“But how’d you end up in here?” I finished. “And did you see Talbot on your, er, travels?”
Pantelli shook his head. “I was too busy falling through a Hans and Roman trapdoor while you were staring at the woo-hoo cuckoo.”
“A trapdoor at the base must be where their volunteers go in,” I said. “Then Hans and Roman open the main part of the coffin, and the platform above hides the volunteer from the audience’s view. Ver-r-ry tricky of Hans and Roman.”
“Trickier still that there’s no exit,” Pantelli said glumly. “I tapped on, shoved at and, oh yeah, at one point pleaded with all four sides of this coffin thingy. As well as, natch, yelling my lungs hoarse. So, we’re stuck.
“But hey,” he pulled a card-sized box from a sweater pocket, “now that we’ve got some light, we can play Miniature Treevial Pursuit.”
From the top of the coffin came a shrill whisper. “Can I play? ”
Pantelli and I reacted less than suavely. We let out blood-curdling yells.
Above us, bony trousered legs swung through the opening—long, spindly feet dangled above us. The Whisperer was about to drop!
Pantelli and I each plastered ourselves against coffin walls to avoid being the Whisperer’s bull’s-eye. One of my knees struck something knobby. “Yeee-ouch” was my first reaction.
Then, frantically, it occurred to me that the knobby something might just be a latch. It was.
Above us, Nurse Ballantyne was flapping about like a flag. “Prepare to be flattened like two pancakes—pest-flavored pancakes,” she hissed, with a dry, ominous chuckle.
I wrenched at the latch. Another trapdoor yawned open. Pantelli and I flopped through to land on the floor underneath. We let loose more yells.
Noise blared on and on. It took me a second to realize we weren’t the sources of it anymore.
The opened latch had triggered Hans and Roman’s built-in security alarm. A siren wailed.
Chapter Twenty-One
The Fisherman Resurfaces
Fzzzz! The stomach-remedy tablets dissolved. Head Conductor Wiggins drank deeply.
With Madge beside me, I’d confided everything, from my very first meeting at age five with Ardle, to Pantelli’s and my scrambled escape from Nurse Ballantyne in the luggage car.
The head conductor examined his empty glass thoughtfully. He poured out fresh water from a glass pitcher and tossed two more tablets in.
Then he raised the fizzing glass to me. “I salute your health, Miss Galloway. As opposed to the tattered remains of my own health. You and your sister may be interested to learn that I’ve applied for early retirement. I’m a broken man, you see. You’ve broken me.
“But—it appears you were right about the vanishing passenger.” Head Conductor Wiggins gave a rather high-pitched laugh. “Passengers, I should say! Why me, I sometimes wonder? No, no, it doesn’t matter.” He sighed.
As assistant head conductor, Beanstalk was now in the luggage car, trying to wake Mrs. Chewbley up for questioning. The police in Toronto were also waiting to question her.
The other conductors were combing the train cars for Talbot. The protests of passengers woken up for a second night in a row, as conductors checked their compartments, pierced the office door like darts.
With Head Conductor Wiggins busy staring into his stomach-remedy liquid, my sister turned to me. She’d started out by giving me bear hugs, but now we were into scolding.
“Why didn’t you tell Mother and me about this ‘king’ business? And to remove that envelope of Dad’s without saying anything—well, that’s just unforgivable. It’s her final memento of him.”
This was the tough part. “It was for Ardle’s sake,” I began—but I couldn’t figure out the words to explain that I kind of liked Ardle. Just as I would always like people whose outside roughness hid an inside goodness. Or semi-goodness, anyway. Madge and Talbot, I realized, didn’t have time for the Ardles of the world. Not that I liked Madge and Talbot any less for that. It was just the way they were. But Dad had found time for the Ardles, and, now, so did I. They made life more interesting. Maybe it was the challenge of trying to find the goodness—okay, semi-goodness—in them.
Nor could I explain my feeling to Madge that, somehow, Dad wanted me to unearth the mysterious king and set things right for Ardle.
I was too worried about Talbot to mind being scolded. Where was Talbot? Nurse Ballantyne was claiming not to know, and Mrs. Chewbley still snored happily in the luggage car.
Freddy stuck his freckled nose in. “Nurse Ballantyne’s agreed to be questioned by you, sir,” he announced. “Not cheerfully agreed, mind,” he added and rolled his eyes.
