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scent before, and—” He stopped, tensing. He swung around to face Gemma, who was plastered against the bulkhead with her little pistol drawn.
    Both he and the woman had their own revolvers out before one could blink.
    And now Gemma had not one but
three
guns aimed at her.
    “Astrid, Lesperance,” said Catullus Graves as though making introductions at a card party, “you remember Miss Murphy.”
    “From the trading post?” demanded the woman. Gemma recalled her name: Astrid Bramfield. She had exchanged her mountain woman’s garb of trousers and heavy boots for a more socially acceptable traveling dress. Yet the woman had lost none of her steely strength. She eyed Gemma with storm-colored eyes cold with suspicion, an enraged Valkyrie. “Following us all the way from the Northwest Territory. She must be working for them.”
    Them?
    “Let’s give her a chance to explain herself,” said the other man, level. Though he didn’t lower his gun. Nathan Lesperance, Gemma recalled. He wore a sober, dark suit, as befitting his profession as an attorney, but the copper hue of his skin and sharp planes of his face revealed Lesperance’s full Native blood.
    A white woman, an Indian man, and a black man. Truly an unusual gathering. One Gemma was glad she’d followed.
    “I retrieved this from her,” Graves said, holding up the notebook.
    “What does it say?” Astrid Bramfield asked sharply.
    Graves glanced down at the notebook. A frown appeared between his brows. Gemma nearly smiled. Her handwriting was deplorable, mostly because she deliberately made it illegible to anyone but her. No sense letting other reporters read her notes. She may as well give those buffoons in the newsroom all of her bylines.
    “I don’t know,” he answered.
    At this, Astrid Bramfield looked surprised, as though Graves admitting a deficiency in
any
knowledge was shocking.
    “If I may translate,” Gemma said, holding out her hand. She did not miss the careful way in which Graves returned her notebook, avoiding the contact of her skin.
    Wanting her own distraction, she looked down at her notes, although she hardly needed them. Every word of the conversation she’d overheard was inscribed permanently on the slate of her memory. She recited everything she had heard.
    “Eavesdropping,” snapped Astrid Bramfield. “I prefer to call it ‘unsupervised listening,’” Gemma answered.
    A corner of Graves’s mouth twitched, but he forced it down and looked serious.
    Gemma closed her notebook and slipped it back into her pocket. “All very strange and bewildering, you must admit.”
    “We need not admit anything,” Astrid Bramfield replied.
    “You’re a journalist,” Graves said with sudden understanding. His keen, dark eyes took note of her ink-stained fingers, the tiny callus on her right index finger that came from holding a pen for hours at a stretch. “That’s what you were doing at the trading post in the Northwest Territory.”
    Gemma nodded. “I had planned on writing a series of articles about life on the frontier. But when you crossed my path, I knew I would find a hell of a story. And I was right.”
    “A journalist,” Astrid Bramfield repeated, her tone revealing exactly how she felt about reporters.
    No doubt most members of Gemma’s profession deserved their reputation. But Gemma wasn’t like them. For one thing, she was a woman. Not an automatic guarantee of integrity, yet it was a small mark of distinction.
    Something that looked suspiciously like disappointment flickered in Catullus Graves’s eyes before being shuttered away. “You’ll find no story here, Miss Murphy.” He took a step back, and she found, oddly, that she missed his nearness. “It is in your best interest, when this ship docks, to turn around and go home.”
    Back to Chicago? She would never do that—she had crossed a continent and an ocean for this story.
    “Who are the Heirs?” Gemma asked.
    Graves, Lesperance, and Astrid Bramfield all tensed.