That was fair enough—a certain aloofness was necessary for a captain, and Wilbur had been the same way himself with his crew when alive. She tended to privacy in personal matters; she never talked about her sexual orientation with anyone on the Natchez, though it was an open secret. Wilbur understood that choice as well, given the general chauvinistic attitude of most of the crews he’d known in his time.
He would be private with her about his own worries, then.
For that, he went to Jeremiah, who was one of the few people among the crew who the captain also confided in. He found Jeremiah writing a letter: using a fountain pen on nice, thick stationery. Jeremiah still used a fountain pen—refillable, not a cartridge. “All them little plastic things just getting thrown away,” he’d told Wilbur once. “That’s just a plain, sad waste.” Unlike most of the crew, Jeremiah didn’t own a computer or laptop; he still wrote letters when he wanted to communicate with someone outside, and wrote out checks for his few bills. He did have a cell phone, even if he rarely had it with him, but it was of the ancient, flip-phone variety. Wilbur had never seen him texting anyone with it.
That was fine with Wilbur, who also thought things had largely been better Back Then.
Jeremiah was off duty; Captain Montaigne was up in the pilot house, filling in for Kitty until the new assistant pilot came aboard. Jeremiah’s quarters were like the man himself: unassuming, understated, and a little old-fashioned, but everything in it was there for a good reason. The walls were lined with pictures and drawings of riverboats, several of the Natchez herself. Jeremiah was drinking a rum and Coke that smelled mostly like rum, the ice tinkling in the glass as he lay down and capped the fountain pen next to the letter.
Wilbur thrust his hand into the wall to draw in steam—he knew exactly where all the steam lines were on the boat. Behind Jeremiah, he allowed himself to become fully visible. “I haven’t heard anything new from the captain. Any new gossip you’ve heard?”
Jeremiah started heavily at the sound of Wilbur’s voice, spilling a bit of his drink. He craned his neck over his shoulder. “I don’t know about this talkin’ thing, Wilbur. It was bad enough when you’d just suddenly show up. Now you got a voice, you can scare the bejesus outta someone. Could you clear your throat or somethin’ to let a body know you’re there?”
“Sorry,” Wilbur told him. “I’ll try to remember that. But have you heard anything?”
“Well, the cap’n says she’s got a new replacement pilot set to arrive by launch tomorrow. I even heard a’ him: guy named Albert Mason, worked mostly on barges but for a few years was the pilot on the Delta Queen, so he knows steamboats. Retired a year or so ago. Cap’n must’ve convinced him to come back. Not like he’s gonna be here long, after all.”
Wilbur consoled himself with the thought that at least the Natchez would be in good hands until that point. “Did the captain say anything else? About the Natchez, I mean.”
“Nope,” Jeremiah said. He took a long swallow of his drink. “Not a word. Far as I know, this’ll be my last trip on your old Natchez. Maybe my last trip pilotin’ ever.”
“I … no, we can’t let that happen, Jeremiah.”
Jeremiah set the glass down on a coaster. “There’s a difference between not wantin’ somethin’ to happen and actually stoppin’ it from hap’ning, Wilbur. I don’t see how either of us got much chance of the latter. It’s the money talkin’. It’s always the money talkin’ for people like that bastard Jackson. Always has been, always will be.”
“I’m aware of the importance of money. I’ve had experience with that.”
Jeremiah chuckled slowly. “I guess you have, seein’ as you say that’s what got you shot.” He picked up his glass again, swirling around the ice cubes. He looked with nut-brown eyes trapped in a net of wrinkles at the wispy outline of Wilbur. “If there ain’t no steam up anymore, that’s gonna really mess with you, ain’t it?”
“What if…” Wilbur hesitated, wondering if he really wanted to say the next words aloud. Say a thing out loud, and you make it real. So be careful what you say. That was something Eleanor sometimes used to tell him. “… I killed Jackson?” he finished. “I could do that easily, you know.”
Jeremiah set down his whiskey glass on the desk with a sharp crack. He took the sheets of the letter he’d been writing and folded them in thirds. “You don’t mean that,” he told Wilbur as he pulled an envelope from a slot in his desk and placed the sheets inside. “You don’t even want to think it.”
