Beyond the Grave

by Muller, Marcia

  He read for a time from a volume of poems by Wordsworth. He had three-score volumes of poetry in his rooms in San Francisco, given to him by his mother, and he habitually took one with him whenever he traveled; poetry relaxed him, helped keep his thoughts sharp and orderly. At eight o'clock he went to the dining car, where he ate a huge meal—raw oysters, roast beef, vegetables, sourdough bread, cheese, fresh-churned ice cream. If he had inherited his genteel Southern mother's love for cultural pursuits, he had also inherited his Scottish Presbyterian father's lusty appetites. There was in him a curious mixture of the gentle and the stone-hard, the sensitive and the unyielding. He sometimes thought that was why he had become a better detective than Thomas L. Quincannon, the pride of the nation's capital, the rival of Pinkerton, the founder of the once-respected Quincannon Detective Agency. He knew his limitations, his weaknesses; he had the ability to look at things in different ways, from different points of view. His father had never in his life been wrong, never once changed his mind, was invincible—and had died foolishly, from an assassin's bullet on the Baltimore docks, when he should have been home in bed like other stout, elderly, and gout-ridden men. That would not be his son's fate. John Frederick Quincannon had vowed that he would die in bed, and none too soon, either.

  After supper he made his way to the saloon car, with the intention of smoking his pipe out on the observation platform behind. But he spied Barnaby O'Hare sitting alone, nursing a snifter of brandy, and stopped instead at the historian's table.

  “Mr. Quincannon, good evening. Will you join me?”

  “If you wouldn't mind.”

  “Not at all. A brandy?”

  “Thank you, no. I no longer indulge.”

  “Oh? Medical reasons?”

  “Personal ones. I happen to be a drunkard.”

  O'Hare seemed taken aback, as much at Quincannon's candor as at the fact itself. “Oh, I see. Well…” His voice trailed off, and he studied the contents of his snifter, as if in consultation.

  In vino Veritas, Quincannon thought, but he did not smile even to himself.

  He sat down, produced his pipe and tobacco pouch, and proceeded to load the Turkish latakia mixture he favored into the briar's bowl. When he had the tobacco tamped down to his satisfaction, he lighted it with a sulfur match and said between puffs, “Will you be stopping in Santa Barbara, Mr. O'Hare?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact. I still have people to see in connection with my book.”

  “A history of los ranchos grandes, isn't it?”

  O'Hare nodded. “A comprehensive one, I think. I have gathered a wealth of information thus far. Everyone I've spoken to, especially Señor Velasquez and his wife, has been most helpful.”

  “His wife? I wasn't aware he was married.”

  “Oh yes. To a woman much younger than he—not that that matters a whit, of course. She also comes from an old Mexican family.”

  “I see.”

  “A beautiful woman, Olivia Velasquez,” O'Hare said, a trifle wistfully. “Quite intelligent, quite strong-willed.”

  She would have to be strong-willed, Quincannon thought, to put up with a man of Velasquez's temperament and attitudes toward women. But he said, “I understand you're a teacher by profession,” to bring the subject back to O'Hare.

  “Yes. A professor of history at the university in Los Angeles. I have a grant to fund my research and writing and a leave of absence from my teaching duties.”

  “Fascinating topic, history.”

  “Very. Are you interested in California's past?”

  “Indeed I am.”

  “Any particular facet?”

  “The temperance movement,” Quincannon said blandly.

  “Ah.” O'Hare seemed nonplussed again. He lapsed into silence.

  Quincannon leaned back with the briar clamped between his teeth, listening to the steady whispering clatter of steel-on-steel. Outside the saloon car windows, the night's blackness was broken now and then by the appearance of individual lights, like fireflies moving through the silky dark, and by strings and blobs of illumination that marked some settlement or other.

  At length he said, “Tell me, Mr. O'Hare, how did you happen to come upon the Velasquez statue?”

  “Señor Velasquez didn't explain?”

  “None of the particulars,” Quincannon lied.

