Nine Lives Last Forever

by Rebecca M. Hale

  Most of the items related in some way to the Gold Rush, Oscar’s favorite period of San Francisco history. It was no coincidence that Oscar’s treasure hunting headquarters was located in the heart of Jackson Square, a neighborhood known during the Gold Rush years as the Barbary Coast.

  The brick buildings that line these streets are some of the few in San Francisco to have survived the massive 1906 earthquake and subsequent city-sweeping fire. The area’s historical significance is further enhanced by the central role it played during the Gold Rush’s massive population influx.

  From 1849 onward, millions of desperate would-be miners rushed past the building that now houses the Green Vase on their way to the Sierra gold fields. Little of the precious mountain dust the gold-seekers collected stayed in their pockets. Most of it ended up back here in Jackson Square, in the hands of saloonkeepers, thrift shop owners, and a cunning swarm of freewheeling swindlers, pick-pockets, and thieves.

  The Green Vase had seen a lot of history over the years, but Jackson Square’s rough and rowdy Gold Rush days ended long ago. The historic brick structures up and down the street are now occupied by high-end antique stores with highly polished merchandise displayed behind expansive glass windows. The line of fancy cars parallel-parked along the street gives notice of the sophisticated clientele who shop here.

  Uncle Oscar had been the lone holdout to this high-brow trend. With the help of his vampy but effective lawyer, Miranda Richards, he’d managed to fend off the neighborhood’s attempts to force him to clean up or sell the Green Vase—its cracked, glass windows and crumbling, brick exterior had matched the dusty piles within. By the time I took over the place, the residents of Jackson Square were so relieved at my willingness to renovate that I met little resistance obtaining permits for the necessary construction work.

  The majority of Oscar’s Gold Rush antiques were now packed up, or at least haphazardly stacked, down in the basement. I had selected what I hoped were the most marketable items from the collection and cleaned them up for a more flattering display.

  To be honest, I had no idea what I was doing, trying to run an antique shop. Prior to Oscar’s death, I had worked as an accountant in San Francisco’s nearby financial district. I’d spent my days hunched down in an office cubicle, drearily crunching numbers and plotting them out onto spreadsheets. It was a dull but comfortably predictable existence, one that I had wholeheartedly immersed myself in. Few vestiges of that previous life survived the aftermath of Oscar’s death.

  Oscar had been buried less than a week when I was dismissed from my job at the accounting firm—thanks to the misguided interventions of my new neighbor, Montgomery Carmichael. To be frank, I was fired. Finding myself suddenly unemployed, I consolidated my meager savings with the proceeds from Oscar’s estate and moved into the apartment above the Green Vase.

  Despite pressure from Oscar’s attorney to sell the antique store, I decided to hold on to it. A part of me, I think, couldn’t bear to let it go. Oscar had been a gruff, grumpy old man, but he’d been my last remaining family tie, the only relative with whom I still had any relationship.

  Almost every Saturday night in the years before his death, Oscar would fix dinner for the cats and me in the apartment above the Green Vase. His signature dish was a skillet full of crispy, pan-fried chicken paired with a heaping bowl of creamy mashed potatoes. The succulent smell still oozed out of the cracks and corners of the upstairs kitchen. If I stood in just the right spot in front of the stove, I could soak in enough of the scent to trick my taste buds into thinking that a hunk of that delicious chicken was passing through my lips. Those Saturday night meals at Oscar’s had been the highlight of every week.

  So, for reasons more sentimental than practical, I’d decided to try my hand as a Jackson Square antique dealer. The store had reopened a couple of weeks ago, but I’d had little luck, thus far, reversing the negative flow of traffic into the showroom. Even with its new red brick exterior flanked by bright green, freshly painted iron columns, the Green Vase just didn’t have the reputation, the cachet, of its competitors up and down the street. I was going to have to come up with another source of income—and soon.