“We don’t need on-the-spot commentary, McClusky,” the head conductor frowned. “When will you learn that a conductor’s role is to be quiet and discreet?”
Freddy held up his hands in surrender. “Sorr-ee.” He pushed the door open, revealing Nurse Ballantyne swathed in a white fleecy robe, her splotchy, poison-ivy-infected face jutting out of it like a rutabaga. Freddy said, “C’mon in, Nurse Ballantyne. Er—no offence, ma’am, but don’t brush up against anyone. We don’t want your, y’know, your,” he lowered his voice, “PI. ”
Wompf! Nurse Ballantyne flattened him against the wall. “‘PI’ got me into this all right,” she glowered, striding into the room. She thrust a long, bony finger at me. “This underage private investigator!”
Head Conductor Wiggins drained the last of his stomach-remedy drink. “You must admit, Nurse Ballantyne,” he said, dabbing at his mouth with a gold-bordered blue napkin, “that Dinah has proved to be correct. Edwina Chewbley did disappear, though of her own will, rather than as a kidnap victim. Mrs. Chewbley believes Dinah has a valuable stamp. You do too, don’t you, Nurse? Isn’t that why you grabbed Dinah’s purse at the Forks Market—not realizing it was full of poison ivy? In fact, you’re the Whisperer, are you not?”
Nurse Ballantyne spat back, “I found that purse on my desk. I opened it to find out who the owner was. Obviously I was set up.” Pulling a bottle of calamine lotion from her robe pocket, she began splashing its contents agitatedly over her face, neck and arms.
Madge leveled one of her glacial blue gazes at the nurse. “Someone has been stalking my sister, Nurse Ballantyne. Right now, you have the doubtful distinction of being the number one suspect.”
“Hmph!” Nurse Ballantyne shook out more lotion. She caught me staring at her hand as she did so. “Well,” she barked, “what do you want now?”
“Nothing,” I said. But it had come back again: that vague sense, prompted by something Pantelli had said in the Hans and Roman magic coffin, that I had missed an important clue.
But where was Talbot? Where WAS he, where WAS he, beat the wheels of the train, skimming smoothly along their tracks.
Madge told me to wait outside the office while, over the speakerphone, she and Head Conductor Wiggins talked to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. “The Mounties should be asking me the questions,” I’d objected. Madge assured me they would, all in good time. They wanted to speak to the adults first, she explained. “The trademark Dinah Galloway melodramatic version comes later, when they’ve had a chance to prepare themselves with some aspirin.”
Freddy, passing by just then, winked at me, but he and the other porters were too busy to chat. To make up for everyone’s compartment being searched yet again for yet another missing passenger, Head Conductor Wiggins had ordered early-morning treats for everyone. The porters were wheeling carts of refreshments from compartment to compartment.
Doors opened at the porters’ knocks; sleepy faces in halos of mussed hair glared out.
“Coffee or tea?” Freddy asked.
“Anything but Dinah Galloway,” a woman snapped, grabbed a pot of coffee and several muffins, and slammed her door.
Boy, was I unpopular. Would an unpopular singer ever be invited to sing at Crumbly Hall? “Carnegie,” I corrected myself and uttered a huge sigh. I trudged along the passageway, feeling use
less and very sorry for myself.
Where WAS he, where WAS he…
The anxious refrain kept on, and all the time more doors were opening, more glares volleying out.
Almost at the end of the car, yet another door opened; another passenger appeared. I summoned my best scowl.
And got a lazy smile in return. The man with the pointed beard—the fisherman! Only this time he wore a red-tasseled nightcap instead of a tweedy, tackle-decorated fisherman’s hat, and red-and-white-striped pj’s instead of denim shirt and shorts.
“I didn’t know you were on board,” I blurted out.
He shrugged, causing the red tassel to flip about. “I can blend into a crowd very easily. Did you ever find your king, Dinah?”
“No,” I said. “I had the wrong king all along. It’s not Charles the First I’m looking for, but Edward the Eighth.”
The fisherman’s smile broadened. He seemed pleased, as if I were a student of his who had just aced an exam. “If you know the who, the where may follow, like daffodils after February rain.”
