Murder on the Oregon Express Read online

  “Seriously? How do you know that?”

  Chase smiled. “I forgot you’re from the city. This is Sapphire Village. Everyone knows everyone’s business here. I honestly don’t know how he thought he’d get away with the affair.”

  “Right,” I smiled. “Well, hopefully you’ll find out through the grapevine who killed him. Do you have the gun, at least?”

  Chase nodded. “It was under the seat. So rest assured, the murderer on this train has lost access to their murder weapon.”

  He asked me a few more questions, then stood up, indicating he was finished with the interview. “Thanks for the information about the fight.”

  I nodded. “No problem. I hope it helps. I hope Isabella didn’t kill him, but then, someone in that carriage had to.”

  Chase nodded sadly. I realized that he knew almost everyone who had been on the train, apart from the tourists who didn’t have any reason to kill a man they didn’t know. That meant it was almost certain that whoever had killed the man was known to Chase, and I felt sorry for him. It must be hard working as a cop in a small place like Sapphire Village, where everyone knows everyone.

  Making my way back to the seat, Cat leaned in close to me. “So? What did he say?”

  Making sure no one was listening in to the conversation, I recounted to Sophie the conversation with Chase.

  “Hm, so that means someone on the train killed Brian,” she whispered, and I nodded.

  “Yeah. Which makes us suspects. Especially since I think I was the last person to see him alive.”

  “For sure. But of course, someone like Isabella, or Carl, are much better suspects.”

  “Wait, who’s Carl?” I asked.

  “Bald guy, forties, looks a little bit like Nicholas Cage?”

  “Ah,” I replied, nodding. I’d seen that man when I walked through the train on the way to the café car.

  “He’s Brian’s business partner,” Sophie continued. “They own Sapphire Adventure Tours, they started it probably about ten years ago. In the summer they do ATV tours, paragliding off the mountain, bungee jumping, that sort of thing. In the winter, it’s mainly snowmobile tours and backcountry ski tours.”

  “He told Isabella the business was in trouble,” I said, recounting the conversation with Brian’s ex-wife.

  Sophie frowned. “That would surprise me, but you never know. From what I can tell they seem to be doing pretty good business.”

  “Well, maybe he just lied to her since she was getting mad at him for not paying his child support.”

  “Yeah, and she has good reason to be mad at him about that, too.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Definitely. It was a huge scandal when it first happened. Five years ago, Isabella was pregnant, and about two months before she had the baby, Karen who owns Pickles’ Pizza found Brian knocking boots with a young ski instructor from Italy inside one of the ski patrol shacks on the mountain. She told Isabella, thinking she deserved to know, and Isabella kicked his cheating butt out immediately.”

  “Good for her!” I said, nodding.

  “Absolutely. It was all anyone spoke about for months. Of course, then there came the issue of the divorce. Isabella hasn’t got any family in Sapphire Village; she moved here when she was in her twenties from Nebraska or somewhere, so when the baby was born she couldn’t really work. Eventually she got some part-time work in IT at the digital marketing company in town; the owner was local and knew Isabella well and she was a quick learer. He let her bring the baby to work every day, so Isabella was making a living, but she definitely wasn’t raking in the dough. Meanwhile, Brian had all his money from the business, and hired one of those fancy suits from the city to be his divorce lawyer. He actually argued that he didn’t want to take care of the child at all, and that because Isabella kicked him out, he shouldn’t have to pay child support either.”

  “Wow, he sounds like a piece of work.”

  “Oh, he was,” Cat agreed. “Of course, the judge in their case gave full custody to Isabella, since that was what both parents wanted, but pretty much laughed Brian out of court when it came to his claim that he shouldn’t have to pay child support.”

  “And yet now Brian is telling Isabella that there’s no money in the business. But Isabella said that he took his latest girlfriend to Mexico.”

  “Wait, Brian has another girlfriend?” Cat replied, her eyebrows lifting in surprise. I nodded.

  “Apparently.”

  “Well, that’s news to me. I mean, the guy jumps from girl to girl, he was never exactly mister monogamy, but I didn’t know he was dating anyone right now.”

