Sabina’s decision to say nothing yet to Amity or Elizabeth about the violent death of Prudence Egan had been the right one.
19
Quincannon
It was midafternoon on Sunday when the Southern Pacific steamboat Delta Queen whistled for her arrival at Kennett’s Crossing. Quincannon, standing at the deckhouse rail with his valise in hand, had a clear view of the sorry little backwater as the packet drew up to the landing.
The hamlet’s buildings were all on the southwest side of a wide body of brownish water colorfully and no doubt accurately named Dead Man’s Slough. On both sides of the slough, a few hundred yards from where it merged with the broad expanse of the San Joaquin River, a raised levee road ended at a cable-operated ferry landing; the barge was presently anchored on this bank, next to a ramshackle ferryman’s shack built close to the edge of a thin rind of mud and cattails. A pair of large bells on wooden standards, one at each landing, were what travelers used to summon the tender when the ferry barge was on the opposite bank.
On this side the inn, a long, weathered structure built partly on solid ground and partly on thick pilings, stood next to the levee road. The rest of Kennett’s Crossing ran upward in a ragged line to where the slough narrowed and vanished among tangles of swamp growth and stunted oaks choked with wild grapevine. Its sum was approximately a dozen buildings and several shantyboats and houseboats tied to the bank alongside a single sagging wharf.
Quincannon was the only passenger to disembark. As soon as he stepped off, deckhands raised the gangplank and the Delta Queen’s whistle sounded again and her stern buckets immediately began to churn the river water to a froth. There was no sign of anyone abroad as he strode up the road to the inn. Scuds of dark-bellied clouds gave the place an even bleaker aspect, like a bad landscape painting done in chiaroscuro. The smell of ozone was sharp in the air. There would be rain by nightfall.
Two men were in the inn’s common room, a giant with a black beard twice as bushy as Quincannon’s and an old man with a glass eye and fierce expression, who slouched with hands on hips before a minimally stocked liquor buffet. They appeared to have been engaged in an argument, which ended abruptly upon Quincannon’s entrance. His deduction that the giant was the innkeeper proved to be correct; the gent’s name was Adam Kennett.
“Is it food, lodging, or both you’ll be wanting, mister?”
“Neither at the moment. It’s information I’m after.”
“What information would that be?”
It was overly warm in the room; heat pulsed from a glowing potbellied stove. Quincannon opened his chesterfield and unwound his muffler before speaking. “Did a woman arrive on one of the night boats from Stockton last night?” he asked. “Young, handsome, blond haired.”
“Young? Handsome? Phooey!” This came grumblingly from the old man. “Ain’t nobody like that in this miserable excuse for a town. Never has been, never will be.”
“I’ll have no more of that, Mr. Dana,” Kennett said.
Dana glared at him with his good eye. “An outrage, that’s what I call it. A damned outrage.”
“Watch your language. I won’t tell you again.”
“I’m a veteran, by grab, I served with McClellan’s Army of the Potomac in the War Between the States. I’m entitled to a drink of whiskey when I have the money to pay for it.”
“The buffet is temporarily closed,” Kennett explained to Quincannon. “And for good reason.”
“Good reason my hind end. Not a drop of spirits sold on account of religion, and me with a parched throat. It ain’t right, I tell you. I ain’t Catholic. I ain’t even a believer.”
“Well, I am.”
Quincannon said, “If the woman I described did arrive by steamer last night, would you be aware of it, Mr. Kennett?”
“No. I don’t stand down at the landing in the middle of the night, or the middle of the day, neither. Folks come to me if they want food or lodging. I don’t go looking for them.”
“Do you know a local man given to wearing a long buffalo coat?”
“That’s like asking if I know a local man wears galluses. Buffalo coats ain’t what you’d call uncommon around here.”
“Short, squat, large head, hardly any neck. Thirty-five or so.”
“That sounds like Gus Burgade,” the old man said.
Kennett shrugged. “Could be.”
“Who is Gus Burgade?” Quincannon asked.
“Runs a store boat, the Island Star. Puts up here sometimes when he’s not out making his rounds.”
Store boats, small in number, prowled the fifteen hundred square miles of sloughs and islands between Sacramento and Stockton, peddling everything from candy to kerosene to shantyboaters, small farmers, field hands, and other delta denizens. More than one of their owners were reputed to be less than honest. “Was the Island Star here night before last?”
“Sure it was,” Dana said. “Gone yestiday morning, though.”
“Due back when, do you know?”
“Later today or tomorrow, likely,” Kennett said. “You got business with Burgade?”
“I may have. With Mr. Noah Rideout, too. I take it you’re acquainted with him.”
“The high-and-mighty farmer?” The innkeeper’s voice took on a truculent edge. “I know him to speak to, not that he’ll have much truck with the likes of me.”
“Goddamn teetotaler,” Dana said. “Phooey!”
“I told you before to watch your language, mister. And keep your voice down, too, or out you go.”
“Throw me out with foul weather comin’, would you? And without so much as one little drink of whiskey to warm my bones.”
“One little drink is never enough for you.”
“How much whiskey I swallow ain’t nobody’s business but mine.”
Kennett sighed. “Burgade’ll have a jug of forty-rod for sale, if you’re willing to pay his price.”
“I’ll pay it, right enough, if he comes today. But I suppose I can’t bring the jug back here to sip on where it’s warm?”
“No, you can’t. Kennett’s Inn is a temporary temperance house.”
“Temporary temperance house. Phooey.” Dana moved away from the buffet, then stopped abruptly to give Quincannon a closer one-eyed scrutiny. “You a Johnny Reb?”
“Johnny Reb? Hardly.”
“Southerner, ain’t you? Tell by your accent.”
The old man must have ears like an elephant to detect what was now only a faint trace of a southern accent. “Born in Baltimore,” Quincannon admitted, “but I’ve lived in San Francisco for fifteen years.”
“Once a Johnny Reb, always a Johnny Reb. Spot one of you graybacks a mile away. Only good Reb’s a dead one, you ask me.”
“The Civil War has been over for thirty years, Mr. Dana.”
“Tell that to my right eye. It’s been pining for the left one for more’n thirty years. Damned Reb shot it out at Antietam.”
He clumped over to a long puncheon table and sat down with his arms folded and mouth downturned into a lemony pucker.
“Don’t mind the old coot,” Kennett said to Quincannon. “He’s only like that when he’s sober and getting ready for a trip to the doctor in San Francisco. His bark’s worse than his bite.”
“About Noah Rideout, Mr. Kennett. Have you ever seen him in the company of a woman such as the one I described?”
“Can’t say I have because I haven’t. He minds his business; I mind mine.”
“How far is his Schyler Island farm from here?”
“Six, seven miles.”
“How do I get to it?”
“You figure on going out there today?”
It was one of two options, the other, less desirable one being to wait here on the chance that Gus Burgade and his store boat would put in an appearance. Action was always preferable to passive waiting. If Pauline Dupree wasn’t to be found at the Schyler Island farm, Rideout himself might have returned there by this time.