Murder Train: A Bakery Detectives Cozy Mystery

by Stacey Alabaster

"Maybe we should have told the others where we are going," I muttered while the train slowly choked its way into the station. We hadn't told Kenneth or Marcello what we were up to. We hadn't told a soul except each other.

  "It'll be fine. Lolly is safe with her dad. And we'll only be gone for a few hours anyway. Trust me. What can happen on a train?"

  "Is there any food on this train?" Pippa whined, looking around.

  I peered at her from over the top of my magazine. She was sitting across from me, in the 'backwards' position, thank goodness, because sitting that way always made me motion sick. And I wouldn't have been able to catch up on my celebrity gossip if I was nauseous.

  "We've only been on the train for twenty minutes," I said.

  Pippa shifted in her seat. "It's the pregnancy..."

  "You haven't been pregnant for six or seven months!" I dropped my magazine. "Oh my goodness, Pippa, you're not...again, are you?"

  She let out a shocked laugh. "No, gosh, I didn't mean to scare you. I just miss being able to use being pregnant as an excuse to eat twenty-four seven. I should still be able to use it for a little while longer, right? It's only fair."

  "I'm not sure about that. And no, I don't think there's any food on this train," I stated. "There's an on board restaurant but I don't think they open it for two hour trips. You should have brought a bag of raisins with you."

  Pippa pointed at a man, wearing a windbreaker and eating powdered donuts, two rows down from us. "He's eating. Go and find out where he got those from."

  I peered over my shoulder at the man. He was in his late twenties, possibly early thirties by the looks of it, and had floppy brown hair like he was from a nineties boyband.

  I relented. "Fine. But only because I'm feeling generous today."

  I had to grip onto the tops of the seats as I navigated the aisles. The train was as shaky as if we were on a ship.

  The guy didn't even look up as I approached and stood right over him.

  "My friend was just wondering where you got those donuts from?"

  "I brought them on with me," he said, his mouth half-full. "Did you want one?"

  I could see his fingerprints in the icing sugar on top. I shook my head.

  He shrugged. "Hey, did you notice that the train we're on uses one of the original carriages from when this new train line opened in nineteen-eighty-eight?"

  I shook my head. "I can't say I did." Although looking around at the worn out carpets and plastic seats, it wasn't that surprising to find out.

  He stuffed another powdered donut into his mouth. "See? I'm kind of observant. I pick up on things other people don't." Then he leaned forward and whispered, like he was imparting some great secret to me, "I'm sort of an amateur detective."

  I opened my mouth to say something but all I could do was shake my head. "Are you just?" I asked, biting my tongue. "Well, that must be a very interesting hobby."

  "Maybe I can teach you a few things about observation some time."

  I excused myself from my new friend and went back to my seat to find Pippa.

  Trains don't really grind to a halt. They tend to slow down so gradually that you don't even realize you're stopping until there's finally no motion at all. Like a lobster slowly being boiled alive in water.

  But this one did the closest thing to grinding to a halt that a train can do. I even got yanked forward violently and Pippa cried out in pain. "Ow, my neck!"

  I leaned over to look out the window. There was no platform as far as I could see. No train station.

  We were in the middle of farmland. Nothing but fields all around us and one tall object in the distance.

  We didn't even look like we were in civilization.

  But I went back to reading my magazine, thinking, hey, sometimes trains just stop, right?

  "What are we stopped here for?" Pippa asked after a few minutes, growing restless.

  The conductor’s voice instructed us over a crackling speaker. It still sounded awfully familiar. "Don't worry, folks. There's just something on the tracks."

  Pippa turned to me slowly with an ever-so-meaningful look on her face.

  "What is it?" I asked. "What are you giving me that look for?"

  "Um, 'something on the tracks' is train code for 'someone has died on the tracks'," Pippa said as though that was an obvious fact everyone knew.

  I set my magazine down on my lap. "Oh, don't be ridiculous."