  “Maybe Isabella was wrong.”

  “Maybe. Either that, or I’m behind on my gossip.”

  Just then, Chase came back into the train car, the blonde woman’s husband going back and sitting back down next to her. “Cat?” Chase asked softly, and my cousin got up off the seat and made her way toward Chase for her interview.

  I mulled over the facts as I’d just learned them in my head. We had one very good suspect, possibly two. If Brian was telling the truth about the business being in trouble, maybe his business partner blamed him for it. In that case, there would be two people with good reason to kill Brian Armistead on this train. And if I was going to make sure everyone knew Cat and I were innocent, I was going to have to figure out which one of them did it.

  Five

  About an hour later everyone had been interviewed, the crime scene technicians had arrived and Chase had arranged for a bus to come and pick those of us who were on the train up and take us back to Sapphire Village. Luckily, the old railroad track ran more or less alongside the highway, so we only had to walk about a hundred feet in the woods at night before we reached the road.

  During the bus ride back everyone was silent, and when I finally got back to Sapphire Village I went straight back up to my apartment above the bookshop; I was so tired I forgot to put a new audiobook on for Archibald and only just managed to throw some kibble in Muffin’s food bowl before passing out on the bed, still fully clothed.

  When I woke up the next day I was both groggy and ravenously hungry; I’d completely skipped dinner the night before. I dragged myself out of bed and to the kitchen, grabbing some cereal and pouring it into a bowl, and when I saw the time on the microwave clock I let out a yelp. It was almost eleven, which meant that in just over an hour I was going to have to be at my Grandma Cee’s place on Brixton Road for our weekly witching lessons.

  I’d had no idea when I moved to Sapphire Village that I was a witch, which meant that I never got all the lessons my cousins and other witches who grew up in the witchy world did. Grandma Cee, a short old lady in her eighties that I was absolutely terrified of, insisted that every Monday–my day off–I come to the family home in Brixton Road at lunch time so she could give me lessons to get me caught up to speed.

  I had never been late, and to be completely honest, I had absolutely no desire to find out what would happen if I was. Grandma Cee might be a four-foot-tall octogenarian, but I had a feeling that woman would smite me in place if I dared arrive even a minute after the clock struck noon.

  I gobbled down the cereal, took a quick shower and changed my clothes, then headed down into the bookstore. Archibald was pacing–well, floating–in circles.

  “Where have you been? I’ve been waiting for you all morning!”

  “Sorry, I slept in,” I said, grabbing the iPad and quickly trying to open up a different audiobook.

  “Well, I find it quite rude to leave a man waiting on his entertainment, especially as I have no way of opening the books myself,” Archibald sniffed.

  “You’ve gone hundreds of years without knowing these books existed, surely you could wait an extra two hours,” I replied.

  “Ah, but that is where you are wrong! I was able to exist without them before I knew of their existence. But now, now that I know that this strange machine which reads the books aloud exists, and now that I know that it contains t
he words of a master of the English language, I must devour them as quickly as possible.”

  “You do realize you’re running out of books, right?”

  “Ah, well, no bother. I will simply wait for Miss Christie to write the next one.”

  “Seeing as she died over forty years ago, that seems unlikely.”

  Archibald let out a cry of anguish. “Oh, how death takes the greatest of us!” he announced dramatically.

  “I have to go, Archibald. I’ll put on ‘And Then There Were None’ for you,” I said, pressing play and then making my way to the far corner of the bookshop.

  The floor-to-ceiling shelves were filled with books, but near the bottom of one of the shelves was one titled People and Personalities in Oregon Fly Fishing, 1948 to 1957. Of course, the title was ridiculous, and it was obvious no one would ever read that book. Luckily for me, that was the point.

  I tapped the book three times and instantly a large, red glowing hole, about the size of me, appeared in front of me. I shook my head; there was no way I was ever going to get used to this portal to Brixton Road. I took a breath, stepped into the red glowing hole, and immediately felt like I’d been swept away by a tornado. The feeling only lasted a couple of seconds, and when I opened my eyes once more I was in Brixton Road.

