What Happened to the Silver Streak?

Upstairs at Whit's End, beside one of the biggest electric train sets in the state, two girls are showing off the model cars they have built. Michelle Terry has made a caboose and painted it blue, which Traci Needlemeyer thinks is all wrong, because everyone knows cabooses are red. John Avery Whittaker points out that a private caboose can be any color a builder likes, and Doreen Charles agrees that it is one of the prettiest cars on the shelf. Traci would rather build something perfect in every detail, like her own model engine, the Silver Streak. Hers even runs.

While the girls hook their cars to the track, Doreen and Whit talk quietly. Michelle came to Odyssey from Oak Creek, a detention center, and now lives at Doreen's halfway house. She is still rough around the edges and slow to trust anyone, but she has been no trouble at all at Whit's End, and she has a real gift for building models. That gift is about to make things complicated: people from the state fair have asked Whit to send them the best model built by one of his kids, and only two cars are good enough to be considered. Then Connie Kendall calls up the stairs. Traci's mother is waiting out front to take her to the dentist, and the vacuum cleaner is losing a fight with the carpet. Traci hurries off, and Michelle promises to put the Silver Streak away safely.

The next day Traci goes to check on her engine and comes running back with the news that it is gone. Whit says it has probably just been misplaced, but Curt Stevens, who has been watching a few too many detective reruns, smells a crime and offers to investigate. Whit reluctantly agrees, warning him not to let it get out of hand. It gets out of hand. Curt clears Whit, who was downstairs wrestling the vacuum with Connie, and then makes some phone calls and turns up Michelle's past: the halfway house, the detention center, and a string of shoplifting charges. Whit is not pleased. He kept quiet about Michelle's record on purpose, because it is hard enough to be the new kid without a reputation following you around.

At the halfway house, Doreen retraces the afternoon and admits that Michelle was alone in the train room for a few moments. Michelle says she set the engine on the shelf above the messy work area, then helped Connie fetch cleaning supplies and went home. When Whit mentions the state fair, Doreen realizes with a sinking heart that she told Michelle about it herself, hoping to draw her out. Opportunity and motive both point one direction, and Doreen has to report the suspicion to Oak Creek.

Whit keeps insisting the evidence is circumstantial, and that what is really on trial is Michelle's reputation. Then Traci grumbles that she just wants the mess cleaned up, and the word "cleaned" gives Whit an idea. Back at Whit's End, Connie cheerfully explains that she scrubbed the train room from top to bottom and hauled out two loads of trash, and that she knows nothing whatever about trains. Everyone races for the dumpster just as the garbage truck arrives, shouting at the driver to wait. In the wreckage Whit spots a set of wheels broken off the Silver Streak. Traci apologizes to Michelle, the caboose is bound for the fair, and it seems the mystery is solved by accident.

But Michelle says one word too many. She remarks that it is a good thing the wheels fell on the ground, when Whit only ever said they were lying there. Cornered, she admits everything. She took the engine while the others were on the stairs, found the wheels already broken, and planted them where they would make Connie look careless. She wanted her car to go to the fair, and she is not sorry. She tells them to spare her the lecture and send her back to reform school.

That evening Connie tells Whit that some people simply do not want help. Whit wonders whether some of them just do not know how to be helped, and after she says good night, he finds there is one thing left he can do. He begins to pray for Michelle.