The Best of Elizabeth Bear

The Body of the Nation

New Amsterdam, April 1897

Under moonlight, the North River Day Line steamboat The Nation seemed to rest on the glassy river like an elaborate toy on the mirrored surface of a drawing-room display. If it were not for the long sculpted lines of smoke hanging above her twin chimneys she might have seemed motionless; the paddleboxes enclosing her side wheels disguised their revolution as the moonlight disguised the brilliant colors of her woodwork. Detective Crown Investigator Abigail Irene Garrett knew The Nation must be fighting the tidal swell up the Hudson Fjord to hold her position, but the paddleboat was like a swan: what rose serenely above the great river’s surface reflected no hint of the steady striving beneath.

The little stern-wheeled tug that bore Garrett toward The Nation could not have been more of a contrast—skittering toward the stately passenger-and-freight vessel like an overexcited water bug.

Garrett shifted her gloved grip on the railing and lifted her face to the wind. Night was no more than a courtesy. The moon’s shining face would have provided sufficient light to navigate by, especially reflected as it was by the river. But in addition, the lights of New Amsterdam lined the right-hand bank, those of New Jersey the left—and The Nation herself gleamed at the center, bedeviled by gilt and shining with lanterns.

As she gave no sign that her magnificent languid grace upon the water was the artifact of concealed frenetic activity, she also gave no sign that within her elaborately painted and gilded bulkheads, there lay a dead man. But that was why Garrett was coming to her on this brisk spring night, a sharp wind lifting the hairs at her nape and blowing her long skirts around the shape of the blue velvet carpet bag she braced between her boots. It was only the presence of a dead man that had stayed The Nation on her route upriver to Albany even this long.

Garrett stepped back from the rail as they came up alongside. She crouched to pick up her carpet bag, avoiding being poked by her stays as she dipped with the expertness of long experience. The stiffness of her wand rested in its sheath along her left forearm—a minor reassurance.

A moment later and two members of the tug’s crew were steadying her on the rail as she lifted her bag up to the waiting hands of The Nation’s roustabouts. They lifted her after, dark hands and pale supporting her with surprising gentleness as she jumped up and was caught. The tug’s bumpers grated against The Nation’s oaken side; neither vessel ever quite stopped moving.

Despite their care, Garrett’s temporary lack of self-determination nauseated her with apprehension as the paddleboat’s crew hauled her over its higher rail and onto the deck. They made a point of bundling her skirts tight about her legs. Their expertise was no surprise. Steamers didn’t stop at every landing along the route between New Amsterdam and Albany. If there were only a passenger or two, a few bales of cargo—they’d be tossed on or off board while the vessel was still moving, to shave a few minutes off the route time.

The crewmen set Garrett on her feet and—once she had twitched her skirting smooth—handed over her carpet bag. She lifted her chin and was about to go in search of the vessel’s master when a cultured tenor interrupted her. “D.C.I. Garrett, I presume?”

“Captain O’Brien,” she replied, after a pause to adjust the cuffs of her gloves that was really a pause in order to collect herself. “So, who’s dead?”

The brim of O’Brien’s hat tilted along with his head. Despite the name, he had no brogue—his accent clearly said Connecticut, and the coast of it. “I would have expected you to have been briefed.”

She smiled. “I was pulled from my supper and told that I must report here. That it was a matter of utmost delicacy and urgency. And that The Nation could under no circumstances be further delayed, despite the fact of a murder, and so I would have to do my work enroute. But the name of the victim, or his apparent manner of destruction? No, these things were not considered essential to my performance. And so I am here before you, with barely the tools of my trade and the clothes I stand up in, ready to detect, to investigate, to draw conclusions, sir.”

He contemplated her for a moment before nodding. “Very well,” he said. “How about if I let you draw your own conclusions, then, since you’re here already? I’ll be happy to share my…” He weighed several words “…observations with you once you feel they will no longer be pejorative.”

“Can you at least tell me if it’s a thaumaturgical case?” Normally, she would only be called for those—or ones where there was a suspicion of black magic… or where the victim was a person of sufficient import that their death interested the Crown. In a symbolic but by no means unreal manner, Garrett was the Queen’s own hand and eye turned to justice for his people. It was her duty to protect his interests, and to serve them.

“I am afraid I am not qualified to judge that,” O’Brien said. “But the Duke specifically required that you be involved in the investigation before he’d allow us to leave New Amsterdam’s jurisdiction.”

That was interesting. And it would be very like Duke Richard not to find a way to alert her to his suspicions or desires. He’d just expect her to know, through sorcery… or telepathy.

O’Brien didn’t look down, and despite herself, she felt the corner of her mouth curve upward. She had come here prepared to wrestle politics and permissions. Confronted with this plain-spoken and obviously weary working man… she felt a spark of hope.

Captain O’Brien was slim and wore his modestly creased uniform with—nevertheless—elegance. A blond fringe peeked out below the sides of his cap, and his small hands seemed dainty in white kid gloves. For all his unassuming aspect, Garrett was not fooled. It took something for a man of Irish descent to rise to captain a paddleboat that happened to be the pride of the North River Day Line—and the O’Briens were descended of Brian Boru, High King of Ireland… and draoi. Druid, an English speaker would say.