“Why not? Wouldn’t that solve the problem? No one would know how it happened, and even if they did, how are they going to arrest me?”
Jeremiah was already shaking his head. “First of all, it ain’t likely to change nothin’. The man’s shares would just go to his heir, and the consortium’s already made up their minds. You’d just have that man’s death on your conscience. You already told me you feel like you’re paying for what you did to Carpenter, and that was justifiable for what he did to you. The Wilbur I know ain’t got it in him to deliberately just murder someone. Face it, you ain’t no killer, Wilbur.”
Wilbur simply nodded his head. The truth of the statement burned within him like steam. No, he couldn’t do that, couldn’t stay inside the man and feel him die around him. It had been bad enough with Carpenter, and the guilt still nagged at him after decades. He couldn’t imagine how he would feel—he knew Jackson had a wife, children, and grandchildren; he knew that from what he’d overheard. The loss of Eleanor had been devastating to Wilbur; he could easily imagine the desolation of Jackson’s wife and children on hearing of his death, no matter what he personally thought of the man.
All the anger building up in him collapsed, cold as water.
Jeremiah grunted, as if he saw that in Wilbur’s steamy posture. “I wish I could help,” he said. “I really do. But that ain’t the way, my friend. That ain’t never the way.”
“I know,” Wilbur said steamily. “But I can’t think of any other way out.” He hesitated. Condensed steam was beginning to make the carpet wet underneath him, and he slid over a few feet. “Yet,” he added finally.
“Well, when you do, let me know. Mebbe I can give you a hand. Too bad that Nurassyl couldn’t fix you so you could drink again. I’d offer you a good, stiff shot in the meantime.” Jeremiah lifted his glass in Wilbur’s direction. “Cheers,” he said.
“Cheers,” Wilbur answered. There was nothing else to say.
It was late in 1949, a year after the Natchez had started running the Mississippi. While Wilbur loved being on the river and being on the boat, it had been a difficult year financially. The monthly payments on the initial loan were due, passengers were more scarce than Wilbur had imagined, and too few companies still used riverboats to move their cargo.
Wilbur was sitting at his desk in the captain’s stateroom with legal papers and bank statements arrayed in front of him. It was a dismal sight, the equivalent of overlooking a blood-soaked battlefield strewn with bodies, where there was no choice but for the general in charge to admit defeat and surrender. Wilbur was kneading his temples against the headache pounding at the inside of his skull when he heard Eleanor enter the stateroom.
“I’m afraid it’s over for the boat, my love,” he said aloud, without looking back at her. He didn’t want to look at the disappointment or perhaps the anger he imagined would be on her face. “I don’t see any way for us to go on like this. I’m not going to be able to make the next loan payments. I’m going to lose the Natchez. All my work, all our work, is just—”
He stopped. Eleanor’s hand had moved in front of his face, holding a check. Wilbur blinked at the amount written there. He turned to see her face, an oddly sad smile set there. “Eleanor, how in the world…” He stopped, realizing he’d never seen Eleanor fully dressed without jewelry, but she was wearing none now. “What did you do? Your emerald necklace, the jewelry from your parents…?”
“I sold it all,” she said simply. “Our Natchez needed them more than I
did.”
“But—” Wilbur began to protest, but Eleanor put her finger to his lips, shaking her head.
“Hush,” she said. “It’s done. You’re going to put that check in our bank account, and you’re going to pay off some of our creditors.”
“Eleanor, I can’t do that,” Wilbur protested. “Those were gifts from your family. Heirlooms.”
“You’re my family, Wilbur. The most important part of all. And this…” She spread her hands, gesturing around them. “This is what we’ve built together. Your dream. What you’ve always wanted.”
“I have what I want. I have you.”
Eleanor’s smile widened at that. “That’s very nice of you to say, dear. Sometimes what you have to do for family, what you have to do to achieve what you want, is to refuse to give up on them, to change whatever needs to be changed and make whatever sacrifices are necessary. That,” she said, pointing at the check, “is just a small one. Those pieces of jewelry were just pretty baubles. This boat holds all of your dreams, and because of that, it’s become my dream as well. So don’t say anything more. This is what we need now, both of us.”
