Читать книгу Huckleberry Finished: - Livia J Washburn - Страница 11

I started to jump back and raise my arms to defend myself, but then I recognized Louise Kramer. I couldn’t bring myself to believe that the meek little woman was attacking me, so I stayed where I was. Sure enough, Louise didn’t do anything except hug me and get the shoulder of my dress wet where her tears were falling.

“Why, honey,” I managed to say, “what in the world is wrong?”

She shook her head and didn’t answer. I patted her on the back and made the sort of vaguely comforting noises that people always do in situations like that.

Then a possible explanation occurred to me. I said, “Did that big ol’ husband of yours do something? Did he hurt you, Louise?” My blood started to boil at the thought.

That finally jolted her out of her teary silence. “What? You mean Eddie? Oh, no! Eddie would…would never hurt me.”

I wasn’t so sure about that. I hadn’t liked the look of Eddie Kramer earlier in the day. He was nearly twice the size of his wife, and from the sound of the way he’d talked to whoever was on the phone, he liked to bully people. Size and meanness were a bad combination.

“Are you sure? I can call somebody, or go find a security officer—”

She jerked away from me. “No! I told you, Eddie didn’t do anything to me. I…I’m just upset. It’s personal. There’s nothing you can do to help.”

One thing I’ve learned in the travel business is your clients’ personal lives really aren’t any of your business. As long as they don’t disrupt the tour or break any laws, you’re better off giving them their privacy.

That’s what I did then, backing off and holding up my hands. “I’m sorry,” I told Louise. “Whatever’s wrong, I didn’t mean to intrude. But I meant it when I said that if there’s anything I can do, I’d like to help.”

She took a handkerchief or a tissue from her purse. In the dim light, I couldn’t tell which. She used it to dab at her eyes and then took a deep breath, composing herself with a visible effort.

“Thank you, Ms. Dickinson.”

“Delilah.”

She summoned up a smile. “Delilah. I promise you, there’s nothing you can do. I’ll be all right in a little while.”

“Well…okay. If you’re sure.”

“I’m certain.”

My eyes were more used to the dim light now. I could see that she didn’t have any bruises or black eyes or anything like that. Nothing visible, anyway. And she had sounded like she was telling the truth when she said that her husband hadn’t hurt her. I knew I should have been ashamed of myself for jumping to that conclusion, but I wasn’t. Not after I’d seen the way some women were treated in their marriages.

“I was just on my way to the dining room to see if there’s anything left to eat,” I told her. “If you haven’t had dinner yet, why don’t you join me?”

“Oh, I…I couldn’t eat anything right now. But thank you for asking. I…I think I’ll go back to my cabin and lie down for a little while.”

“You’re comin’ to the salon for the Mark Twain performance, aren’t you?”

“I’ll try,” she said with a weak smile, but I didn’t honestly believe that I’d see her there.

She walked toward her cabin—or toward what I hoped was really her cabin, after the trick Ben Webster had pulled on me earlier. I didn’t think Louise Kramer had any reason to try to fool me. I watched, anyway, as she took a key from her purse, unlocked a cabin door, went inside, and shut the door softly behind her. She struck me as the sort of woman who had never slammed a door in her life.

That was an odd little incident, I thought as I started toward the dining room again, but it wasn’t that uncommon for somebody to get emotional and lose control momentarily while on a vacation. Traveling was really stressful for some people, after all.

More of my clients than I expected were still in the dining room when I got there. I helped myself to some appetizers at the buffet table and then circulated among the guests, asking them how they were enjoying the trip so far and things like that. Just pleasant chitchat.

I mentioned the Mark Twain performance in the salon to everyone, too, urging them to attend. I wanted Mark Lansing to have a good crowd for his first performance, although, when I stopped to think about it, he might have preferred not to have so many people looking at him. I knew that if I were an actor or a singer or something like that, the bigger the crowd, the more butterflies I’d have fluttering around in my stomach.

But it was too late to do anything about that now. Quite a few people expressed an interest in watching the performance, so as the time approached eight o’clock, I led a good-sized group out of the dining room and up the stairs to the second deck. We went into the salon and found places to sit at the bar and at the tables, and there were comfortable chairs and divans scattered around the sumptuously furnished room.

I didn’t see Eddie or Louise Kramer anywhere in the salon, but that didn’t surprise me, even though I was a little disappointed. I’d been hoping that Louise would feel better and would want to take in the show.

A few minutes later, the double doors from the deck opened, and Mark Twain ambled in, cigar in hand. He went to the bar, rested an elbow on it, and looked around the room at the passengers, who had quieted down as he made his way across the salon. Once everyone was quiet, he said, “Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.”

