by Sandra Balzo
‘Try terrified.’
A grin. ‘Yet when we confronted that goliath of a snake, you were nigh-on to heroic.’
‘Just “nigh-on”?’ I teased, giving him a quick kiss on the lips. ‘And there’s no one else I’d rather be with, either. Especially stuck in the Everglades with a murderer onboard.’
His hand stopped me again. ‘That person is still here somewhere, Maggy. The only other possibility was that he – or she – bailed into the Everglades.’
I remembered what I’d been thinking earlier. ‘Do you want me to take a head count and compare my tally to Zoe’s passenger list?’
‘Already done.’
‘By whom?’
‘By me, just now, when everyone was seated in the passenger car arguing with you. Nobody’s missing.’
I shook my head. ‘What a mess.’
‘You’re telling me. And God knows whose jurisdiction we’re in. We could be on federal park land, the Seminole Indian Reservation or just county, state or private land.’
‘Aren’t you going to get in trouble with whoever the authorities are?’ I blushed. ‘I mean, you’ve scolded me often enough for sticking my nose in and mucking things up and now you’ve …’
‘Become functionally you?’
‘A civilian,’ I tried.
‘Technically, but I’m still law enforcement. And I’m the best we’ve got or will have until we can contact someone both official and local. I’d like to get what we can down on the record before people start swapping – and blending, and embroidering – their individual stories.’
‘Like they probably are, as we speak.’
‘Which suggests …’ He gestured toward the door.
Got it: bring on the engineer.
‘Well, golly, that’s a real good question.’ Engineer Theodore B. Hertel, Jr was sitting across from us, pulling on his earlobe. I hoped, for symmetry’s sake, not the one he’d been dragging down out on the railbed with Potter and the python.
He stopped and then went to his chin. ‘What’s this?’
I set down the camera/phone and leaned across the table. ‘Looks like you missed a spot,’ or three, ‘when you shaved.’
‘That’s a relief,’ he said. ‘Thought it was a hairy mole. Those puppies can turn into cancer, you know?’
I didn’t know. And I didn’t want to know. Not now and preferably not ever, especially from this master of disaster.
‘Back to the question,’ the sheriff prompted.
‘Which was?’
A trained interrogator, Pavlik didn’t roll his eyes, though I feared I might be rolling enough for the both of us. ‘Given that we found Laurence Potter’s body on the opposite side of the flooded track from where we sit now, can you tell me when we passed through that area on the way out into the Everglades?’
I thought I knew where Pavlik was going with this.
‘Before we reversed direction to go back east, you mean?’ He was back to tugging on the lobe, but the one on the other side of his head.
‘Correct.’ Pavlik waited.
‘Well, now. That’s hard to say. You see, I’m not quite sure just where we are.’
‘I can understand that,’ Pavlik said mildly. My brain, on the other hand, was screaming in all capital letters, ‘WHAT THE HELL DO YOU MEAN YOU DON’T KNOW WHERE WE ARE IN THE MIDDLE OF THIS—?’
‘Let’s start with the “when,” then,’ Pavlik continued, giving my nervously vibrating thigh a reassuring squeeze under the table. ‘We know that tonight’s event was to be a three-hour-long round trip. That would mean you turned the train around halfway through that time or ninety minutes after we departed the station, right?’
‘Well, technically we don’t turn around. Just stop and I take her back the other way.’
I could have smacked the man, but the sheriff apparently thought we were making progress. ‘So you confirm that you “took her back the other way” ninety minutes after we left the station?’
‘Probably that, like you say, give or take. This isn’t an exact science, you know.’
Seemed like a hell of a way to run a railroad.
‘And how many miles into the Everglades would that have taken us?’ Pavlik was writing again.
‘No way of telling.’
Pavlik looked up from his notes. ‘You didn’t glance at your odometer?’
Hertel looked puzzled. ‘Odometer? Ain’t got one. Leastways that’s any use to the engineer. No, we just chug from one assigned stop to ’nother along the same track. What would I do with an odometer?’
