Huckleberry Finished

by Livia J. Washburn

  “People are going to find out anyway.”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t want to be to blame for it.”

  He thought about it for a moment, then started to nod. “Yeah, I suppose that makes sense. It wasn’t that you didn’t trust me in particular.”

  “Shoot, no! I reckon I trust you more than anybody else on this boat.”

  I wasn’t sure what made me say that, or even why I felt that way. But it was true. I trusted Mark Lansing. Maybe it was because the first time I’d met him, he looked just like Mark Twain. Who wouldn’t trust Mark Twain?

  He gestured toward my cabin. “Where are you going to stay tonight? That’s a crime scene.”

  “Not much of one, the way Detective Travis was acting. She didn’t tell me I couldn’t stay there.”

  “Everything’s torn up.”

  “Not really. I can put it back in order pretty quick, I imagine.” I wasn’t going to be too happy about spending the night in there alone, knowing that somebody had already broken in once and could do it again, but I sure as heck wasn’t going to ask Mark to stay with me, even though a part of me sort of liked the idea.

  “Look, let’s go see the captain. Surely he can find you another cabin.”

  I shook my head. “From what I’ve heard, the boat’s fully booked. There aren’t any empty cabins.”

  “Then you’re going to stay in my cabin,” Mark declared. “Nobody would think to look for you there.”

  I gave him the skunk eye. “Savin’ me from a return visit by a burglar, is that what you’ve got in mind, Mr. Lansing?”

  “What? Wait a minute!” He started shaking his head. “You’ve got me all wrong, Delilah. You can have my cabin for the night. I’ll stay up in the salon.”

  It was my turn to shake my head. “You can’t do that. You wouldn’t get a bit of sleep.”

  “Why do I need sleep? I don’t have a performance again until the day after tomorrow. I’ll be plenty rested by then. Anyway, have you seen those big armchairs in the salon? I’ll prop my feet up and sleep just fine in one of them.”

  “Well…” It was a tempting offer, and I was convinced now that Mark didn’t have any ulterior motives. Even though I had known him less than twelve hours, he seemed like an honorable fella to me.

  “If you don’t say yes, I’m going to have to sleep here on the deck, right outside your door, to protect you.”

  “I guess chivalry’s not dead after all.” I laughed. “All right. It’s a sweet offer, and I’ll take you up on it. Let’s be careful, though. I don’t want folks seein’ me slippin’ in and out of your cabin. If I’m gonna be bringin’ tours on this boat on a regular basis, I don’t want to get a bad reputation among the crew.”

  I threw a couple of things in a bag and then locked my cabin. I could straighten everything out the next morning. Mark and I went up onto the second deck where the crew had their quarters. I don’t know if he was officially considered part of the crew or not, but his cabin was up there with the others.

  By this time of night, nobody was moving around. The diehard gamblers were in the casino, the boozers were in the salon, and everybody else had returned from sightseeing and turned in for the night. Mark unhooked the slender chain across the deck that had a sign on it reading AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY and led me past it to the crew cabins. He unlocked his door, pushed it open, and held out an arm to usher me inside.

  The cabin looked about the same as the ones used by the passengers. If anything, it was a little more spartan in its furnishings. But the bed was made, instead of stripped, and Mark’s belongings hadn’t been strewn all over the floor.

  He took a phone out of his pocket and said, “Put my number in your phone, and if you have any problems during the night, don’t hesitate to call me.”

  We engaged in the modern-day ritual of programming each other’s numbers into our phones, and then I stifled a yawn and said, “Well, I guess this is good night.”

  “Yeah.”

  I hoped he wasn’t going to linger until things got awkward. He didn’t, thank goodness. He just smiled and went to the door, pausing there to say, “Be sure to lock this and put the chain on after I’m gone.”

  “I will,” I promised.

  He smiled again, lifted a hand in farewell, and was gone, closing the door quietly behind him. I felt a little bad about him having to spend the night in the salon. I hoped he actually would be able to get some sleep.

