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Forty-Eight

Agent Reggie Davis leans against the doorframe, honestly relieved to be found out. It’s been exhausting pretending to be helping Anna, when in truth he was doing the opposite. All this time, he’s had only one goal in mind—kill the people who killed his father.

He was fifteen when it happened. A terrible age to lose your dad.

Unlike Anna’s brother, Reggie’s father wasn’t a soldier being shipped off to basic training.

At forty-five, his fighting days were long over.

No, his father worked the railroad. An engineer.

One unlucky enough to volunteer to drive a brand-new troop train carrying a group of U.S. servicemen to an Army base in Georgia.

“I’m doing my part,” he told Reggie before he left that morning. “When you get to be old enough, I expect you to do the same.”

The war was all but over by the time Reggie could enlist, so he did the next best thing and joined the FBI. For a time, it felt like he was doing right by his late father. He was one of the good guys, catching bad guys, making sure the scales of justice tipped in the right direction.

What he never, ever expected was the opportunity to avenge his father. After all, the man everyone thought was responsible had been dead for a dozen years. But Reggie knew that had Arthur Matheson still been alive, he would have killed him with his bare hands if given the chance.

Then, miracle of miracles, he got it.

Reggie couldn’t believe his luck when he learned not just who really killed his father but that all of them had been gathered together by Art Matheson’s daughter.

He didn’t know what he was going to do about it.

Not even once he’d boarded the train. But as everyone else—the porters, the conductors, even the other passengers—quickly disembarked, he realized something else was going on.

“I thought you brought them here to kill them,” he tells Anna.

“That must have been a surprise when you realized I didn’t,” she says. “Is that when you decided to do it yourself?”

Yes. Although he wasn’t in the lounge when Judd Dodge allegedly died, Reggie knew he hadn’t been poisoned to death.

Unlike what they show in the movies, poisoning is nasty business.

Depending on the dose, there’s vomiting, thrashing, spitting up blood.

Reggie detected none of that beneath the tablecloth that covered Judd’s supposed corpse.

So the first chance he got, he snuck into Room C of Car 13 to see for himself.

“Are you going to tell everyone?” Judd asked in a panic when he’d been caught.

“Not if you agree to do everything I say,” Reggie told him.

What that entailed was to pick the others off one by one. Edith and Herb, Jack Lapsford and Sally Lawrence. The order didn’t matter. Just as long as they all died.

“How’d you put it together?” he asks Anna now.

“Piece by piece. Starting with your shirt.” She eyes it now, the part not soaked with his blood a stark white. “When you first surprised us in the lounge, the one you were wearing was light blue.”

Reggie had hoped no one would notice. His fault for not bringing along a matching shirt. Then again, there wasn’t time to stop by his place to grab a different one. The white one at the bottom of his desk, kept there for sudden assignments like this, had to do.

“Did it get splattered with blood when you slit Herb’s throat?” Anna says. “Or was it simply wet with snow after you exited through the window?”

“Both,” Reggie says, thinking about the damp, blood-flecked shirt now sitting at the bottom of his suitcase. “When did you realize I’d changed?”

“While checking your wound. How is it, by the way?”

Reggie pats the side of his stomach. The wound still hurts. A lot. But at least he can move, thanks to Anna.

“The stitches are holding up nicely. You did a good job.”

“An unnecessary one,” Anna says. “When you stabbed yourself, you made sure the wound looked worse than it is.”

“What makes you think I’m the one who did it?”

“The location. It’s on the left side of your stomach. But Judd Dodge, the man you claimed to have stabbed you, was right-handed. If he had really snuck up from behind, as you said he did, the stab wound would have been on the right side of your abdomen.”

Reggie can’t help but be impressed. So far, he’s been unable to get much past her.

“I couldn’t risk the right side,” he says. “Too many vital organs.”

Anna cocks her head, curious. “Is that something they teach you in the FBI? The exact place to stab yourself that causes a lot of bleeding but not major injury?”