  “Well, one of my hobbies is visiting curio shops. I find them intriguing; and occasionally one can find old books, maps, journals, and other items of historical interest. San Francisco has many such shops, as I'm sure you know. Luther Duff's was one of several I visited last week.”

  “What made you examine the statue?”

  “Curiosity; nothing more. It is quite a handsome piece. You've seen it?”

  “Velasquez showed it to me in my offices.”

  “Well, you can imagine my surprise,” O'Hare said, “when I discovered his father's name engraved in the base. Actually, surprise is too mild a word; I was flabbergasted. I recognized it immediately as one of Don Esteban's long-lost artifacts.”

  “Did you reveal that fact to Luther Duff?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “You made no effort to purchase the statue?”

  “I might have, if I had had the two-thousand-dollar asking price. Not for myself, you understand; I know how much the statue means to Señor Velasquez. As it was, I hurried out and sent a wire informing him of the find.”

  “Did you ask Duff where he'd obtained it?”

  “Oh yes. He said at auction in San José two years ago. How it came to be there, he said, he had no inkling.” O'Hare paused for a sip of his brandy. “I expect you were able to extract a different version from him.”

  “Do you?”

  “Else, why would you be on your way to Santa Barbara instead of to San José.”

  Quincannon smiled around the stem of his pipe. “Whatever I may have learned from Luther Duff is confidential information. You understand, I'm sure.”

  “Oh, of course. Discretion is an admirable trait in a detective.”

  “I'm glad you think so.”

  There was another silence. Quincannon smoked placidly, watching the night glide by outside the windows. After a time O'Hare stirred, finished the last of his brandy, and got to his feet. In the glow of the side lamps, his eyes behind the Roosevelt glasses had the look of peeled grapes.

  “If you'll excuse me,” he said, “I believe I'll retire. Perhaps we'll see each other again before our arrival.”

  “If not in Santa Barbara at some point.”

  “I look forward to it. Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  Quincannon lingered after the young historian was gone, to finish his pipe. A waiter approached him and was politely sent away. It was odd, he thought, but after six months of sobriety he no longer had any desire for alcohol. What he had told O'Hare was true: He was a drunkard. During the year prior to those six months, he had besotted himself with liquor. But there had been a reason for it, and that reason was neither a fondness for whiskey nor an inability to control its use. The reason was a woman named Katherine Bennett, a woman he had never met, never spoken to; a pregnant woman in Virginia City, Nevada, who had died—and whose unborn child had also died—with his bullet in her breast.

  The shooting of Katherine Bennett had been a tragic accident. It had happened during a gunfight that had erupted when he and a team of local law enforcement officers attempted to arrest two brothers who ran a print shop, for the crime of counterfeiting United States government currency. In the skirmish behind the print shop, one of the brothers had wounded a deputy with a shotgun load of buckshot and then attempted to flee through the rear yards of a row of private houses. Quincannon had shot him, to avoid being shot himself; but one of his bullets had gone wild and found its way into the breast of Katherine Bennett, who had been hanging up wash in the neighboring yard.

  A tragic accident, yes, but he had not been able to bear the burden of two innocent lives on his conscience. Guilt
had eaten away at him; he had taken to drink to dull the images of that hot September afternoon, the dying screams of Katherine Bennett that echoed and reechoed inside his head. His work had suffered; he had felt incapable of ever turning his weapon against another human being, even to save his own life. Sooner or later Boggs would have been forced to dismiss him from the Service, and he would surely have become lost in a mire of alcohol and guilt if it had not been for two occurrences this past fall.

  The first was a counterfeiting case involving coney greenbacks that had been flooding the Pacific Coast from an unknown location. Quincannon had uncovered evidence that indicated the source to be a remote mining town, Silver City, in the Owyhee Mountains of Idaho; and Boggs, being shorthanded, had had no choice but to send him there undercover to investigate.

