Garrett Investigates (8 page)

“I know you’re a special friend of the Duke’s,” O’Brien replied. “But he’s in business with Mr. Cook. And with any number of my passengers. Are you…
that
special of a friend?”

“No one is that special of a friend,” she answered. “Except possibly the Duchess. And she owns the New Netherlands.”

Around them, conversations were slowly resuming. Garrett walked the length of the main cabin with the captain, watching silver glitter as it worked against china plates.

The “library” was a set of shelves beside the doors to the saloon, opposite the women’s drawing room. After spending a few more moments with O’Brien, Garrett turned away. She moved toward the shelf—not ostentatiously, but with purpose. Manley hovered between her and the captain as if held in place by the stretch of invisible tackle, obviously torn with regard to whose orbit to maintain.

Garrett was lifting the ship’s English-language copy of
The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon
from the shelf—it was filed under
C
for Crayon rather than
I
for Irving, which made her wonder whether the person doing the filing had somehow missed that
Crayon
was a pseudonym, or if he had a sense of humor. She had asked O’Brien to keep an eye on the passengers as she removed the book. But as her finger settled into the notch of the spine she felt her own awareness vibrating as she stretched it to notice if anyone reacted to her choice of literature.

If they did react, she failed to catch them. Because she looked at the leather of her glove and the leather of the binding, and realized what a ridiculous, foolish oversight she had made.

Garrett hefted Irving in her hand and turned quickly to O’Brien. He seemed to be at parade rest, patiently awaiting her return, but she saw how his eyes flickered about the room, belying his impassive expression. She said to Manley, “Have you been in the saloon tonight?”

He shook his head.

“Mr. Sisters, who cancelled his berth so conveniently—or perhaps so tragically—for Miss von Dissen. Would you know him by sight?”

“I would not,” Manley said. “His arrangements were made by a representative. It’s not uncommon; Mr. Lenox doesn’t book his own travel either.”

Garrett rubbed her thumb across the leather binding of the book. “Take me into the saloon.”

Manley’s chin came up in shock.

She rolled her eyes and turned to O’Brien. “Captain? Take me into the saloon.”

“D.C.I.—”

“Yes,” she said. “D.C.I. I am an officer of the crown, Captain O’Brien. That I am also a woman is not now under the microscope. You will—
please
—accompany me into the saloon.”

To his credit, he pressed his lips thin and took her arm. While a room full of passengers—and Mr. Manley—held their breath, he guided her to the door and held it open. She passed into a miasma of smoke, and he was at her heels so when the bartender rounded on her what he saw was the Captain’s level gaze.

She scanned the room. Men, of course—a double handful of them, leaned over glasses full of amber fluid and ashtrays full of smoldering cigarillos and cheroots. The haze of smoke from their toxic emanations. The eye-stinging vapors of the whiskey and gin, which made Garrett’s mouth water with tired desire.

“I thought it was the book,” Garrett said out loud, as every eye in the room turned to her. She held up both copies of
The Sketch Book
, the one in German and the one in English. “I thought the book had significance. I have been pulling the damned thing apart trying to find whatever secret was concealed in it, assuming that that secret
must
be linked to her murder.”

She watched faces as she spoke, the flicker of attention, the creases of puzzlement and concern, of hostility and curiosity. She wasn’t certain exactly what expression she was looking for, but none of those were it. She smiled.

Behind her, she heard the rattle of the doorknob as O’Brien summoned whatever crewmen might be standing nearby into the saloon. Cigars and cigarettes smoldered unattended. Ice melted in drinks. Sweating nervously, Carter and three other stewards filled the door.

If nothing else, she had their complete fascination.

“But the book had nothing to do with it, did it?” Ah.
There
was the expression she’d been searching for. On the face of a middle-aged man she’d never seen before. He was dark and slight, with thinning dark hair and a prosperous little paunch under his green brocade waistcoat. A pair of wire-rimmed spectacles perched very far down his nose, as if he used them only for reading. He sat with another man—a bigger, gray-haired one with muttonchop sideburns, who looked chiefly confused.