  There was one potential recourse to save me from bankruptcy: a substantial, if illiquid, asset that Oscar had tucked away for me in one of the building’s many hiding places. Two months after its discovery, I still hadn’t come up with a way to leverage the item’s value. Nevertheless, it was comforting to know that I had something, however tenuous, to fall back on should my efforts to run the antique store result in a complete failure.

  But as the hot shower pulsed down on me that morning, my thoughts wandered away from the gloomy financial prospects of the Green Vase. I began to puzzle, instead, on the strange events of the previous couple of days.

  Whispered rumors and speculations of the potential gold mines mapped out in Oscar’s legendary collection of antiques had begun to circulate through Jackson Square. Oscar had not been the only one in this neighborhood, it seemed, with an interest in hidden fortunes, and I had been unwittingly drawn into the hunt. So far, the search had unearthed nothing but questions about my mysterious uncle and his life prior to becoming the caretaker of the Green Vase.

  It was as the last suds of shampoo were slipping down the drain that this second train of thought was interrupted by a series of sharp, thudding bangs that echoed up from the first floor. Concerned, I wrenched off the faucet and reached for a bath towel. I peeked nervously out through the shower curtain and looked around for Isabella. She was nowhere to be seen.

  “Oh, good grief,” I muttered, anticipating the source of the sound. My cats had been up to some strange behavior lately.

  Another loud bump echoed up from the ground floor as I struggled into a sweatshirt and jeans—a troupe of elephants appeared to be rampaging through the Green Vase showroom. I made my way across the bathroom, gingerly stepping around the red igloo and its surrounding sprinkling of litter.

  “You two better not have broken anything else,” I called out as I descended to the second floor, crossed the kitchen, and headed down the wooden staircase leading to the back of the showroom. In the past couple of days, I’d lost several pieces of pottery, including a green vase, to the recent outbreak of feline mayhem.

  Drops of water slid off of my sopping hair, leaving a polka-dotted trail on the steps behind me. Midway down the flight of stairs, I heard the telltale scraping sound of claws scrambling on wood flooring, followed by a swishing whomp of unidentifiable origins.

  I pushed off the bottom step and stood for a moment at the back of the showroom, listening for the location of the feline mischief-makers. There was a scuttling sound near the front of the store, but my view was blocked by the rows of tall oak bookcases that forested the room’s long rectangular cube. I reached up to push the wet bangs off of my forehead and marched resolutely into the store.

  Isabella’s head poked out from behind the bookcase closest to the cashier counter. She flashed me a quizzical, “Guess what I found” look before ducking back out of view.

  “Isabella,” I called out sternly. Then, reflecting on the more likely culprit, I broadened my accusation. “Rupert! What have you two gotten into now?”

  A furry presence appeared at my feet, his long, fluffy tail curling around the back of my leg. Rupert looked innocently up at me, his blue eyes, as always, guilt free.

  “Hmnh,” I harrumphed down at him.

  I took another step toward the cashier counter, causing the worn wooden floorboards to creak beneath my bare feet.

  The last remnants of the morning’s fog still draped the shreds of its thick, gauzy veil over the sun. Isolated rays of sunshine stretched across the floor intermixed with hazy arcs of shadow, creating an eerie half-light that didn’t fully illuminate the room. Next to the counter, I noticed with a start, the front door stood slightly ajar, its curling wrought iron frame rotating slowly on the morning’s thin breeze.

  The blood drained from my face
as I realized that the noise that had summoned me from my shower might have been caused by something other than my cats.

  I crossed my arms over my chest and tried to will my feet forward, but they refused to part with the floorboards. Cautiously, I inched toward the counter.

  Wreeeeek. Wroooooight. I couldn’t hear anything but the increasing pounding of my heart and the annoyingly loud squeak of the floorboards.

  Isabella’s white head poked out again. She chirped at me, clicking her vocal cords instructively. “Come on,” she seemed to be saying. “Come see.”

  I relaxed, suddenly feeling silly for my moment of panic, and released the volume of air I’d involuntarily sucked up into my lungs. Trying to think of alternative reasons for the front door being open, I stepped briskly up to the counter, rounded the bookcase—and stopped short.