Not that that meant that O’Brien would inevitably be a sorcerer—but wizardry, like scholarship, had a tendency to run in families.

Garrett extended a hand. O’Brien took it. Their eyes met; she was the taller. It did not seem to trouble him.

Beneath her laced boots, the decks shivered as the great paddlewheels drifted to a halt, then began more vigorously to turn in a forward direction, taking advantage of the inflowing tide to push The Nation fast and hard for Albany. And Garrett was alone aboard her with a corpse, a crime, and the unknown factors of the crew and captain.

In a civilized nation, no vessel with a murdered man aboard would have been permitted to flit casually from the docks, waiting with bad grace and—figuratively speaking—restive stamping for the presence of the Crown’s Own. But the Colonies were not a civilized nation, with civilized checks on the behavior of powerful men. At least two of those men—Duke Richard, the highest aristocratic authority in the New Netherlands, and Peter Eliot, Lord Mayor of New Amsterdam—had a vested financial interest in the North River Day Line’s monopoly and operations.

If a messenger hadn’t raced on his velocipede directly from the offices of Robert Cook, president of the North River Day Line, to the offices of Peter Eliot as soon as the murder was reported… Detective Crown Investigator Garrett would eat her carpet bag full of the tools of the forensic sorcerer.

As Garrett followed O’Brien’s narrow shoulders along the port side rail, she trained her investigator’s awareness on the vessel. The Nation was at the top of her line, a broad-beamed behemoth strung everywhere with glittering lanterns that reflected from bronze and red and violet paint and from gilt on every surface. Garrett thought she must have used The Nation’s twin sisters in her own occasional trips upriver, though she could not recall having been on this particular vessel previously.

The Nation’s wood finishings were ornate, scrolled and pierced with jigsaw work like the latest style in houses. Deck passengers milled among the cargo piled and lashed in tidy stacks, and the air of excitement led even those who had booked cabin passage to join them. Normally, these more well-heeled passengers would avoid the dirt and poverty of the decks. There would be a main cabin where they might mingle, and at either end of it a salon for the ladies and a saloon for the men. As The Nation was normally a day line ship, and should already have been approaching the safety of her berth in Albany, she did not book out sleeper cabins. And Garrett thought the level of excitement vibrating through the passengers was well beyond what the salon (or saloon!) or even main cabin could have contained. Garrett wondered what the captain had told them, and what additional rumors might be sparking like wildfire from one passenger to the next.

They’d be up all night at this rate.

Well, so would she.

Captain O’Brien paused before a stateroom door, beside which stood a crewman in a dirty-kneed uniform. Mostly, passengers traveled the day line boats on deck, or in the salons—but there were a limited number of cabins available for the shy, or overly moneyed, or those who did not care to mix even with the middle class patrons amid the silver and mirrors in the cabin.

“Here,” he said. He produced a key from his pocket—it was on a numbered fob—and unlocked the door. With no signs of a flourish—only a drab practicality, which—Garrett had to admit—seemed largely appropriate to the somber circumstances—he drew the panel open.

The space within was lit by a single lantern, but that was more than adequate. It was a little room, essentially—more a closet than a chamber—with an easy chair and a shuttered porthole. The curtains had been drawn against the outside. There was a good rug on the floor—anywhere else, it would have been a runner for an entryway—and atop the rug there was a dead… woman.

A book had fallen beside her, and a china teacup figured with cherries lay miraculously unbroken beside her splayed hand. She wore a gown of silk noile of the sort with differently colored warp and weft, so at the peaks of folds it caught the light and reflected back dark burgundy, while the valleys were shadowed and black. Her dark hair was sewn with rubies. More glinted at her neck and ears, amid diamonds and gold.

There were no obvious signs of violence upon her, and no blood upon the floor.

“She’s dressed for a ball,” O’Brien said. “And as you’ve seen, while The Nation’s a sharp boat, she’s not the sort of boat that hosts balls. She was traveling under the name Mrs. Abercrombie.” He shrugged. “Whether it’s her own—”

“Did she come aboard in Albany or in New Amsterdam?” Garrett crouched beside the body, careful of the hem of her own dress and the possibility of contaminating the body with foreign fibers or hairs.

“She purchased passage and immediately embarked when we docked at the Battery,” O’Brien said. “She entered her cabin, called for tea, and was not seen again. We’re all rather distracted—we have a boatload of botanists going upriver for some sort of international conference on stamens and pistils or something, and as a result the holds are full of perishable goods on ice. We wouldn’t have found her before Albany, except one of the stewards—Carter—heard her fall when he arrived with the tea-tray.” He gestured to the fellow beside the door.

Carter was of average height and build, trim in his white coat, his mousy hair thinning despite obvious youth. His face looked pinched.

“You unlocked the door?” Garrett asked him.

“I had to run for the mate,” said Carter. “Stewards don’t have keys to guest cabins, ma’am.”

“But you saw the body? Through the window?”

He shook his head. “The porthole was covered. She didn’t answer a knock.”

“I see.” Garrett returned her attention to O’Brien. “And no one saw anyone enter or leave this cabin, of course?”