Garrett honed her gaze on the face of the balding man in the green waistcoat—the presumptive Mr. Sisters. He stared right back. She wondered if he were forgetting himself in the face of confrontation, or if he were making some misguided attempt to appear unafraid. If so, it was too bald-faced.

She leaned over to O’Brien and hid her mouth behind the German edition of Irving as if it were a fan. “The man in the green waistcoat. Who is he?”

“I’ve never seen him before,” O’Brien whispered back. “I’ll find out, shall I?”

Garrett lowered the book and intoned, “If the book
had
had a single thing of importance to reveal about the murder, it never would have been left behind. Not by a man so careful that he absconded with the victim’s handbag. One who
swept the floor
to remove evidence that could have linked him to the killing.”

Behind her, Carter rocked on his heels. Garrett turned so she had her back to the bar, and could see both him and the man in the green waistcoat clearly. Carter’s face had gone pale and was dewed with sweat.

“One of the chief suspects in any crime, Mr. Carter, is the person who discovers the body. Especially when the discovery of a body causes some desirable effect, such as for a will to be read, or an insurance policy to be paid out—” she could not keep the grin from her cheeks “—or for a steamship to be delayed.”

O’Brien had realized her intent, she saw. As Carter ducked his face and backed away, green with nausea, O’Brien stepped forward and collared the bigger man, lifting him to his toes. “You little—”

“Captain,” Garrett said. “Carter did not kill your passenger. Think: if he had poisoned her, would he have left the cup? No, we were meant to think she died of poison…but then where was the saucer?”

O’Brien did not release his grip. “You just said—”

“Her name was Gisela von Dissen, and she did not die upon
The Nation.
The scene of her death was staged intentionally to delay the ship. And while Mr. Carter was in the employ of the man responsible for her death, he did not kill her. In fact, she was dead before she embarked upon this vessel.”

There. That silence, heady as liquor. Damned satisfying. All eyes were upon Garrett now, and she took up her role like a queen’s ermine. “My first clue was the condition of the body. As the ship’s doctor had noticed, it was unusually cool to the touch from the very first. Additionally—and even more unusually—there was no rigor mortis, and no signs of livor mortis, the discoloration caused by the pooling of blood at the lowest points of the body. The first item suggested that Miss von Dissen had been dead much longer that anticipated, the second that she had not been dead long at all—or that she’d passed away long enough ago for the rigor to have passed. But a dead woman doesn’t drink tea, or annotate a book, or walk aboard a ship under her own power. And the third item…was the most curious, as
it
suggested that she was not dead at all.”

Now Carter looked confused, and the man in the green waistcoat had grown very still. Some of the other passengers and crew—Garrett was gratified to notice the bartender, and O’Brien, who had set Carter more-or-less back on his feet, among them—looked captivated, but the majority radiated boredom and irritation.

One bearded and prosperous fellow—Garrett noticed his silk-lined suit and platinum watch chain—levered himself from a leather-upholstered chair. “Madam,” he said, in a tone that suggested he didn’t mean ‘madam’ at all, “I don’t know the meaning of this circus—”

“Mr. Frick,” O’Brien said, “Please. Trust that all will be made plain in time, and for now choose to enjoy the entertainment.”

“Next time,” Frick said, “I shall
buy
a riverboat.” But he settled himself into his chair again, crossed his legs, and folded his hands over his knee—leaving Garrett more than a little impressed with O’Brien’s charisma and authority.

Frick said, “So you have a little mystery on your hands, Miss Garrett?”

“Had,” she said, ignoring the slight. She was by rights perhaps
Lady Abigail Irene
,
Doctor Garrett,
or
Detective Crown Investigator Garrett.
Miss
, for a woman in her forties, implied a bluestocking dismissal and no recognition of her accomplishments. Well, she’d remember him. “It’s quite solved now, I assure you.”

“Please,” said Frick. “
Enlighten
us. How does a dead woman embark upon a ship?”

“While it is not my duty to the crown to educate millionaires, Mr. Frick, I shall be glad to. You ask how a dead woman travels, except in a stout-sided box. The answer, of course, is
necromancy.
And the sorcerer who is controlling the corpse? Well, he must stay close, of course. So the simplest expedient is to have himself shipped.”