I suppressed a grin as Pavlik seemed to ponder what Hertel could do with his odometer. ‘So you don’t know how far we traveled before we reversed directions.’
‘No sir, that I don’t.’ Hertel shifted on the banquette. ‘Not quite sure why it matters, tell you the truth.’
I saw Pavlik’s knuckles whitening as he gripped his pen, so I took over before he decided to bayonet the guy’s eye. ‘Let’s forget distance for now. If we know what time we reversed, and how long after that we came to a stop because of the damaged track, we’ll know approximately when we passed this spot on the way into the Everglades.’
‘Meaning that’s when this Potter became snake-bait, huh? Well, that’s real good reasoning, I have to say. Not sure it’ll hold water, though.’ Hertel was grinning.
‘And why is that?’ I asked between my own clenched teeth.
Mercifully, my tag team partner stepped in. ‘We left the station a little after eight?’
‘Correct-o-mundo. Eight-oh-four, to be exact.’
‘And we’ve agreed we reversed ninety minutes after we left the station, so as to be back within the three-hour timeframe. That means, of course, nine thirty-four.’
‘Give or take,’ I added before Hertel could.
Pavlik’s pen hovered over a sheet of paper he’d torn from his pad. ‘And the train travels how fast?’
Hertel worried the errant patch of chin hair. ‘We averaged about forty on our way out.’
‘Good, good.’ The sheriff wrote it down. ‘So at forty miles an hour, we’d cover sixty miles in an hour and a half.’
I gave Pavlik an admiring glance. He’d get his gold star later.
The sheriff began chewing on the eraser end of his pen, giving me a glimpse of little Jacob Pavlik in grade school. ‘We still need to know what time we were stopped here by the flooding. With all the commotion, I didn’t think to look.’
‘Maybe Missy or Zoe noticed,’ I suggested.
‘Well, now, I can tell you that,’ Hertel said.
‘You can?’ Pavlik and I looked at him. ‘Why didn’t you say so?’
‘You asked how far we chugged into the Everglades, which I didn’t know, and what time we left the station, which I did. You never did ask when we stopped out here.’
‘I’m asking it now.’ Pavlik’s eyes were narrow slits. ‘When?’
This time I patted his thigh.
‘Why, a mite before ten p.m.’
I threw a smile at Pavlik. ‘That means that Potter went off the train here about nine.’
‘And “here” is approximately forty miles west of the station.’ Pavlik leaned back against the banquette and stretched.
‘And how do you figure that?’ from Hertel.
‘Easy.’ I pushed Pavlik’s paper in the middle of the tabletop so the engineer could see the sheriff’s notes. ‘We reached the place we reversed at nine-thirty and, according to you, our current position at ten. That’s a half hour after reversal, meaning we must have passed this spot a half hour before reversal or nine p.m. That also means that at forty miles an hour we would have covered – you guessed it – forty miles between eight and nine p.m.’ I sat back now, too, pleased with our paired reasoning.
But Hertel frowned. ‘Sounds simple enough, but the problem is we weren’t traveling at the same speed coming back east as going out west. In fact, I was keeping the throttle at near crawl because the track was flooding. And good thing, too,
or I wouldn’t have been able to stop before that wash-out.’
The engineer pulled the paper toward him and dug a stub of a pencil out of his bib pocket. Touching it to his tongue, he started to work. ‘Now if a train’s heading one direction at forty miles an hour, and another at, say, twen—’
I let my forehead hit the table and took the self-inflicted pain without whimpering.
TWENTY-TWO
Pavlik’s eyes were glazed over the instant Theodore B. Hertel, Jr closed the door behind him. ‘So the long and the short of it is that the later it got, the more the rain slowed us down.’
‘There is no short, when it comes to our engineer.’ I was holding my head in my hands. ‘Only long. Really, really long.’
‘Did you understand all that?’ Pavlik asked. ‘I feel like we just lost more ground than the road bed in front of the locomotive’s nose.’
We had Hertel’s chicken scratchings in front of us, but given that we hadn’t maintained a steady speed, even he hadn’t been able to calculate our location with any degree of reliability. And I wasn’t sure we’d have understood if he had. The man had the presentational skills of your average batty theoretical physicist.
