Love and Adventure Collection - Part 2

by Jennifer Blake

  “Not even if I begged you? Nathan said, a whimsical note in his voice.

  “Anyway,” Serena said, smiling valiantly as she applied her handkerchief to her nose, “I’m sure it won’t be necessary.”

  She had reason to be less positive before the day was out. In her rooms, she removed her hat and the shawl that concealed the fact that her dress of gray cheviot was unbuttoned along the side seam. She had moved to the wardrobe to put the toque away when she noticed a paper lying on the floor in the corner nearest Ward’s desk. There was also a corner of a book protruding from under the rolltop.

  Stepping to that massive piece of furniture, Serena pushed the top up. The well-fitted tambour moved easily, retreating into the back section. That was the only thing that was right about it. Inside, the account books and papers were tumbled this way and that, letters, bills of lading, business cards, and receipts wadded indiscriminately together. The upper level of pigeonholes had been emptied and their contents piled helter-skelter with the rest. On top of that had been dumped the contents of the inner drawers, and a collection of pens, extra nibs, pen wipers, stamps, tacks, paper holders, and string. An exclamation on her lips, Serena hesitated. She could attempt to restore some kind of order, but without knowing exactly what she was doing, such a task would be useless. She had watched Ward at work, sitting over the books of the Eldorado, totting up the profits, but she had never pried into the papers. Lacking any idea of what was supposed to be there, it was also impossible to tell what was missing.

  Closing the desk with a thoughtful look in her eyes, Serena moved to the wardrobe. The store of money Ward had given her was slowly dwindling, but what was left was still where she had hidden it, in the toe of her gilt-heeled slippers. She did not delude herself that her small hoard would have been missed by a determined thief. That, plus the fact that the other drawers and shelves in the room appeared undisturbed, was enough for her to dismiss the idea of robbery as the motive for someone rummaging through Ward’s desk. No, there had been something someone had wanted, a particular something. On at least one occasion Pearlie had made herself free of these rooms. It was only logical to suppose she had done so again, more especially since Serena had left them locked and there was no sign the door had been forced.

  The first time, because of a lack of proof and her own insecurity, she had let the incident pass; this time she would not. She was tired of being treated as if her needs and feelings were of no consequence. Rather than sit brooding on the awful thing that had been done to Lessie, she would see what Pearlie had to say for herself.

  The housekeeper at the parlor house opened the door. Colorless, self-effacing, she was a new installation since the girls had complained of cleaning up after such a constant flow of chewing, spitting, smoking, beer-guzzling men.

  Madam Pearlie was not in, Serena was told in a fading voice, and was not expected back for some time, several hours at least. As to where she was, it wasn’t the housekeeper’s place to say. Serena could leave a message if she was of a mind. No, there were no writing materials available.

  It was then that a plump, candy-box brunette passed through the hall. One of the girls who had danced on the stage at the Eldorado before Ward separated the two establishments, her name was Cora. She recognized Serena on sight.

  “Who are you looking for, honey? Pearlie? She’s down yonder smoking up a pipe dream.”

  “You mean—” Serena began, glancing back in the general direction of the girl’s casual wave.

  “Sure, the doctor’s place, that shack right along there. You know. Don’t look much like a pleasure palace, does it?” The brunette gave a flippant chuckle.

  “Thank you,” Serena said.

  “Don’t mention it, honey. Whatever the problem is, I’m on your side, mainly because it ain’t Pearlie’s. Be seeing you.” With a lifted eyebrow in the direction of the open-mouthed housekeeper, she flounced away.

  The housekeeper, her mouth snapping tightly shut with disapproval, relieved her feelings by closing the door upon Serena without another word.