Wilbur could only shake his head. He took her hands and pulled her down into an embrace. “I don’t deserve you,” he told her, and was rewarded with a laugh.
“Then you’d better get working to make sure you do,” she told him.
He would, but in the end, the boat wouldn’t make enough of a profit to save him.
Wilbur left Jeremiah’s cabin and went into a bright afternoon, drifting down the promenade of the texas deck toward the stairs. He figured he’d head down to the Kazakhs’ cabin and talk to Jyrgal and Nurassyl, who’d begun to teach him a bit of the Kazakh language.
But he saw the familiar trio of young men in raincoats and laden with odd pieces of equipment emerge from the head of the staircase toward the bow of the boat, well away from the Kazakhs’ cabin: either Captain Montaigne had given the ghost hunters permission to explore the upper decks, or they’d simply ignored the chain with the CREW ONLY sign that was usually draped across the bottom of the stairs.
“Okay! Let’s get some good readings up here before someone sees us,” the heavily tattooed, studded, and bejeweled Ryan was saying. “Come on…”
This is your own damn fault, all that worrying about your own problems. It’s serendipity. Karma. You can’t have these idiots prowling around up here, not with the refugees so close. Wilbur moved toward the trio, pausing once at a wall behind which he knew one of the steam pipes ran. He thrust his hand into the wall and into the pipe it hid, drawing more steam into himself and absorbing it. He knew that in the sunlight, the most the ghost hunters might see was the wispy, uncertain outline of a figure, but still made certain that the steam inside him remained unseen.
“Are you sure we should be doing this, Ryan?” Sean, the blond cousin, again carrying most of the equipment, asked. “We don’t want to piss off the captain or get tossed off the boat at the next stop—the trip’s just started and though we have some great footage already, there’s so much more to check out.”
“Christ’s sakes, Sean,” Ryan told him. “Quit being such a wimp. We’ll just tell her the chain was down and we thought that meant we were allowed up here. C’mon, let’s get to work. Sean, you scan for EMF residue; I’ll get temp readings and see if there are any anemones.”
Wilbur sighed at that. So did Kevin, the third young man of the group, wearing a black tee and his usual plaid newsboy cap. “Anomalies,” he told Ryan. “You mean anomalies.”
“Whatever.” Ryan shrugged. “Just make sure you’re filming everything as we go, Kevin, just in case we hit something good. Some of the crew hinted that there’s weird stuff going on up here.”
They started moving slowly down toward Wilbur, as Wilbur moved just as deliberately toward them. It was probably leftover irritation and frustration from his talk with Jeremiah, but Wilbur felt angry. Felt that he wanted to do something.
The probe Ryan was wielding was pointed directly at Wilbur, who allowed it to penetrate his body. “Shit! Look at this!” Ryan exclaimed, stopping so suddenly that Sean nearly ran into him. Kevin brought the camera close, zooming in on the instrument: the camera was a Sony, Wilbur saw. He shook his head. He’d never understood how quickly a country that they’d fought in World War II had gone from a bitter enemy to a ubiquitous consumer goods supplier. “I’m getting a reading of fifty degrees Celsius right here—that’s almost hot enough to scald someone.” Ryan moved the probe to his right; Wilbur stayed where he was. “Down to twenty-two degrees Celsius here: air temp. You got that, Kevin?” And back … “Fifty degrees again.” Ryan blinked heavily. “Not a cold spot; a very hot spot.”
“Steam Wilbur,” the two others said nearly simultaneously.
“You guessed it,” Wilbur said aloud, and was pleased to see all of them jump at the sound of his new voice. He moved then, quickly. He put his hands around the Sony being held by Kevin, allowing them to fully penetrate the device, which suddenly became very hot. Kevin dropped the camera with a curse. It was rather too heavy for Wilbur to hold; the camera bounced on the decking, and Wilbur put his feet through it. Steam condensed into water and puddled around it; they could all hear the crackle of electronics shorting out.
