Barbara Hambly - Dead water

Her voice caught in a sob, though her eyes bore no sign of either tears or swelling and her nose was decidedly un-red. “And what do I find? Those animals, those vile murderers have been in here! Look at what they have done!” She released Davis's lapel long enough to sweep her hand at Hannibal, and at January, who was taking note of the fact that the front of her dress was splotched with dampness across the hips, where she would have levered a sodden body off the bed.

“I'm afraid you must hold us excused, m'am.” Hannibal politely removed his hat. “Since your affianced husband was brought here, my man and I were either in the presence of Colonel Davis, or that of some of the deck-passengers—”

“That yellow hussy?” She spat the words in her contempt.

Davis said nothing.

“Then there is more happening aboard this accursed vessel than meets the eye!” She pressed the back of her hand to her forehead, with the appearance of a woman about to crumple in a faint. “For when I came into this room it was as you see it, desecrated ! Well might you imagine my horror, my outrage . . .”

While she trumpted her horror and outrage, January looked around the tiny stateroom. Under Weems's half-stripped body the straw matting of the floor was rumpled and twisted, as if it, too, had been taken hastily up, section by section. The dead bank manager's portmanteau and valise were open and their contents hastily jammed back or lying strewn around. Davis's eyes narrowed and his tic twitched again. “The room has been searched,” he said.

With that grasp of the obvious, thought January, you'll go far in politics. Sir.

With some difficulty they persuaded Mrs. Fischer to leave, Hannibal going to fetch Sophie and returning, not only with the young maid—her face streaked with tears of sympathy for a grief her mistress clearly was far from feeling—but with January's small surgical kit. Outside, the thunder clouds of a summer storm were gathering and the water was growing choppy; when Sophie helped Mrs. Fischer from the room, Davis lit both lamps and brought them close to the bed.

“Did Mrs. Fischer have a key to the stateroom?” asked Hannibal, going to the corpse.

“Thu would know. Sir.” January held up his hand, and instead of going at once to lift Weems back onto the bunk, he knelt, and examined the seams of the mattress, thoroughly fingered the wet pillow for anomalous lumps or shapes, and held one of the lamps low to get a close look at every crack and crevice of the wooden frame. That done—and nothing discovered—he handed the lamp back to Colonel Davis and helped Hannibal manhandle the body onto the bed.

Most of Oliver Weems's bones had been broken by the action of the rudder and the paddle in which his body had been entangled—his left arm, when January gently disentangled the shirt and coat from the torso, proved to have been almost torn off. Because of its long submersion there was very little blood left in the veins. The head and neck were board-stiff, but it was impossible to tell how many of the other joints would have been so had the body lain undisturbed.

“Which doesn't tell us anything, really,” he said, glancing back over his shoulder at Davis as he gently probed at the joints. “Rigor can set in as soon as three hours after death if the body's undisturbed and warm, but in water it would be delayed.”

There were at least four places where the skull gave sickeningly to pressure. January supposed he should be grateful that the head hadn't been torn entirely off. There were no gashes or stabs, and the hands were unmarked by defensive wounds.

As his hands turned the mud-sodden cloth of coat, shirt, trouser-band, January noticed how some of the buttons had been nearly ripped from their holes, while others were whole, as if neatly unfastened by searching fingers. But why search? he wondered. Anything in his pockets she could have easily claimed.

Trunk-key? Notes . . . to what?

Had she suspected her confederate of holding something out on her?

Weems's long-tailed coat contained a wallet and about a hundred and fifty dollars, part in Mexican silver, part in notes: Merchants' Consolidated Bank of New Orleans, Forrest's—a private bank in Baton Rouge—Bank of Natchez, and Bank of New Orleans. No Bank of Louisiana.

“So he was not robbed,” observed Davis, standing behind January's shoulder with the lamp.

In one pocket January found a pen-knife, the stateroom door-key, and a waterlogged copy of the Liberator . Another contained a little tangle of long, stiff shanks like very slender keys, each with a single metal tooth at the end. “Pick-locks,” he explained, seeing Davis's baffled face. “Burglars' tools.”

“Not surprising,” commented Hannibal, leaning in the open doorway of the stateroom and watching the first spits of rain slant down onto the river. “On my quest for Sophie just now I paused long enough to look at the doors of the other staterooms on this side. All of them were scratched around the keyholes, not just the last four. Fresh scratches, since the last time they were polished.”

Before lifting Weems onto the bunk, January and Hannibal had pulled off the bedding, laying the body instead on the pulled-up sections of the floor's straw matting. Now January opened his surgical kit, and with Davis hunkering near to watch in businesslike fascination—and Hannibal keeping his face averted as he held the lamps close—January made an incision under the curve of Weems's ribs and gently detached and drew out the dead man's right lung. There was no water to be found in the rubbery pink mass of rough-textured globules; no mud, and no sand.

“He didn't drown, then,” he said, and handed Davis his magnifying lens so that he could look for himself. “He was dead when he went in, almost certainly from one of those skull fractures.”

“But nothing to indicate how long he was in the water?”

January shook his head. “But in addition to Mr. Souter's testimony about the rudder, both the newspaper and the money from his pocket look like they've been submerged for closer to eight hours than four.”

Since Weems's jaw and neck muscles were frozen into immobility, January had to cut into the esophagus rather than probe down it with a swab. There was neither water nor sand there, though there was both mud and sand in the nostrils.

He replaced the organ in the body and bound the incision with knotted handkerchiefs taken from one of the rifled drawers, then washed his hands in the dresser ewer, and even remembered to walk out onto the promenade and dump the water overside himself rather than hand it to Hannibal to do. Though Davis was clearly a man who respected his slaves and treated them well, January wasn't sure how the Colonel would react to the news that a man he'd been initially told was a slave was in fact a free black surgeon, or how discreet the man would be with such information. With the slave revolts of the past five years still burning in memory, and with the rise of both the Liberator and the Underground Railway, more and more men in the South were coming to distrust free blacks as fomenters of rebellion—if not actively, then by the very difference between their state and that of the slaves around them.

And slavery, January had found—as any number of ancient Roman comic playwrights had found before him—was a camouflage that caused men to act and speak with less guardedness than if they thought themselves in the presence of an equal.

When he came back into the stateroom, Davis had covered Weems's body to the neck, and was folding up the wet and muddy garments. Hannibal sat crosslegged with Weems's portmanteau in his lap, its contents heaped beside him on the floor while he probed and felt around the lining for either a hidden pocket or the ripped-open remains of one.