by Cat Rambo
She sighed. “All in a day’s work,” she retorted. She retreated into the compartment. At least there was time to change before dinner.
She wore sea-green to the meal, a silk-cotton blend that maintained its shape better than most garments when traveling. When she saw Belinda McCormick’s pale brown silk taffeta, trimmed with Bruges, she wished she hadn’t bothered, particularly when the professor’s eyes flicked over her, assessing the color against the dark hue to her skin, pronounced after a month in Baltimore’s sun.
Swarthy little girl, but sometimes those burn the hottest, he thought with a mental picture that kindled fire in her cheeks.
The table’s center held a wire and ivory basket for a spray of fresh flowers and the condiments: cut glass containers of red and yellow and green sauce, tiny shakers of salt and pepper. She fixed her eyes on that. To her right, Belinda was a welcoming, quiet void. She found herself leaning and glanced over to find the girl looking at her with steady, inquisitive...invitation or naïveté? So hard to know, sometimes.
The other passengers spoke and chattered as they ate turtle consommé, a special Coast-to-Coast salad, and chicken-fried steak. Glasses of sherry were served round, though no one at their table took any. The Professor spoke primarily to his daughter, checking to make sure she knew the details of his trip, and what days and when he would be where. Artemus maintained his usual polite detachment.
Elpseth did the same. When a fat man lurched up from his table, at first she didn’t react, lulled by the train’s motion into a half-doze that barely noticed the warmth of his anger. Artemus, though, stood with immediate grace, interposing himself between the newcomer and McCormick.
“Necromancer!” the fat man spat at the Professor, who looked up but continued to chew his steak, placid-jowled and incurious as a cow. “Our President is not content to have sent the dead into the field against their own brethren, but now you assist Abraham the Unholy by raising the dead to bind them into machines.” He pushed at Artemus, who budged not an inch. “Whose soul is bound into you, demon-machine?”
“No one’s but my own, I assure you,” Artemus replied.
Someone at one of the watching tables laughed and the angry man blushed, taking a step back. The steward appeared, taking his elbow to guide him out. The situation stopped ticking with menace as Artemus returned to his seat. The windows rattled in their frames, coffee cups clinked in after-dinner saucers, and they sped on along the prairie.
Elspeth removed herself at one point, vanishing to the johnny-car and returning with cheeks flushed.
Artemus leaned over as she sipped coffee to murmur, “What happened?”
She leaned back into her chair, trying to look official as she whispered into Artemus’s aluminum-cast ear. “A woman wanted know what you were like in bed, offered me money for you.”
“And?”
“And!? Should I pimp you out in order to make a little extra income along the way?”
He shrugged. “It’s all data.”
“You don’t even know what to do, let alone have the equipment to do it!”
He quirked an eyebrow. “I am given from certain ‘blue’ materials that digital and lingual stimulation is sufficient. It’s not as though the act would be about my own pleasure after all, other than the frisson of new experience. Still, I am told it is a valid way to persuade a witness or ally.”
His tone remained impersonal but his eyes flickered an amused blue. She jerked away from him and turned her attention to Belinda.
“What do you hope to do in Seattle?” she asked.
The girl toyed with the food on her plate. Elspeth thought she’d eaten a few bites at most, perhaps even less. “I will continue to act as my father’s assistant, of course,” she said hesitantly.
“Of course you will,” her father interrupted. His own plate shone; he’d used a roll to scrub the last of the gravy from the cold white china. He stared at Elspeth.
She doesn’t keep kosher, his undermind said. I wonder what else she is...unconventional in.
After dinner, Elspeth lingered, sniffing hungrily at the draughts of cigar smoke that wafted her way.
“Think it’s safe enough?” she overheard at her elbow. She craned her ears to listen.
“There was a werewolf attack last month, but since then they’ve put up silver,” the other man said. The deck of cards riffled before he dealt them out. They whispered across the white linen tablecloth.
“And Snakes?”
“Snakes?” The other man spat out a laugh. Black stubble hazed his jaw. He caught Elspeth’s eye and gave her a vulpine grin, sizing her up. Raising his voice, he said, “Snakes are what they use to scare passengers into behaving. Don’t go anywhere by yourself, because you might get et. That’s just a way to keep pretty ladies from getting lured into shadows for kisses from nice men.”
Elspeth refrained from joining the conversation. As a Pinkerton agent, she’d met plenty of supernatural creatures. She knew there were a few werewolves, or rather shapechangers, that lived in the wilderness in small families. She was less worried about Snakes, even though the semi-mythical creatures were blamed for nearly every disaster that claimed human lives.
In either case, this wasn’t like England, overridden with all manner of creature, including werewolves, fairies and vampires.
The Professor sat puffing a cigar, working it with tight jaws. When it finally had burned to an inch’s worth of stub, he caught Elspeth’s eye and nodded at her to follow him as he rose. His mind revealed nothing other than the last of the tobacco’s tang and a weary readiness for his bed.
She followed him through the several cars housing those unfortunate enough not to have the price of a sleeper, relegated to the hard wooden benches fastened to the walls. They smelled of sweat and cheese and garlic and stomach gas and she sensed herself perceived by minds sleep-clouded by motion and time spent staring forward waiting to arrive.
