The Illusion of Murder (8 page)

I could see that a harmonious relationship with the man who has identified himself as a fellow reporter is impossible.

I open the door to leave but pause after stepping out to put a parting shot over his bow.

“I don’t know how reporting is done in South Africa, but from your attitude I must assume your efforts are restricted to news of weddings, funerals, and dog bites.”

After delivering that fine retort, I slam the stateroom door shut hard enough to wake the dead.

Whipping around, I’m doomed to meet the steward again coming out of Mr. Cleveland’s stateroom.

Seeing me leave a man’s room at night, the rogue gives me a knowing grin.

I give him a searing glare that wipes it off his face.

FREDERICK SELOUS IN THE HEART OF AFRICA

9

I return to my cabin but pace like a trapped animal, with more questions buzzing in my head. Wouldn’t Cleveland have come back to the ship to secure his own luggage rather than leave matters to a stranger on the beach? And orders for his luggage to Lord Warton?

One conclusion I reach is that the key must be put in a safe place until I can figure out what to do with it. The best place I can think of is the secret compartments in my shoes.

The dear shoemaker who made my shoes for the trip suggested that I let him make the heels hollow, so I’d be able to put some gold coins in them. “That way if your purse is stolen, you shall still have some money.”

The pieces to the scarab are evidence I can’t hide so I do the next best thing. I toss them out my porthole.

With that resolved, I should be able to sleep, but it isn’t possible. Thoughts are pecking at my head with the beat of a woodpecker. Instead, I throw on my ulster and head for my hearty stern-to-bow walk on the deck in the hopes of burning off nagging thoughts.

Raymond, the steward, is lowering luggage down the side of the ship in a net as I come out on deck. I’m sure the trunks are the ones I saw in Mr. Cleveland’s stateroom.

A shadow falls over me as a man comes up to the railing and stands beside me.

“I couldn’t sleep, either,” Mr. Selous says.

He appears a bit hesitant at having approached me. Perhaps he hadn’t realized it was me until it was too late to politely flee. Or is he implying that I’m the cause of his lack of sleep?

“Mr. Cleveland’s luggage going ashore.” I nod down at the meshed bundle being lowered.

“Quite,” he says, using that uniquely British listening response.

“I suppose Mr. Cleveland is anxiously waiting on the beach for the boat to bring his luggage to shore.” I facetiously stare at the distant beach that is too far and too dark to see anything on. “Can you see him?”

Mr. Selous makes a guttural sound that conveys he is sorry he attempted to be polite and now is
quite
done with my intrigues. He turns to leave as a shout comes from below.

A steamer trunk has slipped out from the meshed bundle, striking the side of the boat waiting for it. The trunk snaps open as it hits the boat and falls into the water, opening for a second before a boatman grabs it.

“It’s empty,” I whisper.

“What?” Selous turns back and peers over the side. “It’s too dark to see—”

“I saw when it hit. It’s empty.”

From his expression I think he’s trying to give me the benefit of the doubt but is uncertain as to whether I deserve it. He starts to say something, then appears to shrug it off and pushes away from the railing.

“Good night, Miss Bly. We should both get some sleep and rise early, for tomorrow we pass through the greatest man-made waterway in the world.”

I stay at the railing for a moment, staring down where the luggage is being unloaded onto the boat. The trunk is empty; a fact that brings more woodpeckers pecking in my head.

When I turn to leave I make eye contact with the steward.

I give him a frown that lets him know that I am no fool, that I know there are shenanigans afoot, and get back an unexpected dark look.

Learn not to signal your punches,
I tell myself on my way down dim stairwells and corridors to my cabin.

A dark figure appears ahead of me at the far end of a corridor before disappearing into a stateroom—the woman in black who I’ve glimpsed on deck during my walks. I’ve taken a fancy to the notion that the mysterious woman who wanders the decks at night is none other than Sarah Winchester, heir to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company fortune.

The name she boarded under was “Sarah Jones,” and the widow Winchester is known to travel incognito in her own Pullman car with the shades down and to use a false name when staying in a hotel.

I haven’t shared my theory about the woman with anyone else because I hope there’ll be a story behind it. It wouldn’t be the first strange tale told about the woman.

Mrs. Winchester fell into deep depression after the untimely deaths of first her daughter and then her husband, and came to believe that she is haunted by the ghosts of the thousands of people killed by the famous Winchester repeating rifles that helped win the Civil War and massacred much of the nation’s Indians.

That she has only worn black since the death of her loved ones is just one of the more mundane rumors about her strange behavior; another is that she is using her vast fortune to build a house with an endless number of rooms because a spiritualist advised her that as long as she kept adding rooms to the house, the ghosts of the Winchester dead would not attack her.
*

I first saw the woman come up the gangplank after I boarded at Brindisi, Italy. It wasn’t her widow’s black garments and net veil that were memorable, but the coffin being carried by porters behind her.

Both woman and coffin disappeared into a first-class stateroom and neither has been seen since—except for the fleeting glimpses of her that I’ve had at night.

Her first name, widow’s clothes, and reclusive habit all add up to the Winchester woman, but it’s the coffin that clinches my conclusion that it is indeed the eccentric woman. While I’ve never heard of Mrs. Winchester bringing a coffin along during her travels, such an oddity would fit the public image of the woman—and provide me with a new slant on her eccentricities for a story.

