“Investigating,” I said.
“Thinking,” Lisa said.
“Reading,” Wolfgang said.
“Out. Out. Out!” Aaron ushered us into the corridor and shut the door. “I can’t believe you’re making me say this, but could you not play games around a dead body?”
“It’s not a game,” I said. “If there’s a killer on this train, we want to find out who it is before they get another one of us.”
“Another one?” Brooke whimpered.
“How soon can the police get here?” I asked Aaron.
“We’re in the middle of the desert—they can’t.”
“Send a chopper,” I said.
“They’re all occupied, water-bombing the bushfires.” He was chewing his lip. “None spare.” That bastard bird, I thought to myself.
“Let’s head back to Alice Springs,” Majors said. “What’s that, six hours or so?”
“Oh, I’ll just pull a U-turn then, shall I?”
“Well, stop the train and call a bus,” I said.
“This is still a working freight line. We have to reach our stops so the freight trains can overtake us.”
“Well, change the blooming freight schedules,” Wolfgang said. He was scarily intimidating in full flight, even in his striped pajamas; he towered over Aaron. “I want off this junk heap right now.”
Aaron finally snapped. “Listen! None of you are detectives, or police. Just as we did last time we found a body, I’m going to ask you to go back to your cabins and wait. We’ll stop at Manguri, where an officer will come on board, we’ll let the freight train that’s behind us pass us, and then we’ll hoof it straight to Adelaide.”
“What about Coober Pedy?” Lisa asked. “That’s supposed to be next on the itinerary.”
“It’s a small town, but it’s at least a thousand people, right?” I added.
“We’re not stopping at Coober Pedy,” Aaron said, “we’re stopping at Manguri, which is the closest point on the train line to Coober Pedy. Manguri is not a full station: it’s a platform in the middle of the desert designed for freight to pass us, which we have no choice except to head to unless we want to be barreled into from behind. There’s forty kilometers of mine shafts between us and the town. Trust me: the best plan is to pull over at Manguri, let the freight pass us, and then we’ll go directly to Adelaide. I’m hoping to get there about twelve hours before our original arrival time.”
Wolfgang was already marching off. “Well, I’m hoping not to die,” he called over his shoulder. “I’ll take my meals in my room, please.”
Aaron put his hands out flat, as if to exaggerate that he had nothing better for us. Cynthia arrived with a chair and sat it down in the corridor. It was clear this was on instruction: she was a guard.
Adrenaline faded and the time started to sink in; it was almost dawn. It felt strange to say good night, so oddly formal but also not quite enough for the situation. Phrases like “sleep well” hummed with the hidden meaning of “stay safe.” “See you tomorrow” became a dark question. But we said our pleasantries anyway, slowly splitting off to our rooms. Lisa was the last one left as I reached my door. Her room was closer to the bar, which means she’d deliberately followed me past her room and down to mine.
“What do you think?” she asked. “Love or money?”
“It can’t just be money. Everyone with the financial motive to kill McTavish doesn’t have the motive to kill Wyatt.” I was thinking of Jasper specifically; my late-night rumination that he might have wanted to remove the competition seemed misguided now. To kill McTavish to secure a book deal had made enough sense to make him a suspect in my mind last night, but it gave him possibly the least motive to kill Wyatt, who he’d just struck a deal with. “How did you know this would happen?”
Lisa furrowed her brow. “I didn’t say that.”
“You said that something would happen and I’d think you were the murderer. Perhaps you expected the body to be found later in the morning. Maybe Jasper blew it by discovering it early. Is that what you meant?”
She looked both ways. The darkened corridor was empty, the shadows of trackside foliage whipping across her face in a flickering roulette wheel. She leaned in, lowered her voice. “Is that really the type of question you want to be asking when we’re all alone?”
“You’ve got to sell it a little more if you want to sound threatening. Put some shoulders into it,” I said. “Besides, you followed me here. I’ve been thinking about what it means to write all this down. You want to make sure you’re in this book, to be a large enough character to have your story written. That’s why you’re going out of your way to cause a scene. I don’t think you’re a killer, but there’s something you want me to say for you.”
Her cheek twitched.
“You can’t defame the dead,” I went on. “If that’s what this is about.” When she remained silent, I probed, “I didn’t know Wyatt published you.”
“Wyatt published my debut. The book about the car thief. It’s not like I’m hiding it. Anyone can look that up. I changed houses for this one. Purely a business decision”—she held a finger up—“before you get ahead of yourself.”
“I wasn’t.”
“I believe that even less than Aaron’s reason keeping us on this death trap.” She leaned in closer still. “Here’s that legal expertise you wanted from me. I’ve worked with law enforcement enough to know how they work. They could easily bus us into Coober Pedy. It’s small but there’s a hotel, a tiny airport. But you introduce more links in the chain—a bus to town, for example—and the weaker it gets. Right now we’re sealed up tight. No one on. No one off.”
It dawned on me. “They wouldn’t.”
“They would. They don’t want this killer to get away, and so they’ve locked us in with them. All the way home.”
Chapter 27
Don’t walk backward in Coober Pedy, so the saying goes.
Coober Pedy is famous for two things. First, the unforgiving heat, which forces much of the one-thousand-person township to live underground. Their houses are burrowed into mountainsides, with rock-walled living rooms like nuclear bunkers from the 1950s. Front doors are either entranceways carved into cliffsides or hatches in the very ground. Surprisingly, given the first, the second thing the town is famous for is not vitamin D deficiency but opal mining. Even more uniquely, given the riches beneath the earth, it’s not entirely overrun by a multibillion-dollar mining conglomerate; rather, it’s largely mined by a mix of industrial operations and hopeful prospectors. Rumor has it the town is filled with secret millionaires who choose to project an exterior of poverty in case people suspect their plots are valuable and move in on their dig.
Opal mining is a simple matter: dig hole, check hole, leave hole. Coober Pedy mandates that mine shafts are to be left open, the mound of excavated dirt left beside the shaft. This serves two purposes: preventing people from falling through an improperly filled mine shaft, and declaring that a site has been explored. The consequence is that the desert is pockmarked with dig sites, mine shafts and mounds of dirt. Though Coober Pedy was nowhere in sight from the station at Manguri, where the train now stood still, these excavations peppered my view like an ever-expanding asteroid belt. Each dig is often only a meter from the next, with drops of varying depths and lethality. So the general guidance is to watch your step. Hence, never walk backward.
I wasn’t in too much danger of falling down a mine shaft, given that we’d been confined to our rooms for the rest of the journey. I didn’t envy Aaron and Cynthia’s duplicates down the other end of the train, where nonfestival guests wouldn’t know about either McTavish’s potential murder or Wyatt’s definite one, and would just be annoyed about having their once-in-a-lifetime trip cut short.