  But there was a growing unrest on the train and I started to get a little nervous. I put the magazine aside and tried to peer out the window. But we were clear in the back of the train in third class and it was impossible to see all the way to the front, and even more impossible to see what may or may not be laying on the tracks.

  We hadn't moved for fifteen minutes and the cart was starting to become uncomfortably hot. I got up and cracked open a window.

  "That's it!" Pippa had had enough. "I'm going to go see what's going on. I'll get this engine started myself if I have to."

  She left her seat and raced down the aisles. I really had no choice but to follow her. She was making a scene and I was worried about how fast she was running in the heels she was wearing in preparation for our business meeting.

  She pressed the button to open the door and leapt onto the next car, which was fairly similar to ours with frayed carpets and dirty windows. She kept going to the next carriage, and she wasn't slowing down.

  "Pippa that's the first class carriage! You can't go in there!"

  She pressed the 'open' button. "Just watch me."

  I thought I'd better follow her through. I'd come this far.

  My first thought was that first class was NOT using the original 1988 carriages. There was no frayed carpet, but new, plush, purple carpet. And the seats weren't plastic, they were bronze-plated and about twice the size of the ones we were squeezed into.

  My second thought?

  Holy cow, what is that laying in the middle of the aisle?

  Because there wasn't a dead body on the tracks. There was a dead body in the front train.

  A dead body in the first class car.

  "See?" I said to Pippa, my voice shaking as I laughed nervously. "You were wrong."

  "I can't get any reception out here!" Pippa was leaning out the window, back in third class, trying to get a bar. "We need to tell The Pastry Tree that we might be a little late." She pulled her arm back inside and studied the screen. "Lucky we caught a train two hours earlier than we needed to. Glad I listened to you when I thought you were being over cautious."

  Normally, I would have taken that small victory, but all I could think about was the woman's body. She was middle-aged, most likely, but she had been exquisitely dressed. She almost looked like she was from the 1920s, with her hairstyle and garb, flowers, feather and sequins all over her.

  We had found out her name was Eden Foulkes.

  "She looked rich, don't you think?"

  Pippa shrugged. She was still more concerned with getting her phone to work.

  "She was wearing a fur coat," I murmured. Did that make a person rich? If it didn't on its own, then the pearl earrings at least had to contribute. And there had been a diamond bracelet on her wrist.

  Unless they were all fake, she was rich.

  "Rachael, if we miss that meeting, we are going to look so unprofessional. We've got to at least try and call them." She looked at me like I could help in some way.

  "My phone isn't working either."

  She looked at me skeptically. "Do you even want to take this meeting?"

  "Of course I do." I folded my arms. "But there is a dead body on the train, Pippa. I'm kind of concerned about that, too."

  She raised an eyebrow and sighed heavily as she went back to her phone. "You sure you're not actually happy for a reason to delay?"

  "Of course not! I'm the one who scheduled the meeting, remember? I'm the one who insisted we leave two hours early so we had plenty of leeway." I said the words with so much force that I almost convinced myself.r />
  "Okay then," Pippa said, lowering her voice. "You know what the best way to get this train moving again is, don't you?"

  I had a feeling I knew. "We need to find out who killed Eden Foulkes."

  Pippa nodded. "So where do we start then?"

  I glanced around me at the slew of people littering the seats and aisle. "Every single passenger on this train is a suspect."

  Chapter 3

  There are advantages and disadvantages to investigating a murder in a highly-enclosed space. The pros are that all the suspects are in one place, and you don't have to travel very far. And you know that the killer can't escape.

  The cons are, well, one, that the killer can't escape. You are trapped with them, in said small enclosed space. You just have to hope they aren't a serial killer. You have to hope the killing was personal.

  The other problem is that it’s very hard to be subtle about what you are doing.

  Every single passenger in the carriage stared at us while we stood up and began to—very conspicuously—walk up the aisle inspecting all of them.

