“You won’t kill me! You don’t have the guts for it!”
Matthew thought about it. Lightning sizzled overhead, followed by a blast of thunder that he could feel vibrate in his bones. “You’re correct,” he said. He placed the barrel against Royce’s right knee. “I won’t kill you, but I’ll cripple you and leave you out here. How long do you think you would last?”
“Gunn told me you were supposed to be the law! You wouldn’t do such a thing!”
“Shall we put it to the test?” Matthew asked. And, truthfully, he was asking himself whether to go ahead and blast Royce’s knee or give the man another moment to decide, because Tobey was leaning against Abram and beginning to cough up blood.
Matthew’s resolve, and the decision that he would do what he threatened, must have shown in his face. Royce looked up at the stormy sky, then at the sword Quinn held and back again to Matthew. It occurred to Matthew that the killer was still seeking a way out of his situation.
“I’ll row,” said Royce, but something in his tone was yet arrogant and haughty; he was far from giving up.
“I don’t like it, suh,” Abram said to Matthew, as he supported his brother. “Man’s a fox.”
“Royce, clear those branches off the boat,” Matthew ordered. “Pull it out to the water.”
Royce gave a grunt and stood stock-still until Quinn suddenly nipped his right cheek with a quick motion of the blade. He looked at her in shock as blood crept down his face.
“He told you to do somethin’,” she said, her eyes dark and dangerous. “Best do it.”
Royce put his hand to his cheek and drew it away. He examined the blood on his fingers, and then without another word he turned and began to follow Matthew’s instructions, as Matthew stood close enough to wing him with a shot if he tried to run.
The boat was dragged into the river. Abram helped Tobey in, then his father, and he took up the oars.
“We’ll be all right,” Matthew said. “Get him in as fast as you can.”
Abram nodded and began to row downriver. Matthew directed Royce to the second boat with a motion of the pistol, and Royce obeyed. That boat, too, was pulled out of the mud and into the shallows. It took some maneuvering and some caution, but in a few minutes Matthew and Quinn were sitting together at the stern while Royce, facing them, sat on the middle plank seat and, with the oars in their locks, began to row them back toward the Green Sea.
Matthew kept the pistol trained on him. Lightning zigzagged across the dark sky and thunder echoed through the swamp. Quinn pressed close against Matthew, but she was also watching Royce for any trickery. Royce pulled steadily at the oars, his face impassive but his eyes narrowed and searching for a way out.
“Keep to the middle,” Matthew told him, as Royce began to let the boat drift toward the right bank. Up ahead, the boat carrying the runaways was rounding a bend and moving out of sight.
“Whatever you say,” Royce answered. “Man who’s got the gun calls the shots.”
Matthew was thinking. What to do about Quinn. Her Daniel would be leaving her, as soon as Royce was returned to the Green Sea and the runaways pardoned. It seemed to Matthew that it would be particularly cruel, for her to lose ‘Daniel’ again, but what could he possibly do about it? He was looking forward to a cleaning of his shoulder wound, a hot bath at the Carringtons’ inn, and as soon as he was able to travel he was taking a packet boat back home. This animal sitting before him, manning the oars, was not worth the rope it would take to hang him. How many had he killed besides Sarah Kincannon and Magnus Muldoon? And Joel Gunn, too? A lead ball to Royce’s head might be the more fitting end to him, but Matthew would have to let a court have the final word. He had no doubt what that word would—
Raindrops.
Rain had begun falling. The drops were few, but they were heavy. Lightning streaked, followed by the hollow boom of thunder. Royce kept rowing, unhurriedly. Maybe upon his face there was a thin and cunning smile. Matthew felt a sense of alarm; he knew the pistol’s flashpan cover was closed, but when the trigger was pulled the cover opened for the flint to ignite a small amount of powder at the touchhole…and rain was definitely not kind to gunpowder. If the powder at the flashpan became damp, the weapon would be useless except as a club.
Within a matter of seconds, the sky opened up and—Matthew’s worst fear—a torrent of rain descended.
