Dead water - Barbara Hambly [58]
And slipped out the back when nobody was looking?
Damn, damn, damn. . . .
“Thank you. You didn't happen to see 'em leave?”
The clerk shook his head. “That may have been the couple that left an hour ago. I didn't recognize them, so they might have come in last night. But she wasn't taller than him.”
January frowned as if puzzled, though a rush of suspicion washed over him. “That's funny, I thought that's what my master said . . . I ain't never seen 'em, myself. He said for sure they'd be carryin' green-and-black-striped portmanteaux. . . .”
“That's them,” agreed the clerk promptly. “They sent the boy for a cab around four-thirty, said they had to catch an early boat.”
“Thank you,” said January again, cursing himself for not having looked more closely at the luggage borne behind the bearded gentleman who had emerged from the hotel, and his fluttery, veiled wife. “I reckon I'll catch 'em down by the landing.”
He left through the yard and the alley, loitering a little, though he couldn't imagine that if Hannibal had returned—or if Rose had taken his place—one or the other of them wouldn't have come seeking him. In any case, neither accosted him as he circled back to Adams Street. Deeply worried now, he made his way through the quiet neighborhoods and up and down the rolling slopes of the hill, back toward Clay Street and the levee.
As he came around the corner onto Washington Street and looked down at the waterfront, he froze.
It was barely six in the morning—activity was only just beginning to stir among the boats, wood-piles, heaps of cargo along the mushy fringes of the river; the time when boats were just beginning to take on their cargoes and work up the final heads of steam.
But the Silver Moon was gone.
TEN
He ran down to the landing as if, contrary to reason and all evidence of his senses, the steamboat were still in view and he could overtake her.
Brown water lapped sullenly on the clayey slope where the landing-stage had rested. Gouged and trampled mud marked the coming and going of feet. His friend Abishag Shaw of the New Orleans City Guards might have been able to pick Hannibal's tracks, or Rose's, from the mess, but to January it was only a muck of slop and puddles.
Shit, he thought, and his mind wouldn't work further than that. Shit, shit, shit.
“When did she leave?” he asked one of the stevedores heaving wood onto the Concord, another stern-wheeler that had—to judge by the activity on her deck—just come in.
“'Bout a hour ago.” The man paused in his course toward the wood-piles on the landing, wiped the sweat from his face with the green bandanna that was all he wore above the waist. “They drawed out the fires and damped 'em but never let the steam go all the way down. Musta cost 'em heavy, waitin' like that most of the night, burnin' up wood. Then this couple come in a cab from town, get on board, an' away they go.”
Shit.
January was, he reflected furiously, exactly where he'd spent most of the past three years trying not to be: in the middle of cotton territory, without five dollars in his pockets. Hannibal had carried money—in a fit of worry about Rose's safety, he had left his cash with her.
Shit!
None of the other vessels at the landing looked capable of overtaking the Silver Moon. Not upstream on a low river, among the snags and shallows around Vicksburg. If worse came to worst, he supposed he could heave wood to get himself back to New Orleans, and pick up a few dollars extra playing for passengers at night, always supposing he could find a boat where someone had a guitar. . . .
And then what? Wait for Rose and Hannibal to return? If they returned? When would that be?
Twenty-five hundred dollars was due to Rosario DeLaHaye for the house on Rue Esplanade on the first of September, just over sixty days away. If that wasn't paid, January would be back living in the garçonnière behind his mother's house—if she were willing to evict the boarder currently occupying the room where January had grown up. Knowing his mother, he