Annie was looking up at him with bright curiosity.

  Betsy had a sudden inspiration. “Is there a club car or an observation car on this train?” she asked softly.

  “Yes, ma’m, the observation car is one car forward,” he murmured. “The club car is downstairs from it, but it’s closed for the night.”

  “Thank you.”

  He touched the bill of his cap and resumed his walk up the aisle.

  ANNIE heard Betsy ask the question she’d been hoping for. “You want to go up there?”

  “Sure! Do we take all our stuff?”

  “No, just our purses.”

  Stumbling a little under the impetus of the rocking train, they slowly walked past the sleeping or reading passengers—Annie had noticed that there were individual reading lights over each seat, but she hadn’t turned hers on—to the door at the front end of the car. It took a few moments for them to see that there was a push plate on it to make it open.

  There was a brief, rackety passage across the plates between cars, then another push plate, and they were in a well-lit car that had luxuriously comfortable swivel chairs looking out the windows at one end, and café-style tables at the other. The windows, larger than in the passenger car, actually stretched up onto the roof. Cool! Annie wished it were daytime, so she could sit and look out.

  All the chairs on one side of the car were taken by a group of twenty-somethings, men and women, in ski lodge wear—bright bulky sweaters, skinny leggings, fat boots—talking and laughing, existing in a happy bubble that excluded everyone else on the train, maybe even the train itself.

  Annie, after a brief, interested halt to eavesdrop, led the way to the other end, where she scooted into a bench seat at a Formica table, and smiled at Betsy sitting down across from her.

  “What should we talk about?” asked Annie, feeling brightly awake. She was dismayed to see Betsy was looking tired but took care to disguise her disappointment.

  Betsy sighed just a little bit and said, “Let’s go over in more detail what you learned at the Naomi Shelter.”

  “Okay. Ask me questions. Otherwise I’ll talk your ear off. What do you want to know?”

  “All right. How many people did you talk to?”

  “About Carrie? Seven or maybe eight—yeah, eight. About ten more didn’t want to talk about anything except did I want to go out with them to buy dope or booze, or could I loan them money, or complain about how life treated them bad.”

  “Did all eight know Carrie Carlson?”

  Annie thought about that. “All but two. Carrie was in there a lot, they said. She never stayed long, just long enough to get warm and clean and put on fresh clothes. She usually had some money in her pocket. Five dollars, ten dollars, sometimes even twenty dollars, enough to buy wine, or whatever. But she would hardly ever share it with anyone.”

  “Did she drink only wine?”

  “I don’t know. But all the people like her that I know, dedicated drinkers they’re called, will drink anything with alcohol in it. But I don’t know if she was like an exception.” Annie considered the odds to be fantastically against Carrie being an exception, but she didn’t say so; she’d already taken too long to answer that one question.

  “She was found with a bottle of bourbon.”

  Annie thought about that. “Maybe someone gave it to her? No, more likely she bought it. She had money almost all the time.”

  “Yes, that’s right.” Betsy stopped talking to think. Annie could almost see the wheels turning in her head. “But what if Mike Malloy is right? Someone put something in that bottle, something lethal, and put it where Carrie would be sure to find it.”

  “Okay, what if,” said Annie.

  “Who might that be? Why would someone want Carrie dead? It would have to be someone who knew Carrie, who hated her—”

  “Or was scared of her,” amended Annie.

  “Yes.” Betsy nodded, flashing an approving look at Annie for her perceptiveness. “Or was scared of her. Because she knew something. Because she had threatened this person, either with physical violence . . .” Betsy trailed off, frowning.

  “What? What are you thinking?”

  “I’m wondering which of the two, Janet or Carrie, would be more likely to get into that kind of situation. Janet was mentally ill, paranoid, and so more likely to feel threatened. But Carrie was quarrelsome and inclined to react violently. Janet’s enemies were mostly imaginary, while Carrie’s were more likely real.”

