front of Scofield’s cabin.”
They nodded. “So?” Phil said.
“So take a look at the railing. It’s the same down here as it is up there. Smooth, rounded, polished wood.” He slid his hand along the surface to illustrate his point. “You want to tell me how you can cut your ankle on that? You could bruise it, break it, sure, but cut it? Uh-uh.”
“Well, wait up a minute, Doc,” John said. “I’ve seen plenty of cases where something blunt like that—a bat, a hammer—can cause a cut, and a damn big cut at that. So have you.”
“No those aren’t
A laceration was typically a wound from a blunt object, he explained, and was really a rupture, usually from the skin’s being stretched over the underlying bone and split open by the impact of the
object—an example would be the way a boxer can get a “cut” on his brow from an opponent’s soft, padded, twelve-ounce glove. As a result, a blunt-object wound was usually pretty obviously torn, rather than cut, with ragged, irregular, abraded edges. And of course, the area around it would be bruised from the crushing of blood vessels under the skin. A cut, on the other hand (more properly, an incised wound), resulted directly from a sharp edge being drawn along the skin. The edges of the wound were themselves sharp, not messy, and, more important, there was no damage to the surrounding tissue, no bruising.
“And that’s what the cut on Maggie’s ankle looks like,” Phil said, nodding. “Yeah.”
“Yes. It looked like a mess before, with all the blood. But now you could see it was clean. And it’s been almost twenty hours. If there was going to be any bruising, it would have shown up by now.”
“So what you’re saying,” John said, swallowing the last of his tangerine, “is that she cut herself—lacerated herself—on ...what, the stanchion?”
“More likely the cut end of the guy wire. Did you see what those wires are like? They’re made of—I don’t know what you call them— a whole lot of thin, stiff wires twisted around each other and then around a core.”
“Wire rope,” John said. “Real strong stuff.”
“Yes. And the ends are sharp as hell when they’re cut off on the bias. Like a hundred little scalpels. That’s why they’re usually covered with tape or with some kind of sleeve, if there’s going to be any traffic around them. But not up there.”
“So
telling us?” Phil said, obviously confused. “And cut herself while she was getting him over the side?”
“That’s what I’m telling you. You caught your foot on the wire yourself, and you weren’t trying to wrestle anybody overboard.”
“But then who threw Maggie in the river? What’d she do, toss herself overboard?”
“I believe so, yes.”
He came back to the table, sat down, and resumed pulling the white, citrusy wadding out of the cucumberlike fruit. It was like eating a pomegranate. You ignored the bean-like seeds and just ate the sweet packing around them.
Phil shook his head, scowling. “Aw, no. Aside from its being ridiculous, it’s impossible, Gideon. It doesn’t add up. Listen, there were only two splashes, right? It’s like Mel said; the second one came
“No, I don’t think it did.”
“Sure, it did. Think back, right to the beginning. What was the first thing you heard?”
“That little yelp.
“From Maggie, right?”
Gideon nodded.
“Okay, a little yelp,” Phil went on. “And then a splash—that’s Maggie hitting the water—and then she yells for help: ‘Help, save me, I’m drowning.’ And
“What if it didn’t happen that way? What if it happened this way? What if—”
“Three
start.” He was still attached to his own theory. But he was paying keen attention.
“What if,” Gideon continued, “Maggie, knowing that Scofield is likely to still be up there in a stupor after everybody else leaves, goes up with the idea of doing just what she did—pushing him off the back of the ship. But while getting him over the edge, she catches her ankle on the end of the wire—”
“And yelps, which is what wakes you up,” Phil put in.
“Correct. And a half second later I hear Scofield hit the water, although I don’t know it’s Scofield at the time. That’s splash number one. So I shoot out of bed and yell that somebody’s overboard at the top of my lungs.”
“Which
