Shadows on the Train

by Melanie Jackson

  I called up Gmail. Jack.French@gmail.com, I typed in.

  I knew my future brother-in-law’s password, not through any sneaky means, but because Jack himself had given it to me. Earlier in the summer, Mother had banned me from using my own e-mail address, juniorsleuth@gmail.com. Too many complaints from neighbors about the helpful hints I’d been sending on theft and fire prevention, recycling dos and don’ts, emotional health and well-being—you name it, I’d probably covered it.

  One day, when I was hanging out at the Spotted Owl Advocacy Committee office, I’d informed Jack that I was in utter agony from e-mail deprivation. I had, I absolutely had, to let Talbot and Pantelli know I’d found the newest Deathstalkers comic at our favorite store, Komix R Us.

  “You could phone Talbot and Pantelli,” Jack sug–gested.

  “Phone?! Please. That’s so-o-o-o last century.”

  Jack, busy photocopying some rally notices, told me to use his e-mail. “My password’s ‘Madge,’” he flung over his shoulder.

  Madge. How drearily predictable for a lovebird, I thought at the time and again now, typing it in on the Gold-and-Blue.

  My plan? A sickly sweet love message from Jack to Madge. Just the ticket to cheer Madge up, I decided.

  Hmmm. Treacly. I wasn’t really into that. But wait, there was that Elton John love song. I could borrow liberally from that:

  I hope you don’t mind that I put down in words How wonderful life is while you’re in the world.

  Pretty sickening. Yup, Madge would love that.

  Quoted adoringly for my true love, Madge Galloway, by her heart’s desire, Jack French, I finished off and pressed Send.

  I then took a minute to scan Jack’s in-box. Curiosity was healthy, in my view. A true sign of an optimist, eager to find out what’s around life’s next corner.

  I recognized all the sender names: mostly Madge, and Jack’s colleagues on the Spotted Owl Advocacy Committee. I was preparing to exit when my gaze fell on a non-colleague name.

  Veronica LaFlamme.

  LaFlamme, I thought. The person who’d prevented Jack from coming to see Madge the other day.

  The subject line beside Veronica’s name read Tried calling you today, but…

  I never could resist a but. Pushing aside what shreds of conscience I had about trespassing, I clicked on the message.

  …some kidlet answered. I remembered your warning about an inquisitive redhead, so I hung up. I didn’t want her to alert Madge to my existence.

  I glared at the screen. Veronica LaFlamme was Peanut-Butter Voice! I knew that was a voice not to be trusted.

  With growing horror, I read on.

  I understand that you’d want to keep things between us a secret until you break the news to Madge.

  Just as I’d feared. Jack was two-timing Madge!

  Now that I had confirmation, I almost couldn’t believe it. I sat and stewed, muttering out plans to draw and quarter Jack, among other slow-death punishments, until Madge glanced up from her elk sketch. “Why the scowl, Dinah?”

  “I…um…” I could hardly admit to my sister that I’d been snooping in her fiancé’s e-mail. However, I might as well start conditioning her to the single life right now.

  “Emily Carr,” I blurted. “Now there’s an artist who never married, never had kids. She threw herself body and soul into her work.”

  “I suppose.” Madge regarded me doubtfully.

  “Ith not body and thoul I’m worried about. Ith teeth,” announced a somewhat indistinct voice.

  The salt-and-pepper-haired woman from the Pacific Central Station platform hovered over us. Her lips were pressed inward, covering her gums. “Loth my denturth,” she explained, and her sorrowful gaze slid to Pantelli. “I thought maybe you could help?”

  “I’m a dendrologist. Into bark, not enamel,” Pantelli said crossly.

  “Ah. Bark. A new, natural approach to denturth, I thuppoth.” The woman shrugged. “Oh, well. I do have a thpare pair in the luggage car. Gueth thath where I’ll have to go.”

  When she’d moved off, I leaned over to admire Madge’s drawing. “Great elk there, Madge…ELK!” I exclaimed in sudden horror and jumped, knocking my knee against the table. “Ow. Excuse me, gotta zoom.”

  Madge, whose pencil-holding hand had been jarred by my abrupt exit, which had the effect of giving the elk an antenna, called acidly after me, “Maybe the reason Emily decided to stay single and childless was that she’d spent time with a pre-teen.”