  Annie felt a stir of excitement. Here was someone thinking like a detective! “So which was the one the killer came after?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Did anyone at the shelter know Janet?”

  “Four people did. Three of them were the same ones who knew Carrie.”

  “What did they say?”

  “That she was crazy. She looked crazy, she acted crazy. But there are a lot of crazy people who are homeless, us people know how to act around them, we aren’t scared of them mostly. They said Janet cried a lot, but wouldn’t talk about why.” Annie thought that was very sad.

  Betsy frowned, as if this fact about Janet was painful. “Did the staff try to help her?” she asked in a sad voice.

  “I’m sure they did. But crazy people have crazy rules in their heads, and they’re stricter than what anyone standing on the outside can do. Like there was this one woman who had to count her steps, and if she got interrupted or forgot the number, she had to go back to her room and start over. Sometimes she missed supper because she started over too many times. You could tell her and tell her she didn’t have to do that, and she’d say, ‘Yes I know,’ real annoyed, but she’d do it anyway.”

  “You never met Janet, did you?”

  “No, I never did.”

  “Are you sure? Maybe your paths crossed and you either don’t remember or she never told you her name.”

  Annie thought about that for a moment. “I suppose that’s possible. Is there a picture of her somewhere?”

  “Actually I have one.” Betsy went rummaging in her purse and came up with two color printouts of the photographs that had obviously been taken during a jail booking. They were folded into quarters. She unfolded them and put them on the table for Annie to look at. “This is Carrie, and this is Janet.”

  Carrie was thin, with heavy bags beneath red-rimmed eyes, and graying dark hair that looked as if it had been cut in the dark with nail scissors. Her expression was angry, her thin lips poised as if to say something.

  “Whoa!” said Annie. “Not exactly a beauty queen!”

  “Yes, but people tend not to look their best right after being arrested. And Carrie, according to her cousin, was angry a lot of the time. Does she look familiar?”

  Annie squinted at the picture, trying to imagine her looking more rested, less angry. “I don’t think so,” she said.

  She turned her attention to the other picture, which was of a woman probably close to Carrie’s age, with hair that had once been dyed a dead black but was growing out very gray. Her eyes, looking a little to one side, were wide and wary, her mouth a little crooked, her shoulders hunched. She was wearing a torn black shirt.

  “Oh, I know her!” exclaimed Annie. Her nose wrinkled at the memory. “She always wanted fresh clothes but they had to be black—and she didn’t wash herself enough. She was sure that someone could sneak up on her in the shower—I think she saw that movie Psycho and it scarred her for life. I had to share a room with her, and I got her to use a washcloth instead of taking a shower, but even then she didn’t like the water running, she said it made too much noise. She’d turn it on and then right away turn it off again. I felt sorry for her, but at the same time I tried to stay away from her. She was just too weird, and she smelled.”

  “How long did you share a room?”

  “Two—no, three days. That was back in November. She said the FBI was after her, and if anything happened to her, I should contact my senator.” Annie hesitated, but decided to ask, “Should I?”

  “I don’t think so. Someone was after her, but he, or she, wasn’t from the government.”

  “Yeah, but the government’s the ones with secret poisons, aren’t they?”

  She could tell Betsy was trying not to laugh at her, and tried not to be offended. Betsy apparently realized that, and, sobering, said, “Actually, you may be right, but they had no real reason to come after Janet.”

  “Oh. Yeah, I guess that’s so.”

  “On the other hand, she is dead. Annie, I’m concerned I might have dragged you into a situation that is more trouble than you can handle. So you don’t have to check in at the Fargo shelter if you don’t want to. You were so clever at getting behind the walls at the Naomi Shelter that I just assumed you’d be willing to go for a stay at the shelter in Fargo.”

  Annie beamed with pleasure at this praise. “But I do want to!” she said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Sure I’m sure! This is important, right?” Annie said this as firmly as she could.

  “Well, yes, it is. And I’m grateful that you’re willing to do this.”

  “No problem, honest, no problem.” Not a problem she couldn’t solve anyway.

