Shadows on the Train

by Melanie Jackson

  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.

  Perseverance. I studied the immigrants’ faces and vowed, I’ll persevere and find you, Mrs. Chewbley.

  “Almost more of a plane tree look,” Pantelli murmured, inspecting the etched tree through his magnifying glass. We yanked him away.

  I walked ahead of the boys. Swinging my rainbow purse, I passed stalls with wooden animal sculptures, brightly beaded necklaces and bracelets, and swirled glasswork vases that flashed red, yellow, blue in the sun pouring through the skylights.

  Then, all at once, it was the colors of stamps that were flashing: ribbons of them in shrink-wrap, fluttering as visitors brushed by. “How much would an elk stamp be worth?” I blurted to the red-faced man behind the counter.

  With angry glances up at the skylight, the stamp dealer was busy smearing sun block over his cheeks. He squished some more out of a bottle, ble-e-ah-ttt, and rubbed it into his forehead. “I’ve complained and complained about this location. I shouldn’t be under the sun—not me or my stamps! Bad for both of us. I burn, they fade!” The stamp dealer slammed the bottle on the counter.

  He turned to me. “So ya got an elk,” he grunted. “The elk stamp came out several years ago. A big bright one. Fine stamp. It’d be worth…” He scratched his chin.

  “Eighty thousand dollars?”

  The stamp dealer’s features, shiny with cream, scrunched into a scowl. “Are you funnin’ with me, kid? A dollar eighty I’d give you, max.”

  “I thought so,” I said. “But what about a stamp with a king on it? Say, King Charles the First?”

  The dealer’s lotioned features gathered into a shiny scowl. “Now I know you’re funnin’ with me, kid. That King Charles, the guy who lost his head, came way before stamps were invented.

  “See, in Britain, it used to be that if you sent a letter, the person receiving the letter had to pay for it. Well, you can guess what happened. A lot of people refused, and the poor mail carrier was stuck with them. Some people even arranged with their buddies to put secret messages in the address of the letter. That way, the recipient could glance at the address on the outside, read the secret message and hand the letter back without ever having to pay.”

  Happy to be chatting about his favorite topic, the stamp dealer forgot to be angry about the direct sunlight beating on him. “In 1837, Rowland Hill suggested the senders start paying. Three years later, the first stamp appeared. It was called the ‘penny black’ because its portrait of Queen Victoria was printed in black. Shell out one penny, and your letter would go anywhere in the British Isles! Finally, the British had a system that worked. The penny dropped, you might say.” The stamp dealer’s shoulders shook with laughter at his joke.

  “Hmm,” I said, disappointed. “I was hoping Charles might be on a valuable stamp.”

  The stamp dealer wiped his eyes with a tissue. “Valuable? I’ll tell you what’s valuable: the 1855 Swedish three-skilling stamp. Now that’s worth a pretty penny. ‘Penny’!” Reminded of his joke, the dealer started laughing again, till I scowled at him.

  He sighed. “The stamp was supposed to be printed in green, but due to a mistake it came out yellow. That mistake made the 1855 three-skilling very rare. In 1996, somebody bought one for 2.3 million dollars. A stamp with a blooper is guaranteed to be valuable because just a few are issued before printing is halted.”

  The stamp dealer fished a crumpled business card out of his wallet and handed it to me. “Now, if you ever come up with a blooper skilling stamp, lemme know.”

  I looked around. Talbot and Pantelli were catching up to me. They made circular forefinger movements beside their heads: Are you crazy? The plan was for me to stay in front of them.

  I pushed ahead and immediately got entangled in long scarves of polka dots, glittery silver, fiery sequins, all suspended from hangers.

  “Just a minute,” the scarf-stall owner objected. “What do you think you’re doing, young lady? Those are my wares, not training equipment for you to practice rhythmic gymnastics on.”

  “I don’t mean to,” I protested, unwinding myself from a white scarf with a smiling blue puffin on it. “I’m trying to get out…”

  But the more I tried, the more I became wrapped up in scarves. Someone was spinning the scarves around me. Tighter and tighter they grew. I was eyeball to eyeball with the smiling puffin.

  “I’ll take that purse,” whispered a voice on the other side of the puffin.
The voice from the observation dome. The Whisperer!

  And my purse was plucked from my hand. Was the Whisperer Nurse Ballantyne, as I suspected? I couldn’t see, couldn’t even reach after it. Scarves bound my arms to my sides, mummy style.

  Talbot chased after the thief. Pantelli stayed to unwrap the scarves and drop them carelessly on the ground as the stall owner fumed.