  Once I’d made sure the door was locked and fastened the chain, I sat on the bed and sighed in a mixture of weariness and relief. This cruise hadn’t gone like I’d planned so far, but it wasn’t my fault that Ben Webster had gone and gotten himself murdered, or that somebody had broken into my cabin.

  My fault or not, though, once news of the murder broke in the media, it wouldn’t be good publicity for Dickinson Literary Tours. And chances were, some eager-beaver reporter would Google my name and find out that a couple of murders had taken place on one of my tours the year before, which would make my involvement in this one even more newsworthy. If it bleeds, it leads, as the old saying goes.

  But there was nothing I could do about it tonight. Nothing I could do about it, period, except hope that the police found Ben Webster’s killer quickly and that his death would wind up having nothing directly to do with my agency. That may sound a little callous, but Ben Webster was beyond caring about now. I had tried to help him, and that hadn’t worked out. If he had just gone to his cabin and stayed there until the boat docked in Hannibal, then gotten off, like he was supposed to, he might still be alive. Instead, he had started roaming around the Southern Belle and had wound up dead.

  But why? I asked myself. The only motive I’d considered was the idea that Logan Rafferty had killed him because Webster was trying to sabotage the boat some way. But I had no proof that any such thing had happened. Maybe Webster’s murderer had followed him onto the boat for the express purpose of killing him. I didn’t know anything about the young man’s background. He could have all sorts of enemies who’d been stalking him.

  That sounded too melodramatic to me, even as the thought went through my head. But one thing was certain: Ben Webster had had at least one enemy, and a bad one, at that.

  Detective Travis would investigate his background, I told myself. She would find out if he had anything in his past that would make someone want him dead. That was her job, not mine, and I was glad of it.

  I took off my blue dress, washed up, removed my make-up, and put on the pair of pajamas I had thrown into the bag I brought along. By the time I’d brushed my teeth, the late hour was catching up with me. I almost stumbled from sleepiness as I went to the bed, pulled back the covers, and crawled in. As I snapped off the lamp on the little table beside the bed, I figured I’d doze off as soon as my head hit the pillow.

  Naturally, it didn’t work out that way.

  When I closed my eyes, my brain started filling up with all the things that had happened since I’d arrived in St. Louis that morning. I replayed the luncheon, boarding the boat, cruising up the Mississippi, and meeting Mark Lansing in his Mark Twain getup. It hadn’t been long after that that things had started to go south, and I don’t mean down the river.

  Maybe I was searching my memory for clues without really being aware of it. I had figured out who had killed those folks on the plantation, after all. But despite that I didn’t think of myself as a detective. I was just a small-business owner trying to minimize the damage to my business.

  While I was lying there in the darkness, turning those things over in my head and wondering why the heck I couldn’t just go to sleep, I heard a noise. It wasn’t very loud, but it came from somewhere close by and my instincts told me that it shouldn’t be there. After a second I realized what it was.

  Somebody had just slipped a key into the doorknob.

  Mark had a key; I knew that. Maybe he had forgotten something that he needed and thought he could slip in and get it without disturbing me.

  But he had t
old me to be sure to fasten the chain on the door, I recalled. He would know that he couldn’t get into the cabin without waking me.

  Maybe he wanted to wake me. Maybe he had decided that he didn’t want to spend the night in the salon after all.

  Maybe I was about to have to make a decision I didn’t really want to be forced to make.

  Or maybe the killer had figured out where I was and had come back to finish his work.

  That thought sent a chill through me. I didn’t have anything to fight off an attacker other than some pepper spray in my purse, and I didn’t recall seeing anything in the cabin that could be used as a weapon except maybe the lamp. And it wasn’t big and heavy enough to be very effective as a club. Of course, I could scream—nothing wrong with my lungs, after all—and maybe somebody in a nearby cabin would come to help me. That might be my best bet, I decided as I fought down a surge of panic.

