Barbara Hambly - Dead water

A tremendous flash of lightning illuminated the windows; rain pounded down as if the Silver Moon were passing under a waterfall. In the door of the Saloon Souter rubbed his hands together and reported, “Plenty of water now!” in a pleased voice, and trotted down the hall and outside, presumably to observe the effects of the rise on every sand-bar and point within view.

“What I'm curious about,” went on Hannibal, “is what Weems was searching for in everyone's staterooms. A hundred thousand dollars in gold—not to mention Bank of Pennsylvania notes and all the rest of it—isn't something you tuck in the back of your glove drawer. Even if the trunks that contained it were stolen and hidden somewhere during the upheaval with the luggage, surely a glance through the stateroom window would have sufficed to tell him whether they were in the room or not. None of those bunks is big enough to conceal a hatbox under, let alone a trunk.”

“Which means the specie was taken out of the trunk,” said January. “Was there time for that?”

“Oh, I think so.” The fiddler's eyes narrowed as he mentally reviewed the events of the previous afternoon. “But probably only just. When the boat hung up on Horsehead Bar, there was about an hour of driving and heaving as Molloy tried to bull through, when anyone on board could see that we were going to have to unload and spar over. Afterwards Molloy turned the pilot-house over to poor Souter, and directed the deck-hands to start unloading. But he had plenty of time to come and go from the hold, pretty much unobserved in the confusion. I'm not sure how much gold he could have emptied from trunks, but it could have been transferred to sacks—God knows there are plenty of pillow-cases in the linen-room and flour-sacks in the galley—and stowed to be moved later, or simply transferred to a crate or box with his own labels on it. Molloy's certainly the only one who could have done it unobserved.”

January grunted thoughtfully. “I wonder if Weems knew that.”

At Davis's table, Kyle Outliver—even more verminous and bedraggled-looking than when he'd tried to lift Sophie's skirts a week earlier—was explaining that most of his fellow deck-passengers had been awake playing cards. . . . No, they didn't know what time they'd quit, but it was before the boat had gone over the bar. No, all the boys wasn't together playing all that time. Some of 'em crawled off to sleep behind the crates, or to have a smoke or take a piss or whatever—it wasn't his look-out what they did. Who'd played? Him and Sam Pawk and Cupid and Billy Earthquake most of the time. . . . No, they hadn't heard nuthin', 'cept Johnny Funk's snorin'. . . .

“An' you fartin' ever' time Cupid took money off you,” retorted Johnny Funk, a bear-like man with one ear bitten off.

“Either Weems didn't figure it out,” said Hannibal quietly, “or he had some information that we don't.”

Leaving Hannibal to follow the proceedings as Davis systematically questioned the deck-passengers—who seemed to have mostly gotten drunk and fallen asleep before midnight, as usual—January descended to the lower promenade to look for Rose. He found the niches among the sheltered wood-piles empty—niches considerably enlarged now because of the amount of wood burned at Vicksburg and Horsehead Bar—for all the inhabitants of the stern were bunched along the starboard rail among the male slaves, watching while Mr. Molloy rowed the skiff away toward what looked like a murky, bubbling tributary stream that broke the wall of trees.

“He ain't really gonna try and take this boat through there, is he, 'Rodus?” asked a boy in Gleet's coffle of the tall, slim Fulani who stood at his side.

“'S'a matter, Lam?” joked an older man to whom the boy was chained. “You ain't anxious to get to Memphis?”

“We could probably do it.” 'Rodus narrowed his eyes to watch the skiff maneuver through the sluicing curtains of rain. “See what he got there, that rope with the markers on it? That's a lead-line, to measure how deep the water is back there.”

“That's the thing he didn't use yesterday tryin' to run over that bar,” added Mr. Roberson's white-haired valet Winslow, and everybody laughed.

“What's goin' on up there, Michie Ben?” asked 'Rodus as January moved along the rail to search for Rose among the spectators. “They figure out anythin' yet about that poor buckra that went overside?”

And January heard in the young man's voice the false note of assumed casualness. Well hidden, of course—blankittes were always complaining that slaves were habitual liars, not seeming to make the connection between the necessity to tell whites what they wanted to hear and the fact that whites could flog or sell the speaker if they didn't like what they heard. As a child, January, with his open and innocent face, had been the champion liar on Bellefleur—something that hadn't saved him when old Michie Simon went on a tear with the rawhide.

Now he scanned the faces of the men chained along the wall, and he saw in all of them a wary and desperate interest.

