Nineteen

Mrs. Berns was right, though I hated to admit it, and I certainly wasn’t going to celebrate my corpse-luck. I was going to spend zero more time feeling sorry for myself, though, and I was going to do whatever I could to help Aimee. Unfortunately, the conductor kept watch outside the door and wasn’t letting anyone near Aimee’s room.

So I did what I could: I kept our door cracked, and I listened.

The EMTs arrived twenty minutes after the train stopped. They made quick work of bundling up the body. I heard one of them clearly say, “no visible cause of death.” My heart soared. Maybe it wasn’t murder. Maybe Aimee’s mom had died of a heart attack, or some other invisible disease. She was young for that, but it wasn’t unheard of. But then, where had Aimee and her dad gone? That was weird.

I poked my head out when I heard the EMTs leave the room, but there wasn’t much to see. The tight angles of the hallway meant that they couldn’t use their gurney, so they had Aimee’s mom’s corpse in a black body bag, held between them. The conductor glared at me, so I ducked back in our room, but not before noting that Ms. Wrenshall was also peeking out of her doorway.

It wasn’t until three hours later that we were brought breakfast, and another hour after that the Glendive Chief of Police showed up. He was not a Gary Wohnt, and for that I was grateful. He was around six feet tall, late fifties, built like Santa Claus with a hound-dog face. His blue eyes were kind. I’d spotted him coming through the crack in the door and so had time to shoot to my seat and pretend I was reading across from Mrs. Berns when he knocked at our door.

“Come in.”

He smiled at both of us, holding out a hand. “Bob Harris. I’m head of the police force here in Glendive, for what it’s worth.”

His voice was deep and gravelly, perfect voice for a radio announcer. I liked him instantly. “Mira James. This is Mrs. Berns. Have you found Aimee and her dad?”

His lip twitched. “You don’t waste time. Did you know the
family?”

“Just from the train ride,” I said. “We got on in Detroit Lakes, back in Minnesota. Aimee said they’d been traveling since New York.”

“That’s right,” he said, glancing down at his notes.

Mrs. Berns coughed. “Was she murdered?”

I kicked her, but it was too late.

“Too soon to tell. Do you know this gentleman?” He held out a mug shot. The guy was lean and hungry-looking, with pockmarked skin and a sneer.

Mrs. Berns shook her head in the negative. I mirrored the gesture. “Do you think he’s involved in whatever happened to Aimee’s mom?”

His lips tightened. “Not directly. His body was found at the Fargo train station, near some abandoned cars. Two gunshots to the head, point blank.”

That information tried to sink in but was not having luck. “Wait, there’ve been two murders connected to this train?”

By way of answering, Chief Harris glanced back at his notepad. “You’re on your way to the PI conference in Portland, aren’t you, Ms. James?”

My eyes widened. I’d misjudged him. He might look like a kindly small-town sheriff, but he’d done his homework. I wondered how often he was underestimated. Probably made his job quite a bit easier. “I am. I’m not a licensed PI, though.”

He kept staring at his notes. I wanted to snatch them out of his hand. Did they say that I was a dead body magnet, possibly that I should receive a little extra scrutiny if a corpse showed up in my vicinity? Or maybe it was a blank sheet of paper, and good ol’ Bob was just trying to get me to confess to killing the woman next door. Dammit. Silence was my arch enemy. I felt compelled to fill it. “There’s another PI on this train, a licensed one. His name is Terry Downs.”

Chief Harris raised his eyes. He didn’t appear particularly excited by my confession. “You don’t say. What else can you tell me?”

Not much. We settled back into silence. I lasted all of twenty seconds. “Aimee reminded me of someone.”

He cocked an eyebrow. “Who?”

I sighed. I had gotten myself in too deep. There was nowhere out but forward. “A girl who was abducted when I was five. Her name was Noel.”

Mrs. Berns visibly stiffened next to me. I’d never told her about Noel. What would have been the purpose?

“Do you think there’s any connection?” Chief Harris asked.

I didn’t, except for my failure: I had let the abductor take Noel, and now Aimee couldn’t be found. I swallowed past the tightness in my throat. “No. But I’m worried for Aimee. Can you tell me if she’s been located?”

He stared at me for an unblinking eon, and I recognized the steel behind the kindness of his blue eyes. He would do what he could to solve this. “She has not. Neither has her father. According to Ms. Wrenshall next door, you two were the last ones to see Aimee and her father. What time was that?”

I told him about the brief interaction outside their door last night, and everything else I could remember, which wasn’t much. Mrs. Berns had little to add. After it was clear we had no more to offer, Chief Harris thanked us for our time and was about to step out when one last question occurred to him, almost as if it were an afterthought.

“Before I go, can I ask? Did you hear a scream last night?”

I nodded. “You mean this morning. Right before the train stopped just outside of Glendive.”

“No,” he said, his expression odd, “at two thirty-four this morning. Ms. Wrenshall said it woke her up, and she looked out into the hall. She saw you talking to a porter just outside the room where the dead body was discovered.”