“We are interviewing the deck passengers,” he said. “They aren’t as helpful as one might wish.”

Garrett sighed. She needed a dozen uniformed officers to deal with a potential witness pool this large, with time this limited. What she had was an interfering captain who was trying to be conscientious… unless he was trying to cover his tracks. “That is the nature of eyewitnesses, Captain. Please continue interviewing them.”

Some would be over-eagerly helpful, some pompous, some irritated to be disturbed. All of them, by now, would be deeply unhappy that The Nation had been so delayed.

“It might be helpful that she embarked in New Amsterdam and suffered such an immediate fate,” Garrett said. “It suggests that her killer—if she was killed, and is not merely the unfortunate victim of a brainstorm—might still be aboard. You didn’t return to the shore to ask assistance?”

“We have a wireless,” O’Brien said. “Six months ago, we would have sent a boat to shore; as it was, we radioed a coded transmission.”

Garrett did not comment on the fact that the ship would have left its berth early in the morning, for the first tide and a fast run upriver to Albany. The North River’s estuary reached hundreds of miles inland—the tides pushed up it as far as the mountains. Into Iroquois Nation country, in fact—where the war magic of the Native tribes had stopped the westward expansion of the Colonies. There was a guarded peace now, and trade… but the border hadn’t always been friendly.

Garrett estimated that perhaps twelve hours had been lost while politics were wrangled…

Gently, Garrett touched the woman’s hand. She had expected it to be stiff, the fingers wooden and room-temperature. The flesh was tepid to the touch… but plastic, soft and flexible. While such things varied a great deal from case to case, a woman who had been dead since breakfast should have showed signs of rigor mortis, and should not yet be relaxing again.

Garrett called for the lamp, insensible for the moment that it was a ship’s captain she ordered around. When she remembered, the lantern had already been set beside her.

“Do you need her lifted?” O’Brien said.

“Not yet.”

It was hard to tell in the poor light, but as she lowered her head toward the floor and lifted the dead woman’s hand, something else struck Garrett’s attention. There should have been pale patches on the backs of her curved fingers, marking where they had pressed the floor. Around those, there should have been liver-red rings. The marks of dependent lividity showed how a body had laid as the blood settled, and could outline anything that pressed that blood from capillaries near the skin.

Garrett humphed and unbuttoned the dead woman’s sleeve. Her flesh was slack and inelastic—more like Plastiline than human skin and muscle—but there was no sign on any surface of the marks of lividity. Nor did they mar her face, already marred as it was by staring, clouding eyes.

She appeared, in other words, fairly freshly dead—except for the fact that warmth had fled her.

“A physician examined her?” Garrett asked.

“Dr. Fenister,” O’Brien said. “He’s the ship’s surgeon. His opinion as of this morning was that she was freshly deceased, although he noted the coolness of her temperature as unusual… you may, of course, speak with him yourself.”

“He didn’t turn her?”

“It was obvious she was beyond help.” O’Brien shifted uncomfortably. “If that’s real,” he said, with a wave to the victim’s ring, “we’re looking at a diplomatic incident.”

“I’m not a jeweler,” Garrett replied. “But it looks real to me. Is that why you stalled the vessel?”

O’Brien’s mouth opened and closed like a fish’s. He glanced aside. “The owners would have preferred the body remain undiscovered until Albany.”

She didn’t drop her eyes. He didn’t raise his.

He shrugged and finished, “Time tables are sacred. And we have perishable cargo and wealthy passengers aboard. Neither take well to delays.”

“Humph,” Garrett said.

Garrett lowered the dead woman’s hand again. As her fingers grazed over it, she examined the ring more carefully. Two heraldic lions supporting a quartered field, on which a red lion and a blue panther alternated with more abstract red-and-white designs.

Before she became a forensic sorcerer, Garrett had been Lady Abigail Irene Garrett, heir to a minor nobility. Those days were past, but she still recognized the arms of the Kingdom of Bayern.

D.C.I. Garrett closed her eyes and sighed. “I assume there’s no shortage of coffee aboard a paddleboat?”

O’Brien cleared his throat. “I shall have young Carter here fetch you some. Cream and sugar?”

“Black,” said Garrett. “I don’t plan to enjoy it.”

The book had plain red boards and a spine curlicued with gilt but otherwise unmarked. When Garrett lifted it, she found beneath it a fountain pen with a shattered nib. Ink daubed the wooden floor, the edge of the carpet, and the printed pages. A glance at the page head told her it was a German-language edition of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon.

“Washington Irving,” Garrett muttered to herself.

She was reminded of O’Brien’s presence when he answered from the door, “Reading up on the local culture, I see.”

Garrett grunted in the most unladylike fashion she could manage. Years of deportment lessons she’d never quite shaken rendered it into a delicate huff. Pity she never made it as far upriver as Sleepy Hollow and Tarrytown.

Garrett looked for the gouge in the floorboards or the spot on the rug where the pen nib might have struck—and for the broken bits of the nib itself—but without success. She was still frowning and weighing Das Skizzenbuch in her hand when a clatter by the door alerted her to the arrival of her coffee. Carter set up a silver tray on a folding stand and poured. The beverage had arrived accompanied by a fat, tempting slice of coconut cake, by which Garrett knew that the ship’s cook was attempting to butter her up. The curls of fresh coconut, the rich aroma, and her own interrupted supper suggested she would allow herself to be courted.

