Dead Water (24 page)

“Other than two grown men shooting at one another because one of them didn't like the fact that the other had spoken to a woman he claimed was ‘his own'? I was watching Hannibal,” she added in a gentler voice. “Hoping against hope he'd be all right.”

“
Is
he all right?”

Rose sighed. “He's probably unconscious with laudanum by this time, and who can blame him? He looked deathly sick when he came aboard, and went straight to his stateroom. That Skippen hussy came tearing down the stair and tried to throw herself into his arms and he thrust her aside, but he couldn't speak. She's knocked at the door of his stateroom three times since, and tried to open it—I was keeping watch at the end of the promenade—but it's locked from the inside. What did you see?”

“Two grown men shooting at one another,” replied January with a wry grin. Then he sobered. “I was watching Hannibal, too. But when I saw the wound in Molloy's head I remembered how that raven flew up, just before the signal to fire, and it came to me that the
whole thing
might have been set up. That the intended victim wasn't Hannibal and myself, but Molloy. I think Molloy was shot with a rifle from that little oak grove at the head of the chute.”

“By whom?” asked Rose, startled. “Mrs. Fischer was on the promenade with Mrs. Tredgold and Mrs. Roberson—I saw her. And Mr. Cain was on the deck below.”

“Levi Christmas, maybe? Or one of his men?”

“But that would imply communication between him and someone on board—either Theodora or one of those awful deck-passengers. Since we've been stopped, there hasn't been a moment when there wasn't a guard of some kind on the hurricane deck. I don't think they could even have signaled without being seen.”

“I know,” said January. “I didn't say this was something I could prove, or even explain. But one thing I can and will do is have a look at the bullet lodged in Molloy's skull. And if it's a ball from a Manton dueling pistol, I'll eat it.”

While they'd been speaking, the great stern paddle had begun to turn, slowly driving the
Silver Moon
out into the channel of the river from the dead water behind the point. The river had fallen to its former low level, and the boat was surrounded by a veritable forest of snags that scraped at the hull and caught in the paddle, forcing the vessel to stop repeatedly while the deck-hands clambered here and there with poles to thrust off. January could hear Mr. Souter's voice yelling down from the hurricane deck, and unbidden to his mind rose the thought of what it must be like to be hidden in the damp, smelly darkness of the hold, listening to the grate of dead wood on the thin walls and knowing how much water lay immediately outside.

The thought made him shudder. He might fear Queen Régine, waiting like a spider down there in the darkness—holding whatever secret it was that she held about Weems's death—but he pitied her, too. She was a woman half-crazy and without fear, but there were limits even to craziness and courage.

January wasn't certain he could have stayed down there and listened to that horrible scraping sound.

When he and Rose reached the upper deck, almost the first thing they encountered was a knot of people grouped at the corner of the 'tween-decks near the door of Molloy's stateroom. Colonel Davis stood by the door, looking as if he wished he could simply call a sergeant and order everyone back to their quarters. Mrs. Fischer, her handsome face flushed behind the black veils she'd assumed, was shouting at him, “The man was a thief and a scoundrel, and I know that it was he who stole poor Mr. Weems's money! Mr. Weems told me himself, that on Saturday, when the boat ran aground on the bar above Vicksburg, and all the men were pressed into service in that
disgraceful
manner, he came back to find his stateroom door open and his money gone. . . .”

“And you just
know
it was poor Kevin, do you?” Miss Skippen lashed at her shrilly. “You just
saw
in his face that he was evil, because he didn't play up to you and tell you you were beautiful, is that it?” She turned to Davis, clutching at his sleeve. “Oh, what am I to do? Mr. Davis, I
must
get into that cabin! I left some things—my money—with Kevin—with Mr. Molloy—for safekeeping, and I must get them back! Oh, to be left this way without my fiancé's protection . . .”

“Fiancé?”
Mrs. Tredgold sniffed. “A fine way to treat your
fiancé,
to make up to other men and send him to his grave, not that I believe for a
moment
that he offered to marry such a piece of work as yourself. . . .”

“Ladies,” pleaded Mr. Tredgold faintly.