  But I didn’t want to start hollering if the person who had just unlocked the door was Mark. That would be embarrassing. So I threw back the covers and swung my legs out of bed, then stood up as I heard the knob turn slowly and quietly.

  My instincts told me to run, but there was nowhere to run to in the cabin. Instead I moved silently toward the doorway as it eased open. I was about to open my mouth to say Mark? when the chain stopped the door from opening any farther. A voice spoke in an urgent whisper.

  “Mark? Mark, it’s me. Let me in.”

  A woman’s voice.

  That stopped me in my tracks. Why would a woman have a key to Mark’s cabin and expect the chain to be unfastened in the middle of the night, as if he were expecting her?

  Well, there was one obvious answer, of course. He could have a girlfriend among the crew. He might even be involved with one of the passengers. He hadn’t said anything to me about having a girlfriend, and he’d kissed me, after all. But let’s face it—that wouldn’t be the first time a fella kissed a woman other than the one he was supposed to be romantically linked with.

  The damn dog.

  As soon as that thought went through my head, I told myself to stop jumping to conclusions. Maybe there was a logical, reasonable explanation for this woman trying to sneak into Mark’s room in the middle of the night that didn’t have anything to do with hanky-panky. Suuuure there was.

  But either way I wanted to know who she was. With her whispering like that, I hadn’t been able to recognize her voice. So I leaned toward the door and asked in a whisper of my own, “Who’s there?”

  “Oh!”

  The exclamation told me that Mark’s late-night visitor was just as surprised to find another woman in his cabin as I had been when she unlocked the door. She didn’t say anything else. She just jerked the door closed, and the rapid patter of footsteps on the dock told me that she was running away.

  Consumed by curiosity, I hurried to the door and fumbled with the chain. I wasn’t thinking about mysterious killers anymore. I wanted to get a look at the woman. When I finally got the chain unfastened, I threw the door open and stuck my head out.

  I was just in time to see a flash of blond hair and the flutter of a robe as she ducked around the corner at the far end of the dimly lit deck. She was moving fast, and I didn’t get a good look at all. For a second I thought about chasing after her, but then I realized how insane that was. Anybody who saw me running along the deck of a riverboat in my pajamas would think that I was a total loon, and they’d be right. Plus there was the whole lurking murderer business to consider.

  I retreated into the cabin, closed the door, and fastened the chain again.

  As frustrating and puzzling as this incident was, I knew there was one good way to find out what had just happened here. In the morning, when I saw Mark Lansing again, I would ask him why strange women were sneaking into his cabin well after midnight. Of course, I reminded myself, I was a strange woman myself, or at least I had been to Mark until about twelve hours earlier, and here I was in his cabin. In his bed, for that matter. But that was different.

  Considering everything that had happened, it took a long time for me to get to sleep. That didn’t surprise me at all.

  CHAPTER 11

  I had a restless what was left of the night and woke up early the next morning feeling almost as tired as when I’d gone to sleep. The gray light coming in around the edges of the curtain over the cabin’s single window told me that it wasn’t dawn yet. I didn’t think I could sleep anymore, though, so I got out of bed.

  Hoping that a shower might wake me up, I went into the bathroom and started the water running, then looked around. Mark’s shaving kit sat on the tiny vanity, partially unzipped. I felt the urge to poke around in it a little, but I resisted. I wouldn’t want him digging around in my purse or my make-up bag, so I had to honor his privacy, too.

  When I had the water at the temperature I liked, I took off my pajamas and hung them on the hook on the back of the bathroom door, then stepped into the hot shower. It felt mighty good. I stayed there for what seemed like a long time, letting the hot water work out all the kinks in my body.

  I wished it could do as good a job working out the mental kinks, but I knew that wasn’t going to happen.

  Finally, when the water began to run cool, I turned it off and pushed back the curtain to step out onto the little mat. I pulled an unused towel from the rack and started to dry. I had pushed the bathroom door up without closing it quite all the way, so most of the steam from the hot shower had been trapped. The mirror was completely fogged up and probably would be for a while, but the steamy bathroom felt good. I like a nice hot shower, even in the summer.