It was probably bad form to eat standing in the doorway of a chamber where a dead woman lay. Nevertheless, she drank left-handed, balancing the book upon her right, and blew on the pages to turn them.

Cut edges fluttered; someone had done a meticulous job with the paper knife. Here and there were cryptic notations in a brown-black ink matching the color of that splashed on the floor and dabbing the dead woman’s fingertips.

“I’ll need access to a room with a table and good lighting. And some privacy.” Garrett frowned at the cut pages and set her empty cup aside. “Where’s her handbag?”

It might contain a clue to her true identity. Or where she had been coming from, first thing in the morning, dressed as if she had danced the night away.

Captain O’Brien did not step across the threshold into the stateroom. He hunkered with his hands upon his knees and leaned in, though, angling his head to peer under furniture. “Let me speak to the baggage master,” he said. “I’ll soon find her luggage.”

“It hasn’t been retrieved yet?” Garrett asked. “Never mind, of course it hasn’t. You were no doubt waiting for instructions?”

O’Brien paused in his leaving and shrugged apologetically. “If I owned the ship, things would be different. As it is—”

“Indubitably,” Garrett said. “Well, she didn’t pay her passage without a handbag, unless they’re sewing concealed pockets into evening gowns these days.”

“A pathetic motive for murder,” O’Brien said, with obvious, real disdain.

Garrett felt the thin fragility of her own smile, the ease with which it cracked when she spoke. “There are good ones?”

O’Brien shifted, his hands behind his back.

Garrett took pity on him. “Who’d lift a handbag and leave a head coiffed in rubies?”

“Considering the overturned cup—I imagine you might be thinking of poison? Even suicide?”

“It could be suicide,” Garrett said. “An imaginative detective might hypothesize that she first tossed her handbag over the railing, to confound scandal.”

O’Brien raised his eyebrows. “It’s better to be murdered than a suicide?”

“It is if you’re a Catholic,” Garrett said, after a brief pause. Well, there are Protestant Irish. And probably atheistic ones. “Or if you wish to conceal the reasons for your suicide.”

“That is imaginative.”

Garrett’s knees still hurt from crouching on the deck. Every year left her a little less nimble. “And imagination is not always a friend to the homicide investigator,” she said. “Too often, the reasons and means of murder are monotonously tedious. But my point is, the staging of this death could be consistent with either self-poisoning, or poisoning by another. The locked stateroom suggests the former; the lack of handbag the latter.”

She set the book on the edge of the coffee tray and picked up cake and fork. The boiled frosting was too sweet, but that was the nature of boiled frosting. The cake itself was excellent. “Except—it’s just as one would expect. And any time I see a crime scene that’s just as one would expect, it makes me suspect that it could be just that: staging. Dead people usually don’t look as the layman would think they must.”

“Mrs. Abercrombie,” it turned out, had loaded a steamer trunk—and the purser from whom she’d booked passage at the last minute clearly recollected her handbag, because it had seemed exceedingly out of place with her costume.

It was well-made, the purser said, and obviously expensive—but suitable for day, not an elegant evening out. “I assumed she was leaving her husband,” he said, “having caught him…” He hesitated, with a glance at Garrett. Garrett restrained herself from rolling her eyes. O’Brien frowned encouragingly, and the purser continued. “Angry women in last night’s clothes aren’t unheard of as paddleboat passengers, is all I mean.”

“I imagine not,” said Garrett. She picked an invisible and exceedingly uncomfortable bit of lint from her sleeve.

“I remember her in particular because at first I turned her away, and she seemed quite distressed. But she returned an hour later, offering more money—we would not, of course, put another passenger off for her convenience. But there had been a cancellation. A Mr. Eugene Sisters, who I recall because of the peculiar beauty of his name.”

Garrett was coming to conclude that the purser—a Mr. Manley—was accustomed to making excuses for his excellent recall of his passenger lists. “Did Mr. Sisters rebook for later?”

He shook his head. “He sent a telegram. It had his code number on it, which is how we prevent pranks in such matters.” Manley rocked awkwardly in his chair. “Shall we go check the holds for that trunk?”

“Oh, yes,” Garrett replied, with a tired glance to O’Brien. Not that he wasn’t a suspect, but at least she liked him. “Let’s do.”

The steamer trunk, of course…

…was missing.

Quite ostentatiously missing. Although the passenger’s half of its claim tag could not be found—perhaps it was with “Mrs. Abercrombie’s” handbag—the tag number was in the baggage master’s book; however, its assigned berth in the hold lay innocent of contents. The deck where it should have lain was lightly scratched, but that signified very little—the deck throughout the hold was much-abused, scratched and gouged and furrowed from the steel-shod feet and corners of years of joyously mishandled luggage.

“Curiouser and curiouser,” Garrett said. A chill crept up her spine; closer inspection revealed that it was just the radiant cold from some sort of large crate that seemed to contain something perishable packed in ice and sawdust. “Well, I suppose the contents of a trunk are as good a motive for murder as the contents of a handbag.”

