Garrett Investigates (7 page)

A good enough answer. Noncommittal, and not full of conversational openings. She resisted the urge to say,
I see you have fenced before.
“How did you come to New Amsterdam?”

“My wife Olivia’s family is settled in Elmira. It was because of her that I came to New Holland.”

“But Captain O’Brien tells me you were already an experienced riverboat pilot when he hired you, though but newly arrived?”

“Ah,” he said. “Yes. I learned my trade out West. The Red Indian Nations of the fertile Mississippi valley issue charters for a limited number of steamboats. The trade in lumber and furs had enriched them greatly, and as they’ve learned of the steel plow and seed drill from Europeans, certain tribes have become producers of trade quantities of cotton and sugarcane, which they sell through the cooperative colony of
La Nouvelle-Orléans
, which the Chitimacha call
Chawasha,
the Raccoon-Place, with as much success any white businessman. The Mississippi, I must say, is a far superior river in every way to the North River—much slyer, madam, and far more full of tricks.”

Garrett had found, over the years, that the most revealing interviews often resulted from following seemingly blind trails. Whatever people wished most to conceal inevitably weighed upon their thoughts and affected their habits of speech. It became a fascination, a sort of obsession, and they could not control the indications of interest that leaked out into their daily discourse. No one, Garrett thought, was more interested in anything more so than themselves—unless it was attention paid to themselves, even if they were the anonymous center of a manhunt. If she had a shilling for every time she’d brought a murderer to justice only to find a cache of newspaper clippings relating to the crime in his or her papers—well, she was sure she’d have at least a guinea.

She had a hunch, in other words. And she was pursuing the hunch when she said, “You seem to be rather a partisan of the Indian Nations, for a white man.”

Clemens had laid his cap upon his knee when he sat. Now he folded his hands over it.

“When I was a young man, I was an Imperialist,” he said. “I believed in the Westward expansion of the Colonies; the inevitable conquest and beneficial civilization of the backwards native tribes.”

“Something changed your mind?”

“Getting to know them,” he said. “Working as a foreigner in their nations. Watching them adopt the best of our technologies and sciences while refining their own on the lathe we call ‘civilization.’ It has been…an education, madam.”

She regarded him. He tipped his head to the side.

Garrett made a note in her case book. “If you are no longer an Imperialist, then what have you become?”

His words were apologetic, but the smile ruffling his moustache was something else. “I’m afraid I’ve become a Republican, Crown Investigator.”

“Well,” she said slowly. “That’s not…illegal.”

“It’s not encouraged,” he retorted.

“Do you speak out against the Queen?”

“Iron Alexandria? There is no queen in all the world more fit to rule England than she.”

Garrett’s lips twitched. She pressed them together to prevent the smile.
Clever man.
“But not the Colonies?”

His shoulders rise and fell. “I think it would be to the benefit of Crown and Colonies both if the Crown were willingly to release us,” he said. “It is my right in common and statutory law to express that opinion.”

“In certain limited ways,” said the Crown’s Own.

“I have never called for revolution, or wished any harm upon the queen or her representatives.”

He seemed earnest, leaning forward persuasively. Garrett swept aside the newspaper that covered the copy of Washington Irving.

“Do you speak German, Mr. Clemens?”

His eyes flicked to the book, but lingered longer on the newspaper. It was
The New World Times
, which carried the column by Josh the riverboat pilot. She watched him force his eyes back to the book. “Was that Mrs. Abercrombie’s?” he asked. “If you need someone to translate it for you…I’m afraid my attempts would be rather crude.”

“What leads you to believe it might have been Mrs. Abercrombie’s?”

His bushy eyebrows rose. Garrett had seen a lot of dismissals in her life, but this one rivaled the occasional more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger stares of her elderly ragmop terrier. “She was Prussian?”

“Bavarian, actually. But it’s an easy mistake to make. Although considering the long-term political tensions between those two nations, were she alive she’d probably have a bone to pick with you over your error.”

