Murder on the Titania and Other Steam-Powered Adventures

by Alex Acks

  Marta bent to peer at her. “I’m afraid I must agree. Nasty business. Simms. Keep watch at the door if you please.”

  Without further ado, she retrieved a locked wooden chest from under the bed—the possessions Elizabeth had with her at the time of the accident. She made quick work of the flimsy lock with her picks and examined the contents. No clothes—those had likely been far too bloody to be worth keeping. A few bits of surprisingly high quality jewelry—those were in keeping with what she’d seen in Clementine’s home, so either the maid had been a thief, or her employer had believed in generous gifts. No sign of the envelope that Simms’s mailman had mentioned, suspiciously enough. Marta picked up the little leather handbag, noting a small bloodstain on one corner, and upended it onto the bed. A small mirror, cracked pocket watch, pen, paper, and key ring fell out. Marta gave the bag another little shake and one more key slithered onto the light blue hospital blanket, this one attached to a leather cord.

  Marta picked it up, frowning. It was an unremarkable key, cheap and mass produced…just like the one she’d found in the Compendium. She retrieved the mold of the other key from her pocket and confirmed that, yes, they were the same.

  “This,” Marta said, waggling the bit of metal in her fingers. “Quite literally the key. How frightful.”

  “Someone has a sense of humor.”

  “A terribly literal one.” She returned the rest of the items to the chest and re-locked it, and then stuffed it back under the bed. “What time is it, Simms?”

  Obligingly, he checked his pocket watch. “Just gone half past nine.”

  “There are rather a lot of banks in this area, I saw as we came in. Banks offering safe deposit boxes.” She turned the key in her fingers. There were many possibilities for such a key, but that one certainly fit the location. “The banks all ought to be open by now.” And for half an hour—they might already be too late. “Whoever attacked me last evening took an exact copy of that key from me, and has no doubt put it to use already or will soon. We’d best hurry.”

  Only hurry was quite difficult, when one didn’t know where to aim hastened footsteps. Chippy trotted gamely along, fluffy tail high like a flag, as they crossed and re-crossed the broad square.

  They found the correct bank on the fourth try, one reputable enough to trust but still small-time enough to warrant cheap keys and slightly shoddy locks. Confronted by the bank of safe deposit boxes within the vault, Marta referred to the Compendium. There were no numbers in the notes, but… Marta turned to the page of the Zacetachichi and snorted, a little shock running through her. “Oh, you rude thing,” she murmured. Yet that was a sense of humor she could certainly appreciate.

  “Captain?”

  Marta waved a hand to shush him. “Box 202, Simms.” The key proved to be a perfect fit for that lock, confirming what she now knew, the details sliding into place in her mind. Deliah must be quite good at disguise, to have gone about masquerading as Morris. And she was quite good at other things as well, Marta thought ruefully, lightly touching her still-aching nose.

  “No envelope,” Simms said. “Just this.” He handed her a folded note.

  In neat copper-plate handwriting now familiar from the notes in the Compendium, the note read:

  Dearest “Mrs. Smythe:”

  I’d like to thank you for retrieving my key. Breaking in to a bank vault is a messy proposition in the best of times, and I’ve a timetable.

  If you would be so kind, I’d like my dog back now. I helped Grandaunt pick him out. Oh and I’d like my jewelry back as well. It’s part of my rightful inheritance, you know.

  Sincerely,

  Deliah

  PS: I’ll be waiting at the little coffee shop across the square for the next hour. I’ll be ever so disappointed if I don’t see you.

  Marta laughed, folding the note back up in her hands. “Rude indeed. Wonderfully rude.”

  “What?”

  “Fancy a spot of coffee, Simms? I’ve a few questions left I’d like answered.”

  As promised, Deliah Nimowitz waited in the back corner of the coffee shop across the square. She took out her fan and waved it coquettishly at Marta and Simms as they approached. As soon as they were within sight, Chippy began tugging madly at his lead. After a hand wave from Marta, Simms shrugged and let him go; the little dog raced to cover the last bit of distance, the leash whipping and snapping behind him. He immediately squirmed into Deliah’s lap.