  “Did you see who it was?” I demanded when my head was free of the puffin scarf.

  “Somebody in a trench coat, hat and gloves,” Pantelli said unhelpfully. He paused to admire a scarf with trees on it. “Ah yes, our old friend, the horse chestnut. We have these at home, in Vancouver,” he explained to the stall owner, who glared back. “The horse chestnut has medicinal properties if used correctly. If not, well…” Pantelli waggled his eyebrows ominously.

  The stall owner exploded, “Your friend’s purse has been stolen, my scarves are getting dumped on the ground and you’re talking about trees?!”

  Pantelli glanced at her curiously. “What else would you like to talk about?”

  Talbot sprinted up to us, hardly out of breath at all, I noticed irritably. Talbot was one of those types who sprinted round the school track even when not ordered to by a gym teacher. Like, for fun.

  Jack did that kind of thing too—but Jack was an even more disagreeable subject to me these days than athletics, so I shoved him out of my mind.

  “Your whispering thief got away,” Talbot apologized. “He or she was pretty cunning about it too—hid behind a book rack. Then stuck a fist out and punched me.”

  Talbot was squinting at us out of one eye. The skin around it was dandelion yellow; soon it would be a bright purple.

  “You’re going to have a fine shiner,” I said, crooking my arm through his. “We better find you some ice. Look, there’s a sno-cone vendor over there. You can snack while cooling your shiner down.”

  Pantelli chimed in, “My aunt gave me a bag of frozen peas for my shiner last month.” He added, for the stall owner’s benefit, “Friends of Di tend to accumulate injuries.”

  The stall owner was busy gathering her scarves up off the ground. She flapped several of them at us. “You ought to be telling the police about the stolen purse.”

  “Oh, we’ll know who the thief is soon enough,” I called over my shoulder as Pantelli and I led Talbot to the sno-cone vendor. “The stolen purse is filled with poison ivy.”

  “At least we know now that, whatever the valuable King Charles item is, it can’t possibly be a stamp,” I said on the bus back from the Forks. “Charles the First was pre-stamp.”

  Pantelli nodded. Talbot probably would have too, except that he was leaning his head back against his seat, with a bag of ice jammed over his shiner.

  Pantelli informed us smugly, “You may be interested to know the species of oak that Charles the Second was hiding in. I’ve been Googling, and it was an oak apple tree at Boscobel House. A descendant of the oak apple lives at Boscobel to this day. That’s the benefit,” Pantelli added, nodding wisely, “of preserving acorns.”

  “Strange,” Talbot uttered in a muffled voice from under his ice pack. “My headache’s actually getting worse.”

  Madge was a few seats ahead, comparing purchases with a couple of other women. I punched our home number into her cell.

  Mother came on the line and cooed how much she missed me, reminded me to behave, and blathered other Motherly nonsense. “Oh, and I visited Ardle today. I got a word or two out of him about this king you asked about.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yes, not yeah, Dinah. Anyhow, Ardle mumbled that this king—”

  “Yeah? I mean, yes?”

  “—is a stamp.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Madge Burns About LaFlamme

  Madge slid her engagement ring up and down her finger. “I can’t understand it,” she fretted. “The only e-mail I’ve received from Jack today is a group one saying how shallow and boring he is.”

  Madge and I were in our compartment. The Gold-and-Blue was swiftly skimming from Manitoba into northern Ontario. The scenery had roused itself from flat prairie. Trees now crowded the sides of the tracks.

  I said, “Sometimes young men have changes of personality, Madge. It could be that Jack is, well, shifting.”

  “You make him sound like a tectonic plate.” Madge pulled off the ring and studied it as if trying to read her future in the tiny diamond’s lights and shadows. “Is there something you’re not telling me, Dinah?”

  “Ummm…”

  “There is.” Madge rounded on me, her blue eyes bright with anger and tears. “Out with it, Dinah Mary Galloway.

  What is it that I don’t know about Jack? ”

  “Ummm…” Best to break it to Madge tactfully.

  Except that I’ve never quite grasped the tact concept.

  “Jack is two-timing you.”

  “What were those blood-curdling screams?” Talbot inquired as I stepped out of the compartment and met him and Pantelli.

  “Madge, finding out about Jack and Veronica LaFlamme.” I shook my head. “Jack, of all people! I still can’t believe it.”

  However, there was no time to ponder Jack’s fall—make that kamikaze descent—from our good graces. Talbot, Pantelli and I had poison ivy to investigate.

