The Ghost in Roomette Four Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Characters, places, and events are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real people, companies, ­institutions, organizations, or incidents is entirely coincidental.

  The interior design and the cover design of this book are intended for and limited to the publisher’s first print edition of the book and related marketing display purposes. All other use of those designs without the publisher’s permission is prohibited.

  Copyright © 2018 by Janet Dawson

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-1-56474-818-8

  A Perseverance Press Book

  Published by John Daniel & Company

  A division of Daniel & Daniel, Publishers, Inc.

  Post Office Box 2790

  McKinleyville, California 95519

  www.danielpublishing.com/perseverance

  Distributed by SCB Distributors (800) 729-6423

  Book design by Eric Larson, Studio E Books, Santa Barbara, www.studio-e-books.com

  Cover art © Roger Morris, IKAM Creative, Inc. All rights reserved.

  library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

  Names: Dawson, Janet, author.

  Title: The ghost in roomette four : a California zephyr mystery / by Janet Dawson.

  Description: McKinleyville, California : John Daniel & Company, [2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017055342 | ISBN 9781564745989 (softcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: California Zephyr (Express train)—Fiction. | Railroad travel—Fiction. | Ghosts—Fiction. | Murder—Investigation—Fiction. | GSAFD: Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3554.A949 G48 2018 | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017055342

  To my mother, Thelma Dawson, who loves to read, and my brother, Roger Dawson, who plays a mean blues guitar

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks to fellow mystery writer D.P. Lyle, who is also a medical doctor. He provided much-needed information on the medical conditions discussed in this novel. Thanks also to Dawn Church for information on how to conduct a séance. Also to Roger Morris, my fellow Pullman pal, who has provided the outstanding cover art for all three California Zephyr mysteries and to Doug Spinn, owner of the Pacific Sands, who first told the story about a haunted roomette.

  Contents

  ­Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  ­Chapter Twenty-One

  ­Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Afterword

  About the Author

  ­Chapter One

  I am not seeing this, Jill McLeod told herself. But she was.

  Light shimmered at eye level, about ten feet in front of her. The apparition seemed to have no source. None, anyway, that Jill could discern. What’s more, she could see through it.

  Jill took a step toward the light. It brightened, then dimmed. She took another step. The light flickered and moved into roomette four.

  She shook herself. A few more steps, then she stopped at the open doorway of the roomette and peered inside.

  Empty.

  Of course it was empty. There was no one traveling in this space. When the California Zephyr reached Salt Lake City, at 5:20 a.m., the passenger holding a reservation for this roomette would board the train.

  But she had seen the luminous flicker. Surely it was just a trick of the light. But what light? How? There was nothing but darkness outside the roomette’s window, save the occasional twin headlights of a vehicle at a crossing or a pinprick from a distant ranch. Here in the passageway the electric lights were dim. What Jill had seen was different from those ordinary lights. Different, and hard to explain. What could have caused it?

  It was nearly midnight. The train’s last station stop had been in Elko, Nevada, at 11:17 p.m. Now the train sped east, heading for the Great Salt Desert that spanned western Utah. The passengers traveling in this Pullman car, the Silver Gorge, had gone to bed.

  Jill would have been in bed, too. However, before she could remove her uniform and put on her pajamas, she and the first-aid kit she carried had been summoned by a porter to one of the Pullman cars. Jill was a Zephyrette, the only female member of the train’s onboard crew. Her job was to see to the passengers’ needs. That included everything from answering questions to broadcasting announcements on the train’s public address system, making dinner reservations, mailing postcards and sending telegrams—and treating a little boy who had scraped some skin off his elbow when he jumped off the bunk in the sixteen-section sleeper near the back of the train. She had doctored the child with Merthiolate from her kit and put a bandage on his arm.

  She was returning to her own quarters when she entered the Silver Gorge and saw—whatever it was she was seeing. Or had seen. It was gone now. She set the kit on the floor and entered the roomette, seeing her own reflection in the window.

  “I must have imagined it,” she whispered.

  But she wasn’t imagining the chill inside the roomette. It was faint at first, a few degrees lower than the temperature in the corridor. As she stood there, the cold grew more penetrating. It seemed to go through her, to her bones. She moved toward the door. Then she heard four short taps.

  Frightened, Jill hurried out of the roomette into the corridor, nearly tripping over the first-aid kit. She picked up the kit and retreated a few steps, stopping at the door that opened onto the soiled linen locker. Her heart pounded. She took a deep breath, willing herself to calm down.

  She struggled to find a rational explanation for what she had seen and heard. And felt.

  I did see it, she thought. I really did. And I heard those taps. That cold feeling. But… No, no, I must have imagined it. I’m tired, that’s all. It’s just because I’m tired.

  She breathed in and out. The rapid beating of her heart slowed. Now all she heard was the rhythmic clickety-clack of the train’s wheels on the rails below her. A rumbling, wheezy snore erupted from behind the closed door of the nearest roomette. The passenger inside was sawing logs, as Jill’s father would say.

