“Right. At which point, thinking fast, still standing on the roof, she yells ‘Help, help, I’m drowning, I can’t swim!’ and
“I’m getting it, I’m getting it,” Phil said. “That’s pretty smart!”
“So when I come out on deck,” Gideon went on, “she’s in the water thrashing around, and in I go to get her.”
“Wait, maybe I’m not getting it,” Phil said. “What was that business with her screaming ‘Get him, he’s getting away!’?”
“That,” John supplied, out ahead of Gideon now, “was supposed to explain that second splash. The first one— Scofield hitting the water—was
“Wow, that’s fast thinking,” Phil said. “But how could she take a chance on accusing Cisco? At that point everybody thought Cisco was still aboard.”
“Not everybody,” Gideon said. “Do you remember Tim’s telling us that Cisco said that he’d be leaving the ship and maybe wouldn’t be back?”
“That’s right!” Phil exclaimed. “And Maggie was there when he said it—she told us so. So . . .”
“So all she had to do was double-check Cisco’s room first and see if he was there or not. If not, she had a clear field. If yes—well, I don’t know, maybe come up with another plan. But he
“Yeah . . .” began Phil, but then vigorously shook his head. “Nope, nope. She couldn’t know she was going to cut her foot, she couldn’t know she was going to have to jump in the water herself. So why would she check his room first?”
The question hadn’t occurred to Gideon, but after a moment he came up with a reasonable, or at least a credible, answer. “Because she probably planned for the blame to fall on Cisco for Scofield’s disappearance—and presumed death—in any case. I mean, who else? And if Cisco wasn’t there any more, if he’d fled the ship, that would cinch it. Or so she thought. And then, even if he did come back, he’d still be the logical suspect, being as loopy as he was.”
Phil was nodding now. “Yeah, okay, I see.”
“And then,” Gideon went on, “when Tim came up with the old history between them—who Cisco really was— she must have thought it was Christmas: a ready-made motive. At any rate, no one was going to think Maggie had anything to do with it.” He paused. “And we didn’t.”
They all sat there cogitating the scenario he’d put forth. Even to Gideon, it was sounding a little rococo by now, and more than a little fanciful.
“So that scuffling she says she heard,” Phil said. “She just made
that up? And the guy in the nightshirt, the mumbling to himself? That too? Just made it up on the spot to make it seem more believable? She’s that quick on her feet?”
“I believe so,” Gideon said.
“And nothing really happened on the deck outside her cabin? It all happened up on the roof?”
“That’s what I think. And I’m in the rearmost cabin, remember, practically right under where Scofield was sitting, which is probably why I’m the one who heard it.”
Phil scratched at his pepper-and-salt beard, which was growing in even less neatly than usual. “But why get rid of that chair? I doubt if blood from her ankle would have gotten on the chair.”
“Because pulling him out of the chair and wrestling him overboard would have been harder than just sliding the chair over the edge with him in it,” Gideon said. “That’d be my guess.”
John, who hadn’t participated for the last minute or so, was looking at his watch. “She’s been gone over ten minutes. That’s a long time to get to her room and back.”
“You don’t think she jumped ship?” Phil asked. “No, what am I saying? She can’t swim.”
“She
They exchanged a look, and before Gideon could get the whole sentence out, they were running for the stairs. At her cabin they pounded on the door. There was no answer. Without waiting any longer, John flung it wide open.
“Aw, jeez,” Phil said, turning away.
TWENTY-THREE
“
“Apparently, she couldn’t face what she knew was coming,” Gideon said, “and it would have been easy enough to do herself in. She had a whole pharmacy full of weird plant compounds in her cabin.”
“We’d need an autopsy to make it definite,” John said. “The body went to Bogota and they told us they’d do one there, but who knows? And even if they do, whether we’ll ever hear about it . . .” He finished with a shrug.