  I charged up the observation dome stairs. The elk stamp! Dad’s envelope, my only clue to the king mystery, was in the sweater I’d tossed on a seat.

  On the stairs I brushed past two custodians, just finished cleaning, and did a mini high-jump over a pail full of suds they’d left at the top. The sweater had to be on the seat at the very front, where Talbot and I had done our witty out-of-control-plane routine.

  My left arm was wrenched painfully back. What was this, rerun time? Same thing had happened under the big clock in Pacific Central Station.

  I turned. A blanket descended on my head, the warm, snuggly kind I’d slept under last night. But this one was wrapped tightly around me, mummy style. Through its folds a very cold and unsnuggly voice whispered, “What have you done with the king?”

  Chapter Ten

  The Clues of the Fisherman

  I was in a woolly fog. The gray blanket stuck on my glasses and filled my mouth. There was a bad joke in this somewhere, about all junior sleuths looking the same in the dark—i.e., totally helpless—but I was too frightened to make it.

  In the middle of my fear, I knew one thing, though. I had to keep the whispering blanket-thrower from heading to that front seat, where my sweater lay in an untidy pile.

  The Whisperer’s shadow inked over me, making the blanket even darker. The Whisperer was too tall to be Bowl Cut, I thought suddenly.

  I remembered reading somewhere that blind people instinctively sharpen their other senses to make up for the missing visual one. If I concentrated on sound and smell, I might be able to deduce something else about the Whisperer.

  “So,” I said conversationally, “what’s new?”

  My shoulder was freed from the clamp-like grip as the Whisperer loosened the blanket over my mouth. “C’mon, give. Where are you hiding it?”

  “In the purser’s safe, of course,” I lied. Then, making my voice prim, I said, “After all, you can’t trust anyone these days, don’t you find?”

  For which I got a shake. “You wanna stay healthy? It’d be just too bad if the Tomorrow’s Cool Talent host had to say, ‘Our next guest, Dinah Galloway, has a lateness problem. As in permanent lateness.’”

  Hot as I was inside the blanket, I shivered. Another shake. I was starting to feel like a castanet. “Next time I pay you a visit, have the king ready,” the Whisperer instructed, in such a hissy voice I couldn’t tell if it belonged to a man or a woman. He, she or it then shoved me forward. Hard. I landed, blanketed face first, in the custodians’ sudsy bucket.

  I was just pulling the sopping blanket off my equally sopping head when footsteps tapped up behind me.

  “I might have known,” Beanstalk snapped. Curving over me in that rubbery way he had, the conductor twitched a disapproving forefinger. “You’re not happy unless you’re disrupting my day, are you? I suppose a budding star will do anything for attention. CLEANERS!” he shouted and began to bounce indignantly toward the stairs in pursuit of them.

  “Wait!” Wringing out chunks of my hair, I slip-slid after him through the spilled suds. “You must’ve passed the person who—”

  “Not another word,” Beanstalk sniffed. He rolled a thunderous look down his sloping nose at me. Then he shrilled, “CLEANERS!” and sprinted down the stairs, three at a time.

  Retrieving my sweater, I clumped down the stairs after him. With one hand I continued wringing out my hair; with the other I clutched the precious but puzzling envelope. Dad, I thought, what is the secret you left? Who is the king?r />
  “Oh no, Dinah!” Madge wailed, setting down her elk sketch. “Not another water incident!”

  I’d had quite a few of these in May, aboard the Alaska cruise ship Empress Marie. Let’s just say the thief I was pursuing had kind of a one-track mind when it came to ways of trying to silence me.

  I hesitated. Madge was already uneasy about my claim of seeing Bowl Cut force his way onto the train. If she found out about the whispering blanket-thrower, I’d probably find myself at the nearest airport, awaiting the next plane back to Vancouver.

  “It’s okay,” I assured Madge. “A minor mishap.”

  Other Gold-and-Blue passengers were gaping at me over their books and chess games. All those faces, still and staring, like the moons of Saturn. One of them might just be feigning surprise. One of them might be the Whisperer.

  I scanned the faces, back and forth, till I grew dizzy—and then, as abruptly as if it had collided with a roadblock, my gaze stopped. One person wasn’t staring. One person was holding a tourist guidebook about Western Canada in front of her face.