“Indeed,” said O’Brien. “If only we could find either, we might be that much closer to the murderer.”

O’Brien set the crew to searching The Nation—stem to stern, quite literally. It was a less than ideal situation, as any one of them could have been involved in the murder, and so Garrett specified that they must work in pairs—and that the mate would choose who paired with whom, rather than relying on crew members to sort it out. Garrett needed to begin interviewing the remaining crew and the passengers—but she was painfully aware that there were close to three hundred people aboard The Nation, and that she had less than eight hours remaining in which to find the one who was a murderer.

Garrett had done the obvious thing first, and laid out the dead woman’s pen on a clean handkerchief to see if it could be thaumaturgically encouraged to point out the direction of its missing piece. But it lay there without even a shiver, blithely ignoring the principles of affinity and sympathy. Which didn’t mean that the broken-off piece didn’t exist, of course. But if it were far enough away that the spell didn’t offer at least some direction, it was a safe bet that it wasn’t on board The Nation.

Perhaps the pen had been broken before the dead woman came on board. But if that was the case, why had she had it out to make notes in a book when she died?

Garrett needed a starting point. Any starting point. Even a bad one. Flipping through the pages of the dead woman’s short story collection was not providing the needed inspiration. Her annotations were cryptic—shorthand in a foreign language—and there wasn’t even a name scribed on the flyleaf.

She was about to pick a direction of questioning at random, on the ancient axiom of police investigations: some action is better than no action. Until she glimpsed a shorter edge of paper tucked between the pages of the book, and flipped back page by page until she found it again.

It was a newspaper article, on fresh, greasy newsprint. Garrett could still smell the cheap ink. A column clipped from the pages of The New World Times, penned by one “Josh,” apparently a “Master Riverboat Pilot” by trade. It was a humorous tall tale of travel on the North River between New Amsterdam and Albany, focused in particular on the perils of sea monsters and the opportunity to view “extinct saurisceans” in the canyons below West Point.

Garrett frowned at the thing. “O’Brien.”

“Ma’am?”

“What’s the name of your pilot?”

The pilot’s name was Clemens. Garrett did not stand as he was brought into the captain’s office, which had been hastily cleared to serve as her interview room. Instead, she sat behind the powdery pale wood of the desk and assessed him. He was a man neither tall nor short, whose eyes glittered sharply over a luxuriant moustache. His once-ginger hair was fading to the color of strawberry milk, but his posture remained as crisp as it ever might have been. He did not seem put off by her sex or her spectacles, which could be good or bad.

He radiated an aura of wit and focus that led Garrett to suspect immediately that while he might be a charming interview, he would not be an easy one. She longed for a gin just looking at him.

He had removed his cap upon entering and stood now with it tucked jauntily under his arm. The ring it had left depressed his curls, a small flaw she found comforting, like a chink in the otherwise flawless armor of his uniform. Dammit, Garrett thought. I’m the one who’s supposed to be making him feel this way.

“Mister Clemens,” she said. “Please sit.”

A ladder-backed chair had been drawn up to the blank side of the desk. Clemens folded himself into it as the door shut and latched behind him—the invaluable and nearly invisible Carter, yet again—and spoke in a cultured Virginian accent. “Detective Crown Investigator.”

“Do you know why you’re here, Mr. Clemens?”

“I imagine you are interviewing the ship’s officers regarding the death of Mrs. Abercrombie, as that was why you were brought aboard.”

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 rose 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. 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 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 meant 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.”

“I know you’re a special friend of the Duke’s,” O’Brien replied. “But he’s in business with Mr. Cook. And with any number of my passengers. Are you… that special of a friend?”

“No one is that special of a friend,” she answered. “Except possibly the Duchess. And she owns the New Netherlands.”

Around them, conversations were slowly resuming. Garrett walked the length of the main cabin with the captain, watching silver glitter as it worked against china plates.

The “library” was a set of shelves beside the doors to the saloon, opposite the women’s drawing room. After spending a few more moments with O’Brien, Garrett turned away. She moved toward the shelf—not ostentatiously, but with purpose. Manley hovered between her and the captain as if held in place by the stretch of invisible tackle, obviously torn with regard to whose orbit to maintain.

Garrett was lifting the ship’s English-language copy of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon from the shelf—it was filed under C for Crayon rather than I for Irving, which made her wonder whether the person doing the filing had somehow missed that Crayon was a pseudonym, or if he had a sense of humor. She had asked O’Brien to keep an eye on the passengers as she removed the book. But as her finger settled into the notch of the spine she felt her own awareness vibrating as she stretched it to notice if anyone reacted to her choice of literature.

If they did react, she failed to catch them. Because she looked at the leather of her glove and the leather of the binding, and realized what a ridiculous, foolish oversight she had made.

Garrett hefted Irving in her hand and turned quickly to O’Brien. He seemed to be at parade rest, patiently awaiting her return, but she saw how his eyes flickered about the room, belying his impassive expression. She said to Manley, “Have you been in the saloon tonight?”

He shook his head.

