“Hmmm,” said Cagey.
“You don’t usually carry a gun, do you?” Ace asked eagerly.
“Nope. It just seemed like a good idea up in these hyeah gun-totin’ hills.”
“Isn’t it really loaded?” said Zoe.
“Loaded? An accident-prone individual like me carry a loaded gun around?”
“Not even with blanks?” Ace asked, disappointed.
“Not even with blanks. Blanks can be dangerous, too, if they go off close enough to your body. People have been killed that way. Nope, it’s a real antique handgun, but for all practical purposes, it’s just a prop.” Cagey gave Zoe a sharp look and asked, “How about you? The late Wayne Colfax ever try and make a play at you?”
“Oh, yeah, he tried it once or twice,” said Zoe.
“... a day,” Ace muttered.
“But don’t worry, Cagey,” Zoe went on, “I’m not a flyaway romance fancier like Eulalie Detweiller. And poor old Wayne was pretty good company otherwise.”
“Yeah,” Ace added, “so long as me or Jethro or one of the other kids stuck around. Poor old Jeth.”
They reached the Dawes Creek business office of the Appalachia Nostalgia Corporation, its name painted in oldfashioned letters above an electric scale model of the Appalachia Pufferbelly in the window. Ace opened the door for them, and Zoe went up to the long wooden counter to announce:
“Cagey Warrington Thursday to see M. Shima. We’ve got an appointment.”
The man at the counter picked up a nostalgia telephone with a body like a bud vase and a separate earpiece like a little black cup on a wire, relayed Zoe’s message into it, listened for a few seconds, and nodded. “Go right in, M.’s,” he told them, pointing to a door marked “PRIVATE - V.I.P.” at the back of the room. “M. Shima is waiting for you.”
M. Shima had only been up here for about six weeks, since the middle of July. Ace and Zoe suspected that when they themselves had hit the area on June 14, this back office had been empty, kept available for corporation big hats when needed, but most of the time just part of the stage set.
The twins followed their cousin through a swinging gate at the end of the counter and into the “Private—V.I.P.” office. A tall woman with Butterscotch skin, almond eyes, and dark brown hair pulled back in a bun stood up to meet them. “Lieutenant Thursday,” she said briskly. “Your cousins have told me about you.”
The “Lieutenant” was strictly a roleplaying title that Cagey had given herself, and Sheriff Detweiller would probably have used it sarcastically if he’d used it at all. But M. Shima used it as respectfully as if Cagey had been a real police detective.
“M. Magda Shima,” Cagey replied, returning the executive’s handshake. “Yes, they’ve told me a little something about you, too—all favorable.” The “all favorable” was stretching the truth.
“They are excellent go-betweens. The local authorities have been less than no help at all.” M. Shima shrugged gracefully and kind of fatalistically. “These people are so provincial. So clannish. Since the deaths, they have banded together and continue to insist that Colfax and Davis were fine, sterling, ‘all-American’ boys, in spite of the very clear evidence that they were in fact the ones responsible for the July Fourth vandalism. Pardon me, young M.’s, if I seem to denigrate your late friends,” she added to the twins.
“Yeah, I guess so,” Ace decided. “They were really more like new acquaintances than friends, anyway, and it wasn’t much of a secret that they did it.”
“It wasn’t all that bad, either, though,” Zoe said defensively. “Was it?”
“No, Zoe-chan, I suppose it was not,” said M. Shima. “Merely seventy-eight thousand tridollars’ worth of absolute damage, besides the loss of twenty-seven days’ revenue from the coaches that had to be repaired, and the warnings of further damage to the train, the station, and even the tracks. Not mentioning certain violent references to ‘dirty Chink enterprises.’”
“Yeah, you’re right, the actual damage was pretty bad,” said Ace. “But the notes and warnings were just jokes.”
“And so our corporation overreacted by sending me up here,” said M. Shima. “So sorry. But, you see, the actual damage made it just a trifle difficult for us to comprehend the jokes. In any case, I do not accuse the boys of plotting their own deaths on purpose to further embarrass the Appalachia Nostalgia Corporation. Lieutenant Thursday, may I offer you coffee?”