  There was something satisfying to Marta, to see Deliah’s black mourning skirts get coated with dog fluff just as Simms’s jacket had. It made her look slightly less collected and smug. Deliah’s face was partially obscured by a black lace veil, though Marta could sense amusement crackling around her like an electric halo.

  “Hello, little darling,” Deliah murmured to Chippy, and patiently allowed him to wash her chin. “Please do sit…well, come now, you might as well tell me your real names.”

  “You haven’t figured that out yet?” Marta asked. “I’m a bit disappointed.”

  “I have been a bit busy,” Deliah said tartly. “Though if the two of you are married, I’ll eat my fan.”

  Simms snorted. “Do I look mad to you?”

  Marta was fairly certain that was supposed to be her line. But amusing enough, normally their bickering seemed to render their occasional role as a married couple more believable. “Captain Marta Ramos, at your service.” She swept Deliah a bow, doffing a hat she wasn’t actually wearing, and sat. “And my associate, whom I haven’t enough breath to name, and he’d rather you just call him Simms anyway.”

  Deliah’s fan snapped open and fluttered, perhaps obscuring a smile. “Oh, I am honored,” she said.

  Simms had remained standing; he glanced between the two women warily. “So she murdered Clementine Nimowitz?” His eyebrows went up as if to ask and we’re going to have coffee with her?

  “Do sit down, Simms.” Marta patted the chair next to her. She turned her attention to Deliah, meeting those remarkable tawny eyes again. The veil was no impediment at all. “Miss Clementine Nimowitz killed herself. Correct, Deliah?” With a bit of post-mortem assistance, obviously. But the intentional nature of it seemed clear: sending the maid away on an errand, giving away all of her no-doubt beloved plants, finishing the book that had been her life’s work first.

  Deliah nodded. Something tightened in her expression as if in pain, though Marta now knew better than to take any such tells at face value. “I was simply there to make certain it wouldn’t get… ugly… after.”

  “It was plenty ugly when we saw it,” Simms muttered.

  But they all knew it could have been immeasurably worse, all three glancing at Chippy.

  “Also, the intention was to give it the appearance of a murder, since she didn’t want to…shame…the family with a suicide. Always the bloody family and the reputation. And now you’ll ask why, I suppose,” Deliah said, sighing. “That’s rather personal…”

  “I know why already.” Marta leaned forward, elbows on the table. “She’d become senile, hadn’t she?”

  Deliah drew back a bit. Marta took oblique satisfaction in that. “How did you guess? The entire family had conspired to keep it quiet. One of the few things upon which we could agree.”

  “I don’t guess,” Marta said. “I might have ignored the comments here and there about her having gone a bit forgetful or odd, since that’s the sort of thing people often say behind the backs of the elderly. But the corrections written in the Compendium were inescapable. She’d only partially updated the book before she began to lose herself, hadn’t she?”

  Deliah’s voice was a bit hollow when she answered. “Just control of her hands, at first. I helped her with the last of it, taking dictation when she could focus. She knew she was struggling, but she wanted it finished.” Her delicate features thinned out with sorrow. “She was so frustrated. Such an intellect, and then…”

  That was a specter Marta hoped would never haunt her, though she did also wish to li
ve to a ripe old age. While not normally given to sympathy, it still struck home, though not enough to put her off her line of reasoning. “And knowing her weakness, the less scrupulous members of your family sought to control her.”

  “Yes.” The word was a venomous hiss.

  “But not you yourself?” Marta raised an eyebrow.

  “You took the evidence yourself. The will that named me as heir, which Morris so vilely attempted to replace, was signed before any symptoms began to intrude upon her life.”

  Which they had only Deliah’s word for, not that Marta felt a compelling urge to make herself magistrate over this familial squabble. The questions were being answered, and that was her primary concern. Next to her, she could all but feel Simms radiating discomfort at the implication. “I can only presume that Elizabeth Strickland’s final errand was to take a new copy of the will to the safe deposit box, then.”