  Brixton Road felt like someone had turned a Candyland game into real life. Peaches and Cat said it was created by all of the paranormal creatures–witches, wizards, werewolves–that lived in Sapphire Village back in the sixties, and it was obvious that they had been smoking a few joints while coming up with the design for it. The sky twinkled with stars that were nothing like the ones in the real night sky, and tonight it was a soft turquoise color.

  I followed the trail of giant, colored dots that created the road – they were soft, walking on them was like walking on a trampoline, past swirly colored trees and grass that was an unnatural pastel shade of green. Eventually I reached a large brown house with a pink roof, the same color as all the other roofs in Brixton Road, with a baby blue tree out front that looked like it was made from cotton candy.

  Knocking on the door, I checked my phone. It was still eleven fifty-eight, I’d made it with two minutes to spare. The woman who opened the door reminded me a lot of Ron Weasley’s mom from the Harry Potter books. She was plump, with the same copper colored hair that I had, wearing an old-fashioned checkered white-and-blue dress with an apron on top.

  “Oh, Alice, how nice to see you,” Sage Calliope, Cat and Peaches’ mom and my aunt, said when she saw me, taking me into a big hug. “I’ve just got some food ready for lunch, if you’d like to come in and have a bite,” she added.

  Before I had a chance to respond, however, the sound of a crackly old voice came out from behind. “Alice doesn’t have time for simple pleasures like food. She’s years behind in her training, if the Others come for her tomorrow and she can’t defend herself because she was busy eating a slice of your pie, how would you feel then?”

  “I think at least I’d die happy,” I muttered, causing Sage to swoon over me and take me in a big hug.

  “Oh, I’m so glad you’re living here with us again. I know you must miss Corrine so much, but I’m truly glad you’re back.”

  “Let the poor girl go, we have magic to learn,” the voice said again, and as I pulled away I saw Grandma Cee now standing next to Sage. She was a small figure, but imposing. The scar on her left cheek, her crooked nose and stringy grey hair couldn’t hide the fact that she had likely been a beautiful woman in her youth, although she seemed to be doing her best to hide it. Today, she was wearing a white pantsuit printed with various colored polka dots. She kind of looked like a McDonalds ball pit had thrown up on her.

  “Now, come with me, Alice. We need to practice our magic,” Grandma Cee ordered, and I dutifully followed her through the house.

  “There will be pie for you when you’re done,” Sage whispered to me as I went past, and I shot her a grateful smile. Cat was an excellent cook, I pretty much lived for her cupcakes now. It was obvious Cat had gotten her cooking skills from her mother, who I was pretty sure was incapable of making a bad meal after having tasted a few of them.

  I followed Grandma Cee into the large backyard behind the house, where the grass was that same weird shade of pastel green. I wondered what on earth I was going to learn today.

  “All right,” Grandma Cee said. “I am loathe to give praise too readily, your generation simply latches onto it and ignores the need for improvement. But, I must say, last week after you successfully managed to make fire appear out of nowhere and managed to make it dance, I can say you are a gifted witch. It should not be that much of a surprise; your mother was gifted as well. It is why the Others came for her, and it is why when the Others come back, they will come for you. You need to be better prepared than you are. Today, we are going to learn to deal with some of the more abstract sides of magic.”

  I gulped. So far, magic had seemed pretty simple to me. I simply had to focus on what I wanted to happen, point my finger at it, and it happened. Abstract stuff seemed like it was going to be a lot harder. And I wasn’t totally sure I needed to know it, anyway. Grandma Cee insisted that the Others were coming back, that it was they that had killed my Aunt Francine and not cancer, but no one else in the family seemed worried. Cat and Peaches said that Grandma Cee had simply never forgiven the Others after they had killed my biological mother, and now saw them where they weren’t, and it seemed that the rest of the family agreed with that assessment. I couldn’t help but not be too worried when no one else in the family was either.

  “The first thing we’re going to learn to do is teach you to fly,” Grandma Cee said. “This is basic abstract magic. Watch.”

