“Everyone just gave up on him?”
The question struck a nerve. He slammed the flat of his hand on the desk next to the chalkboard, “I’ve never given up hope! Many of the items I create are so one day I can mount an expedition to find him and bring his body home. However, until I discover where to search, I’ve nowhere to begin. Bessie, Doyle’s motorized bicycle, your goggles, and the flying machine I invented so one day I can go search for your father.”
“I don’t know what to say. Friday started simple enough and here it is Monday, and my world is changing. I had hoped you would throw me a line, give me a direction.”
“Helena, motivation to do anything has to come from within. Whatever you decide to do it will be your choice. Some things can’t be decided for you.”
“I don’t like that answer at all.”
“You’ll like this even less, I do fear a war brewing. If we are going to avoid annihilation, we will need someone to work with all parties. Someone to represent science, magic, religion, legendary creatures, and the common people. We need a peacemaker.”
Doldrums:
Helena was sure she had more questions for The Wizard, she loved that name, she just wished that the rogue Doyle hadn’t come up with it. How did Doyle know professor Merryall? After Helena’s suggestion of the armor, the professor seemed strangely distracted, not wanting to distract him further Helena, went in search of her companions to return home before dark. The last thing she wanted was a recurrence of the previous night, having the smug Doyle rescue her once more was more than she could bear.
Lane navigated the busy streets, low cloud cover kissing the tops of the buildings. However, the sun was on the horizon and the orange glow reflected off the low clouds creating the most beautiful colors between yellow and dark purple she had ever witnessed. She felt she could reach out and touch the colors as they headed west driving up Union Street towards the heights. She let her mind wander for the four minutes it took to go from the Wizard’s workshop to home.
Upon reaching the estate she left Lane and Sigmund to attend to things, Helena needed to think. She went to the study where this little adventure had started a few days earlier. She found that the room had been cleaned while she had been absent, the violin set on the sofa table bow lying next to it arranged ever so neatly. She looked at how pristine it seemed. It had been a mess when she left, paper strewn about mail laying everywhere violin on the sofa, and now it was clean. She picked up the violin and began working through the scales, trying to teach herself how to play, just like Sherlock Holmes. She thought how this room made an excellent analogy for her life. Helena would make a mess of things, and someone always came along behind her cleaning things up, that described her life.
The frustration of her life built up inside her while she hopelessly tried to make her fingers move into the correct position to hit the notes as she slowly worked with the violin.
“Dammit!” she shouted preparing to throw the violin towards the door when she spied Sigmund leaning against the frame watching her. Her face turned crimson as soon as she realized someone witnessed her outburst, “I must apologize, Sigmund, I can’t understand why I can’t learn to play the violin like Sherlock Holmes.”
“Could it be possible that he is a fictional character, and Sherlock Holmes never did anything that Arthur Conan Doyle didn’t write for him to do. We are not characters in a book our actions tend to take a good deal longer than they do in novels. Are you sure nothing else is bothering you?”
“Everything is bothering me. We have run around like chickens with their heads lopped off, no closer to finding Missy or her family, than on Friday. Three days went by, and we found nothing. I feel I understand even less about my mother and father now than when we started even though it seems everybody we meet knew them. I always thought the world was so perfect and all I see is pain and sorrow whenever we leave the estate. Right now, I want to cry until I can’t cry any longer, but I don’t know what to cry for or who to cry for. I want to do something like Missy did to help people, but I have no idea what!”
“May I suggest the first step would be to arrange a building for the Chinese Girl’s School? You promised to find a building for them.”
“Yes, Sigmund of course. I’ve been so wrapped up in everything I forgot about that. Could you please find a suitable building that can be secured for the Chinese Girl’s School?”
“Of course, I will see to it, Mistress.”
She thought a moment about her epiphany of other people cleaning up her messes and here she found herself asking Sigmund to fix her problems, to clean up her mess. At her realization that she had fallen into old bad habits, she let out a primal scream, causing Sigmund to jump and Lane to come rushing down the hall.
“Is something wrong?” Lane asked sticking his head into the room.
Sigmund shook his head slowly, “No, I believe it is merely a realization that life is complicated, am I correct Mistress?”
“Before you walked in I realized that I do nothing for myself, I’m lazy and spoiled and I need to change that. Yet before I even leave the room, I am asking you to fix another one of my problems, am I ever going to take control over my life?”
“Mistress, do you know the most important thing your grandfather ever taught me?” Sigmund asked. Lane losing interest headed back down the hall to search for food.
Helena shook her head no, dropping on the sofa her violin and bow still in her hand.
“He told me for someone to be successful they must work at least a hundred hours a day.”
“That’s impossible, there are only twenty-four hours in a day, everyone knows that.”
“This is why successful people hire others to work for them, it’s how capitalism works. You have people that work for you to do things that multiply your time. What you need to do is to learn how to effectively use the resources at your disposal.”
Helena sat there mutely listening to what Sigmund had to say.