  "So what do we ask people?" Pippa whispered to me. "Where were you between the hours of ten and eleven this morning? We already know where they were. They were right here with us!"

  I stopped walking. "Well, we can ask them if they left their seats." I wished I hadn't been reading my magazine at the time; I might have noticed who left their seat and who didn't.

  Pippa squealed. "I have a bar of reception!"

  "Gosh, you scared me. I thought you had found another dead body for a moment there."

  I had to wonder why it was taking so long for the cops to arrive at the scene. There'd been no sirens, no flashing lights. In fact, no one had arrived. Not an ambulance, not a police car...not even a regular car.

  I stared out the window of the carriage. Not a single car travelled along the road to my left.

  What was going on?

  We retreated to our seats.

  "Okay, we need a different plan," I said slowly. "We can't just go around randomly interrogating every last passenger."

  Pippa nodded. "We need to go back to first class."

  The door to the carriage suddenly opened and a very familiar man walked through it.

  "Is that..." Even though he was familiar, it took me a moment to place him in the unfamiliar location. "That's the guy from the town meeting last week! Garry."

  Only now he wasn't Foreman Garry, he was Conductor Garry. He squeezed his way through the aisle.

  "Sorry about the disruption, folks," he said in a loud, deep voice. The same one that had told me that the petition to save my bakery had not been successful. "But I am going to have to ask you all to remain in your seats." He seemed to glare at Pippa and I especially. "And in your carriages."

  There were some groans from the crowd and one woman asked how long we would be waiting for.

  "Shouldn't be too much longer, ma'am. But I do have to insist that you remain seated."

  "Well, there goes our plans to go back to first class," I muttered, turning back to Pippa. She was barely even listening to Garry's announcement. She was, of course, still trying to call The Pastry Tree.

  Suddenly, she looked excited. "Ooh, ooh, I've got a dial tone!"

  Then she groaned in frustration.

  "Did you get through?" I asked.

  Pippa shook her head and threw the phone down on the seat. Luckily, it was plush in spite of the old plastic underneath, otherwise she would have broken it with the force of the throw.

  "Something's going on," I murmured. "Something is not right, Pippa..."

  "Uh, yeah, duh. A woman was murdered on the train."

  "No, not just that." I tapped on the glass of the window. "Look, the roads are deserted."

  She turned around to look properly at the completely empty road that ran parallel to the train track. "So what does that mean? Are we totally trapped and alone out here?"

  I shook my head. I didn't understand it either.

  "Well!" I said, jumping up. "There's nothing to do but just solve this case ourselves then! No matter what our conductor friend says. Maybe getting this whole mess cleared up will get the train moving."

  We attracted a few glares as we moved down the aisle—a few "you're not supposed to be doing that" faces—but we ignored them and moved forward, desperate to get off the train.

  Without waiting for permission, we hit the open button on the doors to the first class carriage and stepped through.

  Oh no. It was my donut-scoffing friend from before. And he was standing over Eden's body, examining her like she was an exhibit in a museum.

  "Who is that?" Pippa asked.

  I looked at her in disbelief. "That's the guy you made me practically steal the donuts from before!"

  Pippa shook her head like she was in a daze. "Oh, right. Forgot. Pregnancy brain."

  I shot her a look. "Okay, you don't get to use that as an excuse anymore either."

  "So?" Pippa asked. "Who is he, then? Besides a donut hog."

  "I didn't get his name. He fancies himself as an amateur sleuth though."

  He seemed to respond to that and straightened up. He looked as surprised to see us as I had to see him.

  "Dan," he said, extending a sticky hand for Pippa to shake. He had a pen and notepad in the other hand and it looked like he had been taking notes.

  "Pippa," she replied. "And this is Rachael. We just came to see what was going on with Eden's body—see if there was anything we could do to help out."

  "You don't have to worry about anything, ladies. I know this might be a little intimidating to you, but I have actually solved a mystery before."

  Oh, had he? Pippa and I looked at each other, both trying our best not to laugh at him...yet.

