Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect

I felt a tap on my ankle and looked behind me: Jasper had made it up the ladder. I gripped the Taser tightly, pressing it into the roof as I dragged myself forward. The train didn’t seem to have slowed at all. How long does it take to pull a lever? Surely Aaron had been on the radio to the drivers, too. But fourteen hundred tons doesn’t stop on a dime, I figured.

Suddenly, something hit me in the wrist. I saw enough through the squinty blur of wind to make out a shoe, and the Taser went skittering across the roof. I’d love to tell you it teetered on the edge, perilously balanced, so a stretched-out hand could grab it at the perfect moment, but while thrillers often contain fight scenes that are laden with luck, this book has one thing most don’t: physics. The Taser wobbled and fell over the side.

I clutched the air in front of me, hoping to grab Harriet. My eyes were getting used to the wind, and her blur had started to take shape. She looked like she’d turned around. In fact, I could see her well enough to watch as she raised the broken bottle and brought it down firmly into my shoulder.

The bleeding was immediate, and serious. It felt like a bucket of water had been tossed over my back. I tried to grab her but realized I couldn’t move my right arm. I felt my skin pucker as she pulled the bottle out. Saw her clamber away. So much for a big fight scene. I was getting light-headed. All I could do was lie flat and hope the wind didn’t blow me off the train before we came to a stop.

I felt a hand on my shoulder, then hot breath on my ear. Jasper, leaning close.

“Use my name,” he said. “My real name.”

Then he was moving ahead of me. He widened his arms as he approached Harriet, and she dropped the bottle. I couldn’t tell what he was saying to her. She wiped her face with the back of her hand. And then Jasper made his move.

He hugged her.

It was a tight embrace, tight enough that their hearts would beat against each other’s chests. Like a soldier home from war. Harriet nuzzled her face into Jasper’s shoulder. Maybe, for a second, they forgot everything around them: the wind, the blood, the death, the pain. They just held each other.

Then Jasper rolled them both over the side.

From: [email protected]

To: @penguinrandomhouse.com.au

Subject: Epilogue

Hi ,

The epilogue is proving tricky, mainly because it hasn’t happened yet.

I’m supposed to catch you up on the bits after the climax, and that’s easy enough. There are not all that many opal mines left to fill in. Royce has been arrested for covering up the rape. Douglas Parsons, to my understanding, has been fined for illegal possession of a firearm. Lisa Fulton sidestepped criminal charges for grand theft auto, but Hatch grumbled that she owed him a new Land Cruiser. Given Brooke is now officially the McTavish estate (courtesy of DNA results), I’m sure he’s hoping for the newest model. And Jasper and Harriet, well, they’re just a red smear on the side of the Ghan. You’ll have seen that photo in the papers.

Majors’s plagiarism accusations are now much more public, so she’ll get the lawsuit she wanted. I can’t prove this, but I have a feeling she was going to shred whatever confidentiality agreement she’d signed at the same time as Lisa. Besides, you can’t defame the dead, so she could accuse McTavish of whatever she wanted now. I also suspect she knew a little more than she was letting on about everything. Why else would she invite McTavish, Royce and Lisa all together on the same trip? Perhaps she and Lisa had planned it together: a chance to expose McTavish once and for all for both of his crimes. Of the other guests, we were truly just barnacles: Wolfgang was invited, as she’d told me, for the grant funding pedigree, and me, well, now I know I wasn’t invited at all. Majors had a spare slot and wanted Juliette to give her a blurb.

I know you think I’m being harsh on Simone. I don’t care about the one-star review, really I don’t. But if she’d told me about the ghostwriter earlier, instead of hoping I’d solve some riddle so the book would be more complex, Wyatt and Jasper would still be alive. Probably Harriet too. And maybe Harriet should have lived to face just punishment. Though it’s far from the worst lie told on that train, it’s opened up a strange chasm between Simone and me, so I feel it’s best we end our professional relationship.

But the actual ending, therein lies the problem.

One of the fallacies of most books written in first person is the perception that everything is happening in real time. That’s why readers are able to indulge suspense when, say, a character scrambles across the roof of a train—it’s a tacit agreement that they won’t acknowledge the author, sitting in a hotel room in a sling, bashing away at the keys. But underneath it, we always know. It’s why readers anticipate that I survive this book the whole way through.