  I couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t possible.

  A man sat on a stool behind the counter. Isabella paced back and forth on the floor in front of the stool, purring up at him adoringly. Rupert sped past me to join her, his tail fluffed up in greeting.

  I could do nothing but stare at the man on the stool, my legs immobile, my head unable to process any thoughts or emotions.

  He smiled—in a way that only unsettled me more.

  “You seem surprised to see me.”

  It was all I could do to gasp out my response.

  “I . . . I thought you were dead.”

  PART III

  The Days—and Frogs—in Between . . .

  Chapter 1

  A MILITANT MUSTACHE

  LATE WEDNESDAY MORNING, a grungy, off-smelling man hobbled down Jackson Street toward the Green Vase. His pace appeared slow and painfully labored. He paused every ten or fifteen feet, as if to rest a sore hip, and scanned the nearly deserted street.

  A pair of recently purchased overalls hung loosely over the man’s bony frame, but the crispness of the fabric had already begun to wilt from several days of repeated sweaty wear. The few pedestrians he passed turned their heads to avoid making eye contact. That was fine with Harold Wombler; that was the whole purpose of the outfit.

  Harold raised a rough, wrinkled hand to his face and wiped the dribbling underside of his nose with the back side of it as he paused outside of an empty storefront. Sheets of brown kraft paper covered the floor-to-ceiling windows, sealing off the inside showroom from view. Harold stared into the sheeted plates of glass, looking for any indication of recent activity, but there was no sign of the previous occupant.

  No one had seen Frank Napis—or his elaborate mustache—since mid-April, when he had poisoned, and nearly killed, the niece of one of the Jackson Square shopkeepers. Local gossip speculated that Napis had escaped police capture by hiding out in the network of sewage tunnels running underneath the streets of San Francisco. He’d skipped town, many assumed, and fled the country for a sparsely populated outpost in South America.

  One of the neighbors even insisted that Napis had accessed the sewage tunnels through a secret entrance in the basement beneath the Green Vase antique shop. Napis, this gossipy person was convinced, had made off with an enormous diamond previously owned in the late 1800s by San Francisco finance magnate William Ralston. But since this individual was prone to exaggeration and any number of tall tales, most dismissed his story.

  Harold Wombler had turned a deaf ear to all of it. Senseless drivel from a bunch of ninnies, as far as he was concerned. He’d been there, at the scene of the crime, and he had seen Frank Napis run up out of the basement, and not into the tunnel entrance. Moreover, Harold was quite certain that Napis had not managed to get his hands on the diamond. No, the rumors circulating Jackson Square—on this particular issue at least—were wrong.

  Harold had a different theory regarding the whereabouts of Frank Napis, but he kept it to himself.

  Napis’s store of Far Eastern antiquities had been surreptitiously cleaned out the day after his disappearance, the locks changed, and the windows papered over. The place had appeared vacant ever since. Harold Wombler knew better.

  “I’m onto you,” he grumbled under his breath before limping on to the next store. “You haven’t fooled me.”

  Harold stopped next in front of a red brick edifice that was flanked on either end by iron crenellated columns covered in bright green paint. The top half of the brick wall featured several rows of square windows, every other one of which contained the inlay of a green vase icon.

  Harold fingered one of his many riveted pockets as he looked in through the windowpanes at a woman seated on a stool behind the cashier counter. Scattered papers filled with doodles and an uneven pile of books cluttered the counter in front of her. The closest book lay on top of the pile, open-faced but ignored, as the woman stared upward, unseeing, into the rafters, her bifocal glasses tilted slightly off kilter.

  “This is going to be easier than I thought,” Harold muttered with satisfaction, patting a rectangular shape bulging inside one of his larger pockets.

  IT WAS ANOTHER still, quiet day inside the newly reopened Green Vase. Oscar’s antique cash register sulked on the counter in front of me, glowering in reproachful silence. Every now and then, a wary pedestrian would stop on the sidewalk and peer in through the windows, but so far I had been unable to lure anyone inside. My new business venture was off to a decidedly inauspicious start.