Outside the two compartments, the Professor paused.
Elspeth waited.
He looked everywhere but at her. “I want you to speak to my daughter.”
“About?” His embarrassment burned in her stomach, incandescent as lava.
“She has always lived with me. Her mother died when she was three. Our domestic situation has made her isolated in a manner that has warped her.”
“Such as?”
“She has become forward in unexpected ways,” he said. His pink skin deepened in tone and he wiped at his brow with a crumpled silk handkerchief.
“The suffrage movement appeals to many young women who feels their own lives are circumscribed,” Elspeth supplied. She’d seen this struggle before, including in her own family when she’d announced she planned to become a Pinkerton agent.
He shook his head. “There are many movements affecting the young nowadays. I was thinking more of the...” He hesitated, picking the words as carefully as making change out of a purse. “The movement that some people call Free Love.”
Elspeth tried to school her face into a lack of expression, but a brow crept upward despite herself.
“She wishes to practice Free Love?” she said, very carefully. Where was Artemus? But her partner had said he wished to check the rest of the train. She wondered if he was looking for the woman who had offered Elspeth money for a couple of hours with him.
The Professor’s hand flapped in the air like a trapped bird searching for windows of escape. “Tell her...tell her that things are not as simple as she would like to think when it comes to defying societal mores. For women there are consequences and they come when least expected or desired.” He sighed.
There was something in his mind around all this that made Elspeth uneasy, but she nodded. They exchanged slight bows and retired into their compartments.
Artemus was back within a half hour, ready to set up watch. Elspeth did not question him as where he had been. Her partner’s inability to sleep was a definite plus. It made simple sense to always have him be the one watching i
n the small hours of the night, when his human counterpart might fall prey to drowsiness.
So many pluses to partnering with him. Before him, she’d been assigned to a former Army colonel who had never quite gotten over the shock of working with a woman. For Artemus that had never been an issue, and chivalry was impersonal with him, a matter of his metallic brain and body outshining any human’s, gender notwithstanding.
They’d spent a week last spring in the Pinkerton Academy and she’d had a chance to speak with other female agents, despite how few and far between they were. Chloe Louisiana was a mulatto and former slave who always partnered with another woman, a half-Shawnee who’d been raised in England and whose name was Persephone Godschild. They were all united in their hate of the only other female agent present, a southern sharpshooter, Belle Cheatham, whose disdain they had all dealt with in the past.
“You’re lucky to have Artemus as your partner,” Chloe had said. She glanced over at Persephone, who’d nodded. The three of them had been sitting in a classroom, comparing notes and waiting for an instructor in ballistics to arrive.
Elspeth hadn’t understood. Back then she’d seen it as punishment, assigning the odd psychic to the only thing capable of dealing with her. She went back and forth on whether the assignment was punishment or praise. It felt like either with equal frequency.
She lay in bed. A thought occurred to her and she pulled herself out of the narrow bunk to press her face up to the cold glass of the tiny window. Outside the vast plains were silvered with moonlight and the train’s long shadow raced beside them. Faint clouds seined the starry sky and somewhere a wolf howled.
Artemus shifted in the hallway. He’d heard her, she suspected, and wanted her to know her he was there if needed, without saying it outright.
Another one of the little gestures that seemed so unmechanical.
She returned to bed and lay there. The train said chuggadiggity-chuggadiggity-chuggadiggity and she dropped into sleep counting the syllables of that complex beat.
Someone scratching on her door woke her. She gathered her wrapper around her nightgown and slid the door open.
Belinda, in her own wrapper, embroidered with pale blue flowers and uncoiling ferns. No Artemus in the corridor, but the light in the other room suggested he was there with the Professor.
“Do you smoke?” Belinda said in a low whisper. Her eyes sparked as Elspeth nodded, and she held up two cigarettes in a conspiratorial way. ”They’re talking. We’ll go indulge.”
Outside, they sparked cigarettes alight with phosphorus matches in the doorway’s shelter before moving to stand on the swaying platform as the dark world hurtled past.
Belinda exhaled. The smell of the tobacco flickered in Elspeth’s nostrils. “You know what I want in Seattle?” she said.
Elspeth shook her head. It was so refreshing not to be able to pluck the answer out of the other’s head, mystifying and giddying all at once, trying to figure out answers from clues as fragile and fleeting as cigarette smoke.
“I want to have a friend. Maybe several,” Belinda said. She reached out with her free hand and scraped the back of her index finger along the soft flesh of Elspeth‘s inner arm.
Elspeth’s heart jumped in her throat. In her mind, the Professor’s voice said, ...the movement that some call Free Love. She didn’t react to the touch and after a long moment, Belinda leaned back against the railing and took another puff from her cigarette.
Elspeth had opened her mouth to reply when something lunged out of the night, a snarl of claw and tooth and gray fur striking from the ground to land between them.
Belinda recoiled, colliding with the glass of the door even as Espeth’s foot snapped out to catch the beast in the throat. She thanked her Pinkerton training, all the work she’d had to do to prove herself.
