistles shrieking. But this was the first summer that Poke and JT figured out all the creatively dangerous things they could do around trains.
