Shadows on the Train (15 page)

Then, finally, the piano teacher sagged back in her seat. A begrudging grin cracked her plump features. “You never switched the cups. I was wrong about you, Dinah Galloway. You
are
a smart—no, make that brainiac—junior sleuth. You've outwitted me fair and square. I've just downed the tea-dissolved sleeping pills I'd intended for you.” She shook her head, and more hairpins cascaded.

I gulped. My impulse was to burst into tears of relief, but that could wait. I had to question Mrs. Chewbley while she was still conscious.

“You made Pantelli's piano teacher sick,” I accused. “You made Mr. Wellman sick—and you put something into my Coke yesterday in the dining car. No wonder you didn't want a taste of it when I offered! I thought I felt awfully queasy for just having taken a normal nap. Meanwhile, you calmly walked away to this hiding spot in the luggage car, where you already had,” I gestured to the romance novels, “your reading material to help pass the long solitary hours.”

Mrs. Chewbley shut her eyes. “I had to make you come and look for me, Dinah. Alone, without your oh-so-protective buddies. I thought I'd have to slip out in the dead of night to summon you in secret, but then, much more conveniently, you snooped your way here. And now I must ask you for the king. If
I
don't get it from you, my assistant will—and ‘dead of night' will become more than just an expression. It'll be your epitaph.”

“But I don't have—”

Loud, descending-the-scales-type yawn from Mrs. Chewbley. “Gracious, you've given us far more trouble about stealing back the king than we thought you would. A loudmouth twelve-year-old,” Mrs. Chewbley marveled and opened an eyelid at me. “I could use a helper like you, Dinah. Ideal to train 'em young.”

With a snore, she tipped forward. I grasped Mrs.

Chewbley's shoulder and shoved her back into an upright position. “My goal is to sing at Carnegie Hall,” I informed her, “not become the next Artful Dodger.”

I heaved the dregs of both teacups at Mrs. Chewbley. She spluttered awake. “Now,
talk
,” I ordered. “What do you mean, steal the king back? Was he yours to begin with?”

Mrs. Chewbley giggled. “Sure he was—after I'd stolen him! Never mind from where, though. Thievers, keepers, I like to say. But then one night, just over seven years ago, my son was in a card game with Ardle McBean. The foolish boy ran out of money and offered the king up as an eighty-thousand-dollar bet. Ardle won the king—by
cheating
.” Mrs. Chewbley tsked disapprovingly.

There was an irony in here somewhere, but I was too tired to pin it down. “Go on,” I urged.

“Then Ardle, wanted by the police for a whole packet of break-ins and thefts, turned himself in and got slapped in jail for seven years. All that time I had to wait for my king—talk about your seven-year itch,” Mrs. Chewbley sighed, and her eyelids began to flutter again. I gave her a not-too-friendly shake.

“Huh? Oh, right. Anyhow,” she resumed, “I visited Ardle in jail, pestering him to tell me where the king was. I said we'd give him eighty grand.” Here Mrs. Chewbley snorted. “The king's worth way more 'n that now, not that we told Ardle, of course.

“Finally, just before he got out of the slammer, Ardle admitted—spilled the McBeans, you might say—that he'd entrusted the king to your late dad. So I moved into your neighborhood to keep an eye on the Galloway household. I became the sweet, befuddled old lady fond of chocolate.
And I listened
. It's amazing what you find out if you listen. Most people don't have that gift. I found out that Mrs. Grimsbottom taught piano. That among her students was a friend of yours, Pantelli Audia. That your mom thought it'd be good for you to take lessons too, from someone far more patient than sour Mrs. Grimsbottom.

“Whom, yes indeedy, I served horse-chestnut-spiked tea to. She grew violently ill, our Mrs. G.”

Our Mrs. C. lapsed into a nostalgic, if sleepy, smile. “As did your agent, later on.

“Of course, I pretended not to know Ardle, and vice versa. It was part of the deal we were supposed to have. He gave me a start when he showed up at your window—I was afraid he'd tip you off to me! Like I say, you just can't trust that McBean.

“And then the stupid, soft-hearted man had a change of heart. Said he'd decided to be law-abiding, as he'd promised his late friend Mike Galloway. Ardle intended to retrieve the king from you and return it to its rightful owner! I knew I'd have to get the king from you myself—and silence Ardle before he blabbed to you.” Mrs. Chewbley yawned. “Silence him…faster than a speeding Buick, shall we say?”