‘Well, we have to start somewhere.’ Pavlik drew himself up. ‘We know we reversed around nine-thirty and got stuck here at ten.’
‘Correct. What we don’t know is where “here” is.’ I checked my cell. One a.m.
The ‘Dark Side of Midnight,’ as legendary Milwaukee jazz DJ Ron Cuzner had dubbed his late-night show way back when. Ron had kept me company through countless hours spent rocking Eric when he was a colicky baby. And today …
I shook myself back into the present.
‘… try to bracket the time of death,’ Pavlik was saying. ‘We know Potter was alive as Zoe got up to welcome people. Hopefully she’ll be able to tell us exactly what time that was.’
Or, more likely, Missy would. ‘So that time, whatever it is, will be the early end of our bracket. The latest has to be well before we reversed directions at nine-thirty.’
‘Why “well before”?’
I chewed on my lip. ‘I see your point. Since we don’t know how slowly we’ve traveled since the turn-around – or “reversal,” as Hertel insists – let’s just say Potter went off the train before nine-thirty.’
‘Why not after?’
‘Because you said he’d fallen or been pushed—’
‘Let’s use “exited,” since we don’t know. It’ll be more consistent.’
Honest to God, Pavlik was nearly as maddening as the engineer. ‘You said he’d exited when we came past this point on the way into the Everglades.’
‘Actually, I didn’t. You did.’
I tried to think back to the conversation with the engineer and who had said what.
‘See?’ Pavlik pointed at his notes. ‘You took over questioning here and made the statement to Hertel.’
Son of a bitch, but the sheriff was right. ‘Only that has to be how it happened. We’re on one side of the break in the tracks—’
Pavlik interrupted. ‘Let’s call what lies in front of the train – to the east of the locomotive – the flooded track. We don’t know there’s an actual break or that the tracks are washed away, rather than merely covered.’
‘So stipulated,’ I said, though if I clenched my teeth any harder, I’d need to wear a mouth guard to spare my molars. ‘But my point is that Potter’s body was on the opposite side of the flooded track from where we sit right now. Remember? We had to wade through water to get there?’
Pavlik was writing. ‘The snake was encountered on the opposite side, east of the flooded track.’
‘With Potter’s body in him.’
‘Mostly.’
‘Thank you.’ I was one heartbeat away from—
‘Maggy, you think I’m nitpicking, but this kind of detail is important.’ Pavlik read from his notes: ‘The snake was encountered on the east side of the flooded track, opposite the train’s stopped position. The lower portion of the victim’s body was protruding from its mouth.’
‘The African rock python was encountered,’ I corrected. Two could play this game.
‘We have only the engineer’s opinion that it was a python, and only,’ the notes again, ‘Markus’s belief that it was, indeed, a rock python.’
I threw up my hands. ‘Hey, maybe it isn’t even a snake. Why don’t you just say a really big worm with teeth dwarfing a great white shark’s? Want me to go out and count them?’
‘Sarcasm rarely becomes you, Maggy.’ Pavlik was writing again.
‘I was going for “facetious.”’
‘Well, you missed the target.’ He still didn’t look up.
I sighed. ‘OK, I’m sorry. Obviously, this detecting is more complicated than I realized.’
‘The record-keeping is tedious and using the same terminology to identify something may seem repetitive, but believe me, it reduces ambiguity and makes the detecting, as you call it, easier and conviction much more likely.’ He raised his head and smiled. ‘Apology accepted.’
I cocked my head. ‘Aren’t you going to tell me what word I should use instead of “detecting”?’
Head down again. ‘I’m trying hard not to.’ A beat. ‘But “investigating” might be a good choice.’
Pavlik was just too cute and I laughed, genuinely. ‘“Investigating” it is, Sheriff. Now tell me what difference it makes to the investigation to say that both the snake and Laurence Potter’s body were on the east side of the flooded track, versus the snake was on the east side of the flooded track with Laurence Potter’s body inside it. Mostly.’
