Train Ride

A station loudspeaker calls the Double M Special to track 13, and John Whittaker and Eugene Meltsner hurry aboard just as the conductor gives the last signal and shouts "All aboard!" After a long stretch of board meetings in Chicago, the ride home to Odyssey is supposed to be a peaceful one. The conductor settles them in the lounge car and warns that the quiet will not last, since a whole carload of mannequin salesmen is heading to a convention in Cincinnati a few cars back. A porter offers to carry the bags and points out compartment B7, right next door, she says, to a real English detective named McGreevy, who has been touring the United States to learn how American police work is done.

The peace ends sooner than that. A passenger spots Eugene in the corridor and greets him like an old friend, and Eugene turns to ice. The man is Lawrence Chalmers, and Eugene wants nothing to do with him. Years earlier Lawrence stole a paper Eugene had worked on for six weeks and collected Eugene's A+ for it. Whittaker, holding Eugene back from a shoving match, suggests that a stolen grade is not worth all this fury, but Eugene explains that the damage did not stop there. He had to write a replacement paper overnight, the weaker paper pulled down his final grade, the final grade pulled down his average, and the University of Chicago turned him away. That is how he ended up at Campbell County Community College, and how he ended up far from a young woman named Margaret Hoffmeyer. Lawrence leaves grinning, telling Eugene to charge dinner to his tab, and to be sure to eat it in the dining car, because there is a surprise waiting.

Eugene refuses to hide in his compartment, so the two of them go to dinner. There they meet the inspector from the next compartment, a courteous man writing a book called The History of the Reading Jail, the prison where Oscar Wilde was held and about which he wrote a famous poem. Then the surprise arrives. Margaret walks up to the table, delighted to see Eugene again, and Eugene realizes what Lawrence meant. Margaret is now married to Lawrence Chalmers. She apologizes and flees, and Eugene, saying that Lawrence has now stolen his paper, his girl, and his appetite, goes off to see whether his sleep has been stolen too.

Whittaker cannot shake the feeling that something is wrong on this train. As the cars swing around a curve, he and the inspector look back and see the door of the rear storage car standing open, two figures struggling inside, and one of them tumbling out into the dark. The emergency cord has been disconnected, so the two men run the length of the train themselves. In the storage car they find Margaret, shaken and crying, saying that the men were fighting and one pushed the other out. The one who fell was Lawrence. When Whittaker asks her who pushed him, she gives a single name: Eugene.

Eugene is not in his compartment. Margaret, laid on the sofa in the inspector's room and locked safely in, tells her story: she had gone to the storage car in tears, Lawrence followed and started shoving her around, Eugene appeared, and the two men fought. Whittaker insists on hearing Eugene's side, and the two men split up to search the train. They come back with nothing, and worse, the compartment window is open and Margaret is gone. Then they find Eugene in his own room, half asleep and baffled, explaining that he had dozed off in a quiet little alcove with a skylight off the back of the lounge car. The porter wanders in and cheerfully mentions unlocking every door for Eugene, including the connecting door, because his key was sticking. Eugene protests that his key never stuck. The inspector announces that the train reaches Odyssey in forty minutes, and unless Whittaker can explain things by then, Eugene goes to the authorities.

Whittaker asks for everyone to be gathered in the lounge, makes a few stops of his own, and then lays out what he has worked out. Why would a kind woman marry a man like Lawrence, and why would she then try to pin his murder on the one man who truly loved her? He invites the inspector to ask Margaret himself, since she is sitting right there, alive. Margaret admits she was desperate to escape Lawrence and that Eugene's arrival gave her a way out. But Lawrence, Whittaker says, is not dead at all. Having chatted with the conventioneers about their inventory, he knows that the thing thrown from the train was a mannequin. As for where Lawrence is, the answer is in jail. Anyone truly from England, and especially a scholar of the place, would spell Reading Gaol G-A-O-L rather than J-A-I-L. The inspector is Lawrence Chalmers.

Lawrence admits it, boasting that he wanted Eugene tucked safely away so the stolen paper would never come up. Whittaker replies that there is only one victim in the room, and it is himself, the victim of an elaborate hoax. Eugene, caught out, happily introduces his drama students from Campbell County Community College: Jeffery Chism as the inspector and as Lawrence Chalmers, and Jennifer Marley as Margaret and as the porter. Eugene explains that Whittaker himself always says a break from routine sharpens the mind, so after all those board meetings he arranged a mystery train. Whittaker admits he was challenged, then tells Eugene his very first clue was Eugene's own acting.

The train pulls into Odyssey Central and the celebration at Whit's End is postponed, because police are waiting on the platform. The officer explains that Whittaker cabled ahead when he believed a man had been thrown from the train, and that the Chicago police searched the spot and found not a mannequin but a body. He orders the whole troupe taken in for questioning on suspicion of murder, and hauls them away protesting. Whittaker stays behind, thanks the officer by name, and asks him to hold the group only an hour or two before letting them in on the joke. Jim calls him an ornery critter, and Whittaker answers that he is simply a believer in breaking up the daily routine.