Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect

I paced our tiny cabin—it was, unfortunately, not an appropriate size for grand deductions—while Juliette sat and stared out the window. Our room had been converted back into the comfortable seating arrangement, the beds packed up and flipped into the wall by the invisible team of service staff when we went for breakfast. Outside there was smoke on the horizon. Juliette tilted her knees to the wall every time I got to her.

“I think you should sit down,” she said after my hundredth lap, patting the seat next to her. “You’re going to walk a hole through the floor.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” I said, turning back for another five-step lap.

“It makes perfect sense. An overweight alcoholic had a heart attack.” She acted out dusting her hands. “Case closed, Detective.”

“An overweight alcoholic who everyone on this train hated.”

“Just because you hated him doesn’t mean everyone else did,” Juliette cautioned.

“Everyone had cause to.” I counted them off on my fingers. “Royce felt betrayed he didn’t get the endorsement. Wyatt wants him to keep writing the Morbund books—I heard them arguing. Simone wants to sign him up.”

“Listen to yourself! None of this is worth killing for. A few petty jealousies and disagreements.” Juliette mimicked my counting, exaggeratedly flicking each finger. “Lisa has the endorsement. Simone, I’d wager, wants him alive to sign him, just like Wyatt would want him alive to write more books.”

“They might feel spurned if he said no.”

“I’m not an expert, but killing your cash cow seems like a bad negotiation tactic. And then everyone else is a fan of his.”

“Exactly.”

“Exactly?” She tucked her legs to the wall.

I spun. “Maybe Brooke’s obsessed with him.”

“Ooooh.” She wriggled her fingers spookily at me. “Motive.”

“You weren’t at the panel yesterday. It was supercharged. S. F. Majors has some kind of grudge against him too. Their conversation was fiery. And”—I got excited, remembering—“there was a woman in his room last night.”

Juliette folded her arms, but I could tell there was a new spark of curiosity. “Last night?”

“I heard—”

“You were snooping even before he’d been killed?”

“No. I went to confront him about the review.”

Legs to the wall. “Really? Ernest—”

“I changed my mind. When I got to his cabin, Royce was already there, banging on the door. But McTavish wouldn’t come out. Royce said he heard a woman in there with him.”

Juliette seemed unconvinced but sat a little forward. “And is this when you heard Wyatt tell him he wanted more Morbund books?”

“That was later,” I said sheepishly. “In the hall.”

“And you weren’t snooping.”

“I got up to . . . be sick. I’d had too much to drink.”

“So you were drunk, then.”

I stumbled into her knees; she hadn’t tilted them this time. I steeled my reply. “I know what I heard.”

“All I’m saying is, if this was in a mystery, you wouldn’t trust the intoxicated witness.”

“I wasn’t drunk.”

“I’m not trying to argue with you, Ern. I’m trying to help. All this is, it’s simply confirmation bias. You want it to not add up.”

“Why would I want that?”

“Because you’re thinking there’s a book in it.”

“I’m thinking there’s a crime.”

“Is there a difference, to you?”

I stopped pacing and collapsed into the seat next to her. I put a hand on her knee and watched the desert flick past for a moment. “Okay,” I said at last. “My curiosity is a little selfish. But think about how these things play out.” I thought about my list, my schematic for how a murder mystery is supposed to go: 60,000 words: A second murder. “There’s never just one murder in these things. There’s always at least two.”

Juliette put a hand on top of mine. “This is real life, not a book. It doesn’t have to follow any of your rules. Most importantly, it doesn’t have to play fair.”

“But what if I’m right? What if this person’s just getting started? What if,” I appealed, “I can stop them . . . this time?”

That was the key to it all, those two words. This time. So many people had died on the mountain. If I’d been smarter, if I’d acted faster, maybe it could have been different. There were too many links and too many secrets bubbling under our little group to write off McTavish’s death as a coincidence. Didn’t I at least have a responsibility to see what I could find out?

And maybe, not that I believe in this kind of stuff, but maybe even if I didn’t deserve to be here, I was meant to be.

“If I do nothing,” I said, “everything that happens from here is my fault.”

“It’s not your job,” Juliette said softly. “And it’s not—not now and not then—your fault.”

“I know that,” I said, in a way that made it clear that I didn’t.

Juliette chewed her lip, knowing I was both waiting for and not really asking for her permission. “If you need this—just for you, not for any other reason—then ask some questions. Sure. But just enough to feel comfortable that this is exactly what it looks like. Don’t try and prove that McTavish was murdered. Try and prove to yourself that he wasn’t.”