‘Happily.’ Sheriff Jake Pavlik, out of his jurisdiction or not, made steady eye contact. ‘The difference is how Potter got there.’
TWENTY-THREE
‘Are you saying Larry Potter didn’t necessarily exit the train as we passed this spot on our way west?’
‘Exactly,’ Pavlik said. ‘The—’
I interrupted. ‘Do you know if pythons eat … dead things?’
‘Carrion? If you’re asking whether they’re scavengers or consume only what they’ve killed themselves, I don’t have a clue.’
‘We’ll have to ask somebody.’ My kingdom for Google. ‘I’m sorry, I interrupted. You were saying?’
‘Just that the snake could have retrieved the body – or Potter, still alive, if that’s the way it went down – from another location.’
‘Retrieved?’ The word made the thing sound more like a loyal hunting dog than a repulsive, slithering man-eater. But then foxes probably weren’t so fond of hounds, either.
‘Yes. Retrieved the body and conveyed it to where we found them both on the east side of the flooded track. That means Potter needn’t have exited the train on the east side of the flooded track, but anywhere in the vicinity.’
‘And the time?’
‘According to the engineer, he didn’t see the snake – and Potter – until he’d brought the train, now eastbound, to a stop and climbed down to investigate,’ notes again, ‘“a mite before ten.”’
‘So, this “mite before ten” would be the latest Potter could have exited one of the cars, and the start of Zoe’s speech the earliest.’
‘Agreed.’ Pavlik wrote it down and gestured toward Grace’s tattered copy of Murder on the Orient Express. ‘Who’s next?’
‘“The secretary, MacQueen,”’ I read. ‘That would be Markus.’
‘Have Zoe send him in,’ Pavlik ordered. ‘But first, and I should have thought of this earlier, grab some bottled water and a rack of clean glasses.’ He hooked his finger to the club car behind us.
I stood up, too tired to question. ‘Will do, boss.’
‘Oh, and Maggy?’
I stopped and turned around. ‘Yes?’
‘Glass glasses, not plastic. And use a towel when you take them out of the rack.’
I got the glasses and, on Pavlik’s orders, poured the water into three of them. One for him, one for me a
nd one prepared for our next witness. And that witness’s fingerprints. Then I went to the far-end door and slid it to access the vestibule.
The train was eerily still without the clatter of the tracks passing below. I pulled open the door of the passenger car, half-hoping the whole lot of them would be asleep. If so, Pavlik and I could follow suit. It had been a long day.
But alas, Zoe was still awake and seated in the front row, with Prudence now next to her. The latter looked up.
I stepped in. ‘Is Markus—’
‘Here,’ a voice said, and he stood up.
‘See?’ Grace popped up from the seat behind Prudence and Zoe. ‘I told you we’d be called in the same sequence as the characters in the book were.’
‘That means I’ll be very nearly last,’ Rosemary Darlington, aka Mary Debenham said. ‘Wouldn’t you rather go alphabetical? Perhaps start with “A” for Arbuthnot?’ She hooked a finger toward the young man seated next to her. Danny had finally snagged an audience with the great lady.
‘Andrenyi comes before Arbuthnot,’ Carson, aka Count Andrenyi, pointed out. ‘I should go first.’
‘I think we’ll stick with the book’s order.’ I turned to Zoe. ‘Is the only railroad staff on the train the engineer?’
She shrugged, as if it didn’t matter, and called out, ‘Missy?’
The first Mrs Hubbard half-rose from a seat next to Pete the bartender about three-quarters of the way back. I had to hand it to Missy, she certainly was being sought out by the young men on the train. But then we only had three passengers under the age of thirty – it shouldn’t be surprising that they’d seek each other out.
Even from this distance, I saw Missy blush. ‘Maggy, we had a very tight budget, you know.’
Which had managed to put us in a very tight spot. ‘And …’
‘And, well, the train people said we had to have a conductor and I told them we did.’
‘Don’t tell me,’ I said. ‘Pierre Michel?’
The line between fact and fiction was quickly blurring. Although for these people maybe they were the same thing.
