The Bohemian Murders

by Dianne Day

  “Quincy!” I had been sleeping with my walking stick beside the bed. I grabbed it and unsheathed the hidden blade with a swish, letting the base of the cane fall wherever it would. I hadn’t the patience to wait for the light to revolve around again, and the floor was black as pitch so I couldn’t find my slippers. Barefoot and blind, I tore out of my bedroom beneath the eaves. Up or down? No time to debate. I went down, based on a hasty conclusion that the barn and Quincy’s lean- to were on fire, not the lighthouse itself.

  Smoke rose through the stairwell, gray and wispy, winding its way up to the height of the lantern. Smoke that came through the open front door …

  “Hey-a-a-ah!” I yelled at the top of my voice, and yelled again, as a year or more ago I had instinctively learned the reason for war cries; and I charged full tilt at the bulky figure silhouetted against the open door when once again the light came around. My robe and gown billowed with the speed of my flight, and my long, unbound hair streamed out behind me. I daresay I must have appeared a screaming banshee—but this banshee was no specter, she was armed, and knew how to use her blade.

  The intruder was no match for me, especially as the light had gone as quickly as it came. I felt the tip of my blade pierce flesh, heard a grunt and the sound of something heavy, with a metallic clunk, dropping to the floor.

  “Back!” I commanded. “Move back! As you’ve already learned, I know what I’m doing. I wouldn’t hesitate to slash your throat.”

  He backed into the doorway, and when the light came around I saw it was Pete Carlson. For the space of a heartbeat this confused me, but then the fleeting light gleamed for a moment in his eyes before moving on, and they were the same eyes. The eyes of my attacker, the bandito in the woods.

  “You bastard!” I said, jamming the tip of the blade into his throat.

  “Hey!” He sounded scared. As he went on he began to whine. “Leave off, lady. None of this was my idea. I’m just the hired hand!”

  “You can tell me later. And believe me, you will—you’ll tell me everything!” I tossed hair out of my eyes. “But right now you’re going to help me undo some of the damage you’ve done here.”

  “Hey, I didn’t touch the lighthouse. Lighthouse is gov’ment property. I’m not that stupid.”

  I pulled the tip of my blade back an inch from his throat. “Bully for you. Now turn around. That’s right.” I put the rapier’s point between his shoulder blades. “Move!”

  As soon as I went through the doorway I saw fire-glow on Hettie’s carefully cultivated rectangle of lawn. I heard the roar and crackle and lick of flame, tasted bitter ash on my tongue. I shot a glance over my shoulder and saw: The barn was burning.

  San Francisco’s post-earthquake conflagration had left me with a morbid fear of fire. For months afterward the simple stoking of a cookstove’s belly had been too much; I would cringe before it, my hands would shake. Yet now, fueled by my own rage, I knew I could face this fire without the slightest hesitation. Relentlessly, step by step, I drove before me the man who had hurt me and my friends and invaded the sanctuary of my home.

  “I ain’t going in that!” Pete wailed. “You can’t make me!”

  “Is that so?” I jabbed, forcing him to keep moving. By the firelight I saw blood seeping through his shirt where I had already wounded his left shoulder. “I am armed and you are not. You dropped your weapon, didn’t you? What was it? A gun?”

  “Yeah,” he sneered. Suddenly he ducked and turned on his heel to face me, making a grabbing motion with his right hand. In my super-alert state I did not even have to think, but stepped back and with a flick of my wrist slashed his palm. He looked tremendously surprised.

  “Any more false moves and I swear I’ll run you through! Now walk toward the barn. You are going to get Quincy out of the fire, and release the animals. If you burn up yourself in the process, it will serve you right!”

  The terrified cows were mooing, bellowing, really, at the top of their lungs, while the bay mare’s hooves pounded the walls with the force of John Henry’s hammer. Over and over I yelled Quincy’s name. Just as my captive and I got close enough for me to send Pete through the flames, the door of the lean- to flew outward with explosive force.

  Quincy had kicked out his own door. His spare form hurtled out and he landed rolling in the grass, coughing, wheezing, spitting. The first words out of his raspy throat were “Bessie! Cows!” but I was already ahead of him. Without a shred of mercy I forced Pete Carlson to unlatch the burning barn door and let the horse and the Holsteins out. Sparks sizzled in his hair and burned holes in his clothes and so of course he commenced whining, but he was not badly hurt. I have observed that it is always the bullies who are most cowardly at heart.

