what about you? How many times has Julian bled you now? It appears to me you're just as damned stubborn and stupid as you say I am."
Joshua smiled. "Perhaps," he admitted.
"Hell," Marsh swore. "All right. You're goin' back to Julian, like some egg-suckin' idyut. What the hell do you want me to do?"
"You had better leave here as quickly as you can," Joshua said, "before our hosts get more suspicious than they are already."
"I'd figured out that much."
"It's over, Abner. Don't come looking for us again."
Abner Marsh scowled. "Hell."
Joshua smiled. "You damned fool," he said. "Well, look if you must. You won't find us."
"I'll see about that."
"Maybe there's hope for us yet. I'll return and tame Julian and build my bridge between night and day, and together you and I will outrun the Eclipse."
Abner Marsh snorted derisively, but down inside he wanted to believe. "You take care of my goddamned steamboat," he said. "Ain't never been a faster one, and she better be in good repair when I get her back."
When Joshua smiled it made the dry, dead skin around his mouth crackle and tear. He lifted a hand to his face and tore it away. It peeled off whole, like it was only a mask he'd been wearing, an ugly mask full of scars and wrinkles. Beneath it his skin was milky white, serene and unlined, ready to begin anew, ready for the world to write upon it. York crumbled his old face in his hand; wisps of old pain and flakes of skin sifted through his fingers and fell to the floor. He wiped his hand on his coat and held it out to Abner Marsh. They shook.
"We all got to make choices," Marsh said. "You told me that, Joshua, and you was right. Them choices ain't always easy. Someday you're goin' to have to choose, I think. Between your night folks and... well, call it good, Doing right. You know what I mean. Make the right choice, Joshua."
"And you, Abner. Make your own choices wisely."
Joshua York turned, his cloak swirling behind him, and went outside. He vaulted over the balustrade with easy grace and dropped the twenty feet to the ground like it was something he did every day, landing on his feet. Then he was gone, vanished, moving so quick he seemed to fade into the night. Maybe he turned himself into a goddamned mist, Abner Marsh thought.
Away off on the distant shine that was the river, a steamer sounded her whistle, a faint melancholy call, kind of lost and kind of lonely. It was a bad night on the river. Abner Marsh shivered and wondered if there'd be a frost. He shut the balcony doors and walked on back to bed.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Fever Years: November 1815-April 1870
BOTH of them were true to their word: Abner Marsh kept on looking, but he did not find her.
They left Aaron Gray's plantation as soon as Karl Framm was strong enough to travel, several days after Joshua York had vanished. Marsh was glad to be gone. Gray and his kin were getting mighty curious by then about why there was nothing in the papers about a steamboat explosion, and why none of their neighbors had heard of it, and why Joshua had taken off. And Marsh was getting tangled up in his own lies. By the time he and Toby and Karl Framm got themselves upriver, the Fevre Dream was gone, as he'd known she would be. Marsh returned to St. Louis.
Through the long dreary winter, Marsh kept up his search. He wrote more letters, he loitered around the riverfront bars and billiard halls, he hired some more detectives, he read too damn many newspapers, he found Yoerger and Grove and the rest of the crew of the Eli Reynolds and sent them up and down the river, cabin passage, looking. All of it turned up nothing. No one had seen the Fevre Dream. No one had seen the Ozymandias either. Abner Marsh figured they'd changed her name again. He read every goddamned poem Byron and Shelley ever wrote, but this time it was no use. It got so bad he had the damn poems memorized, and he even went on to other poets, but the only thing he found that way was a sorry-looking Missouri stern-wheeler named the Hiawatha.
Marsh did get one report from his detectives, but it told him nothing he hadn't figured out already. The side-wheel steamer Ozymandias had left Natchez that October night with about