Trail of Blood by Lisa Black Page B

the introductions. Edward Corliss shook hands with each of them, pressing Theresa’s gently in his firm fingers. He had an easy smile and the trimness of one who had long ago embraced whole wheat tortillas.
    “I’m sorry if you waited at the front—I didn’t expect you to get here so quickly.”
    “Are you getting it ready for winter?” Frank asked, nodding at the sailboat.
    “No! It’s too early yet. I don’t put Jenny away until the lake threatens to freeze. Let’s go inside and see if I can help you, shall we?”
    He took up the rear, guiding them off the dock like a good captain, and they followed him inside. Theresa ran her fingers through her hair to repair whatever damage the lake’s gusty winds had done to it.
    Corliss ushered them into an oversize front room done up in russet and gold tones, the colors splashing against the white walls. Windows made up most of the north wall, from which every whitecap on the lake could be seen in frothing clarity. Scarlet carpeting, jacquard sofas, a vast fireplace.
    And trains. Lots of trains.
    They collected on every surface, end tables, the high mantel, and circled the room on three high shelves. A mahogany table that could have seated twelve had been given over to a mountaintop village with miniature houses and farms and more train tracks than any real mountaintop village would have. Two engines with several cars wound through it, occasionally passing but not colliding with each other. She swore she could smell the evergreens.
    “Wow,” Theresa said.
    “Yes,” Corliss said. “I went a little overboard in here. One of the hazards of bachelorhood, not having a wife to stop me. But you’re here about my father’s building, right? Would you like to sit down?”
    Theresa would rather have studied the snow-covered village and its trains but followed her cousin to the crisp settee. Jablonski perched on the edge of a wing chair, pulling a tiny camcorder from one of his two camera bags. He clicked it on and aimed it at Theresa.
    “Your father constructed the building at 4950 Pullman?” Frank began.
    “Yes. I mean, he contracted for it to be built.”
    “Did he have any other buildings in Cleveland?”
    “No, no. My father was a railroad man; he only dabbled in landlord-ship that one time, and only as an investment. My father—his name was Arthur—”
    “We know.”
    Corliss spoke of the large train systems with the same enthusiasm he showed for his miniature ones. “He started working in the rail yards as a boy, moving through every job they had, from loading to shoveling coal to coupler, eventually to detective—like you—with a small railroad company in Pennsylvania. By the time the line’s owner began to fall into ill health, my father had enough saved to buy the line. You see, around the turn of the century there were hundreds of small, limited-span lines. In the 1910s and ’20s, bigger companies began to buy up the mom-and-pop lines and turned into conglomerates like the Pennsylvania Railroad and the B&O.”
    Theresa fingered a pair of binoculars on the end table, wondering how close they would bring the whitecaps and seagulls. But she didn’t pick them up. They looked too heavy and too expensive.
    “Oh,” Frank said. Jablonski finally switched the camcorder’s gaze from Theresa to Corliss.
    “My point is, Pennsylvania bought my father’s company and made him one of their vice presidents, as well as a very wealthy man. Rich enough that he could have retired right then, but he loved the trains too much, and besides, the Depression had arrived. He needed a safe investment for his money and figured real estate would be as safe as any.”
    Frank made a note. Jablonski, the camera perched on one knee, plucked a gold figurine of a steam engine off the coffee table in front of him. Corliss looked askance, and the researcher put it back with the gentlest
clink
.
    Frank went on. “He kept an office there for himself?”
    “I believe so, yes. He’d take