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Sixteen

Outside Room C of the train’s thirteenth car, the sconce with the loose bulb continues to flicker and hum, casting an intermittent glow over the corpse of Judd Dodge.

Still shrouded beneath a tablecloth, the body is carried by Seamus and Dante.

Neither man wants to be doing it, but they have little choice.

They can’t just leave him on the floor of the lounge.

Anna follows them, watching from the doorway as Seamus and Dante place the body onto the mattress and swap the tablecloth that covers it for a sheet. It feels more reverent that way.

“Does anyone want to say anything?” Dante asks.

“Only that I’m sorry he didn’t suffer more,” Anna says before walking away.

She returns to her own room, leaving the door unlocked for Seamus, who she knows will join her there soon. Until he arrives, she stretches out on the bed. God, she’s exhausted, and it’s not even midnight. She’ll be positively catatonic by the time the train reaches Chicago.

Her eyes refuse to stay open, so Anna doesn’t fight them. She simply lies there, eyelids shut tight, even as Seamus enters the room, his presence as familiar as her own.

“We failed,” she says.

“I know.”

Seamus climbs onto the bed and lies down next to Anna, their bodies inches apart yet comfortably close.

Theirs is an unusual bond, forged through unimaginable grief and the strangest of circumstances.

Lying beside Seamus now, Anna thinks about their first meeting.

That cold, gray day in the cemetery after she had buried Aunt Retta.

Few people showed up to pay their respects, which made Seamus easy to notice in the sparse crowd.

He had the look of a brawler. Big, and clearly well-built, but with a lithe physicality to him.

He was graceful for someone so large, moving toward her with catlike precision once the funeral was over and everyone else had dispersed.

“Your aunt sent me” was all he said.

“How did you know her?”

Seamus looked to the open grave and the coffin that had just recently been lowered into it. “I didn’t. We never met in person. But she wrote to me a few times.”

He didn’t explain the nature of the letters, nor did he need to.

Anna knew that, in a quest to clear her father’s name, Aunt Retta wrote letters to all the families of the train explosion’s victims, trying to convince them someone other than Arthur Matheson was responsible.

Anna had always assumed no one wrote back.

Clearly, she was wrong. At least one person had.

“Who did you lose?”

“My brother. Sean Callahan.”

Anna knew the name. She’d made sure to memorize the identities of all the victims. They were, after all, the men who had died alongside her brother.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” she said. “It was kind of you to pay your respects.”

“That’s not why I’m here. There’s something I need to show you.”

They trudged to a black Buick parked at the edge of the cemetery. “A gift,” Seamus said, opening the trunk. “From your late aunt.”

Six boxes sat inside the trunk. When Anna saw them, she understood not only what they contained but that Aunt Retta was right. The proof had indeed found her.

Seamus followed Anna to the mansion that had once been Aunt Retta’s but now belonged to her. Together, they spent the next twenty-four hours sorting through all the information contained in those boxes—a painful, painstaking process.

The evidence left Anna feeling stunned, not just by the breadth of the plot but by the people involved.

People she knew. People her father had trusted.

People they both had loved. Sal and Edith, Herb Pulaski and Judd Dodge.

Seeing their names, their deeds, and their outright treachery had left her so raw and betrayed and furious that there was no question in her mind that vengeance had to be enacted.

“Do you think we should kill them?” she said.

“Yes,” Seamus replied. “All of them need to die. And I want to be the one to do it.”

Anna ultimately decided that death wasn’t enough punishment for everyone involved.

It was too easy, too quick. Short of kidnapping and torturing them over an extended period of time—an idea she and Seamus discussed at length—the only way to guarantee an adequate amount of suffering was to bring all of them to justice. Something that’s now impossible.

“Which one of those bastards do you think did it?” Anna says.

Beside her, Seamus shrugs. “Honestly? Any of them. Including Reggie Davis. You think he’s lying?”

“If so, he’s very good at it.”

Anna knows that from experience. When he told the others she wasn’t carrying a weapon, Reggie had sounded so convincing that even she almost believed him.

