Destination Murder

by Jessica Fletcher

The silence was broken by a few surprised gasps and other expressions of pleasure. I knew about the million-dollar bequest to the Track and Rail Club because during one of our phone conversations, Gene Driscoll had told me the beneficiaries of Blevin’s will, thanks to someone he termed “a good source inside the probate court.” My only question was whether Theodora would go on and name the other beneficiaries. I doubted she would.

  She read from a card: “Al specified in his will that the money be used to further the appreciation of railroads and the role they’ve played in opening up the vast North American continent to exploration and development.”

  She looked up from the card and took us in. When no one made a move, she said, “I’m sure we’d all like to thank Al for his generosity.” There was a smattering of polite clapping.

  “That’s really great,” Reggie said after Theodora had resumed her seat and Jenna and another server brought us our appetizer, smoked salmon with avocado and vodka mousse, accompanied by dark bread and a sun-dried tomato spread. “Who ever figured he’d leave a million to the club?”

  “A guilty conscience,” Marilyn said under her breath.

  “I suppose he left the grieving widow the rest,” Rendell said, almost loud enough for Theodora to overhear. “Or her kid.”

  “You should join the club, Jessica,” Theodora called to me from where she sat. “Al would be so pleased to have a famous writer as a member.”

  “Good idea,” said Reggie. “I’ll sign you up.”

  “I’ll have to think about that,” I said, my eyes again on the open door to the kitchen, where I could see Jenna helping prepare salad plates.

  We’d been given a choice upon boarding of salmon or beef Wellington as a main course. I chose the beef, and it was as good as I’d anticipated. As cynically as Theodora’s announcement had initially been received, it did serve—along with a tasty dinner, it seemed—to lighten spirits. Callie kept our wineglasses filled, and a general sense of celebration set in, enhanced by music coming through the speakers—oldies sung by Eddie Fisher, Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Sammy Davis, Jr., Doris Day, and others of that musical era. We enjoyed our dinners, and conversation became lively. Before I knew it, we were slowing down as we approached the place where the train would be turned for the trip back to Vancouver. The tables had been cleared, and the staff was off getting dessert ready. As we pulled into the small station known as Porteau Cove, the sounds of the band that had played for us in Vancouver wafted into the Apollo dining car. I asked Bruce how they got there before us: “They pile into cars and drive up here in time to greet us,” he replied. “They can drive a lot faster than the train goes.”

  I joined everyone on the station platform, where a joyous atmosphere prevailed. The band provided toe-tapping music, which had couples up dancing. The attractive blonde singer had been given names of couples celebrating anniversaries or individuals with birthdays and announced them to applause.

  “Isn’t this wonderful,” a woman said to me. “Like a big party.”

  “Yes. Everyone seems to be enjoying themselves.”

  I looked across the makeshift dance floor and saw Callie standing near the idling train with Jenna and Bruce. And then I saw another familiar face standing on the fringe of the dance floor, Detective Marshall. My initial instinct was to acknowledge having seen him, but I realized that was exactly what he wouldn’t want to happen.

  “Excuse me,” I said to the woman, and meandered toward Callie, Jenna, and Bruce. As I approached, Jenna moved away from the others and walked down the platform toward the engine and a path that crossed the tracks and led to a concrete walkway overlooking a body of water. I followed. She eventually stopped at a railing, leaned on it, and appeared to be deep in thought. I came to her side and said, “It’s good seeing you again, Jenna. Or should I call you Tiffany, Tiffany Jennifer Carroll?”

  She reacted as if I’d physically struck her and jerked her head in my direction. “How—? What? What is it you want?” she said. She looked terrified.

  “I want to talk to you.”

  “About what?”

  “About your father, Alvin Blevin.”

  She turned back to the water but not before I saw tears well in her eyes.

  “I know this is painful, Jenna,” I said, “but I have a feeling you’d just as soon have it off your chest.”

  I waited for a response. When she finally faced me again, her demeanor had changed. There was pleading written all over her face.