Is it the body of her young daughter in the coffin? Or her husband?

The thought of sleeping with the dead in a stateroom gives me goose bumps … a goose walking over my grave, as my mother would say.

I make sure my door is securely locked before I put on my nightgown. I’m about to undress when there is a knock on my door.

Certain it is Lord Warton coming to accuse me of searching Cleveland’s room, I open the door and find Von Reich instead.

“I thought I should check on you and make sure you’re well.”

I lean against the door frame and rub my forehead. “My head has split in two and I’ve lost one of the halves.”

“After what you’ve been through, it’s amazing you have any head left. Tomorrow the Wartons and I are taking another day excursion—”

I shake my head no and even that hurts. “I am going to stay aboard and rest.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. We are going to feast with a sheikh in the desert that will be like nothing you have ever imagined, then we are visiting the ruins of ancient Tanis, the city that once was the capital of Egypt. But since you—”

“I’m coming!”

He grins. “We leave before the dawn. To avoid the sun. And trouble.” He starts to leave and turns back to me. “It’s rather like the Biblical Revelation, isn’t it?”

“The feast?”

“No, no, the story of the Mahdi. The Muslim holy book says he’ll return to Earth amidst a reign of war and destruction much like the Bible says the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse will create.”

He looks at me for a long moment. “I told you that you must expect the unexpected in Egypt. It’s an ancient land, one still haunted by thousands of years of intrigues, wars, and hexes.”

“What’s the surprise for tomorrow?” I ask.

He raises his eyebrows. “A miracle, dear lady; you shall stand witness to a true miracle.”

Von Reich leaves and I carry his words to bed with me.

Holy war, apocalyptic horsemen of war and death, the intrigues of modern nations and ruins of an ancient one—all mysterious and exotic, and nothing that I expected when I made the impulsive decision to race around the world.

Now I’m to witness a miracle.

I could use one at the moment. So could Mr. Cleveland.

I feel bad that I had mentally ridiculed him for acting so secretive. He had his reasons, though whatever intrigue he was involved in, he hadn’t played it well, not at least good enough to keep from getting himself killed.

The invitation from Von Reich sounded to me as innocent as a pickpocket with his hand in my purse. With the Mahdi on the warpath, I have to wonder if the miracle won’t be that we get back to the ship with our heads still on our shoulders.

I would have passed on the invitation, but it’s just too convenient that we all ended up in the marketplace as murder was coming down. I have to find out if it was a coincidence or something else.

Exhausted from the day, I sit down to take off my shoes. Right after removing one shoe, I stop. A movement from the corner of my eye catches my attention and I look up.

Something
—a shadow, a figure—is at my porthole.

Gripping my shoe, I slowly get up to see “what” if anything is there. Just inches away from my porthole a man’s face abruptly appears. Someone might as well have thrown a spider in my face. I drop my shoe, and the face, draped by a gray striped hood, disappears as quickly as it came.

Without any thought, I run for my door, throwing off the other shoe I still had on and barrel out of the doorway, racing down the corridor to the companionway and out to the deck.

Breathless, heart in my mouth, I make myself slow down so as not to draw any attention and cautiously walk down the deck toward my porthole.

Several male passengers are mingling about, enjoying their evening cigars and brandy, none in Egyptian hoods. I look in every direction trying to figure out where the hooded man went.

My feet are wet from the deck’s evening washing and even though it is not cold, my body shivers. Putting my chin and shoulders up, I’m determined to strengthen my resolve. I know there was a face at my porthole with the same hood as Mr. Cleveland’s when he was killed in the marketplace. Whoever is trying to frighten me can go to hell.

I march back down the deck to the companionway, meeting Frederick Selous returning to his cabin.

Staring down at my bare feet and lack of a night coat, he asks, “Is something wrong, Miss Bly?”

“Does it look like something is wrong to you, Mr. Selous?”

I leave him with that until I am past him. He pauses at his cabin door and appears wishing he could say something.

“Don’t worry, Mr. Selous, I don’t frighten easy. In fact, when I get scared, I get mad.”

I strut into my cabin six feet tall and filled with strength.

Once my door is shut behind me I collapse against it and try to get my breathing back into a normal rhythm. Then I lock it and shove the cabin chair under the handle.

What the devil?
What insanity is this? Someone’s idea of a bad joke?

No, not a joke, but something much more cruel—an attempt to frighten me, perhaps even send me running to the captain screaming that the ghost of John Cleveland has paid me a visit. If someone wanted to discredit me, that would certainly be grist for the mill.

I hadn’t gotten a good look at the face in the porthole, all I saw was a dark face half hidden in the hood of a cloak, but I have no doubt that it meant to frighten me into believing it was him.

I draw the curtain over the porthole before slipping into bed, still angry and tense from the invasion of my privacy. The face in the window had served a powerful purpose—it brought home the fact that the murderous rage that spilled blood in the marketplace has followed me back to the ship.

The small cabin suddenly makes me feel confined, with an eerie sense of being cornered. I’m no longer certain I’m safe aboard. I feel exposed, even trapped, rather than safe and cozy because I don’t know who I can trust and there’s no place to run and hide.