The Bohemian Murders

by Dianne Day

  I frowned a little, and did not reply immediately. The ruse to which he referred was that whole Misha persona. Michael had sought to appear as if he’d become dissolute and unreliable, because he wanted out of the spy game and neither government would agree to let him go.

  “The problem is, Michael, that Artemisia didn’t know it was an act. She thought Misha was the real you, and she could have been hurt. Deceiving people is so, so—” Thinking of the people I myself had deceived, albeit for (supposedly) good cause, I could not complete the sentence.

  “I didn’t deceive her,” Michael said patiently. “I told her from the beginning that I was in love with someone else. Of course I meant you, Fremont.”

  “It might have been nice if you’d told me.”

  “I’d intended to. Back at the end of the summer I thought all I had to do was announce my resignation to both sides, and I’d get some sort of letter of dismissal and that would be that. But that was not what happened. During the fall when you had to stay in San Francisco for Mickey Morelock’s trial, I found out that neither the Russians nor the Americans would let me go. Their refusal panicked me. I became obsessed with the morbid idea that what had happened to Katya would also happen to you the minute I said the words ‘I love you.’ ”

  “So you became Misha.”

  “Yes. By the time you arrived in Carmel I’d perfected the act. Believe me, I didn’t always enjoy it.”

  “But you did sometimes?” I teased. “Like the time Artemisia spent the night with you?”

  “I told you,” he grumbled, “I was drunk. I’m human. And I’m sorry.”

  “I forgive you,” I said, reaching up perversely to tweak his ear; but somehow the tweak became a kiss of delicious tenderness.

  Outside our little cabin the wind picked up and went moaning like a ghost at the cracks around the door and windows. But we were safe and warm. We had built a fire in a hideous potbelly stove, the room was gilded by the glow of many candles, and we had the comfort of each other lying side by side, full length, skin against skin.

  “It has all been worth it,” Michael murmured.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You demonstrated something to me that makes all the difference.”

  “I was not aware of giving demonstrations.”

  “No, you were just being yourself. Fremont Jones. That is what I learned: You are not Katya.”

  I turned my head on the pillow and tried to find my way through Michael’s eyes into his soul. My throat felt dry. To speak of Katya was like treading on holy ground; one must go respectfully. I cleared my throat and admitted: “I still don’t understand.”

  “For years I felt the guilt of her death. How could I love you, and want to have you with me, when for Katya loving me had been the same as dying? But you, Fremont, are different. In fact, you’re completely impossible! You have a talent for getting into risky situations that equals, if not exceeds, my own. You may listen to advice, but then you inevitably draw your own judgments from it and go your own way. You’re so strong, or maybe just so stubborn, that if an avenue doesn’t open up in the way you want to go, you will just hack your way through the obstacles regardless. It has become perfectly clear to me that you are going to continue to get into these situations no matter what I or anyone else does.”

  A remarkably accurate assessment, but I was not entirely sure I liked it. I sat up, tossed my hair back, and put my fists on my hips. “So?”

  Grinning, Michael pushed himself up against the head of the bed and folded his arms over his hairy chest. “So I may love you and I may be concerned about you, but I’m not enough of an idiot to think I can control you—which also means I don’t have to feel responsible for you.”

  “All right.” I sighed. “That’s good. In fact, that’s really fine.” I let down my guard and leaned back against him, snuggling into the soft hollow beneath his arm.

  For a while we were quiet, and then Michael said, “Oh, by the way. You might want to know that the Cypress Coast Company has charged Braxton Furnival with fraud and theft, and the district attorney has also charged him with murder. It seems that when the new man from Cypress went to his house in Del Monte Forest—which incidentally didn’t belong to Furnival, it’s a lodge for the developer’s guests—he found a dead body, subsequently identified as Ramon Reyes, a speculator from Paso Robles. They’re looking into the possibility that Reyes was shot with the same gun that killed the fellow they found in the woods—Pete Carlson. There’s a warrant out for Furnival’s arrest.”

