“Also seems more than possible that Grace told him about the letters, maybe even let him read them, since initially she believed he shared her moral beliefs. I also imagine she would have sworn him to secrecy. Grace was always telling me how a woman can be more influential working behind the scenes. A big believer of hiding her light under a bushel, was my cousin.”
Laura heard the mixture of anger and sadness in Caro’s voice and said, “After seeing these articles, deliberately put where she—or others—might find them, she must have finally understood why Willie’s fraternity brothers were being so unkind to her and suspected he was the one who had told them about the letters.” Leaning forward, she said, “Then, to add insult to injury, she discovered that Willie happily spent the afternoon dancing with Miss Sinclair, Elliot’s sister. No surprise that she felt betrayed and broke off the engagement.”
Caro sighed deeply and crammed the pile of papers in her purse. “But Laura, while this explains the broken engagement, it doesn’t explain why she went running home three weeks later, even given how upset she might have been over the fake essay at the society meeting. Or why she wrote in her deathbed letter to me that other people on campus are in danger. Do you think that maybe she suspected that these fraternity boys have been targeting someone else?”
“That’s possible, although I would think I would have heard if that were true, don’t you? Then again, I didn’t know about what was happening to her.”
Caro nodded and said, “I think it is high time for me to confront Mr. Willie Caulfield and see what he has to say for himself.”
Caro picked up the last tart and took a sharp bite out of it, and Laura felt just the tiniest bit sorry for the young man.
Chapter 20
Monday morning, March 14, 1881
Berkeley
“It isn’t necessary to take the full course. You can go as a ‘special’ for as long as you want to stay…” 920 O’Farrell Street, Harriet Lane Levy
Seth watched Laura’s retreating back as she hurried down the station platform in front of him. She had muttered something about needing to check with Miss Sutton before she took off like a shot.
Hang Miss Sutton!
He knew his anger at the woman was unreasonable, but Seth felt like every time he made an effort to get back on better footing with Laura, the blasted woman and her theories that her cousin had been hounded to her death got in the way.
He’d made arrangements to meet Laura for dinner on Saturday, determined to tell her about working for Nate, try to explain why he hadn’t told her earlier. But he was late again, and before he could say a word, she launched into her newest theory that Miss Atherton had been targeted by the fraternities because of some letters the young woman wrote to some defunct student newspaper.
He knew from the moment Laura told him that Miss Sutton was back in town that she was going to get involved with her again. Just as he knew she wasn’t being forthcoming on Tuesday when she told Kitty and Celia she had been investigating the campus scandals of a couple of years ago for a newspaper article. Not that what she’d found wasn’t interesting, but it seemed pretty far-fetched to think that there was a connection between what she found and some organized conspiracy to harass Miss Atherton.
In addition, didn’t she see that the more she talked about fraternities and the problems they created for students, the more upset Celia got? Laura would never purposely hurt anyone, but when she got excited about some cause, she didn’t always understand why everyone else didn’t get as het up as she did.
He’d once joined a cause, along with hundreds of thousands of other young men. Snuck into the Union army when he was fifteen. Not that he regretted joining, a man had to do what he could. But eighteen years later, he wasn’t sure that the sacrifice and deaths of so many had made a damn bit of difference. Nor did he believe talking about it would do any good. What happened, happened. Just like whatever happened to Miss Atherton happened. Damned shame, but there it was. No reason to dig up the past.
All weekend, Laura wondered what had happened during Caro’s confrontation with Willie Caulfield, if she’d even been able to talk with him. But she hadn’t heard a word. Made her jumpy as a cat. To make matters worse, when she got home from work Friday evening, all primed to tell Annie about Grace and what she and Caro had discovered, it was to find that her sister-in-law didn’t need her company for dinner because Annie had insisted that Nate come home early for once.
Too tired to even think about going back on campus for the Neolaean meeting, she had gone down to the kitchen to see if she could cadge an early dinner. To no avail. Mrs. O’Rourke told her they were too busy…some domestic crisis with the flue to the oven…and she would just have to eat at six with the rest of the boarders. Normally this wasn’t a problem; she liked getting a chance to catch up with everyone over dinner, something she didn’t often get to do because of her work schedule. But last night the high-pitched voices of three children and Millie Moffet’s unceasing monologue had exacerbated the headache she’d developed at work while setting type for an author who unaccountably scattered italics throughout his text.
After dinner, she went upstairs to put a cold washcloth on her forehead, and she actually slept for a few minutes.
Then she was woken up by what sounded like Nate and Annie having an argument in their bedroom next door. Laura suspected the subject of the fight was how often her brother worked late at the office. Why did men have to be so pig-headed about being the main bread-earner? Annie hadn’t married him for his earning potential! Didn’t he know that by now? Suddenly the voices had dropped, so she assumed they had gotten to the making-up part of the fight. This had been even more uncomfortable to contemplate, so she went down to the parlor to join in the spirited card game the children were playing with Mrs. Hewitt. The fact that she kept losing to eleven-year-old Ian Hennessey didn’t do much to restore her to good humor.