  “There’s nothing like a gross rash to flush out a suspect,” Pantelli remarked in satisfaction as we bustled along the passageways to the infirmary. The Whisperer just had to be stretched out on one of Nurse Ballantyne’s cots.

  We had a ready-made excuse for knocking on the infirmary door: Pantelli and his motion sickness. As a matter of fact, the Gold-and-Blue skimmed along so smoothly he hadn’t barfed since the wee episode in the observation car—but there was no need to let Nurse Ballantyne know this.

  The infirmary was fully lighted. Two cots with their starched, sterilized linens gleamed brightly. We peered round. No Nurse Ballantyne.

  And yet I felt someone’s presence.

  “We’ll grow roots if we keep standing here,” I whispered and began tiptoeing toward the desk. I figured Nurse Ballantyne had to keep a record book of patients.

  Talbot grabbed my elbow. He pointed over the cots to what I’d assumed was a wall. At closer glance, I saw it was a floor-to-ceiling white plastic curtain drawn fully across the room. Against the curtain, the silhouette of a large bony hand lifted, grabbed a bottle and then flopped down again. A moan echoed through the infirmary. Pantelli turned as white as the curtain. “So…has it actually been proven that the dead don’t walk?”

  “Shhh!” I hissed.

  The three of us crept toward the curtain. I was the nearest to the curtain’s edge. I touched it with a baby finger and crooked it ever so gently aside.

  In a green hospital gown, Nurse Ballantyne lay on a cot, eyes shut and horselike face covered with huge, angry red splotches. A bottle of calamine lotion was clutched in an equally splotchy hand.

  Talbot, Pantelli and I dropped our jaws in unison. Who says junior sleuthing doesn’t provide you with good exercise?

  This confirmed my suspicions. Nurse Ballantyne was the Whisperer.

  We ducked into a nearby linen supply room to discuss this latest development. Pantelli grabbed a facecloth and mopped his forehead. “Dendrology doesn’t take it out of you the way sleuthing does,” he moaned.

  Talbot said, “The train gets into Toronto tomorrow afternoon. What if we haven’t found Mrs. Chewbley by then? Do they smuggle her off, never to be seen again? Reminds me of the case of the Princes in the Tower in 1483. The two princes vanished, probably murdered.”

  Normally I enjoyed these ghoulish historical anecdotes of Talbot’s, but I shuddered on Mrs. Chewbley’s behalf. After Head Conductor Wiggins’s search had turned up no Mrs. Chewbley, he and his staff concluded she’d definitely disembarked at Jasper. I knew they were wrong.

  “We have to find her,” I declared.

  Talbot nodded. “We know that only one person, a patient, has left the t
rain. Therefore, Mrs. Chewbley must still be on the Gold-and-Blue, but not anywhere the crew has looked. Okay. Where would you stash a woman you didn’t want anyone else to find?”

  “The men’s washroom?” Pantelli suggested.

  I hoisted myself on a huge hamper and began swinging my legs so that thunk! thunk! my heels hit the sides. Noise always helps me think. “The luggage car,” I speculated. “At the start of the trip, that’s where you have the conductor store anything you won’t need. Like your leaf specimens, Pantelli. You know they’ll be safe because the luggage car is kept locked.”

  Talbot grinned at me. “Another blazingly brilliant deduction from our favorite girl sleuth. As a Gold-and-Blue employee, Nurse Ballantyne would most likely have access to the luggage-car key.”

  I was really smashing the sides of the hamper now. “I bet that poor dentures woman wasn’t accidentally knocked on the head. I bet someone slammed a box on her because, while prowling around for her spare dentures, she saw something she shouldn’t have.”

  “That does it, Pantelli,” Talbot said. “You and I are going to approach Freddy and ask in our politest possible manner if we can check on how your leaves are doing.”

  “What about me?” I demanded. “It may surprise you, Talbot St. John, but I, too, am able to muster a polite manner now and then.”

  “Ha!” Pantelli scoffed. “If so, it’d be harder to find than Mrs. Chewbley.”

  “Yeah? This from the guy who thought 24 would be improved if the title referred to tree rings instead of hours!”

  “Puh-leeze, you two,” Talbot begged. “Dinah, you’re a target. I think we should escort you safely back to your compartment, where you double-bolt the door.”

  I opened my mouth to object, specifically to the word “safely,” which I always find tedious.

  Talbot cut me off. “Besides, Madge is upset about Jack and this LaCrème woman.”

  “LaFlamme.”

  “Whatever. Anyhow, at this trying time for Madge, you should be there in case she wakes up and needs you to comfort her.”