  “Ah, Elizabeth,” Deliah sighed. “That was unfortunate. She was a good woman, and to be felled by random chance…” She stroked Chippy’s head. “That was why Chippy was left in the house, you see. She was supposed to have been back, perhaps an hour after the deed was done, to find her mistress murdered. But when she didn’t return, well…I could hardly be the one to find her just on my own. Morris had already been such an ass about me visiting Grandaunt that I had to start creeping about disguised as him to do so.”

  Marta snorted. “I don’t think you had to make him your disguise.”

  Despite the grim topic, Deliah laughed lightly. “Well, true. It was just a bit more fun that way.”

  “Why, then, take his now-invalid will?”

  There was something very predatory about Deliah’s smile. “So I could tuck it away in Grandaunt’s house where he would find it. I want to see the look on his face when his hopes are thoroughly dashed at the magistrate’s bench.”

  Ah, family. The source of such warm feelings. “And just what are you, Deliah?”

  The smile turned secretive. “A spy, dear Captain.”

  “For whom?” Oh, but that was fun.

  “For whoever can afford me.” Deliah retrieved a small filigree watch from an inner pocket of her jacket, checking the time before snapping it shut. “And with that, I’m afraid I must go. I’ve an appointment with Grandaunt’s solicitor. You took longer than I expected.” But rather than rise immediately, she leaned forward, Chippy momentarily hidden by her bosom. “But I’ll take my jewelry back now. That set was Grandaunt’s favorite.”

  Marta spread her hands, this time her smile taking on a smug air. “I no longer have it, I’m afraid. I’ve sent it to a safe place, but you know how this goes. Sometimes things simply get lost.”

  Anger flashed hotly in Deliah’s eyes for a moment, and then she laughed, sitting back again. “I should have made my request before telling you of my profession, shouldn’t I?”

  “Wouldn’t have made a bit of difference, I’m afraid. You’ve already made quite an impression on me.” Marta resisted the urge to touch her nose.

  Deliah set Chippy down on the ground and rose to her feet. Automatically, Marta rose as well. Deliah stepped around the table, putting them in closer proximity than was probably necessary. A stray corner of Marta’s mind noted, again, that Deliah smelled quite lovely. “Well, then. As a personal favor to me, would you mind looking for it?”

  “Well, we don’t normally take jobs…” Marta drawled. “We’re pirates. We tend to take rather than return. But…”

  “I take personal favors rather seriously.” Deliah reached out as if to pick a bit of fluff from the bodice of Marta’s dress, but instead leaned in more closely.

  “I—”

  Deliah proceeded to cut off the conversational riposte Marta had prepared by kissing her, a technique no one had ever dared try before.

  A moment later, Marta caught Deliah’s wrist, pulling her hand away from the pocket sewn on the inside of her jacket. “Naughty, naughty,” she said.

  “Well, I did have to try.”

  “I don’t—”

  Deliah gave her a particularly wicked smile and kissed her again.

  As gambits went, Marta decided after a moment, she could get to like this one, particularly when it involved such soft lips and—oh my—a very clever tongue, nearly so clever as the exceedingly attractive mind behind it all.

  After a long moment in which Marta heard nothing but the thud of her own heart and the sound of her breath rushing, Deliah pulled back. Delicately, she reached up to touch a finger just to the side of Marta’s nose. “More makeup, dear Captain. You’re still looking a bit squashed. I’d offer to kiss it better, but I think your man Simms might have an apoplectic fit.” She turned to go, Marta’s hand falling away—when, exactly, had she gripped the edge of Deliah’s sleeve like that?—and said over her shoulder in a thoroughly amused tone, “I look forward to hearing from you.”

  For once robbed entirely of words, Marta watched her go silently. Deliah did not glance back, her skirts swishing gracefully as she walked away, though Chippy did cast a few little looks toward Simms before bounding happily along in her wake. Only when Deliah had left the shop, her departure announced by the tinkling of the bell, did Marta murmur, “Oh, you wicked creature.”

