by Janet Fox
Yes. Kula Baker does the right thing. For the right reasons.
“Kula.” Miss Everts gestured at the door. I went to hold it for her and followed her into the bright sun.
The automobile waited for us by the curb. It was shiny black with little brass lantern headlamps and a leather top as on a buggy, only the top was rolled away, considering the fine, cool day. I circled around the thing, nervously eyeing it from every angle.
Put me on the back of a pony, even one that was barely green broke, and I wouldn’t blink. I could ride bareback all the way across Montana on a four-legged animal. This was another thing altogether, putting my life in the control of a machine. It was both a fright and a thrill.
“Who guides it?” I asked.
“Jameson will be doing the driving,” said Miss Everts. “Jameson, I should like to give Miss Baker a view of Mount Tam. Please drive out to Telegraph Hill.”
Jameson held the door open, and I followed Miss Everts into the backseat. Jameson started the crank, and the two or three pops the engine made as it fired gave me a bigger fright, and I found myself with my hands covering my ears, wincing at the sound.
As soon as we were under way, I hung on for dear life, especially on the hills. We could carry on no conversation; the thing made too much noise, and Miss Everts seemed lost in her own world.
Then we started up the steepest hill imaginable. The automobile engine strained. I couldn’t look. My stomach did somersaults, and I leaned forward to put my head between my knees. As I did so, something on the floor by my foot caught my eye.
It was a small black shoe. Being black, it all but vanished in the shadows, but I leaned over and picked it up between two fingers while holding tight to the door handle with my other hand to try to keep my teeth from rattling loose. I sat up and caught my breath. The shoe was embroidered with thick black thread along the sides and toe.
We reached the top of the hill, and Jameson pulled the automobile to a stop and cut off the infernal noise. I held the shoe toward Miss Everts.
She looked at it and then met my eyes. “Mei Lien,” she said in a clipped tone, and turned right away to accept Jameson’s help leaving the automobile.
Well, I supposed it made sense. Though Mei Lien wore Westernstyle clothing, I was sure this shoe was Chinese made and for a delicate child-size foot. Mei Lien could certainly own such a shoe, and she was a tiny little thing. I could return it to her myself. I placed the shoe on the seat.
As I put it down I marked a smudge of black—shoe-black, I guessed—on my beige glove fingertips, and where the blacking had rubbed away on the shoe, the thread beneath was gold. Gold thread on such a shoe. On Mei Lein’s shoe.
“Kula?” Miss Everts called, and I hastened out of the car, rubbing my blackened gloves clean on my handkerchief. I was thankful to stand on my own two legs again and leave that swaying, chattering, and clanking behind.
We were at the top of a hill overlooking the bay. I saw the map of San Francisco in my mind; now I saw the beauty of it all laid before me.
Everything sparkled, flashed, shone. The bay shot a million bright sparks. Ships in the harbor flashed where their glass panes turned in the sun. Sails on smaller vessels ballooned, and the air was fresh and salty and hung with morning moisture. The streets flanking the hill were packed cheek by jowl with houses, tenements, workplaces, and their east-facing windows, too, caught the light and dazzled my eyes.
This was my first view of the vast spread of San Francisco. What an enormous place it was.
“That’s Mount Tam.” Miss Everts pointed away to the north and west, and I turned, expecting a snow-covered peak, like the Rockies of home. But I was disappointed.
“That’s a mountain? It’s nothing but a lump.”
Jameson, standing by the car, cleared his throat.
“This is a mountain that you can ascend to the top,” said Miss Everts. “There’s a train that goes right to the top, and a place to dine and admire the view. And the landscape and scenery are breathtaking.”
Miss Everts pointed again, slightly to the east of Tam. “I have another home just there. Just across the bay.”
Another home—two houses. I was sure the second was as grand as the first. “Do you go there often?”
“In the summer. When it’s too dismal in the city. I do not care for the damp weather that accompanies the summer fogs.”
I stared across the bay at the green slopes where her second home lay. So much for deprivation; Phillipa Everts was unimaginably wealthy. “And your house sits there, empty, all winter?”
