Huckleberry Finished

by Livia J. Washburn

  “Yeah. Actually I was born in a little town down in the boot heel of Missouri, but I was raised in St. Louis.”

  “Have you been acting long?”

  “No, not really. The bug bit me late.”

  “What did you do before that?”

  He shrugged. “I was a lawyer.”

  I tried not to stare at him. “Let me get this straight. You gave up being a lawyer so you could play Mark Twain for a bunch of tourists on a riverboat?”

  “Yeah, pretty crazy, isn’t it?” he asked with a grin. “But there comes a time when you’ve got to do what you want in life, or what’s the point?”

  I couldn’t argue with that.

  “What about you?” he went on. “Did you always want to be a travel agent?”

  “Well…not really. But once I got into the business, I liked it.” I told him about working for one of the big agencies in Atlanta until I finally decided to take that leap of faith and open my own business. As I told him, I saw that he had done basically the same thing by leaving law and becoming an actor. That was a leap of faith, too.

  I went on to tell him about my daughter, Melissa, and her husband, Luke, and my twin teenage nieces, Augusta and Amelia. I didn’t tell him anything about what had happened during the first Gone With the Wind tour the year before. I didn’t want to scare him off.

  Both of us lost track of the time for a while, a sign that we were enjoying the conversation. Eventually Mark glanced at his watch and said, “I’ve got to go get ready for the performance. Maybe we can talk some more afterward.”

  “I’d like that,” I told him.

  He left the salon. I checked the time myself and saw that I was almost too late for dinner. I had forgotten all about it while I was talking to Mark. With a wave to the bartender, I left the salon.

  Most of my clients who planned to have dinner on the boat had probably eaten already, I thought as I headed down the stairs to the main deck. But a few of them might still be in the dining room, so I headed that way, figuring I could at least put in an appearance and maybe get something to eat. Just something to tide me over, though, because I was already thinking about suggesting a late supper to Mark….

  The sobs coming from a dark area along the rail caught my attention and made me freeze. I didn’t know who was there. All I could see was a shadowy figure bending over the railing. I thought about going to find a steward, but that seemed a little cowardly. Instead I said, “Hello? Is there something I can do for you?”

  The figure jerked around from the rail and came at me.

  CHAPTER 5

  I started to jump back and raise my arms to defend myself, but then I recognized Louise Kramer. I couldn’t bring myself to believe that the meek little woman was attacking me, so I stayed where I was. Sure enough, Louise didn’t do anything except hug me and get the shoulder of my dress wet where her tears were falling.

  “Why, honey,” I managed to say, “what in the world is wrong?”

  She shook her head and didn’t answer. I patted her on the back and made the sort of vaguely comforting noises that people always do in situations like that.

  Then a possible explanation occurred to me. I said, “Did that big ol’ husband of yours do something? Did he hurt you, Louise?” My blood started to boil at the thought.

  That finally jolted her out of her teary silence. “What? You mean Eddie? Oh, no! Eddie would…would never hurt me.”

  I wasn’t so sure about that. I hadn’t liked the look of Eddie Kramer earlier in the day. He was nearly twice the size of his wife, and from the sound of the way he’d talked to whoever was on the phone, he liked to bully people. Size and meanness were a bad combination.

  “Are you sure? I can call somebody, or go find a security officer—”

  She jerked away from me. “No! I told you, Eddie didn’t do anything to me. I…I’m just upset. It’s personal. There’s nothing you can do to help.”

  One thing I’ve learned in the travel business is your clients’ personal lives really aren’t any of your business. As long as they don’t disrupt the tour or break any laws, you’re better off giving them their privacy.

  That’s what I did then, backing off and holding up my hands. “I’m sorry,” I told Louise. “Whatever’s wrong, I didn’t mean to intrude. But I meant it when I said that if there’s anything I can do, I’d like to help.”

  She took a handkerchief or a tissue from her purse. In the dim light, I couldn’t tell which. She used it to dab at her eyes and then took a deep breath, composing herself with a visible effort.

  “Thank you, Ms. Dickinson.”

  “Delilah.”

  She summoned up a smile. “Delilah. I promise you, there’s nothing you can do. I’ll be all right in a little while.”

  “Well…okay. If you’re sure.”

  “I’m certain.”

  My eyes were more used to the dim light now. I could see that she didn’t have any bruises or black eyes or anything like that. Nothing visible, anyway. And she had sounded like she was telling the truth when she said that her husband hadn’t hurt her. I knew I should have been ashamed of myself for jumping to that conclusion, but I wasn’t. Not after I’d seen the way some women were treated in their marriages.

  “I was just on my way to the dining room to see if there’s anything left to eat,” I told her. “If you haven’t had dinner yet, why don’t you join me?”

  “Oh, I…I couldn’t eat anything right now. But thank you for asking. I…I think I’ll go back to my cabin and lie down for a little while.”

  “You’re comin’ to the salon for the Mark Twain performance, aren’t you?”

  “I’ll try,” she said with a weak smile, but I didn’t honestly believe that I’d see her there.

