Rutland

Rutland is a waypoint in Eileen Dunlop’s repeatedly revised escape plans, not a place the account establishes she ever reached. She imagines abandoning the Dodge Coronet there and taking a train toward a new life, making the town both a practical link in her proposed route and a device for concealing her intention to disappear.

Role in the Escape Plan

On Monday morning, Eileen drives to work at Moorehead while developing a route that would take her northwest across state lines to Vermont. She plans to leave the Dodge Coronet in Rutland, then walk to the railway station and travel south to New York City. Her precise knowledge that New York City is 257 miles south of X-ville contrasts with the improvised nature of the rest of the plan: she has read about Rutland in a book about railroads and imagines finding an abandoned lot or dead-end street for the car.

The route is designed around practical limits as well as concealment. Eileen intends to endure the drive in layers of clothing, with an empty suitcase to hold the garments she removes on the train. She has money saved in the attic and considers bringing clothes and little else. The proposed journey is not simply departure from X-ville; it is an effort to arrive elsewhere without carrying the visible signs of the escape with her.

Concealment and Changing Scenarios

Eileen also considers borrowing books from the X-ville library and keeping them as mementos. Their absence, she imagines, could make a search less straightforward: investigators might suspect she was visiting a friend or had been taken, rather than infer that she had planned to leave. She wants her father to believe she is missing or dead, not to know that she chose to run away. In this imagined aftermath, Rutland’s abandoned car would help obscure the direction and purpose of her departure.

By the following Tuesday, the details have shifted. In another version, Eileen imagines leaving the car at a filling station in Rutland, perhaps beside a gas pump, covering her head with a scarf, and boarding the next train from the station to New York. This alternative keeps Rutland’s function intact while changing the setting for the abandonment: the car might be left in an isolated lot or at an ordinary roadside stop. Both scenarios remain plans narrated from X-ville, rather than events that the account says took place.

Narrative Significance

Rutland gathers the contradictions in Eileen’s imagined escape. It is a real point on a route she has researched, but its role is also theatrical: she scripts what a missing-person search might conclude and tries to control the story her father will tell about her absence. The plans expose both her desire for self-determination and her wish to make that departure register as a loss to those who have failed to see her. The evidence presents the town as a projected threshold between X-ville and a possible new life, not as the site of her confirmed disappearance.