  “Why are you doing this?” she asked. Before I could respond, she added, “Please, please, just leave me alone.”

  “I can do that, Jenna, but others won’t. Others can’t.”

  “What others?”

  “The police.”

  “You don’t think—”

  “It isn’t a matter of what I think, Jenna, it’s what others will know.”

  “Because you tell them?”

  “It would be better if you told them.”

  “Told them what? That Alvin Blevin was my father? What does that prove?”

  “Nothing in and of itself, Jenna. But they’ll come to their own conclusions. They’ll want to know if the money your father left you motivated you to—well, I might as well be direct. Motivated you to kill him.”

  “What money?”

  “In his will. The million dollars he left to you.”

  Her mouth dropped open and her eyes widened. “I didn’t know,” she said, more to herself than to me.

  “You didn’t?”

  “No. He did that? Left me money?”

  As I looked into her pretty face, I was certain she was being truthful, that she didn’t know of her late father’s bequest.

  “How did you find out?” she asked. “About me and my father?”

  “I know a little of the circumstances surrounding your birth, Jenna. Oh, and once I was told that Tiffany’s middle name was Jennifer, I was more than confident that you were the daughter he abandoned at birth. That must have been a painful burden to carry all these years.”

  She nodded.

  “Do you know you resemble him?”

  “I do?”

  “I think so.”

  I opened my purse and drew out photos Reggie had downloaded from the club Web site for me. In one, a picture of a younger Alvin Blevin, the resemblance was clear, even down to the twinkling blue eyes and dimpled chin.

  Jenna studied the photo. “May I keep this?” she asked.

  “Of course,” I said.

  “But you couldn’t have known from this alone, could you?”

  “No. There was more,” I said. “I questioned the intensity of your reaction to his murder. Your demeanor, everything about you, changed so dramatically after he died in the bar car.” I paused before asking, “Did he know you were his daughter? I mean, did he know you were on the train with him?”

  She shook her head; silent tears now erupted into overt sobbing. “I was waiting for the right time, and now he’ll never know.”

  I rubbed her arm in sympathy. She was so young and had seen such unhappiness in her life.

  “He just walked away, Mrs. Fletcher,” she said plaintively, bringing her crying under control. “How could a father do that, just walk away?”

  “I don’t have an answer for that,” I said. “Your mother took you away from Vancouver. To Ontario?”

  She nodded.

  “Where were you brought up?”

  “Toronto,” she said.

  “When did you come back to Vancouver?”

  “A year ago.”

  “You never attempted to contact your father?”

  “I thought about it, lots of times. But I didn’t want to—” A whimper swallowed her words.

  “Didn’t want to be rejected again,” I said.

  She nodded.

  I looked back to where the rest of the group was enjoying the music. The strains of “All The Things You Are” reached us. I saw Detective Marshall, who’d come halfway toward Jenna and me and pretended
to be examining the train’s engine.

  “Jenna,” I said, “when the bequest is made public, the police are going to ask you if you poisoned your father.”

  Had I been a prosecutor and asked her that question when she was on the witness stand, her response wouldn’t have convinced a jury. “I didn’t do it,” she said weakly, wiping her wet cheeks.

  “Do you have any idea who did?”

  She shook her head.

  “Did you know your father would be on the Whistler Northwind that day?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you intend to confront him on that trip?”

  “Mrs. Fletcher,” she said, “I’ve intended to confront him a hundred times since I moved back to Vancouver. But I never had the courage.”

  “I understand,” I said. “Does Theodora know?”

  “No.”

  “But Benjamin does,” I said.

  “Please leave him out of this.”

  “If he knows,” I said, ignoring her warning, “it’s logical to assume Theodora knows it, too. And if you’re to collect what your father left you, she’ll have to know who you are.”