  Grandma Cee grabbed an old, ratty broomstick from the side of the house. She dropped it to her side, and it instantly began to hover next to her. Climbing up onto it, Grandma Cee suddenly darted off toward the night sky. I watched in awe as she gracefully flew in slow, lazy circles above the house. Then, without warning, she did a loop-de-loop, a barrel roll and shrieked with delight as she swooped straight down toward the ground in a nosedive and pulled up at the last second, the grass on the ground waving slightly in the breeze caused by her movements. She might have been an old woman, but she looked fifty years younger on the broomstick. After a minute or so, Grandma Cee floated softly back down to the ground and landed without a sound, pulling the broomstick out from under her. It was back to being a simple cleaning tool.

  “Wow,” I couldn’t help but say. “That was impressive.”

  “Obviously, I have learned a few tricks in my time on this earth,” Grandma Cee said. “It would be unwise for you to attempt a nosedive, or a barrel roll right off the bat. But there is no reason why you shouldn’t be able to fly confidently around the house in a couple of hours.”

  “Ok,” I said, and I couldn’t help but feel a little bit excited. Magic was awesome, and I still wasn’t completely used to being a witch. Sometimes I was pretty sure that even now, weeks after finding out that I was a witch and that magic was real, I still hadn’t quite come to grips with it. But still, getting to fly around on a broomstick was even cooler than making things change color or making fire appear out of nowhere. I was going to fly!

  My heart pounded with a combination of excitement and apprehension as I made my way toward the broomstick Grandma Cee handed me.

  “Now, the key to flying is to really relax your body. If you stiffen up, the broom becomes much more difficult to control. You need to pass your body’s magical energy through to the broomstick. You do that by holding the broomstick, then picturing yourself becoming so light you begin to float. Go ahead, try it.”

  Feeling a little bit silly, I took the broomstick and held it horizontally. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine myself becoming as light as possible, then started to picture myself becoming so light that I started to float slowly upwards, like a helium balloon. Suddenly, I felt the familiar flow of energy building up inside of me,
then radiating through my fingers.

  “Now let go of the broom, slowly,” Grandma Cee said. I did as she asked and opened my eyes. My hand was now a few inches above the broom, which was floating in place. A grin spread across my features as I looked at the floating broomstick.

  “Good,” Grandma Cee said with a curt nod. “Climb onto the broom, like you would a horse.”

  “Ok,” I said, now feeling a little bit apprehensive. I hooked a leg over the broom and sat awkwardly on it.

  “The key to flying the broom is to be gentle but firm, and to really feel the broom. Lean forward slightly to go straight, pull back to go up, push down on it to go down,” Grandma Cee said.

  I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. Still, her instructions sounded simple enough. How bad could it be?

  Famous last words, right?

  I decided that I wanted to float about a foot in the air and do a small circle around the backyard. That would be safe, and a good introduction to broom riding. I leaned forward just a little bit and the broom began to putter along forward, my heels still dragging along the ground. Good! I’d moved on the broom and hadn’t died. This was a good start!

  I decided to go up a little bit higher. I pulled firmly on the handle of the broom, but apparently a little bit too firmly. Right away the broom shot upwards, heading straight for the sky. I screamed, wrapping my arms around the piece of wood as it headed skywards. Unfortunately, wrapping my arms around the broomstick only pulled it back further, and before I knew it, the broomstick was completely vertical. I looked down and saw my Grandma Cee looking up at me with a disapproving look on her face, her hands on her hips.

  I was going to die, and Grandma Cee was probably going to tell the whole funeral it was my own fault for being a terrible witch.

  I knew that if I was going to do anything, I had to get this broom back down to earth. The higher up I got, the more painful my death was going to be when I inevitably fell off this broom. Quickly deciding to change tactics, I forced my body to the left. The broom followed, my lead and headed left, leveling out. Unfortunately, I was now hanging upside-down on the broom, my arms and legs clutching at the wood as hard as I could. Looking down, I was probably three hundred feet up into the air.