All at once my patience, which I didn’t have great quantities of at the best of times, disappeared—another vanishing passenger, you might say. I’d had enough of mysterious utterances. Enough of everything.
“You’re so smart, you answer your own questions,” I snapped at him. “Am I the one who kidnaps people and steals valuable stamps? No-o-o-o. But guess who everybody dumps on—yours miserably truly.”
Still looking irritatingly good-humored, the fisherman tapped his chin. “There’s a song in that, I believe. At last, an improvement on that ‘Black Socks’ ditty you’ve been belting out.”
“What, you’re a music critic now?”
But he’d stepped away from the door. I heard a couple of clicks; then the volume was turned up. An instrumental version of an old standard floated into the passageway.
The fisherman called, “Know this one, Dinah?”
“Of course,” I said, frowning at him. This seemed an odd time to play Name That Tune. “It’s ‘Nobody’s Baby.’ Dad used to pound it out for me on our ancient piano. He said most singers cooed the tune, but I should go full throttle on it.”
The fisherman reached in to crank up the volume. “Sing now,” he suggested. “You need to think. Where’s Talbot? Where’s the stamp? People think best when they’re in a creative mood, which in your case involves making lots of noise.”
I gaped at him. But he was right. I did have to think.
I’m nobody’s baby
I wonder why…
I rocked and rollicked the song. Compartment doors reopened. This time, though, the sleepy, cross faces were breaking into grudging smiles.
But where was Talbot?
On the walkie-talkie, Talbot had warned me to get out of the luggage car. Because that’s where he’d been captured, and he didn’t want me to be. And because that’s where he was being held.
Or so I’d assumed.
Nobody wants me,
I’m blue somehow…
Ryan sidled out of his compartment, and I took his hand. Pausing in my song for a moment, I whispered, “I’m like you. I love to sing, but smooth-talking like Edward the Eighth? Forget it!”
Ryan beamed. I resumed singing—and thinking.
With all its cartons and trunks, the luggage car was the perfect place to stash someone. Mrs. Chewbley had hidden there. Pantelli had fallen into Hans and Roman’s magic coffin there.
On the walkie-talkie, Talbot had said he was “in with the dolls.” But I’d already noticed those doll cartons weren’t big enough to hold anyone much bigger than my cat Wilfred. Maybe Talbot was behind the doll cartons.
If only that stupid cuckoo hadn’t been woo-hoo-ing overhead! I could have heard Talbot better.
Won’t someone hear my plea…
The fisherman was beaming at me. Passengers were crowding every doorway now. One lady was smiling and dabbing at her eyes with a gold-edged blue facecloth. Everybody felt like nobody’s baby sometimes, I realized. My dad had made me feel like that when he went and got himself killed from drinking too much.
Then—it wasn’t the CD I was singing along with anymore, but Dad, beside me, bashing out the notes on our old piano.
And take a chance with me…
Dad said, Take a chance on yourself, Dinah. Know what you know.
What do I know? I asked him silently while holding one of my Methuselah’s-lifetime-long notes. Okay. I know that, between walkie-talkie crackles, Talbot asked for my help, while overhead, that stupid cuckoo…
Abruptly I stopped singing. The cuckoo had been woo-hoo-ing overhead. But not on the other end of the walkie-talkie.
Talbot couldn’t possibly be in the luggage car.
Chapter Twenty-Two
She Might Have Gnome
Dolls, Talbot had said. But maybe I’d heard “dolls” because of the power of suggestion. The boxes of Petrie’s Porcelain Dolls were looming in front of me.
What else could Talbot have meant?
Know what you know.
The other passengers were applauding. Dad, at the piano, grinned at me and started fading.
I glared at him. “You have a definite Cheshire cat quality to you.”
What? You’re giving lip to a ghost?
Amid the applause, the fisherman cupped his ear at me. “What was that about cats, Dinah?”
“Uh, nothing.” I managed a fake bared-teeth smile. “Y’know, Cats. Great musical.” I raised my voice over the applause. “Listen, thanks, everyone. I just want to say that I’m really sorry about all the disruptions on this trip. Disappearing passengers, sleep deprivation and all that.”
“It’s all right, dear,” the weepy woman called. “It’s rather like being on one of those mind-and-body-toughening Outward Bound treks. Rock climbing, muddy river fording—except that, in place of those, we have you.” She dabbed at her eyes some more.
