Little Tiny Teeth

“I—” She saw where he was leading. “You’re right, Gideon, they’re all Indians, aren’t they? Smaller than I am. I would have noticed if he was only five-three or five-four. And he wasn’t.”

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“Well, then—”

“Well, then, it wasn’t one of the crew,” she said stubbornly. “That hardly proves it was Arden.” She spread her hands, a gesture of frustration. “Okay, he’s a drug-runner. That’s crazy enough, but I accept it. But to say that he’s a ...a murderer, that he tried to kill me... and besides, I haven’t heard anybody come up with a why—or with what he was doing out on the deck talking to himself in a . . . in a nightshirt or something, or what the scuffling I heard was, or—”

“I looked in Arden’s room afterward,” John said. “Nothing was disturbed. If you heard scuffling, it came from someplace else.”

“No, I’m quite positive—”

“Are you positive? You said you were sleeping. Are you sure you didn’t dream it?”

“Well . . . all right, I grant you, that could be, it might have been a dream. Let’s put aside the scuffling, then. But to suggest that it was Arden that . . .” She folded her arms. “No, I’m sorry.”

“Maggie,” Mel said thoughtfully, “what did he smell like? The man who threw you overboard.”

The question, like most of the others, seemed to annoy her. “What did he smell like? You mean, did he smell dirty, or—”

“Uh-uh. Arden was a steady pipe smoker, though. My brother always has a pipe in his mouth too, and the smell doesn’t just soak into his clothes and his hair, it soaks into him. It comes out of his pores. Get close to him and you can’t help smelling it. Do you remember anything like that?”

Good point, Gideon thought. Smokers do smell of their tobacco—pipe smokers more than anyone else, it seemed—and he himself had noticed the sweet, coconut-and- vanilla scent that hung around Arden.

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But Maggie rejected it with an impatient shake of her head. “No, I don’t—” She stopped abruptly, staring hard at nothing, her thoughts obviously turned inward. “Oh my God,” she said slowly, looking at each of them. “I did smell it. I smelled it and didn’t realize what it was. I thought it was something Cisco smoked, something familiar...marijuana . . . only it didn’t quite smell like marijuana. Sweetish, yes, but different. I guess I assumed it was something else like that, I don’t know, something from around here. But it wasn’t. It was Arden’s Sultan’s Blend—he gets it from England—how could I not have realized it? It just never occurred to me to think that . . . that ...”

She was rocking her head back and forth, hands steepled in front of her mouth. “My God . . . it’s so unbelievable...Arden. But why?”

269

TWENTY-ONE

BUT why?

That was the question that absorbed them for the remainder of dinner, but no persuasive or even credible answers emerged, and the flow of ideas slowed and eventually stopped. Everybody was tired. Everybody had missed most of the previous night’s sleep. Once the rice-pudding dessert was finished, people began leaving, talking about getting to bed early. There would be no convivial gathering under the stars that night. In the morning they would reach Leticia, and nobody knew what awaited them when the police were informed of the bizarre goings-on of the last few days. John had told them that they might all very well be detained—they would certainly be interrogated— and it wouldn’t hurt to be well rested. The Colombian police did not rank among the world’s most considerate forces.

Phil went off to wash clothes, John disappeared somewhere, and Gideon went to the ship’s “library,” a two-foot shelf of fly-specked novels in German, Spanish, and English, apparently none of them less

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than fifty years old. He found a dusty copy of Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street and took it out to the salon, hoping to read for a couple of hours in the early evening breeze and calm his mind. It had been a hell of a day. But the posture he chose—sprawled back in one chair, with his feet propped on another, proved too comfortable. It wasn’t long before the book fell open on his lap and dropped to the deck.

“Hey ...Doc.” John was shaking his shoulder.

He had been deeply, dreamlessly asleep. “What time is it?” he said, unwilling to open his eyes.

“What time is it? It’s seven o’clock. What difference does it make what time it is?” He was brimming with impatience and enthusiasm. “Come on, you’ve been snoozing for an hour. Open your eyes, wake up—I got something to show you. Come on. Hey.” More shaking.

Gideon grumpily brushed at his hand. “Okay, okay, don’t nag.” He squeezed his eyes open one at a time, reluctantly pulled his feet from the chair, stretched, and stood up.

John was standing there, bouncing on his toes and holding a manila envelope. Beside him was Phil, looking scrawnier than ever in nothing but his baggy shorts and a pair of flip-flops.

“All my shirts are in the sink,” he explained.

“Really? All both of them?” Gideon yawned and stretched once more. “All right, I’m awake. What’s all the excitement?”