He said quite quietly, “Colonel Davis askin' questions. I think he means to question everybody on board, probably you included.”

“Us?” The boy Lam looked scared, and put a protective arm around the younger brother chained at his side. “Why us?”

“What would a dressed-up buckra like Weems be doin' down here that time of night?” asked 'Rodus in a tone of such complete calm naturalness that January would have bet money they'd seen something, knew something.

And with an almost audible click, like the sound of a key in a lock, he heard Souter's voice again: a nigger gal singin' to her pickaninny . . .

Every night, the voices of the male slaves had risen in song. Desultory, sometimes, or joyful; sometimes the familiar call and response of work songs. He'd heard them himself as he slid into sleep last night. . . .

So why not at midnight, when Souter had gone up to the pilot-house?

Why had the men on the starboard side fallen silent, while the women continued to sing?

But he only shook his head. “They know he was dead when he went in the water,” he replied, and saw the glance go back and forth among the men. “Somebody smashed him over the head.”

The men around were silent. In the to-and-fro of their eyes he could almost hear the words: How'd they know? How much do they know? What's it gonna mean for us?

“He tell 'em?” asked 'Rodus mildly, but before January could answer, Mr. Lundy appeared at the bow end of the promenade and flourished his cane at the cluster of servants and deck-hands watching Molloy in the skiff.

“God damn the lot of you, trim the boat! What do you think you're looking at? Trim the damn boat before we get in more trouble—how do you expect a body to steer with all the weight on one side? Haven't you anything better to do than gape?”

“Oh, 'scuse me, sir,” murmured 'Rodus too low for the former pilot to hear. “I'll just move on upstairs into the Saloon for a few hands of ecarte.” And the men on either side of him, including January, snickered. The servants moved obediently on their way, some of them as usual pointedly ignoring the slaves chained along the wall—as if they themselves couldn't just as easily end up in the same situation next week—and others exchanging nods with them. January wondered how much the valets might have heard, or guessed, of what had happened on the other side of the piled cordwood, and whether he could ask questions without engendering suspicion.

“Man's an idiot.” Lundy tottered over to January's side. “Claims we can cut half a day off our time by going through Hitchins' Chute—high water be damned, you couldn't drown a cat in that chute!” The former pilot looked exhausted, hollow-eyed with strain as he glared out across the threshing water with its floating masses of downed trees, broken lumber, and torn-off branches.

Across the narrow stretch January could see Molloy standing in the skiff, dropping the lead-line overboard, then pulling it back. What he found must have satisfied him, for he rowed on a ways, almost invisible now between the rain and the intervening boughs.

“Looks deep enough to me, sir,” commented January, folding his arms. The thunder had ceased, save for ever more distant rumblings over the Mississippi bluffs. “Why's he in such a hurry all of a sudden?”

“Well, we lost most of a day yesterday.” Lundy's mouth twisted sourly. “More hurry, less speed, I say. River's gonna fall the minute the rain lets up and we'll be stuck in the chute waiting for Levi Christmas and his boys to show up. Molloy threatened to cane me when I told him what that girl of his had been up to in Natchez—like I couldn't have taken on that Gaelic drunkard with one hand behind me, before the palsy caught up with me! But the first thing he did when we got ourselves stuck good was to get every man-jack armed and on the deck, watching the shore. He knows.” Lundy shook his head, and unslung his spyglass from his side.

After a moment of silent scanning he offered it to January, who took it and followed the far-off figure in the skiff until it disappeared behind the trees. Down at the stern the paddle was turning slowly, more to keep water in the boilers than anything else. With the strength of the storm-fed current the Silver Moon was almost literally standing where she was in the water.

“How did the boat get hung up on Horsehead Bar to begin with, sir?” January folded up and returned the glass. “Souter seems to know his business better than that.”

“Souter?” Lundy sniffed. “If Molloy told Souter to stand on his head bare-naked in the Saloon, he'd do it. Mind you, anyone can run on a bar—in high water they build up fast. But it wasn't high water. The boy knew damn well there was a bar below Steele's Bayou, but Molloy told him to shave the bank close and shave it he did, and everyone on board got to rassle spars until nightfall because of it.”

“Is that what happened?”

“It's what Souter says. He was near in tears about it when I talked to him on the bow that afternoon and asked him what the hell he meant by shaving the bank that close. Molloy came down the stairs and slapped him on the shoulder and says, ‘You shouldn't go believin' everythin' you're told, boy. . . .'” Despite the crippled soft monotone of his voice, Lundy captured the Irishman's speech with blistering scorn. “It's my opinion Molloy did it just to break the boy's spirit a little and keep him under his thumb.”

