Page 18

Thirteen

For a full minute after Judd Dodge is declared dead, no one speaks. At least not loud enough for anyone else to hear. Plopped into a chair, Edith Gerhardt whispers a near-silent prayer. Next to her, Herb Pulaski moves his lips but no words come out.

As for Anna, she can’t even breathe. If she does, she’s not cognizant of it. It feels to her as if she’s the dead one. Considering where she is and who she’s with, that would have been less surprising than this.

Still on the floor, she looks across the car to Dante, and their eyes meet in a silent exchange of worry. He was right. They have turned on each other. In a way she never expected.

Anna risks another glance at Judd, struck by how undignified he appears in death.

His eyes are closed, yes, but that’s the only thing resembling a peaceful repose.

The rest of him, from the blood-flecked foam on his lips to the tablecloth still in his grip to the odd, angular bend of his right leg, looks like a man still suffering.

It makes Anna shudder. She’d wanted him to suffer, but not like this.

It’s a relief when Seamus gently straightens Judd’s legs and removes the tablecloth from his fingers. It’s even more of a relief when he places a dry cloth from a neighboring table over the corpse, shielding it from view.

“Is he really dead?” Herb says.

Seamus nods. “Yes.”

“We need to contact the police,” Edith says.

“What we need,” Lapsford says, “is to stop this goddamn train!”

“No!” Anna says from her spot on the floor. “This train isn’t stopping.”

Sal stares at her, bug-eyed. “Not even for this ? You’re nuts.”

The others nod and mutter in agreement. Even Seamus, standing next to Judd’s body, seems torn about it. “What should we do, Anna? This wasn’t part of the plan.”

“I don’t know,” she says. “I need to—”

Think.

That’s what she needs to do, when all she wants is to cry. Not for Judd Dodge himself. He doesn’t deserve her tears. What he had deserved was to pay for his sins. And while that might currently be happening if there is a heaven, a hell, and judgment in the afterlife, Anna isn’t able to witness it.

And that’s what she deserves. It’s what her whole family deserves. What she owes them as their last surviving member.

Make all of them pay, Aunt Retta had told her, and Anna vowed that she would. But now it’s impossible to make that happen. That’s why Anna feels the tears burning at the corners of her eyes. Judd’s death denies her the chance to see all of them brought to justice.

Her plan now feels like water pooled in her cupped hands, slipping between her fingers and draining away.

All that work for nothing. All that wasted money, not to mention opportunity.

She could have made it easier on herself, as Dante pointed out.

Summoned the FBI, handed over the evidence, watched the arrests happen.

But that hadn’t been enough for her. Not after what these people had done to her family.

Like a queen bee hunting those who destroyed the hive, she wanted them to feel her sting.

But someone else had struck first, and the pain she feels keeps the tears welling. She thinks of what Aunt Retta would say in this moment. Don’t cry. Don’t show emotion. And for God’s sake, don’t flinch.

Anna stops the tears from falling through sheer force of will and climbs to her feet. She needs to focus, to concentrate, to figure out what to do next.

The others are right. The best course of action would be to notify the authorities.

But that means stopping the train, and she’d gone to great lengths to ensure that that couldn’t happen, not ever thinking there might come a moment in which the train needed to stop.

With that scenario unlikely at best, Anna can think of only one other option—identify the killer herself.

Rotating slowly in the center of the car, she says, “Which one of you did this? You’re all going to prison anyway, so you might as well confess now and save the police a lot of time and effort.”

“What makes you think it was one of us?” Lapsford asks.

“Well, it had to be someone on this train,” Anna says. “And since we’re the only people on it, that means it was one of you.”

“Or one of you, ” Lapsford says, pointing to Anna and Seamus. “I think Judd was right. You are trying to kill us.”

Anna’s not surprised by being pegged a murderer. In fact, she expected it. And even though she knows none of them will believe her, she says, “I already told you my plans. If I intended to kill all of you, I would have done it by now.”

The statement—as blunt as it is unnerving—quiets the car. A few seconds of silence follows, broken only when Herb gestures at Seamus and says, “What about him?”

“What about you? ” Seamus says back. “Anna and I aren’t the only ones capable of murder. Considering what the rest of you have done, you’re all more suspicious than the two of us. If Mr. Dodge was murdered—”

“If?” Sal says with a roll of her eyes. “What else could have killed him?”