  I had wondered what happened to Ramon; there were any number of questions I wanted to ask, but I dared not. All I said was “They’ll have to find Braxton before they can arrest him.”

  “Do you know where he is?”

  “No. Of course not!”

  “Hmm. At any rate, he was selling memberships in a nonexistent golf club,” Michael went on, “and taking cash for options on property to which he didn’t have the title, and pocketing the money. Some of it, of course, went into bribes to cover up Sabrina Howard’s death. Fremont, I have an idea you know a great deal more about all these things than you put in your letter to Wish Stephenson.”

  When I made no reply, Michael said softly, “Look at me, love.”

  I looked at him mutely. I suppose there may have been a plea in my eyes but if so, it was unformed, for in truth I wanted to tell him everything but felt bound to hold my tongue.

  He said, “I do have a proposal for you, but not a proposal of marriage. I propose that we be partners, you and I. Fremont Jones and Michael Kossoff. Partners in life and in work, all burdens, all secrets, all joys to be shared. What do you say, Fremont; will you be my partner?”

  A smile spread slowly over my face while in my head I repeated the words and let their meaning bloom full in my mind. Then I said, “That makes eminently good sense.”

  I sat up in the bed, folding my legs Indian-style, and Michael did the same. We faced each other. I held up both my hands, palms out, and Michael fitted his palms to mine—a spontaneous, solemn salute.

  “Yes,” I said, “Michael Kossoff; I, Fremont Jones, will be your partner in life and in work, all burdens, all secrets, all joys to be shared.”

  To all women who

  are Keepers of the

  Light, in or out

  of lighthouses.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many people helped with various aspects of the writing of this book. Thanks to Pat Hathaway, Randy Reinstedt and John and Susan Klusmire for helping with research. Special thanks to all the writers who coffee in Carmel, especially Bob Irvine, Bob Campbell, Nancy Baker Jacobs, Adele Langendorf; with extra thanks to Bob Campbell for letting me use twangy boys. Extra appreciation goes to Dorothy Nye, for being such a careful, intelligent reader.

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  The Strange Files of Fremont Jones

  Fire and Fog

  Emperor Norton’s Ghost

  Death Train to Boston

  Beacon Street Mourning

  And coming soon

  Cut to the Heart

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  DIANNE DAY spent her early years in the Mississippi Delta before moving to the San Francisco Bay Area. She now lives in Pacific Grove, California, where she is at work on a novel of suspense based on the life of Clara Barton. Fremont Jones has appeared in six mysteries: The Strange Files of Fremont Jones, which won the Macavity Award for Best First Novel, Fire and Fog, The Bohemian Murders, Emperor Norton’s Ghost, Death Train to Boston, and most recently, Beacon Street Mourning.

  ONE

  SPIRIT SHOCK

  As recently as a week ago I would not have thought that I, Fremont Jones, should ever find myself in a place such as this. I peered surreptitiously through the dim light in an effort to see if the others present were handling the eerie atmosphere with more equanimity than I. I was, in point of fact, decidedly uncomfortable. Even apprehensive. Only loyalty to my new friend—whose risk was, after all, far greater than mine�
��kept me in my seat; otherwise I should have bolted. Facing resolutely forward, I sneaked a look at her from the corner of my eye.

  My friend, Frances McFadden, waited alertly, eagerly, for the séance to begin. Her eyes glinted, picking up light from the candles that burned in sconces on the wall; her lips were parted and her breath came light and fast. In truth I could not comprehend her attraction to Spiritualism—so great an attraction that she would deceive her husband and come on the sly. I was helping her, of course, out of my own curiosity, as well as a profound belief that one owes it to one’s gender to thwart the sort of husbands who are forever telling their wives where they may go and what they may do.

  We were eight around the table; when the medium entered, she would make nine. Whether there was significance to that number or not, I did not know. The medium’s empty chair was to the right of Frances, and Frances at my own right. On my left sat a man who smelled unpleasantly of cheap cigars, a bulky fellow whose scratchy tweed sleeve kept rudely impinging upon my more lightly clad arm. The woman beside him I could not readily see, though with the curve of the round table one would have thought she should fall in my line of vision. I mentally pictured a wife shrinking in her husband’s shadow—though in truth I knew neither of them from Adam or Eve.