The white triangular sail of the skiff winked from among the trees, tacking before the brisk gusts back toward the Silver Moon. Molloy's oilskin coat and wide-brimmed hat were running with rain, but he looked cheerful and stood up in the skiff to shout, “Plenty of water in the chute, laddies!”

“Oh, the hell there is!” Lundy limped over to the pilot as the deck-hands crowded forward to draw the skiff close to the bow and help Molloy spring aboard. January saw the older man gesture furiously, pointing toward the gap in the trees as the Silver Moon came slowly around and pointed her nose to the chute.

Because of the palsy, Lundy's buzzing, timbreless voice was inaudible over the rain and the paddle's splashing, but Molloy's reply boomed out arrogantly.

“What's the matter, man? You can't run a boat in ten feet of water? I thought you were the one with the hard-on to get to Lexington—in a manner of speaking,” he added, and strode on up the stair with a jeering laugh.

Lundy clung for a moment to the stanchion as if all strength had deserted him. But as January came forward to help him, the former pilot pushed himself away and moved, with surprising agility, up the stair as well.

“What causes it?” asked Rose's voice softly behind him. January turned to see her looking after the old pilot with compassionate eyes. “Palsy, I mean.”

“They don't know.” January went to take her in his arms, to press her to the thin boards of the wall through which the throb of the engines beat like a heart. To press his lips over hers, as the touch of her, the scent of her—even after a week unwashed in the heat on a steamboat's deck—aroused in him the desire to pull her behind the wood-piles and crates and have her on the bare deck like a savage, a Kaintuck, a rapist.

I feared I would never see you again.

He realized how often this was his fear when something separated them, when something went wrong.

“We wouldn't have left you, you know,” Rose said after that long, wordless time of silent rocking in one another's arms. Of silent thanks to God and the Virgin that in spite of Queen Régine's curse and every effort by the world in general to the contrary, the ultimate thing was still all right. She was still with him.

“I don't think I've ever felt so relieved in my life as when I saw you coming down the bank,” she went on. “Hannibal and I were watching for you, of course—Mr. Lundy told us Steele's Bayou was the likeliest place you'd make for.”

His lips brushed the feather-soft curls that emerged from beneath the edge of her tignon. “Don't tell me you were the one who actually got poor Souter to run the boat up on the bar.”

“Nonsense.” Her smile was a quick sunflash, quickly tucked away. “If we hadn't run aground on that bar, Hannibal was going to light a small fire in the cordwood near the engine-door just as we came within sight of Steele's Bayou so that I could slip in and dump the boilers in the confusion.”

January sighed. “It's good to know I have ingenious friends. Where was Lundy last night, by the way? I'll have to ask Hannibal what time he left the Saloon after dinner.”

“You don't suspect poor Mr. Lundy of heaving Weems overboard, do you? Why would he? I'd say it would be Mr. Molloy, if anybody. Or that cold savage, Cain.”

“Except that Molloy was in the pilot-house when it happened,” said January. “And Cain appears to have been continuously in the company of others—either the other card-players or Gleet—between nine-thirty and one. And I suppose,” he added thoughtfully, “if I were being suspicious, I'd find that in itself suspicious . . . because as far as I've seen, Cain can't stand Gleet. But it doesn't alter the fact that he couldn't have hit Weems over the head and dumped his body overboard at eleven-thirty—which is what seems to have happened.”

And he recounted to her, briefly, the results of his makeshift autopsy, and Hannibal's account of events in the Saloon the previous night. “Which makes nonsense of Mrs. Fischer's accusation, of Hannibal at least,” he concluded. “In fact with both Molloy and Cain accounted for, the murder could have been committed by anyone on board, including Mrs. Fischer herself. She's certainly tall enough and strong enough to have killed a man with a sharp blow over the head, especially one who had no reason to be wary of her. And in fact, we know almost nothing about anyone on board, including such ostensible innocents as Lundy and Quince.”

While he spoke, the Silver Moon had drawn closer to the fast-racing waters of Hitchins' Chute. Seven or eight deck-hands clambered down into the skiff, rowing across to the steep clay banks among the willows. Four sprang ashore on one side of the chute's mouth; the rest took the skiff across the fifty or sixty feet of water to the other. There they waited, with the long poles they'd brought with them in hand, for the steamboat to approach and be nudged into the narrow passageway.