  The shack pointed out to Serena was down the hill from the Eldorado and almost directly behind it. Ramshackle, looking as if a strong wind would send it crashing to the ground, it stood alone, shrinking away from its nearest neighbors, a livery stable and a blacksmith shop. Serena had seen Pearlie making her way in that direction more than once, as well as a number of other women and a few men. She had been told it was a doctor’s office, though there was an odd tone in the voice of those who mentioned it and Serena had seen for herself that his patients were drawn mainly from the cribs and parlor houses. It had crossed her mind more than once that she ought to consult a physician, but somehow she had shied away from the thought of being attended by this particular man.

  She could wait until Pearlie returned to the parlor house, but the housekeeper had seemed to think it would not be any time soon. She had no idea what course of treatment Pearlie might be undergoing to take so long, but she was in no mood to wait.

  The door to the doctor’s office was closed and locked, though Serena thought she saw the curtain move at a side window. She knocked and waited. After what seemed an interminable time, a man came to the door. With a cheerful smile that had wariness behind it, he ushered her into a small anteroom in the one-story building.

  “Yes, and what may I do for you this evening?” he asked, rubbing his hands together. As he spoke there came a soft moan from the back room. He sent a fleeting glance over his shoulder, but his smile did not waver.

  “I am looking for someone,” Serena answered.

  “We are all looking for someone or something,” the doctor, a small man with a full head of hair and a small mustache, replied. “Who sent you to me?”

  “No one, really. I wanted to see Pearlie—” Serena stopped, aware suddenly that she did not know Pearlie’s last name, or even if, when she had taken the pseudonym, she had troubled to give herself one.

  “Ah, yes, Pearlie. A magnificent female, but so lost. May I assume she told you of my little place here?”

  “No, it was Cora at her parlor house, if you must know.” Serena replied, unable to see why it mattered but willing to humor the man.

  “Ah, yes, a delicious morsel, so cooperative. Come in then, by all means. We will see what we can do for you.”

  “I only want to see Pearlie,” Serena repeated as her arm was taken and she was steered rapidly toward the door at the end of the room.

  “And so you shall, so you shall. One would never have guessed your predilections ran in that direction, especially not to look at you, but I am not one to deny or question another’s desires. Come in, my dear girl, come in.”

  As he finished speaking, he half-pushed, half-dragged Serena into the back room. At the sharp sound of the door closing behind her Serena swung around, but the doctor smiled and, closing his delicate fingers firmly around her arm, propelled her forward.

  The room was not large. The rugs in the brilliant hues of the Orient that covered the walls as well as the floor made it seem smaller and more close. Low couches were set here and there, each with a small table beside it holding a nargileh, or Far Eastern water pipe, of ebony, silver, and brass. Upon these divans three women reclined, among them Pearlie with her auburn hair spread around her. Brass coal braziers glowed in the four corners of the space, adding their smoke to the blue haze that hung in the air, adding also their heat, a necessary element since the women who lay in such attitudes of abandon were completely naked.

  “Here is a place for you here, my love,” the physician said in a soothing tone. “Make yourself comfortable, just as you like, and I’ll bring you a pipe.”

  A pipe, a pipedream. This place she had come to was no doctor’s infirmary. The women sprawling upon the couches were smoking opium. This was an opium den.

  Serena had heard of such places. Now and then the sheriff raided one and hauled all who were caught in them off to jail. They were places of iniquity far worse than the parlor houses,
or so it seemed from the editorials let loose in outrage against them. The opium enslaved the user’s senses, made the person a slave to the fatal gum that filled the pipes, sapping the will so that the user became the tool of the person who supplied the mind-rotting substance. There were tales of women ruined because of an addiction they could not control, and from the look of the caress the doctor gave the flank of the young woman lying face down in a stupor on the couch near the door, it was not difficult to imagine the path such destruction could take.

  The instant the door closed behind the doctor, Serena stepped to the couch where Pearlie lay. She put a hand on the woman’s shoulder and gave her a quick shake.

  “Pearlie? Pearlie!”

  With excruciating slowness, the fine auburn lashes of the woman lifted. “Oh,” she said without surprise. “It’s you,”

  “Yes,” Serena said grimly. “Are you awake?”

  “I don’t know. Am I?”