  Continuing on clockwise around the table, in the place of honor as it were, directly across from the medium’s throne-like chair, sat a handsome man with a hawkish profile. He was clean-shaven but had a good deal of dark, wavy hair on his head—in color either black or brown or dark red, it was impossible to tell in the dim conditions. I did not want to be so rude as to stare, and a glance hardly sufficed to make the distinction. Diagonally across from me, next to Mr. Hawk, sat a blob of a woman, pasty-faced, whose several chins spilled over the high neck of her fancy black dress and thus obscured most of a very large cameo. She breathed with a wheeze. Two more women made up the balance of the table, both middle-aged and unremarkable in bearing or dress, but I thought a great deal of sadness seemed to emanate from them.

  Emanate, indeed! I gave an inward snort. This seance and its oppressive atmosphere must be poisoning my mind—ordinarily I’d have no truck with anything such as emanations, not even in my vocabulary! I should have to watch myself, or I’d become as enamoured of the spirit world as Frances.

  The room was stifling, all the windows closed and hung with heavy velvet drapes. I squinted and judged the drapes to be dark green, matching the embossed, brocaded wallpaper whose color was just discernible in the candleglow. The silence was thick, marred by the wheezing of Madame Blob. I heard Frances catch a breath in her throat, a little gasp, and at the same time the candles began to waver and cast weird shadows as if in a draft, although I had neither seen nor heard a door open. From my friend’s palpable sense of anticipation, as well as by these slight signs of movement, I guessed the marvelous medium’s advent was at hand.

  The hawkish man stood up suddenly, raising his eyebrows in an expectant manner. When I moved as if to stand up too, Frances tugged on my skirt and I subsided. The others sat riveted in place. I thought: It is embarrassingly obvious who is the neophyte here. And I concluded that Mr. Hawk, the only man of passable good looks in the room, must be the medium’s confederate—which showed she had some taste in men at least, though one had to wonder at her choice of vocation.

  “Mrs. Locke!” Mr. Hawk announced, in a voice like a gong. He might as well have prefaced his announcement with “Behold!” for such was clearly his intent.

  I made a swift survey of the table to determine which way I should direct my gaze in order to behold, because for the life of me I had seen no door other than the one by which we’d all entered. She would not come in that way, surely? For that door led only from a large, bare entrance hall, which offered no possibility for concealment of the various engines necessary to work the medium’s chicanery and deception. Everyone knows that these people are fakes; though I must admit that Frances was convinced quite otherwise.

  Suddenly I realized the others were all looking at me! In that same instant I felt a frisson, a sort of premonitory rush, and then—but curiously not before—directly behind me I heard that door, the only door, open. They had been looking not at but rather beyond me, and I turned around slowly and did the same.

  Mrs. Locke, the marvelous medium, was a tiny woman dressed all in lace that may have been white but looked ivory in the candlelight. She moved with dainty steps, and absolutely no facial expression whatsoever, to her chair at the head of the table. She did not acknowledge our presence. Her age was impossible to determine; she was neither pretty nor plain, nor had she any character in her face. She was as near to a mask, or a cipher, as a human being may become. Her male confederate first closed the door and then came with long, efficient strides to assist her into the huge chair, pulling it out, tucking it in, then placing beneath the table a stool for her feet. Given that her feet could not possibly reach the floor, and that she did need the height of the chair to make her our equal at the table, I nevertheless immediately thought Aha! The means by which she does her tricks are somehow hidden in the overlarge chair and in that footstool.

  I, of course, do not believe in spirits. I believe that when we are dead we go to make dirt, and there’s the end to it; but Frances had declared that one session with Mrs. Locke would persuade me otherwise. That was not very likely—yet I had to allow I could neither deny nor ignore the eerie feeling that pervaded this room. What, I wondered, was its source?