“Do you know how to find a building? Or to rent a building?”
She shook her head no.
“Neither do I. We could sit down, we’re both smart enough to learn how to do it. It would probably take us a week maybe a fortnight, but we could learn it. Then we could go out and do it for ourselves. Does that sound very efficient?”
She shook her head no.
“Neither do I, so we hire someone that already has the knowledge to do that work for us. They can spend the hours while you and I focus on something else.”
“Thank you, Sigmund, that makes sense. I will try to think of that next time I lose my temper. That doesn’t help you find something, we’ve no clue where to find Missy. I think she’s alive. I think she’s being held near water in a dark, pitch-black cell. That could be anywhere on the docks, it could be anywhere on the coast of California.”
“True. What can we do about it?”
“I think Mister Holmes would use a seven percent solution to help sharpen his mind to find what he is missing.”
“Mistress that is a story, in my experience people who use narcotics rarely improve their life. May I make another suggestion, that doesn’t involve you, needles, and cocaine?”
Miss Helena rolled her eyes Sigmund simply didn’t understand her, “Of course, what is your suggestion?”
Sigmund reached into his right vest pocket and pulled out the strangest looking gold rod with a red tassel. “Follow me if you please.”
Intrigued, Helena pushed herself off the couch and followed closely behind Sigmund as he walked up the stairs to the landing to stop in front of Helena’s parent’s picture.
An inpatient Helena asked, “Yes?”
Sigmund took the golden stick, glanced around to ensure they were unobserved, then reached about eye-level on the right-hand side of the gilded frame inserting it into a cleverly disguised slot. Once the key found home, Helena discerned a distinct click, followed by a louder clunk as the picture frame and a sectio
n of the wall behind it swung out. Helena’s eyes bulged with surprise as she stared past Sigmund’s shoulder and saw a metal staircase spiraling down into a dark hole.
“This has always been here?”
“I wasn’t supposed to show you this, the general’s orders. But I think you’ll find this much more rewarding than a seven percent solution. Let me go first and light lamps.”
Sigmund disappeared down the stairs using an instrument she’d never seen before to light the sconces and suspended lamps as he went. Helena couldn’t help herself she followed right behind him.
“If you’re going to ignore my suggestion and follow me, close the door behind you. Few people know of this room, I think you should keep it that way.”
Helena did as she was told, climbed the few steps to shut the door then reattached herself to his coattails, “Is this...” Helena didn’t finish her sentence most afraid of the answer.
“Yes, this was your father’s study and your mother’s workshop. I tried to keep it exactly as I found it after your mother’s disappearance.”
They descended below the main floor level and kept going underground, Helena guessed at least twenty feet below the landing. If she was that concerned about it, she could go back and count the steps, but she really wasn’t. The shelves filled with books and jars caught her attention first. However, as more lights came up, she found many more things to be excited about.
The last light lit Sigmund tried to explain, “Your parents had eclectic tastes when it came to research. Nothing was off-limits. I often wonder if that was why they were so secretive, I never knew what they worked on.”
“Father was a scientist, my mother a witch, did they always work separately?”
“On the contrary. They worked more together down here than apart. They presented the perfect blending of magic and science. Had you not been born, I’m sure your mother would’ve been by your father’s side when he went missing. They made a decision that one should remain behind in case the unthinkable happened.”
Helena took what Sigmund said at face value, but she couldn’t help but wonder if she caused her parents’ mishaps. If she hadn’t been born, and her mother had been by her father side, perhaps he would’ve never gone missing, and she would’ve never gone to such great links to find him. An unspoken nagging feeling struck at the core of her soul that she was ultimately responsible for losing her parents.
“Is all of their research here?”
“As far as I know, after your father disappeared we tried to keep everything exactly where we found it. Not as some memorial, but we thought maybe the arrangement of his ongoing research might help us discover where he went. Your mother was particular about what I could and couldn’t help with while we searched. Even after his disappearance, she was utterly secretive about what exactly they researched.”
“The answers to what happened to them might be down here still.”
“They might be, but your mother and I sifted through all this information with a fine-tooth comb.”
Helena walked to one of the bookcases wordlessly reading the titles, all she had never read before, many written in Latin, Spanish, French, and Italian. She could speak those languages, but there sat mounds other books she couldn’t fathom what language they had been written in, to her eye they look more like squiggly lines than a decipherable language.
“Sigmund, if you don’t mind I think I’d like to be alone down here. This is the closest I’ve ever been to my parents,” she kept her back to him, so he couldn’t see the tears dropping from her eyes. Her hand rested on a copy of ‘The Ascent of Legendary Creatures and their Zoology,’ by Charles Darwin, she had read two of his other books this might be a decent place to start.
“Of course, Mistress. Remember I told you there comes a time when we must do our own research. I will leave your mother’s key here on her desk,” Sigmund set the red tasseled key down on the small secretary desk covered with papers then slowly ascended the stairs leaving Helena to her thoughts.