  The beatific smile the other woman gave Serena made it seem doubtful, but since she was here, she could only try to get some sense out of Pearlie. It might well be a better opportunity to do so than she was likely to have at any other time.

  “I want to know if you were in my room this afternoon, if you went through Ward’s desk while I was out?”

  “Ward’s desk? Half mine. We were partners. He had no right, no right at all. I’ll pay him back.”

  “What did you take? I know you took something.” As Pearlie’s eyes began slowly to close once more, Serena shook her again.

  Pearlie giggled. “Take? The deed, silly. What else would I want?”

  “The deed? But — why?”

  As abruptly as the woman had begun to laugh, her face dissolved into a look of woe. “He doesn’t want me as his partner any more, all because of that girl. What did I do? What did I ever do to make the men I love leave me?”

  “The deed,” Serena prompted, her voice less harsh.

  “If I can’t have the Eldorado, why should he? Ward made a mistake, you know, a stupid mistake for a lawyer. He paid me for my half of the place, but he didn’t make me sign — anything. The deed is still in my name. That means I can sell my half. If he doesn’t come back, I can sell his half, too.”

  “If he doesn’t come back?” Serena straightened, staring at the moist face, the staring eyes, and flushed body of the other woman.

  “There was an old prospector came down out of the mountains last week. Said the Indians told him a man who looked like Ward had an accident, fell from a ledge.”

  “He — was hurt?”

  “He may be dead. He’s probably dead. That would be just what he would do to me. Everyone does it to me. I never mean to make them die; I never mean to!”

  Pearlie’s voice was so strident, her movements as she began to toss on the couch so violent, that Serena did not hear the doctor enter once more. When he spoke at her side, she started, turning to stare at him.

  “Here we are, my love, just what you need. Let me help you off with your shawl and loosen your dress. Perhaps after a while you will like me to come and sit beside you?”

  “I need you, doctor,” Pearlie said, suddenly opening her eyes wide. Serena, taking advantage of the moment, snatched her shawl back up around her shoulders and stepped around the couch out of the man’s reach. “Not as much as this lady who is new to us. I know she voiced a preference for your company, but it seems such a shame. I’m afraid she has found the company of men rough and hurtful. I think I should show her it needn’t always be that way.”

  “You like her better than me,” Pearlie accused, her tone rising. “No, no. I’ll admit she’s attractive, even as she is, and I quite look forward to initiating her into the mysteries of the pipe, but like her better? How could it?”

  “Doctor,” Serena said, interrupting in a firm tone, pushing the smoking pipe, an ornate affair of chased gold and pink quartz, back at him across the couch, “there’s been a mistake. I didn’t come here for this.”

  “You’re upset now. Soon you will be calm,” he answered, gently refusing the pipe. “You must lie down. Soon I will come to you and you will be more relaxed than you dreamed possible. I will show you delights unimagined.”

  “Show me!” Pearlie pleaded, snatching at his arm, reaching higher, pulling him off balance in her desperate strength. As the doctor’s feet went out from under him, Serena threw the pipe down on the low table and fled. The key was in the front door. Turning it, she flung the panel open. If she was followed she did not know. She did not look back. Eyes wide and unseeing, she ran from the house with its somnolent degradation. She ran from the comatose women unaware in their debasement. She ran from Pearlie, from her shameless, naked lust, her vicious need for revenge and piteous lack of understanding. She ran from the mind-dulling smoky gloom and from the man with the stroking, persuasive hands who called himself a doctor. But most of all she ran from herself, from the tearing anguish that came with the thought of Ward’s death, from the shattering recognition of the love she felt for the gambler who owned the Eldorado.

  14

  It snowed in Cripple Creek in late September. Sleet and snow fell in October. In November it came down again, a white blanket that draped itself over Pike’s Peak to the east and turned the ranges of the Sangre de Cristos and the Continental Divide to cones of frosted ice. Still Ward did not return.