That got a nice laugh. Mark acknowledged it with a wave of the unlit cigar. “I want to welcome all of you to the Southern Belle. As some of you may be aware, I worked on riverboats much like this one, back in my early days. I was an apprentice pilot to Captain Horace Bixby, whose task it was to teach me the river. But the face of the water itself, in time, became a wonderful book…a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.”

I guessed that most of that must have been a passage from Life on the Mississippi that Mark Lansing had memorized. He continued talking in Twain’s words about the river, about how the slightest ripple might indicate a snag under the water that could tear the bottom right out of a riverboat. Despite its peaceful, placid appearance, the river hid many dangers under its slow-moving surface, and a good pilot had to be able to recognize all of them instinctively.

Mark was good; I had to give him that. He spoke Twain’s words with precision and conviction. After a while, listening to him was like being back there roughly a hundred and fifty years earlier, when the country was still young and brawling and vibrant.

Gradually the focus shifted from the river to young Sam Clemens’s boyhood in Hannibal. I didn’t know which pieces of writing the passages came from—probably more than one—but Mark wove them together into a narrative that was, well, rollicking. It was easy to see how young Sam’s experiences in Hannibal had become the stuff of fiction in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Mark kept the audience alternating between rapt attention and uproarious laughter. He never broke character and was never less than convincing in his portrayal.

Most of the performance had to do with Hannibal and the Mississippi, but to wrap it up Mark performed some material about Twain’s days as a newspaper correspondent in the West, then talked about politics for a while. The jabs at Congress and the president were as timely as when Twain wrote them, and the passengers in the salon seemed to enjoy them a lot. When Mark waved his cigar in the air and said, “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” they gave him a standing ovation.

After the performance people crowded around to talk to him. Some of them even wanted an autograph, which Mark provided even though he looked a little uncomfortable doing so. I thought he did, anyway. He stayed in character while chatting with the passengers. I waited until they left him alone before I slipped up beside him.

“Oh, Mr. Twain, that was just amazin’,” I said in a breathless voice. “You’re my favorite writer in the whole wide world.”

Mark kept smiling under the bushy mustache, but he said, “I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared in my whole life.”

“You didn’t have anything to be scared about. You were great!”

“You really think so?”

I nodded and said, “I do.”

“You’re not just saying that?”

“Nope. You had all these folks eatin’ right out of the palm of your hand. I think everybody in here enjoyed it. I know I did.”

“Well, it’s kind of you to say so.” Mark took a handkerchief from the breast pocket of the white suit coat he wore and patted his forehead with it. A little make-up came off on the handkerchief.

I linked my arm with his and said, “Come on over to the bar. It’s not every day I can ask Mark Twain to have a drink with me.”

The same bartender brought us champagne. Mark had some trouble drinking his through the drooping fake mustache, but he managed. “Next time I’ll get rid of this soup strainer first,” he complained.

“No, no, you have to leave it on,” I told him. “It makes you look distinguished.”

“You really think it went all right?”

“I know it did.”

Mark relaxed after that, and we chatted about his performance and the passengers’ reactions. Some of them still came up to him to shake his hand and thank him for an entertaining evening. He seemed to enjoy talking to them, and after a while I leaned over to him and said, “I think you may have a future in this business.”

“What, riverboat acting?”

“It’s a start. Today, the riverboat. Tomorrow, Hollywood or Broadway!”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” he cautioned, but I could tell he was pleased by what I’d said.

I started thinking about what a pleasant evening it had turned out to be after all, despite the strains and worries of the afternoon. The Kramers could work out their problems between themselves. Wherever Ben Webster had gone, at least I was confident he wasn’t still on the riverboat. The rest of the overnight cruise was bound to go smoothly.

I know, I know. I’m dumb that way sometimes.

I was nursing another glass of champagne when the cell phone in my purse rang. Thinking that it might be Melissa or Luke, I said, “Excuse me a minute,” to Mark and stepped away from the bar while I took the phone from my purse.

The number on the display wasn’t a familiar one, though. I didn’t even recognize the area code. I opened the phone and said, “Delilah Dickinson.”

“Ms. Dickinson.” It was a man’s voice, calm and powerful, and one that I’d never heard before, as far as I could recall. I didn’t have to wonder whom it belonged to, though, because he went on immediately, “This is Captain Williams.”

“Captain Williams?” I repeated.

“Captain of the Southern Belle,” he explained. “Where are you right now?”

The blunt question took me by surprise. “Why, I’m in the salon—” I began.

“Stay right there if you would, please. Mr. Rafferty will come and get you.”

“Come and…get me?” Whatever this was, if Rafferty was involved it couldn’t be good.

“That’s right. There’s something…or rather, someone…you need to see.”

No, sir, I thought. Not good at all.