Dead water - Barbara Hambly [129]
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.
The key was in a hollow in the tree's trunk, tucked in a tin candy-box only slightly larger than the one he'd found in Molloy's cabin. There were two keys, one of them small and modern, the other four or five inches long, and made of heavy wrought iron—too big to be hidden easily around the neck or in a pocket.
An old key.
The key, in fact, to the grillework that surrounded the crumbling tomb in the St. Louis Cemetery, where January had seen a small man whom he'd taken for an undertaker, and a tall woman in a green dress figured with rust and cream, bestowing what he had thought to be the coffin of a child by night.
The following day the Gloria Zicree put in at Mayersville, and January, Rose, and Hannibal took passage south for New Orleans. Hannibal slept for nearly twenty-four hours in his stateroom—with January again acting as “valet,” this time simply to make sure he was all right—before he was himself again.
Thu had calculated well, thought January. Mrs. Tredgold, manipulated by Mrs. Fischer, would never have consented to holding the Silver Moon in port long enough for the fiddler to recover sufficiently to be questioned. Sheriff Lear, though both intelligent and kind, was at heart a lazy man, and January had no doubt