The rain fell so heavily, in gray sheets, that he could hardly make out Royce sitting before them; the man was just a shape in the deluge. Rain beat down upon Matthew and Quinn, and the surface of the River of Souls was thrashed as if by the twistings of a thousand alligators.
Royce—or the blurred shape of Royce—ceased rowing.
Water streamed down Matthew’s face. “Keep rowing!” he shouted against the voice of the storm. He was aware that this torrent was also beating down upon the pistol and there was nothing he could do to prevent it. “Go on!” he demanded.
Royce didn’t answer. Slowly and deliberately, the man stood up. Through the curtain of rain Matthew saw him lift the oar on his right from its lock.
“Stop it!” Matthew shouted, but Royce would not stop. Matthew had no choice. The time had come. He aimed at Royce’s chest and pulled the trigger.
The trigger snapped.
The rain-soaked gun remained mute.
“I’ll be leavin’ now,” Royce said. He swung out with the oar and slammed it into the left side of Matthew’s head.
Matthew fell to his knees in the boat, bright and searing pain fogging his vision and filling his brain. He dropped the useless pistol, and did not see that Quinn was on her feet and slashing out with the sword. Royce turned the blade aside with the oar and followed that with a fist to Quinn’s face that brought the blood from her nostrils and sent her reeling back into the boat, which swayed precariously from side to side on the tortured river.
Under the driving rain, Matthew was aware that he had to fight back. Dazed, his vision cut to a dark haze, he found the knife in his waistband and drew it out, at the same time trying to get to his feet. A second blow of the oar, to almost the same place near the left temple of Matthew’s head, knocked the knife from his nerveless fingers and sent him over the side of the boat into the River of Souls.
He went down, his head full of fire. He had the sensation of drifting into a different realm, worlds away from…he could not remember from where, nor could he remember exactly where he was or why, but he realized he could not breathe and he must find air…and yet, this was a peaceful place, this darkness and quiet, and here he might find rest if he so chose.
In the boat, as the deluge continued to slam down, Royce grabbed Quinn by the hair with both hands and dragged her forward in preparation to throw her over the side. She had lost the sword. Her hands scrabbled at the bottom of the boat, seeking the weapon. Royce hauled her up and grinned in her bloodied face.
“Over you go, Rotbottom bitch,” he said, spitting water. “But first…I’ll take a kiss.”
He pressed his mouth against hers with a force that nearly broke her teeth.
Quinn kissed him hard, in return.
Her kiss was delivered by the knife that Matthew had dropped and her fingers had found, and deep into the heart this kiss was driven, and twisted for good measure and good fortune on the journey that Griffin Royce was about to undertake.
He gasped and pulled back, but the knife remained in his heart and Quinn’s hand held it firm as the life streamed out of him. His mouth opened and filled with rain. His green eyes blinked, shedding water. All the world, it seemed, had turned to a river without beginning or end. The haunted girl from Rotbottom and the animalish killer from the Green Sea stood together in a rowboat between shores obscured by the downpour, and above them thunder shouted like the voice of God condemning men for sins too foul to forgive.
Royce looked down at the knife, as if to wish it away. He took hold of Quinn’s hand but was suddenly too weak to push it aside. Then his rain-beaten face seemed to run and dis
tort like melting tallow, and when Quinn released the knife Royce fell backward into the bow of the boat and lay there, arms and legs splayed and knife still piercing his heart. His sightless green gaze flickered and dimmed, as the River of Souls carried the boat in the direction of the Green Sea on its sinuous path to the Atlantic.
Quinn leaped overboard. Her Daniel had risen back to the surface but his face was still underwater. She swam to him and lifted his face from the river, and there she saw the ugly darkening bruise and swelling at his left temple. For a few seconds he was still and her heart nearly broke because she feared she’d lost him again, and then his body convulsed and water burst from his mouth and nose and he drew in a ragged breath of air strained through the falling rain.
“Stay with me,” she pleaded, holding him close lest the river pull him under again. “Daniel…please stay with me.”
She thought he might have nodded, but she wasn’t sure.