  Quincy recovered quickly. At what cost to his healing collarbone I do not know, but he tied Pete Carlson to a fence post, muttering all the while, “I told you he was no good, Fremont, I told you he was no good.” Then Quincy and I, using the emergency water tank, put out the fire. The blaze had not been so huge as it had at first seemed in the black of night, and due to the isolation of the lighthouse, I doubted the Pacific Grove Fire Department had been alerted. That was fine with me.

  Quincy wanted to go for the police.

  “No,” I said, “if you will trust me, Quincy, I have something else in mind.”

  “Fremont, I trust you almost as much as I do Miz Hettie, and that’s a fact!” He looked both earnest and comical, with his smudged face and sparse gray hair sticking out from his head in odd directions.

  I smiled and patted his arm in comradely fashion. “Thank you. Pete is going to provide me with the answers to some important questions. I’ll tell you later all about it, but for now, would you kindly just keep an eye on him while I go and put on some clothes?”

  It was five o’clock in the morning; the sun would not rise for some time yet. The fog had begun to roll in from the south, over the Santa Lucias, while Quincy and I were putting out the fire, and now a dense whitish mist covered everything. I had seen thicker fogs in San Francisco, so I was not at all concerned. There was about five feet of visibility around the Maxwell, which was plenty for me. I turned and addressed Pete Carlson, whom Quincy and I had previously tied with sturdy ropes in the passenger seat: “Now you are going to tell me some things, because if you do I’ll see to it that you get some special consideration when I take you to the police. And if you do not—well, who knows what I might do?” I paused to let him think about that, then resumed. “My first question is: Do you know the whereabouts of Phoebe Broom?” My heart pounded as I waited for the answer. The longer he delayed, the more I was afraid my hopes were soon to be dashed.

  Finally Pete said sullenly, “Yeah, I know.”

  With my heart in my throat I asked, “Is she alive or dead?”

  Pete laughed. It was an ugly, mirthless sound. “She’s alive. That Mr. Braxton High-Falutin’ Furnival ain’t got the stomach for killin’. He near-bout turned me in himself just for hittin’ you upside the head. Said I could’ve kilt you. As if I’d give a shit.”

  I winced, but nevertheless this was interesting stuff. “Then the first order of business now is: You are going to give me directions to wherever Phoebe is hidden.” I started the motor, which Quincy had previously cranked for me.

  “Well,” Pete drawled, recovering his confidence, “I just don’t know as I can do that. For all that Brax is a yellow-bellied ladies’ man, he paid me pretty good.”

  In my lap I had Pete’s gun, having found it on the floor when I went in to change; I picked it up now and pointed it at him. It was large and heavy, the type that is called a revolver. I am nowhere near as practiced at shooting as I am at slashing, but Pete did not know that—which was just as well. “I disagree,” I said. “I think you will tell me exactly where she is, and you will not try to misdirect me, because if you do I will shoot you in the foot.”

  “You bitch.”

  “I am quite serious. May I point out to you that if shooting you in the foo
t does not suffice, you have another foot, and knees, and so on.”

  Pete shrugged the shoulder I’d pierced, then winced as the motion pulled at the cloth stuck with dried blood to the wound. The pain must have made a timely reminder, for he gave up the bravado. “I guess you do mean it. Okay, she’s in this kind of mee-dee-val tower down to the end of Brax’s property. Some old guy built the thing out of rocks like you find down by the water, back a long time ago when all that land was El Rancho Pescadero. I helped Brax fix it up, turn it into sort of a hideout. The ladies like a tower, he says, they think it’s romantic. Har! I bet your friend Phoebe ain’t been finding it any too romantic.”

  The Maxwell’s carriage lamps gave our passage a ghostly glow in the fog. I had no difficulty staying on the road, but I did involuntarily shudder now, both at his words and because we were passing the place where Pete had knocked me out. Though it was low on my list of questions, thus reminded I could not resist asking, “Why did you hit me in the head?”

  “To get them pictures for Brax.”