  I had previously asked Frances what we might expect at this seance. She had replied: “It is always the same yet different, depending on who the spirits are that come through. They come through her, Mrs. Locke. She doesn’t do manifestations—you know, ecto-plasmic extrusions and ringing bells and blowing trumpets and all that—she just talks. But not in her own voice; in the voice of the spirits. Oh, and she has a control.” Of course she does, I’d thought, and her control will be a Red Indian or an Arab or some two thousand year old man. But Frances had said, “He’s a little boy named Toby.”

  Now Frances seized my right hand and squeezed the life out of it. She shot me a quick, bright-eyed glance, as if to say Isn’t this the most exciting thing! And because I myself was so pleased to have a woman friend of about my same age and background, I squeezed her hand back and smiled, although that room was hardly conducive to smiling. A little riffle of nervous anticipation passed through our circle around the table. Mr. Hawk placed a green pillar candle in front of Mrs. Locke and lit it; as he did so, Frances leaned to me and whispered, “Green is Toby’s favorite color.”

  Mrs. Locke said, in a voice like a clear bell, “Thank you, Patrick.” So that was Hawk’s name; it was the only one I was likely to learn here tonight. Part of the appeal of seances must be, I suppose, the anonymity in which one participates. It makes for more of a thrill. Patrick did not acknowledge her thanks, but went about extinguishing the candles in the wall sconces, then took his seat opposite the medium at the table. The room smelled of burnt candles and something else, something sweetish that I did not like, perhaps incense from the pillar candle into which Mrs. Locke now gazed.

  For a moment I studied the medium’s perfectly blank face. Her eyes, I noted, were such a dark brown they were almost black, and in addition her pupils were widely dilated. She stared, and stared.…

  And after what seemed an unbearable length of time she said, “Let us join hands. By the joining of our hands we declare that we are all pure, honest, and determined in our intent to contact the World of the Spirits.” Her voice was high, virginal, of the most convincing sincerity.

  I closed my eyes, unconvinced but wavering. I thought: What harm can it do? Why should I not, for Frances’s sake, let go my disbelief for the next hour or so, and participate with an open mind? I decided that I would.

  The man on my left gripped my hand in a tentative fashion, as if he were afraid of contagion; or perhaps he only wanted to bolt and run, as I had earlier. His palm was hard as horn. A laborer, I
guessed, perhaps one who works the docks. I wondered what had brought him here. On my other side, Frances’s hand felt hot—my own were cold by comparison. Yet having given up my disbelief, I was now burning with curiosity and eager to get on with the seance. The flame on the pillar candle seemed hypnotic. For a single light it gave a good deal of illumination. Faces were easily read. The two unremarkable middle-aged women now seemed starkly terrified, with almost identical facial expressions; Madame Blob looked pettish, with her eyes closed; Patrick stared abstractly ahead, nobly serene. Frances, her eyes shut tight, was frowning; she began to rock slightly back and forth. And the medium appeared all of a sudden to be in pain.

  “A-a-agh!” she gasped. She twisted about while clinging with great force to the hands of the people on either side of her, one of them being Frances. I fancied—or maybe it really did happen—that a current like electricity shot through all our linked hands. Mrs. Locke slumped forward, then threw her head back. Her neck popped, I heard it, and my own shoulders hiked up to my ears in sympathy.

  “Who is here?” That was Patrick’s orotund tone, with an edge of urgency added.

  Not Toby, I thought, that’s no little kid—though precisely why I had that thought, I did not know. A moment later I was proved right.

  Mrs. Locke groaned. A sheen of perspiration covered her face, now wreathed about with pain. Frances rocked harder; her hand trembled in mine and I gripped it more tightly.

  “Speak to us!” Patrick commanded. “Tell us your name.”

  The medium started to laugh, but this laughter had no merriment in it. Her clear, high voice had gone all low and harsh. And over to my left a small, hesitant female voice said, “Why, he laughs just like my dad!”