For a moment she watched the boat carrying the body of Griffin Royce drift away until it was obscured by the curtains of rain. He would be no more threat or harm to anyone, she thought, unless he was as strong a spirit as her husband and could also find his way back from the vale of Death. But she didn’t believe God, in His final judgment, would allow such a wicked soul to find a way through. Then, holding tightly and lovingly to her Daniel, the girl from Rotbottom struck out for the opposite shore.
Twenty
Magnus Muldoon was again a man on a mission.
Under the bright hot sunlight of morning he rowed up the River of Souls. He had asked for and been allowed this boat by Donovant Kincannon at the Green Sea plantation an hour earlier. The master of the Green Sea was once more on his feet, in spite of Dr. Stevenson’s admonitions to remain in bed for a few more days, but Sarah was being buried this afternoon in a plot beside the chapel. Kincannon was determined to bid farewell to his daughter while standing with his arm around his wife. In what was an unheard-of decision, the slaves Abram, Mars, Tobey and Granny Pegg were invited to the service, and Magnus as well. It was doubtful that Tobey would be there, as he was under the doctor’s care after the removal of the ball and the tending of two broken ribs. Magnus planned to be at Sarah’s funeral, but not in these grimy old clothes he was currently wearing.
Rain had fallen for two days straight, drowning out the fire that had been moving so hungrily through the forest. Magnus and the snake-bit but still surviving Caleb Bovie had found one of the boats left behind by the group of men Seth Lott had shepherded back to Jubilee, and rowing through the deluge they had come upon a strange sight: what at first appeared to be an empty rowboat drifting downriver, but which upon closer inspection revealed the corpse of Griffin Royce splayed at the bow, his eyes open toward the stormy heavens and a knife stuck in his heart.
He was a red-blooded man, that Royce, thought Magnus at the time. A lady-killer, possibly with a trail of dead ladies behind him…or, if not dead, at least changed for the worse. Gunn had known too many secrets about Royce, and might have been persuaded to spill them if Royce hadn’t blown his brains out. So there lay Royce, a heartless man felled by a wound to the heart…but who had struck the blow?
Upon reaching the Green Sea, Magnus had been told by Abram that Matthew and Quinn had been in the boat with Royce, but they’d been left behind and out of sight because of the rain and Abram’s haste to get help for Tobey. Matthew had had a pistol, Abram had said…but both he and Magnus had realized that the pistol likely was useless in such a downpour.
The question that Magnus intended to have answered this morning, and the reason for his mission, was to find out what had happened to Matthew and Quinn, and for that he was on his way to Rotbottom.
He rowed steadily past dozens of alligators lying motionless in the sun on either side of the river. Several drifted by his boat, and one particularly large beast bumped the bow with its knobby tail as it swam unhurriedly on. Further ahead he passed an area where several men in boats were using spears, nets and ropes to spear and trap their prey, and Magnus wondered if those nets had not recently brought up a few human remains. Not far beyond the realm of reptiles, daylight revealed the harbor of Rotbottom, a wharf around which were standing several weatherbeaten log structures, a few barns and livestock corrals, and back in the woods more log cabins and what appeared to be a larger meeting house at the center of town, if it could be called that.
Magnus approached the wharf and, spying an old man fishing nearby, called for a rope to be thrown to him to moor the rowboat. Directions were asked to the house of Quinn Tate, and the old man sent him off in search of a cabin “four to the left of the meetin’ house, got a flower garden in front, but,” the elder added, “that girl’s not right in the head, y’know.”
Magnus thanked him for this information and continued on his way.
