by JL Bryan
“But the whole gang died,” I said. “And she knew it. The court records said that she and McCoyle both shot at the railroad cop. She would have seen McCoyle die, right? And she couldn’t have missed the passenger car exploding.”
“The rest of her gang died.” Calvin nodded as he thought it over. “At least, the ones we know about died. Maybe there was a fifth that we don’t know about.”
“Ugh. How would I even begin to figure that out?”
“You’ve been focusing on those who died. Maybe you need to spend more time thinking about those who lived.”
“That’s easy to say, but the information on the passengers who weren’t killed is pretty sketchy. I might have to contact Grant for more help.” I considered the idea. “But wait. We know the other person, if there is one, never collected the money. So that person might have died in the robbery. But why would she have left half the money for someone who was already dead? Maybe she didn’t know he was dead?”
“If there was an accomplice, Maggie must have believed that person was alive in order to leave the money behind.”
“The plan must have gone wrong somehow.” I rubbed my head. “If only I had any idea what the original plan was in the first place. Would Maggie have known about the double-cross, killing the O’Reilly brothers in the middle of the robbery? If that was a double-cross and not a stupid accident. There are too many possibilities...”
“Focus on just one at a time,” Calvin said.
“Okay. Starting over. If there was no other accomplice, then she buried the money because it was too much to carry, or as security in case she got caught. But then why the mysterious death two weeks later in New Orleans? And where did her half of the money go? Well, that part’s easy. Any number of people would’ve been happy to steal that money from her, before or after her death. Maybe she was killed by somebody unrelated to the train robbery, somebody who’d discovered she had money to steal.
“Second possibility: she’s leaving the money for an accomplice, but not one of the gang members we know about, because she knows they’re dead. And we’re back to having no leads on the accomplice.”
“Don’t you think it’s interesting,” Calvin said, “that the entire railroad crew was tied up and shot except for the railroad detective?”
“He was burned. And shot in the leg. That’s a serious injury, especially in 1902 and several miles out of town. If it struck the femoral artery, he would have bled out and died fast.”
“But he did not die,” Calvin said. “And Maggie escaped the scene unharmed, with the money. In fact, if she was found in New Orleans, how did the investigators connect her to the crime?”
“She had a canvas satchel...probably just like that one.” I pointed to the one on the table. “They found it near her body, with three hundred dollars in Third National Bank of Atlanta notes, a few gold coins, and one crumpled piece of paperwork with the date and intended destination of the cash transfer. The Bank of Charleston.”
“Convenient,” Calvin said.
“Extremely. Why would she keep that with her? It’s almost exactly like somebody planted that there to make it an open-and-shut case.”
“Did any witnesses to the robbery corroborate that Maggie was among the gang?”
“The robbers all wore bandannas on their faces,” I said. “Like any old-timey bad guys. I guess the engineer must have seen her face when she hailed him down, since she probably wouldn’t have worn a mask for that, but he didn’t survive. None of the surviving witnesses saw her face, unless I missed something in the file. But they did say one gang member was female, in a red dress and leather boots. She had a derby hat like the men in the gang—like millions of men wore at that time. Red hair, like Maggie.”
“The contents of her satchel are convenient for us, too,” Calvin said. “If some other person unrelated to the train robbery killed Maggie in New Orleans in order to take her money, why would they leave any cash behind? You said the satchel was found near her body—not hidden anywhere?”split
I nodded, getting his point. “Whoever killed her wanted to make it clear she was connected to the robbery. That the last member of the gang was dead and the authorities could stop searching for her.”
“Was that all the money ever recovered from the robbery?” Calvin asked. “Three hundred dollars and change in her satchel?”
“Until now.” I pointed to the cash on the table.
“What scenario does that suggest?”
I thought it over. “If we’re suspecting the railroad cop, then he must have tracked her to New Orleans. Taken her money and killed her. He must have used poison, right?”
