Feast of Murder(57)
The one thing he did do was to light another candle. It was sitting in the holder on the opposite side of the doorway where the already lit candle was, and he lit the new one off the old, grateful for even this small sliver of extra light. Then he sat down on the low plank that had been built into the open side of the bunk to serve as a stair for someone climbing into bed and as a bench for someone who needed to sit. Jon Baird stood in the doorway, his back in the passage, waiting.
“Well,” Gregor told him, “I take it you heard what I said to Tony, or somebody heard it and told you.”
“About Charlie dying from strychnine? Yes, I heard it. I wasn’t very far from the door. Nobody was very far from the door. They all heard it.”
“You realize it must have happened at dinner?”
“I don’t realize it was strychnine, Mr. Demarkian. I think I’m with Tony on this. I know you’re supposed to be an expert, but you’re not a medical doctor and you haven’t run the tests a coroner would run to determine cause of death. You’re just speculating.”
“Am I?”
“Tony was right about something else, too,” Jon Baird said. “Nobody would want to kill Charlie Shay. Even his wife only wanted to divorce him, and she’s off in California or Tibet or something anyway. Charlie Shay wasn’t the kind of man who made enemies. He wasn’t even the kind of man who made good friends.”
“Mmm,” Gregor said. “Of course, we’re in a better position than I thought we were going to be. I thought we were going to lose the body. Now we have the body, and we can give it to the proper authorities as soon as we can contact them. Can we contact them?”
“Eventually.”
“There is no radio on this boat?”
“No.”
“What about emergency signaling equipment? What about flares?”
“There’s not a single thing on this boat that couldn’t have been here in the seventeenth century.”
“But that isn’t true, is it?” Gregor insisted. “There were the chairs this morning, for one thing. There was the salad tonight. Your commitment to authenticity isn’t anywhere near monolithic.”
“Oh, it’s monolithic all right,” Jon Baird said with feeling. “All those things you’re talking about—and there are more—all those things were Sheila’s idea. Sheila’s always got ideas. It doesn’t do to thwart them.”
“So you’re saying that everything on this boat that is anachronistic to the seventeenth century was brought on board by your wife.”
“Exactly.”
“All right.” It wasn’t all right at all. Gregor didn’t believe this nonsense for a minute. After all, even if the salad had been Sheila Baird’s idea, the salad dressing had been a Jon Baird specialty. Mark Anderwahl had said so. Still, for the moment it was better to let it drop. “Let’s go about it this way,” Gregor said. “What about making land. We have a dead body on board. Something happened to make it dead. It seems to me we ought to make contact with a police force as soon as physically possible.”
“I agree.”
“Then you’ll order the crew to head back to land.”
“Well, I could,” Jon Baird said, “but it wouldn’t do any good.”
“Why not?”
Jon Baird rocked back on his heels, smiling slightly. “Do you know why the Puritans landed in Massachusetts? They were on their way to Virginia. They got blown off course.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s supposed to mean we don’t have a modern compass on this ship. We don’t have navigating instruments. We don’t have radar or sonar or any of the rest of that. We don’t even have a motor. All we do have is the sun and the moon and the stars. Which right this minute happen to be covered by clouds.”
“Does that mean you’re not going to do anything at all about finding us a way to contact the authorities?”
“Not at all. I’m going to do everything I can. I’m just trying to tell you it’s not going to be much.”
“Do you expect that to look good when we finally do get to talk to the police?”
“I’m not sure it’s going to matter what it looks like. You know, Mr. Demarkian, there’s one thing you haven’t considered.”
“What’s that?”
“This ship was headed straight out to sea from the Virginia shore. It wasn’t supposed to have gone out past the twelve-mile limit, but it might have. And even if it didn’t, how is anybody going to be able to tell? Who is going to have jurisdiction here? I still say this wasn’t a murder. It’s absurd to even think Charlie Shay might have been murdered. There wouldn’t be a sane motive on earth. But as for the police—” Jon Baird shrugged. “I’ve never had much use for the police,” he admitted. “I’ve never understood how any man could take a job that was so unlikely to make him any money. I’m going up now. Are you going to come with me?”