Dead water - Barbara Hambly [74]
“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.
The Colonel set down the clothes and said, “It sounds as though Mr. Weems died shortly before midnight. Or shortly after.”
“I'd say so.” January knelt by the bunk and tucked Weems's protruding hand back under the sheet, pausing as he did so to feel the joints of the fingers. On the right hand they were stiff down to the wrist. On the left, the arm that had been caught in something, the joints of all but the smallest had been broken. That smallest finger was also locked in rigor.
“Then perhaps we had best find out,” said Colonel Davis, still turning the pick-locks over in his hands, “where Mr. Weems's enemies—whoever they might have been—were at that time.”
THIRTEEN
Immediately upon their return to the Saloon, Davis sent for Mr. Souter from the pilot-house. “It's next to useless dealing with that arrogant boor Molloy,” remarked the Colonel, and January wondered if Molloy had seen Miss Skippen's attempts to claim the young widower's attention with dropped handkerchiefs and worshipful gazes.
By this time rain was hammering down in earnest, churning the brown water with fluttering white-edged waves. All the male cabin passengers had sought shelter in the long, gloomy room, drinking coffee or whiskey as their natures dictated, and playing cards. The sole exception was Mr. Quince. He as usual remained as a guest in the Ladies' Parlor, entertaining them—if the word could be used—with his views on Vegetarianism and the organization of the spiritual hierarchies.
Passing the open door of that small chamber, January felt a pang of sympathy for Miss Skippen, who sat in a corner by the window, gazing bleakly out at the rain, clearly bored to sobs. Mr. Quince, finding the company of his own sex unbearable and vice versa, had the option of ingratiating himself with Mrs. Tredgold and being invited to hold court among the ladies. For a woman to spend the day in the Main Saloon chatting with the men would have marked her