Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect

“But she wanted a father figure, and so she built one herself. Out of his books,” I surmised. I’d been thinking back to S. F. Majors’s interpretation of obsession: The stalker might picture themselves having a certain relationship with this person. A connection that only they see. They insert themselves into a world they aren’t actually a part of. In this case, the connection was more literal, but the interpretation still held. MongrelWrangler22 had posted that they felt like he was speaking directly to them. A bedtime story. To Brooke, reading the Detective Morbund books was like talking to her dad. No wonder she didn’t want them to end.

“I indulged that. I figured it was harmless, healthy even. A bit of an outlet. Like I said, he was supposed to be a continent away.”

“Until this trip.”

“Exactly. Ouch.” Lisa sparked the cables against her fingertips and shook them, just as the engine sputtered and then roared. She hoisted herself into the driver’s seat and patted the dash. “Research pays off after all.”

Then we were moving. The only road at Manguri was the one bending away to Coober Pedy, so Lisa drove off-road parallel to the train track. The ground was flat enough to accommodate the train but ragged enough to jostle us roughly in our seats. The Ghan was a speck on the horizon ahead.

“When you were invited here, I imagine she would have begged to come with you?”

“Desperately. But I wasn’t having it. I wasn’t even going to accept the invitation—I certainly didn’t want to be anywhere near him. But she really wanted to finally meet him. We had a huge blow-out, screaming-the-grout-from-the-kitchen-tiles type stuff. And I told her, in the heat of the moment, what he’d done. That he’d raped me.”

“And she still wanted to come?” I said, despite already knowing the answer. I should have believed her.

“It made her want to come even more. You must understand, I didn’t sit her down and gently tell her the reality. I screamed it at her across the room.” Lisa took her eyes off the tracks, where the back of the Ghan had gotten closer, turning from a blurry lump to glinting steel, to read my face. “You clearly don’t have kids. Or if you do, not girls. She was livid, accused me of saying anything to get her to not go. She’s a smart girl, she wouldn’t have let anger override common sense, and she knows what men are capable of. But you’ve got to understand, she had this picture of him in her head. Her father. The writer of her favorite books, the teller of her bedtime stories. He’d been speaking to her for years through Morbund. She couldn’t replace that image she’d built so easily.”

“I imagine she’d have found a way to come without you, then.”

“She told me if I didn’t take her, she’d pay her own way. Sell her car if she had to. I figured I was better off here protecting her.”

“Looks like she wasn’t the one who needed protecting.”

“She wouldn’t have killed them.”

“I don’t think you believe that.”

My conversations with Brooke flashed through my head. Her sucking up the courage to introduce herself to McTavish. Him pressing his room key into her hand. The image of him that she’d built, in denial of her mother’s warning, crumbling in front of her. The key, squeezed so tight it cut into her palm. The note, which must have been originally attached to the whiskey: From an admirer. McTavish whispering to her: It’s a mighty fine drop to drink alone. Her telling me in the Chairman’s Carriage: Never meet your heroes.

Lisa’s knuckles whitened on the steering wheel. The man who raped her and the man who had covered it up were both dead. I didn’t have to say it.

Lisa would have had the same thoughts I did. I knew exactly why she had left Brooke alone. Even for a second. Even that it crossed your mind. Love doesn’t make you invincible to doubt. I knew that as well as any. Lisa knew that by leaving the train she would incriminate herself with the appearance of guilt, and it might give her daughter a head start.

Lisa had sought me out, told me what she had, in the hope that I would write it down. And that one day her daughter would read, and understand, what she’d done to save her.

The funny thing was, Brooke believed her mother capable of the very same crime. That was why she’d been at pains to introduce me to Majors’s possible motives: to distract me from her mother’s. Each protecting the other.

“Why take me back?” I asked.

“Because you’ve solved it. Haven’t you?”

I nodded, but with the bouncing of the Land Cruiser it was a bit more enthusiastic than I’d intended, so I added, “Almost.”