Clemens huffed into his mustache. “In any case, she spoke German; she is dead; the book is in the possession of a homicide investigator. It seems a natural supposition.”

Garrett opened the book to the page she had previously marked and extracted “Josh’s” clipped-out column on the cryptozoology of the North River Fjord. She extended it between gloved fingers. “I don’t suppose you know who writes under this pseudonym of ‘Josh’?”

He didn’t extend his hand to take the trembling slip of paper. “That would be your humble correspondent, madam. She clipped it, I gather? It’s so gratifying to have a fan.”

***

After the pilot, Garrett began interviewing the ship’s other officers. She was just about finished with the mate when a hesitant rap on the door paused him mid-sentence. She was reasonably certain he hadn’t been about to produce anything functionally useful, but she gestured him to continue anyway. When he paused, she raised her voice and called, “Enter!”

O’Brien leaned in the door to give her a look Garrett wanted to interpret as shared amusement over the irony of the captain of a vessel tapping on the door of his own cabin.

“Captain?”

“Mr. Manley found the trunk.”

***

It hadn’t got far. Just across the hold, stacked atop a bay otherwise half-full of sacks of sugar. A cargo net had been tugged aside and inexpertly refastened; O’Brien said that error had been noticed by one of the roustabouts. He also said that no one had touched the misplaced trunk since it was discovered.

Garrett examined it first
in situ
. It was hard to tell which of the dents in the sugar sacks might have been made by feet, but she measured a few for safety’s sake. Then, she confronted the trunk.

The best procedure would have been to clear every potential subject from the hold. But the best procedure would have had her here twelve hours ago, and the ship never leaving the waters of New Amsterdam.

And look how swimmingly and in accordance with her authority—and the Crown’s—all that had been carried out! Alexandria Regina should consider herself lucky that the Colonies still bothered paying their taxes. For a moment, Garrett closed her eyes and allowed herself nostalgia for London, when she had had the full power and the authority of the Enchancery and the Crown behind her every investigation.

Well, she’d made her decision to try her luck in the Colonies. It wasn’t as if she could take it back.

“Well,” said O’Brien, who had been observing curiously but silently, “we know he’s strong enough to drag a loaded trunk the width of the hold.”

“Assuming it’s loaded,” Garrett said. The box was blue, steel-strapped, and had an intrinsic lock rather than a padlock. She wondered if she’d have to witch it open. “You don’t think it Mrs. Abercrombie could have done this for herself?”

“Would a woman be strong enough?”

It was a big trunk. Garrett thought she might have
dragged
it, fully laden with clothes. Not books. Lifting it up the pile of sacks without tearing one, however—

She touched the latch with gloved fingers, depressing the catch. To her surprise, it sprang open.

She glanced at O’Brien, to find him gazing with pursed lips at her. “Do you suppose it will explode?”

He smiled tightly and would have stepped forward to assist her with the lid, but she gestured him back. Balanced precariously on the sacks—her tidy little boots were never meant for this kind of escapade—she checked the trunk for residue of sorcery or explosives. Both came up negative.

Surely if there were a booby trap, it would have gone off when the catch released?

“Well,” she said. “Here goes nothing.”

She flipped up the lid.

—nothing. In fact, there was nothing at
all
inside. The sanded interior was smooth and plain.

Garrett blew a lock of hair out of her eyes. She stood back, so O’Brien could peer over her shoulder. She said, “I think a woman would be strong enough to manage
that
.”

He replied, “So—it looks as if ‘Mrs. Abercrombie’ may have been smuggling something. Do you suppose whoever relieved her of it was an accomplice? I’m surprised he didn’t toss the trunk overboard when he had emptied it.”

“Tossing steamer trunks overboard by day is rather noticeable,” Garrett replied. She thought—but did not add aloud—that there was also the possibility that the suspect might not be listed on the passenger manifolds. Which meant he would not be free to move around the ship, unless he could find some means of escaping notice.

If that was the case, though, it mean that Garrett was and had been looking in all the wrong places for a killer. And outside the portholes, the long night was wasting.

