by Dianne Day
“No, not in the sense that he was speaking to me, or putting thoughts in my head, but I knew he was there. I could tell. And I could—well, it’s hard to describe.”
“Do the best you can. I shall be able to follow you.”
“I could feel the presence of the dogs, guarding him. They were like—like a barrier, an invisible wall.”
“Ah. Dogs.”
“Yes. The same as barked through Mrs. Locke that day, you remember, when I went into trance so unexpectedly at the séance. Mr. Rule, it is not I who first made this happen, it was she. She was the one who gave voice to the dogs, or one of them. Lazarus, it was. I only happened to be there in the room, and receptive, so that he could come through me. And then he was able to find me again.”
“He? Who is it that you speak of?”
“The Emperor.”
“Ah, the Emperor. Frances, let us return to the dog or dogs. Tell me more about them. They sound like familiar spirits, and familiar spirits can be either benign or malign. One must be careful in making contact with spirits that come across on the ethereal plane as being other than human.”
Frances flicked her eyes at me. Patrick Rule still held my hand. I could see no need of it, because the part of the interview that might have turned into a séance was clearly over now, but I did not want to disturb this process by reclaiming my hand. In the overall context of things, it would have seemed unnecessarily disruptive at that moment. I gave Frances the slightest nod, and immediately she continued:
“They’re just dogs. You know, curs, mongrels. They’ve passed on, too. Lazarus was the first to go, and then Bummer—he’s the more playful of the two. They’re the Emperor’s dogs, that’s all.”
But Patrick was skeptical. “We can’t be certain. You should not be so accepting of that; more investigation will be required. Now tell me more about the Emperor himself.”
“His full title is Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico. Of course he knows he isn’t, not really, but that’s what he thought when he was alive. He’s a good fellow. Mr. Rule, Fremont, I don’t understand why you’re asking me all these questions.”
Now seemed the perfect time for me to take my hand back, which I did, and put both in my lap. I chose to answer her myself. “Mr. Rule believes some kind of negative influence—is that fair to say?” I waited for his nod of assent before continuing. “Some kind of negative influence may have come through that day you and I attended the séance. It was the last séance Abigail Locke ever gave, after all, and something peculiar did happen.”
Rule gave an emphatic nod, a quick, hard down-pull of his head.
“But I myself”—I sat a little taller, as if that could establish some authority on my part, which I felt had been sadly lacking in this interview process so far—“cannot believe spirits have anything to do with murder. In my opinion, the murder weapon in both these cases had to have been wielded by a human hand.”
“Yes, a human hand,” Rule said, looking at me sidewise, “but yet a malign spiritual influence may have been at work. Abigail had protected herself from such influences for a long time, with certain spells and wardings, yet something broke through. And it must have happened in roughly the same time period when you came to see her.”
Frances shrugged, handling the gesture in a way that was so ladylike it became almost elegant, as if to say, What could things of this nature possibly have to do with a refined female like me?
I took up her cause again, as I had been doing perhaps far too often—but at the moment I was unaware of that. I said, “It is my own belief—and please recall, Mr. Rule, you’re paying me to look into these matters in a professional way—that Frances’s Spiritualistic abilities have nothing whatever to do with the deaths of the two mediums. That part is simply coincidence. However, you’ve seen—and may I say participated in?—a clear demonstration of her natural abilities in this area and must therefore be able to understand that she needs a teacher.”
Rule didn’t want to let it go, to allow me (a woman, after all) free reign in the case. He wanted to hover over me, pulling strings. I wasn’t going to have that, couldn’t have it; to give in would have established a pattern that would then become the norm for future cases. So we had a silent battle of wits and wills and eyes, his eyes having become that flat, clear gray so curiously devoid of content. He really had the strangest eyes I had ever seen.
At last he said, “Very well. You take care of the investigation, Miss Jones, and I will work with Mrs. McFadden to see she receives guidance. Toward that end”—he turned slightly, addressing himself to Frances alone now—“I’ll need to know more about the automatic writing I understand you’ve already done.”
I sensed I was no longer needed, and left them to it.
They departed together half an hour later, walking with matching strides like lovers, her head tipped up to him and his bent down to her, still talking, talking, in murmurs intelligible I supposed only to themselves. I watched them out the door, then moved to the window and watched them down the street. They belong together: impossible not to have that thought. It proclaimed itself so loudly in my mind that I almost uttered the words aloud. Yet I knew, somehow I knew, that this was not a match made in heaven but in hell.
“Fremont Jones, you are losing your mind!” I muttered, a bit louder than was quite necessary. How could I possibly know something like that? He was going to help her, he’d be good for her, and besides, the man she was married to acted like such a brute—
A low chuckle from behind startled and interrupted me, sending a chill through my bones.
13
———
A Disaster?
You are doing it again,” I said without turning around, “sneaking around, and this time scaring me half to death. Wherever did you get that evil chuckle, Michael?”
He came all the way up behind me. As no one was about, he indeed moved entirely too close, and as we stood there front to back looking out the window he became aroused. Even through skirt and petticoat I could feel him pressed against me.
