The Ghost at Eden Station
by J. H. Zech
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Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
part 2
Eden Station was crawling with police officers. Flashing lights were everywhere, and it seemed half the force had come down here since they had nothing else to do in this town. Bursts of white light from the forensic team’s cameras occasionally provided clear glimpses of Jessica’s body.
“Are you alright?” Richard asked.
“I’m fine.” Dahlia was not fine. She had seen plenty of dead bodies in her career, but that didn’t mean that it ever got any easier. Most times, people died outside the view of the public, and the few times one saw a corpse was a reminder that death came for everyone. No matter a pauper or an emperor, eventually they would all be fragments below the sand. Their short lives would be given meaning by the living after their death.
How ironic then, that Jessica was the one to have her life cut short; she, a journalist whose writings would give lasting meaning to people’s ephemeral lives. And how fitting it was, that if Jessica gave meaning to lives, Dahlia, a detective, would give meaning to her death.
“I hate to do this, but I am going to need your statement,” Richard said.
Dahlia explained what she had seen.
“So, everyone here was with you and witnessed the murder together?”
“Yes, we were all together from seeing Jessica hanged while alive, to lowering her body after she was dead.”
“And was the culprit really Xu Ling?”
“Of course not. There’s no such thing as ghosts. But...”
“But?”
“Whoever it was wanted to play the part of Xu Ling, to make us think it was Xu Ling. Why they did that, I don’t know. There may be some deeper reason.” Dahlia glanced at the body. “Has a time of death been determined yet?”
Richard answered, “It took us about ten minutes to get here, and it’s cold out, so the best we’ve got is within the last 30-40 minutes. But we already know from your testimonies that it happened around midnight, which is right in the middle of that range. What’s bothering you?”
“I have so many questions. What was Jessica going to announce? Did that have anything to do with why she was killed? Does this relate to the threats that Rudy received? And why is this all tied together with Xu Ling?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. I’ll continue gathering clues for now, and you should get some sleep tonight.”
“You’re supposed to be the inspector here. Put some more thought into it.”
“Unlike you, I was never that gung-ho about justice. I’m content to do a satisfactory job and sit until I get my pension.”
“A fifty percent murder solve rate is satisfactory?” Dahlia quipped.
Richard bristled. “That’s perfectly average, I’ll have you know!”
Dahlia rolled her eyes. “Do you mind if I have a look around?”
“I’ll permit it, but I can’t let you get close to the body. The rest of the station area is fine, though.”
She walked back to the station entrance near her parking spot to retrace her steps. From the very beginning, she would reexamine everything.
Aside from the police cars and the cars of the others who had come, the parking lot was vast and empty. No lamps illuminated the expanse of asphalt. She walked forward to the plaza leading up to the platform and remembered when she had first seen the others. The two lamps on the platform on the near side were the only source of light here. Across the train tracks, there was only one lamp.
Dahlia recalled the circle of light that had been cast upon Jessica before. Where had that come from? It couldn’t have been coming from outside the station. A high concrete wall behind Jessica’s body blocked the view and any light from beyond. Right now, the only lights around her were from the forensics team.
Walking around the platform, Dahlia came to the gate separating her from the tracks. She looked up. There was nothing around the lamp above save for some moths fluttering about. No tricks that could explain what they had seen. She looked down. A glint of something reflecting the lamp’s light caught her eye. She bent down and picked it up: a small black piece of curved plastic. Was this from the train or something else?
A little later, Richard approached her. “Did you find anything?”
“I’m not sure yet. I’ve got some questions but no answers so far. Did forensics find anything?”
“It’s preliminary, but here’s what we know so far. There were no fingerprints or DNA on Jessica. Cause of death was asphyxiation from the rope around her neck. Likely, she was drugged with something before she was killed. Her hands were bound, but we didn’t see any signs of a struggle, so she was probably knocked out first and then tied up. The rope is an ordinary rope you can get anywhere. Her call history is quite suspicious though.”
“How so?”
“Every person here tonight was on her call list today.”
“I guess that makes sense. She invited all of us here tonight.”
“There’s more. One unknown number shows up as the last call on her record, and the unknown number was the one who called her.”
“So you think the unknown caller is the murderer?” Dahlia asked.
