Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect

Suddenly the train hit a curve. I smacked my head loudly against the door and, to my horror, the voices stopped. I bolted down the hall, slipping into the tea alcove just as I heard the door click open. I pretended to make a cup of tea, just in case Wyatt or McTavish came out to investigate, but my charade was hobbled by the fact that the kettle had been tossed, assumedly broken, into the nearby bin.

It didn’t matter; I heard the door click shut and, after a minute, edged my way back through the corridor. Wyatt had lowered his voice or the argument had subsided naturally; either way, I couldn’t hear anything this time, so I hurried back to my bed.

I still couldn’t sleep. Juliette was dozing so contentedly above me, one arm still hanging over the side of the top bunk, that I couldn’t even hear the small whistle of her breathing over the train. How did she do it? Ignore everything around her, be at peace, so successfully? I’d thought that praise and acclaim were what was missing from my career, what would make me a real writer, but hearing that argument with Wyatt had made me realize McTavish felt just as trapped as I did. Was there any light at the end of this tunnel? Or did it not matter who you were or how well you’d done: someone always owned you. Someone always asked for more, more, more.

The whole day had left a sour taste in my mouth that wasn’t just from the regurgitated martinis. I had a feeling that tomorrow was only going to get worse.

I had no idea.

Chapter 11

This may be a surprise, but everyone survives the night.

I know that’s not how things usually go in a mystery. There’s the night before, in which halves of conversations are overheard (check) and the complex motives and backstories of everyone are introduced (check), then everyone retreats, as if Broadway choreographed, to their rooms, doors clicking in unison, only for dawn to rise on a tussle in the night, a bloodstained cabin and a victim. Alas, not here. Not yet.

The sunrise was, however, as impressive as advertised: a furnace of gold that bled over the sand and turned it into shimmering lava. As we approached the center of Australia, the land had become indescribably flat. It may strike you, as it has my editor, as lackluster that I can’t describe flat. But there’s flat, sure, and then there’s endless, barren levelness the likes of which an explorer, atop a camel perhaps, must have looked out across and thought was the end of the world. That’s flat. That’s the middle of Australia.

Juliette and I watched the sunrise from the corridor in our pajamas. Then we showered and dressed, navigating our confined cabin tango, and made our way to the bar for the morning’s panel. It was a congregation familiar to anyone as the first morning of a holiday—a mix of the overeager and the ravaged who’d hit it too hard the night before—and no corpses to speak of. The book club ladies (not dead) who’d been reading erotica bore the pale-faced regret of overindulgence. Brooke (not dead) was in the too-keen camp, staking out a seat right down the front, her copy of Misery on the floor and a large scrapbook in her hand, edges overflowing with jagged, hastily glued-in leaflets. Today’s was to be a smaller panel, just S. F. Majors (not dead), who was flicking through notes, and McTavish (not yet arrived), and so two fold-out chairs had been placed at the end of the carriage, and the audience seating was whatever we could snag from the bar.

McTavish (not dead) showed soon after, in a vest and a red tie, with Wyatt (not dead). They were both in jovial spirits, seemingly having moved past their midnight argument—though McTavish did have a slight bump on the bridge of his nose, a redness that looked like the prologue to a bruise. Had it been getting physical before I interrupted them? Brooke tried to shove her journal, pen extended, at McTavish as he passed her on the way to his seat, but Wyatt squeezed between them and reminded her there’d be a signing after the panel.