“Possibly. He might have smothered or strangled her. Forensics was not much of an issue at the time.”
“So the railroad cop and Maggie would have been cahooting together,” I said. I began pacing, seeing the scenario come together in my head. “James McCoyle wasn’t in on it, or he wouldn’t have shot the railroad cop, right? So Maggie and the cop—what’s his name? Kroeller. Maggie was double-crossing the rest of the gang, maybe she and Kroeller were going to kill the others and then split the money.
“The O’Reilly brothers go to rob the passengers, and either Maggie or Kroeller blows up the car. Probably Kroeller, he would have had more time to set it up, since he was already on the train before the robbery. So, boom, there goes half the gang. Then Kroeller just has to kill James McCoyle, the leader.”
“Which he did,” Calvin said.
“But not before McCoyle shoots Kroeller in the leg,” I said. “Maybe Kroeller kills the train’s crew because they see or hear something that tells them he’s in on the robbery. So Maggie runs away with the money and Kroeller hangs around acting innocent. He’s been burned a little by the dynamite explosion—maybe he stood too close—and he’s been shot, so he’s not an immediate suspect.
“Maggie doesn’t know whether he’s going to live or die, so she hides his half of the money in the plantation ruins.” I shook my head. “That still doesn’t make sense. If he dies, she can keep the money. If he lives, she can give him his half.”
“Their original plan, whatever it was, must have been shaken by Kroeller taking that bullet,” Calvin said. “Hiding the money must have been a last-minute attempt to make the hand-off. Perhaps she intended to write him and tell him where to find it. While he convalesces in the hospital, she flees the state with her half of the money, without stealing his.”
“But before she gets that information to Kroeller, he tracks her down, despite his wounded leg, and kills her,” I said. “That eliminates the last witness, and he keeps her money. Well, it’s speculative, but it fits what we have. Wouldn’t the railroad company or the state investigators be suspicious of Kroeller, too? When the whole train crew dies except for the one who’s actually supposed to be providing security...”
“Maybe they were suspicious,” Calvin said. “What happened to Kroeller subsequently?”
“I have no idea.”
“Then you’ll need to get one.”
“Okay. I’ll look for follow-up information on Angus Kroeller, and on the little girl, Sophia Preston. I’m pretty sure she’s our banshee. We’re going to trap her tonight if we can, but I don’t really have any good bait. The cash from the robbery seems like good bait for the bandit ghosts, but they aren’t the immediate concern.” I thought of the large, dark figure that had dragged Sophia’s ghost out of the basement the other night. “From what Jacob said, it seems like the bandits are trying to rule the area. The passengers’ ghosts have to sneak around and avoid them.”
“You mentioned another ghost on the train, keeping the passengers off,” Calvin said.
“The passengers seem to want to get on the train, but the train won’t stop,” I said. “Maybe the engineer’s ghost is afraid to stop. Or Kroeller’s ghost won’t let him.”
“If Kroeller killed them all, that can give him a lot of power over the other ghosts,” Calvin said. “He would be the alpha ghost in this hau
nting.”
“And he’s on the train, stopping the others from leaving. Why?”
“He could be obsessed with keeping his crime a secret,” Calvin said. “Which means staying in control of all witnesses. For all time.”
“Assuming Kroeller was actually working with Maggie Fannon to rob the train, and wasn’t just an innocent man who got shot in the line of duty.”
“We haven’t established anything for certain.”
“Any chance you want to tackle some of that research today?” I asked. “Maybe give Grant a call? Anything we could learn about those two people, Kroeller and Sophia, would be pretty great right now.”
“What will you be doing?”
“Pounding the pavement, talking to witnesses about these intruders around the neighborhood,” I said. “Unless you’d rather do that while I focus on the historical research.”
“I’ll stay inside with the computers and the air conditioning.”
I caught him up on the case, which took a much longer time than I’d expected. He leaned in a little when I told him about the Acura tailing us, seeming more concerned about that than a trainload of ghosts.