Richard shrugged. “It’s suspicious, but that’s not enough to say this caller is the murderer.”
“Hey, Richard, can I go home now? It’s past one,” Rudy said, walking up to him.
Aileen, Maximillian, and Katy stood behind him nodding in agreement.
“Alright. Since you all have clear alibis, you can go. But don’t leave town. We might have more questions later.”
“What does that mean?” Katy asked.
“It means that although none of us directly murdered Jessica, any of us could have been accomplices,” Dahlia said.
“That’s a serious accusation you’re making,” Maximillian snapped.
“I’m not accusing anyone. I’m only stating the possibility. Or do you have some reason you need to skip town?”
“Of course not.”
“Oh, I see,” Katy said. “Maybe some people here do have a reason to be an accomplice. There was that rumor that another developer who’s a competitor to Atlantis Co. was paying the mayor. If Jessica had the inside scoop on that, she’d have a motive.”
“That’s slander!” Aileen hissed. “And it’s not like I should be singled out. Jessica wrote an article about Maximillian promising kickbacks to other cities to take Eden’s homeless off our hands.”
“Hey, don’t throw me under the bus like that. Everything I did was legal and in the best interest of the city. If you want to talk about corruption, what about Ms. Hernandez’s advocacy group being inolved with an Atlantis Co. exec that the federal police are investigating? Jessica was no doubt sniffing around that, too.”
“We had nothing to do with that!” Katy growled. “Tell him, Rudy.”
“Uh, yes. Um... That matter is being resolved through the legal process and his behavior was all his own choice, nothing to do with me.” Rudy looked uncomfortable.
“Well, it looks like you all have reasons you need to stay in town then,” Richard said.
A chill went through the air, and the group silently dispersed into their cars and drove away.
“What will you do now?” Richard asked.
“I need to do some research. I’ll head to the library tomorrow morning and see what I can dig up. Good night.” Dahlia walked away to her sedan. She left the train station behind, driving onto a lonely, dark road.
Even though this road from the station only went one direction, it twisted and turned unnaturally, and anyone not paying attention could fly off the road and into the creek below. What Eden’s designers were thinking, Dahlia couldn’t fathom.
* * *
The next morning, Dahlia woke up late, having gone to bed past two. Her head felt heavy, and she swayed her way to the bathroom to jolt herself awake with a splash of cold water on her face. After getting dressed into her usual slacks and a light coat, she zig-zagged down the stairs of the apartment and headed out the door. She crossed the street and strolled through the pristine white path in the park beyond which the library lay.
Despite the carefully manicured beauty of the park with trimmed rose hedges and jacaranda trees overhanging the path, the library itself was a boring beige stucco rectangle that simply read “Eden Main Library” above the glass doors.
Dahlia entered through the automatic sliding doors and sat in a tiny chair in front of an antiquated boxy computer, where the clacking of the keyboard filled the silence of the library.
A few minutes later, she had gathered all the materials related to Eden Station she could find, all the way back to 1945.
Eden was a new, post-war boomtown on the West Coast, but it had been built at a strange nexus in time. It was arguably one of the last streetcar suburbs, or at least had been intended to be one. Plans for Eden Station had existed since the late 1930s but had been delayed due to the war, and the post-war boom was flush with cash, so planning had started again in 1945, and construction started in 1954.
“The Lynching of Xu Ling.”
The section header grabbed Dahlia’s attention. She had been aware of this event but not in great detail. Perhaps history would have a clue to the present.
Eden was still somewhat a wild west at this point, and poor immigrant laborers had been brought from all over to work on the station. Two main groups worked on it, the Centrosians and the Yurazanians. They went on strike in 1958 due to poor working conditions, but their unity didn’t last. The Centrosians had previously complained about being underpaid relative to the Yurazanians, so relations had never been cozy.
And then on June 28th, 1958, Albert Koth, the leader of the Yuraznian workers, was found bludgeoned to death. The Yurazanians suspected the Centrosians and rioted, massacring the Centrosians and lynching their leader Xu Ling by hanging him from a tree. This gave the government an excuse to send in the military to break the strike, and the station was finished in 1959.
