Fevre Dream Page 0,40

can be... bloody."

York stared up at him for a long time, his eyes as gray and unreadable as smoke. "Yes," he said finally, "I will take care." Then he turned and was gone.

Abner Marsh watched him go ashore and vanish into Natchez-under-the-hill, his lean figure throwing long shadows beneath the smoking lamps. When Joshua York was quite gone, Marsh turned and proceeded forward to the captain's cabin. The door was locked, as he had known it would be. Marsh reached in his ample pocket, and came out with the key.

He hesitated before putting it in the lock. Having duplicate keys made and stored in the steamer's safe, that was no betrayal, just plain sense. People died in locked cabins, after all, and it was better to have a spare key than to have to break the door in. But using the key, that was something else. He had made a bargain, after all. But partners had to trust each other, and if Joshua York would not trust him, how could he expect trust in return? Resolute, Marsh opened the lock, and entered York's cabin.

Inside, he lit an oil lamp, and locked the door behind him. He stood there uncertainly for a moment, looking around, wondering what he hoped to find. York's cabin was just a big stateroom, looking like it had all the other times Marsh had visited it. Still, there must be something here that would tell him something about York, give him some clue as to the nature of his partner's peculiarities.

Marsh moved to the desk, which seemed the most likely place to begin, carefully eased himself into York's chair, and began to sift through the newspapers. He touched them gingerly, noting the position of each paper as he slid it out for examination, so that he could leave all as he found it when he left. The newspapers were... well, newspapers. There must have been fifty of them on the desk, numbers old and new, the Herald and the Tribune from New York, several Chicago papers, all the St. Louis and New Orleans journals, papers from Napoleon and Baton Rouge and Memphis and Greenville and Vicksburg and Bayou Sara, weeklies from a dozen little river towns. Most of them were intact. A few had stories cut from them.

Beneath the litter of newspapers, Marsh found two leather-bound ledger books. He eased them out slowly, trying to ignore a nervous clenching in his stomach. Perhaps here he had a journal or a diary, Marsh thought, something to tell him where York had come from and where he aimed to go. He opened the first ledger, and frowned in disappointment. No diary. Only stories, carefully cut from newspapers and mounted with paste, each one labeled as to date and place in Joshua's flowing hand.

Marsh read the story before him, from a Vicksburg paper, about a body that had been found washed up on the riverfront. The date placed it six months back. On the opposite page were two items, both from Vicksburg as well; a family found dead in a shanty twenty miles from the city, a Negro wench-probably a runaway-discovered stiff in the woods, dead of unknown causes.

Marsh turned the pages, read, turned again. After a time he closed the book and opened the other. It was the same. Page after page of bodies, mysterious deaths, corpses discovered here and there, all arranged by city. Marsh closed the books and returned them to their place, and tried to consider. The newspapers had lots of accounts of deaths and killings that York hadn't bothered to cut out. Why? He searched through a few newspapers and read over them until he was sure. Then Marsh frowned. It appeared that Joshua had no interest in shootings or knifings, in rivermen drowned or blown up by boiler explosions or burned, in gamblers and thieves hanged by the law. The stories he collected were different. Deaths no one could account for. Folks with throats tore out. Bodies all mutilated and ripped up, or else too far rotted for anyone to know just how they'd died. Bodies unmarked as well, found dead for no reason anyone could find, found with wounds too small to notice at first, found whole but bloodless. Between the two ledgers, there must of been fifty or sixty stories, nine months' worth of death drawn from the whole length of the lower Mississippi.

Briefly Abner Marsh was afraid, sick at heart at the thought that perhaps Joshua was saving accounts of his