“They make a handsome couple, I’ll grant you that,” Michael conceded, and then took it back in his next breath, “if appearances were all one had to go by.”
I slipped to one side and left the window, for a moment wondering what had ever possessed me to think I could work in the same space as this man, the two of us self-professed partners in love and work. When Michael was in one of his amorous moods it was terribly hard to get anything done.
“Who are we to be judgmental, Michael?” I asked from the relative safety of my desk. “He has lost his working partner, who may have been more than that to him—I mean of course Mrs. Locke—and she, Frances, is in a loveless marriage that is more like a lifetime prison sentence than anything else. If they find pleasure in one another’s company, who are we to deny it to them? Or to make unkind remarks about them?”
Perhaps I had expressed myself a little too strongly; I know I do that at times. At any rate, Michael froze. His entire manner changed, and he became more like the Michael I had first known at Mrs. O’Leary’s house some years ago, remote and mysterious. He can do that instantly, tuck his personality so deep inside himself that even I cannot find it, not even through the windows of his eyes.
I was in no mood to soften or to placate. He was on the verge of stepping into my case, I knew that as surely as I knew my first name was Caroline—and I liked the idea of his doing that about as much as I liked my first name, in other words, not much at all.
A moment later he confirmed it by saying in a leading tone of voice, “Of course, you must run your investigation in the manner you choose. I’m here for consultation, only if you wish it.”
“I appreciate your confidence in me,” I said both formally and firmly, “however I do not wish to consult at the present time.”
He shot me an impenetrable look and turned back toward his own little office; then changed his mind and spun on his heel, heading instead for t
he front door. Which meant he was going to go out on his own, for a walk, or to do whatever he did when he was out of sorts with me.
One hand on the doorknob, he looked back at me over his shoulder. “You can be cold. Do you know that, Fremont Jones?” he asked, then opened the door and was gone.
Michael did not come to me that night, nor did I go to him; and the next morning when I came down there was a note on my desk. It is seldom wise to take a case on impulse. A judicious background check on one’s potential client is often in order. MAK.
I sat down abruptly, as if all the wind had fled my sails. I am never at my best first thing in the morning, and I had not yet even had my coffee. I was vulnerable, my defenses down, and somehow the use of all his initials—MAK, for Mikhail Arkady Kossoff—made me recall in a rush all that I had been through with this man, not to mention how embarrassingly well he knew me. Or how good he had been to me. Most of the time. Of course there had been some times …
Well, the main thing was, he was right. I tucked the note into my pocket and went to tell him so. But when I got to his side of the house Michael was not there. In his bedroom the wardrobe stood open, clothes obviously having been snatched out and packed in haste, in the leather case that was also missing. He had gone. Apparently he had decided to take his trip, the one meant to save me from having to explain our relationship to my father, a week early.
I felt bereft and shaky, though this was what I had wanted: A free rein, the autonomy to conduct my first case my way, on my own.
———
Wish Stephenson used his old police department contacts to do a check for me on Mr. Patrick Rule. It was still not an easy thing to do much by way of looking into the backgrounds of people in San Francisco, or in California, or in the whole of the American West for that matter. If the West was the land of opportunity, that was true in part because here people tended to be taken at face value. You didn’t get introduced to someone new, and then in the next five minutes find yourself answering questions like, What was your mother’s family? and Where did you go to school, my dear? True enough, a stratified society of sorts had grown up in San Francisco during the fifty-something years since the Gold Rush, but it was a society based on wealth, not on family; therefore, anyone could get in.
This was not at all like Boston, where it has been said the Cabots talk only to the Lowells and the Lowells talk only to God. (Which was untrue, by the way; the Lowells talked to my mother and father on quite a regular basis when I was growing up.) For my immediate purposes the important point was that in Boston, in all of Massachusetts and the New England states—indeed throughout the East—records were kept of everything. But here in the West that was far from the case; and in San Francisco particularly, most of the records we’d ever had were burned up in the fire after the earthquake. That fire had destroyed City Hall, and a huge percentage of all the places of business in the City.
Criminals and opportunists were of course having a field day. I did sincerely hope Patrick Rule was not one of them. On the other hand, we San Franciscans have a rather loose definition of what constitutes a criminal; some crimes are worse than others.… With my thoughts running along those lines, it really was just as well that Michael was not here.
“Can’t find much on Patrick Rule,” Wish announced on the afternoon of the day of Michael’s departure.
That was not exactly bad news; it was, in fact, a relief. I said, “Well, are you going to tell me what you did find?”
“It’s more what I didn’t find: no criminal record, for instance. Owns no real property—that’s as in real estate—has no visible means of support. That is, no job.”
“His job would have been looking after Abigail Locke.”
“But, Fremont, that was a personal relationship. Or so you said. Didn’t you?”
“I don’t recall.” I fell to musing over this, just talking aloud as I mused—something Wish himself did, as a matter of fact—and I knew that if he picked up on anything valuable in my musings he would point it out to me, as I would have to him. “She must have paid him, because apparently he maintained his own household. At the very least he had a room he lived in somewhere, he didn’t live at the house on Octavia Street.”
