Huckleberry Finished

by Livia J. Washburn

  “But you got sidetracked,” I said.

  He grinned. “Yeah. Wound up an MP instead of a PhD. Funny how life works out sometimes, isn’t it?”

  “It sure is. Are you still in the service?”

  “No, I’ve been out for a while. I’ve been trying to decide whether to go back to school or maybe get into the security field.”

  He was a likable young guy, but I had a potential crisis on my hands. I had chatted long enough to do my duty as the tour director, so I said, “Well, I’ll see you later, more than likely. Enjoy your cruise, Mr. Mallory.”

  “Thank you.” He looked concerned. “You’re sure there’s nothing I can do to help you?”

  “No, thanks.” I smiled and turned to head for my cabin.

  When I got there I opened my laptop and called up the records for this cruise. I had a copy of the passenger manifest that someone in Charles Gallister’s office had e-mailed to me earlier in the day. In addition to giving me something to check against my own records, it provided the numbers of the cabins assigned to my clients. It took me only a second to scroll down the list to Ben Webster’s name and see that he was supposed to be in Cabin 135.

  That was on the second deck. The son of a gun had lied to me. He had picked Vince Mallory’s cabin at random and claimed it was his so he could get away from me and do whatever it was he planned to do—which couldn’t be anything good. Now I was stuck with not knowing where he was or what he was up to.

  I still had one thing I could check before giving up and going to Rafferty, though. I left my cabin and hurried up to the second deck again. Earlier I had walked all around it looking for Webster, but I hadn’t knocked on the door to Cabin 135. That’s what I did now.

  Somehow, I wasn’t the least bit surprised when there was no answer.

  I tried the knob, not expecting the door to be unlocked. But it was. I confess, I jumped a little in surprise when the knob turned in my hand. I didn’t know whether to open the door or not. It had occurred suddenly to me that I might not like what I found in there.

  But I had gone too far to back out now, I figured, so I eased the door open a couple of inches and knocked on it again, just in case. I even called out, “Mr. Webster? Ben? Are you in there?”

  When there was no answer, I really thought about closing the door and going for help, so I wouldn’t have to go in there by myself. I sort of wished now that I’d asked Vince Mallory to come with me. Having a big, strapping former MP with me would have done wonders for my confidence right then.

  It seemed like I stood there, torn by indecision, a lot longer than I actually did. Probably not more than a couple of seconds went by after I called out before I pushed the door all the way open and stepped into the cabin with my heart pounding.

  Nobody was in there.

  Unless they were in the bathroom, my nervous brain reminded me. The closed door loomed ominously in a corner of the room.

  I took a better look around first. There had been a suitcase sitting on the bed in Vince Mallory’s cabin, as there probably was in most of the passenger cabins on the boat. Not here, though. I didn’t see a bag anywhere. I opened the door to the tiny closet. No suitcase, no clothes hanging up, nothing. By the looks of the cabin, it could have been unoccupied.

  That left the bathroom. There’s an old saying in the South about being as nervous as a cat on a porch full of rocking chairs. That’s how I felt as I approached the bathroom door. I was ready to jump.

  I knocked on it first. “Mr. Webster? Are you in there?”

  Either he wasn’t, or he couldn’t answer.

  “Stop that,” I told myself out loud as that thought went through my head. “Just because you found a dead body that other time doesn’t mean you’re gonna find one now.”

  I knew that made sense, but I still felt a whole cloud of butterflies in my stomach as I reached out and grasped the knob. I swallowed hard and then turned it. I pushed the door open, halfway expecting to bump up against a corpse.

  Instead the door opened all the way, revealing a bathroom with a toilet, a tiny vanity, and a shower, just like the one in my cabin. The shower curtain was pulled across the opening. I started to push it back, then hesitated. I didn’t think the shower was big enough for a body to be hidden in it. The only way that would be possible would be if the body was stiff enough so it could be propped up against the wall and stay there.