“You can’t come up here again,” Wilbur said, the words emerging in wisps of steam. “If you do, it’ll be the last mistake you make. You’ll end up like this…”
Wilbur moved quickly, entering Kevin’s body. For a second, he was lost in Kevin’s thoughts—What the fuck? It’s like I just stepped into a sauna …—then he snatched control of the body from the young man. He forced Kevin to take a step, then another, toward the rail. He could feel Kevin fighting him, but the ghost hunter had already lost that battle; the water and heat his body was absorbing drained his energy and his will. Wilbur brought one foot over the railing, then looked back to Ryan and Sean. “Next time, I’ll make him jump,” he said, this time with Kevin’s voice. “Then I’ll force the two of you to jump right after him. Now go while you can! GO!”
With that final shout, Wilbur stepped away from Kevin, who collapsed into a soggy heap on the deck, his clothing drenched. He coughed, retched, and threw up water and whatever he’d eaten for breakfast: eggs and toast, with bits of bacon, Wilbur decided.
Sean was already lumbering toward the stairs. Ryan, to his credit and Wilbur’s mild surprise, went to Kevin, helping him up. “Kevin, c’mon, little bro.” With one arm around him, he slowly followed Sean, looking around him fearfully all the while, as if he expected Wilbur to jump out from the nearest cabin. They left the camera where it was.
Wilbur watched them leave. “I need to stop doing that,” he muttered. “It always makes me feel so dry.”
Wilbur crouched down next to the camera. So small now. They used to be enormous. He started looking for the film compartment or the button to eject the video cassette, then belatedly remembered the new cameras used neither anymore. Everything’s small now. Flipping up the cover, he took out the memory card. Moving to the stern of the boat, he watched the paddle wheel churning below him in the wheelhouse. He held the card over the white water and the dripping paddles and let it drop. It hit one of the rising paddles, bouncing once, then vanishing into watery chaos.
He did feel somewhat better, having chased away the Dead Report kids and hopefully convinced them to stay away from the texas deck. He went back down the promenade a bit to the door of stateroom 3, and went through. “Sälem!” he said: Hello. “I thought I’d stop by for another lesson.”
Late the next afternoon, Captain Montaigne, JoHanna, Jeremiah, and the bartender, Jack, were ensconced in Montaigne’s quarters. Wilbur had seen them gathering and was there as well, slipping in unseen while the door was open to admit JoHanna.
“I’ve heard from the JADL that several hundred of the captured refugees from the Schröder are all now on this place called Rathlin Island, not far from Belfast. That’s where they’ll be deporting anyone
they catch. The island is quarantined and the waters around it patrolled. They’ve been told that any unknown boats trying to leave the island will be sunk,” Jack was saying, scowling. “They’re acting like these poor people are carrying a plague.”
“We know better,” JoHanna said. “They’re just people. Nothing more. But if our group is found…” She let the statement hang for a moment. “Jack and I have firmed up everything with the JADL. All the drop-offs are set. But we’ll still have half a dozen of the refugees with us when we reach Cincinnati—they’ll be picked up there and taken to Charlotte, where their contact is a guy called Theodorus, supposedly some wealthy joker who’s a big donor to the JADL.”
“There ain’t nothing easy or safe about any of this for anyone in this room,” Jack interjected. His Cajun accent was nearly as thick as JoHanna’s. “We’re still days away from Cincinnati with the stops we’re scheduled to make. We’ve already had one visit from ICE, and I’d be surprised if there ain’t more. From what I’ve heard, there’s lots of official types interested in finding Nurassyl, especially. And this Theodorus wants us to make certain he gets to Charlotte.”
Jeremiah sniffed at that. “There’s already been people snooping around that cabin, and I’ve heard some of the crew wonderin’ about the meals that keep gettin’ sent up there. The rumors from the crew are all over the place: that there’s some big-ass star holed up there with his or her entourage who don’t want to be seen, or that it’s one a’ them aces or jokers doing the same, or that the people in there came down with a nasty communicable disease they picked up traveling. Hard to keep it from the crew that there’s people in there, and then havin’ the passengers pick up on it.”