“You see here.” Mrs. Tredgold stabbed a thick finger at Davis. “I've heard the rumor that you plan to tell the sheriff at Mayersville to hold the entire boat for investigation of these absurd stories about Weems having a fortune in stolen gold aboard. . . . What I have to say is, I'd like to see that fortune! You order us about, ransack every piece of luggage on board, delay us needlessly, run up a fortune in wood-charges that we'll have to pay and soon, if we're to make it to Mayersville at all. . . .”

“And where do you think you're going?” Mrs. Fischer rounded on January as he tried to speak quietly to Davis. Without waiting for a reply she went on. “You forbid me to enter the stateroom of a man who robbed my fiancé, yet you're going to let a thieving black Negro in—”

“As a surgeon, Madame,” interposed January, “I need to make an examination of the body—”

“For what purpose? We all know he's dead.”

Theodora cried, “Oh!” and sagged against the rail of the stair up to the hurricane deck. Nobody paid any attention.

“All you want to do is search the room for anything you can get that you think will help your master prove my poor Oliver was a thief! Well, if
he
can enter, then so can
I
!”

“Madame, you will do nothing of the sort,” retorted Davis, blotches of color staining his pale cheekbones. “I will accompany this boy and no one else—”

“Who are you to treat us like you were a policeman and we were all criminals?” interrupted Mrs. Fischer, shoving her face inches from the planter's. “You paid your passage on this boat like everyone else!”

“Tredgold,” said Mrs. Tredgold sharply, “it's for you to take charge here. Now, you go into that stateroom and look for Mr. Weems's money for poor Mrs. Fischer!”

Davis stared at her, speechless with indignation, and from above Souter shouted, “Mr. Lundy says, if you're all gonna argue, argue someplace else! He can't hear the leadsman and he can't hardly hear himself think, he says!”

“You be quiet!” yelled Mrs. Tredgold back. “This is my husband's boat and we'll say what we want, where we want to!”

“Dearest . . .”

Mr. Souter came hesitantly halfway down the steps from the deck above. The
Silver Moon
had begun to move, the breeze flowing down the river as they rounded Hitchins' Point riffling his thinning black hair. “Er—then Mr. Lundy says your husband can pilot the boat wherever he wants it to go.”

Geranium-red with fury, Mrs. Tredgold stormed up the steps, nearly shoving Mr. Souter over the rail. Davis and January darted at once to the stateroom door, to which Davis bent with a key, probably obtained from Thu. Mrs Fischer strode in their wake like a black-sailed ship fully rigged for a race and Theodora Skippen brought up the rear, not a tear on her face and the only redness visible being her rouge. From the hurricane deck voices drifted down, mostly Mrs. Tredgold's.

“That's just what we need,” muttered January as Davis unlocked Molloy's cabin door. “Lundy quitting on us . . . because there isn't a pilot under the sun who'll put up with being told what to do. . . . Ladies,” he added, turning in the doorway as the two bereaved caught up with them. “It is my intention simply to make a medical examination of Mr. Molloy's body—”

“And cut him up,” demanded Theodora shrilly, “as you did poor Mr. Weems? How
dare
you? How can you permit . . . ?”

To Mrs. Fischer—ignoring the younger woman's tirade—he continued. “Mr. Davis here will vouch for it that I do nothing else while in the room. Perhaps, Madame, if you could give Mr. Davis a description of what you are looking for, he could locate it without the unseemliness of ransacking the room, as Mr. Weems's was ransacked?”

The woman stood for a moment, staring up into January's face. Her dark eyes were like an animal's, that calculates its opponent's strength, a crimson flush of anger rising under the sallow skin of her cheeks. Though no black man was supposed to meet a white woman's eyes January did so, quietly challenging her, and he was interested to see that she didn't react like a woman born to command slaves. She met his eyes as an equal, an opponent.

Then she turned to Davis and snapped, “I never thought I would live to see the day when a Southern gentleman would stand by and let a lady be insulted by an impertinent Negro!”

And without waiting for Davis to reply, she turned, and strode toward her own stateroom. Miss Skippen wavered, clearly not up to challenging both January and Davis. January wondered whether she would faint. Instead she burst into somewhat artificial-sounding sobs, and hastened away in the same direction with her handkerchief pressed to her face.

“And
I
,” panted Davis as he locked the stateroom door despite the suffocating heat, “never thought
I
would live to see the day when a woman—
not
a Southerner, I perceive—would so unsex herself . . .”