  She sighed. “It doesn’t matter anymore, does it?” she said. “It doesn’t matter who knows now. If the money is mine, I’ll take it and that’s the end of it.” She looked past me down the platform. “I have to get back and help set up for the return trip. Thanks for the picture and the news about the money, Mrs. Fletcher.”

  I watched her walk back to the train platform, passing Detective Marshall as she went. He casually observed her and came to where I stood.

  “Did she acknowledge being his daughter?” the detective asked me.

  “Yes.”

  “Did you discuss the murder with her?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “And?”

  “And I believed her when she said she didn’t kill her father.”

  “Based upon what?”

  “A gut feeling.”

  “Gut feelings don’t hold up in court, Mrs. Fletcher.”

  “I know that. But she was a daughter yearning to make contact with the father who’d deserted her. His death kept her from doing that, which is why she mourned him so noticeably. Even if she had hated him, had harbored resentment over the abandonment and wanted to kill him, it makes more sense that she would have revealed herself to him beforehand.”

  “And she never did.”

  “No. She was too timid, and I think she’ll regret that all her life.”

  “How did you make this connection?”

  “How are you at remembering faces?”

  “I suspect I’m not as good as you are.”

  “She looks like her father,” I said. “That was the first inkling I had that she might be his daughter. But it took the other information to confirm it in my mind. I was right, and I think I might be right about my other gut instinct, another answer to one of my ‘what if’ questions.”

  He looked at me quizzically.

  The loud blast of the diesel engine’s whistle announced we were about to leave for the dessert and coffee portion of the trip.

  “Are you alone?” I asked.

  “No. Detective Jillian and I are in a car up front with the general population, people not involved with your group. A couple of anniversaries, a young guy proposing to his girlfriend.”

  “Did she accept?” I asked as we walked together back to the train.

  “Yeah. Very touching. Would have been awkward if she’d said no.”

  The festive atmosphere on the platform carried over into the Apollo dining car as we chugged out of the station and headed back to Vancouver. Some people had changed tables: Reggie had joined Theodora, Benjamin, and the Pinckneys. Marilyn Whitmore had taken a seat at a table occupied by Winston Rendell, and the Goldfinches asked if they could sit with me, which I readily agreed to.

  Jenna avoided me as she, Callie, and another young woman started serving dessert and coffee and took after-dinner drink orders. I heard Theodora order a Brandy Alexander, and Benjamin, who hadn’t said much the entire trip, opted for Kahlúa.

  The door to the kitchen remained open, giving me and others facing in that direction a view of the preparations going on in there. The chef, Karl, who’d delivered the vodka to Callie the day Blevin died, faced me as he worked behind a stainless steel table. He was wearing a chef’s toque today instead of the white bandana he’d worn on the Northwind. I watched him take off the hat and wipe his brow with his sleeve.

  Winston Rendell left Marilyn at the table and bumped into me as he made his way toward the kitchen. “Excuse me,” he said. “Have to order another drink.” The writer and businessman claimed not to have suffered at Blevin’s hands in their business deal to manufacture new steam engines, but I’d learned differently from my old friend George Sutherland of London’s Scotland Yard.

  My mind raced, and I closed my eyes to better focus on the visuals that came and went.

  “Sleepy?” Gail Goldfinch asked.

  I opened my eyes and smiled. “No, no, just day-dreaming.”

  My thoughts went back to my first day in Vancouver this trip, when I had been jostled by a man in a hurry. He’d been watching the arrival of a couple in a limousine. The Blevins. I saw his face clearly, as though it had just happened. And I was mentally transported to the dinner party at Theodora Blevin’s home when her friend Nancy Flowers identified people in photographs strung along the fireplace mantel. I saw only one face at that moment of reverie on the Pacific Starlight: Elliott Vail, who’d disappeared under mysterious circumstances and whose body had never been found.

  Callie was preparing the after-dinner drinks that had been ordered. She mixed the drinks and poured them into glasses on the steel table, coming into view as she did, and disappearing from my sight when she returned the bottles to wherever they were stored. Rendell had his back to me.

