Barbara Hambly - Dead water

“Oddly enough,” said Rose, “I never quite accepted Cain as a slave-dealer. And I realize now what troubled me about him. On the first day he came on board at Donaldsonville, he came onto the promenade to look at the women, and he encountered me there. And he stepped back out of my way, to let me pass. The way any gentleman would, for any lady. Any white lady.” Her green eyes were wry behind her spectacles. “And he looked at me, for one instant, politely, as if I were indeed any common lady in the street, and not something to be raped or worked to death with indifference. Mr. Bredon was,” she concluded softly, “an exceptional man.”

Thu nodded, and briefly closed his eyes. “He was that,” he murmured “I only wish—” He stopped himself, and shook his head again. “What was it that Molloy was looking for in Weems's stateroom, when he found the paper?” he asked. “The gold that Weems was supposed to have stolen?”

“Not the gold exactly,” said January. “And that brings me, Mr. Lundy”—he turned to the old pilot—“to a great favor I would like to ask of you.”

The following day, while Rose remained with the still-groggy Hannibal, January and Lundy borrowed Sheriff Lear's shay and drove down the river road to Hitchins' Chute. Davis, Jim, and Thucydides went along as armed and mounted escorts in case Levi Christmas's surviving bravos still lurked in the woods, but they encountered no trouble. As they passed under the mottled shade of willows and sycamores, January would hear, now and then, the far-off drift of voices from some hoe-gang or wood-cutting detail, singing as they worked under an overseer's eye:

Ana-que, anobia,

Bia tail-la, Que-re-que,

Nal-le oua, Au-Monde,

Au-tap-o-te, Aupe-to-te,

Au-que-re-que,

Bo.

Or sometimes it was,

Run to the rock, rock will you hide me?

Run to the rock, rock will you hide me?

And he'd see Thu turn his head, listening, a look of calculation in his eyes.

As if he flew high above the land in a dream, January saw in his mind the cautious figures slipping from rock to rock, from brush-thicket to brush-thicket, working their way toward whatever point along the river they had heard was a meeting-place. And 'Rodus—and others—were out there somewhere, gathering them in, patiently, like the Good Shepherd going back into the stormy night when he realized one lamb was unaccounted for. . . .

Once Jim turned his head at the sound of the singing, and January thought the old valet caught Thucydides's eye. Knowledge passed between them; Jim shook his head slightly, and smiled.

And Colonel Davis of course, riding importantly ahead with a rifle on his arm, saw nothing.

January slipped his hand into his pocket to touch the rosary of blue beads, the cheap steel crucifix. Holy Virgin, Mother of God, get them safe north. Cover them with your mantle of invisibility, your mantle as blue as the sky. Lead their feet, and guide them when they get there.

Guide me, too.

As they neared Hitchins' Chute, January, who was driving the shay, said quietly to the pilot, “The more I thought about it, the less likely it seemed to me that Weems—and Mrs. Fischer, no doubt the brains of the outfit—ever took the money out of New Orleans at all. Six hundred pounds of gold, and God knows how many cubic feet of banknotes and securities, would be both heavy enough and bulky enough to call attention to itself, even split up among many trunks and crates.

“But gold, even more than banknotes, is anonymous. Once they convinced their pursuers, by their rather ostentatious flight, that the gold had been taken out of New Orleans—once they'd scattered the pursuit—how much easier to leave the gold in New Orleans itself, in some safe place to which they could return in a year, or two, and slip it out of the country a little at a time.”

“Given that wildcat Fischer's nerve,” muttered Lundy, “I wouldn't put it past her to open her own bank in New Orleans.”

January laughed, “She might have, at that. By the places she and Weems were searching on the boat, it became fairly obvious to me that what they were looking for was not gold and banknotes, but a key—the key to wherever they'd hidden the gold. It was easy for Molloy to steal that key, but Molloy knew it was easy for someone else to take it back, either Fischer or Theodora Skippen. . . .”

“Who folded her tents and vanished during the night,” put in Lundy. “Without paying the landlady, I might add—and helped herself to the jewelry of Mrs. Roberson's daughters, whose room and bed she was sharing. I'm guessing Miss Skippen went south on the Wild Heart this morning. There's no other way out of town.”

“Minx,” said Davis, who had dropped back to ride beside the shay. The side of his face twitched convulsively.

“If she shows up in Natchez again,” said Lundy comfortably, “she'll get what she deserves.”

And just what did a girl deserve, wondered January, who was born poor and recognized at least that marrying a stevedore and bearing a child a year—the only options open to a poor girl—was not what she wanted?

What had Mrs. Fischer deserved? To end as no more than a streak of blood in the river's muddy stream?

“So you think Molloy disposed of the key the same way Weems disposed of the gold?” Thu, riding on the other side, glanced down at January. “Why not keep the key on his person? Around his neck, or in a pocket?”

“Because it was a big key, an old key, wrought-iron and heavy. . . .”

“How do you know that?” demanded Davis.

January smiled. “Because I know now what it opens,” he said. “And yes, I think the first thing Molloy did, when he got the key, was to look for a way of getting it off the boat entirely, so that he could come back for it after he'd gotten rid of pursuit. Once Molloy had the key, I'm not sure that either Weems, or Fischer, would have finished the voyage”—his glance crossed Thu's—“no matter what else went on.”

There were at least three places behind Hitchins' Point where water would break through to form a chute on a high river. As January suspected, it took a pilot to recognize which of the low sloughs behind the tree-covered rise had been the chute through which Molloy had attempted to take the Silver Moon —January would never have believed that a steamboat, even a small stern-wheeler, could have maneuvered down that swampy aisle of mud and trees.

But Lundy found the place without trouble. Moreover, once January and Davis had helped him hobble along the bank from where they left Jim with the shay, Lundy guessed exactly which tree it was likeliest Molloy had concealed the key in. “Lord, everybody uses that big black oak that overhangs the chute in high water. It's got a box on it that pilots use to drop messages off to one another.” The old pilot pointed ahead of them, to the oak on the muddy rise of ground, far above the few nasty pools that were all that remained of the chute. The tree was the largest on the bank and shaped distinctively, bending forward like a beggar-woman, with two limbs that reached out like arms.

“So he wouldn't have used it to hide the key in,” remarked January. “But as a marker.”

Lundy winked at him. “You're getting good, son. So which tree would we find your key in?”

“That sweet gum next to it. It's a little lower down the bank. Molloy could have reached it easily without getting out of the skiff. The whole left side of it's dead; look at how the branches are leafless. It has to be hollow inside.”

Having learned painful details about hollow trees as a child, January threw a couple of rocks at the sweet gum from a safe distance, to satisfy himself that bees had not taken up residence in the hollow. Then he clambered up the mess of deadfalls and graying dry debris to the old tree's side.