Mary Calhoun Brown

Jaxon MacKenzie, a mute, yet secretly literate, 12-year-old girl, discovers a faded newspaper article documenting the greatest train wreck in American history?an event that claimed the life of her grandfather?s best friend, Oliver Pack. That night Jaxon is whisked through an old painting in her grandparents? parlor, back to July 1918 in an attempt to prevent the accident. Miraculously, she finds herself able to speak for the first time. Jaxon meets three friends: Sara Hale, Dewey MacKenzie, and Oliver. Soon Jaxon realizes her mission in this world of horse-drawn carts and prejudice is to save Oliver from dying aboard one of the ill-fated passenger cars, filled with young black men on their way to Nashville to work making gun powder for the war effort. With the government?s takeover of the railways during World War I, and a calamity of human error, the train cannot be stopped from its fate, and the responsibility of saving Oliver Pack is planted firmly on the shoulders of this remarkable young lady.