  “Well, that’s all I wanted to know. This bench isn’t nearly as comfortable as our seats. Want to go back?”

  “I’m not sleepy,” hinted Annie. “And there’s nuthin’ to look at out the windows back in the regular car.”

  “Well, then, what do you want to talk about?”

  “I dunno.” Annie looked expectantly at Betsy. Maybe she’d talk about what it was like to run a business.

  But Betsy picked the topic Annie was most tired of. “Tell me about yourself. Where are you from?”

  “Minneapolis. Born there. I’ll probably die there, too, or maybe as far away as in Saint Paul.” She tried to change the subject. “What about you?” she asked Betsy, looking genuinely interested.

  “I was born in Brown Deer, a suburb of Milwaukee. My sister Margot started the shop, and I inherited it when she died. How did you come to . . .” Betsy bit her tongue, but her eyes said she really wanted to know.

  Annie surrendered. “Be homeless? It wasn’t hard. All I had to do was make some easy mistakes.”

  “Like what?”

  Annie sighed. “First, drop out of school. My parents warned me, but I was seventeen and knew everything.” Annie was sure that many homeless people were high school dropouts—some didn’t even get that far. Though if the economy was bad, even rich people could end up homeless if they didn’t have rich relatives.

  “But that’s just to start with,” said Annie. “It didn’t help to pick a bad man for a husband.”

  “Bad how? Was he cruel to you?”

  “Not on purpose. He was fun actually. We laughed a whole lot. But he was lazy and he drank too much. Couldn’t keep a job. Smoked marijuana a lot—I think it was the marijuana that made him lazy. It was making me stupid, so I quit. I thought he’d stop all that stuff once we were married, but he stayed like a kid when he should have been like a grown-up.”

  “I had a boyfriend like that once,” said Betsy. “I was young and thoughtless, and I almost married him. I’m really glad I didn’t.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I had a good friend who got me into a conversation about where we wanted to be in ten years, and I suddenly realized Gary wasn’t going to help me get there.” She smiled. “I think she did that on purpose!”

  Annie said wistfully, “I wish I’d had a friend like that.”

  “So go on, then what happened?”

  Annie sighed, but obediently went on. “Then I had an even stupider idea. I thought having a baby would force him to grow up, but it made him worse. His jokes weren’t funny anymore, we fought all the time, and he finally walked out.”

  “But didn’t he pay child support?” Betsy asked, the soul of naïveté.

  Annie gave a high-pitched sound, almost like a bark. “Ha! Every time the law found him, and started to close in to make him pay child support, he’d quit his job and move to a new address.”

  Betsy gave a sympathetic sigh. “The pig!”

  “I thought so. I worked two jobs to support my son and myself, but without that diploma, they were crappy jobs and we lived hand to mouth. Plus, I was a crappy mom, because I wasn’t home much and too tired when I was.”

  “But what else could you do?”

  Annie paused to think, though it was a familiar question. She shrugged. “I don’t know. Dick Junior was a wild kid, and he grew into an irresponsible man, a lot like his father, only without the charm.”

  “Did he ever straighten up?” Betsy asked hopefully.

  “Last I heard, he was living in his car somewhere in Arkansas—but that was two years ago. I don’t know where he is now.”

  “You don’t ever hear from him?”

  “He wouldn’t know how to get in touch with me even if he wanted to. And vice versa.” This conversation was really getting her down.

  “You said you had a good job at a factory.”

  Annie looked out the window into the darkness. “Yeah, that was the best job I ever had, workin’ on the line at that auto parts factory. But they moved overseas, and I’m too old to get another factory job.” Annie pulled her shoulders up. That had been a good job.

  Betsy said, “Oh, Annie . . .”

  Annie looked at her and saw tears forming in her eyes.

  “Now don’t you go getting all sympathetic on me, okay?” she scolded. “It’s not a pretty story, but it’s not unusual. There are an awful lot of women with a story just like mine. If I think about it too much, I get depressed, so I just stay . . .” She searched her brain for the word she wanted, then brightened on finding it: “Assertive.”