***

Garrett sat behind the Captain’s desk, the dead woman’s book open on the blotter before her, the broken pen laid next to it. The ink matched—she’d checked that carefully—and now she lifted the pen and turned its barrel with her fingertips.

The empty trunk had given Garrett her first real hint of means and opportunity, though motive—and thus perpetrator—still floated amorphously somewhere outside of her ability to define. The comprehensive search had turned up no evidence of sabotage or stowaways, but Garrett was convinced—a hunch, an induction, a leap of logic she could not yet adequately defend—that her as-yet unidentified suspect was not a member of the crew.

She didn’t exactly feel that her time spent interviewing them was wasted, however. There was something about Clemens…

In any case, she needed a fresh and effective tack. And she needed it now.

Failing that, she’d settle for a desperation move.

She set the pen aside, rose, and went to the door. Having opened it, she leaned out and made sure Carter was there. She dismissed him to his other duties—over his protests, but she was sure she was easier work than whatever else he might have been detailed to accomplish.

At last, he stepped away, shoulders square. As if the thought had just struck her, she called after him—“Steward?”

He paused and turned. “Madam?”

“Does this boat have a library?”

“The Captain’s books are right there—”

“No,” she said. “A library for passengers. Fiction and such. Improving literature.”

“Of course,” Carter said. “It’s in the main cabin.”

“Thank you, Carter,” she said. She shut the door. And then, on a whim, she turned to O’Brien’s book shelf and pulled down a selection of reference tomes that would, she imagined, have been exquisitely useful to the captain of a top-of-her-line luxury steamer. She did wish he had a copy of a recent edition of
Registered Wizards and Sorcerers
, but she had to admit that was rather a specialized taste.

***

Now that
The Nation
was underway and a meal was being served, those who had paid for more than deck passage had largely retreated to the main cabin. As Garrett approached, its broad glass windows sparkled with light and fluttered with the motion of people bustling within. Garrett caught glimpses of the white coats of stewards through beveled panes, the shimmer of silver as they held their trays high. She picked out the balding back of Carter’s head as he sidled through the crowd and wondered at the length of his workday. Under the circumstances, none of the crew would have slept. She spared them a moment of pity, then collected herself and paused outside the doors of the main cabin.

She raised her eyes to the moon, to the light that scraped down the high cliffs to either side and
The Nation
’s own gilded superstructure. Veils of mist swayed above the river like a ghost bride’s petticoats, and trees just softening with young leaves lined the clifftops.

Some of the passengers would know who she was—Garrett was no stranger to innuendo and scandal—and they would certainly know why she was here. She must appear in command of the situation as she entered, and she must never let that appearance of control lapse.

With the captain at her left hand, she swept into the main cabin, pausing with the reflexes of a lady as every eye turned to her. Silence spread in ripples, lapping over one another, making snatches of conversation audible that should have lain beneath the general murmur of words. “…a dead woman…” “…said she was poisoned…” “…missing my daughter’s—” “…botanical conference.”

She recognized several of the ship’s crew, including Mr. Manley, the purser with such exceptional recall. She caught his eye and he came toward her. Having glanced at O’Brien for permission, he said, “D.C.I.?”

Garrett rode the moment, feeling it like the swell of a wave beneath
The Nation
. When her well-honed sense of society told her attention was beginning to waver away from her, she lowered her voice and said to Manley, “Sir, is there anyone in the cabin who you cannot put a name to?”

He turned once, slowly, and then shook his head.

Garrett frowned. She turned to O’Brien as if he had said something amusing and permitted herself to laugh. He caught her gaze, frowning, but seemed to understand that she was dissembling. His hand on her elbow moved her forward, and Manley fell in beside.

“We could search everyone in Albany,” she whispered. “When they disembark. Although anyone with sense would have divested themselves of anything that might have identifiably belonged to ‘Mrs. Abercrombie’ by now. A handbag would be a lot less obvious going over the railing than a trunk. And there would be political implications.”