Himalayan Hazard

Chapter Eight

Like most older people I knew, Rhonda had kept her phone fully charged, which meant I didn’t need to be careful about preserving its battery life—and thank goodness for that. I used the screen to illuminate my path as I moved carefully past her body and joined my mother at the bed.

“It’s her personal planner,” Mom revealed, flipping through the pages demonstratively. “You know, like the calendar app, but on paper.”

“C’mon, Mom. I know what a personal planner is.” The cover on this one was made of blue leather that I suspected matched the exact shade of Grizabella’s eyes. Gold trimmed the edges of each page, not unlike a Bible.

Mom shook her head and continued to search through the entries until she landed on the current week. “Here,” she pointed to the box reserved for yesterday. “She got on in New Brunswick. A bit earlier than us.”

“I found the same thing on her Facebook profile, but I could’ve sworn we saw her when we were saying goodbye to Nan. She was in a hurry, but I definitely remember that blinged out cat carrier of hers.”

Mom tucked her heavily hair sprayed hair behind her ears, but it immediately bounced back to its previous shape. “Huh. I don’t remember seeing her, but maybe she just got off to stretch her legs.”

“Or to a say a quick hello to someone waiting at the station,” I suggested. We’d only seen her returning, though. Huh, indeed.

“So she got off, but she got back on,” Mom recapped with a shrug. “Hang on. Let me see what else is in here.”

While she thumbed through the planner, I returned to Rhonda’s email and searched the name of the train company. Sure enough, since she never discarded anything, her travel itinerary popped right up.

“She was headed to Houston,” I told Mom hardly believing anyone would want to be on a train for such a very long trip, but then again, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad with a private room. Still, she had either knowingly lied to me or changed her plans quite suddenly. “She told me she’d probably get off before Georgia.”

Mom stood and marched over to me, then shoved the planner in my free hand. “Her planner has a cat show in that area early next week.”

So a sudden change of plans, then. “I wonder if the person she met at our stop said something that spooked her. Like maybe a threat. Maybe she reached out to me in the dining car because she felt safer with company.”

Now I felt terrible. Had I been given the opportunity to save her, only to run away because I couldn’t take another mundane cat story?

“That’s a lot of maybes,” Mom said, rubbing my shoulder like she somehow knew I was partially blaming myself for poor Rhonda’s fate. “I do agree this is all very suspicious, but we don’t know anything for sure.”

I shook those feelings aside and focused on the facts. Whether or not I’d played a role in what had happened, the best thing I could do now was to find justice for the poor lonely woman who loved her cat more than anything else in this world.

“She was wearing a necklace when I met her, but the necklace was gone when Octo-Cat and I came in presumably just minutes after her murder,” I told Mom, forcing myself to move on.

Mom frowned and set the planner down where she’d initially found it. “Missing necklace. Quick visit to the platform in Bangor. Abandoned trip to Houston. Five stab wounds. We have a lot of little bits and pieces, but not enough to know what kind of puzzle we’re building.”

“Don’t forget the distraught feline. It was Grizabella’s cries that alerted us to the trouble.” Despite the Himalayan’s cool demeanor when we’d first met her in the dining car, her reaction to Rhonda’s death showed the cat had loved her owner just as much as she’d been loved by her.

“Now that’s interesting. Could it be a jealous cat show competitor?” Mom ventured, taking the planner back from me and holding it in both her hands as we continued to talk. “They were on their way to a show, after all. Maybe someone threatened them to keep them on the sidelines this year, so another cat could take the crown.”

“I don’t think cat shows work the same as beauty pageants,” I said with a wry laugh. Laughing was good. It kept the horror from creeping in. “But it’s not a bad theory. A jealous rival killed her off and then took the necklace to make it look like a simple robbery.”

Mom nodded, but her face remained grim. “There are worse reasons to take a life. Not many, mind you, but I’m sure there are at least some.”

The door swung open so suddenly, it made us both jump in fright. My heart hammered a heavy tattoo against my chest.

“Helloooooo!” a young male voice bellowed. Then he gasped and his voice became higher. “Holy heck, so that guy’s crazy claims are true, after all.” He moved into the room and shone his lantern-style flashlight on Rhonda’s body. The curly red hair immediately struck me as familiar. This was the same worker I’d spied in the snack car, the one I’d almost bought snacks from before Rhonda intercepted me.

“Hi. That crazy guy was my husband,” Mom said, offering him a friendly wave.

The man—who couldn’t have been much older than a teenager—staggered back and lifted a hand to his chest. “Yeesh, don’t do that! I thought the dead was rising again.”

Okay, so this kid had seen one too many zombie movies in his day. He also had access to the dining car and all of its knives. Could he be the killer returning to the scene of the crime? If so, Mom and I could definitely take him. Not that I wanted to engage in a fight to the death… now or ever.

“What are you doing in here?” I asked, studying him closely. His pale, blemished skin looked ghastly in the glow of his lantern. His skinny arms didn’t appear strong enough to inflict the wounds I’d seen on Rhonda, but then again, young mothers could lift entire vehicles to save trapped babies—or so the rumor went.

“My boss sent me over here to check it out, since my station was the closest. He said that—” He stopped abruptly and raised his light higher. “Ha! Nice way to distract me. What are you doing in here alone with a dead body?”

He took another big leap back into the hall, terror washing over his once accusing features. “Wait. Did you kill her? Are you going to kill me?”

“Well, that depends…” Mom said and then moved slowly toward the frightened worker.

Yikes! What was happening?