“Thought you’d never ask,” Cagey said cheerfully. “I was almost ready to help myself.”
The office had a restored antique Mr. Coffee that was sending up such a good aroma the twins asked for and received mugs of coffee half-and-halved with milk. They seated themselves on the wide windowsill while Cagey and M. Shima took the cushioned chairs, sipped, and talked.
“I’d have wanted a closer look at this affair anyway,” said Cagey. “Were you aware there have been similar cases cropping up for at least the last sixty years?”
“No, I was not aware of that. Similar in what way?”
“Victims lying across the tracks in the path of an oncoming night train out in a rural, usually heavily wooded area. Usually a pair of victims, occasionally three, in one case four together. Always motionless, according to the engineers, who invariably don’t see them—or, at least, don’t recognize them as human bodies—in time to stop. The motionlessness suggests they’re either already dead or stoned unconscious when the train arrives. In one case the autopsy turned up bullet wounds to substantiate the already-
murdered theory, and several times trace evidences of alcohol or some kind of drug have been found in the bodies, but never enough to prove the stoned theory. Except for that one time, it always seemed possible that the actual death wounds could have been administered in some part of each body that was so arranged on the tracks that train wheels made the original marks undiscoverable even by careful autopsy. Often the bodies are covered or partially covered by some kind of tarp or other outdoorsy cloth or plastic sheet. Frequently the victims’ guns, lanterns, spotlights, or flashlights have been placed somewhere with or near the bodies.
M. Shima nodded. “Yes. This sounds identical. Such cases have been occurring for the last sixty years, you say?”
“At least. The earliest ones I’ve found in the newsmedia morgues were in the 1980s. They kept up, here and there, never so many or so closely located as to attract a national spotlight, throughout the 1980s and ’90s. I’ve only been able to find one in the first decade of this century, and none at all in the twenty-teens. Of course, during that period train service of any kind was almost nil. With the revival of nostalgia passenger trains like yours in the ’20s, this kind of death started happening again. Your case up here is just the latest.”
“Very interesting,” said M. Shima. “I feel slightly reassured to think that it might not have been aimed at our corporation in particular. But it would seem highly improbable that all these deaths are the work of a single deranged jack the ripper.”
“Improbable,” Cagey agreed. “Not completely impossible, though he—or she, but it seems more like a man’s modus operandi—would have to be well over seventy years old by now. Still, it looks to me more like a series of copycat killings, possibly involving a lot of copycats over the years and locales. They’d have to be criminologists or other types who’d know about the earlier cases, but there are enough amateur criminologists around.”
“All that is less reassuring. It might have been someone with a particular grudge against Appalachia Nostalgia after all, merely using knowledge of the earlier cases. More coffee?”
“Thanks.” Cagey never refused more coffee. “I’d almost be willing to bet, though, that it was the other way around. Not so much attacking your corporation, as making use of your train to dispose of either Wayne Colfax or Jethro Davis.”
“‘Either ... or’?”
“One of the boys could have been the primar
y target, making it the other one’s misfortune to be in the killer’s way as a potential witness. What were they doing out in the woods, anyway?”
“‘Spotlighting,’ I believe it is called.” M. Shima’s voice dripped with distaste. “Night hunting with a spotlight and a firearm. One hunter shines the light in the animal’s eyes to dazzle and blind it. While the animal ‘freezes,’ staring back at the light, the other hunter blows its brains out.”
“Hmmm,” said Cagey. “Yes, I’ve heard of that, under one name or another. I wouldn’t have thought August was exactly the season for it. Woods still too full of leaves.”
“Hey!” Ace put in. “Better than during the regular hunting season, when the
woods are full of floaters with guns. Besides, kids have more time during summer vacation.”
Cagey gave him the same kind of sharp look she’d given Zoe when asking if Wayne had made any plays at her. “Tried it yourself this summer, sport?”
“Me? Heck, no. I was just trying to explain about Wayne and Jeth.”