“Mr. Sisters, who cancelled his berth so conveniently—or perhaps so tragically—for Mrs. Abercrombie. Would you know him by sight?”

“I would not,” Manley said. “His arrangements were made by a representative. It’s not uncommon; Mr. Lenox doesn’t book his own travel either.”

Garrett rubbed her thumb across the leather binding of the book. “Take me into the saloon.”

Manley’s chin came up in shock.

She rolled her eyes and turned to O’Brien. “Captain? Take me into the saloon.”

“D.C.I.—”

“Yes,” she said. “D.C.I. I am an officer of the crown, Captain O’Brien. That I am also a woman is not now under the microscope. You will—please—accompany me into the saloon.”

To his credit, he pressed his lips thin and took her arm. While a room full of passengers—and Mr. Manley—held their breath, he guided her to the door and held it open. She passed into a miasma of smoke, and he was at her heels so when the bartender rounded on her what he saw was the captain’s level gaze.

She scanned the room. Men, of course—a double handful of them, leaned over glasses full of amber fluid and ashtrays full of smoldering cigarillos and cheroots. The haze of smoke from their toxic emanations. The eye-stinging vapors of the whiskey and gin, which made Garrett’s mouth water with tired desire.

“I thought it was the book,” Garrett said out loud, as every eye in the room turned to her. She held up both copies of The Sketch Book, the one in German and the one in English. “I thought the book had significance. I have been pulling the damned thing apart trying to find whatever secret was concealed in it, assuming that that secret must be linked to her murder.”

She watched faces as she spoke, the flicker of attention, the creases of puzzlement and concern, of hostility and curiosity. She wasn’t certain exactly what expression she was looking for, but none of those were it. She smiled.

Behind her, she heard the rattle of the doorknob as O’Brien summoned whatever crewmen might be standing nearby into the saloon. Cigars and cigarettes smoldered unattended. Ice melted in drinks. Sweating nervously, Carter and three other stewards filled the door.

If nothing else, she had their complete fascination.

“But the book had nothing to do with it, did it?” Ah. There was the expression she’d been searching for. On the face of a middle-aged man she’d never seen before. He was dark and slight, with thinning dark hair and a prosperous little paunch under his green brocade waistcoat. A pair of wire-rimmed spectacles perched very far down his nose, as if he used them only for reading. He sat with another man—a bigger, gray-haired one with muttonchop sideburns, who looked chiefly confused.

Garrett honed her gaze on the face of the balding man in the green waistcoat—the presumptive Mr. Sisters. He stared right back. She wondered if he were forgetting himself in the face of confrontation, or if he were making some misguided attempt to appear unafraid. If so, it was too bald-faced.

She leaned over to O’Brien and hid her mouth behind the German edition of Irving as if it were a fan. “The man in the green waistcoat. Who is he?”

“I’ve never seen him before,” O’Brien whispered back. “I’ll find out, shall I?”

Garrett lowered the book and intoned, “If the book had had a single thing of importance to reveal about the murder, it never would have been left behind. Not by a man so careful that he absconded with the victim’s handbag. One who swept the floor to remove evidence that could have linked him to the killing.”

Behind her, Carter rocked on his heels. Garrett turned so she had her back to the bar, and could see both him and the man in the green waistcoat clearly. Carter’s face had gone pale and was dewed with sweat.

“One of the chief suspects in any crime, Mr. Carter, is the person who discovers the body. Especially when the discovery of a body causes some desirable effect, such as for a will to be read, or an insurance policy to be paid out—” she could not keep the grin from her cheeks “—or for a steamship to be delayed.”

O’Brien had realized her intent, she saw. As Carter ducked his face and backed away, green with nausea, O’Brien stepped forward and collared the bigger man, lifting him to his toes. “You little—”

“Captain,” Garrett said. “Carter did not kill your passenger. Think: if he had poisoned her, would he have left the cup? No, we were meant to think she died of poison… but then where was the saucer?”

O’Brien did not release his grip. “You just said—”

“Her name was Gisela von Dissen, and she did not die upon The Nation. The scene of her death was staged intentionally to delay the ship. And while Mr. Carter was in the employ of the man responsible for her death, he did not kill her. In fact, she was dead before she embarked upon this vessel.”

There. That silence, heady as liquor. Damned satisfying. All eyes were upon Garrett now, and she took up her role like a queen’s ermine. “My first clue was the condition of the body. As the ship’s doctor had noticed, it was unusually cool to the touch from the very first. Additionally—and even more unusually—there was no rigor mortis, and no signs of livor mortis, the discoloration caused by the pooling of blood at the lowest points of the body. The first item suggested that Miss von Dissen had been dead much longer than anticipated, the second that she had not been dead long at all—or that she’d passed away long enough ago for the rigor to have passed. But a dead woman doesn’t drink tea, or annotate a book, or walk aboard a ship under her own power. And the third item… was the most curious, as it suggested that she was not dead at all.”

Now Carter looked confused, and the man in the green waistcoat had grown very still. Some of the other passengers and crew—Garrett was gratified to notice the bartender, and O’Brien, who had set Carter more-or-less back on his feet, among them—looked captivated, but the majority radiated boredom and irritation.