Although grateful for that particular lie, Anna wonders if it’s not the only one he’s told them.

While it’s certainly possible he boarded the wrong train, it’s also not very probable.

Because of that, Anna can’t shake the feeling he’s here for a reason.

“Either he really is an insurance salesman who got on the wrong train—or he’s a plant sent by Kenneth Wentworth.”

“My money’s on insurance salesman,” Seamus says. “The plant sent by Wentworth is clearly his son.”

Anna sits up, surprised. “Dante? He’s here for a different reason. Or so he says.”

“And what’s that?”

“To see me.”

“You really believe that?” Seamus asks.

“Maybe. I get the feeling he’s trying to help us.”

A few hours ago, Anna thought she’d never see Dante Wentworth again, let alone trust him. But the fact that he didn’t stop the train when he had the chance tells Anna there’s more to Dante’s presence than he’s letting on.

“Or maybe he’s lying through his teeth,” Seamus says.

There it is. Another flare of jealousy.

What happened between them occurred only once.

An unplanned tumbling into bed when the burdens they both carried had become too heavy to bear.

Fueled by wine and grief, they tossed those burdens aside, along with their clothes and inhibitions.

Anna was surprised by the intensity of the encounter.

How eager they were to escape their pain, if only just for a night.

One night was all they got. When they woke the next morning, their limbs still entwined, Anna felt not embarrassment but another, worse emotion: resignation.

“We can never do this again,” she said.

“It’s too sad,” Seamus added in agreement.

And while that had seemed to be the end of it for Anna, perhaps it wasn’t for Seamus, who’s more sensitive than his hulking appearance suggests.

The possibility that he might still have feelings for her worries Anna.

The night has already been disrupted enough.

She can’t have emotions—Seamus’s or anyone else’s—messing things up even more.

“For me, the biggest suspect is Jack Lapsford,” Anna says, even though she has nothing to back the claim. Just a stirring in her gut that tells her Lapsford’s up to something. He’s certainly the most vocal of the bunch. The most desperate, too.

While he wasn’t close enough to slip poison into Judd’s drink when no one was looking, that doesn’t mean he couldn’t have done it another way.

It’s possible he poisoned the martini glass in the first hour of the trip when no one had yet entered the lounge.

Or he could have spiked Judd’s drink unnoticed when he went to the bar to collect his own.

“But why would he kill Judd?” Seamus says. “Why would any of them?”

Anna understands what he’s getting at. If anyone on the Phoenix has justifiable reason to commit murder, it’s her and Seamus. Which means the two of them also have the biggest targets on their backs. She can’t fathom why one of the others would, as Dante had predicted, turn on their own.

But turn they did. And Anna can’t shake the feeling that one of them, in a desperate bid to appear innocent, has decided to get rid of those who know the most about their guilt—their fellow conspirators.

“Because the dead can’t tattle,” she says.

“You think whoever killed Judd is planning to do it again?”

“Possibly,” Anna says. “To avoid that happening, we need to keep an eye on everyone for the rest of the trip. That means checking on them once an hour, maybe more.”

Seamus nods. “To make sure one of them isn’t up to something.”

“And to make sure the others remain alive.”

The irony isn’t lost on Anna. In order to destroy their enemies, they must first protect them.

But she also knows monitoring their every move isn’t enough. They can’t just hope Judd’s killer doesn’t strike again. They need to stop whoever did it before they get the chance.

“I still don’t understand the poison. Why did the killer have it? I mean, who brings poison onto a train?”

“Someone who intended to use it,” Seamus says.

“That’s what’s strange,” Anna says. “I don’t think anyone knew who else was going to be aboard the Phoenix.

That makes it highly unlikely this was premeditated murder.

I think the killer decided to do it after realizing what this trip is all about.

That means it’s someone who always carries poison with them or else—”

Seamus sits up. “They found it on the train.”

“Exactly. And if we can also locate it, that might give us a good idea of who used it.” Anna slides off the bed, her eyes bright. “Find the poison, find the killer.”