  Isabella sat, sphinxlike, on top of the nearest bookcase, staring intently at the front door. Rupert occupied the bottom shelf, curled up in the dark space behind the row of books. One white foot poked out between the spines, offering the only evidence of his location.

  To pass the time—and to distract myself from the realization of my obvious shortcomings as an antique dealer—I had begun reading through a selection of books I’d culled from Oscar’s collections: numerous tattered texts on the city’s history, political, and social movements, along with several anthologies of famous San Francisco writers.

  On that day, however, concentration was fighting a losing battle with distraction. Several discarded books littered the counter in front of me. My mind kept drifting off, floating up toward the wooden rafters in the ceiling. Shielded from the wind billowing down the street outside, the warmth of the sun soaked into the room, coaxing me into the hazy film of a daydream.

  Though my thoughts started out on their own random course, each one eventually fell into the same well-trodden path—a course my dreams had worn bare through the thicket of my imagination. For the last two months, my subconscious had been fixated on a single disturbing image.

  A feathery orange mustache flitted through the rafters of the showroom—unattached to its human face, each half of the hairpiece fluttering like the wing of a small bird. The strange, runty beast seemed almost cuddly at first, pausing for a moment on one of the ceiling beams, as if to preen its feathers.

  Seconds later, however, the mustache took on a more militant persona. Its body hardened into a sharp, arrowlike shape as it dove down from the rafters, aiming for my head. My arms flailed about as a hidden beak snipped at my hair. I picked up the nearest book and swung it around at the vicious orange blur, catching enough of its body to send it spinning across the room. The nasty little critter circled back to the rafters to regroup, all the while chattering angrily at me.

  I was preparing to fend off another assault from the warring mustache when a glass-cracking knock jolted me loose from the dream. Someone was banging on one of the windows that ran along the street.

  Startled, my weight shifted, and the stool I’d been sitting on tipped backward and slipped beneath me. I grabbed onto the edge of the cashier counter, but it was too late. I landed with a loud thump, rump first, on the floor. Somewhere, in the far corner of the room, I could have sworn I heard that wicked mustache laughing at me.

  Isabella looked down, concerned, as I righted the stool and pulled myself up. I coughed and straightened my glasses, allowing my eyes to focus in on the crumpled face pressed up against the nearest pane of glass. The end of t
he man’s perpetually runny nose smushed into a puddinglike circle as he peered in at me.

  Blushing with embarrassment, I slid around the counter and reached for the knobbed, tulip-embossed handle of the front door. I twisted it open in time to be greeted by a loud snort as Harold Wombler pulled back from the glass and readjusted his nose.

  “Uh, hi, Harold,” I said, grimacing as he wiped a gnarled hand across the lower half of his face.

  Harold grunted a response and pushed past me, shuffling his way through the front door with a stilted, lurching gait resembling that of an arthritic crab. A foul, decaying odor seeped into the air as Harold tipped his dingy baseball cap up to scratch the scalp of his greasy black head of hair. I carefully edged around him to return to the stool on the opposite side of the cashier counter.

  “What’s going on in here?” he asked, mockingly flapping his hands above his head, mimicking my daydreamed efforts to stave off the dive-bombing mustache.

  I mumbled something about a pesky fly as my eyes averted his dubious glare.

  Harold gummed his teeth, pushing forward the bottom frame of his ill-fitting dentures. His sunken, bloodshot eyes bored into me suspiciously.

  Steeling myself for his inevitably caustic reply, I mustered a smile and asked, “How can I help you, Harold?”

  Harold glanced up at Isabella and then down to the bottom shelf of the bookcase. The still sleeping Rupert had rolled over, creating a cat-sized wave in the line of books.

  Harold’s thin upper lip rumpled into a flat, squiggling line as he returned his gaze to the counter. “Place smells like old books,” he said, scowling at the pile in front of me.