The town of Rotbottom was not the collection of miserable hovels that Magnus had expected. The cabins were small, to be sure, but they were not very different from his own house. In fact, some were better maintained. The dirt streets were clean, willow and oak trees spread their leafy and cooling canopies over the roofs, and except for a fishy smell of decomposition wafting in the air—which Magnus took to be the odor of alligator innards or newly-skinned carcasses issuing from a barnlike structure that appeared to be a warehouse—Rotbottom was a community not unlike many others carved from the wilderness. Some of the houses had vegetable gardens and plots of corn. Apple, pear and peach trees grew in small orchards. There were chicken coops and hogpens, and a few cattle and horses grazing in corrals. Dogs bounded about, following the path of several children playing with rolling-hoops. As a stranger in town, Magnus attracted much attention from the children and from people sitting in the shade of their porches. He was called upon to pause, sit awhile and state his business but he had to go on, and soon found himself approaching the door of Quinn Tate’s house, if he’d followed the directions correctly. Someone was inside, because cooking-smoke was rising from the chimney.
He knocked at the door and waited. It was a tidy-looking place with a small porch, but all the windows were shuttered.
Still he waited. He knocked again, a little harder.
Did he hear a movement from within? He wasn’t sure. “Quinn Tate!” he called. “It’s Magnus Muldoon! You in there?”
And now…yes…he did hear footsteps creak the floorboards. But yet the door did not open, and Magnus had the feeling that if the girl was indeed on the other side, she was standing with her hand on the latch and indecision in her addled mind.
“I need to speak to you,” he said, quietly but firmly. “I’m lookin’ for Matthew. Do you know where he is?”
A few more seconds passed. And then a latch was turned and the door opened a crack, and there was Quinn’s face…strained and frightened-looking, with a bruised nose and dark blue bruises under both swollen eyes.
“Oh,” said Magnus, unnerved at the sight. “What happpened to you?”
“The man hit me,” she answered. “The pistol…it was wet. All that rain, comin’ down. He tried to get away.” She gazed past Magnus, as if expecting he’d brought someone else with him. “You’re alone?”
“I am.”
“Thought you were dead. That Royce killed you, with the others.”
“He tried,” said Magnus. “And he came awful close.”
“I thought…somebody might be comin’ for me. To take me off, maybe. I stabbed that man in the heart, and I left the knife in him. I had to…after what he did.”
“What did he do?”
“He hit Matthew with an oar. In the head, more than once,” Quinn said. “Matthew fell into the river. After I stabbed that man, I went into the river to find Matthew…but…” She hesitated, chewing on her lower lip.
“But what?” Magnus urged.
“The River of Souls took him,” she said, in a hushed voice. “He’s gone.”
“Gone? You mean…he drowned?”
“River took him,” Quinn repeated. “He must’ve
been hurt bad. I dove for him, but I couldn’t find him. I stayed out there as long as I could, before the ’gators started comin’. After that…I had to get out and leave that place.”
“He’s not dead!” Magnus’s voice cracked. “He can’t be dead!”
“All I know is…the river took him. Please, sir.” She reached out and grasped his arm. “Are you going to send men here to get me? For stabbin’ that very bad man in the heart?”
Magnus shook his head. “No. Not my place to do that.” He had left Bovie in one boat and rowed back to the Green Sea with Royce’s body in the other, just to show the Kincannons what had happened. Bovie hadn’t been hesitant to tell the master and mistress of the Green Sea about Royce’s murder of Stamper and Barrows, and the killing of Joel Gunn. Magnus figured the story ought to end here, with Abram, Mars and Tobey pardoned and Sarah’s killer gone to his reward. No one at the Green Sea was going to ask who had put the knife into Griffin Royce, but if anyone did…maybe Matthew would want to take the credit for that. But Matthew dead, after all they’d been through? Magnus couldn’t believe it; or, maybe, he didn’t want to.
“How far upriver did Matthew go in?” Magnus asked.
“Just after we got started. I don’t know…it wasn’t far past where the slaves took their boat out.”
It was likely six or seven miles away, Magnus thought. With all those alligators in the water, a body wouldn’t last long. He was torn between rowing further upriver in search of the body and giving it up as a lost cause. But still… “You’re sure he didn’t crawl out? All that rain comin’ down…maybe you couldn’t see him? And you bein’ hurt and all?”
“I looked for him as long as I could,” she repeated, with some finality in her tone. “You know…the way I felt about him…I wanted to find him, more than anything.”
The River of Souls Page 22