“That’s multiple incidents,” he said. “I’m going to see if someone at the department can do me a favor, maybe just pull those guys over and check their licenses.”
“Hopefully we won’t see them again,” I said, my head too full of our problems with the ghost world to begin worrying about the living.
“Hoping for the best is rarely the soundest strategy,” Calvin replied.
“You should put that on a poster,” I said. “Maybe with a kitten dangling from a limb. Okay, I’m hitting the road. Let me know if you turn up anything on Sophia before tonight. And I’ll call you if I get kidnapped and murdered by some guys in a black Acura.”
“Please do.”
I drove away from the office, wondering whether we’d actually made some progress on the case, or were just spinning our wheels in the dark.
Chapter Eighteen
That afternoon, following a quick sleep and shower at home, I parked my Camaro in front of the Kozlows’ house and checked my make-up in the mirror. I was trying to look professional and sane. I’d even dressed in my rarely-seen black pantsuit, which clashed with my sneakers, but I was not going door to door in heels.
I picked up my pen and notebook, slung my purse over my shoulder, and paused for a deep breath. Introducing myself to strangers and asking them questions is far from my favorite way to spend a Sunday afternoon. I’m not exactly a people person—not a misanthrope, just not the peoplest person around. I’d rather be quietly reading by myself.
Stacey would have been useful in this situation, but she was even more useful reviewing our past footage and setting up the van to record the feeds we were swiping from Cecil Nobson’s mail-order spy cameras around the neighborhood. She was doing all of that back at the office.
Armed with my notebook, I set off down the sidewalk, doing my best confident-and-together act. My first stop was the home of Donna Watt, who had recently seen an intruder who’d vanished before the police arrived, leaving no trace of himself.
It was a five-minute walk over to her cul-de-sac, just enough time to get my social anxiety nice and keyed up before I approached a total stranger out of the blue to ask about her ghost problems.
The two-story Watt home sat at one side of the street, enclosed by a picket fence. From our previous tour with Captain Neighborhood Watch, I knew that the symbols carved into the back of the Watts’ fence included a woman and one bread-head stick-figure child. I was interested to see whether that matched the occupants of the house—if there were no children or multiple children, we might have misinterpreted what that small child figure was meant to indicate.
The trees in the yard were spindly and thin, probably no older than the house itself and clearly not thriving. I passed an old white Chevy Malibu and a red Big Wheel with Iron Man decals in the driveway and climbed the half-story of brick steps to the front door. A concrete angel, about as tall as my shin, crouched on the corner of the brick stoop, clutching a concrete bucket full of crushed cigarette butts.
I straightened up my spine, put on a smile—hopefully a gentle one, not a too-big creepy one—and rang the doorbell.
The solid front door swung inward, leaving the screen door as a barrier. The pudgy woman who looked out through the screen had long, tangled brown hair, glasses, and wore a pajama-bottom-and-stained-t-shirt ensemble that made it clear she was not expecting company. A television blared somewhere behind her. It sounded like a loud kid’s show.
A boy of three or four dashed up behind her, peering around the woman to look at me.
“Hello?” The woman gave me a suspicious look, probably expecting me to try and sell her magazine subscriptions or a new religion.
“I’m sorry to bother you, ma’am,” I said. “My name is Ellie Jordan, and I’m a private detective with Eckhart Investigations in Savannah.” I held out a business card.
The woman creaked open the screen door and accepted the card. She looked skeptical at first, then relaxed a bit as she read it over. Our cards resemble any detective agency’s, no little cartoony ghosts or anything to indicate that we walk on the weird side all the time. The mere sight of a professional-looking card seems to help people relax and open up, even though anybody can get a thousand of them for a few bucks at Staples.
“I’m looking for Donna Watt,” I said. “Is that you?”
“What’s this about?”
