Shadows on the Train (11 page)

“Who's under the bandages?” I demanded.

“A frail passenger with a head injury,” the nurse snapped. “I'll thank you not to slow us down. Getting my patient to the hospital is vital in a case like this.”

“In a case like what?” Jogging up beside the stretcher, I poked a finger in the patient's tummy. “This patient's awfully well-fed for being frail.” Chewbley well-fed, I was thinking. What better way of sneaking the piano teacher off the train than wrapped up in bandages?

Nurse Ballantyne held the door open for the stretcher bearers. The first backed gingerly out, trying to keep the stretcher straight. Nevertheless, it tipped slightly, and the patient started a headfirst slide.

“Be careful,” I said and scowled at Nurse Ballantyne. “That's Edwina Chewbley, isn't it? You kidnapped her because she knows too much.”

Nurse Ballantyne's right hand flared out from under her cloak. This time I was
wompf
!-ed against the wall and held there. The nurse's beady eyes were two tiny black cannon–balls. “Don't cross me, Dinah Galloway,” she whispered.

I squirmed, feeling like a bug being pinned to a Bristol board for a science project. “That telltale whisper,” I retorted. “You're the one who threw the blanket over me in the observation car.”

The two tiny black cannonballs gleamed for a second. Then Nurse Ballantyne released me so abruptly I crumpled to the floor. She strode off the train, her white-stockinged legs flashing under the station lamps.

Nurse Ballantyne might have finished with me. I wasn't done with her yet. Not as long as I had VOLUME.

“HELP! HELP! NURSE BALLANTYNE'S SMUGGLING MRS. CHEWBLEY OFF THE TRAIN!”

Heads began popping out of sleeping compartments. On the platform, porters stopped loading their dollies with packages. The stretcher carriers paused too, with doubtful glances at Nurse Ballantyne.

In the awkward silence, Freddy murmured admiringly, “What a voice, Miss Galloway. I just wish we had a brass section.”

Nurse Ballantyne began cracking her bony knuckles. The
snaps
! echoed out into the still darkness around the station. “Proceed on with the patient! An ambulance is waiting.”

“KIDNAPPING IS A CRIMINAL OFFENCE!” I shouted. I'd heard this on a police show recently. Kind of an obvious comment, if you thought about it, but I had to stall the removal of poor Mrs. Chewbley.

The stretcher bearers hesitated some more. The woken-up passengers began providing commentary.

“All those bandages. An odd way to travel, I must say. Rather like Cleopatra wrapping herself up in a carpet!”

“Is there even a hole for the poor thing to breathe through? Dreadful the way they treat old people nowadays.”

“Wonder if that patient had the mussels. I was afraid to—I
knew
they looked a bit off.”

Bundled in their housecoats, Talbot and Pantelli trotted up to me. Talbot murmured, “Okay, Di, what gives?”

I tried not to stare at Pantelli's housecoat, which was patterned with all kinds of trees, their Latin names underneath. “Edwina Chewbley is under those bandages!” I announced.

Jumping off the train, I marched up to the stretcher before Nurse Ballantyne could flare out a bony hand at me again. I grasped a bandage end. “Freedom is mere seconds away, Mrs. Chewbley.”

With an authoritative nod at the porters, Freddy and the curious passengers now clogging the train doors, I peeled the head bandage off, round and round…

And round…

A face emerged, but not Mrs. Chewbley's.

The salt-and-pepper-haired woman's.

Freddy escorted Madge and me into the head conductor's office. “Way to pull a publicity stunt,” the young conductor winked at me.

Then, having got his first good look at Madge, Freddy goggled while slo-o-owly closing the door. My sister, who'd changed into a pearl gray blouse and matching slacks, looked fresh and lovely, even at one in the morning—but this was a girl who looked fresh and lovely after playing tennis for two hours. Unnatural, if you ask me.

“Ow!” Still goggling, Freddy had closed the door on his nose.

The head conductor switched his unhappy gaze to me. “Forty-two years with the Gold-and-Blue,” he mourned. “Never an incident like this. Never a claim about a disappearing passenger. Never an attack on a patient.”

“Dinah didn't attack the patient,” Madge pointed out. “She
unwrapped
her.”

Though very critical of me herself, Madge grew prickly when others tried to be. It's a sister thing.