  I could see her chestnut hair, though. And her red dress.

  Mrs. Zanatta!

  What was she doing on the Gold-and-Blue?

  “And where’s her little boy?” I muttered.

  Beanstalk breezed back, cleaners in tow. Hearing me, he whipped his rubbery neck round to follow my stare. “Ryan Zanatta is playing quietly in the Gold-and-Blue Day Camp,” he informed me, adding snootily, “We like our adult patrons to enjoy themselves. To escape from children.”

  With a foul parting look at me, he and the cleaners paraded on.

  Much you know, Beanstalk, I thought grimly. Ryan’s playing quietly because, for whatever reason, he’s the kid who doesn’t speak.

  I glanced at Mrs. Zanatta again. Granted, in a short while we’d be in Jasper, the first of two stops the Gold-and-Blue would be making so passengers could take side trips. The next stop would be Winnipeg.

  Maybe Mrs. Zanatta really was brushing up on her landmarks.

  But holding the guidebook upside down was an awfully strange way to read about them.

  On the pale sand by Jasper’s Annette Lake, out of Madge’s and Mrs. Chewbley’s hearing range, I filled my fellow junior sleuths in about the Whisperer.

  “That does it,” Talbot said. From his knapsack, he withdrew two clunky, wire-sprouting black rectangles. Er, walkie-talkies. “Keep this with you at all times,” he instructed, handing one to me.

  I fought back a howl of protest that would have echoed across Annette Lake to the distant blue Mount Edith Cavell, with its splotch of snow at the peak.

  Talbot, Pantelli, Madge, Mrs. Chewbley and I had spread out blankets to enjoy the gi-normous sandwiches the Gold-and-Blue chef had provided. There were an awful lot of them: egg salad, smoked salmon and cream cheese, tuna, blackened chicken, and my favorite, banana-peanut-butter-and-honey. Plus garlicky pickles, Caesar salad, potato salad—we couldn’t gobble fast enough.

  It turned out Mrs. Chewbley had ordered for ten. “You never know how hungry you’ll get,” she’d giggled. There were so many sandwiches she’d had to stuff some of them in her flowered-print bag.

  I’d sort of hoped Talbot would forget about bringing along the walkie-talkies. He’d constructed them last month out of old telephones and radio transmitters. Oh, and elastic bands and duct tape for holding everything together were also an integral part of the design. The walkie-talkies were Talbot’s solution to my habit of running into villains—and sometimes not running away fast enough.

  Pantelli burst into rude laughter at the sight of the walkie-talkies. I clapped a hand over his mouth. After all, Talbot meant well.

  “Fine. I’ll carry this thing around,” I promised, though not in the most gracious tone. Talbot was such a worrywart! I stuffed the walkie-talkie into my knitted rainbow purse, whose strap I’d refastened with safety pins. “At the very least, it’ll build up my biceps.”

  This was a complaint as much as a joke, but Madge, emerging from the lake, overheard and smiled with approval. “It’s great that you’re giving thought to physical fitness,” she remarked and proceeded to squeeze water from her auburn tresses. Why was it, I wondered, that when Madge did this she resembled Aphrodite fresh from the foam, as a reporter had remarked last month? Whereas I looked like I’d just been through the carwash—without the car.

  “C’mon, Di,” Talbot urged. Yelling, he and Pantelli charged into the lake with maximum splashes. I followed more reluctantly, expecting icy temperatures.

  But Annette Lake was surprisingly warm. “The lake’s shallow,” Pantelli explained, treading water ahead of me. “Annette’s a mere leftover of a way bigger lake that once covered this whole valley.”

  We swam easily to the raft anchored twenty-five yards out. Hauling myself up, I prepared to bask in the sun.

  Pantelli challenged Talbot to a race to shore and back. “Go on,” I told Talbot, who had a concerned, should-we really-leave-you? expression under the long, wet, but still soulful forelock he kept shoving out of his eyes. “Unless the Jaws shark shows up, I’ll be fine.”

  Both boys made fins with their hands and hummed the DOO-doo-DOO-doo Jaws theme music. I laughed heartily. I believe that sophisticated wit should be encouraged.

  Talbot and Pantelli kick-started themselves into violent crawls toward the shore.