“I’m sure you know there’s been a pattern of break-ins and intruders around the neighborhood,” I said. “We’ve been retained by some of your neighbors to look into them.” That made it sound like more than one household had hired us, but it wasn’t strictly a lie—Tom and Ember were two people, after all, so it wasn’t totally inaccurate to say some of your neighbors. Just a little misleading.
She looked hesitant.
“Some of your neighbors have had...abnormal experiences,” I said, as if I’d been chatting with her neighbors all day. “Sometimes there’s no sign of a break-in, and it’s not clear how the person entered or left the house--”
“That’s what happened to me. Cody, go watch Paw Patrol,” she said to her son.
“Paw Patrol! Paw Patrol!” the boy sang, running out of sight toward the sound of the television.
She watched him go, then stepped out and closed the door firmly behind her. She glanced furtively at her next-door neighbor’s house, where nobody was outside, then pulled a red pack of Marlboros from her pajama-pants pocket.
“Can you tell me what you saw?” I asked. “And when it happened?”
“About a week ago.” She lit the cigarette, coughed, spat something ugly over the porch railing and into the bushes. “Sorry. Cody’s been saying he sees somebody at night. An ‘evil cowboy.’ Of course, I thought it was all made up until I heard him screaming last Friday night. I got out of bed to check on him. When I opened the door from my room into the hall, I saw it walk past. It looked at me.” She shuddered.
“What looked at you?”
“A man. I guess. He had an old hat and a coat, and he had a bandanna over his face like he was about to rob a bank in some old John Wayne movie. He looked like an old movie, too, I mean everything was gray, there was no color. His eyes were solid black. I’m sure that was all some kind of lighting trick, the moonlight from the window, maybe.” She was shivering, though, like she hadn’t completely convinced herself that her eyes were playing tricks on her.
“What did he do?” I asked.
“He just moved on down the hall, like he didn’t care whether I saw him or not. He smelled bad. Like rotten meat soaked in bad whiskey. And cigars. All that rolled up together. I thought I was going to be sick. I was so surprised, and scared, too, that all I could do was stand there and watch him walk away.
“Cody screamed again, so I looked over at his room. When I looked back, the man was gone. He must have gone down the front stairs, bu
t he would’ve had to be lightning-flash quick to do that. He must have, though.”
“Did you hear any sounds?” I asked. “Footsteps on the stairs?”
“Nothing. And to be honest...well, anyway. I screamed for Evan, my husband. Ex-husband, soon to be. I guess I was so tired or scared I forgot he left us four months ago. High and dry. He’s the manager down at Chet’s Discount Grocery, and he moved into that girl’s apartment. The cashier.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She shook her head. “Anyway, I checked on Cody and he wasn’t hurt, just scared. I called the police, but they couldn’t find where he might have broken in. They searched the house, but they didn’t find any sign of him.”
“Does anybody else have a key?” I asked. “Your ex-husband, maybe?”
“I had all the locks changed,” she said quickly, as if eager to share that information. “Only my friend Jenna has the new key, and she didn’t give it to anyone.”
“Was anything missing?”
“Not a thing.”
“Did anything else happen? Bear in mind I’ve heard a lot of strange things today, things that are hard to believe. So if you saw anything else strange, it’ll actually fit right in.”
“What else are people seeing? Who did you talk to?”
“Of course, I want to keep people’s information confidential,” I said. “I won’t repeat anything you tell me to your neighbors, either.”
“Fine.” She cupped her hand to hide her cigarette as a hulking gold Mazda SUV pulled into her next-door neighbor’s driveway. With her other hand, she waved at the blond woman in yoga pants who climbed out, who didn’t seem to notice. She was several years younger than Donna and looked like she split all her free time between aerobics class and the tanning salon. Donna waved again and shouted “Tammy Lee!”
Tammy Lee glanced over with a slight wave and distasteful smile, then turned her attention to lifting her baby out of a carrier in the back seat. She strode away at double-time toward her house, never looking back.
“Has your neighbor seen anything strange?” I asked.