“Thanks,” I said, a bit doubtfully.
And stared at her. Specifically at the gold and blue facecloth she was drenching with her tears.
Pantelli had used one of those to mop his forehead when he, Talbot and I were hatching investigative plans in the linen closet. Among the towels.
Towels, Talbot had said. Not dolls.
“Um,” I said loudly. But the passengers were all chatting about my powerful singing voice.
“A knock ’em dead voice.”
“Thrilling—although her fondness for late-night commotion is unsettling.”
“Oh well, these show-biz folk. Always slightly off, if you know what I mean.”
Only the fisherman stood apart, with his sleepy smile. I paced up to him. “Mr.—who are you, anyway?”
“Jonathan Hector,” he returned lazily. “Hector the Protector, they call me.”
Brother, I thought. And people think I’m slightly off. “Uh, oka-a-ay. But for now, Talbot’s in the linen supply room, probably a prisoner, and I’m going to spring him.” I wrenched open the linen-supply-room door. From down the corridor, in the infirmary, Nurse Ballantyne spotted me. She was applying a sponge drenched in calamine lotion to her forehead. Her nose, down which drops of the lotion were speeding like a mountain stream, quivered in fury. She stuck her right foot out and slammed the infirmary door shut.
Something about Beverly Ballantyne nagged at me, something all mixed up with the image of Pantelli chomping peanuts in Hans and Roman’s magic coffin.
But I couldn’t think about that now. I stepped into the linen supply room.
“Talbot?” I peered round at the stacks of plump navy towels. “Talbot?” I said louder. No response.
I began pulling towels off their stacks, pawing through them in case Talbot was underneath. Soon towels were toppling all around me.
Oof—some on top of me, as well. Was it possible to drown in terrycloth? I struggled to stay above them. “TALBOT!!!”
Then, from the far wall, a thud.
The towels were avalanching on me now. Some buried me;
I fought my way up again.
Thud. Straightening my glasses, I squinted over the sea of navy towels. The hamper. The giant one I’d sat on top of and kicked my heels against.
Those thuds were kicks. And given the five LARGER THAN LIFE! SOLID STONE! garden gnomes piled on the lid, the kicks were signals for help, not a lively two-step.
Flailing, I tobogganed down a towel stack to ram right into the hamper. I heard a muffled owwww.
“Sorry,” I called and heaved the garden gnomes off the lid, one by one.
Talbot was at the bottom of the hamper, compacted like a tinned sardine under the weight of towels. Unable to move, he hadn’t been able to yell out, either—his mouth had been duct-taped shut.
R-r-rip! He peeled the tape off in one painful gesture that left the lower part of his face resembling an oversized stick of cinnamon gum.
“Ouch,” I said for him, since he needed a minute to gasp in big breaths of air. I quickly filled him in on the latest developments. “So,” I finished, “Mrs. Chewbley’s unconscious and Nurse Ballantyne’s more or less confined to the infirmary.”
“A normal day in the life of Dinah Galloway, in other words.”
“And what happened to you?”
Talbot grimaced. “While Pantelli, way down the aisle from me, pored over his leaves, I noticed that what I’d thought was a box covered with hanging fabric was just— hanging fabric. I started to push through when wompf! A fist descended on the top of my head.”
“That would have been Nurse Ballantyne, stopping you before you could discover Mrs. Chewbley,” I said grimly.
“The Whis—I mean, Nurse Ballantyne then threw a laundry bag over my head, tightened the strings around my neck and whispered, ‘It’s not much to ask is it, buddy-o? The stamp. I WANT THE STAMP.’ To which I said, ‘Why don’t you just use e-mail?’”
“And you got an appreciative whisper-laugh?”
“I got another wompf! ‘The stamp. Such a little thing to ask for. Well, let’s see if I can’t change your mind.’ She whispered that if I didn’t want Pantelli to disappear as well, I’d better go quietly with her.
“Nurse Ballantyne dragged me, half-stumbling because my head ached and I couldn’t see, through car after car. She hissed, ‘For your tree-freak buddy’s sake, if anyone stops us, stay limp. Nobody’ll recognize me with this hat pulled low. I’ll pretend to be a passenger with laundry. And you’re the laundry, get it? So method-act for me, kid.’ She snorted at her, uh, humor.
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