  With a rasp of curtain rings on the rod, I shoved the curtain back.

  Then blew out a long breath because the shower was empty. Not just empty, but also dry, as if no one had used it since the passengers came on board.

  I looked around the bathroom. It didn’t take long. No shaving kit or anything else personal. The hand towel beside the vanity was damp, the only sign that this cabin had been occupied anytime recently. If not for that, it would have been like Ben Webster had never been here.

  So he had come to his cabin and cleaned it out after leaving me down on the main deck, I thought. Why? It made sense if he’d been planning to get off the boat at Hannibal, as he’d agreed to do. But he hadn’t gotten off. At least, I hadn’t seen him if he had.

  So where the heck was my missing tourist?

  CHAPTER 4

  I admit, I should have gone to Logan Rafferty, told him what was going on, and enlisted the help of him and his security personnel to find out what had happened to Ben Webster. But as I stood there in the empty cabin, I talked myself out of it, at least for the time being. I didn’t know that anything had happened to Webster, just like I didn’t know he was hiding somewhere and plotting to cause trouble. Either of those things was possible, but so were other explanations. He might have gotten off the riverboat, like he was supposed to, and I had just flat missed it. He also could have disembarked while I was wandering around the boat looking for him.

  Don’t borrow trouble, I told myself. I could tell from the response I’d gotten when I announced this tour that it was going to be popular. I didn’t want to have future tours banned from the Southern Belle.

  So, smart or not, I left Ben Webster’s cabin just like I found it, with the shower curtain pulled closed, the bathroom door shut, and the cabin door unlocked. I went out on deck, leaned on the railing, and looked at Hannibal while I thought about my next move. I had a good view from the second deck like this. The only ones better would be from the observation areas on the third deck or the pilothouse.

  The crowds around the dock had thinned out. The tourists who had gotten off the boat had already spread out through the town. The locals in costume who had come out to greet them were gone, too, having lured customers back to whatever theater or museum employed them. A few stragglers might get tired of gambling or run out of money and decide to see the attractions that Hannibal offered, but for the most part everybody who was going to town was already there.

  The more I thought about it, the more I believed that the most likely explanation was that Webster had gotten off the boat without me seeing him. His cabin looked like he had cleaned it out and left. I didn’t know why he claimed that Vince Mallory’s cabin was his. Maybe he had planned to pull some sort of angry stunt but later changed his mind. I doubted that he could have been wandering around the off-limits areas on the riverboat for this long without being caught by some of the crew. In that case, they would have turned him over to Logan Rafferty, who would have sent for me.

  So when I thought about it like that, it seemed obvious that Webster must have gotten off the boat. If I could just prove that, then I could relax and enjoy the rest of the tour, provided that no more problems cropped up.

  There couldn’t be that many rental car agencies in Hannibal, I told myself as I headed down the stairs to the main deck. All I had to do was find the one where Ben Webster had picked up a car to drive back to St. Louis.

  I left the boat, walked off the dock, and headed up Center Street. When I got to Main I found myself at the Hannibal Trolley Company, which operated sightseeing trolleys around the town. I thought they mig
ht be able to tell me where the nearest car rental agencies were, or at least have a phone book I could look at.

  The folks at the trolley company were friendly. No surprise there, in a town that catered so much to the tourist trade. The lady working at the counter pointed me to the car rental places, adding, “But why rent a car when our trolleys can take you anywhere in Hannibal you want to go?”

  I told her I was just looking for some information and headed for the nearest car rental agency.

  It took me the better part of an hour to hike around Hannibal to all the places where Ben Webster could have rented a car. My frustration grew right along with the tired ache in my legs. The folks at the agencies were all cooperative—they could have refused to answer my questions, after all—but none of them recalled renting a car to anybody who looked like Webster that afternoon, and his name didn’t show up in their records.

  So if he wasn’t on the boat and he hadn’t rented a car to drive back to St. Louis, where was he?

