Murder on the Orient Espresso(32)

Missy tugged on my arm. ‘We really need to find Laurence, Maggy.’

‘Oh, of course,’ I said and then to Danny, ‘I’m sorry. We can talk later.’

‘Umm, sure. Anytime,’ he said distractedly. Then to Missy: ‘I’d love to hear more about you. Maybe you and I can get together for a drink.’

Missy giggled and tugged at her dress. ‘Maybe.’

As we pressed on toward the restroom at the end of the car, Missy was walking taller, with a sexy little wiggle that threatened to send her careening off her shiny spiked heels as the train chugged along the track.

Ahh, amour. And ambition. And always the twain shall meet.

Which brought me back to our guests of honor. Missy had said that Rosemary Darlington and Laurence Potter had a ‘history.’

I took that to mean an affair and Audra Edmonds’s reaction to Rosemary seemed to bear that out. But was this affair truly ‘history’ or more current events? As in, the two of them shacked up in the sleeping car at this very moment.

If so, I had to give both Potter and Darlington props for acting ability. The disdain he professed for her – and her new writing endeavor – seemed very genuine. Ditto, our female guest of honor’s feelings toward the reviewer, not to mention her own reaction to the motion of the train, her medication and my espresso martini. If Rosemary Darlington was faking, I’d eat her beret.

As Missy and I reached the back of the car, wind was whistling through the opening in the windows I’d been forced to leave in order to secure her banner.

For all the good the thing was doing. Not only, as I expected, was there no one out there to see it except for the denizens of the Everglades, but the vinyl banner was slapping rhythmically against the side of the train, occasionally being lifted by a gust to cover the windows.

The sign might not survive the trip. I just hoped the windows would.

Hesitating at the restroom door, I said to Missy, ‘I suppose it won’t hurt to check again.’

She shrugged. ‘Sure, maybe third time’s the charm.’

‘Speaking of charm,’ I said casually, as I tapped on the restroom door, ‘Danny is kind of cute.’

‘You think?’ She cocked her head. ‘He seems awfully young to me.’ She must have seen the surprise on my face. ‘Oh, don’t get me wrong, Maggy. What girl doesn’t like a little male attention, but …’

‘But?’ I gave another knock.

‘But he’s really not my type. I don’t like users.’

‘Losers?’ Still no answer from inside, I tentatively slid the restroom door open.

‘No, user. Somebody who uses other people to get what they want. True love should be more than that.’

Not wanting to get into a discussion of ‘true love’ with the starry-eyed girl, I stepped my jaded self into the empty restroom. ‘Huh, this is larger than I expected.’

Missy came in after me. ‘Do you think so?’

‘Well, bigger than an airplane restroom, certainly. I mean, we’re both standing in here, not exactly comfortably and it smells like a flaming bag of dog poop, but—’

The door slid closed.

‘Hey,’ I said, grabbing the handle and giving it a shove. ‘That’s not funny.’

‘Oh, I’m sure nobody did it on purpose, Maggy. It was probably just the motion of the train.’

We did seem to be slowing. ‘The door is stuck.’

‘I think you locked it.’ She pushed the handle the other way and yanked open the door. ‘Here we go.’

We stepped out into the hall and I let out the breath I’d apparently been holding. ‘Thank God for South Florida’s insistence on over air-conditioning.’

‘It was a little stuffy in there. Now, where were we?’

‘Heading that way,’ I pointed, proud that I was getting the hang of this front-is-now-back, back-is-now-front reorientation. At least I had a sense of which way we were going, which was more than I could say of my one and only cruise. I’d spent the entire four days wandering the halls and punching up information on the computerized ‘You are here’ maps. And eating, of course.

My stomach growled again.

Beyond the restroom was the vestibule leading to the sleeping car. I had a hard time seeing why someone would come here to smoke. The exit doors on both sides of the vestibule had no outside platforms, the floor was a rumbling metal ramp and the space was noisy and smelled.

Come to think of it, it probably wasn’t unlike a lot of places smokers had been banished to.

‘What’s that?’ Missy said, pointing to something in the corner to my left.

‘An empty book of matches.’ I picked up the black and silver pack. ‘Potter’s, do you think?’