Murder on the Orient Espresso(52)

‘Correct.’ Pavlik waited.

‘Well, now. That’s hard to say. You see, I’m not quite sure just where we are.’

‘I can understand that,’ Pavlik said mildly. My brain, on the other hand, was screaming in all capital letters, ‘WHAT THE HELL DO YOU MEAN YOU DON’T KNOW WHERE WE ARE IN THE MIDDLE OF THIS—?’

‘Let’s start with the “when,” then,’ Pavlik continued, giving my nervously vibrating thigh a reassuring squeeze under the table. ‘We know that tonight’s event was to be a three-hour-long round trip. That would mean you turned the train around halfway through that time or ninety minutes after we departed the station, right?’

‘Well, technically we don’t turn around. Just stop and I take her back the other way.’

I could have smacked the man, but the sheriff apparently thought we were making progress. ‘So you confirm that you “took her back the other way” ninety minutes after we left the station?’

‘Probably that, like you say, give or take. This isn’t an exact science, you know.’

Seemed like a hell of a way to run a railroad.

‘And how many miles into the Everglades would that have taken us?’ Pavlik was writing again.

‘No way of telling.’

Pavlik looked up from his notes. ‘You didn’t glance at your odometer?’

Hertel looked puzzled. ‘Odometer? Ain’t got one. Leastways that’s any use to the engineer. No, we just chug from one assigned stop to ’nother along the same track. What would I do with an odometer?’

I suppressed a grin as Pavlik seemed to ponder what Hertel could do with his odometer. ‘So you don’t know how far we traveled before we reversed directions.’

‘No sir, that I don’t.’ Hertel shifted on the banquette. ‘Not quite sure why it matters, tell you the truth.’

I saw Pavlik’s knuckles whitening as he gripped his pen, so I took over before he decided to bayonet the guy’s eye. ‘Let’s forget distance for now. If we know what time we reversed, and how long after that we came to a stop because of the damaged track, we’ll know approximately when we passed this spot on the way into the Everglades.’

‘Meaning that’s when this Potter became snake-bait, huh? Well, that’s real good reasoning, I have to say. Not sure it’ll hold water, though.’ Hertel was grinning.

‘And why is that?’ I asked between my own clenched teeth.

Mercifully, my tag team partner stepped in. ‘We left the station a little after eight?’

‘Correct-o-mundo. Eight-oh-four, to be exact.’

‘And we’ve agreed we reversed ninety minutes after we left the station, so as to be back within the three-hour timeframe. That means, of course, nine thirty-four.’

‘Give or take,’ I added before Hertel could.

Pavlik’s pen hovered over a sheet of paper he’d torn from his pad. ‘And the train travels how fast?’

Hertel worried the errant patch of chin hair. ‘We averaged about forty on our way out.’

‘Good, good.’ The sheriff wrote it down. ‘So at forty miles an hour, we’d cover sixty miles in an hour and a half.’

I gave Pavlik an admiring glance. He’d get his gold star later.

The sheriff began chewing on the eraser end of his pen, giving me a glimpse of little Jacob Pavlik in grade school. ‘We still need to know what time we were stopped here by the flooding. With all the commotion, I didn’t think to look.’

‘Maybe Missy or Zoe noticed,’ I suggested.

‘Well, now, I can tell you that,’ Hertel said.

‘You can?’ Pavlik and I looked at him. ‘Why didn’t you say so?’

‘You asked how far we chugged into the Everglades, which I didn’t know, and what time we left the station, which I did. You never did ask when we stopped out here.’

‘I’m asking it now.’ Pavlik’s eyes were narrow slits. ‘When?’

This time I patted his thigh.

‘Why, a mite before ten p.m.’

I threw a smile at Pavlik. ‘That means that Potter went off the train here about nine.’

‘And “here” is approximately forty miles west of the station.’ Pavlik leaned back against the banquette and stretched.

‘And how do you figure that?’ from Hertel.

‘Easy.’ I pushed Pavlik’s paper in the middle of the tabletop so the engineer could see the sheriff’s notes. ‘We reached the place we reversed at nine-thirty and, according to you, our current position at ten. That’s a half hour after reversal, meaning we must have passed this spot a half hour before reversal or nine p.m. That also means that at forty miles an hour we would have covered – you guessed it – forty miles between eight and nine p.m.’ I sat back now, too, pleased with our paired reasoning.