“Of course! Isn’t that what I just said?”
“I didn’t mean—”
“Jameson.” She turned away, and Jameson helped her back into the automobile.
I followed slowly. Maybe she sensed my skeptical reaction to all this talk of souls and the unimportance of possessions when she had more possessions than humanly necessary. She was an odd one, and no mistake.
When I climbed into the backseat, I looked for the shoe, but it was gone. Jameson cranked the engine, and we were off, and I was too fretful about Miss Everts to be as bothered by the automobile and the slope on the way down the hills as I had been on the way up.
By our next stop half an hour later Miss Everts was friendly again, which was happy news to me, for we’d arrived at one of San Francisco’s grand department stores on Market Street.
“You’ll need a gown,” Miss Everts said. “We must attend the Henderson affair. I’ve created a ruse about who you are, and your presence is now required. You can’t go to an evening event in day wear.”
It was the first time I’d ever been measured or fussed over. It was embarrassing. At first, I pushed the woman’s hands away. Even when I’d helped a lady dress, I’d never been so familiar. Miss Everts shushed me and pulled me aside to educate me, and after that I submitted . . . but not without shying like a spooked horse from time to time as I was touched so by an utter stranger.
In the end it was all worthwhile, for a gown of fine scarlet-colored crepe, all tiers and gathers, would be delivered to Miss Everts’s house in four days’ time, along with proper gloves, stole, shoes, and my first-ever corset. The last, I confess—since I had laced a few of those up the backs of unhappy employers—I was not looking forward to wearing. Yet the sacrifice of wearing one for the pleasure of donning that rosy-colored gown was necessary, and I’d be willing.
And again, Miss Everts paid for everything. I would owe her so much after all of this.
I hoped that once I found my pa’s treasure it would be enough to secure his freedom and repay her, too. For I’d begun to think it must have been a treasure I was seeking. What else could it be? Nothing else would be of use to freeing Pa but money. If I could pay for a proper lawyer, Pa was sure to have a strong defense. I could even hire a Pinkerton detective to investigate and find the true murderer. I imagined what would be inside the box once I’d found it, the “box the size of a badger.” It had to be filled with gold.
The idea grew in me as we left the department store. It must be gold—the rush was only back in ’49, and in California. Gold from California. It only made sense.
Ty Wong was the connection.
On leaving the store, Miss Everts and I paused on the avenue beside the automobile where Jameson waited, making slow circles with a rag, polishing the contraption’s already-gleaming exterior. There Miss Everts turned to me. “I must go on an errand on my own, Kula. You will stay with Jameson.”
She turned on her heel and stalked up the avenue, leaving me standing next to the horseless with Jameson, surrounded by the noise and the confusion of trolleys and horse-drawns and people scurrying to and fro across that broad avenue framed by monstrous buildings.
“But . . .” By the time I’d sputtered out my protest, she was away, out of earshot. But I needed to get on with my own search. Generosity or no, I’d had enough. I turned to Jameson. “Take me to Chinatown.” I had to start somewhere.
He shook his he
ad. “I must wait here for Miss Everts.”
“Fine. Then I’ll go on my own.”
“Miss Baker, you must not.”
“I have to! I need to find Ty Wong!” My frustration broke through my voice.
“Miss Everts will take care of that.”
“What? Has she—Is she looking for him? How do you know . . . ?” A sudden suspicion planted itself in me. “She means to find Ty Wong without me?”
Maybe she wasn’t being kind at all. All that talk of possessions and souls and her generous purchases was just to throw me off the scent. Perhaps meanness was her true nature. Hadn’t Mrs. Gale said they’d had a falling-out? Miss Phillipa Everts had lost her very own soul and was planning on finding Ty Wong to retrieve my pa’s box for herself. That I could not allow.
I started down the street after her.
“Miss!” Jameson called to me.
I whirled around to face him. “Leave me alone.”
He shook his head. “You should not follow her, miss.”