  “You were wearing a mask and bandana over your face—I couldn’t have identified you. You could have just asked me to hand over the pictures, and I would have. You didn’t have to hit me, especially not that hard!”

  “So?” He looked away from me, out into the fog. “I like to hit people. I ain’t no sissy. Brax shoulda let me take you too, along with that Broom bitch. But he said you bein’ the lighthouse keeper, if you disappeared it would cause too much of a fuss, I should just get the pictures.”

  I let that pass. “Braxton paid you to kidnap Phoebe?”

  “Paid me to help him do it. I told him you was a troublemaker, you’d never let it alone. From the minute Tom called Brax and said there was these women been messin’ around and we better go get that body—”

  “Tom, at Mapson’s, told Braxton that Phoebe and I were there?”

  “Yeah. Didn’t you figure out none of this? I thought you was supposed to be so smart. Brax thinks you’re really something, you know, that’s mainly why he didn’t want you hurt. He wanted me to do stuff that’d scare you but not really hurt you. I told him it wouldn’t do no good.”

  “Like poisoning the water and loosening the carriage wheel. And tonight, setting fire to the barn.”

  “Yeah, except the fire tonight was my idea. That sanctimonious son of a bitch Quincy, I hate his guts. It was kinda amusing for a while, workin’ out here, knowin’ the damage I’d done, plannin’ what else I could do—but after a while I just couldn’t take no more of Quincy. So I thought I’d do him some mischief, burn up his barn. Maybe he’d get out and maybe he wouldn’t. If you hadn’t woke up so fast, I’da got you too!”

  I turned the Maxwell into the Del Monte Forest at the Pacific Grove gate. Ghostly, mist-shrouded trees closed in all around us, even overhead. I said, “I’d like to know exactly what you mean by that but before I ask, there is something I want to go back to. The woman whose body was at Mapson’s, Sabrina Howard. I presume either Braxton killed her, or paid you to do it.”

  “Heh, heh, heh!” A low chuckle, wicked, tinged with twisted amusement. “Then you presume wrong.”

  I had to slow the car. Here in Del Monte Forest the fog was so thick I could barely see the edge of the pavement. “But her shoe was found near where Braxton lives. If he didn’t kill her, then all the rest of it makes no sense. You can’t expect me to believe that.”

  “Brax, he had his reasons.”

  I took my eyes from the foggy road for a moment. All this time I’d had one hand on the gun and one on the steering wheel. I raised the weapon and aimed it at Pete’s nearest foot. “And what were his reasons?”

  “Hey, he didn’t tell me. Okay? All I know is, when we went to get the body from Mapson’s, Brax said it would be bad for business if anybody found out who she was, on account of her havin’ been known to work for him.”

  I mulled this over. It made a certain amount of sense—if Braxton were doing something shady or criminal, he wouldn’t want the police coming around and asking him questions—but still it was hard to believe. I decided to move on to the next obvious question. “What did you do with Sabrina’s body after you took it from the mortuary?”

  Pete’s eyes shifted from my face to the gun in my hand, and back, before he answered. “I buried her out here in the forest. Nobody’ll ever find the grave. Brax didn’t want to know where I buried her, and I don’t even think I could find it again myself.”

  Damn! But I had to admit he was being cooperative. I lowered the gun and a few moments later asked casually, “By the way—if you had gotten me tonight, what did you intend to do with me?”

  Pete Carlson didn’t answer for a long time. I watched him from the corner of my eye, saw how he stared at me. He exuded an ugly feeling that I supposed must be hate, but what had I ever done to make Pete Carlson hate me? He didn’t even know me! Finally he broke the silence with a snort of derision.

  “Your friend Mr. Braxton Loves-the-Ladies Furnival is gone. He left early last night. He said I could have the bitch in the tower to do anything I want with. All by herself, she’s not much fun—I know, ’cause I had her already. She just lies there, don’t wiggle nor squeal nor nothin’, and besides, she’s ugly as a foot. So I was gonna take you over there …”

  He half turned toward me. His eyes were glittering, and I could feel the hate. My right hand closed over the gun while my left kept the Maxwell on track through the fog in the murky half-light of approaching dawn. I let up on the gas a little more, slowing the car to a crawl.