  I pondered that question as I started retracing my steps toward the river. My route took me past the Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum, at the corner of Main and Hill streets. Hill Street, as you might guess, was kind of steep. The narrow, two-story white frame building where Sam Clemens had grown up faced the street with an old stone building sitting hard against it on the left side. A sign identified the stone building as the Mark Twain Museum and Gift Shop. Across the street sat another white frame structure known as the Becky Thatcher House. I knew from my research for the tour that young Sam Clemens’s childhood playmate Laura Hawkins, later immortalized in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer under the name Becky Thatcher, had lived there.

  That was interesting, but it didn’t help me find out where Ben Webster had gone. Maybe he was wandering around Hannibal trying to see some of the sights, at least, before renting a car and heading back to St. Louis. I started into the boyhood home, thinking how ironic it would be if I ran smack-dab into Webster after searching for him all over the boat and hiking over half of downtown Hannibal.

  I didn’t see Ben Webster anywhere in the house, but the Kramers were there. Louise greeted me with a smile. Eddie just grunted and gave me a curt nod.

  “This is all so fascinating,” Louise gushed. “I just love Mark Twain, don’t you?”

  “Sure,” I said. To tell the truth, I’d read Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn in school, like everybody else, and I wasn’t sure I’d ever picked up anything by Twain since then. I sure as heck couldn’t have written a thesis on him and his work like Vince Mallory had talked about doing.

  But the people who had signed up for the tour didn’t have to know that. I’d done enough research on Twain so I could talk about him with enough enthusiasm and knowledge to satisfy most people with a casual interest in him.

  “I’m really looking forward to the performance on the boat tonight,” Louise went on. “That man who plays Mark Twain looks just like him, don’t you think?”

  I agreed that Mark Lansing bore a strong resemblance to the man he portrayed. “I plan to be there, too,” I told Louise, remembering the promise I had made earlier that afternoon. I hoped nothing interfered with that plan.

  I didn’t expect anything serious to come of it, since I’d be back in Atlanta in another day or two, but I wouldn’t mind spending some more time in Mark Lansing’s company. Will Burke and I dated fairly often, but we hadn’t gotten to the point where either of us wanted the relationship to be exclusive. Heck, after having a twenty-year-plus marriage end in divorce, I wasn’t sure I ever wanted anything that committed again.

  I left Louise Kramer poring over the furnishings in the boyhood home and her husband Eddie looking bored. My next stop was the museum and gift shop next door. I described Ben Webster to the clerks behind the counter in the gift shop, but none of them remembered seeing him.

  “But we have so many people coming through here, you know,” one of the women said with an apologetic shrug.

  “I know y’all do,” I told her. “I appreciate your help anyway.”

  While I was there I took a quick walk through the museum. Under other circumstances, I might have enjoyed it, but worrying over the Webster situation kept me from concentrating on what I was looking at. After a few minutes I gave up on trying to see the sights for myself and headed across the street to the Becky Thatcher House.

  There was a gift shop there, too, but that clerk didn’t remember Webster, either. The same thing was true at the nearby Twain Interpretive Center and the restored building that had served as the office of Sam Clemens’s father when he was justice of the peace in Hannibal. No one recalled seeing Webster, but because of the amount of tourists that came through all these attractions, nobody could be sure.

  It was time to give up, I told myself. I had done what I could. But even though I knew that was true, logically, worry nibbled at my brain as I walked back to the riverboat. Dusk was settling down over the town. It was going to be a warm night, and we were far enough from St. Louis that the air was fairly clean, without the sort of pollution you get in a big city. Having lived in Atlanta as long as I had, even relatively clean air tasted a little like wine when you took a deep breath of it. I should have been enjoying this gorgeous early evening, instead of worrying.

  Tell that to my nerves. They were as tight as piano wires as I went back on board.

