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Thirty-Three

“He’s trying to frame me,” Anna says as she shuts the window with an angry slam. It’s just her and Reggie in the room now, Seamus having left to shoo the others back to their own quarters. “Just like they framed my father.”

She thinks about not just who’s been murdered and when, but how.

Judd, poisoned because he was the first person to admit a role in the scheme that killed Anna’s family, not to mention the first person to suggest she’d gathered everyone there to kill them.

Edith, actually suffocated but made to look like she was strangled because that was what Anna had almost done when she lost control in the lounge.

Herb, his throat slit after everyone onboard learned that she’s carrying a knife—and after predicting he’d be the next victim.

Add in the missing drapery cord found around Edith’s neck, the open window in her room, her father’s pin, and the fact that she had good reason to murder all of them, and it makes Anna look guilty as sin.

“Let’s say you’re right,” Reggie says. “Who do you think is doing it?”

“Lapsford,” Anna says. “Because it serves two purposes at once. It eliminates those who might implicate him while also making me look guilty, casting doubt on my mental state and the idea that my father was innocent.”

“Do you really think he’s capable of that?”

“He plotted worse before. There’s no reason to think he wouldn’t try it again.”

Reggie shakes his head. “I meant physically capable. Killing Judd and Edith, yes. He’s even capable of slitting Herb’s throat. But then climbing out the window onto the roof of the train? You think someone Jack Lapsford’s age and condition can do that?”

No, Anna doesn’t. When examining the window, she wasn’t even sure Lapsford could fit through it.

“Maybe there’s a different way out of the room. Something we missed. Or maybe it is possible to latch the dead bolt from the outside. Open my door and check.”

Reggie, who had closed the door after Seamus left, doesn’t budge. “Or maybe you should just stay in this room and not come out until we reach Chicago.”

Anna drops into the chair beside the window.

Reggie thinks she’s guilty.

He doesn’t outright say that. He doesn’t need to. She sees it in his eyes, on his face, in the coiled tightness of his body. He thinks she’s killed not just Herb, but Judd and Edith as well.

“You don’t believe me, do you?” she says. “You think I’m the killer.”

“I don’t,” Reggie says.

“Then why are you treating me like I am?”

“Because it’s what everyone else thinks. And I’m worried there’ll be a mutiny on our hands if I don’t defuse the situation.”

“By forcing me to stay in this room.”

Under normal circumstances, Anna wouldn’t mind that.

She’s quite used to being alone, having spent years living in isolation with her aunt.

Home confinement born less out of choice than necessity.

They were outcasts in a world that thought her father a man so cold-blooded he would slaughter his own son.

killer spawn read one of the notes wrapped around the rocks that occasionally crashed through their front windows.

Aunt Retta would burn the paper and use the rocks as a border in her garden.

Even after Seamus entered the picture, Anna spent more time than not by herself.

So solitude should make her comfortable now.

It doesn’t. Because now she knows the killer can move from room to room outside the train.

Not that anywhere was safe. Judd Dodge, after all, was murdered in a room full of people.

Which, now that she thinks about it, seems like more of an outlier than the other deaths.

“Something doesn’t add up,” she says. “Judd died right in front of us. But Edith and Herb were killed in isolated places where no one could see it happening. Why?”

Reggie eases himself onto the bed. “If your theory is correct, it’s to frame you.”

“But that wasn’t the case with Judd. I didn’t make the drinks. I wasn’t even near him.”

“Do you think there’s a reason for that?” Reggie says. “Judd Dodge was killed first. Was he worse than the others? Did he play a bigger role in what happened?”

“Yes,” Anna says. “Even though it’s impossible to rank the six of them from worst to least awful, some had more to do with what happened than others. And Judd Dodge, who built a locomotive designed to explode, is at the top of that list. But I don’t think any of the others actively hated him.”

“Did you?”

Anna turns, as if taken aback by the unnecessary question. “I hate all of them. Far too much to kill them.”

“And you’re certain Mr. Dodge didn’t kill himself?”

“Certain? No. But I doubt it. Then again, I have no idea how it happened in the first place. There was a lot going on at the time.”

She spends the next ten minutes relating all of it to Reggie, from her arrival in the lounge to everyone marching to the front of the train and back to Dante ending up behind the bar, mixing martinis.

“Do you think he could have poisoned Judd’s drink?” Reggie says.

Anna doesn’t—and not just because she’s certain of Dante’s innocence. “He mixed all four martinis in the same shaker.”

“What about after he poured them?”

That’s another no. Anna clearly remembers Dante pouring the drinks into four glasses before spreading his arms wide and saying, “Come and get ’em.” After that, he stood back as the others approached the bar and grabbed a martini of their choice. Sal first, then Herb, Lapsford, and, finally, Judd.

