Garrett Investigates - By Elizabeth Bear Page 0,20

as any one of them could have been involved in the murder, and so Garrett specified that they must work in pairs—and that the mate would choose who paired with whom, rather than relying on crew members to sort it out. Garrett needed to begin interviewing the remaining crew and the passengers—but she was painfully aware that there were close to three hundred people aboard The Nation, and that she had less than eight hours remaining in which to find the one who was a murderer.

Garrett had done the obvious thing first, and laid out the dead woman’s pen on a clean handkerchief to see if it could be thaumaturgically encouraged to point out the direction of its missing piece. But it lay there without even a shiver, blithely ignoring the principles of affinity and sympathy. Which didn’t mean that the broken-off piece didn’t exist, of course. But if it were far enough away that the spell didn’t offer at least some direction, it was a safe bet that it wasn’t on board The Nation.

Perhaps the pen had been broken before the dead woman came on board. But if that was the case, why had she had it out to make notes in a book when she died?

Garrett needed a starting point. Any starting point. Even a bad one. Flipping through the pages of the dead woman’s short story collection was not providing the needed inspiration. Her annotations were cryptic—shorthand in a foreign language—and there wasn’t even a name scribed on the flyleaf.

She was about to pick a direction of questioning at random, on the ancient axiom of police investigations: some action is better than no action. Until she glimpsed a shorter edge of paper tucked between the pages of the book, and flipped back page by page until she found it again.

It was a newspaper article, on fresh, greasy newsprint. Garrett could still smell the cheap ink. A column clipped from the pages of The New World Times, penned by one “Josh,” apparently a “Master Riverboat Pilot” by trade. It was a humorous tall tale of travel on the North River between New Amsterdam and Albany, focused in particular on the perils of sea monsters and the opportunity to view “extinct saurisceans” in the canyons below West Point.

Garrett frowned at the thing. “O’Brien.”

“Ma’am?”

“What’s the name of your pilot?”

***

The pilot’s name was Clemens. Garrett did not stand as he was brought into the captain’s office, which had been hastily cleared to serve as her interview room. Instead, she sat behind the powdery pale wood of the desk and assessed him. He was a man neither tall nor short, whose eyes glittered sharply over a luxuriant moustache. His once-ginger hair was fading to the color of strawberry milk, but his posture remained as crisp as it ever might have been. He did not seem put off by her sex or her spectacles, which could be good or bad.

He radiated an aura of wit and focus that led Garrett to suspect immediately that while he might be a charming interview, he would not be an easy one. She longed for a gin just looking at him.

He had removed his cap upon entering and stood now with it tucked jauntily under his arm. The ring it had left depressed his curls, a small flaw she found comforting, like a chink in the otherwise flawless armor of his uniform. Dammit, Garrett thought. I’m the one who’s supposed to be making him feel this way.

“Mister Clemens,” she said. “Please sit.”

A ladder-backed chair had been drawn up to the blank side of the desk. Clemens folded himself into it as the door shut and latched behind him—the invaluable and nearly invisible Carter, yet again—and spoke in a cultured Virginian accent. “Detective Crown Investigator.”

“Do you know why you’re here, Mr. Clemens?”

“I imagine you are interviewing the ship’s officers regarding the death of Mrs. Abercrombie, as that was why you were brought aboard.”

A good enough answer. Noncommittal, and not full of conversational openings. She resisted the urge to say, I see you have fenced before. “How did you come to New Amsterdam?”

“My wife Olivia’s family is settled in Elmira. It was because of her that I came to New Holland.”

“But Captain O’Brien tells me you were already an experienced riverboat pilot when he hired you, though but newly arrived?”

“Ah,” he said. “Yes. I learned my trade out West. The Red Indian Nations of the fertile Mississippi valley issue charters for a limited number of steamboats. The trade in