  I tilted my head back and closed my eyes. Maybe the sun would tan my freckles together. That’d be a better option than trying to scrub them off with a Brillo pad, which I’d done in the spring after Liesl the Weasel Dubuque made fun of them: You oughtta write START on one side of your face and FINISH on the other, and challenge people to find their way through the freckle maze.

  Roars from the beach. Talbot had got there first and was pretending to storm it in a reenactment of D-Day, 1944, at the beaches of Normandy.

  Talbot was a history buff. At home he had all these board games of famous battles: D-Day, Gettysburg, Waterloo, the Somme. He and his dad replayed the battles, complete with their own sound effects of bomb explosions, gunfire and people screaming with agony as they died.

  Normally Talbot and his dad were such quiet people too…

  Lately Talbot had started reading historical biographies. This meant his socials marks, already stratospheric, soared even higher. I’d overheard a teacher remark regretfully to him, “I just wish I could give you more than a hundred percent, Talbot.”

  Like, give me a break.

  Right now, Madge, a lot less enthusiastic about his pas–sion for history, was shooing Allied Commander St. John away. “Not yet!” I heard him shout. “I have to secure the beach first!”

  I grinned. Not yet, not yet, I started to hum. I couldn’t get “Black Socks” out of my head. It was as if the song was pestering me.

  Nobody else on or near the raft. I might as well let ’er rip.

  Black socks, they never get dirty,

  The longer you wear them, the blacker they get.

  The words echoed satisfyingly around Annette Lake. This was fun. When I sang, I didn’t care about freckles or anything.

  Someday I think I will wash them,

  But something keeps telling me…

  “You can do better songs than that.”

  I stopped in mid-note. As, a few seconds later, did my echo around Annette Lake. A man in a gray tracksuit was regarding me comfortably from a rowboat close to the raft. A fishing pole and metal tackle box lay in the boat. The man, who had a pointed beard, wore a gray tweed hat, gleaming all over with the lures and hooks stuck into it.

  Based on my experience in the observation dome, I wasn’t in the mood to welcome new acquaintances. Talbot and Pantelli, thrashing through the water again, were still far away. But the fisherman looked so harmless, almost sleepy, that the scream I’d considered volleying to shore limped out as an “Um…”

  “I would’ve thought the old standards would be more your type of song,” the fisherman said as, glasses-less, I squinted at
him. “Cole Porter, say. Or Irving Berlin. Now there was a guy who knew how to write belter-outers. Why, in a few years I could see you playing Annie in Annie Get Your Gun.”

  My jaw did a slow amazed drop. Playing Annie—she’s the rootin’ tootin’ cowgirl who gets to sing “There’s No Business Like Show Business”—was a secret dream of mine. Annie was so like me: untidy and troublesome, but good-hearted in a wacky kind of way, and, of course, equipped with volume, volume, VOLUME.

  “You’re right,” I said meekly. “I do know better songs. It’s just that ‘Black Socks’ reminds me of something. Of a problem.”

  The fisherman trailed his paddles in the lake. The surface water skimmed silkily over them. “Of a king?”

  Instantly suspicious, I scrambled up and stood at the opposite end of the raft from him.

  “There are kings and kings,” the fisherman said easily. By squinting fiercely, I could see that he was smiling. “Britain’s Charles the Second, for example. Did you know that to escape his enemies, the Roundheads, he fled up an oak tree? They didn’t notice him, and he was able to escape to France. Very clever of Charles the Second, not to mention quite spry of him.

  “A shame his dad, Charles the First, didn’t take a—wait for it—leaf out of his book.” The fisherman’s shoulders heaved with merriment. “Charles the First, not a good hider at all, was easily captured by the Roundheads.”

  “Huh,” I commented, wondering just how much time this guy had spent in the sun. I also wondered if it was time to start hollering. Maybe Bowl Cut and/or the Whisperer had sent him to pry information from me.

  “Ah, yes, Charles the First,” the fisherman went on, as if we had all day to muse about dead monarchs. “Handsome fellow. Not the brightest, though.”

  I would’ve frowned at the man except that I was already squinting. “Who are you?”

  The fisherman winked. “Someone who hopes for an answer from you, Dinah Galloway. About where a king might be hidden. Not in a tree this time. Somewhere much harder to detect.”