  A reception was scheduled in the salon before dinner. People could come and go as they pleased, of course, but I expected a fairly good turnout. I went to my cabin and traded my slacks, blouse, and blazer for a simple dark blue dress that I thought looked elegant without being flashy. Low heels replaced the comfortable walking shoes I’d been wearing earlier as I tramped around Hannibal. I ran my fingers through my short red hair to fluff it out. I thought I looked good enough to sip a little champagne at the reception and then eat dinner.

  A few of my clients were already in the salon when I got there. I greeted them and asked them how the tour was going for them so far. Everybody seemed to be having a good time. I started to relax, telling myself that the whole business with Ben Webster would blow over without any more trouble. Sure, I didn’t know where he was, but he was a grown-up and it wasn’t my job to keep track of his every move. As long as he wasn’t on the boat, his whereabouts weren’t any of my business anymore.

  I became aware that a man sitting at the bar was watching me. Not to be vain about it or anything, but I’ve had a few men eye me in bars over the years. Not as many as when I was younger, maybe, but it still happened. This man wore jeans and a sports jacket and had dark blond hair over a pleasantly rugged face. When I caught him looking at me, he didn’t jerk his eyes away or look guilty. He just gave me a friendly smile and lifted the glass in his hand like he was saluting me.

  That interested me enough that I went over to him. “Hello,” I said. “Have we met?”

  “We have, Ms. Dickinson,” he said.

  “I’m sorry. Normally I remember ruggedly handsome men—”

  “And I always remember pretty redheads.” His voice changed, took on a slight quiver like that of an older man. “I quite fancy redheaded women, you know.”

  “Well, Mark Twain, as I live and breathe!”

  Mark Lansing grinned. “That’s right. You didn’t recognize me at all without the wig and the mustache and the make-up, did you?”

  “No, you look totally different,” I told him. “Bigger, even.”

  “That’s a trick. You stoop over a little and draw your shoulders forward, and people think you’re smaller than you really are.”

  “What are you doing here? I’m surprised to see you out of costume. It must take a long time to get ready, and you’ve got a performance tonight.” I checked my watch. “In a little more than two hours, in fact.”

  “It only takes about thirty minutes to get the make-up and the mustache on,” he said with a shrug. “The wig and the clothes take only a few minutes. I can’t wear the getup all the time. It’d drive me nuts. I’d rather take the time
and trouble to take it off and put it back on every now and then.”

  “Well, I reckon I can understand that. Pretendin’ is fun, but deep down everybody wants to be who they really are.”

  “Pretty profound for a redhead.”

  I gave him a mock glare. “The last fella who said something like that to me got pitched overboard.”

  “How about if I buy you a drink to make up for it?”

  “I think you just wanted an excuse to buy me a drink.”

  He grinned again. “Now that you mention it…”

  “Champagne,” I said to the bartender.

  “Ouch,” Mark Lansing said.

  I ignored him and went on, “I’m Delilah Dickinson.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the bartender said. “I’ll fetch the bottle I’ve been using for your party.”

  “What, I’m not paying?” Mark asked.

  “And give a glass to my friend here,” I told the bartender.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Mark shook his head. “Great, now I feel like a gigolo.”

  “Shut up and drink your champagne,” I said.

  It felt good to relax and flirt with a good-looking man for a few minutes. That’s all it was, just some harmless flirting, but I was glad that I’d run into Mark Lansing without his Mark Twain garb on.

  We sipped champagne and talked a while longer, the sort of small talk that a man and a woman make when they think they might be interested in each other and want to get to know each other better. I mentioned my divorce but didn’t go into detail about it. He said that he’d never been married but had come close a couple of times.

  “Cold feet?” I asked.

  “Jobs got in the way,” he said. “I’m attracted to successful women, I guess. The ones I was thinking about asking to marry me got good job offers on the other side of the country. I didn’t want to leave St. Louis, and I wasn’t going to ask them to turn down the jobs because of me.”

  “You’re from St. Louis?”