Page 37

Twenty-Eight

Only Dante remains in the lounge, looking at Anna with a combination of fear and concern. “Are you okay?” he says.

Anna stretches, her limbs tight. When she rotates her neck, it lets out a sharp crack. “I can take care of myself.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“I’m fine,” Anna says. “Really.”

“You sure about that?” Dante’s gaze drops to her neck. “Because you’re still bleeding.”

“Am I?” Anna says, touching her throat and finding a speck of blood on her fingers.

“Here. Come with me.”

Dante grabs Anna by the hand. Before she can protest, he pulls her behind the bar. He then grabs a cloth napkin, dips it into a nearby ice bucket with an inch of water in the bottom, and places it against Anna’s neck.

She snatches the napkin from his hand. “I can do it myself.”

“Of course you can,” Dante says.

Anna places it against her throat, the damp napkin blessedly cool against her skin. She didn’t realize how hot she’d become, flush from both exertion and rage. Even now her blood continues to boil. She can feel her pulse thrumming at the side of her neck.

“Do you think Herb Pulaski really intended to kill you?” Dante says.

“I don’t know. He’s desperate to get off this train, that’s for sure. He’s convinced the killer is going room by room and that he’s next.”

“Maybe that was a ruse. Maybe he’s the killer.”

“I doubt it.”

“Innocent men don’t threaten women at knifepoint.”

“Well, none of these people are innocent,” Anna says, lowering the napkin. “But he seemed genuinely afraid.”

“And are you afraid, Annie? Because I’m starting to think you should be. By the way, you missed a spot.”

Dante takes the napkin and gently tilts Anna’s head back. She reluctantly allows it.

“I’ve been scared since before we left Philadelphia.”

Dante starts cleaning the spot she missed, standing so close that Anna can smell his aftershave. It’s the same scent she remembers after all these years. A mix of cedar and citrus.

“But things have gotten out of hand,” he says. “Two people are dead. And it’s all my fault.”

Anna goes still beneath his touch. “What does that mean?”

Suspicion storms her thoughts. Understandable, considering that they’re in the same car where Judd Dodge died, standing at the very bar in which he accepted the drink that killed him.

A drink that Dante had mixed. Anna thinks about the two of them in the galley.

Had Dante been there earlier on the voyage, finding the poison beneath the sink?

If so, had he already decided to use it to kill Judd?

Then there’s Edith to consider. In the fifteen or so minutes Anna was gone from the observation car, Dante could have slipped inside and killed Edith before returning to his room right before Anna knocked on his door.

While she has no way of knowing if any of that really happened, it’s entirely plausible.

“You didn’t…”

Anna can’t finish the accusation, leaving Dante to complete the thought.

“Kill them? Of course not. But I am the reason you’re here.”

“Your father is the reason I’m here,” Anna says, pulling away from him.

Dante drops the napkin onto the bar. “And you wouldn’t know that without the evidence your aunt acquired. Do you know how she got her hands on it?”

“No. She died before she could tell me.”

“Maybe you should have asked me.” Dante pauses. “Because I’m the one who sent it to her.”

It takes Anna a moment to fully comprehend what he’s saying. When it does finally hit her, she feels an unwieldy mix of awe, confusion, and gratitude.

“ You gave it her? Why?”

“Do you want the long answer or the longer one?” Dante says.

“Both.”

“The long answer is because my father doesn’t care one bit about me.

He never has. I spent my entire childhood trying to make him love me.

Something, it should go without saying, no child should ever have to do.

Their parents should love them unconditionally.

And my mother did. She wasn’t always the best at showing it, but at least she tried, which is more than I can say for my father.

” Dante edges around the bar and starts pacing the area in front of it.

“For as long as I can remember, he treated me like a disappointment. Nothing I did seemed to please him. So I made it my mission to prove him wrong. I joined the family business. I worked hard. I tried to impress him. And when that didn’t work, I returned to the tactic I used as a teenager. ”

“Rebellion,” Anna says.

Dante gives an enthusiastic nod. “Which meant digging through his dirt.”

“But why did you pretend to be surprised when I told you about the evidence?”

“I didn’t want the others to suspect I had anything to do with it,” Dante says.

“Rightly so, it turns out. You saw what happened to Judd. He all but confessed in this very car, and someone poisoned him because of it. If word gets out that I provided that evidence, whoever killed him and Edith might come for me next.”

“Yet when we were alone, you continued to act like you didn’t know.”

“Because I didn’t want you to know I was involved. That’s why I started sending everything I’d gathered anonymously to your aunt. I didn’t want you learning that I was helping to prove your father was innocent while I implicated my own.”

Anna slides closer, filling the empty space between them. “Why not?”

“Because you hate me.”