“Cut the jokes, Mrs. Chewbley,” I said, unamused. The dissolved sleeping pills had relaxed the piano teacher into a would-be Ben Stiller. “Who
is
the rightful owner, anyway?”

“As to that,” eyes shut, Mrs. Chewbley lolled around in her chair, “you'll have to find out yourself, Dinah Galloway.”

With a sleepy shudder, the piano teacher fell face-first into an open box of chocolate creams.

I, however, was cured of any urge to snooze. My first thought: Scram in case Nurse Ballantyne shows up, with her baleful
wompf
!s and whispers.

Jumping up, I began to investigate the on-end trunk, which Mrs. Chewbley had claimed didn't open from the inside. Now that I knew she wasn't a kidnap victim, a prisoner, there was no reason to believe her.

But where
was
the exit? The trunk definitely didn't open from the inside. I heaved at it with my shoulder. Ow. Not smart, Dinah. That was my left shoulder, the one Nurse Ballantyne, in her guise as the Whisperer, kept wrenching out of its socket.

Never mind the Whisperer, whatever happened to Bowl Cut?

Deafening snore from Mrs. Chewbley. I guessed that was the only answer I could expect for the moment.

Massaging my shoulder, I leaned against the fabric-covered box to the left of the trunk.

And toppled backward. The box was hollow!

So that's how Mrs. Chewbley got in and out of her hiding place, I thought, gingerly picking myself up in the passageway. Well, at least now I could go for help.

I was about to propel my increasingly sore body toward the luggage-car door when it slid open to reveal a dark-trench-coated figure with hat pulled low. Even in the throes of poison ivy, Nurse Ballantyne couldn't resist gliding about menacingly.

I dove back into the box.

“Ma,” Nurse Ballantyne hissed. Whoa. Mrs. Chewbley was Nurse Ballantyne's
mother
? This was the most charming mother-offspring match since Mrs. Bates and Norman.

Soft footsteps padded along the passageway. Any second the fabric would be thrust aside, and here she'd find me, stuck with the snoring Mrs. Chewbley.

I had to get out. But how? All those boxes, cartons and trunks loomed around me, hemming me in.

“
Ma
.”

The footsteps padded ever closer.

Sir Edmund Hillary I was not. As I frantically clawed my way up a stack of Lola's Lingerie boxes, one broke loose. Pink nightgowns slipped out, unfolding in mid-air to float down on Mrs. Chewbley. Soon her sleeping body was draped from head to toe.

I nearly toppled, but grabbed the edge of a wooden crate in time and heaved myself up. Below, I heard Nurse Ballantyne croak, in best Whisperer fashion, “What are you supposed to be, Ma, a giant strawberry sundae?”

Ah, a rare flash of humor from our poison-ivy-ravaged nurse. Strange—when not in Whisperer guise, Nurse Ballantyne never wisecracked.

Then the nurse erupted into an interesting assortment of whispered swear words—who said sleuthing wasn't a learning experience?

I also heard vicious slaps. Nurse Ballantyne was trying to rouse her maternal unit.

I crawled from the top of the carton to the top of Hans and Roman's giant, ebony, magic coffin. The top was slashed with painted-on lightning bolts. Nothing subtle about those guys.

Subtle. Now that's what
I
had to be. Subtle like a panther, I thought, inching forward in total silence. Hey, I wasn't doing too bad. Even Talbot, athletic and wiry as he was, couldn't be quieter than I was being.

With growing confidence, I inched along the top of the magic coffin. I leaned forward, putting my weight on my hands, and pitched headfirst into darkness.

Oh, that sinking feeling.

With a
smack
! I hit bottom.

But, no—it wasn't bottom, just a platform of some kind. Splintering noises, and I was falling again.

This time I landed on cushions, which would have been nice, except that the first body part to make contact was my much-damaged left shoulder. I let out a long howl of pain.

“That was helpful,” remarked Pantelli in a laryngitic voice. “By crashing through that upper layer, you've gained us some light.”

I raised one eyelid. The other was smushed into a cushion. Pantelli was right. From the very top, light was now dribbling down.

Across from me, Pantelli sat against a magic-coffin wall, calmly tucking back honey-roasted peanuts from a Gold-and-Blue snack bag.

He held out the bag to me. “Whenever Beanstalk, Freckles or some other conductor brings round the snack trays, I help myself to several of these at once,” he explained. “You never know when you might need an extra shot of protein.”