  Simms looked rather like someone had hit him in the back of the head with a brick. At some point he’d risen to his feet—oh, the dear man, had he thought Deliah was going to attack her?—but now his legs seemed to no longer be prepared to hold him, and he thumped back down into his seat. “Well,” he said after a long moment, his tone shocked and affronted. Had he been an elderly society maven, Marta would have expected him to be clutching at his pearls. “Well, now I have seen everything.”

  “Oh, I hardly think that, Simms. I’ve gotten the impression there’s quite a bit more to it.” Marta sank back down to her own chair, carefully licking her lips. A thoughtful smile turned up the corners of her mouth as she considered the jewelry, the opportunities, the chance to work both with and against someone of that caliber—someone of that caliber with such gorgeous eyes and clever lips. “I’m certainly looking forward to finding out.”

  The Jade Tiger

  “You do realize I’m not a hired gun,” Captain Marta Ramos said, staring over the rim of her pint glass. “I don’t…take jobs.” She was a brown, handsome woman who wore trousers and boots by preference, since both were easier to fight in.

  “We really don’t,” Meriwether Octavian Simms—known by preference as “Simms”—agreed. He was a lanky man with a face made overly serious by muttonchops, his vest and coat of buttery buckskin.

  “It is not a job.” The woman shook her head. She looked old, though to Marta’s keen eye it was old before her time, worry lines creasing her face and her black hair gone stringy and shocked with gray. She was dressed like the other women of Silver Cliff, work boots and a canvas apron singed from the furnaces, but her high cheekbones and almond-shaped eyes were unusual in this part of the duchy.

  Marta set down her glass delicately. “Well, then, please speak your mind.”

  There was a certain level of infamy that Captain Ramos possessed, and Simms was fairly convinced that she reveled in it. While she never went into the large cities of the Grand Duchy of Denver without some sort of horrifying disguise, in the smaller mining towns (where infamy transformed to fame) she insisted on wearing her scarlet frock coat. It meant that they were constantly approached by those hoping to hire them (always unsuccessful), sell them information (occasionally useful), or pick a fight with Captain Ramos over the fact that she happened to be female (often good for a laugh).

  “May I…?” The woman tilted her head toward the empty chair at the table.

  “As if it’s been waiting for your arrival.” Simms gave it a push with the toe of one boot.

  The woman sat with a sigh that spoke of long hours on her feet. “My name is Jun Xing. I was formerly employed in the house of Lord Pike.”

  “I take it that your parting was not on good terms,” Marta
said.

  “I was blacklisted.”

  “So this is about revenge.”

  “No,” Jun said firmly. “It’s about justice.”

  Marta shrugged. “I already told you. I’m a pirate.”

  Jun’s hands were squeezed so tightly in her lap that her knuckles were white. “I merely have information. Perhaps you will find it useful. If you do not, telling you has cost me nothing.”

  “And what information could be so worthwhile?”

  “Lord Pike is coming to Denver from the Grand Duchy of Salt Lake. Within the week. And when he comes, he will have a gift for the Grand Duke.” Jun’s smile was brittle. “They did not part on very good terms either.”

  “What manner of gift?”

  “A large box of treated calcite lenses. Perfect ones, I have been told.”

  “That’s quite interesting,” Marta still sounded quite bored. The way she steepled her fingers in front of her lips spoke volumes to the contrary; to Simms, it was a warning bell indicating that his life, through no fault of his own, was about to become complicated. “I’ll be certain to consider what you’ve told us.”

  Jun opened her mouth to speak again, but shook her head and stood, her chair scraping across the floor. “I’m sorry I wasted your time.”

  As she turned to go, Marta asked sharply, “What did Lord Pike take from you?”

  Jun looked over her shoulder, one hand coming up to her throat. “A gold and jade pendant of a tiger. The greatest treasure of my family.”

  “I see. Good day to you, Mistress Xing.”

  Simms waited in silence until the saloon doors had swung shut. “That was a bit cruel even for you, sir.”

  Marta snorted and picked up her beer. “She’s directing us to a trap, Simms. It’s obvious.”

  “If it’s a trap, we’re not going.”

  “We most certainly are. If there’s even a hint of truth, it’s too valuable to pass up. I need to replace the lenses in my microscope, and you’ve been wanting a new set of goggles.”