***
“Then what happened?” Nellie asked, breathless.
Martin was still shaking like wind chimes from what had happened. “I don’t know. Right after they arrested him, they tossed me out of the car and shut the door in my face.”
“I just don’t understand…” Nellie said, shaking her head. Nellie and the Coburns were huddled together in the first-class sleeping compartment. Martin had just stumbled through the door a few minutes before with a tale that seemed to grow taller as he spoke.
“You shouldn’t be so surprised,” Selina said, her hands folded neatly in her lap. She may have been crying hysterically earlier, but she made it a point to overcompensate now. “You’ve known him for less than a day. Who knows what he’s capable of?”
“That’s not what I meant. I meant…well, I’ve spoken with him all this evening. We haven’t been separated since we first became introduced. Where did he find the time to kill that murderer?”
“Then he lied to the marshals about being the murderer.”
“But why?” Nellie persisted, still not understanding.
“What, exactly, did Mr. Hunter tell you he did for a living?” Selina asked.
Nellie shrugged. “He told me that he was a professional adventurer, but I’m sure if someone else asks him, he’ll give them a different answer.”
“Where’s he from?”
“Again, I didn’t get a clear answer out of him,” Nellie said. She didn’t mention the strain she heard in Ian’s voice, almost as if he was hiding an accent. The journalist in her refused to say something before she was able to verify it. Besides, she was too busy being distracted by Selina’s questions and the rebellion they had awaken inside of her. Because the more she thought about it, the more she realized that she didn’t understand her new friend. She had spent the better part of a day speaking with him, and she didn’t know a thing about him, and this unnerved her – as it should have. Then she added, with a sudden spark of hope, “Maybe we’ll be able to ask him soon enough.”
“I come from my mother, although if you ask her, she’ll never admit to it,” a voice said suddenly behind her.
Nellie and the Coburns all jumped. Nellie turned around wildly to see Ian leaning against the door, his hands planted casually in his pockets. They hadn’t heard him come in, even though the door had a little squeak to it when it was opened. Ian looked so much at peace with the world that it was hard to imagine that he had just escaped from custody a few minutes before.
Nellie was so startled, she wasn’t sure if she wanted to hug or slap Ian. Instead, she found a middle ground, snapping, “What were you thinking? We were worried for you.” The emotion in her voice caught her off-guard.
“Well, someone had to be worried for my safety, and it definitely wasn’t going to be me,” Ian said as he settled down into a cushioned chair. He winced dramatically. “Sitting on the floor like that can age a man.”
“Why would you do that?” Nellie persisted.
Ian’s smile evaporated a little. “Well, how else was I going to find out the truth?”
“The truth?” Nellie repeated.
“It was obvious that Mr. Coburn wasn’t guilty. No offense, Mr. Coburn, but I’ve known killers, and you aren’t a killer.”
“What do you do for a living, exactly?” Nellie asked, Selina’s question now infecting her.
Ian ignored her as he continued, “When the marshals had taken away Mr. Coburn, I found it interesting that he made no attempt to resist his arrest. While I had no idea what he was being arrested for, his compliance was what drew me in initially. And when I walked into that train car, and I saw Mr. Coburn and his interrogators near the tied-up corpse, the intrigue obviously deepened. And so I committed myself to the only logical choice: I falsely admitted to the murder.”
“That was the only logical choice?” Nellie wondered, uncomprehending.
“I needed to free our innocent friend here while also understanding the mystery behind the murder. And so I told them what they wanted to hear, and in a few minutes, they had me tied up to the pole and left me alone in the room.”
“They left you alone? Why?” Martin asked, still shuddering from his encounter with the marshals.
“I have a talent for driving people away. I don’t get invited to a lot of social events, which, believe it or not, I consider to be a gift rather than a curse,” Ian said. What Ian failed to mention was that one of the marshals, in a spasm of frustration, had pressed his gun against Ian’s temple during his interrogation. Ian didn’t bother to share this detail because he didn’t find it relevant to his story. “And thank goodness they left me alone with my thoughts, because I needed it.”
“You weren’t alone. You were tied up with a corpse,” Martin said, understandably horrified.
“Correction: it was evidence, but it wasn’t the only evidence. Did you remember the paint peeling off the walls?”
Martin shook his head slowly. Ian sighed. “You couldn’t have asked for a more blatant clue as to how Mr. McKenna had died.”
Nellie leaned forward, having forgotten her earlier disgust with Ian. She asked, “How does the paint give it away?”
“Paint can peel for a number of reasons. One of those reasons is if the paint comes into contact with moisture. So this is my theory. When I was in Kansas City, I read that the rail yard that houses train cars for this company was caught up in major flooding recently. I believe the refrigerated car was among those impacted, and its ventilation system was severely damaged as a result. Now, the ventilation system onboard your average refrigerated car uses a supply of chloroethane to cool the air that is pumped into the interior. As useful as this chemical is, it can be dangerous, deadly even, if you are breathing it in for a sufficient amount of time. Mr. McKenna was inadvertently being poisoned by the sheer levels of the chemical present inside of the car. During their brief interrogation of me, the marshals revealed that they were posted outside of the doors of the train car for most of the trip from Kansas City. It was only by this saving grace that they weren’t killed in the same manner.
“So when I found myself being bound to the same pole as the dead killer, I decided to check the body for evidence of chloroethane poisoning. Initial symptoms include dehydration, blurred vision, and dizziness only a drunk can appreciate, among other ailments. The longer you’re exposed to the chemical, the worse the symptoms become, culminating in vomiting, loss of consciousness, and failure of the heart and lungs. When I looked over the corpse, it showed signs of these very symptoms. There was dried vomit around the mouth and the corpse was blue in the face, indicating that McKenna ultimately died from choking on his bile. There was bruising on the neck indicating that he was flailing against his restraints at one point.
“Not only did the body tell a story, but I was in danger of becoming a storyteller myself. While I’m confident that most of the fumes had dissipated by the time I found myself in my sticky situation, I still felt a bit woozy. They say that chloroethane poisoning is similar to intoxication. Whether I was beginning to feel the effects or if I had just subconsciously convinced myself that I was being poisoned was irrelevant. What was relevant was that I had to make my escape, and escape I did.”
“How did you escape?” Nellie asked.
Ian grinned. “In my travels, I once met an Indian soldier who deserted his post while stationed in Bombay. When the soldier was captured, his British captain was planning on strapping him to the mouth of a cannon and lighting the fuse. The night before the execution, the Indian somehow escaped his cell. He told me how he did it so that we would be even. Do me a favor and I’ll pay it forward.”
“I think we’re missing the bigger picture though,” Nellie pointed out. “And that is that no one is responsible for McKenna’s murder. The marshals are looking for a killer that doesn’t exist. If anyone should be tried for his murder, it should be the awful engineer who designed that
ventilation system.”
“Do you think that scenario is actually playing out in their minds?” Ian argued. “As far as they’re concerned, they’re trapped on a train brimming with suspects. This McKenna fellow is one of the most hated people in Wyoming, if you believe everything you read in the papers. The marshals would believe in a pair of hands being the killer before they believed in a chloroethane leak. And given that Wyoming is still recovering from that range war some months back, all it takes is accusing the wrong person of murder to rip off the scab. Who knows what’s going to happen in the next day – the next few hours, even. It’ll be enough to make God go mad.”
Chapter 9