One bearded and prosperous fellow—Garrett noticed his silk-lined suit and platinum watch chain—levered himself from a leather-upholstered chair. “Madam,” he said, in a tone that suggested he didn’t mean ‘madam’ at all, “I don’t know the meaning of this circus—”

“Mr. Frick,” O’Brien said, “Please. Trust that all will be made plain in time, and for now choose to enjoy the entertainment.”

“Next time,” Frick said, “I shall buy a riverboat.” But he settled himself into his chair again, crossed his legs, and folded his hands over his knee—leaving Garrett more than a little impressed with O’Brien’s charisma and authority.

Frick said, “So you have a little mystery on your hands, Miss Garrett?”

“Had,” she said, ignoring the slight. She was by rights perhaps Lady Abigail Irene, Doctor Garrett, or Detective Crown Investigator Garrett. Miss, for a woman in her forties, implied a bluestocking dismissal and no recognition of her accomplishments. Well, she’d remember him. “It’s quite solved now, I assure you.”

“Please,” said Frick. “Enlighten us. How does a dead woman embark upon a ship?”

“While it is not my duty to the crown to educate millionaires, Mr. Frick, I shall be glad to. You ask how a dead woman travels, except in a stout-sided box. The answer, of course, is necromancy. And the sorcerer who is controlling the corpse? Well, he must stay close, of course. So the simplest expedient is to have himself shipped.”

Now she had them. The murmur of side conversations faded; even the table playing euchre at the back set down their cards.

Garrett reached into her sleeve and drew Gisela’s pen from its temporary place beside her wand. O’Brien, having consulted briefly with Mr. Manley—who was not holding Carter’s sleeve—came back and whispered behind his hand, “He’s not a listed passenger. A stowaway, and in plain sight! Bold as brass.”

“Well,” Garrett whispered in return. “Mr. Sisters couldn’t very well stay in the trunk once he was breathing again, could he?” She raised the pen and said, “This is Gisela von Dissen’s fountain pen. You cannot see this, because of the cap, but the nib is broken. I had at first suspected that she might have stabbed her assailant with it, and that I might be able to use the connection between pen and nib to locate her killer. Alas, it was not to be… but then I realized what I could do. Because someone—I assume it was Mr. Carter—took her handbag. And while I imagine that theft was only to confuse the issue… it seems likely that a traveling woman’s handbag contained a vial of ink. It might not be too much to hope that that would be the same ink used to fill this pen. And that Mr. Carter might have handed the bag and its contents off to his employer.

“A dead woman would not have been entertaining herself with a book in her cabin—but a man staging a death might very well have laid a book and pen about the place, to go with the overturned cup of tea. And a man who had intended to delay a steamship, and who found a better way to do it than some act of sabotage, might very well sacrifice his own booking on that vessel in order to conveniently smuggle a corpse aboard!”

She was looking directly at the man in the green waistcoat—and he was looking directly back. Now she lectured to him alone. “The principal of sympathy states that two portions of the same object will sustain an affinity for one another. So the ink in the pen and the ink in the vial, though contained in separate reservoirs, remain—thaumaturgically speaking—the same object…”

She laid the pen flat across her palm. For all its reticence on the previous attempt, now it shuddered and tumbled from her hand, bouncing on the carpeting before rolling toward the man in the green waistcoat as if drawn on a string. He started from his chair, backing away from the pen as if from a snake—

“Grab him!” O’Brien shouted.

Garrett yelled, “Eugene Sisters! Stop in the name of the Queen!” and fumbled for her wand, but Sisters was too nimble. He shouldered past the steward and two passengers, ducked O’Brien, and vanished through the saloon door as Garrett was still struggling silver-tipped ebony from inside her sleeve.

She might have shouted, “After him!” but the door was already jammed with crew and passengers giving chase.

Sisters obviously intended to swim for it, as he pushed his way through the startled main cabin passengers toward the stern doors with O’Brien and two stewards in pursuit. He had the advantage of surprise, however, and there were too many people in the way—jostling her, shoving one another aside, shouting in confusion—for Garrett to use the stasis spell in her wand.

She waded into the chaos anyway, her wand brandished overhead in case she got a clear angle on the fugitive. If worse came to worst, she’d cast the spell into the crowd. Divided between subjects, it wouldn’t do more than stun and disorient—but that might slow him down enough for O’Brien to lay hands on him. Of course, there were the innocent bystanders to consider: nobody really wanted to be on the receiving end of a stasis spell. They were normally harmless enough, but Garrett had stood for enough of them during her training to know how unpleasant it could be to feel one’s heart grinding in one’s chest. And if Sisters were to plummet into the river while stunned… well, the odds of saving his life would not be high.

Still, allowing him to escape—the rising mist would hide him. If he was a strong enough swimmer to survive a plunge into the spring-frigid North River… he’d be away clean before a boat could be launched to look for him. The sky might just be graying with dawn, Albany only an hour or so upriver… but the mist would cancel any advantage of the light.

Garrett was still debating her options when Sisters reached the door and plunged through it into the soft night beyond. As he turned to check the status of his pursuit, Clemens the riverboat pilot stepped into the frame and cold-cocked him.

