Huckleberry Finished (11 page)

“S
ee?” she went on. “I told you you'd be shocked.” I realized I was staring. I forced myself to stop it. I shook my head and said, “I reckon there's got to be more to it than that. You don't strike me as the bloodthirsty type, Louise.”

“Oh, that's where you're wrong. Under the right circumstances, I think I could be very bloodthirsty indeed. If I had the person who killed my little girl right in front of me, and a gun in my hand, I could…I could…”

She wasn't able to go on just then. Instead she pushed her coffee cup aside and put her hands over her face for a moment. She looked completely grief stricken.

When she lowered her hands, she said, “Now you really do deserve an explanation. You must think I'm a crazy person.”

“Not at all,” I told her, but to tell the truth, I wasn't a hundred percent convinced of that.

“You see, Delilah, one year ago…one year ago
today
…my daughter, Hannah, was killed on this riverboat. This exact same riverboat. Someone murdered her.”

I tried to look as surprised as I would have been if Melissa hadn't told me the same thing a few minutes earlier. I didn't have to fake the sympathy I felt as I reached across the table, clasped Louise's hand, and murmured, “That's terrible.”

“You don't know how terrible it is. When you get back to Atlanta, you give your daughter a great big hug and tell her how much you love her. Do that every day.”

“You know, I think maybe I should.”

Louise nodded. “I wish I'd been able to do that one more time. Just one more time, so Hannah would know.”

“I'm sure she did.”

“I hope so.” She sighed. “Anyway, when I said I wanted to kill someone, I meant that I'd like to find whoever murdered Hannah and…well, I can't say even the score, because you don't keep score with your loved ones' lives….”

“Of course not.”

“But see that justice is done, I guess you'd say. And to me, there can be no justice while the person responsible for Hannah's death is still drawing breath.”

She had stopped crying. Her eyes burned with the desire for vengeance now. I had no trouble believing that if she had a gun and knew who had killed her daughter, she wouldn't hesitate to shoot whoever it was.

I had to pretend that I didn't know any of the story's details. “Tell me about it,” I said. “It might help.”

“I'm not sure anything will help, but…all right. It started a couple of years ago when Hannah and her father had a terrible argument.” That sad smile came back on her face. “Eddie's not the easiest man in the world to live with. He hasn't been for me, and he wasn't for Hannah, although he did love her a great deal. But they just didn't get along, and when they argued that last time, Eddie told her she could move out if she didn't like the way he did things. She was twenty-one then, so it was her decision. She didn't just leave home, though. She moved all the way to St. Louis.”

“Where do you live?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer.

“A little town called Kennett.”

I nodded. “I've heard of it.”

“I worried so much about her, but she seemed to be happy. She met a man she liked, and she got a job, here on this boat. She worked in the casino as a waitress.” Louise shrugged. “It wasn't really what you'd call a good job, but she hoped it would lead to better things.”

“I'm sure it would have.”

“If she'd ever had the chance…But then someone…someone…”

Even though I wanted to hear the story from her, the pain in her eyes was so stark I couldn't help but feel sorry for her. “You don't have to go on if it's too hard,” I told her. “I understand. And this is really none of my business.”

“Yes, it is,” Louise said. “Because Eddie and I came on this cruise under false pretenses. Or at least
I
did, anyway.”

“What do you mean, false pretenses?”

“Like you said, it's not as painful to just come right out with it. After Hannah had been working on the riverboat for a while, someone hit her on the head and threw her overboard. She was caught in one of the paddlewheels.”

“Good Lord,” I muttered, and I didn't have to fake the horror I felt at hearing it again, this time from the mouth of the murdered girl's mother.

“Yes, it was terrible,” Louise agreed. “The police told us that the blow to the head probably would have been fatal, even if she hadn't gone overboard. The killer was just…making sure, I suppose you'd say.”

All I could do was shake my head in sympathy and wait for her to go on.

“The police investigated but never made any arrests. I don't think they ever even had any strong suspects. I'm not sure they even cared that much about solving the case.”

“Oh, I imagine they did. They just didn't have any leads, I expect.”

“Well, I have a lead,” Louise said. “Hannah had told me less than a week earlier that she'd had some sort of trouble with someone else who worked on the boat. But she didn't say who or what it was about, and when I told the police, they told me they had questioned all the other employees and everyone said Hannah got along just fine with everyone else. They claimed not to know what I was talking about.”

“But you think one of the crew killed her?”

Louise nodded. “I'm convinced of it. I just don't have any proof or anything to tell me which one. So I did the only thing I could.” She hesitated. “You won't tell anyone about this?”

“There's nobody I'd tell,” I assured her.

“I hired a private detective,” Louise said. “An old acquaintance of mine. You know him. Mark Lansing.”

That just about floored me. I tried to keep the surprise off my face, but I'm not sure I managed. “Mark?” I repeated. “Mark is a private detective?”

Louise nodded. “His mother and my mother are good friends and have been since we were kids. I've kept up with him that way, even after he moved to St. Louis.”

“Let me get this straight. If he's a private detective, what's he doing pretending to be Mark Twain?”

Louise leaned forward over the table and lowered her voice to a conspiratorial tone. “He's undercover.”

Well, that made sense, I supposed. If Louise had hired Mark to investigate her daughter's murder, and she thought that someone who worked on the
Southern Belle
was responsible for it, then Mark would be able to find out more if everyone on the boat thought he was just an actor playing Mark Twain. The killer wouldn't suspect him of being a detective.

That explained the gun in his shaving kit, too. I'm no expert on such things, but it seemed likely to me that a private detective would have a license to carry a gun.

And the fact that Mark and Louise were old friends, as I had thought they might be once I found out where Louise was from, even explained the hug. There wasn't any hanky-panky going on between them, and she had probably come to his cabin the night before to see if he had uncovered anything important in his investigation.

