Barbara Hambly - Dead water

“It cut up my heart to do it, M'am,” January assured her. “Just as bad as it cut up him. But he's dead, and felt nuthin'. An' my old master, that was a doctor, he taught me how to tell if a man'd been murdered. Without me doin' what I did, no one would have known, and Mr. Weems would have gone to his grave cryin' out to be avenged, an' no one knowing.”

Sophie sniffed, and wiped those immense brown eyes. “And to think that the murderer might be your own master!”

“I don't see how it could, M'am,” said January earnestly. “Michie Hannibal, he was playin' cards all that night in the Saloon.”

“Mrs. Fischer says he's sly, and dangerous, and clever,” replied Sophie, her voice sinking dramatically. “He could surely have slipped away to do the awful deed, while the others were engrossed in their game. She even thinks you might have done it, but if you had, why would you have cut up his body, to prove the murder? No.” She shook her head decidedly. “It was your master, in the pay of Mr. Fischer, seeking revenge upon Madame, and after she and poor Mr. Weems had tried so hard to achieve happiness. Oh, my poor Madame!”

A tear fell on the pieced-together crape of the black dress in her lap, and left its stain, like a sad echo, on the slave-woman's gray skirt beneath.

Refraining from taking issue with this unlikely scenario, Rose asked, “Were they together at all on that last night? I know you came down to the deck to sleep, after you helped poor Julie. . . .”

“Oh, poor Julie!” Sophie shook her head, and pressed a delicate hand to her brow. “I feel so guilty for having helped her instead of waiting for Mr. Weems! I might have been able to do something, to say something. . . .”

“But Mrs. Fischer sent you away,” pointed out Rose, “didn't she?”

“Yes.” Sophie sighed tragically and removed her hand, the stains from the crape on her fingers leaving a long, sooty smudge beneath the edge of her pink tignon. “Yes, she did. There was nothing, really, that I could have done. But I should have been able to. I brushed out her hair for her, and folded up her clothes and locked up her jewelry. She settled down in her wrapper to wait for . . . for Mr. Weems. . . .” A blush suffused the girl's ivory cheeks. “I'd made up a bundle, you see, for Julie, while I was waiting for Mrs. Fischer to come back from dinner. Some food, and a dress Mrs. Fischer had given me, which didn't fit me, and shoes. I took it out of the stateroom with me just as Julie came out of Miss Skippen's stateroom crying. I put my arms around her and tried to comfort her, and it was then that the boat ran on the bar. We clung to each other—I was afraid the boat would sink . . . !”

January blinked for a moment at this concept—by running onto the bar the boat had in effect touched the bottom of the river, and couldn't sink—but Sophie went on breathlessly.

“Then Julie said, ‘I'm going now! We must be near shore, and the water shallow, to run on a bar. I can get to shore, I know it!' Oh, poor Julie! I only hope she made it to shore!”

Eleven o'clock, then, thought January, unless something delayed her . . . But what would have delayed Julie for the hour that it took to walk the boat over the bar?

Which left, unfortunately, only one other black culprit with reason to wish Weems harm, and without an alibi.

Benjamin January.

“Do you know if Mr. Weems came to see your mistress at all?” asked Rose sympathetically.

Sophie shook her head tragically. “I know he didn't. She lay awake far into the night, waiting for him—when I came up in the morning to tell her of that . . . that horrible sight, that horrible thing Jim saw . . . all the lamp-oil was burned away. When I opened the door the first thing she said was, Run to Mr. Weems's stateroom, and learn why he did not come last night.”

“She did not go look herself, earlier in the night, then?”

Sophie recoiled in shock at the suggestion. “She was not dressed! She was so much the lady, she would not have ventured about the boat only in her wrapper and her nightgown! Oh, if only I had been there, I could have gone and searched in the night myself! Perhaps, if I had found him, I could have prevented his terrible death!”

“And when you told her . . . ?” prompted Rose gently.

“My poor Madame,” whispered Sophie. “The shock of it . . . all she could do was sit up in bed and say, What? Just like that . . . as if she could not believe. Then she said, Good Christ, and got out of bed without another word, and dressed. No tears,” she whispered, “though she has been weeping all the afternoon in the Parlor, with the other ladies about her. . . .”

I'll bet she has, thought January. After breaking into Weems's stateroom and searching . . . for what?

“It is a most tragic story. And I am the more grieved for hurting her, after all she has suffered already,” he said gently. “It might indeed have been my master who killed Mr. Weems.” He spoke reluctantly, like one convinced against his will. “But there are other evil people on this boat who might also have done this terrible thing. Not all of them,” he added, lowering his voice to a whisper, “men.”

Sophie's beautiful eyes widened and her lips parted with understanding and shock, and she glanced automatically to her left, the direction in which Miss Skippen's stateroom lay. Rose, taking her cue, produced a perfectly-judged little gasp and breathed, “ Miss Skippen? ”

January raised his eyebrows: like Hamlet's friends, We could an if we would, and, If we list to speak . . .

Rose prompted, “But surely Julie was with her?”

“Not after we ran onto the bar,” answered Sophie. “And Miss Skippen didn't undress as Mrs. Fischer did—Julie told me. In fact, she said Miss Skippen . . .”

At the forward end of the promenade Thucydides appeared, carrying a tray of lemonade. As he passed January and Rose in Mrs. Fischer's stateroom doorway, he said quietly, “Mrs. Fischer's coming,” then walked on by without breaking stride. January and Rose followed him immediately, without even a word to Sophie, who for her part instantly bowed her head over her sewing so that she would be stitching away industriously when her mistress rounded the corner.

It wasn't until dinnertime that January heard what Miss Skippen had done on the night of Weems's death. He spent the twilight hour with Rose, huddled next to the galley passway beside a makeshift smudge of lemongrass and gun-powder that Eli had rigged to give some relief from the mosquitoes that swarmed in the dead water under Hitchins' Point. Around them, deck-hands beat a steady trail into the engine-room with wood, to Eli's loudly-voiced annoyance. In the cobalt gloom the passway, and the engine-room door, looked like the furnace-gate of Hell.

“You want maybe to sit here all day tomorrow, with all those passengers eating their heads off?” roared Molloy's voice. “Settle in, maybe, set up camp on the shore? This is a steamboat, by God, and what we need is steam !”

The pilot came stamping out of the engine-room and swung himself around the newel-post and up the stair. January glanced across at Rose and raised his brows: “Any ideas on how we might be able to get into his stateroom for a look at the floorboards?”

“Thucydides has spare keys to every stateroom on the boat,” she replied quietly. “If he was good enough to warn us about Mrs. Fischer . . .”

January shook his head. “Any slave would do that for any other slave.” And when Rose—a freewoman born and bred—looked inquiring, he explained, “You ever heard field-hands singing, and they'll change their song when the overseer rides by, or when a party of whites rides along the road? They'll sing something like, “ Chink, pink, honey o lula, 'way down in the bayou . . . go wade in the bayou .” His deep, velvety baritone shaped one of the earliest field-songs he knew. “I was five or six, before I understood what it meant when they'd sing it. . . . That they'd heard rumor someone had run, and they were singing warning, if the runaway was resting near, to get into the bayou so the dogs couldn't sniff him out.”