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 paddle boat?”
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