Case file
The River Palace
The premise
The lower Mississippi, October 1927. The packet steamer River Palace runs Memphis to New Orleans in four days. Once a year she carries the October game: ten years running, invitation only, in the texas lounge. At 22:00 last night Lyle Ransome, who owns the boat, put the deed to Conroy's Reach into the game's bank. He does it every October, with the same toast — to the house that floats.
At 23:30 the fog came down the river like a wall. At 23:40 the pilot tied the Palace to the bank for the night, and the fog bell called the crew to stations for twenty minutes. At midnight the purser opened the strongbox to bank the first session. The cash was all there. The deed was gone — and squared on top of the money sat three thousand dollars in banded hundreds that nobody aboard will claim to have left.
No skiff has touched the hull and the stage is up: whoever opened that box is still aboard. The fog lifts when it lifts — daylight at the earliest. You have three rounds.
Who is at the table
Everyone introduces themselves with one public line before a word is said. Nothing below is a clue — this is only what the whole table already knows.
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Vida Marlowe
The boat's singer, two seasons aboard — the ten o'clock set and the midnight set. She sings standards the way other people read old letters.
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Callie Greer
The pilot. Thirty years on this river; she knows every sandbar and bend by its first name, and the fog is hers to call. What the pilothouse window sees, she sees.
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Cassius Boone
A gambler in a white suit who has ridden the October game seven years straight. He wins politely, loses rarely, and nobody on this river has ever seen him angry.
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Orin Pettigrew
The purser: the strongbox, the passage book and the boat's money answer to him, and have for twenty-two years. The fog bell is the one thing on the river with the authority to move him off his stool.
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Lyle Ransome
Owner of the Palace line and host of the October game for ten years. Every October he stakes the same deed and makes the same toast, and every October he wins it back or buys it back.
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Temple Rutledge
"Major" Temple Rutledge, a passenger of no stated business who knows everyone's game and plays none. He boarded at Memphis with good boots and no luggage worth the name.
Where you are
The Palace by night: the texas lounge where the game runs, the boiler-deck promenade, the purser's office amidships, the pilothouse above it all, the stage rail forward. The fog was a wall. The bell rang stations from 23:40 to midnight, and every one of you was out of a chair for some part of it. The deed to twelve hundred acres is on this boat — or in the river.
Everyone at the table gets a character, three cards and one rule: you may hide things, you may not invent them. Between the acts a dossier appears on every phone with a new fact about somebody in the room — and it never clears anyone.
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