  Let's wait and see what he has to say, first.

  "See, I'm a member of an online forum," Dan explained, crossing his arms proudly. "A forum dedicated to so-called 'cold cases'."

  "What are they?" Pippa asked. I just thought, darn, don't encourage him.

  "We look at old unsolved cases throughout history..." he started to explain. "Almost all of them grisly murders. Most of the suspects themselves are as long dead as their victims, so there can never be justice brought to them personally. But it does give one a measure of personal satisfaction to tie up the loose ends of a case long thought impossible to solve."

  He raised his eyebrows and lowered his voice. "You ever heard of the Pottsville murders of nineteen-oh-two?"

  I shook my head.

  "Okay, long story short: Farm house. Dead family. No killer ever found. Well, I figured out who did it. It was the farmhand."

  "So you didn't actually...solve it then?" I asked. "You didn't solve any case?"

  "Of course I did! Just because the police can't arrest anyone—seeing as everyone involved at the time is long dead—doesn't mean that I didn't solve the case."

  Okay. Now it was a little harder not to laugh at him.

  "Well, Dan, Pippa and I have actually solved a few mysteries in our time as well...And some of those suspects have still been alive. And a lot of them have ended up in jail, thanks to us."

  I couldn't tell whether he didn't believe me or just wanted to not. He turned a little red, but didn't respond with words at all.

  "Step aside," he said, pushing past me to get back to the body. Luckily, the train wasn’t moving or I probably would have tumbled over.

  "Mrs. Eden Foulkes was traveling with a companion. A man quite a bit younger than her, by the name of Julian..."

  "Actually, I already know all this," I said, interrupting him. "I got the information when I was down here earlier. I guess I was the first at the scene of the crime." I didn't know any of it though and I immediately regretted cutting him off. I'd let my ego get in the way of getting information.

  "Well, if you already know it, I don't need to tell you then," Dan said, popping the cap back on top of his pen and placing the little notepad back in the pocket of his windbreaker.
/>   "Julian was her...friend," I said, trying to bluff.

  "Boyfriend."

  "Yes, well, we can only speculate on that," I said.

  "No, we know that for a fact," Julian said. "They were traveling together for a romantic getaway. The other passengers saw them holding hands and Julian has since admitted that they were romantically involved." There was a smug look on Dan's face. "But of course you already knew all that."

  "I did, actually."

  Pippa whispered to me, "What on Earth are you talking about? You didn't know any of that."

  "Shh."

  Dan laughed a little as he looked at us, like he really had one over the both of us. "If you follow me, you can come talk to our lead suspect right now."

  I stood up straight. "I don't need to follow you. I know where he is."

  "Oh, yes? Where is he then?"

  "I…um. He is..." I glanced around the carriage and then nodded up ahead. "He's down there, right in the little nook between the bathroom and the driver."

  "Lucky guess."

  A young thin man with black hair, sitting there holding a magazine, looked up at us wryly.

  "Come to gawk at the murderer, have you?"

  He had a British accent that sounded quite posh and upper class, as far as I could tell anyway. His clothes didn't really look posh, although they did look eccentric, a little like Eden's had, but rather than expensive, his were shabby chic. And he had silver and brass rings on almost every finger and thumb.

  He was definitely younger than Eden, by at least twenty years, if not more. And he was quite tall and rakish. He and Eden sure had made an odd couple.

  I tried not to be too taken aback by his sarcasm. "Did you see anything, Julian?"

  "Oh, sure. I saw her dead body while I was standing above her strangling her." He didn't even look up from his magazine as he spoke.

  I looked at Dan. Was that a confession?

  "I thought Eden died from a blow to the back of the head?" I asked slowly.

  Dan wrote down something on his notepad.

  "Julian," I said, trying again. "Were you there when Eden was killed?"

  He slowly flipped through the pages and mused over the matter. "I already answered that." He gazed up at me through a long black fringe. "Are any of you the police?"