  The inquiry into Lessie’s death turned up next to nothing. When found, she had been dead more than twenty-four hours, placing her death the night before. A man had been seen coming from her crib around ten o’clock, though in the dark it had been hard to get a good look at him. No description was available beyond the fact that he had not been dressed like a miner. Despite the reward posted by Nathan, no new information surfaced. The incident was unfortunate, but the police had no choice other than to consider it closed. This was especially true in light of the fact that no new attacks against the women of the tenderloin occurred.

  The newspaper of the town had been inclined at first to treat the case as cause for alarm. Featuring headlines that called for the capture and conviction of the mass murderer, they gave much space to the gruesome details of the crime. The murderer was dubbed Colorado’s Jack the Ripper, despite the fact that all three women had died from strangulation. There was even some speculation that the mysterious killer who had terrorized London only seven years before had immigrated to the United States and taken up his grisly trade once more. In both cases, London and Cripple Creek, it was pointed out, the victims were prostitutes plying their trade.

  Gradually interest waned. As the weeks passed and the reward money remained unclaimed, other news took over the front page. The coverage of a mining accident, a broken cable that let a bucket hoist carrying four miners fall three hundred feet, taking all to their deaths, ousted the murders even from the back pages of the dailies.

  Serena did not see Pearlie for some time after that day at the opium den. The thought of the deed to the barroom in the woman’s hands troubled her, but there seemed little she could do about it. The danger of Pearlie’s attempting to sell her supposed half interest was slight as long as the chance remained Ward might return and call her to account. And if for some reason he did not return, what became of the Eldorado was of little concern. Serena well knew she had no claim to anything Ward owned, and as far as she was aware, he had no direct heirs. If Ward was dead, Pearlie was welcome to the Eldorado.

  Pearlie had never been denied access to the barroom. She had stopped coming of her own accord after the rift with Ward over her treatment of Serena. Now as the fall turned more to winter, she began to put in an appearance. More often than not, she was far gone in drink. At times she turned maudlin, crying, going on and on to whoever would listen about the death of her husband and Ward’s part in it. Just as often, she would laugh with an edge of hysteria, joking with Serena of how Ward had deserted them both. Occasionally, her mood grew spiteful and she would stand at the bar with her foot propped on the rail like a man, criticizing, c
arping, telling everyone what she would do, how she would change the running of the place when it was hers. She did not speak again of her right to sell, but she did drop the hint that she expected to have a large sum of money in the not too distant future. With these allusions usually went a few derisive remarks about the looks on the faces of certain Natchez matrons when they saw her again.

  One person who had been denied entrance to the Eldorado was Otto Bruin. Since it was he who usually came looking for Pearlie to carry her back to the parlor house, keeping him out became a problem. The first time it was tried, the barman who made the attempt was knocked sprawling, his jaw broken. Serena barred his way on one occasion, but the feel of his hands on her flesh as he set her aside made it an experience she was not anxious to repeat, nor did she care to risk having the barroom torn apart as the miners tried to come to her aid. It reached the point where it was better to give in gracefully than court destruction and ultimate defeat. Otto, as well as Pearlie, came and went as he pleased. It seemed to Serena as time wore on that it pleased them to come more often and stay longer.

  The situation amused Pearlie. Whether she kept Otto at her side because she knew he affected Serena with shivering disgust or because she enjoyed his slavish attention in the same way parlor-house girls enjoyed their pampered French poodles was something no one but Pearlie knew. It was certain she took perverted pleasure in the havoc he could cause, often urging him on to start fistfights, or giving him a loose rein when his attention was snared by a pretty face or a lissome body.

  Serena was only happy that her growing size made it possible for her to retreat more and more to her room. A stout door with a lock and key made her feel reasonably secure, though sometimes she thought she heard the shuffling footsteps of the apelike man in the hallway outside in the early hours of the morning. That Otto Bruin went no farther she attributed to two causes; first, her continued position as a favorite of the miners. Gold Heels, the lady of the Eldorado. and second to lack of proof that Ward was alive or dead.