“And she knew too much about that night in Edinburgh, when she was conceived. She held on to a copy of the article with you all in it, for one thing. But she knew a lot about Majors’s plagiarism accusations too. She brushed it off as being public knowledge, but that’s not true: there’s barely been a proper plagiarism accusation on this trip, it’s all veiled threats. The only way Brooke would really know about what went on that night was if someone who was there told her.” Brooke had told me, when I thought she was talking about Majors: I should have believed her. But she’d been talking about her mother. “You told her to try to discredit McTavish.”
“She was fascinated by him—Henry himself, sure, given all his success, but it was mostly the idea of a father in general. She hit her teens and she had questions. I knew she would. I’d been spending a lot of time thinking about what to tell her. I couldn’t lie to her, but I also couldn’t bring myself to tell her what he did to me. I hoped that telling her about Majors would be enough for her to know he was bad news without me telling the whole story. I thought I’d never have to, that he was an ocean and a lifetime away. I thought she’d never meet him.”
“But she wanted a father figure, and so she built one herself. Out of his books,” I surmised. I’d been thinking back to S. F. Majors’s interpretation of obsession: The stalker might picture themselves having a certain relationship with this person. A connection that only they see. They insert themselves into a world they aren’t actually a part of. In this case, the connection was more literal, but the interpretation still held. MongrelWrangler22 had posted that they felt like he was speaking directly to them. A bedtime story. To Brooke, reading the Detective Morbund books was like talking to her dad. No wonder she didn’t want them to end.
“I indulged that. I figured it was harmless, healthy even. A bit of an outlet. Like I said, he was supposed to be a continent away.”
“Until this trip.”
“Exactly. Ouch.” Lisa sparked the cables against her fingertips and shook them, just as the engine sputtered and then roared. She hoisted herself into the driver’s seat and patted the dash. “Research pays off after all.”
Then we were moving. The only road at Manguri was the one bending away to Coober Pedy, so Lisa drove off-road parallel to the train track. The ground was flat enough to accommodate the train but ragged enough to jostle us roughly in our seats. The Ghan was a speck on the horizon ahead.
“When you were invited here, I imagine she would have begged to come with you?”
“Desperately. But I wasn’t having it. I wasn’t even going to accept the invitation—I certainly didn’t want to be anywhere near him. But she really wanted to finally meet him. We had a huge blow-out, screaming-the-grout-from-the-kitchen-tiles type stuff. And I told her, in the heat of the moment, what he’d done. That he’d raped me.”
“And she still wanted to come?” I said, despite already knowing the answer. I should have believed her.
“It made her want to come even more. You must understand, I didn’t sit her down and gently tell her the reality. I screamed it at her across the room.” Lisa took her eyes off the tracks, where the back of the Ghan had gotten closer, turning from a blurry lump to glinting steel, to read my face. “You clearly don’t have kids. Or if you do, not girls. She was livid, accused me of saying anything to get her to not go. She’s a smart girl, she wouldn’t have let anger override common sense, and she knows what men are capable of. But you’ve got to understand, she had this picture of him in her head. Her father. The writer of her favorite books, the teller of her bedtime stories. He’d been speaking to her for years through Morbund. She couldn’t replace that image she’d built so easily.”
“I imagine she’d have found a way to come without you, then.”
“She told me if I didn’t take her, she’d pay her own way. Sell her car if she had to. I figured I was better off here protecting her.”
“Looks like she wasn’t the one who needed protecting.”
“She wouldn’t have killed them.”
“I don’t think you believe that.”
My conversations with Brooke flashed through my head. Her sucking up the courage to introduce herself to McTavish. Him pressing his room key into her hand. The image of him that she’d built, in denial of her mother’s warning, crumbling in front of her. The key, squeezed so tight it cut into her palm. The note, which must have been originally attached to the whiskey: From an admirer. McTavish whispering to her: It’s a mighty fine drop to drink alone. Her telling me in the Chairman’s Carriage: Never meet your heroes.
Lisa’s knuckles whitened on the steering wheel. The man who raped her and the man who had covered it up were both dead. I didn’t have to say it.
Lisa would have had the same thoughts I did. I knew exactly why she had left Brooke alone. Even for a second. Even that it crossed your mind. Love doesn’t make you invincible to doubt. I knew that as well as any. Lisa knew that by leaving the train she would incriminate herself with the appearance of guilt, and it might give her daughter a head start.
Lisa had sought me out, told me what she had, in the hope that I would write it down. And that one day her daughter would read, and understand, what she’d done to save her.
The funny thing was, Brooke believed her mother capable of the very same crime. That was why she’d been at pains to introduce me to Majors’s possible motives: to distract me from her mother’s. Each protecting the other.
“Why take me back?” I asked.
“Because you’ve solved it. Haven’t you?”
I nodded, but with the bouncing of the Land Cruiser it was a bit more enthusiastic than I’d intended, so I added, “Almost.”
“And you don’t think it’s her. I can tell. So maybe she needs you.” She floored the accelerator and the engine whined. “That’s why I’m going to get you back on the train.”
I’d been so focused on her I was almost surprised when I looked up and saw the back of the Ghan filling my view. Lisa was nudging eighty, and she pulled up alongside it, dropping to seventy and holding close. From the outside, the calm meditative clack-clack was gone: the train kicked up an absolute clattering roar as it moved.
“You came after me not because you cared that I’d taken the manuscript,” Lisa shouted over the noise. “And not because you thought I was a murderer. You came to ask me something. And you haven’t asked me yet. You’ve just been telling me what you already know. Train’s coming up. So you’d better ask.”
“Majors. Is she telling the truth?”
“Seriously? Is that it?”
“You were there that night. I think she told McTavish a version of the story that wasn’t the true story from the papers. That’s the version he stole for Off the Rails. Right?”
“You jumped off a moving train to ask me that?”
“I had to know for sure.”
“You already do. Have you learned nothing about Henry McTavish? What he does?” She was nodding. “This is a man who takes from women. He took my body. And he took her mind.”
Chapter 31
It is much more difficult hanging out of a car window than they make it look in the movies, let alone jumping from one.
I had one hand on the side mirror and one hand on the roof as I maneuvered my way out of the car. The window didn’t wind all the way into the sill, so the glass dug into my thighs. The wind roared in my ears, the tires kicked dust into my eyes and my cheeks stung with the peppering of bugs. I squinted against the wind at the Ghan. Lisa was aiming for the smoking deck; she had the Land Cruiser as close to the tracks as she could go without hitting them. The deck was too high to jump onto easily, but I was pretty sure I could grab on to the fence and climb over.