“It’s surprising how much you learn on the job.”

“Such as wounding yourself to make it appear like you’re not a murderer?” Anna asks. “Did you kill Edith, too? Or was that Judd?”

“He did the killing, but at my suggestion. The cord from your drapes was also my idea.”

“To make it look like I’d done it. It was the same with the open window and my father’s pin. When did you take it?”

“In the observation car,” Reggie says, recalling how easy it was to pluck from her dress as he pointed out Edith’s smeared lipstick.

“I couldn’t understand why I was being framed, even after I realized you were the killer.” Anna places a finger to her chin, as if putting it together on the spot. “But now it’s starting to make sense. By framing me, you were really framing Judd Dodge.”

“I thought it would look more plausible that way,” Reggie admits. “Judd fakes his death, kills those who could implicate him, then frames you for the crimes. He seemed to think it was a good idea.”

“But in reality, once you murdered the others, you planned to kill him, claiming self-defense. You’d have a scapegoat, no one would be any wiser, and you’d be hailed a hero.”

It was, Reggie thinks, a perfect plan. Practically foolproof. And it would have worked except for one key detail. Anna, of course, knows what it is.

“But then I figured out Judd wasn’t dead. It didn’t help matters that he left his room.” Anna’s voice gets quieter, distant. “And then Seamus killed him.”

“Not part of the plan. At no time did he know what I was up to.”

Sympathy compels Reggie to say it. He doesn’t want Anna to think less of Seamus than she already does. Despite everything, he still admires her. She’s plucky, determined. Very few of his fellow agents would have been able to pull off some of the things Anna accomplished during the night.

“Still, by then, your plan had fully unraveled,” she says.

Reggie steps deeper into the room. “I wouldn’t go that far. It could still work—if you don’t tell anyone. Think about it, Anna. All this time, you’ve been craving vengeance. So have I. Now’s our chance to get it.”

“And we have very different ideas about what that looks like,” Anna says.

“But we don’t have to. They’re bad people, Anna. They took everything from you. You deserve to do the same to them.”

Anna shifts in the chair, uneasy. “Not all of them. Kenneth Wentworth isn’t even on this train.”

“That’s the beauty of this. He’ll suffer exactly the way you want him to. Humiliation. Prison. The most hated man in America. And those who helped him will be dead, which is what I want. We both get our way.”

Anna wears a strange expression. A kind of hesitant doubt. Almost as if she wants to say yes but can’t bring herself to do it.

“But what if I refuse to go along with it? Are you going to kill me?”

“Yes,” Reggie says. “That is unfortunately the plan.”

“But what if I kill you first?”

Anna uncrosses her arms, revealing Reggie’s gun gripped in her right hand.

The whole time she’s been wearing his jacket, it’s been right there, deep inside a pocket.

Reggie doesn’t know how long it took for her to remember it was there.

It doesn’t matter now that the gun is in her hand and aimed squarely at his chest.

He smiles at the sight. He can’t help it.

“Before you shoot me, I have one question for you,” he says. “Did you honestly think I’d give you a loaded gun?”

Anna’s eyes dim. When she pulls the trigger, the action produces nothing but a sharp click.

“No, I didn’t,” she says, flicking her gaze to the hallway behind him. “And do you honestly think I’m the only one who knows you’re the killer?”

Just then, Reggie senses someone at his back, followed by the wind of something fast and heavy rushing toward his head. When it connects with the base of his skull, pain explodes through his body, causing instant paralysis.

He drops to the floor, his vision distorted, like he’s looking through smudged glass. As he flops onto his back, he sees Sally Lawrence step into the room. In her hand is the blunt object she’d just used to take him down.

The champagne bottle she’d picked up in the lounge. She now holds it by the neck, its base smacking against her open palm.

It’s the last thing Reggie sees before his entire world goes dark.