  The second occurrence was his meeting Sabina during the course of that investigation. At first he had been both fascinated and repelled by her, for she bore a superficial resemblance to Katherine Bennett; and she also seemed to be involved in the shady goings-on in and around Silver City. It was only later that he discovered she was neither the milliner she pretended to be nor the criminal he feared her to be, but a “Pink rose”—a female operative of the Pinkerton Agency's Denver branch—on an undercover assignment of her own.

  Quincannon had continued his steady, mind-dulling consumption of alcohol while in Silver City, and as a result he had made a foolish mistake that nearly cost Sabina her life. Far-reaching changes had been wrought in him as a result. He had found the strength to stop drinking, to accept his guilt and his dependency on liquor for the senseless, crippling indulgences that they were—indulgences that had almost caused the death of a second innocent woman. And where was the purpose, the atonement, in destroying himself? There were things to be done with his special skills, perhaps even lives to save over many years of public service. And indeed, wasn't the ongoing use of those skills a proper memorial to the short and tragic life of Katherine Bennett?

  After his return to San Francisco, he had given considerable thought to his future. Alcohol had no part in it—he had had his last drink in Silver City—but he'd decided that Sabina did have. He had asked her by wire if she would consider leaving the Pinkertons and joining him in a brand-new venture, a detective agency wherein they would be equal partners. She had wired back affirmatively. She was a widow—her husband, also a Pinkerton operative, had been killed in the line of duty two years before—and had no family ties in Denver; she, too, was ready for a new beginning. He had given notice to the Service, over Boggs's strenuous objections, and when Sabina arrived in San Francisco, they had pooled their savings and opened Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services.

  If the agency had not yet prospered, neither was it floundering. If the past five months had had their share of frustrations, they had also had their share of smiles and satisfactions. Life felt and smelled and tasted good again. The past was behind him, trapped in an occasional nightmare, a vagrant thought or feeling like a dark cloud passing across the face of the sun. He was, he had realized not long ago, with no little surprise, a reasonably happy man once more.

  Not that he was happy at the present time, however. This train was just not where he wanted to be—especially not after he returned to his compartment and settled himself into the berth the porter had made up for him. There was something about the rhythm and motion of a moving train that made sleeping alone a difficult and depressing state of affairs….

  Santa Barbara was a settlement of some five thousand residents, nestled between the Santa Ynez Mountains and the sea. Its primary attraction was its sulfur and mineral springs, whose healthful and curative properties had been bombastically praised by a New York writer named Charles Nordhoff in an 1871 travel guide to California. Ever since, tourists had flocked to Santa Barbara to take the waters—the modern version, Quincannon supposed, of the eternal quest for the fountain of youth.

  He had visited the town more than once as an operative of the Secret Service, the last time three years ago on a case that had taken him to the old Ortego rancho outside the neighboring village of Montecito. The hilly land there now belonged to members of a spiritualist colony called Summerland, who believed they could converse with dear-departed friends and relatives through an individual called a medium. Locally the colony was known as “Spookville,” and Quincannon had found that appellation all too appropriate. More than one strange thing had happened to him in Spookville, not the least of which was an attempt on his life outside the spiritualists' temple near the beach.

  It was midmorning when the train arrived at the main depot at Victoria and Rancheria streets, on Santa Barbara's west side. Well-fed, if not well-rested, Quincannon alighted in the company of Felipe Velasquez and Barnaby O'Hare. The two men had been in the dining car when he entered it at eight o'clock, and he had joined them for breakfast. Velasquez's travel sickness no longer seemed to be plaguing him; he was in better spirits this morning and had eaten the same hearty meal as Quincannon. Their conversation had been polite and limited to neutral topics. No mention had been made of Don Esteban's lost artifacts, and Velasquez had prudently refrained from speaking James Evans's name in front of O'Hare.

  Velasquez's intention was to stay the night in Santa Barbara, he said, at the St. Charles Hotel, and then return to Rancho Rinconada de los Robles early the next day. Quincannon asked and was given directions, in the event that he was required to stay in town longer than just one day. He also managed to find out that O'Hare was stopping at the Delgado, a small lodging house on Gutierrez Street. If for any reason another talk with the historian became necessary, he wanted to know where to find him.