“I’ll do as I please.” And I turned back again, in time to see Miss Everts turn a corner in the distance. My, but she was a fast walker for someone her age. I picked up my pace and my entangling skirts to try to catch her. It was not the first time I longed to wear a man’s trousers, and it wouldn’t be the last.
At the first corner I nearly got myself run over by a trolley. By the way the conductor jangled that bell you would have imagined he thought I was deaf.
After I scurried back to the curb from that close shave, I tried crossing again, only to encounter further terrors. The driver of a horseless blew his honker at me—it sounded like a sick goose—and then I was knocked about by crowds until I’d lost sense of the corner down which Miss Everts had turned.
But no mind—I would find her. I pressed on, holding my hat in one hand against the buffeting cross breeze and my skirt in the other to free my feet, and now eyeing the traffic as I came to each new intersection.
I came to the corner where I suspected she’d turned, and I turned as well down a street that was more of an alley. But she was not in sight; the alley was empty. Perhaps she had gone into one of the buildings here. Ramshackle brick warehouses lined this byway. Garbage blew along the gutter. I walked deeper in, feeling lonelier by the second. After half a block I had to give up. I must have been mistaken about where she’d turned.
I’d have to confront Miss Everts later. Once again anger filled my gut. I’d grown soft in my five months in Bozeman, in my dependence upon others. It was one thing for me to want a fine man to take care of me right. It was another thing altogether for me to let myself be duped out of my rightful belongings. That was twice, now, within one miserable week.
Kula Baker does not like being taken for a fool.
I made my way back up the street, to find Jameson and return to Miss Everts so that I could confront her truly, when from behind me I heard a voice.
“Why, if it isn’t Miss Kula Baker.”
I whirled around and found myself face-to-face with the man whose leering smile had haunted me for months: Josiah Wilkie. Snake-eyes himself.
Chapter FOURTEEN
April 3, 1906
“On my return to San Francisco it did not
take me long to discover that the city
was wide open to all sorts of crime from
murder to petty theft.”
—California: 1849–1913,
Lell Hawley Woolley, 1913
“YES, MISS BAKER. I KNOW WHO YOU ARE. YOU ARE LOOKING fine, yessir.” Wilkie’s eyes roved over me, and I took a step back. “Mighty fine.” He was duded up himself in those nice togs of his—complete with a felted bowler hat and wool suit. A wolf in sheep’s clothing.
All my determination shook out of me. I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t want a tremor in my voice to give me away.
“What, don’t have a greeting for your old friend?”
How had he found me? How did he know who I was? I tried easing back without looking behind me, one slow step at a time.
“Your pa hereabouts, somewhere?” He took a step toward me and smiled. More exact, he sneered. “No. I imagine not. Why, that’s right. I do believe he’s in prison. I do believe you took leave right after he was arrested. Hopped right on that train to San Francisco, you did.” He shook his head. “Not much loyalty from you, girl.”
His accusation made me clench my fists, useless gesture though it was. He had followed me. He had to have followed me on the train right to San Francisco.
We were engaged in that slow dance of predator and prey, my taking one step back, his taking one step forward, all the while knowing which of us had the upper hand on this forgotten back street; which of us had few—or no—friends in San Francisco; which of us had something that the other wanted.
“So where is that key, Miss Kula? Is it, perhaps, on your person?”
My hand twitched, and he saw that at once and gave me a broad grin.
“Yes, indeedy.”
How many steps were there to get back to that infernal intersection?
“You know, Miss Baker, this is my home, this city. I have a commission here. I have a job to do.”
I found the nerve to speak. “Your job? Your home?”
“That’s right. I am a respected citizen of the city of San Francisco. I’ve been appointed a marshal here, and I work for a powerful outfit in this town. And part of my job involves one Nathaniel Baker. Now your old pa, he got in over his head with something, didn’t he?” He raised his eyebrows. “And you deserted him, now, didn’t you? Shame.”
My jaw clenched, and I edged closer to the avenue, closer to safety. “He asked me to come here.”