“Nurse Ballantyne's patient injured herself while rummaging in the luggage car for her extra set of dentures,” Head Conductor Wiggins explained. “One of our cleaning staff opened the door for her, and she barged in ahead, without waiting for help. Said something about being ‘dethperate.'

“She seems to have knocked over a stack of cartons, including a,” Mr. Wiggins frowned at his notes, “box labeled Softie Toilet Paper. Odd. In any event, the falling boxes struck her on the head, jaw and ears, and she passed out. Nurse Ballantyne and I thought it best that she be moved to the nearest hospital.”

“Very sensible and unmysterious,” agreed Madge, with a stern sideways glance at me. “There will be no further trouble from my sister.
Will
there, Dinah?”

“Y'know, it's just so hard to commit,” I began, and then I noticed the fierceness of Madge's glance. Blue as in glacial blue. “Er, no, there won't.”

Chapter Fifteen

Charles? Chuck that Idea

Talbot, Pantelli and I poised our forks over the eggs Benedict. “Charge!” I ordered, and we all plunged our forks into the eggs at the same time. Yolks overran the plates like tsunamis. It was glorious, the true advantage of ordering eggs Benedict.

Madge was having her breakfast of grapefruit and melon wedges in our compartment. The baleful looks from other passengers gave her a headache, she'd said.

After stuffing a yolk-soaked English muffin in my mouth, I punched into Madge's cell phone—which I'd
borrowed
—the number from the envelope.

“This is Calvin Blimburg,” a tinny voice said.

“Mflgmltch,” I said.

“Sorry I'm not here right now. Got something to get rid of, huh? Without anyone knowing, I bet. Well, no probs. I'll deal with it, and we'll both stay mum.”

“
Mflgmltch
,” I repeated. The guy was a fence!

“Leave your name, or a phony name if you prefer, and I'll get back to you.” Beep!

I gulped down the muffin. “I don't have a phony name,” I said wrathfully. “And I don't approve of the business you're in. However, my dad wrote your number down, and I need to talk to you. My name's Dinah Galloway.”

I added our number to the message and snapped the phone shut. Talbot was regarding me dubiously. “Do you really think you should give your personal contact info to a stranger, Di?”

I was too glum to worry about it. Had Dad handed over the king to Calvin Blimburg? Was that why it was missing from the envelope?

And why oh why had Dad contacted a fence in the first place? Whatever his other failings, I'd been sure Dad was honest.

In Winnipeg, everybody lined up for the tour bus that would first take us to Assiniboine Park and then to the famous Forks Market. At the prospect of shopping, Madge's mood improved, and she was chatting with another woman about the jewelry, pottery and other knickknacks from different cultures available at the market.

Pantelli glanced up from the
Plant Life of Assiniboine
Park
brochure he was studying. “Dinah, how come you're being so quiet?”

I couldn't reply. I was too miserable at the thought of Dad getting involved with a fence.

Talbot rapped me gently on the head. “You in there, Di? I want to check on your walkie-talkie.” Taking it from my hand, he pressed a duct-taped
On
switch. “Testing,” he said into first my walkie-talkie, then his. “Testing…”

“We could always use them as doorstops,” I said absently. I was looking at Pantelli's
Plant Life
brochure. One of the photos had distracted me, for the moment, from the thought of Dad and Calvin Blimburg.

I murmured to Pantelli and Talbot, “I've just had a blazingly brilliant idea about how to smoke out the Whisperer.”

Talbot and I lowered our strings, each with a chunk of cheese tied at the end, into the green Assiniboine River. Madge, leaning against an elm, shook her head at us over her sketchbook.

“For all you know, prairie fish might
love
aged cheddar,” I said defensively. Sitting cross-legged at the edge of the grassy bank, Talbot and I squinted into the green depths. Minnows were nipping at the cheese. Well, you had to start small.

The cheese was left over from the picnic Beanstalk had handed us when we boarded the Winnipeg tour bus. Though when Madge stepped in front of him, Beanstalk first clutched the basket to his heart. “Is it—can it be true you're engaged?” he demanded, with a catch in his voice.

I'd grabbed the basket from Beanstalk. “You're crushing our lunches.”

“Not that there's anything wrong with being
un
engaged,” I remarked now, as more minnows circled the cheese chunks. “In fact,” I said loudly over my shoulder, “more and more people are choosing the solitary life.”