“There's a great deal of money at stake, sir,” said January. “Men speak a great deal about women being worse than men, if they decide to take to crime, but I suspect that's because crime is one of the few ways a woman
can
get her own money, and need not rely on a man. But it's curious, isn't it, that both ladies are acting as if what they're looking for is small enough to be easily palmed, or concealed in a pocket—either mine or hers. So Miss Skippen doesn't seem to think there's six hundred pounds of gold, or several trunks full of securities, hidden in here.”

He knelt beside Molloy's body on the narrow bunk, turned the head gently, and withdrew a bullet-probe from his small medical kit. The pilot's closed eyes had begun to settle back into his head; blood and brain matter leaking from the wound had soaked the pillow, and in spite of the closed door the room was droning with flies. January inserted first the probe, then a pair of long-nosed bullet forceps into the channel cut by the bullet, which had cracked the skull on the other side.

Davis, after a rapid search of Molloy's portmanteau and the few drawers in the tiny dresser, came over to January's side, looking down over his shoulder as he withdrew the bullet from the wound. “That's no pistol-ball,” he said at once. “I loaded those pistols. That ball wouldn't have gone down the barrel.”

“I'm glad to hear you say it, sir.” January dropped the bullet into the nearest vessel, in this case the saucer under an empty coffee-cup that had been on the cabin's single chair. “In fact, I didn't expect it to be. You can tell from the angle of the wound that it wasn't made from the front, but from about twenty degrees to Molloy's left—that is, from the little rise at the head of the chute. The only thing Hannibal had to do with Molloy's death was to unknowingly lure him out on the riverbank, where someone could take a clear shot at him . . . and blame the death on Hannibal.”

“Well . . . I'll be dipped,” murmured Colonel Davis. “Who would have done such a thing?”

“I can think of four, right off-hand.” January covered the dead man's face with the sheet, then went to the washstand and poured water to wash his hands and the probe and forceps. “Unfortunately, three of them were within sight of half a dozen people at the moment of the shooting . . . and the fourth, as far as I can figure out, had no way of knowing that Molloy would be on the bank, involved in a duel, at dawn today.” He fetched the bullet and washed it in the basin as well, then held it up.

It was a .45-caliber, the same as the Leman rifles handed out to the guards.

“Anything in the drawers, sir?” He remembered to modify his tone into one of humble inquiry.

Behind them the door rattled peremptorily. Mrs. Fischer demanded, “Open this immediately!” and Mrs. Tredgold and Miss Skippen chimed in as a sort of operatic chorus, mezzo, contralto, and soprano.

Davis shook his head.

“In the portmanteau? A letter? Or tools of some kind—hammer, nails, pry-bar?”

“Nothing. Only a couple of empty tins.”

“Tins, sir?”

“Such as they sell candy in.” Davis held one up—English, gaudy reds and golds, flat and square and slightly larger than January's enormous palm.

“Open this door immediately!” shouted Mrs. Tredgold. If her tone of voice was any indication of her attitude in dealing with Mr. Lundy, January despaired of ever getting to Memphis.

“I will go to the purser's office,” Davis said, “and ascertain if any of the rifles is missing, or if one has been fired recently.”

“Missing is more likely,” said January as Davis unlocked the door and the two men stepped out, letting the three women push past them into the small cabin. “It could simply have been thrown in the chute afterward—it's what I'd do.” Behind them in the cabin three shrill voices rose, quarreling already over who had the right to be there.

“But if the man who pulled the trigger came off this boat,” said Davis worriedly, “how did he come back on? While you were ashore, Mr. Tredgold and Thucydides counted most assiduously to make sure that no one was inadvertently left behind. Every deck-hand and passenger is accounted for, even to the slaves who went ashore with Mr. Cain. And if the man who pulled the trigger
didn't
come off this boat, why would his accomplice on the vessel need to smuggle him a rifle? Surely such a man as that would have his own weapons? And why in any case would they wish to kill Mr. Molloy, who is, as far as we know, the only one who knew where Weems had hidden his loot . . . if indeed the loot exists at all?”

January shook his head, and glanced up to see Souter coming down the steps from the hurricane deck. Tredgold followed him: January caught a snatch of their speculation about where the nearest wood-yard was and whether the
Silver Moon
could make it there or would have to stop yet again for the deck-hands—and the hard-worked slaves—to cut enough trees to keep the fires going.