  Pete said with a sneer, “I was gonna take you over there to the tower and fuck the both of you.”

  Having never heard that word before, I had no idea what it meant, but from the context I could guess. I steeled myself not to show the reaction Pete was waiting for.

  In a moment, when I didn’t react, he continued: “I’da kept you alive for a while, played with you. Who knows, maybe you’d have figured out how to escape, seein’ as how you’re so smart. ’Course it’s pretty hard to get out of a place with nothing but bare stone walls—”

  In a flash, bonds and all, he rose up and flung himself sideways at me. There was no time to think, only to react. My hand was on the gun but I never felt the heft of it, or the recoil after. I shot Pete Carlson.

  My ears rang. The car tilted off the road. Pete’s weight fell across me; I could reach neither the gearshift nor the steering wheel. So I used my feet, jamming both of them quick and hard onto the brake, hoping that way to kill the motor before I crashed into a tree.

  With a lurch and a cough the Maxwell came to a rolling stop right up against the broad trunk of a cypress. Even before the car stopped rolling I pushed open the door and scrambled out, frantic to get away. My blouse and skirt, where Pete had fallen on me, bore a wide band of blood. Panting and wild, I aimed the gun, my hand clamped to it like a vise. I blinked, shook my head, took in great gulps of air.

  He wasn’t moving. His head lolled upside down in the open car door, half off the seat. Still pointing the gun and holding it now with both hands, I took a step closer. Then another. Pete’s eyes were open and so was his mouth. He looked a little surprised.

  “Phoebe! Phoebe, it is I, Fremont Jones!” I called out loudly as one by one I tried the keys on the ring I’d taken from Pete Carlson’s bloody pocket. I was not sure how long it had taken me to find this picturesque tower that held Phoebe prisoner. Since the fog was thinning, every now and then letting through a strong shaft of sunlight, I estimated the hour to be later than nine o’clock.

  “Phoebe? Do you hear me?” I myself could hear nothing on the other side of the stout oaken door, which was banded in rusting iron and secured with an equally rusty padlock.

  At last a key slipped all the way into the lock and turned easily; in spite of its ancient appearance the lock’s inner mechanism had been oiled. I pushed the heavy door inward on creaking hinges and announced as I entered, “Phoebe, it’s Fremont. I’ve come to take you home.
”

  Phoebe stood near a fire pit centered in the floor of this round room. She had lost a great deal of weight. Her eyes were huge in her small, bony face, deeply shadowed and darkly ringed. Her hair and clothes were unmentionably filthy, and she looked at me without comprehension. Then she looked up over our heads, and back at me again. I wondered if perhaps the long imprisonment had played havoc with Phoebe’s wits.

  I too looked up, to see what drew her eye. The round tower walls leaned slightly inward, like a funnel, and were open to the sky. At the top, some twenty-five or thirty feet above our heads, perched a large, handsome bird with feathers of ruddy gold.

  “A goshawk,” said Phoebe. Her voice wavered a little. “He flew away when you opened the door. I’ve been taming him. He is my only friend.”

  Looking up again at the bird I said, “He’s beautiful.” I looked back at her. Her head tipped to one side, she studied me. “You do remember me, don’t you?” I asked.

  She nodded and began to walk around the fire pit toward me. She looked like a ragged child with an old face. “Fremont. You’re not with them. Not one of them. Are you?”

  “No, of course I’m not!” I wanted to run to her and take her in my arms, but I dared not. There was something feral in Phoebe now, and who could blame her for that?

  Suddenly I knew how to gain her trust and ease her pain at the same time. I would tell her the very thing I myself had not yet come to terms with. “I killed him, Phoebe, I shot Pete Carlson. His blood is on my clothes—see? He can’t hurt you or frighten you anymore.”

  She stood stock-still. “Pete. The short one, ugly and mean. What about the other one? He said he would get me out. Is that it, did the other one send you to let me go?”

  “Braxton Furnival has gone away, or so I have been told. No one sent me—I came on my own. I took the keys to this tower out of Pete’s pocket after I shot him. I’ve been looking a long time for you—not just this morning, but ever since you disappeared. I’m so glad you’re all right!” Tentatively I took a couple of steps forward.