“Yeah?” Talbot glanced at me sideways. “Is that what you're planning for yourself, Dinah?”

“I was thinking more of Madge,” I said, raising my voice even more as my sister appeared to be dozing. “After all, true artists devote themselves to their work. ARTISTS LIKE MADGE,” I bellowed.

Talbot grinned at me. “That's a relief. I mean,” and he reached over to pull my string, which had drifted to the bank, back into the water, “think how solitary the solitary life would be.”

From behind Madge in the bushes,
crackle
. That got her attention. Her blue eyes popped wide open. “Bears,” she exclaimed fearfully and leapt up.

“You're so urban, Madge,” I said, in withering tones. “That's no bear, it's Super Dendrologist.”

Pantelli emerged from the bushes. He wore long gardening gloves, a full rain suit and a magnifying glass on a string around his neck. “I found just the specimens I wanted,” he announced, holding up a Baggie filled with leaves.

Madge stared at him for a moment in disbelief. “Pantelli, it's a hot day. How can you stand to wear all that stuff? And aren't those your mother's gardening gloves?”

“They were,” Pantelli informed her. Striding over to a trash bin, he peeled the gloves off, dropping them in without touching their outsides with his fingers. “When Mom opens her gardening shed, reaches inside for these and discovers them gone, she will just have to understand. People have to expect to make sacrifices in the name of science.”

“I'm going for a walk,” Madge said rather faintly.

We watched her stroll under some elms to the Winnie-the-Bear statue, sculpted in honor of the Winnipeg bear donated to the London Zoo in 1914. A.A. Milne named Winnie-the-Pooh after him.

Meanwhile, Pantelli stripped off his slicker so that he was just a regular kid in T-shirt and shorts again, not Super Dendrologist. He stuffed the rain jacket and pants into the bin.

“Good thing my sister didn't see that,” I commented. “She would definitely have lectured you on wasting perfectly good clothes. And have asked inconvenient questions.”

Good thing, as well, that Madge was so urban, I reflected. Otherwise she might've inspected the leaves in the plastic bag and recognized them as poison ivy.

Phase one of my blazingly brilliant idea, or BBI, was now complete.

We stood in front of
The Path of Time
, a sculpture by Marcel Gosselin at the entrance to the Forks Market. The sun-shaped sculpture let light in through carved-out symbols. Light filtered through different symbols depending on where the sun sat, high in summer, low in winter.

“Just think, people have been gathering at the forks of the Red and Assiniboine rivers for six thousand years,” Madge mused. She already had her sketchbook out.

“But only one of them is the Whisperer,” I muttered to Talbot and Pantelli.

I'd jammed the walkie-talkie into a back pocket of my cutoffs. Signs warned about pickpockets, but I wasn't worried about losing the walkie-talkie. Like, who'd want it? “This is what I'm anxious to hold on to,” I practically shouted and held up my rainbow purse.

“So
loud
, Dinah,” Madge tsked, unaware that drawing attention to my purse was all part of my BBI. She flipped her sketchbook shut and traced the arc of the inner limestone sculpture with her finger. “Birth, life and death. From the earth, and back to the earth.”

“Uh, Madge, if you don't mind, we're hoping not to spend the birth-life-death span
here
…”

Madge sighed. “The way it's turning out, much of my own lifespan consists of listening to Mother and Mrs. Audia plan my wedding.”

I peered unhappily at Madge. “That may come to an end pretty soon.”

It was now time for phase two of my BBI.

“Of course I'll be fine,” I assured Madge. “I'll be with Talbot and Pantelli. I know you would much rather prowl blissfully through the two levels of market stalls and shops on your own.”

Besides, I thought, we have to get rid of you to make my idea work.

“We-ell…” Madge hesitated. She gave an odd glance at Pantelli, still brandishing his Baggie of leaves. Then her glance fell on Talbot, and she smiled. Grown-ups always trusted Talbot. “All right. We'll meet back here in an hour.” Noticing a stall glistening with First Nations silver jewelry, she broke into an Olympic sprint.

After a brief BBI strategy meeting, Talbot, Pantelli and I headed past limestone etchings of Manitoba's past: the lined, weary faces of the immigrants, and the logo of the North West fur-trade company, with a spreading oak tree and the word
PERSEVERANCE
overhead.