“Marshal? May I speak with you for a moment?”
Ansel was kneeling, examining the head wound on the bodyguard killed in the massacre, when he heard the little voice call out. The marshal looked up to see one of the first-class passengers standing in the doorway. He didn’t know the passenger by name, but he recognized the face, with the thick glasses and thin goatee. Ansel remembered the face during a visit to the dining car from what felt like years ago but was actually two days beforehand. The marshal remembered the passenger being in an intense conversation with the corpse to his left.
Ansel stood up, wincing as his knees creaked. “How can I help you, sir?” He asked.
The passenger struggled for the words. “My name is Davis, um, Ezra Davis. I am – was – a business associate of his.” He pointed with a shaky finger at Clark’s body stretched out on the couch, staining the fine cushions red.
“I’m sorry for your loss, sir,” Ansel said with a sigh, but not for Davis losing an associate. He sighed because Death was running rabid through the train, and there was no telling who was going to be the next one bitten. He didn’t even remember the war being this heavy on the soul.
“I need to talk with you,” Davis said in a pleading voice. He added, “In private, please.” Ansel’s first impression of Davis was that the man had status, and yet he had never seen someone so powerful look so helpless.
Still, Ansel was reluctant to leave the crime scene. He pointed to his fellow marshal, Haley, who was pulling Adele’s body away from the wall to get a better look at her wound. “We’re still investigating this mess,” Ansel said. “If you have something to say, say it here.”
“It’s for the best that I don’t say it here,” Davis persisted. He gestured to the curious crowd that was still milling about in the corridor as he mouthed the words, “Someone might hear.”
His eyes narrowed, Ansel looked at Davis for a few moments before saying to Haley, “I’m going to go talk with this gentleman for a few minutes. Make sure no one but me walks in here while I’m gone.”
“Don’t worry about that. I didn’t even want to walk in here,” Haley said with a grimace, lifting his boot up and examining the blood that had gotten on it. In another time, Ansel would have been alarmed that this was what disgusted Haley the most about the scene. But Ansel was distracted by Davis and what he could possibly have to say.
And that was how, less than a minute later, Ansel found his self in the sleeping compartment next door, sitting across from Davis and two of his companions. The woman sitting next to him was wearing too elegant of a dress for the murders that happened next door, her hair too polished for their train being stuck in a blizzard. To the other side of Davis sat a silent man with a square jaw and curly hair that was graying at the wingtips. They were sitting in awkward silence before Davis broke it with a hammer. He asked, “Did you want a drink? I have a bottle of single malt that’s packed away in my suitcase, but I can have Mr. Price here fetch it for us.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Ansel said stiffly. “I won’t be here for that long. Now, you said you have some important news for me?”
“Oh, yes, that’s right,” Davis said before clearing his throat. He looked to the woman sitting next to him. She gave an encouraging nod, and so Davis continued, “I think I know who is responsible for what’s been going on.”
“Is that so?” Ansel said, barely interested. He found that whenever something inexplicable happened, there were as many theories as there were people. He learned long before to be skeptical around people who offered unsolicited opinions.
Ansel’s lack of faith was telling, because Davis said, “I know you don’t believe me. You must be asking yourself what qualifies a privileged man like me to talk about something so unfortunate. In reality, that is all of the qualification that I need.”
“Is that so?”
“It is,” Davis said, starting to find his strength. “Do you know what Clark was? What I am?”
Both pains in my backside, Ansel wanted to say. Instead, he asked, “No, what?”
“If you had thought to review the passenger manifest when this was starting to happen, you would know. Regardless, we’re ranchers, returning home from a business meeting in Kansas City.”
“And how, exactly, is that relevant to the crime we have on hand?”
“We’re survivors of the range war that happened in Wyoming some months back. It was sprayed across newspapers everywhere – you must have read it somewhere. But if you’ve already forgotten that you had been transporting that foul Sheldon McKenna to Wyoming, then you can be forgiven for forgetting the headlines then.”
Ansel brushed off the veiled insult, instead choosing to be surprised. “How did you know about Mr. McKenna?”
“Word travels quickly, especially on a train, and especially when that train is trapped in the snow,” Davis said. “But that’s not the point. The point is that when we heard about that monster dying, we thought to ourselves that it was for the best. True, some of our more foolish associates had hired him as a mercenary during the fight, unaware of what atrocities he was capable of. But monsters live to be slayed, so we thought it was the universe just straightening itself out. But then we heard about what happened to one of Clark’s bodyguards, being so brutally murdered in the baggage car. We began to think that maybe the universe was over-correcting itself. And then what happened to Clark and his other bodyguard…”
“All signs point to the wife being the culprit,” Ansel interrupted. “You think that the wife was responsible for the other murders?”
Davis’ eyes snarled a bit at being interrupted. But in an instant, he was back to his regal self, saying, “What the manifest will tell you is that his wife’s name was Adele Rowe. What the manifest won’t tell you is the family that she had come from. I don’t remember the family name – I only remember it was something forgettable – but they were poorer than the dirt they plowed. My associate rescued her from that life of poverty, and she never forgave him for that.”
“And he actually told you all this about his wife?” Ansel wondered.
“He told me because he was hoping that someone else could understand it for him. But she held onto those feelings of resentment over these many years until she heard that those on our side in the war were dying onboard. I once saw a spark travel from one burning cornfield to one across the road and light up that one as well. Sir, I think we’re seeing that spark now.”
“Again, because you’re rich, you feel qualified enough to talk about the poor?” Ansel asked, incredulous against his will.
“I don’t know what it means to be poor, but I know what it means to be desperate. When I finally found love…” Davis paused to pat the hand of the woman next to him. “My family didn’t approve of Charlotte. They said that she was poor in everything. They said that if I were to marry her, I wouldn’t raise her up to our class but I would fall to hers. I lost my inheritance over what they insisted on calling a scandal, but I called the love you find in fairy tales. And I’ve been raising us up from those depths ever since. So yes, I know how the desperate feel, and I know how they want revenge for losing. They’re hungry, and they won’t feel full until us three…” He gestured to his self, Charlotte, and the bodyguard Price. “Until us three are just as dead as the Clarks.”
“So what would you have me do?”
“What would I have you do? Your job, I suppose. Your job is to keep order, and we are the order. I’m not asking you to like me – I can tell by the look on your face that I’ve already lost that battle. I’m asking you to think about what the newspaper headlines will read next week across the country, that the rich were being hunted down by the poor. Just think of the repercussions that would follow something like that? The country’s economy is already hanging by thread...”
“More like a hangman’s noose.”
“Well, let’s go with your metaphor then. Do you really want to be the
one who kicks the chair away? Or are you going to play nice with us?”
More than anything else, Ansel wanted to throttle the arrogant rancher. He could barely follow his superior’s orders, let alone a civilian. But deep down, he knew that the little rat was right, and he hated himself for thinking that. Finally, Ansel said, “Let me talk with the others.”
“This isn’t a committee decision. There is no other choice but to do the right thing.”
“I think you and I have a different definition of what’s the right thing to do,” Ansel growled. “But talk to me like that again, and I’ll do something that both of us know is the wrong thing.”