  Quincannon saw Velasquez into a waiting hack, said good-bye to O'Hare, who set off on foot, and then engaged a hack for himself. It deposited him at the Arlington Hotel on State Street, Santa Barbara's finest hostelry—an elegant three-story building surmounted by a tall, square tower that concealed a water tank, and surrounded by lush gardens. The desk clerk insisted that no rooms were available. Fifteen minutes later, after a private discussion with the manager, Evander Boggs, chief of the Secret Service's San Francisco field office, was personally escorted to a large and comfortable third-floor suite.

  Quincannon spent a few minutes refreshing himself, went downstairs again, treated himself to a brace of ten-cent Cuban panatelas at the tobacco counter in the lobby, and strolled outside. There was fine spring weather here, too; instead of taking another hack, he decided to walk to Anacapa Street. He unwrapped one of the cigars, lighted it, and set out to meet James Evans.

  What he found at number 1206 Anacapa Street, however, was a German family named Kreutz.

  James Evans had not resided there for three months, and neither the Kreutzes nor anyone else in the neighborhood knew what had happened to him.

  PART III

  1986

  ONE

  BY SUNDAY NOON I was back home from the hospital, relieved in one way and disturbed in another. When Nick and I had arrived there at seven, Mama had already been given something to relax her before surgery. She kept telling me I should go to work, and after the third time I stopped reminding her that I didn't have to go, it was the weekend. She asked Nick about how his run had gone at least seventeen times; since it was a subject that interested him far more than going to work interested me, he replied to each question, dredging up more details to keep her mind off her imminent operation. He was explaining how his buddy Ed's pulled hamstring might keep him out of the Carpinteria Marathon two weeks from now, when they came to take Mama down to surgery.

  Then Nick and I went to the cafeteria to wait. While he drank milk and read the Sunday paper, I gulped down what seemed like gallons of black coffee. I'd bought a sweetroll, too, but I couldn't eat it; my huge grief-induced appetite of the night before had vanished and I felt choked up and slightly queasy. Anyway, every time my hand strayed toward the roll, the old health nut's jaw pushed out in a way that made him look like a bulldog.

&n
bsp; To keep my mind off what might be going on in the operating room, I thought back to the old detective's report I'd read the night before. It had actually been only a fragment of a report, ending abruptly, as if the rest of it had been lost. I wondered what had happened in—and to—the additional pages. Had John Quincannon found Don Esteban Velasquez's missing artifacts? There was no way of knowing.

  Finally Dr. George found us and said the operation had gone well; Mama was on her way to her room from Recovery.

  It was when I saw Mama that I started to worry all over again. She was groggy, but I'd expected that. What I hadn't expected was for her to be as closed and unresponsive as she'd been the afternoon before. She held Nick's and my hands and said she was relieved that everything was going to be okay, but she didn't ask when she could go home, or if we'd gotten hold of Carlota yet, or any of the other things that would have made me feel she was really there with us. And when Dr. George said we should go and let her rest, she didn't protest. As we went out, she was staring at the ceiling just as she had been when we'd left the day before.

  I tried to talk to Nick about it, but he was looking preoccupied and said something about having errands to run; he left me in the hospital parking lot. His abrupt departure made me feel even more shaky inside. I got into my car and sat there for a few minutes, thinking. All my life I'd depended on Mama, and now she was weak and in need of support herself. And ever since I'd known him, Nick had seemed strong and self-assured, but Mama's illness seemed to have unnerved him. This was, I decided after a few minutes, one of those growing-up experiences when you realize that your elders are not invincible but mere humans who are easily frightened when their increasingly fragile bodies seem to be letting them down. Being able to categorize it that way made the situation a little less threatening but did nothing to comfort me. I've found that coming-of-age events are seldom reassuring until their emotional barbs are blunted by time.