With a gabbled whine, the creature fell away. Elspeth grabbed Belinda and pulled her inside the car.
In its confines, the younger woman swayed, hand at her throat, eyes wide and fixed on Elspeth as her knees buckled.
Elspeth stooped to the floor as well, feeling the rocketing rails underneath through her shinbones, grappling Belinda to her.
Belinda’s lips tasted of tobacco. Her heart hammered against Elspeth as Elspeth drew her into the compartment and the narrow, moon-washed bed.
She woke tangled in Belinda’s arms to the sound of knocking on the door. Artemus’ characteristic shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits.
“What is it?” she called.
“The Professor.”
She gestured quiet at the wide-eyed Belinda as she pulled on her nightgown. “What about him?” she called through the doorway.
“His doorway is locked but he’s not answering.”
Artemus looked to her before fingering the lock. He was not supposed to pick mechanisms unless there was a human present.
She hoped that Belinda would have the sense to wait until they had entered the other cabin before making her way out of Elspeth’s compartment.
The lock clicked open and Artemus’s hand fell away. He flipped the handle open and swung it inward cautiously, as though afraid of waking the Professor.
Who was unwakeable, lying as he did in a pool of crimson and surprise, face agape.
As they stood there in the doorway, Belinda appeared behind them and gasped. “Papa!”
“I must ask you to stand back, Miss McCormick,” Artemus said. “Elspeth, would you take her to a quiet place close by?”
“Like my cabin?” Elspeth said.
“That would do, certainly.”
Elspeth escorted the wide-eyed, shocked Belinda back into the cabin and petted and soothed her for a few moments before returning to Artemus’ side in the other compartment.
He stood frowning in the middle of the compartment. “I don’t see it.”
“See what?”
“The professor was carrying the formula for his work to the War Ministry.”
She looked around the tiny space. “It’s not here?”
“He has his case there, and another trunk full of presents. I believe for his host’s children.”
“What makes you think that?”
“I took the liberty of opening them. One is a puzzle, another a set of fables, and the third a board game, ‘Snakes on a Train.’”
“So the killer must have taken the formula.”
“Belinda is the most likely suspect.”
Elspeth hoped Belinda would remember the brief story Elspeth had coached her in. “She went for coffee to the dining car but found it closed. He was alive when she left.”
Artemus’s expression ground into disapproval. He didn’t like activating that portion of his face’s mechanism, she knew, preferring to keep it a bland and unthreatening smile.
“I don’t think it was her,” she said firmly, and left it at that, hurrying on to say, “I think it’ll be someone who gets off at the next stop.”
“When is that?”
“For a major stop, one that is more than fuel? A day or so.”
Summoned, two wide-eyed porters helped drag the body back several cars, wrapped in a blanket and supported as though it were an under-the-weather passenger, back to the refrigerator car.
After that, the Pinkerton agents canvassed the train to find the individuals planning on getting out at Kansas City. A young married couple, the Emersons, planning on joining Mrs. Emerson’s brother’s homestead nearby; a school-teacher headed into the Territory; two traveling sales-men, one in patent sun hats and soaps, and the other in tin-ware; two former soldiers headed to get jobs as cattle drovers; and a veterinarian who had just purchased a practice in Kansas City in the mail.
Neither Artemus nor Elspeth could extract any reason why any of these individuals would have reason to kill the Professor.
Artemus’ expression was still disapproving. “The daughter...”
“It’s not her,” Elspeth said. “I think it’s a wolf. We saw one when we were out there. One could jump onto a platform and com
e along a corridor.”
“And have hands to open the door?”
“Were-wolves,” she pointed out. “Shape-changers. Skilled ones can manage half-way forms.”
“If there were such a creature then it is long gone,” Artemus said.
“Let’s question everyone,” Elspeth said. “The man who called him a necromancer, for example.”
That man turned out to be a Portland bound minister, Alexander Knolle. Roused from his own sleeping car and questioned as to how he knew what McCormick had been doing, he pointed out that it had not been much of a secret, since McCormick had spoken in several lyceums in the Baltimore and DC area in the week previous to boarding the train.
“He bragged on it,” the fat man said sweating but adamant, gaze trembling between the two. “On how his formula help suit machinery and morbid flesh to each other. Morbid flesh, that’s what he called it. Dead things. I fought in the war last year. I know what comes of that.” He shuddered and retched.
The next night, Artemus spent on the platform watching for wolves.
Around two in the morning, Elspeth went out with him. The stars stretched overhead, brilliant as diamonds, lights that seemed close enough to reach up and pluck one.
“Is Belinda settled?” Artemus said over the rush of the wind and the rattle of the train.
“For now,” Elspeth said. She titled her face away from him, knowing he’d be able to read any rush of heat to her cheeks. She said, over her shoulder, “When we were first assigned together, I didn’t like it. Now I wouldn’t have any other partner.”
She wasn’t sure whether or not he was aware of Belinda’s scent clinging to her, of the phantom pressure of hands that clenched at her skin. Perhaps he’d think her blushes the result of her verbal confession. Either way, she wanted him to be reassured. “There’s no one else I’d rather have.” Silence stretched between them and she said, struck by it, “Can you say the same?”
