Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect

I took the pause as a chance to ask the next question. “This morning, you saw everything that happened. Poison?”

“Was it?”

“You’re the forensic pathologist.”

“Where . . . put it?” He mumbled this sentence so I only half caught it and reconstructed from the words I did hear. Where would you put it?

“In the hip flask,” I said. “Right?”

Royce wrote it down. “Suppose so.”

“Suppose?”

“If that’s what you’re telling me.”

If I may, here: you’re lucky Royce isn’t writing this book because I believe he’d be the unreliable sort.

“I’m not telling you anything. I’m seeking your . . .”—I had to root-canal the word out of my teeth—“expertise.”

Royce picked up his notepad and flipped it back a page like a traffic cop giving a fine. He blew out his cheeks in thought, and I reckon if I’d lit a match the cabin would have exploded with the pure gasoline he hissed into the air. I peered over at his page of scribbles. Among the other notes I saw he had all those Goodreads reviews written out, one per line, in ascending order, starting with my one-star review and then following with the others:

Wolfgang: ** Heavenly

S. F. Majors: *** Overblown

Me: **** Splendid

Instead of Lisa’s name, he’d violently written Trollop. Then, clearly with shaking hands, her five stars and the review: Tremendous.

On my quick glimpse, I noted both the oddity of S. F. Majors’s rather harsh wording against her rather mild stars, and the inverse for Wolfgang. It was almost like they were deliberately the wrong way around.

Royce saw me spying on his notes and tilted the notebook away. He cleared his throat, glanced at the door. “Maybe we should talk in the bar?” His words wobbled, a little nervous.

“I’m okay here. You all right?”

“Why me?”

“Because—are you serious?—how many times do I have to tell you? I want your help. You used to work in forensics. You’re as close to a doctor as I’ve got.”

Royce puffed a little at that. “You want me to solve it?”

I shrugged, which was the most I could summon.

He cleared his throat. “Okay. I think I’ve got it all. There’s just one thing I don’t understand.”

I was, if I’m honest with you, a bit affronted that he had the crime worked out not only so early on, but also so far ahead of me. I know it seems heartless. Solving crimes is supposed to be about bringing a murderer to justice, not about who got there first, but still . . . out of everyone, did it have to be Royce?

Of course, there’s a whole lot of this book to go, and so you already know that means that either Royce is wrong, or he’ll be killed before he can tell me. I will refrain from stating my preference on this particular matter. I will tell you that I won’t figure everything out myself until chapter 31, when Andy, it pains me to write, provides an assist.

I stood. “You’ve solved it?”

Royce’s head swiveled, looking past me to the door. “Almost,” he squeaked.

I took an excited step toward him. “Tell me, then. What’s missing?”

Royce squeezed against the window, away from me, then said, “Where you got the heroin.”

“Heroin?”

“I mean, we can call it poison if you like. Heroin is technically poison, even if it’s not as commonly used as cyanide or arsenic or whatever else is popular in novels these days. But effective all the same. That was an overdose we saw. Heroin is a nervous system suppressant, so it slows down things like circulation, breathing. I researched it for Dr. Jane Black, Book Nine. The cause of death, I’d say, was an anoxic brain injury. Means no oxygen gets to the brain. Cells die, and it switches off.”

I remembered McTavish’s blue-tinged face, his sharp breaths. His eyes disconnecting from his brain, like a switch flipped. On. Off. Dead. It made sense. “Heroin,” I muttered to myself. Then realized, “Wait, you just said where did I—”

I paused. Took in the scene. I was standing up. Royce was squeezed hard against the wall, glancing at the door. My name in his notebook, underlined. “Hang on. What do you think’s going on here?”

“You’ve just confessed,” Royce said.

“Confessed?”

“Well, I’m interviewing you.”

“I’m interviewing you,” I huffed.

“Why do you get to interview me, and I don’t get to interview you?”

“Because I’m the narrator!”

“Not in my book.”

Thinking back on our conversation, I realized Royce had indeed been asking many of the questions. I’d been following the rules for mystery novels, such as excluding Juliette, predicated on myself being the detective. In Royce’s book, in his head, he was the detective and I was a suspect. Hell, apparently, I was the killer.

“You can’t seriously think I’d—” I couldn’t finish the sentence.

Royce flicked through his notebook pages. Read his notes aloud. “You went to Henry’s cabin last night in a”—he drew his finger down the page until he found it—“rash mood. You were angry with him over that review. One star, ghastl—”

“I know the review, mate.”