  The Silver Gorge was, in railroad parlance, a ten-six sleeper. That meant the car had ten roomettes, five on either side of the center passageway where Jill stood, and six double bedrooms facing another passageway at the front of the car. The roomettes were designed to accommodate one person, while the double bedrooms had two beds, one upper and the lower a bench seat that converted into a bed. At the soiled linen locker, in the middle of the car, the passageway jogged right, then left again.

  Jill pushed away from the locker and turned to her left, entering the corridor that fronted on the bedrooms, with doors to her left and windows to her right. She heard a loud, whistling snore coming from bedroom E, then the two-long, one-short, one-long whistle, a warning as the train approached a crossing.

  Jill went through the vestibule to the next car, the Silver Crane. The Pullman porter, Darius Doolin, sat in his tiny compartment. He stood up when he saw her. Threads of silver streaked his close-cropped black hair and wrinkles wreathed his coffee-with-cream face. He’d loosened the collar on his white s
hirt, preparing to settle down and get whatever sleep he could before the train arrived in Salt Lake City.

  “I thought you’d long since turned in for the night, Miss McLeod.”

  Mr. Doolin’s quiet voice was flavored with a Southern drawl. He’d once told Jill he was originally from Oklahoma, though he’d lived in Oakland for years. He was a veteran of more than twenty years as a porter, most of it on the Western Pacific Railroad, one of the three railroads that jointly operated the California Zephyr. That morning, the sleek streamliner, pulled by three Western Pacific locomotives, had departed from the huge shed called the Oakland Mole on San Francisco Bay. The WP took the train over the Sierra Nevada Mountains and across the Great Basin to Salt Lake City. There the locomotives and train crew would swap out for the Denver & Rio Grande Western crew and engines for the journey over the Rocky Mountains to Colorado’s capital city. The Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad brought the train across the Great Plains into Chicago’s Union Station.

  Jill, a Zephyrette, was considered an employee of the Western Pacific. The Zephyrettes were a small group of female railroad employees who traveled aboard the California Zephyr, which was called the CZ or the Silver Lady, because the sleek stainless steel cars all had “Silver” in their names. There were two trains per day, one eastbound, one headed west, each with one Zephyrette as part of the crew. The trip took two and a half days, and the Zephyrette had a layover of two nights in Chicago or San Francisco before boarding the California Zephyr for the return trip.

  “Good evening, Mr. Doolin.” Train crew members were expected to keep things on a “mister and miss” basis, even though they had traveled together frequently, as was the case with Jill and Darius Doolin. She gestured at the first-aid kit she carried in her left hand. “I was called to the sixteen-section sleeper. A little boy hurt himself when he jumped off a berth.”

  “A lot of children on the train this trip,” Mr. Doolin said. “And many of them running wild, as they sometimes do.”

  Jill kept her voice quiet as well, not wanting to disturb any passengers. “Yes, there are lots of kids traveling. That’s to be expected since it’s summer. I’ve had such a hectic day. There were a couple of boys playing cops and robbers in one of the chair cars, and later a little girl who took a tumble on the stairs in the dome-observation car. I’m tired. That must be—”

  Mr. Doolin looked at her. “Is everything all right, Miss McLeod? You look a bit peaky.”

  “I’m tired,” Jill said again. “That’s why I saw—”

  “Saw what?” Mr. Doolin asked. When she didn’t answer, he smiled. “Oh, you saw the ghost. On the Silver Gorge.”

  Jill stared at him. “You’ve seen it, too?”

  He nodded. “Twice.”

  “I don’t believe in ghosts,” Jill said. “There has to be a logical explanation for what I saw.”

  “Miss McLeod,” he said, “you know whose ghost that is. You’re the one who found the body. Two months ago, it was. In roomette four on the Silver Gorge. For some reason, that man’s spirit ain’t resting easy.”

  Jill looked at him in consternation. “Resting easy? That man died of natural causes. Something to do with his heart. At least that’s what I was told.”

  Mr. Doolin looked skeptical. “That may be. But he’s haunting that roomette. Trying to send a message, I expect. Now, you look tired to the bone, Miss McLeod. You need to get to bed. That ghost will keep until tomorrow.” He smiled again and returned to his seat.

  “I don’t believe in ghosts,” Jill muttered as she walked through the Silver Crane, through the vestibule and into the darkened dining car, the Silver Banquet, where white tablecloths gave the deserted car a spectral look. The next car was the Silver Roundup, the dome-lounge car. The front section held a coffee shop and a lounge, both long since closed for the night. The back of the car had a dormitory section with bunks stacked five high, for the waiters and cooks who worked in the diner. There were also two compartments, one for the dining car steward and one for the Zephyrette.

  Jill’s compartment was small, with a bench seat, a toilet and a sink. Once inside, she locked the door and set the first-aid kit in its usual place on a nearby shelf. She removed her uniform, a tailored teal-blue suit that was worn with a white blouse. The left breast pocket had a monogram reading Zephyrette, and so did the garrison cap she wore on her short brown hair. The blouse had a CZ monogram, standing for California Zephyr. She hung up her uniform, ready to get back into it if necessary. If she was called upon to assist a passenger in the middle of the night, and she hoped she wouldn’t be, she’d have to get dressed again.