“That’s good,” Cagey replied. “As far as I know, it’s illegal any time of year.”
“In my opinion,” M. Shima said with a sniff, “the only worse night activity is vandalism, and they had already tried that. Lieutenant Thursday, I think I noticed a gun in your pocket.”
“You, too? Bogey! I might as well have worn a holster.”
“Is it loaded?”
Cagey grinned and shook her head. “Nope. Just for show. Obviously doing a better job than I’d expected. I thought I’d have to take it out and wave it before anybody noticed.”
“What caliber?”
“A real, authentic police thirty-eight.”
M. Shima opened her desk drawer, took out a box, looked at it, put it back, took out a second box, nodded, and laid it down on the table in front of Cagey. “Here. With the compliments of the Appalachia Nostalgia Corporation.”
“Thanks,” said Cagey. “I don’t pack ammo.”
“These are blanks. Useful, on occasion, for firing over people’s heads.”
Cagey shrugged, picked up the box, and put it in her other trousers pocket. “Tell the Appalachia Nostalgia Corp. thanks for me. By the way, is that cigar store Indian working for you people?”
“What cigar store ... Oh, you must mean Chief Running Stag. No, I believe the local Chamber of Commerce, such as it is, must have hired him in order to lend the town a little color. I won’t say ‘local’ color, because as far as I know that particular style of costume isn’t indigenous to these hills.”
“You’d think the C. of C. would have done some research,” Cagey remarked. “He couldn’t just be an indigenous costume fancier?”
Zoe said, “I doubt it, ‘Lieutenant.’ Ace and me came up in June, and I don’t remember seeing him around town till after the Fourth of July. What’s a ‘cigar story Indian,’ anyway?”
“Tell you later,” said Cagey.
True to her promise, she told them over lunch, in the Dawes Creek Hotel Coffee Shop, how a century or two ago, when the percentage of smokers was as big as the percentage of nonsmokers was nowadays, tobacco stores used to put wooden statues of Native Americans in complete costume and regalia, holding handfuls of cigars, out on the sidewalks in front of the shops. They were such a big thing that “cigar store Indian” got to be a popular expression, and you could still see the old statues occasionally in museums and antique shops.
“Oh, yeah!” Zoe exclaimed. “We saw one of them at that place in Atlantic City. Remember, brother?”
“Yeah, that’s right. We thought it was a figurehead from one of those old sailing ships.”
When they got to the twins’ “rustic cabin” at M. Angelou’s Moonshine Resort, with its fake log walls, fraying braided rugs on splintery old realwood floor, and crescent moon on the comfort room door, Cagey took one look around and said, “Well, I always figured you two were still a little young to go vacationing without adult supervision. But then, a lot of people would say, so am I. Let this be a lesson to all three of us.”
“All part of the rustic charm,” said Ace, digging with his thumbnail at a chipped place in one of the plaster logs.
“Besides,” Zoe pointed out, “Mom and Dad picked this place and made the arrangements.”
“Okay, so long as the coffeeserve works.” Cagey promptly tested it by getting herself a mugful. Pronouncing it drinkable—but then, the coffee had not yet been discovered that she could not drink—she settled down to clean her gun.
“Why do that?” Zoe wanted to know.
“Because accidents happen with dirty guns. Bad accidents.”
Ace asked, “Even when they’re never loaded? Not even loaded with blanks?”
“Hey, fella! I don’t take any chances, not with guns. Besides, it’s like one of those Chinese puzzles. Helps me think.” She worked awhile before going on, “How come your computer-net message didn’t mention what, exactly, Wayne Colfax and Jethro Davis were doing out in the woods the night they were killed?”
“Hey,” said Ace, “any hacker can patch into other people’s computer mail. You don’t like letting everybody know victims were doing anything illegal. It’s bad enough some people are saying the poor floaters must’ve been stoned on booze and mindblankers.”
“Besides,” said Zoe, “what does it matter? The big thing is that it put them out there for somebody to getcha, isn’t it?”