  She walked toward her cabin—or toward what I hoped was really her cabin, after the trick Ben Webster had pulled on me earlier. I didn’t think Louise Kramer had any reason to try to fool me. I watched, anyway, as she took a key from her purse, unlocked a cabin door, went inside, and shut the door softly behind her. She struck me as the sort of woman who had never slammed a door in her life.

  That was an odd little incident, I thought as I started toward the dining room again, but it wasn’t that uncommon for somebody to get emotional and lose control momentarily while on a vacation. Traveling was really stressful for some people, after all.

  More of my clients than I expected were still in the dining room when I got there. I helped myself to some appetizers at the buffet table and then circulated among the guests, asking them how they were enjoying the trip so far and things like that. Just pleasant chitchat.

  I mentioned the Mark Twain performance in the salon to everyone, too, urging them to attend. I wanted Mark Lansing to have a good crowd for his first performance, although, when I stopped to think about it, he might have preferred not to have so many people looking at him. I knew that if I were an actor or a singer or something like that, the bigger the crowd, the more butterflies I’d have fluttering around in my stomach.

  But it was too late to do anything about that now. Quite a few people expressed an interest in watching the performance, so as the time approached eight o’clock, I led a good-sized group out of the dining room and up the stairs to the second deck. We went into the salon and found places to sit at the bar and at the tables, and there were comfortable chairs and divans scattered around the sumptuously furnished room.

  I didn’t see Eddie or Louise Kramer anywhere in the salon, but that didn’t surprise me, even though I was a little disappointed. I’d been hoping that Louise would feel better and would want to take in the show.

  A few minutes later, the double doors from the deck opened, and Mark Twain ambled in, cigar in hand. He went to the bar, rested an elbow on it, and looked around the room at the passengers, who had quieted down as he made his way across the salon. Once everyone was quiet, he said, “Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.”

  That got a nice laugh. Mark acknowledged it with
a wave of the unlit cigar. “I want to welcome all of you to the Southern Belle. As some of you may be aware, I worked on riverboats much like this one, back in my early days. I was an apprentice pilot to Captain Horace Bixby, whose task it was to teach me the river. But the face of the water itself, in time, became a wonderful book…a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.”

  I guessed that most of that must have been a passage from Life on the Mississippi that Mark Lansing had memorized. He continued talking in Twain’s words about the river, about how the slightest ripple might indicate a snag under the water that could tear the bottom right out of a riverboat. Despite its peaceful, placid appearance, the river hid many dangers under its slow-moving surface, and a good pilot had to be able to recognize all of them instinctively.

  Mark was good; I had to give him that. He spoke Twain’s words with precision and conviction. After a while, listening to him was like being back there roughly a hundred and fifty years earlier, when the country was still young and brawling and vibrant.

  Gradually the focus shifted from the river to young Sam Clemens’s boyhood in Hannibal. I didn’t know which pieces of writing the passages came from—probably more than one—but Mark wove them together into a narrative that was, well, rollicking. It was easy to see how young Sam’s experiences in Hannibal had become the stuff of fiction in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Mark kept the audience alternating between rapt attention and uproarious laughter. He never broke character and was never less than convincing in his portrayal.

  Most of the performance had to do with Hannibal and the Mississippi, but to wrap it up Mark performed some material about Twain’s days as a newspaper correspondent in the West, then talked about politics for a while. The jabs at Congress and the president were as timely as when Twain wrote them, and the passengers in the salon seemed to enjoy them a lot. When Mark waved his cigar in the air and said, “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” they gave him a standing ovation.

  After the performance people crowded around to talk to him. Some of them even wanted an autograph, which Mark provided even though he looked a little uncomfortable doing so. I thought he did, anyway. He stayed in character while chatting with the passengers. I waited until they left him alone before I slipped up beside him.

  “Oh, Mr. Twain, that was just amazin’,” I said in a breathless voice. “You’re my favorite writer in the whole wide world.”

  Mark kept smiling under the bushy mustache, but he said, “I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared in my whole life.”

  “You didn’t have anything to be scared about. You were great!”

  “You really think so?”

  I nodded and said, “I do.”

  “You’re not just saying that?”

  “Nope. You had all these folks eatin’ right out of the palm of your hand. I think everybody in here enjoyed it. I know I did.”

  “Well, it’s kind of you to say so.” Mark took a handkerchief from the breast pocket of the white suit coat he wore and patted his forehead with it. A little make-up came off on the handkerchief.

  I linked my arm with his and said, “Come on over to the bar. It’s not every day I can ask Mark Twain to have a drink with me.”

  The same bartender brought us champagne. Mark had some trouble drinking his through the drooping fake mustache, but he managed. “Next time I’ll get rid of this soup strainer first,” he complained.

  “No, no, you have to leave it on,” I told him. “It makes you look distinguished.”

  “You really think it went all right?”

  “I know it did.”

  Mark relaxed after that, and we chatted about his performance and the passengers’ reactions. Some of them still came up to him to shake his hand and thank him for an entertaining evening. He seemed to enjoy talking to them, and after a while I leaned over to him and said, “I think you may have a future in this business.”

  “What, riverboat acting?”