Now she had them. The murmur of side conversations faded; even the table playing euchre at the back set down their cards.

Garrett reached into her sleeve and drew Gisela’s pen from its temporary place beside her wand. O’Brien, having consulted briefly with one of the Mr. Manley—who was
not
holding Carter’s sleeve—came back and whispered behind his hand, “He’s not a listed passenger. A stowaway, and in plain sight! Bold as brass.”

“Well,” Garrett whispered in return. “Mr. Sisters couldn’t very well stay in the trunk once he was breathing again, could he?” She raised the pen and said, “This is Gisela von Dissen’s fountain pen. You cannot see this, because of the cap, but the nib is broken. I had at first suspected that she might have stabbed her assailant with it, and that I might be able to use the connection between pen and nib to locate her killer. Alas, it was not to be…but then I realized what I could do. Because someone—I assume it was Mr. Carter—took her handbag. And while I imagine that theft was only to confuse the issue…it seems likely that a traveling woman’s handbag contained a vial of ink. It might not be too much to hope that that would be the same ink used to fill this pen. And that Mr. Carter might have handed the bag and its contents off to his employer.

“A dead woman would not have been entertaining herself with a book in her cabin—but a man staging a death might very well have laid a book and pen about the place, to go with the overturned cup of tea. And a man who had intended to delay a steam ship, and who found a better way to do it than some act of sabotage, might very well sacrifice his own booking on that vessel in order to conveniently smuggle a corpse aboard!”

She was looking directly at the man in the green waistcoat—and he was looking directly back. Now she lectured to him alone. “The principal of sympathy states that two portions of the same object will sustain an affinity for one another. So the ink in the pen and the ink in the vial, though contained in separate reservoirs, remain—thaumaturgically speaking—the same object…”

She laid the pen flat across her palm. For all its reticence on the previous attempt, now it shuddered and tumbled from her hand, bouncing on the carpeting before rolling toward the man in the green waistcoat as if drawn on a string. He started from his chair, backing away from the pen as if from a snake—

“Grab him!” O’Brien shouted.

Garrett yelled, “Eugene Sisters! Stop in the name of the Queen!” and fumbled for her wand, but Sisters was too nimble. He shouldered past the steward and two passengers, ducked O’Brien, and vanished through the saloon door as Garrett was still struggling silver-tipped ebony from inside her sleeve.

She might have shouted, “After him!” but the door was already jammed with crew and passengers giving chase.

***

Sisters obviously intended to swim for it, as he pushed his way through the startled main cabin passengers toward the stern doors with O’Brien and two stewards in pursuit. He had the advantage of surprise, however, and there were too many people in the way—jostling her, shoving one another aside, shouting in confusion—for Garrett to use the stasis spell in her wand.

She waded into the chaos anyway, her wand brandished overhead in case she got a clear angle on the fugitive. If worse came to worst, she’d cast the spell into the crowd. Divided between subjects, it wouldn’t do more than stun and disorient—but that might slow him down enough for O’Brien to lay hands on him. Of course, there were the innocent bystanders to consider: nobody really wanted to be on the receiving end of a stasis spell. They were normally harmless enough, but Garrett has stood for enough of them during her training to know how unpleasant it could be to feel one’s heart grinding in one’s chest. And if Sisters were to plummet into the river while stunned…well, the odds of saving his life would not be high.

Still, allowing him to escape—the rising mist would hide him. If he was a strong enough swimmer to survive a plunge into the spring-frigid North River…he’d be away clean before a boat could be launched to look for him. The sky might just be graying with dawn, Albany only an hour or so upriver…but the mist would cancel any advantage of the light.

Garrett was still debating her options when Sisters reached the door and plunged through it into the soft night beyond. As he turned to check the status of his pursuit, and Clemens the riverboat pilot stepped into the frame and cold-cocked him.

The man in the green brocade waistcoat went down like a pile of laundry, leaving Clemens standing over him and—wincingly—shaking his hand.

“Much obliged, Mister Clemens,” Garrett said, as she came up to him. “By the way, you’re under arrest.”