I was silent for a few minutes, mulling things over. Then went on: “But he lives there now. According to the newspapers, Patrick Rule was the principal beneficiary of Abigail Locke’s estate. He was the only person to benefit financially from her death.”
Wish inserted, “The estate wasn’t large at all, if the newspapers are to be believed. If she was paying him, he’d probably have done better to continue working for her. What are you thinking, Fremont? That your client has hired you to throw the scent off himself?”
I studied Wish, who leaned with his elbows on his knees, big hands dangling down. He had such an earnest, puzzled expression on his face it was almost comical. I smiled, and in the process became aware it was the first time I’d smiled since Michael’s leaving. “Wish, I do believe you’re even more ready than I am—make that than I used to be—to take people at their word.”
He blushed, but only a little. Not long ago he would have blushed a lot. After hanging his head for a moment, in what might have been self-deprecation, he looked up grinning. “I guess that’s true. Always think the best until somebody does something to prove otherwise.”
“That’s not a particularly useful philosophy in our profession. I’m surprised you’ve been able to stick to it.”
“Useful professionally, no. You’re right, from that point of view it’s kind of … dumb. But personally, it makes me a whole lot happier. I’ve gotten pretty good at sorting out the bad apples, Fremont. You want me to interview this Patrick Rule on some pretext? Tell you how he comes off to me?”
If Michael had made the same offer, I would have rejected it instantly. But coming from Wish, I considered it. Why? Why should I be so prickly only with Michael, whom after all I knew far, far better than I knew Wish Stephenson? It did not stand to reason.
“Fremont?” Wish prompted.
I widened my eyes, mentally shaking myself. “I’m here. I was just thinking.… Wish, let me think upon it overnight. I’ll speak to you again on that tomorrow. Oh, and Wish? Do you know anyone, man or woman, who might like a job answering the telephone here for the next two weeks? And permanently after that if we can get something worked out?” I had decided to take matters into my own hands. I would pay out of my own case fees, if necessary, but I simply could not be tied to that desk any more.
Wish chuckled. “When the cat’s away, eh, Fremont?”
“I suppose you could look at it like that. But really, Wish, one cannot conduct an investigatory business by staying in the office. Nor can I ask you every time I want to go out. Oh, I can hardly wait, there is so much to do.”
Opening his central desk drawer, Wish (who was very neat) started putting things away as he did every night before leaving. He poked at the inside of his cheek with his tongue. “Well,” he said, “about someone to answer the telephone … I do have an idea. A couple of them, actually. Leave it to me, Fremont. I’ll have someone here for your consideration tomorrow morning.”
———
Late afternoon, just after four o’clock. Wish had left, saying on his way out that he was going to do a bit on his own special project on his way home. I was curious, of course, to know what his special project was; nevertheless I did not ask. I had a strong hunch it had something to do with those graves, which I had not liked at all, and if that were the case I did not want to know.
I roamed through my side of the house, at first idly and then with the dawning realization that I was looking at my space through my father’s eyes—or as near to that as possible. His visit, coinciding with my birthday, was just a little more than a week off.
The entire downstairs, the office suite, Father could not help but approve. He would not expect the mahogany-paneled solemnity of his own offices at the bank. Nor even, I daresay, the elegance of h
is library and study in our own Boston house. Our three rooms here, including Michael’s minuscule study, were tastefully furnished and as filled with light as any space can be in this city of ever changing moods and fogs. The kitchen he would ignore as not being his domain, therefore not a place about which he felt entitled to render an opinion.
With an increasingly heavy heart and a sheen of apprehension appearing on my skin, I climbed the stairs to my private rooms on the second and third floors. The wall along the stair needed pictures—paintings, or at least photographs. But art takes both time and money to acquire; one cannot (if one has any sense of taste at all) just put up any old thing, buy old paintings out of the barrel at the junk shop, which was about all I could afford for now, and in the foreseeable future.
My own sitting room had a nice Chinese rug on the floor, a sort of house-warming gift from my friend Meiling Li, who is Chinese and a special student at Stanford. This rug had a border pattern in a subdued apricot shade, a central sort of mandala predominantly of the same shade, and a background field of ivory with tiny apricot, brown, and green flowers woven into it. Father would like the rug—even Augusta would have to like that rug, as it was very fine—but he would look around and think, if not say, “And where is the rest of your furniture, Fremont?” No, he wouldn’t, he’d say, “And where is the rest of your furniture, Caroline?”
I found myself resenting that mightily, though he was not even here yet, and even though I knew I could hardly be certain what he’d think.
“Oh yes, I can!” I said softly but intensely, leaning in the sitting-room doorway, heartsick. I loved my father dearly, and he would never understand, never appreciate how long it had taken me to trust that the J&K Agency could provide me with income-producing work, work which would enable me to support myself as I’d done with my typewriting service that first glorious and strange year in San Francisco. He couldn’t know that only recently had I dared spend a substantial portion of my little remaining hoard of money for the two chairs the room did hold. These were a pair of velvet-upholstered wing-back chairs in a rich butterscotch shade, one with a matching footstool. I had been so proud of purchasing those two chairs, yet now I saw that to Father they would look like nothing. Perhaps even worse than nothing.