  When I finished drying, I moved to hang up the towel. As I did, I bumped the shaving kit with my hip. There wasn’t much room on the vanity to start with, since it was so small, and the leather kit was perched near the edge. When I bumped it, it slid off and fell to the floor.

  It landed on the tile with a heavy clunk.

  The sound brought a frown to my face. Just how heavy could a man’s razor and toothbrush be, anyway? I bent over and picked up the shaving kit, set it on the vanity. It was heavy, all right.

  Feeling a little guilty about what I was doing, I unzipped the top the rest of the way and looked inside.

  The first thing I saw was a clear plastic bag with a tube of toothpaste and a toothbrush inside it. The toothbrush had one of those plastic covers over the bristles. Next to the bag was one of those razors with multiple blades. I don’t know how many this one had, but it’s only a matter of time until they come up with a twenty-two-blade razor that a guy has to move only an inch to shave his whole face. There was a can of shaving cream and a plastic bottle of aftershave, plus some first-aid stuff and a package of cotton swabs. Nothing out of the ordinary there, and although the shaving cream might have made the clunking noise when the bag hit the floor, I knew it hadn’t.

  No, the gun underneath all the other stuff was what had made the noise.

  I saw the barrel and part of the cylinder poking out and recognized them for what they were, even though at the same time my brain was rebelling at the thought. Who carries a revolver in a shaving kit?

  Well, Mark Lansing, for one, obviously. I had the testimony of my own eyes for that. I moved the stuff in the bag so I could get a better look at the gun.

  It wasn’t very big. A .32? A .38? I don’t know. The whole thing wasn’t over six inches long, and the barrel accounted for about two inches of that. The handle had plastic grips made to look like wood with a little checkered pattern in it. The finish on the rest of the gun was silvery. It looked sort of like a toy, but it was the real thing. The feeling of danger that came off it told me that.

  And I had knocked it off onto the floor. Revolvers sometimes went off when they were dropped. Maybe it wasn’t loaded. I didn’t want to touch it, so I picked up one end of the bag and tilted it so I could look at the chambers in the cylinder from the back. As far as I could tell, they were empty. So at least the gun wasn’t loaded.

  That didn’t t
ake away from the fact that Mark had a gun in his shaving kit. And a package of condoms, too, I saw now, nestled next to the can of shaving cream. Obviously a man who wanted to be fully protected: Trojans and a Smith & Wesson.

  I pushed that crazy thought away and set the bag back on the vanity. I pulled the zipper part of the way closed, like it had been when I found it. Then I realized I was standing there naked in the bathroom of a man who packed heat and had mysterious women visiting him in the middle of the night.

  It was time to get out of Dodge.

  The night before I had stuck a clean pair of slacks and a blouse in my bag, along with clean underwear, of course. I got dressed in a hurry, put on as little make-up as I could get by with, and ran a brush through my hair. I’m lucky that it doesn’t take a lot of work.

  As I came out of the bathroom I heard my phone ringing in my purse.

  Mark was calling, I saw as I got the phone out and checked the display. I didn’t know whether I wanted to talk to him or not. I had plenty of questions for him. Well, two big ones really: Who was that woman? What’s the deal with the gun? But I thought it might be better to ask them in person.

  If I ignored the call, though, he might get worried and show up to pound on the door. I didn’t want to draw any attention to the fact that I had spent the night in his cabin, so I opened the phone and said, “Hello?”

  “Good morning,” he said, sounding cheery as all get-out. “It’s not too early, is it? I was afraid I might wake you.”

  “No, I was up,” I said. I thought, I’ve been up long enough to take a shower and find the gun in your shaving kit, but I didn’t say it.

  “How about some breakfast?” Mark asked. “I realize it’ll be our second breakfast today, but—”

  “That’s fine,” I said.

  “Should I come to the cabin and get you, or would you rather just meet in the dining room?”

  “Let’s meet in the dining room,” I said. “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”