Saturday and Sunday hadn’t been much better. She never did find a moment alone to talk to Annie. And although, for once, Seth was able to meet her for dinner Saturday after she left work, he arrived late. As a result, she had barely gotten to the point of telling him about Caro’s plans to restart the investigation when he had to leave. And, as he counted out his tip, he’d said that, from his experience, there wasn’t any percentage in trying to figure out the secrets of the past, and he hoped she would encourage Miss Sutton to move on. Her wretched temper had flared and she told him that, as far as she could tell, he wasn’t doing all that good a job of moving on from the secrets in his own past.
Such a stupid, cruel thing for me to say to him.
Not surprisingly, he’d not shown up for Sunday dinner or the afternoon study session. Ned had come, though, so she hadn’t even been able to talk freely to Celia and Kitty about her new discoveries about the anti-fraternity ban.
As a result of her growing impatience, this morning Laura practically flew up the hill to campus, hoping to catch Caro before she went into Professor Moses’ political economy class, which was just down the hall from Laura’s nine o’clock English class with Instructor Royce. Since Caro already had a bachelors and had enrolled in January as special student, she hadn’t any difficulty getting permission to start attending classes again, despite her two-month absence.
As Laura exited the stairs onto the second floor, she saw Caro beckoning to her from the end of the hallway, so she quickly wove between the clumps of students standing outside of each classroom.
Without preamble, Caro said, “We have ten minutes before the bell. Let me tell you what happened on Friday.”
“You met with Willie?”
“I caught him as he came out of his afternoon English Literature class. I re-introduced myself, only this time as Grace’s cousin. At first, he tried to put me off. Said that he didn’t have time to talk to me because he had to get to the fraternity house to pack for a camping trip he was taking this weekend.”
“What did you say?”
“I said if h
e’d spent a little time answering my questions when I met him last January, Grace might not be dead.”
“Oh my, Caro, how did he react?”
“He looked like he might faint as he stammered out how sorry he’d been when he heard of Grace’s passing. Then he got defensive. Told me that my suggestion that he’d had any role in Grace’s death was outrageous. That’s when I bluffed and told him I knew he was responsible for telling his fraternity brothers about Grace’s letters to the Oestrus. And that meant he was responsible for them harassing her to such an extent that she was forced to flee campus.”
“Did he deny that he’d told them about her anti-fraternity letters?”
“No, he didn’t. He probably assumed Grace told me, but it was nice to have this confirmed. Instead, he went on and on, attempting to justify what he’d done. Said if Grace hadn’t been so disparaging of his decision to join the fraternity, so disdainful of his good friends, he wouldn’t have gotten angry and told someone about her letters.”
“Wouldn’t you know he’d blame Grace? Always the woman’s fault.”
“When I asked him how he could have let these good friends of his harry her so unmercifully, he said I was blowing everything out of proportion.” Caro smiled grimly. “That’s when I told him that I doubted very much that the university administration would consider acts like the destruction of the Junior Exhibition Day decorations and the creation of a fake essay as harmless pranks. Particularly since these so-called pranks appear to have been part of a personal vendetta against Grace. A vendetta that eventually led to that her death—since her family doctor believed that her emotional state when she fled home contributed to her inability to recover from the influenza she contracted on that trip.”
“Oh my! What did Mr. Caulfield say to that?”
“Nothing at first. Just opened and closed his mouth like a fish. Then he begged me not to go to the authorities, saying he’d had no idea that Grace had taken the pranks so seriously, and he was distraught to think they might have had anything to do with her passing.”
“Do you think he really felt bad about what happened?”
“Not really. I do know he was frightened by the idea that I would go to the university authorities. I told him that he had a simple choice—tell me everything he knew about what had been done to Grace, and by whom—and I would think about refraining from telling anyone about what happened.”
Laura stared at Caro for a moment. She could hear the anger in her friend’s voice and imagined that to Willie Caulfield, Caro must have sounded both completely sincere and truly terrifying. She said, “Did he cooperate?”
“He said that he needed time…to think. He told me that some of the people who’d been involved in the pranks—particularly some of the underclassmen—were innocent of doing anything malicious. According to him, what they’d said and done to Grace were similar to the kind of jokes they played on male students who were grinds.”
Laura thought of all the derogatory comments Seth had to put up with because he didn’t drill with the student cadets or join in on the ridiculous campus rushes. The snide suggestions that he was too stupid to understand the importance of a trained military…or that it was cowardice that kept him from joining in with the other freshmen as they tried to pummel the sophomores into handing over their canes.
She said, “That was supposed to excuse their behavior?”
“According to him. He added that all of them had suffered much worse at the hands of the upperclassmen when they joined the fraternity.”
“And these so-called gentlemen weren’t uncomfortable about the fact that they were harassing a female?”
“I did mention that to him, but he just shrugged and said that some men on campus felt that if women wanted the right to attend co-educational universities…they needed to be able to take a joke…like a man.”