The man in the green brocade waistcoat went down like a pile of laundry, leaving Clemens standing over him and—wincingly—shaking his hand.

“Much obliged, Mister Clemens,” Garrett said, as she came up to him. “By the way, you’re under arrest.”

“Oh,” said Clemens, “I don’t think you’re going to want to do that, once we’ve had another chance to chat.”

Mr. Clemens smelled of black coffee, and Garrett didn’t blame him one bit. He sat in the chair across from the captain’s cleaned-off desk, and she sat behind it, and he said, “I’ll need to be in the wheelhouse when we come into the dock in an hour.”

“You’re not an agent of the crown,” Garrett said.

“Because I’m an anti-imperialist?” he answered. “Some people choose to work for change from the inside. How about if we trade, Doctor Garrett? Questions and answers? If you like, I’ll go first.”

“Can I trust you to be honest?”

“As much as I can trust you.” His eyebrows went up. “So how did you know Miss von Dissen’s name?”

“Who is Whom,” she said with a smile. “I assumed the ring was real, and there was a limited number of people she could be. Are you an agent of the crown?”

“No, I am not an agent of the crown. I am a sort of… free agent, if you will. But I am on the side of the angels and America, never fear. How did you know Miss von Dissen was… not herself?”

“An evening gown with no gloves?” She shook her hair back. “No woman would make that mistake.”

He winced. “Of course. Even if she were running away from something personally embarrassing. You question, madam.”

“Who do you work for?”

“Robert Cook,” he answered. “Any other tasks I perform are strictly on an amateur—on a volunteer basis. But in this matter, I have been acting on behalf of a union of concerned individuals.”

“You work for the Iroquois Nation!”

“That is an unfounded allegation and it’s my turn to ask a question. So our Mr. Sisters was a necromancer, and he smuggled himself aboard in his comatose state while controlling Miss von Dissen. Why not just keep her mobile to the destination, if he was smuggling himself?”

“Because the point was to delay the vessel. Sisters had a reservation. He cancelled it so Miss von Dissen could have a berth; the ship was full. He must have originally planned something more personally risky, but the opportunity to use a dead foreign noblewoman—and one who must have personally discommoded him—was too good to pass up. He might even manage to embroil the Bavarian crown in a spy scandal, if all went well.”

“Ah,” said Clemens.

“I am correct in my guess that Mr. Sisters is working for the Prussians?”

His smile was much less tight than she would have expected. “So we believe. It is, of course, a guess.”

“Of course,” Garrett agreed. “But who else would have an interest in preventing a trade deal between Bayern and the Iroquois?”

That made his smile grow broad. “I thought you’d have to use a question for that.”

“I’m tricky,” she said. “I did ask a question.”

“So you did. The English?” he asked, then waved it away. “I choose to assume that that was speculation, and not a trade question. If it was, my guess is yours for free. Call it lagniappe. So why delay my boat? What good could twelve hours have done them?”

“Now I am reduced to speculation,” Garrett said. “But it’s possible that there was a Prussian agent on another boat with a juicier offer?”

Clemens’ curls moved softly as he shook his head. “Unlikely.”

“I find your coyness frustrating,” she said. “But I won’t ask you to elaborate. All right, then, it has something to do with something in the hold. Something perishable. Packed in with the ice and the botanical samples. Am I closer?”

Clemens brought his hands together thumb to thumb, inverted them and spread them. A gesture of innocence.

Garrett let it stand. “Of course, if it looked like a Bavarian princess died under curious conditions while on a secret mission to the Iroquois, that alone might be enough to derail the deal. Bayern is unlikely to forgive such carelessness. But she wasn’t even supposed to be on the boat, was she?”

“Is that your question?”

Garrett shrugged. “Explain a few things to me. The book was a recognition symbol, wasn’t it? That’s why your column is tucked into it. Something that would not happen by chance, and so must be recognized if she were to walk through a drawing-room or the lobby of a hotel with such a thing in her hand, perhaps the top of the column protruding. It would give her an obvious and natural reason to speak to you—if she were an appreciator of your humor, and if she approached you with a pen. You were meant to meet her ashore last night, but she never made it to your rendezvous. Sisters got to her first, while she was still dressed for whatever intrepid young ladies do to entertain themselves in a foreign city.”

Clemens sat back in the chair. “You are… distressingly clever.”

“And I suppose he either did not recognize the significance of the column, or didn’t notice it, or thought it might lead to your being suspected.”

“It did,” he said.

“Indeed,” said Garrett. “But it turns out you’re not a murderer after all. Just an agent of a foreign power.”

“I am an American,” he reiterated. His face tightened as he tried to conceal his concern. “And… I helped catch your murderer.”

Garrett stood. She placed her hands flat on the blotter, staring down at Miss von Dissen’s tortoiseshell pen and her copy of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Garrett could not—quite—make herself look at Clemens. “Dammit.”

“What?” he asked.

She lifted the book. She weighed it in her hand, and then she tossed it to him. “Go and sin no more,” she said.

He caught it, pages a-flutter. His column did not slip loose. He stood too, and faced her. “What will happen to Sisters?”

“Oh,” Garrett said. “He’ll hang.”