Helena didn’t know what to think, her stepfather the General had kept all this hidden from her, her whole life. Could she have possibly discovered some secret to locating her mother and father, might she have awakened some secret power sooner to save them? Why did everybody know so much about her past, or at least her parents past and nobody would tell her anything?
Then she remembered something Sigmund had said about her parents’ fanatical need for secrecy. Perhaps nobody told her about her parents because they had no earthly idea what they were doing. As far as she could tell they might’ve been down here summoning the devil and plotting the end of the world. There probably was some of the social elite in San Francisco that thought the couple was doing precisely that.
If mother was a witch and father was a scientist with evil diabolical plans what could they have been scheming? Maybe that’s the warning, death on white wings, has something to do with what her parents had researched. She walked around the room lightheaded peacefully touching items that she knew her parents had once touched, it made her feel closer to them even though she really never knew them. She plopped down in what must’ve been her father’s chair, a high black leather wingback office chair. The kind that she envisioned her father sitting in smoke from his pipe creating a halo over his head, his red hair and beard looking aflame in the gas line.
She cracked open her newly discovered Darwin book and started reading about the zoology of Legendary Creatures. She began skimming books, there was so much information that she never knew of contained in this one room. She wanted to read and memorize everything. She discovered book after book tugging at her attention, but she was always careful to put each and every tome back exactly as she found them.
With no windows, time stopped. She was vaguely aware of Sigmund bringing food and a pot of coffee which she consumed between books. Sometime during the night, she fell asleep, on a couch she was sure belonged to her mother covered by a quilt that was draped across the back, which had been lovingly folded by somebody.
She woke the next morning when Sigmund brought breakfast down the spiral staircase, the smell of coffee woke her. She noticed the dirty dishes from the night before had been removed. Someone had taken care of her during her night of her studies.
“Do you have any plans for the day Mistress?” Sigmund asked while pouring coffee.
“We’ve no new leads, and I find this whole workroom utterly fascinating, I don’t know what we should do about Missy’s disappearance.”
“We may not be able to find anything to help. Why don’t you stay down here and continue searching and learning? I won’t disturb you until the post arrives. Have you found the maps?” Sigmund said placing the silver coffee pot on the silver tray, the contained her breakfast.
“Maps? I haven’t found any maps.”
“I doubt you’ll find information there concerning your parents or Miss Whitaker, but I always found them fascinating. I found it like exploring while never leaving the house,” he walked over to a massive cabinet with skinny drawers. He pulled one open showing her an ancient hand-drawn map of Baja and Alto California. “I believe this is an original copy of the first Spanish map from the explorer Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo. I’ve no idea how your parents got their hands on this. We might not want to learn how they got it. I believe it to be over four hundred years old.”
“Thank you, Sigmund, I hadn’t found these.” She put the Spanish map back and started going through the different charts looking for anything that might be relevant. Sigmund left her, again silently ascending the stairs, and locking her behind the door.
The map storage gave her a new area to explore, she had just found the item that might help in their search for Missy. She located a ten-year-old map of the San Francisco sewer system. She was thinking about a way it could help when she discerned the click of the secret door open. She expected Sigmund to come walking down the steps, but instead, he called down to her, most strange.
&nbs
p; “Mistress the morning post has arrived, I think you need to come up here. There’s been a most dire development that will need our attention as soon as possible,” Helena didn’t like the sound of that, it was the first time she’d ever known Sigmund to sound scared. She put the map down for later and did her best to run up the circular staircase.
Plague:
Helena quietly closed the doors behind her, wishing to keep her secret library, a secret. She could hear Sigmund and another man speaking in hushed tones in the lounge right down the stairs from her parents’ portrait, the same room she had received Minnie in and learned about Missy’s disappearance.
As she walked in, she saw Lane, Sigmund, and a man she’d never met before. “Sigmund began the introduction as soon as Helena was far enough in the room.
“Mistress Helena, this man is Mister Brubaker, he is our real estate agent, our building locator. He arrived with the morning post. Mister Brubaker why don’t you inform Mistress Brandywine what you told me.”
Helena found it strange Sigmund hadn’t offered everybody to sit, but she really needed to listen to Mister Brubaker’s tale.
“You see it’s like this Miss, Mistress, I was looking for a building, a building that Sigmund here asked me to find for you, a location for the Chinese Girl’s School. I was downtown looking for a favorable neighborhood when a bunch of men showed up. And they started throwing barricades blocking off every road leading towards Chinatown, and the Coast. They are keeping all the Chinamen and anyone they deemed undesirable from leaving the area. Any high-class people who came to the barricades they would let them out, I bet by now they’ve got the whole area sealed up. I didn’t understand what was going on, but I knew I needed to return here as fast as possible, so I could inform Mister Sigmund, and you Mistress what I witnessed.”
“Sigmund what could this mean?” Helena asked, her immediate concern for the Chinese Girl’s School which was probably cut off by the barricades.
Pretty Waiter Girls Page 13