“There you go,” Reggie says. “One of them must have slipped the poison into his glass while they were choosing.”

“But I was watching,” Anna says. “We all were.”

She closes her eyes, replaying the scene in her memory.

In her mind’s eye, it looks like a movie.

Bright and flickering. She watches it like a movie, too.

One she’s seen before. Instead of getting caught up in the plot, she scans the background for details whose importance she missed in the moment.

She sees Sal take her glass and Herb grab his.

She watches Lapsford reach for one of the remaining glasses, decide against it, pick up the other. Judd takes what’s left.

Anna sits up as a forgotten detail emerges. Lapsford brushing against Judd as he leaves the bar. That touch, while brief, could have been the moment Lapsford dropped poison into Judd’s glass before moving smoothly away.

But it wasn’t, Anna quickly realizes. The contact occurred while Judd was still on his way to the bar, meaning there was no glass in his hand when Lapsford passed. And no one was near Judd after he carried his drink to the center of the car.

Anna keeps mentally replaying the moment, telling Reggie what she sees in her memory.

Sal gulping from her drink, her lipstick staining the rim of the glass.

Herb taking tiny, nervous sips. Lapsford glaring at her over his glass, probably at that very moment finalizing his plan to fake a heart attack.

Judd, off on his own, seemingly so uninterested in his drink that he yawns.

Things get blurry after that. There was so much activity going on in the lounge.

First the train that clattered past, followed by Lapsford’s fake emergency and Judd’s sudden, surprising demise.

While she might have missed plenty of details in those moments, Anna made sure to note where everyone was located during all of it.

At no point while the glass was in Judd’s hand did anyone get close enough to poison him.

But there was poison in his drink. She’d seen it with her own eyes. That gritty residue on the inside of the glass, bearing the same smell as the rat poison in the galley. It seems to her that the only person who could have put it there is Judd himself.

Anna gasps as it suddenly hits her.

A missing detail she’d only vaguely noticed, unaware of how important it would turn out to be. Not that she could have known. After all, how can something be considered important if it never even happened?

“He didn’t drink it,” Anna says to Reggie now. “The whole time that martini was in Judd’s hand, he never once took a sip.”

Reggie perks up. “Are you sure?”

Rather than answer, Anna springs to her feet. A signal that she’s certain. Not just about Judd never taking a sip of his martini, but the fact that he wasn’t poisoned at all.

The thought that Judd has been playing dead this whole time rattles through her head, louder than the train itself. And as she rushes to the door, Anna can only think of one reason why he’d do such a thing.

She pushes out of the room, leaving Reggie with no choice but to follow her. Seamus hears them and peeks out from his own room, confused.

“What’s going on?” he says.

“I’ll explain later,” Anna tells him as she moves to the next car. Seamus trails after her, getting in line right behind Reggie. Over her shoulder, Anna says, “When you checked Judd’s pulse, are you sure you didn’t feel one?”

“Yes,” Seamus says. “I’m sure. There was nothing.”

Reggie gives him a brief backward glance. “Do you know the proper way to check someone’s pulse?”

“There’s a proper way?”

“So that’s a no,” Reggie mutters.

Seamus scowls at the back of his head. “Who are you to judge? And where are we going?”

“Judd’s room,” Anna says between cars.

“Why?”

“Because he might be the killer.”

Anna slows once they enter the train’s second-to-last car.

An unconscious calming. As if she doesn’t want to wake the dead now resting in its rooms. One of whom, it turns out, might not be dead at all.

Another reason Anna remains quiet. If Judd is still alive, she doesn’t want him to know they’re coming.

Outside the door to Room C, she presses an index finger to her lips, signaling to Reggie and Seamus that they also need to be quiet.

Because the man inside is assumed to be dead, Anna knows the door is unlocked.

She reaches out, slowly grasping the handle.

Then, without warning, she flings the door open.

Reggie enters first, storming in before Anna even gets a chance to move.

Seamus is next, shoving into the room right behind him.

Anna, unceremoniously shoved aside, pushes in behind them, their sturdy backs blocking her view inside the room.

In the sliver of space between their bodies, she gets glimpses of the window, the chair next to it, the door to the bathroom.

Reggie and Seamus are still in her way as they turn the corner to the bed dominating the other half of the room. Again, Anna sees only slivers. A strip of sheet. A glimpse of headboard.

What she doesn’t see is Judd Dodge.

With good reason.

When Seamus and Reggie part, finally allowing Anna a clear view of the room, all she sees is an empty bed and a tossed-aside sheet that once covered what they all had thought was a dead body.

Judd himself, though, is gone.