Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect

Honestly, on reading it, I was surprised he’d married her. It was an absolute pasting. Although the review didn’t have too much to say about the book, it was dogged in comparing Jasper to the literary heavyweights of the genre—career authors, multimillionaires. Harriet couldn’t quite accept that he wasn’t up to their level, and she razed him for it. Murdoch wishes he could write like McTavish, and there are glimmers of potential in his work, but alas, he falls short of the high mark set by the Scottish favorite.

No wonder Jasper didn’t write crime anymore. But I remembered the look in his eyes as he’d watched Harriet dance. If this review had led them to cross paths (I imagined him plucking up the courage to write this reviewer an email, perhaps offering a coffee so he could explain what he was trying to do with the novel, or maybe downing half a bottle of white wine and cavalcading in with a thesaurus’s worth of inventive and invented curse words), he probably didn’t mind it one bit. I reread it through the lens of Jasper’s hippie zen-ness and it didn’t sound so cruel. On scrolling, I also saw Harriet was the writer of McTavish’s oft-used NYT blurb—“unputdownable and unbeatable: McTavish is peerless”—pulled from a review of his fifth novel in 2006.

I sent another text to Juliette and was momentarily excited by the immediate ding in return, until I realized it was a red exclamation mark claiming the message could not be sent.

I put the phone away and shut my eyes. But Jasper’s voice stayed inside my head. Except now he was saying something else: especially if Wyatt keeps doubling my advance. I remembered Wyatt on the phone at the station. Trying to authorize a deal term, perhaps?

It had glanced off my notice at first; I’d assumed Jasper’s new deal was for an Erica Mathison book. But if this review held weight, if Jasper’s writing really was Dollar Store McTavish, then his own fiction would always be just an imitation. Even the success of The Eleven Orgasms of Deborah Winstock wouldn’t have papered over that feeling, that he was a wannabe relegated to a permanent second place behind a better author. One way to beat the comparison, perhaps, was to remove it entirely.

I fell asleep thinking two things:

Henry McTavish hadn’t wanted to keep writing the Detective Morbund books.

And perhaps, to Wyatt Lloyd, McTavish-lite was better than no McTavish at all.

Chapter 25

I had no idea how long I’d been asleep, but I knew from the bashing on the door whose inelegant fist the knock belonged to, so I wasn’t all that surprised to see Royce standing in the corridor. What did surprise me was the line of people behind him.

“Come on,” was all he said, shuffling off to assault the next door before I’d had a chance to wipe the sleep from my eyes. He kept moving along the line, like a prison warden waking inmates.

I slid into the conga line between Simone and Wolfgang. Everyone was in pajamas: I was decent in a faded band T-shirt and tracksuit pants; Simone wore a matching purple silk shirt and trousers, SM embroidered on the breast pocket; and Wolfgang, most surprisingly, was in full-length blue-and-white-striped flannel pajamas. I’d assumed he slept in a three-piece suit. S. F. Majors was behind Wolfgang, still in the finery she’d worn to dinner, which meant she had either taken the time to get dressed or not yet gone to bed. We shuffled along to the next door. I checked the time: three A.M.

I tapped Simone on the shoulder. “What’s going on?”

“Royce has solved it,” she whispered. “Wants us all in the bar carriage.”

“What?” If I’d had a drink, I would have spat it out. “Royce?”

“It’s not like you didn’t have enough chances. Damn it, Ernest, you were supposed to get there first.”

“Well, what’s all this then?”

“Don’t be bitter. You know you’ve got to get all the suspects together to do the grand reveal. That’s what you’d do, isn’t it?”

“I know how a denouement works,” I said, sulking.

“De-noo-moh,” Wolfgang said from behind me, ladling the French over my mispronunciation like syrup. “Not dee-now-ment.”

“Merci,” I growled, refusing to turn and face him. Up ahead, Lisa slid out of her room, closing the door quickly behind her lest anyone see inside, and joined the line.

A heavy hand clapped me on the shoulder. Wolfgang again. I couldn’t see his face, but I could feel his grin burning into the back of my neck.

“Looks like he beat you to it, old chap. Your book will be second fiddle now.”