Laura started to respond, but Grace held up a hand and said, “Look, we could discuss the wrong-headedness of that attitude all day. The important point is Mr. Caulfield promised to meet me today. And I think I scared him enough to get him to tell me something more. I hope that he will at least give me the names of the older students who encouraged the younger men to target Grace.”
“Did he give you any idea if it were only Zetas involved? That would narrow down the names considerably.”
“Actually, he said his fraternity wasn’t alone in harassing her…as if that excused his own fraternity brothers. However, he did admit that the primary impetus came from those seniors who were still angry over the mass suspensions—and who blamed students like Grace who were vocally anti-fraternity. But I thought it was also interesting that he thought these seniors weren’t totally responsible because he believed they were being encouraged by some individual who was working behind the scenes.”
“Some individual? Like who? Sounds to me like he was desperately looking for someone else to blame, and he wanted the weekend to figure out exactly who he was going to accuse.”
“That was my impression. He said the camping trip would give him some time to decide what to do next. He didn’t want to implicate someone who was innocent. However, he did agree to come by my boarding house this morning, around eleven. Do you want to be there?”
“I would love to, but I think it would be better if he didn’t feel there were any witnesses…he might be more forthcoming. I…”
A sudden commotion down the hallway caught Laura’s attention. When she turned to look at what was causing the noise, she saw an agitated crowd had formed around the door to Professor Moses’ class, their voices raised. Seth emerged from the knot of students, hurrying down the corridor towards them.
“What’s happened, Seth?” she said, noticing the extreme concern in his grey eyes.
“It’s Willie Caulfield. Ned Goodwin just came up the stairs and said that they had learned over at the Zeta Psi house that he died this weekend. He was on some sort of camping trip, and apparently he wandered off in the middle of the night and ended up plunging down a cliff…broke his neck.”
Chapter 21
Monday evening, March 14, 1881
San Francisco
“A coroner’s jury returned a verdict yesterday of accidental death.” San Francisco Chronicle, November 17, 1881.
Annie looked over at her husband, who stood glaring down at his sister, and silently pleaded with him to curb his temper. His hunched shoulders and ferocious frown made him look even more like an angry hawk than usual. Laura, her feathers equally ruffled, glared right back, her brown eyes snapping.
They are so alike…but so different.
Annie never failed to marvel at how mother nature had taken the same material for both siblings (tall, slender builds, thick, wavy dark brown hair, equally dark brown eyes under arched eyebrows, and prominent cheekbones) and with a few minor tweaks (Nate’s beak of a nose, thin lips, and wide shoulders and Laura’s slightly turned-up nose, full lips, and creamy skin) turned one of them into an extremely handsome man, the other into a very beautiful woman.
As for their personalities, she supposed it was the very similarities between them that explained why her usually reserved, slow-to-anger husband and her sweet, empathetic sister-in-law could find themselves furious with each other in the blink of an eye.
She struggled up out of the armchair by the fireplace, sighing audibly, and said, “Kathleen will be up momentarily with my evening tea, and if she senses the slightest tension in the room, she will tell Mrs. O’Rourke, and we will have her up here to give us all a tremendous scold. So calm down, both of you.” She then placed her hand over the prominent curve of her stomach. “Also, the little sprout, here, seems to have excellent hearing and gets very agitated when you two raise your voices, kicking me unmercifully.”
Nate took the two steps needed to be at her side. Putting his arm around her shoulders, he led her to the table by the bay window overlooking the street. She sighed again as she lowered herself into the straight-backed chair next to the table.
Her husband rested his hand on her shoulder and said, “See, Laura, this is why…”
“No, Nate. You are not to berate your sister. Someone she knew is dead. She is understandably upset. Who else would she come to but us? She needs to talk, not listen to one more of your lectures. Might I remind you, before she arrived, you were in the midst of apologizing for once again leaving me to spend my evening alone while you work downstairs in the study. So go, leave us, and Laura and I will have a comfortable chat.”
To take some of the sting out of her words, she reached up and gave his hand a squeeze. She knew that his angry response when Laura ran into the room and blurted out the terrible news about Willie Caulfield’s death was really misplaced fear. Nate couldn’t shake his belief that Laura, ten years his junior, needed him to protect her from all harm. A belief that had been reinforced since Laura had moved to San Francisco, given that in the past year she had suffered from a physical assault, the tragic loss of her best friend, a kidnapping, and a deadly fire. No wonder he worried, although unlike some of Annie’s misadventures, Laura’s own actions hadn’t precipitated any of these events.
Nate gave her a crooked smile, then cocking his head, he said, “I believe that must be Kathleen now.” He opened the door for the maid and, as Annie had instructed, excused himself to go downstairs to work.
After Kathleen returned to the kitchen, Laura came over to sit across from Annie, who poured her a cup of tea.
“Thanks for shooing my brother away. I know he means well, but I fail to see how he can expect me to pretend that Willie Caulfield’s death is none of my concern or tell Caro Sutton she’s on her own in trying to find out what happened to Grace.”
Scholarly Pursuits Page 15