Conductors and snack trays…why did something flicker in my mind just then?

“That was a false bottom you cracked.” Pantelli gestured up at the platform just above, now sporting a jagged-edged hole. He shook his head, marveling. “Always the dramatic entrances with you, Di.”

Painfully I raised myself into a sitting position. I was wondering just how necessary to the rest of my life my left shoulder would be.

Wincing, I filled Pantelli in about finding Mrs. Chewbley— the new, definitely not improved Mrs. Chewbley. And about Nurse Ballantyne, a.k.a. the Whisperer, being close by.

“But how'd you end up in here?” I finished. “And did you see Talbot on your, er, travels?”

Pantelli shook his head. “I was too busy falling through a Hans and Roman trapdoor while you were staring at the woo-hoo cuckoo.”

“A trapdoor at the base must be where their volunteers go in,” I said. “Then Hans and Roman open the main part of the coffin, and the platform above hides the volunteer from the audience's view. Ver-r-ry tricky of Hans and Roman.”

“Trickier still that there's no exit,” Pantelli said glumly. “I tapped on, shoved at and, oh yeah, at one point
pleaded
with all four sides of this coffin thingy. As well as, natch, yelling my lungs hoarse. So, we're stuck.

“But hey,” he pulled a card-sized box from a sweater pocket, “now that we've got some light, we can play Miniature Treevial Pursuit.”

From the top of the coffin came a shrill whisper. “
Can
I play?
”

Pantelli and I reacted less than suavely. We let out blood-curdling yells.

Above us, bony trousered legs swung through the opening—long, spindly feet dangled above us. The Whisperer was about to drop!

Pantelli and I each plastered ourselves against coffin walls to avoid being the Whisperer's bull's-eye. One of my knees struck something knobby. “Yeee-ouch” was my first reaction.

Then, frantically, it occurred to me that the knobby something might just be a latch. It
was
.

Above us, Nurse Ballantyne was flapping about like a flag. “Prepare to be flattened like two pancakes—
pest
-flavored pancakes,” she hissed, with a dry, ominous chuckle.

I wrenched at the latch. Another trapdoor yawned open. Pantelli and I flopped through to land on the floor underneath. We let loose more yells.

Noise blared on and on. It took me a second to realize we weren't the sources of it anymore.

The opened latch had triggered Hans and Roman's built-in security alarm. A siren wailed.

Chapter Twenty-One

The Fisherman Resurfaces

Fzzzz!
The stomach-remedy tablets dissolved. Head Conductor Wiggins drank deeply.

With Madge beside me, I'd confided everything, from my very first meeting at age five with Ardle, to Pantelli's and my scrambled escape from Nurse Ballantyne in the luggage car.

The head conductor examined his empty glass thoughtfully. He poured out fresh water from a glass pitcher and tossed two more tablets in.

Then he raised the fizzing glass to me. “I salute your health, Miss Galloway. As opposed to the tattered remains of my own health. You and your sister may be interested to learn that I've applied for early retirement. I'm a broken man, you see.
You've
broken me.

“But—it appears you were right about the vanishing passenger.” Head Conductor Wiggins gave a rather high-pitched laugh. “Passen
gers
, I should say! Why
me
, I sometimes wonder? No, no, it doesn't matter.” He sighed.

As assistant head conductor, Beanstalk was now in the luggage car, trying to wake Mrs. Chewbley up for questioning. The police in Toronto were also waiting to question her.

The other conductors were combing the train cars for Talbot. The protests of passengers woken up for a second night in a row, as conductors checked their compartments, pierced the office door like darts.

With Head Conductor Wiggins busy staring into his stomach-remedy liquid, my sister turned to me. She'd started out by giving me bear hugs, but now we were into scolding.

“Why didn't you tell Mother and me about this ‘king' business? And to remove that envelope of Dad's without saying anything—well, that's just unforgivable. It's her final memento of him.”

This was the tough part. “It was for Ardle's sake,” I began—but I couldn't figure out the words to explain that I kind of liked Ardle. Just as I would always like people whose outside roughness hid an inside goodness. Or semi-goodness, anyway. Madge and Talbot, I realized, didn't have time for the Ardles of the world. Not that I liked Madge and Talbot any less for that. It was just the way they were. But Dad had found time for the Ardles, and, now, so did I. They made life more interesting. Maybe it was the challenge of trying to find the goodness—okay, semi-goodness—in them.