At least, I hoped that was the case.

I mulled all that over in my head for a couple of seconds, then said, “So you and Eddie hired Mark—”

“No,” Louise interrupted. “
I
hired Mark. Eddie doesn't know anything about it. He thinks…he thinks that we should just move on, that Hannah's murder will never be solved and we just have to accept it. I was barely able to talk him into taking this cruise with me. I told him it was going to be my way of…of saying good-bye to her.”

“But you're really hoping that Mark will find out who killed her?”

She nodded. “That's right. I realize, after all this time, the odds are against it. But I have to keep hoping, you see. I have to keep hoping for justice.”

I understood. I couldn't imagine the pain and grief she must have experienced, of course, since I'd never been through anything like that in my life and hoped that I never would. But I could see in her eyes how important it was to her that Hannah's killer be found.

“Does your husband even know Mark?” I asked. Eddie hadn't acted like it when we were all in the dining room earlier.

Louise shook her head. “He's heard me talk about him, but they've never actually met.”

I was a little annoyed. Mark Lansing had told me that he was a lawyer before he became an actor and got the job as Mark Twain. I supposed I could forgive a fib like that, since it was in the line of duty, so to speak, but I was irked anyway. He could have told me the truth.

And just why would he do that? I asked myself. Less than twenty-four hours earlier, he hadn't known me from Adam—or Eve. Even though I was convinced he actually liked me—that hadn't been an act—his first responsibility was to his client. I could understand that feeling, since I felt it myself toward the folks who went on my tours.

Still, I intended to have a talk with Mr. Mark Lansing and inform him that I knew the truth now. From here on out I expected him to shoot straight with me.

“Anyway,” Louise went on, “you can see why I was upset when I heard about Mr. Webster. Even though I didn't know him, to have another young person killed here on the same boat, on almost the same day…it was just too much for me. That's why I lost it for a minute. I'm sorry, Delilah.”

“Nothin' to apologize for,” I told her. “You had every reason to be upset. I hope that talkin' about it has made you feel better.”

She smiled, and it wasn't quite as sad this time. “I believe it has, a little bit. But now I've added to your burden.”

“Not at all. Has, uh, Mark found out anything?”

Louise sighed. “I'm afraid not. A lot of the people who worked on the boat with Hannah are still here, but some of them have left in the past year, of course. We may never be able to track down all of them. But my instincts tell me that the killer is still here. A mother's instincts can't be wrong, can they?”

All the time,
I thought. I knew that from bitter experience. No matter how good a kid was—and Melissa was a mighty good one—there were going to be times when they'd let you down when you'd least expect it. Probably the same held true about being a parent.

“Mark's been around the boat for several days now,” Louise went on, “but he told me this morning that he hasn't found anyone who had trouble with Hannah before she was killed. The only possible clue he's come up with is finding one of the dealers in the casino who knew Hannah and said she was worried about something a couple of days before she died. He said she was so nervous she was sick to her stomach.”

“Did she get like that very often?”

“Not at all. Hannah was always very healthy.”

I didn't know what that meant, if anything, but I filed it away in my brain, anyway.

“So you talked to Mark about the case this morning?” I asked. Louise didn't know that I had seen her coming out of his cabin, and I figured I probably wouldn't tell her. That would just complicate things.

“Yes, I went up to his cabin for a few minutes after we saw the two of you in the dining room. I was able to catch his eye there, and I guess he understood that I wanted to talk.” Her mouth tightened. “I was going to talk to him last night. I even slipped up to his cabin after Eddie had gone to sleep. Once Eddie's good and asleep you can't wake him with a bullhorn. But Mark had company.”

I swallowed. “Really?” I managed to say.

“That's right. He gave me a key to his cabin, but when I started to let myself in, the chain was on…and there was a woman in there.”

“Do tell,” I murmured.

“Of course, Mark's private life is his own business, and I don't expect him to be working on Hannah's case twenty-four hours a day. I know it shouldn't bother me that he's already made a conquest….”

I wouldn't have gone so far as to call it
that.

“But I guess it does, a little,” she went on. “I'm curious, too, if it's someone who works on the boat or one of the passengers. If it's one of the passengers, someone Mark didn't even meet until yesterday…well, I'm no prude, but that seems like moving awfully fast to me.”

I couldn't argue with her there. It seemed mighty fast to me, too. But there had been extenuating circumstances, I told myself, and anyway, nothing had happened. All I'd done was borrow Mark's cabin for the night. He hadn't even been there.

“Did you ask him about it this morning?”

Louise shook her head. “Oh, no, I couldn't have. I was too embarrassed. And he didn't bring it up, so either he was asleep and his girlfriend didn't tell him about me showing up at his cabin, or else he was too ashamed to admit it.”

I knew the truth. Mark didn't know a thing about her coming to his cabin the night before. And it would be better all around, I told myself, if things stayed that way.

Louise drank some more of her coffee, then said, “My, I've really poured my heart out to you, haven't I? I hope I haven't bored you too much.”

“Not at all,” I assured her. “And I'm so sorry for your loss, Louise.” I added the thing that people always say at times of tragedy. “If there's anything I can do to help…”

“You've been a good listener.” She squeezed my hand. “That's enough. Unless you can figure out who killed my daughter and tell the police.”

She didn't know about what had happened on the plantation the year before. At least, I figured she didn't. The case had gotten some national publicity, but not much. My fifteen minutes of fame, or notoriety, as the case may be, were long since over.

“I'll leave that to trained detectives like Mark,” I said.

Louise stood up. “I'd better go find Eddie. He was going to make some calls to his office, but I'm sure he's done with that by now. He's probably wandering around the boat looking for me, and I don't want him getting into any trouble.”