He kept his voice pitched low. I could tell that he didn’t want to attract any more attention than he had to. That was sort of difficult to do, though, as big and tough-looking as he was.
“Where are we going?” I asked as we started toward the door of the salon.
“Captain Williams will explain everything to you.” He paused, then added, “And you’ve got some explaining to do, too.”
“Hey, I may be a redhead, but I’m not Lucy Ricardo.”
He didn’t as much as grunt. I don’t know if he didn’t get the reference, or if he just didn’t have much of a sense of humor. Of course, the comment wasn’t really that funny to begin with, I told myself.
I expected Rafferty to take me up to the pilothouse, since that’s where Captain Williams would normally be. Instead, when we reached the stairway, he headed down toward the main deck. But he didn’t stop there. He opened a door and revealed some stairs that led below decks. Down there was the belly of the boat, the engine room and the boilers and all the other things that made the Southern Belle go.
“Where are we going?” I asked, suddenly feeling even more nervous than I was before. “Are you sure Captain Williams is down here?”
“He’s waiting for us,” Rafferty said.
Short of turning and running, which he hadn’t really given me any reason to do, my only other option seemed to be to follow him down those stairs. With plenty of misgivings, I did so.
Since the boat was docked, the main engines were off, but I could still hear the rumble of the generators that provided electricity. The riverboats in Mark Twain’s time hadn’t been equipped like that, of course, but there were only so many creature comforts modern tourists would give up in the name of authenticity. Folks wanted to be able to flip a switch and have lights and air-conditioning.
When we reached the bottom of the stairs, Rafferty led me along a narrow, metal-walled corridor. We turned a couple of times and then went around a corner to see several men standing in front of a small door set into the wall. The door was partially open, but I couldn’t see through it because of the man who stood in front of it.
He was tall and slender—lean was actually more like it—and wore a white uniform with gold braid on it. A black cap sat on his head. He was in his sixties, I estimated, based on his white hair and the weathered look of his face. Dark eyes stabbed at me as he snapped, “Ms. Dickinson?”
I recognized his voice. “Captain?”
“That’s right. I’m Captain L. B. Williams. You’re the head of Dickinson Literary Tours?”
“Yes, sir, I am. If you don’t mind, can I ask what this is all about?”
Evidently I couldn’t, because he didn’t answer me. Instead he asked another question of his own.
“A man named Ben Webster booked passage on the Southern Belle through your agency?”
“That’s right.”
“I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Ms. Dickinson, but Mr. Webster is dead.”
In the back of my mind, I’d been halfway expecting that. The other half had been worried that Webster had done something to damage the boat. So I felt both relief and shock, mostly shock, at the news he was dead.
Then it was all shock as Captain Williams stepped aside so that I could see through the partially open door into what was evidently a storage closet of some sort. The only thing stored in there now was a body. Somebody had crammed Ben Webster into the locker, doubling up his arms and legs so that he would fit. No way he could have gotten in there like that himself, I thought.
He hadn’t broken his own neck, either. I could tell by the odd angle of his head that his neck was broken. He hadn’t committed suicide. He hadn’t tried to hide in the locker and accidentally killed himself.
No, Ben Webster had been murdered, sure as anything, I thought.
“You seem to be taking this awfully calmly, Ms. Dickinson,” Williams commented. “Did you already know that Mr. Webster was dead?”
I opened my mouth to tell him that no, the only reason I was able to handle this catastrophe without falling apart was that I had a little experience with murder, from the time Luke and I took a tour group to the plantation.
But I never got the words out, because it suddenly didn’t matter that I had seen murder victims before. I hadn’t seen this murder victim. I hadn’t looked into Ben Webster’s wide, staring eyes that no longer saw anything, or noted that the tip of his tongue stuck out a little between his lips, or thought about how, if rigor mortis had already set in, whoever took him out of the locker might have to break his arms and legs just to straighten him out again. All of that was new, and it was too much.
I felt my eyes rolling up in their sockets and was aware that I was falling backward. That was all I knew before I passed out.
When I came to and opened my eyes, Captain Williams had taken off his captain’s cap and was fanning my face with it. I was lying on something soft, and I had to squint against the breeze Williams was stirring up and tilt my head to see that I was lying in Logan Rafferty’s lap.
I let out a yelp and started trying to struggle into a sitting position. “Get off me!” I said to Rafferty.
“You’re mixed up, Ms. Dickinson,” he said. “I believe you’re the one on me.”
“Yeah, but I was unconscious! That’s the only way I’d ever be anywhere near your lap, you…you…”
While I was sputtering in indignation, Captain Williams said, “Are you all right, Ms. Dickinson?”
“I just fainted, that’s all.” Too much champagne and not enough food, I thought. That, and the sight of a corpse crammed into a storage locker.
“You didn’t hit your head when you fell, or anything like that?”
I had managed to sit up. I tugged my dress down with one hand and patted my head with the other, feeling for any goose eggs. I didn’t find any.
“I’m fine,” I said. “At least I will be if one of you gentlemen will help me up.”
Two of the three other men standing in the corridor wore white trousers and dark blue shirts. That was the uniform the stewards and other crew members wore. The third man was in khaki work clothes. The grease stains on his hands told me he probably tended the engines.
Rafferty had stood up. He took my hand and lifted me to my feet. Instinctively, I brushed myself off, even though the corridor floor seemed pretty clean.
“I apologize,” Williams said. “I admit that I intended to shock you by showing you Webster’s body, Ms. Dickinson. I thought that if you knew anything about his death, you might blurt it out.”
I glanced at Rafferty. “Sounds like something you would do.”
He held up his hands and shook his head. “The captain’s running this show. He’s the final authority on this boat.”
“Well, within reason,” Williams said. “I’m afraid that in circumstances such as these, I’ll have to defer to the law. Call the Hannibal police, Mr. Rafferty.”
Rafferty hesitated. “We don’t know when or where Webster was killed. If it was while we were still on the river, before we docked, the State Police will have jurisdiction.”
That answered my question about who was responsible for law enforcement on the Mississippi, I thought.
“We’ll start by notifying the authorities in Hannibal,” Williams decided. “If they want to, they can call in the State Police.”
Rafferty shrugged, took out his cell phone, and walked off down