Dahlia put down the book. The irony was that after all that bloodshed, Eden Station became a novelty used mostly by out-of-town commuters after the federal government opted to replace most of the rail network with highways. Eden was a paradise of a city, but even paradise had skeletons under it.
But the grudge of a ghost from fifty years ago wasn’t a compelling case for a motive today. She read through the printout report of the development deal from twenty years ago. What was the motive back then? The deal seemed uncontroversial. The station would be demolished but rebuilt to a more modern form with a mall and apartments around it. Existing train riders could still use the platforms during construction. No one lived near it, so there weren’t any major complaints, and the developer had acquired the land with no legal battles. Normally, the person with the most to lose from something would have the strongest motive, but here, there were only winners. There was something deeper Dahlia was missing.
She went back to the primary sources, the news clippings from the original lynching and the case twenty years ago. Was there any thread connecting them?
Rail Workers’ Leader Albert Koth Found Dead: Savage Centrosians to Blame?
The first article about the incident was a sign of the times. June 28th, 1958. The article included closeup shots of a man with a bushy beard and the bloody wound on the back of his head. “Two brutal blows to the head. Only a jealous Centrosian could have performed such a savage and cowardly murder of a modern-day labor hero,” it read. Writers for The Eden Times had been pumping such drivel even fifty years ago. The author’s name caught her eye. In that context, certain things made sense now. Dahlia rose from her seat and made for the door.
She had to tell Richard about this. Just as she exited the library and pulled her phone out of her bag, it was knocked out, and she felt the sting of cuts all over her hand. A shot had rung out. Dahlia dropped down behind the bushes.
Her days on the police force flashed before her eyes. Where was the shooter? She couldn’t see them in the immediate vicinity. A sniper? Someone hiding behind the trees? No, she couldn’t afford to look for them right now. The library was right behind her. She dashed out and leapt towards the door.
The door slid open. Dahlia was one foot in when another shot rang out, and her back leg screamed in pain. She stumbled forward into the library and managed to get her other leg in, so the door slid closed. The shooter wouldn’t come to the door with all the people here. She turned over onto her back and let out a deep breath.
A little boy saw the blood streaming from her leg and started crying. The people were in a commotion while one of the librarians waved her arms trying to prevent a panic. Another was on the phone calling the police. Dahlia had survived. Which meant it was time to put this all to bed.
* * *
The police had arrived shortly after the incident, and Dahlia had received a flurry of messages from a worrywart Richard. The paramedics had stopped the bleeding and taken her to the hospital. Thankfully the bullet hadn’t fractured her bone; it was a relatively light wound. They stitched her leg and discharged her with crutches.
She wrote a message to Richard, “I’m fine. Only minor injuries. Summon the involved to the train station. I will explain everything there.”
* * *
Aileen, Katy, Maximillian, Rudy, and Richard had all gathered at the platform at the train station. Dahlia lurched forward towards them on her crutches.
“Oh, dear, what happened to you?” Aileen asked, covering her mouth.
“I was shot at. My injuries are minor though.”
“Good heavens! Did the police catch them?” Maximillian cried.
“No, but we’re about to.”
“What does that mean?” Rudy asked, his arms crossed. “I’m actually quite busy. You have no idea how much heat I’ve been getting from the higher-ups due to the debacle around this project.”
“I’m sure our inspector here has good cause for summoning us like this,” Aileen said with a polite forcefulness suggesting consequences if the cause weren’t good enough.
“This is why nobody likes the police. I’m filming you right now, so watch out,” Katy announced in a defiant tone while pointing her phone at Richard.
“Rest assured, our brave consultant will now tell us the results of her investigation,” Richard said.
“Isn’t that supposed to be your job?” Maximillian quipped.
Richard pretended not to hear, though Maximillian was right.
Dahlia said, “To give some more context, this morning, I was shot at by an unknown assailant at the park. There were no security cameras, and only a few witnesses were around, but they only saw someone in a hoodie and mask with no other details. The perpetrator is still at large.”
“That is troubling news, but what does this have to do with us?” Aileen asked.
“The culprit behind this shooting and the murderer of Jessica Li are likely one in the same. And that culprit is among us!”
They gasped.
Copyright © 2025 by J. H. Zech