  “It’s a start. Today, the riverboat. Tomorrow, Hollywood or Broadway!”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” he cautioned, but I could tell he was pleased by what I’d said.

  I started thinking about what a pleasant evening it had turned out to be after all, despite the strains and worries of the afternoon. The Kramers could work out their problems between themselves. Wherever Ben Webster had gone, at least I was confident he wasn’t still on the riverboat. The rest of the overnight cruise was bound to go smoothly.

  I know, I know. I’m dumb that way sometimes.

  I was nursing another glass of champagne when the cell phone in my purse rang. Thinking that it might be Melissa or Luke, I said, “Excuse me a minute,” to Mark and stepped away from the bar while I took the phone from my purse.

  The number on the display wasn’t a familiar one, though. I didn’t even recognize the area code. I opened the phone and said, “Delilah Dickinson.”

  “Ms. Dickinson.” It was a man’s voice, calm and powerful, and one that I’d never heard before, as far as I could recall. I didn’t have to wonder whom it belonged to, though, because he went on immediately, “This is Captain Williams.”

  “Captain Williams?” I repeated.

  “Captain of the Southern Belle,” he explained. “Where are you right now?”

  The blunt question took me by surprise. “Why, I’m in the salon—” I began.

  “Stay right there if you would, please. Mr. Rafferty will come and get you.”

  “Come and…get me?” Whatever this was, if Rafferty was involved it couldn’t be good.

  “That’s right. There’s something…or rather, someone…you need to see.”

  No, sir, I thought. Not good at all.

  CHAPTER 6

  Mark must have seen the worried look on my face as I closed my cell phone and slipped it back into my purse. “Problem?” he asked. “Something about your tour?”

  “I don’t know.” I picked up my glass and threw back the rest of the champagne. Luckily there wasn’t much of it left, or I might have choked on it. “That was Captain Williams. You know him?”

  “I’ve met him a couple of times. I’m new at the job of playing Mark Twain, remember? I don’t know any of the crew all that well yet.”

  “When you talked to him, did the captain strike you as the sort of fella who’d get worked up over something if it wasn’t important?”

  “Not at all,” Mark said, not hesitating a bit. “He seemed very calm and levelheaded to me.”

  There went my idea that maybe the captain wanted to fuss at me because one of my clients littered the deck or something like that. Calm and levelheaded meant that Williams wouldn’t be sending the head of security to fetch me unless something important had happened.

  “If there’s anything I can do to help…” Mark went on.

  I didn’t want to burden him with my problems. Besides, I didn’t even know yet what the problem was. So I shook my head and said, “No, that’s all right. But I appreciate the offer from a famous man like Mark Twain.”

  Just then, Logan Rafferty came into the salon. He moved with a brisk efficiency that said while he wasn’t hurrying, he wasn’t wasting any time, either. He spotted me and started across the salon toward me.

  I put my hand on the sleeve of Mark’s white coat for a second and said, “Maybe I’ll see you later. Congratulations again on your performance.”

  Rafferty wore a pretty grim expression as I went to meet him. “Ms. Dickinson,” he said. “Please come with me.”

  He kept his voice pitched low. I could tell that he didn’t want to attract any more attention than he had to. That was sort of difficult to do, though, as big and tough-looking as he was.

  “Where are we going?” I asked as we started toward
the door of the salon.

  “Captain Williams will explain everything to you.” He paused, then added, “And you’ve got some explaining to do, too.”

  “Hey, I may be a redhead, but I’m not Lucy Ricardo.”

  He didn’t as much as grunt. I don’t know if he didn’t get the reference, or if he just didn’t have much of a sense of humor. Of course, the comment wasn’t really that funny to begin with, I told myself.

  I expected Rafferty to take me up to the pilothouse, since that’s where Captain Williams would normally be. Instead, when we reached the stairway, he headed down toward the main deck. But he didn’t stop there. He opened a door and revealed some stairs that led below decks. Down there was the belly of the boat, the engine room and the boilers and all the other things that made the Southern Belle go.

  “Where are we going?” I asked, suddenly feeling even more nervous than I was before. “Are you sure Captain Williams is down here?”

  “He’s waiting for us,” Rafferty said.

  Short of turning and running, which he hadn’t really given me any reason to do, my only other option seemed to be to follow him down those stairs. With plenty of misgivings, I did so.

  Since the boat was docked, the main engines were off, but I could still hear the rumble of the generators that provided electricity. The riverboats in Mark Twain’s time hadn’t been equipped like that, of course, but there were only so many creature comforts modern tourists would give up in the name of authenticity. Folks wanted to be able to flip a switch and have lights and air-conditioning.

  When we reached the bottom of the stairs, Rafferty led me along a narrow, metal-walled corridor. We turned a couple of times and then went around a corner to see several men standing in front of a small door set into the wall. The door was partially open, but I couldn’t see through it because of the man who stood in front of it.

  He was tall and slender—lean was actually more like it—and wore a white uniform with gold braid on it. A black cap sat on his head. He was in his sixties, I estimated, based on his white hair and the weathered look of his face. Dark eyes stabbed at me as he snapped, “Ms. Dickinson?”