“ Hated you,” Anna says, the past tense surprising even her.

Dante flashes his famous crooked smile. “I didn’t know that then. But I never forgot you, Annie. I know it was such a long time ago, that this might sound strange. But it’s the truth.”

Anna doesn’t find it strange at all. She never forgot Dante. In many aspects of her life, he was the first. First boyfriend. First love. First heartbreak.

“Anyway, that’s the longer reason,” Dante says.

“I never forgot you and I always wondered why my father forbade me from seeing you. Just like I always had doubts that your father did everything he was accused of. I know what everyone said about him being a German sympathizer, but it never made any sense to me that he would sacrifice his own son for what was clearly becoming a lost cause. Then there’s the way my father bought your father’s company so quickly—and for so little money.

Because it all struck me as suspicious, I started investigating. ”

Anna leans against the bar top. “To clear my father’s name—or to ruin yours?”

“My father’s doing that well enough on his own,” Dante says.

“I learned, for example, that he’s a tax cheat.

In addition to being a different kind of cheater.

He’s had multiple mistresses over the years.

No surprise there. He always treated my mother with the same disdain he shows to me.

And I learned that his mighty railroad company has been losing money for years now.

Train travel isn’t what it used to be. People nowadays prefer cars, and soon they’ll be preferring airplanes.

Trains are the past. The future is in the sky.

You didn’t need to buy up every seat on this train, Annie.

There would have been plenty of empty space. ”

“So your father’s company is failing,” Anna says, eager for him to get to the point.

“It would have already gone belly-up if he hadn’t been able to swoop in and buy your father’s railroad for dirt cheap.”

“You discovered his motive.”

“Trust me, that wasn’t his motive,” Dante says with a grim set of his jaw.

“I found it out, eventually. After years of searching. My father hid things well, I’ll give him that.

A file here. A document there. Then there’s the safe in his study, which had a combination that took me months to figure out.

That’s where the bulk of the incriminating evidence had been hidden. ”

Anna knows what he found. The memos and forgeries and bank records. All of it enough to arrest, try, and convict everyone responsible.

“How did it feel to learn all the horrible things your father did?”

“I was furious,” Dante says. “And unbearably sad. And betrayed. Most of all, though, I just wanted to know why he did it.”

“Greed,” Anna says.

“But it’s not, Annie. It’s…worse.”

The word wedges into her ribs like a dagger made of ice, shivery and ominous. Part of her doesn’t want to learn what Dante discovered, even as another part of her needs to know. And even though she’s certain she’ll regret it in a minute or so, Anna can’t help but ask, “What was his reason?”

“I think,” Dante says, “it was heartbreak.”

“That makes no sense.”

“It does once you realize it was your mother who broke it.”

The icy jab in Anna’s chest grows sharper, colder. “My mother and your father were—”

“In love, yes.” Dante gives her a weary look, as if he can’t believe it, either. “A long time ago. Before you and I were ever born. They were even engaged for a time, although it didn’t last very long.”

“How did you find this out?”

“The safe in my father’s study also contained letters,” Dante says. “From your mother to my father.”

“Love letters?”

He nods, and Anna’s cheeks begin to burn. She remembers writing her own florid declarations of love to Dante.

Her whole life, she’d been told that she took after her father, and she believed it. After all, it was Tommy who got their mother’s good looks, her vivaciousness. Yet Anna now knows that she was wrong. She’s more like her mother than she ever imagined.

“Except for the last one,” Dante says. “That was a breakup letter. Your mother wrote to my dad telling him that she was sorry, but she was ending things. She’d met someone else and fell head over heels in love.”

“Did she say who it was?” Anna asks, even though she already knows. It’s clear from the way her heart throbs and her body quivers and her head spins. Her body preparing her for news both shocking and so obvious in hindsight she’s stunned she never thought of it before.

“Arthur Matheson,” Dante says.

Anna sighs, for it all makes sense. Her parents married quickly. Only two weeks after meeting. To Kenneth Wentworth, that must have resulted in emotional whiplash. Loving someone. Thinking they love you. Then being left behind while they immediately find a new, permanent love.

Now Anna understands her mother’s angry reaction when Dante and his father crashed that final Christmas party.

She was worried Kenneth Wentworth was there to cause a scene.

Anna also realizes why Mr. Wentworth forbade Dante from seeing her.

He wanted a Matheson to experience the same heartbreak he did.

Finally, it explains why Kenneth Wentworth ultimately targeted her father.

“I had it wrong,” Anna says. “The whole thing.”

This wasn’t about making money. Maybe it was to Lapsford and Herb Pulaski and all the others. But for Dante’s father, it was personal. And what he did wasn’t merely an act of sabotage.

It was revenge.