Anna approaches Judd’s body, carefully tiptoeing past it to reach the cocktail table he’d stood next to before hitting the floor.

While some of the tablecloth is on the floor beside him, a martini-soaked portion still clings to the table’s surface.

Resting on its side atop it is the martini glass Judd had drunk from.

Anna swipes an index finger along the inside of the glass, feeling a gritty residue.

She lifts the glass to her nose and sniffs, detecting a sharp, unpleasant chemical scent.

“He was poisoned,” she announces.

“You sure about that?” Seamus says.

“Not a hundred percent. But I’ve drunk enough martinis in my life to know they don’t smell like this. Someone put something toxic in Judd’s drink.”

“Told you it was murder,” Lapsford says with smug satisfaction.

While that fact is now obvious, Anna still doesn’t understand the motive behind it. Why would someone want to kill Judd Dodge? If anyone on this train is a target for murder, it’s her, followed closely by Seamus. Yet someone killed Judd instead.

“Did any of you have a grudge against Judd?” she asks, not expecting an honest answer.

Edith shakes her head, while Lapsford says, “I barely knew the man.”

“Not me,” Herb says. “But he did seem a bit jumpy when he first got here.”

“Jumpy how?” Anna says.

Looking jumpy himself, Herb wipes his brow with a handkerchief and then starts twisting it in his hands. “Nervous. Like he had a bad feeling about this night.”

“As well he should have,” Sal says. “Seeing how one of you offed him.”

On the other side of the car, Jack Lapsford looks her up and down. “Excluding yourself, I see. In my mind, that makes you the prime suspect.”

“The feeling’s mutual,” Sal says.

“I had no reason to kill him,” Lapsford says. “Even though he all but confessed to treason and sabotage when he saw that blueprint.”

Whether intentional or not, Lapsford’s response provides Anna with a prime motive for murder.

Judd did say he drafted the blueprint that had been in the briefcase, even clarifying that it was for the locomotive that had been designed to explode.

That’s as close to an admission of guilt as she could hope for.

Maybe one of the others, worried he’d easily confess to everything they’d done, resorted to murder to keep Judd quiet. But who? And when?

Anna tries to summon details from minutes earlier.

Whoever did it had to have slipped the poison into Judd’s glass without anyone else noticing.

But not much time had passed between Dante making the drinks and Judd’s sudden collapse to the floor.

And Anna had been too distracted by the passing train—not to mention tending to Lapsford during his faked heart attack—to notice much of anything else.

“Who was standing next to Judd when he died?” she says.

“No one,” Seamus says. “He was alone.”

“And no one got near him after he grabbed his drink from the bar?”

“No.”

Seamus turns to the bar itself. Dante remains behind it, not having budged since pouring the martinis. Aware of the suspicious way everyone is looking at him, he says, “You don’t seriously think I did it, do you?”

“A man did just die while drinking a martini you mixed,” Seamus says.

“But why would I kill him?” Dante said. “ When could I have killed him? You all saw me mix those martinis right in front of you. I made everyone’s drinks at the same time, in the same shaker. If I poisoned Judd’s, then Sal, Herb, and the lieutenant colonel here would also be dead.”

Sal stares at the glass still in her hand and, seeing that it’s mostly empty, lets it go with a gasp. The glass hits the floor, its stem snapping at her feet. Herb and Lapsford, both of whom had set their half-consumed drinks aside earlier, exchange stricken looks.

“But you’re not dead,” Dante adds. “Which means I didn’t poison Judd’s drink. How could I? I didn’t know who’d be taking which glass. I let them pick.”

“It’s true,” Anna says, recalling how Dante, as he did with everything, presented the drinks with a charming flourish. “He set out the glasses and poured the drinks, but the rest of it was random.”

“And Judd took the last glass that was left,” Dante says.

“Who took the first?”

“Sally,” Edith says, piping up from her chair by the window. “She chose first.”

Sal whirls on her. “So you’re saying I did it?”

“I’m simply pointing out that you had the opportunity,” Edith says.

“As did Herb.” Sal grabs her handbag from the bar and uses it to gesture at the man next to Edith. “And Lapsford. And everyone else in this car. Including you, Edith. Speaking of which, you’ve been suspiciously quiet throughout all of this.”

Edith sighs. “I see no point in raising a fuss. Especially when you and the others are all too happy to do it for me.”

“Or maybe you’ve been plotting something this whole time and hoping no one would notice.”