  Betsy was one of those people who looked for solutions. “What about the factory? Didn’t they offer a pension?”

  “Sure, but I didn’t work there long enough to earn one. They gave us six months’ pay when they let us go, but a year later, I still got no job so I can’t pay my rent, so . . .” She shrugged again. “That’s how come I’m homeless.”

  “But what about welfare?”

  “Oh, I’m on welfare. But welfare doesn’t pay enough for me to rent an apartment, even in a bad neighborhood. I’m on a waiting list for a subsidized place. It’ll happen. Once I get a place to live, I can really start over. I can find some kind of a job maybe. At least I’ll have a real address, and I can open a bank account.” The familiar dream made her voice turn quiet. “Save up and buy a TV. Yeah, that’ll be nice.”

  This time the tears spilled over. “Oh, Annie . . .”

  “Say, I told you, don’t feel sad for me! I’m alive and kickin’. Things’ll work out, they generally do. I’ll be fine!” She’d really had enough of this conversation, so she faked a big yawn. “Well, I guess I’m tired after all. How about you?”

  She could tell that Betsy recognized the ploy for what it was, but that was all right, because she said, “Yes, me, too. Let’s go back.”

  Betsy led the way back to their seats, finding them in the dim light when she recognized their coats on the rack above them. They sat down with identical sighs, and in a few minutes both women were sound asleep.

  THEY were awakened by the conductor. “Ladies, we’re coming into Fargo,” he said quietly. “You’ll need to gather up your things and come down the stairs. Be sure to check the overhead.”

  “Gotcha,” murmured Annie.

  “Thank you,” mumbled Betsy.

  He moved up two rows and bent over a figure wrapped in blankets.

  They got their coats down from the shelf, shrugged their way into them, picked up their purses from the floor, and made their way to the steep, narrow stairway going down. After the dimness upstairs, the lights now seemed bright down there, and Betsy found their suitcases with no trouble. It felt even more crowded down there with four other people, also waiting to get off. There was a sliding, slow, thumping sound from behind them and two more people appeared. The others rearranged themselves so the new arrivals could get their luggage. Then they all stood quietly, with legs well apart, trying not to stagger as the train rocked ever more slowly, coming into Fargo.

  It was the soul-deadening hour of half past three in the morning and nobody was saying much.

  There were no windows where they stood, so Betsy felt, rather than saw, the train gliding to a gentle stop. A conductor opened a door around from the luggage shelves and a current of icy air came drifting in.

  When Betsy got to the front of the line, the conductor, now standing on the platform, took her suitcase from her with one hand and helped her down with the other. Betsy took a few steps, then turned to wait for Annie.

  “Which way to the Radisson Hotel?” Betsy asked the conductor.

  “I don’t know, I’m from Portland,” he replied, helping the last passenger down.

  The modest, one-story, brick train station was lit up, but nobody seemed to be in there. Betsy went around to the west side of the building, where two of the passengers were putting their luggage into the trunk of a waiting car. It was snowing, but the parking lot was clear except for a thin coating of fresh snow.

  “Which way to the Radisson, do any of you know?” Betsy asked loudly.

  The nearer of the two women pointed down the street perpendicular to the parking lot. “That way, about two blocks,” she said and stepped back while the other closed the trunk.

  Betsy turned around to ask Annie if she could walk that far in the snow and cold.

  “Piece o’ cake,” said Annie before Betsy opened her mouth.

  The streets and sidewalks were piled with four or five inches of snow. They waited while the two cars picking up passengers went out into the snow-clogged street and disappeared quickly from sight. Betsy, glad she had worn her boots, waded through the snow as she crossed the street and began walking down the sidewalk, Annie behind her. Not a single building showed a light, and now there was no traffic at all. It was so quiet that when she stopped to listen, all she could hear was the faint whisper of the snow falling all around her.