“No, I’m quite positive-”
“ Are you positive? You said you were sleeping. Are you sure you didn’t dream it?”
“Well… all right, I grant you, that could be, it might have been a dream. Let’s put aside the scuffling, then. But to suggest that it was Arden that…” She folded her arms. “No, I’m sorry.”
“Maggie,” Mel said thoughtfully, “what did he smell like? The man who threw you overboard.”
The question, like most of the others, seemed to annoy her. “What did he smell like? You mean, did he smell dirty, or-”
“Uh-uh. Arden was a steady pipe smoker, though. My brother always has a pipe in his mouth too, and the smell doesn’t just soak into his clothes and his hair, it soaks into him. It comes out of his pores. Get close to him and you can’t help smelling it. Do you remember anything like that?”
Good point, Gideon thought. Smokers do smell of their tobacco – pipe smokers more than anyone else, it seemed – and he himself had noticed the sweet, coconut-and-vanilla scent that hung around Arden.
But Maggie rejected it with an impatient shake of her head. “No, I don’t-” She stopped abruptly, staring hard at nothing, her thoughts obviously turned inward. “Oh my God,” she said slowly, looking at each of them. “I did smell it. I smelled it and didn’t realize what it was. I thought it was something Cisco smoked, something familiar… marijuana… only it didn’t quite smell like marijuana. Sweetish, yes, but different. I guess I assumed it was something else like that, I don’t know, something from around here. But it wasn’t. It was Arden’s Sultan’s Blend – he gets it from England – how could I not have realized it? It just never occurred to me to think that… that…”
She was rocking her head back and forth, hands steepled in front of her mouth. “My God… it’s so unbelievable… Arden. But why?”
TWENTY-ONE
But why?
That was the question that absorbed them for the remainder of dinner, but no persuasive or even credible answers emerged, and the flow of ideas slowed and eventually stopped. Everybody was tired. Everybody had missed most of the previous night’s sleep. Once the rice-pudding dessert was finished, people began leaving, talking about getting to bed early. There would be no convivial gathering under the stars that night. In the morning they would reach Leticia, and nobody knew what awaited them when the police were informed of the bizarre goings-on of the last few days. John had told them that they might all very well be detained – they would certainly be interrogated – and it wouldn’t hurt to be well rested. The Colombian police did not rank among the world’s most considerate forces.
Phil went off to wash clothes, John disappeared somewhere, and Gideon went to the ship’s “library,” a two-foot shelf of fly-specked novels in German, Spanish, and English, apparently none of them less than fifty years old. He found a dusty copy of Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street and took it out to the salon, hoping to read for a couple of hours in the early evening breeze and calm his mind. It had been a hell of a day. But the posture he chose – sprawled back in one chair, with his feet propped on another, proved too comfortable. It wasn’t long before the book fell open on his lap and dropped to the deck.
“Hey… Doc.” John was shaking his shoulder.
He had been deeply, dreamlessly asleep. “What time is it?” he said, unwilling to open his eyes.
“What time is it? It’s seven o’clock. What difference does it make what time it is?” He was brimming with impatience and enthusiasm. “Come on, you’ve been snoozing for an hour. Open your eyes, wake up – I got something to show you. Come on. Hey.” More shaking.
Gideon grumpily brushed at his hand. “Okay, okay, don’t nag.” He squeezed his eyes open one at a time, reluctantly pulled his feet from the chair, stretched, and stood up.
John was standing there, bouncing on his toes and holding a manila envelope. Beside him was Phil, looking scrawnier than ever in nothing but his baggy shorts and a pair of flip-flops.
“All my shirts are in the sink,” he explained.
“Really? All both of them?” Gideon yawned and stretched once more. “All right, I’m awake. What’s all the excitement?”
“Don’t ask me,” Phil said. “Ask him. He practically dragged me out of my room by the scruff of my neck.” He frowned. “Do people have scruffs?”
“Well, see, the whole thing didn’t make sense to me,” John said, herding them toward the stairwell, “so I’ve been wandering around looking at things, trying to see everything, you know, from a fresh angle. I went to look at Scofield’s room again, I looked at Cisco’s room, I went over the ship pretty much from top to bottom, to see what I could see. And I found something up on the roof that changes everything.”
“The roof?” Gideon repeated. “Where does the roof come into it?”
“That’s what I’m going to show you. I want witnesses.” And then, portentously: “You’ll probably have to give depositions later.”
Once on the roof, he took them to the rearmost part, where Scofield had isolated himself behind the smokestack in the evenings. The sun was still above the horizon, but it had dropped below the evening cloud bank and it was tolerable to be out in the open, especially in the breeze that came up every late afternoon.
“Oops.” One of Phil’s flip-flops had caught on one of the stanchions to which the two guy wires that secured the smokestack were attached.
“Watch out, Phil!” John exclaimed. “And for Christ’s sake, keep away from the other one!” This exhortation, emphatic enough to begin with, was made still more forceful by his grabbing Phil by the elbows, lifting him bodily, and setting him down three feet to the right. “In fact, don’t move. Jesus.”
Phil docilely allowed himself to be transported, but looked puzzled. “What’s the big deal?”
“Give me a minute and you’ll see. Look around, you guys. What do you notice that’s different?”
“From?” Gideon said. He brushed at a waft of gritty smoke that had drifted down from the smokestack.
John waved it away too. “From what it was last night, and the night before, and the night before that. What’s changed?”
Gideon and Phil looked around them. “Where exactly are we supposed to be looking?” Phil asked.
“Right here. Right where we’re standing.”
“Well,” said Phil, “this is where Scofield was, right?”
John nodded. “Right. Sitting right here in his beach chair.”
Phil shrugged. “Give us a hint.”
“I just gave you a hint.”
“Here’s his teapot and his cup, still on the floor,” Gideon said, “and a plate with some crumbs in it. Well, the cup’s on its side, is that what you mean?”
“That probably figures in it, but no, that’s not what I mean.”
Gideon spread his hands. “I don’t know, John. How about letting us in on it?”
John folded his arms somewhat crossly. “For a guy who sure loves to take his time when he’s telling other people about his brilliant deductions, you’re a little impatient when you’re on the other end of it.”
Gideon saw the justice in this. “I beg your pardon. Please continue.”
“Where’s his chair, Doc?”
Gideon scowled. “His, uh, chair.”
“Yeah, his chair.”
“I don’t know. I guess somebody moved it.”
“Really? Look around. Nobody’s moved any of the others. They’re all where they were last night, roughly anyway. There’s where we were, there’s where-”
“Okay, so somebody took it downstairs.”
“Why would anyone carry a beach chair downstairs? Except for the dining room and the salon, this is the only place there’s enough room for it. And I already checked the dining room and the salon. It’s not there. Besides, who’s gonna have the nerve to take away Scofield’s chair?”
“All right, then, maybe the crew was up here cleaning up.”
“They cleaned up his chair, but they didn’t clean up the teapot and cup that he left on the floor? Nope, no good. Besides, I talked to Vargas. The crew hasn’t done any work at all up here. He didn’t even know we were using the roof.”