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“Do you know if the judge had any enemies?” Rafe asked her.
“Sure,” Larrah said. “I mean, anyone he put away or fined. And of course, anyone looking to get away with expanding their land rights.”
“Was that many people?” Rafe asked.
She shrugged.
“We heard Tag Pricketts say something about it,” Jade said.
“Sure, Tag,” Larrah agreed. “Plenty of others too, I’ll bet. Most people coming out here want a lot of land.”
‘That tracks,” Rafe said. “Anyone you think is capable of violence?”
The schoolteacher got a strange look on her face.
“Just about everyone out here is, I guess,” she said with a slight shiver. “Sigg-3 is not an easy world. You have to be tough on the tundra.”
Jade repressed a shiver of her own. Surely, this spread-out little town of colorful houses wasn’t full of potential murderers.
Was it?
“Did you notice anything unusual happening on the train between the time the judge left our car and the next day when he was found?” Rafe asked.
It was such a general, open-ended question. Jade had wondered if anyone would bother answering it when Rafe practiced it on her this morning.
But Larrah Boone was obviously looking to extend the conversation.
She cleared her throat and frowned as if she were thinking back to the night before last and scanning the train for clues.
“Well,” Larrah said after a moment. “There was one thing that I thought was kind of weird.”
“What’s that?” Rafe asked.
“You know that little woman with the big glasses?” the schoolteacher asked, leaning in a bit as if she were sharing juicy gossip, not a clue in a murder case.
“Sure,” Rafe said. “I know who you mean. What’s her name?”
“I have no idea,” Larrah said, shrugging. “I’ve never seen her before, but there was something weird with her.”
“What was it?” Rafe asked.
“Did you notice that as soon as Tag was talking about land rights, her eyes got all big?” Larrah asked. “It was super strange. She just stood up and like, ran off. And she wasn’t in that car with us when the lights went out.”
Jade’s eyes met Rafe’s as she recognized that this was true.
She opened her mouth to ask Larrah which car the glasses lady had gone to.
“Izah-belle,” Larrah yelled, shaking her head and moving as fast as a lightning strike toward a little Bergalian girl holding a Vystian boy over her head. “Put him down this instant. We do not pick up our classmates.”
The Bergalian girl was smiling triumphantly and pretending not to hear her teacher. The boy in her arms was also smiling, his tentacles floating merrily around his head.
Before they had a chance to continue the conversation, the bell rang, and the kids ran for the school all at once.
Larrah waved to Jade and Rafe as she chased the kids in, making eye contact with Rafe and then tapping her bracelet as if asking him to send her a comm.
A now-familiar flame of jealousy flared in Jade’s chest. She was finding it harder and harder to ignore it.
“You okay?” Rafe asked her.