  I turned to Martin Goldfinch. “Find him yet?” I asked.

  “Pardon?”

  “Have you found Elliott Vail yet?”

  “I’m not sure what you’re referring to,” he said.

  I kept my voice low. “I know you want to keep it a secret,” I said, “but I’ve come to learn that you and your wife—if she is your wife—aren’t along on the trip because you love old trains, and I’m sure Merit Life isn’t interested in them, either.”

  Martin smiled. “We were afraid you’d find out. How did you know?”

  “I’d love to say that the proverbial little bird told me, but that wouldn’t be true. And it isn’t important. What is important is that you determine whether he actually died in a fall from the Whistler Northwind.”

  He, too, spoke in a low, conspiratorial voice. “You’re absolutely right, Mrs. Fletcher. Any ideas that would help me?”

  We were interrupted by the arrival of Bruce, Callie, and the third server carrying trays with our desserts. Jenna brought up the rear with another tray on which our drink orders rested. She followed her colleagues as they placed the dessert plates in front of each person, and consulted a slip of paper on which table and chair numbers were paired with drink orders. She started behind me, at the table where Theodora and Benjamin sat. I turned and saw Theodora lift her brandy snifter in preparation to offer a toast.

  I stood. “I wouldn’t drink that if I were you.”

  Her puzzled expression testified to what she was thinking.

  Reggie came to me. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “Reggie, please get Detective Marshall. He’s with Detective Jillian in the next car down. Ask them to come back here.”

  “I thought I saw him,” he whispered to me. “I figured he was following Theodora again.”

  “Reggie? Please, just do it.”

  As Reggie left the Apollo car, Benjamin said to me, “This is ridiculous. Are you still playing amateur detective, sticking your nose into everybody’s business?”

  “I plead guilty,” I said. “And what I’m attempting to do now is keep someone else from being poiso
ned.”

  My statement brought about the expected reaction from others in the car. “Oh, no,” I heard Marilyn say.

  “Another murder?” someone else said.

  “Please,” I told Theodora. “Just put your drink down until the detectives arrive.”

  “Detectives?” Rendell said.

  “Not again,” was another comment.

  Reggie returned with Detectives Marshall and Jillian.

  “I think you’ll want to check that brandy snifter,” I said to them.

  Jenna, who’d stood motionless, still holding the tray, paled and started for the door leading to the kitchen. I stepped in her path. “I think you should stay,” I said. Detective Jillian quickly came to my side and replaced me, preventing Jenna’s departure.

  I looked into the kitchen, where Karl, who’d now removed his tall white chef’s hat, was packing up to leave. I turned to Martin Goldfinch: “I think you might find Elliott Vail in the kitchen,” I said. “He looks very different from when he disappeared, but there’s still enough similarity. Plastic surgery and hair dye can change many things, but not the eyes.”

  Goldfinch jumped up and joined Detective Marshall in a dash for the kitchen.

  Benjamin stood. “Dad? Where?”

  “Elliott?” Theodora exclaimed. “He’s here?”

  “Yes, he is,” I said, “and this time he wanted to kill the right person. You!”

  Karl burst through the door before the two men could catch him and made for the vestibule leading from the Apollo to the next car, which had the same sort of half-doors as the Whistler Northwind. Reggie and I followed and reached the vestibule in time to see Marshall and Goldfinch wrestling Elliott Vail back over the bottom half of the door he’d tried to climb. They pulled him to the floor. Vail kicked at them and swore, but they managed to subdue him by yanking his hands behind his back. Marshall pulled a set of cuffs from his belt and snapped them on Vail’s wrists.

  Bruce joined us. “This is just terrible,” he said. “This has never happened before. People are upset. Can’t you—?”

  “We’ll keep him out of your way,” Marshall said, yanking Vail to his feet and pushing him up against the vestibule wall. To Bruce he said, “How much longer to Vancouver?”

  “Fifteen, twenty minutes.”