Cagey finished reassembling her gun, laid it on the table, and squinted at it. “Well, the news media must agree with you. They didn’t mention it, either. In fact, the records don’t mention it in at least half of the historical cases. I wish they did. In almost every case where it is on record, the victims had gone out to hunt animals by dazzling them with a bright light.”
Zoe shivered. “Wow! And then they died beneath a train, with its one big light.” She thought about a train chugging along in the darkness, wailing like some lonely, one-eyed monster.
“Like the cyclops M. Dryden had us read about in lit class last year,” said Ace.
“Mmm-hmm,” Cagey agreed, yawning.
Ace asked, “How can you be sleepy, with all that caffeine you drink?”
“Caffeine has no effect on me whatever. People who feel it will tell you that drinking too much of the stuff actually has a soporific effect. Anyway. I sat up till midnight consulting the databanks about all those cases, got up again at oh five hundred to make the right travel connections, and these old eyelids are getting so they can’t take that kind of punishment anymore.”
“Come on, Cagey,” said Zoe. “You aren’t that old.”
“I’ll never see thirty again.” With another yawn, Cagey put her gun back in her pocket. Standing, she patted her pockets on both sides, found the box of blanks M. Shima had given her, gave it a confused frown, and finally put it on the top shelf of the kitchenette cupboard, slapping it in with her hand. It hit something, and by the time the domino effect was over, old plastic tumblers lay all over the sink, countertop, and floor, and two or three ceramic mugs and some kind of glass dish were in smithereens.
“See why I never carry a loaded gun?” said Cagey. “I hope none of that was Ming Dynasty.”
“Naw,” said Ace. “You don’t think they’d leave anything valuable in these furnished shacks, do you?”
* * * *
Cagey’s accident proneness was as good an excuse as any not to cook. They all ate dinner back at the hotel, and would have talked more about the case; but Sheriff Detweiller came in and sat down at a table near theirs.
“I don’t know why that shut you two up,” Cagey remarked when they returned to the cabin. “He knows good and well why I’m here.”
“Yeah, that’s just it,” said Ace. “He probably wanted to overhear something. Remember how you said any copycat killer would have to be someone who’d know about the earlier cases? We
ll, a lawman would be in a position to know, wouldn’t he?”
“Oh, you’re full of velcro,” said Zoe. “It’s more likely to be M. Shima, and she just asked us to call in our cousin to throw suspicion off herself.”
“Yeah? Well, how about that heck of a motive old Detweiller had for hating Wayne because of Eulalie? And Detweiller lives here, too. He knows the area and he knows local people’s habits.”
“Yeah, but he’s stuck here, isn’t he? If he skipped town, people would talk. M. Shima will be out of here clear in a few weeks, and she really hated Wayne and Jethro, both of them, because of what they did to her train.”
“It isn’t her train, for the love of Elvis! She just works for Appalachia Nostalgia. Besides, old Detweiller does all the investigating around here. Anyone can see M. Shima hates him, too, because he never arrested them for the vandalism. If she’d come after anyone, it’d have been Detweiller.”
“Yeah, and how come he never arrested them, when he hated Wayne so much, if ...” Zoe stopped, afraid of helping her brother’s case against the sheriff. “Anyway,” she finished, “I’ll bet you five tridols it’s M. Shima. If it’s either one of them.”
“Huh! I’ll bet you twenty tridols it’s old Detweiller!”
“And I’ll bet the both of you,” Cagey said around another yawn, “that if I don’t get to sleep on it right now, I’m going to start dreaming about it out loud right here where I sit.”
* * * *
The cabin was so pioneer-theme that it didn’t even have bedrooms, just curtains around the two fourposter beds and the sleeping loft. Cagey took one of the fourposters, not even waiting to undress. A few seconds after she got in and drew the curtains, her arm snaked back out and deposited her gun on the floor beside the bed.
“Yeah,” Ace observed, “that must’ve been quite a lump in your pocket, huh?”
There was no answer. The arm simply disappeared again.
The twins waited about fifteen minutes, arguing softly about the sheriff and the executive. Then Zoe said, “Get the blanks,” and went over to get the gun.
The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK Page 12