  She put on a comfortable, well-worn pair of blue cotton pajamas. Then she pulled the sink down from the wall, washed her face and brushed her teeth. When she pushed the sink back up to the wall, the water drained out. Then she lowered the back of the bench seat, transforming it into her bed. She got between the covers and propped herself up with a pillow. Jill usually worked on her trip report before turning in for the night. The report, required to be filed at the end of each run, was an account of each day’s activities, the usual and the unusual, and Jill kept a pencil and a small notebook in her uniform pocket to make notes throughout the day. She jotted down problems, such as smoothing the ruffled feathers of that demanding passenger traveling in one of the sleeper cars, and dealing with those rambunctious children in the coach cars. She noted the number of dinner reservations she’d made this first day out and mentioned giving out soda mints to three passengers suffering from motion sickness.

  Jill set aside her notes and leaned back against the pillow. Normally she would read before going to sleep. Agatha Christie was her favorite author and she loved the Miss Marple books. She’d already read the latest, so she had brought a couple of old favorites to tide her over until the next Christie release. She looked at one of them, A Murder Is Announced, and decided she was too tired to read. She took off her watch and twisted the tiny knob on the right side of the face. The train crossed from the Pacific to the Mountain Time Zone when it went over the border between Nevada and Utah. Jill’s last announcement, made around nine o’clock this evening, was to remind passengers to reset their watches. Now she did the same.

  She turned out the light, listening to the clickety-clack of the rails. It usually lulled her to slumber. But tonight, sleep didn’t come right away. She kept thinking about what she’d seen.

  I don’t believe in ghosts, she told herself again. But what could explain the light she’d seen? What could explain that strange cold feeling inside roomette four, and the tapping sounds she’d heard?

  She thought of a scene in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, when Marley’s ghost pays a Christmas Eve visit to his former business partner. Ebenezer Scrooge didn’t believe in ghosts, either. Marley’s ghost had asked, “What evidence would you have of my reality, beyond that of your own senses?”

  And Scrooge had replied, “You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”

  Jill sighed. Well, I didn’t have any of those things for dinner, so I can’t blame this on my digestion.

  She rolled onto her side, plumped the pillow. Instead of drifting off to sleep, she thought about a day in May, two months earlier, at the end of a westbound run, when she’d found a dead man in roomette four.

  Chapter Two

  May 1953

  The California Zephyr headed through the Oakland waterfront, passing warehouses and piers. Each time the train neared a street, the engineer blew the warning for public grade crossings—two long whistles, followed by one short and another long. The train had already made a brief stop at the Western Pacific station at Third and Broadway, where a number of passengers had departed. Now the CZ, at the end of its westbound run from Chicago, entered the vast rail yard, criss-crossed by tracks. Its destination was the Oakland Mole, an enormous train shed on the shoreline of Oakland’s Middle Harbo
r.

  Zephyrette Jill McLeod, tired after the two-and-a-half-day journey, looked forward to getting home to her family in Alameda. But her day wasn’t over yet. Once the train arrived at the Mole, she would assist departing passengers, those heading for East Bay destinations and those hurrying to catch the ferry that would depart from the Mole, crossing the bay to San Francisco. After that, she had to finish and submit her trip report, due at the end of each run.

  Inside the ten-six sleeper, the Silver Gorge, she walked down the central passageway between the roomettes, glancing from side to side. Many of the travelers had already left the train at other stations. At roomette seven, she stopped to help Mrs. Wolfe, an elderly woman who had boarded in Denver, heading to San Francisco to visit family. Mrs. Wolfe had already gathered her book and her knitting, tucking them into her oversized handbag. Now Jill lifted Mrs. Wolfe’s suitcase from the overhead rack and handed it to Frank Nathan, the porter, who stood nearby.

  “Here’s the porter,” Jill said. “He’ll help you off the train and direct you to the ferry.”

  “If you’ll follow me, ma’am,” Mr. Nathan said.

  “Thank you, young man.” Mrs. Wolfe took a change purse from her handbag, opened it, and handed several coins to the porter. “You’ve been such a help this trip.”

  Jill followed Mrs. Wolfe as she and the porter made their way to the vestibule, where two other passengers waited, eager to leave the train at the end of their journey. As she came abreast of roomette four, Jill glanced inside. The passenger, Mr. Randall, was still in his seat, his head tilted toward the window. He had removed his suit jacket and loosened his tie. It looked like he was asleep, eyes closed under the lenses of his horn-rimmed glasses.

  Mr. Randall had boarded the train at the California Zephyr’s stop in Portola, just after eight that morning. During the journey, she’d seen him eating breakfast and then lunch in the dining car, drinking coffee in the lounge. Mostly, though, she had seen him here in this roomette, his jacket off and his tie loosened, his briefcase open on the floor, a ledger and a notebook on his lap. “Business trip,” he told her, looking up from his work.