“SOwhat do we think happened, exactly?” Phil asked. “I’m a little confused. Somebody go over the sequence for me.”
Phil, John, and Gideon were sitting in a nook at the rear of the upper deck, aft of the cabins. It was four-thirty and the first pale pink smears of the day were just beginning to show up ahead on the eastern horizon, although high in the sky, a single, torn shred of cloud was lit a flaming orange. The meeting in the dining room had broken
up half an hour earlier, and the three had come up here to talk things over on their own.
“All right,” John said. “Apparently Cisco came after Scofield and—”
“When?”
“Well, it would have to have been right before Maggie came out of her cabin.”
“Where?”
“Where?”
“
“In his cabin,” said Gideon. “Maggie heard them scuffling, remember? And Scofield’s room is right next to hers.”
Phil nodded. “Okay, so he walks in on Scofield, who is not only asleep, but pretty much gaga from that crap he drinks, and drags him out of bed, and flops him over the side, is that it?”
“Probably something like that,” John said. “Could be, he slugged him or...You know, I should take a look at the room, see if there’s any blood or anything.”
“Okay, and then what happens?” Phil asked.
“Then Maggie wakes up, goes outside, sees Cisco standing at the rail admiring his handiwork, and he turns around and sees her, and over the side she goes too, letting out a yell that Doc here hears.”
Gideon nodded.
“And then?” Phil persisted.
“And then,” said Gideon, “after I yell ‘Man overboard’—and probably make a racket falling all over myself trying to get to the door in the dark—Cisco bids us good-bye too.”
“Uh-huh.” Phil was plainly doubtful. “And that’s it?”
“As far as we know,” John said. “What’s the problem?”
“Well, first, why would the guy just toss Maggie overboard? I mean, couldn’t he figure out she’d scream? Wouldn’t he, you know, knock her out or choke her or something?”
“Yeah, a rational person would,” John said, “but we’re talking about Cisco here. Who knows what he had in his system by that time of night?”
“Not only that,” said Gideon, “but if the guy had really just killed Scofield, Maggie’s showing up would have thrown him into a panic. And when you’re talking about panic, there’s no such thing as a rational person.”
“Okay, I can see that,” Phil allowed, “but what about the splashes?”
“What
“There should have been three of them, but we only heard Maggie and Cisco hit the water. Why didn’t we hear Scofield?”
“What do you mean, ‘we?’ As far as I remember, I’m the only one who heard any of the splashes. You two were snoring away, right up to the ‘man overboard’.”
“Well, hell, we were further away,” John said. “You were right next to Maggie’s room.”
“And just one more down from Scofield’s,” Phil added. “So why didn’t you hear him go in too?”
“Phil, I was lucky to hear Maggie go in. It wasn’t the splashes that woke me up. It was that yelp when she cut her ankle. If not for that—”
John’s head came up. He sniffed once, twice. “Do I smell smoke?”
“Must be some more logging up ahead,” Phil said, as they got up to peer around the corner of the cabin block.
BUT there weren’t any logging projects along this stretch of the Javaro. The acrid smoke was coming from a charred, one-story wooden building built on the right bank above a rickety old pier that was under repair, with some jarringly clean new planks among the dark, rotten ones.
“Looks like a house,” Phil said. “What’s left of it, anyway.”
“No, I don’t think so,” Gideon said, looking at the blackened structure. “It’s pretty big for that, and that’s a fairly good-sized unloading pier down below. I think it’s some kind of commercial building. A warehouse or something.”