“You want to know why? You want to get the whole picture? Your pa thought he could save you. But he made one mistake after another. See, that box I been looking for, that one for which you have the key, I already found it. Right before I put your pa in jail. And you, you’ve got nothing. Course, your pa, he don’t know that.” He examined his hands, turning them to pick at his fingernails. “I think you need to head back to him, now, don’t you? I think maybe it’s time you left San Francisco.”
The box—my reason for being here, my only hope to save Pa—was in the hands of Josiah Wilkie. My thoughts swirled. Snake-eyes Wilkie had found it. He was right—it was time for me to go home. But to what home? And why did he care if I left San Francisco? I pulled my shaky self together. “That’s my pa’s box, and I’ll go to the authorities to get it back.”
“I am the authorities,” he said. “Remember?”
“You got yourself a shiny pin, that’s all.” I practically spit the words at him.
“I got me some powerful friends. And I turned that box over to them, just as I was hired to do.” He leaned toward me. “Time for you to run along home. Before you step in something . . . nasty.”
He wanted me out of this town—he wanted me gone and bad. But why? If he already had the box, had already turned it over to . . . who? I was of no use to him. He was setting me up, this Wilkie, but for what, I didn’t know. I knew my pa wasn’t a killer, but Wilkie. . . I took a chance. “Pa didn’t commit that murder. He didn’t kill that man Black. You did.”
Wilkie eyed me for a minute. “Maybe I did, and maybe I didn’t. Either way, you’ll never prove it.”
I was right. Kula Baker has a good sixth sense. “Watch me.” Brave words, backed by nothing but air.
He shook his head. “You have no idea what you’ve stepped into here, girl. This is bigger than you; there are things you don’t understand. Why, this is even bigger than me. Your pa’s in the way, and he’s a problem. I solve problems.”
What Miss Everts had said—“things you don’t understand”—echoed in what he said. “I don’t care. I’ll find a way to bring you to justice. You’ll see.” My legs shook; my strength was all gone to my brave words.
“Now, I’m sorry you feel that way. And so it looks like we got us another problem. You keep meddling where you don’
t belong.” He took a step closer again. I clenched my fists and set my legs to run. “But we can fix that.”
A rush of fear ran up my spine. “Get away from me.” I turned to dart off, but he was too fast for me. His hand gripped my wrist hard, twisting it.
I pulled, but he tightened his hold. “Let me go!”
I tried to wrench my wrist from his grasp. A movement behind Wilkie caught my eye, and I sucked in air: Min stepped from a doorway and moved swiftly toward us.
Wilkie heard her coming and turned, letting me go, leaving me so he could strike out at her. “I told you to leave!” He raised his fist at her.
I edged back away from them even as I cried, “Don’t!”
Min, as fast as a cat, moved to Wilkie and dropped, right there in the alley, to her knees and then facedown, placing her forehead on the toe of his boot. I gasped, my hand covering my mouth.
Wilkie stood still, his hand raised to strike her, and Min lay prostrate at his feet, clutching his foot, a sacrifice in the filth of the alley. My heart pounded. I knew I should run for safety, but I couldn’t leave Min . . .
And then, for an instant, an expression crossed Wilkie’s face that I wouldn’t believe, couldn’t believe—something like affection, a softening of his features. But it was fleeting, and it vanished as he lifted his foot away from her, his rough gesture kicking her in the face, causing her to whimper. “Go on,” he said to her, his voice quiet. “Get out.”
She didn’t move. I crept backward toward the busy avenue. He reached down and yanked Min to her feet. As he lifted her, our eyes met, and I saw in hers a plea, but not for her. She was trying to tell me to leave, to get away, that I couldn’t save her, she was already lost. Telling me to save myself, yes, get away. I backed toward the street as Wilkie pulled Min down the alley in the other direction. He lifted his chin to me, his eyes narrowed. “We’ll finish this later.”
I turned and made for the corner.
She was his. He owned her, or so he thought. I shuddered to think of it. She was like me, an outsider, a foreigner, judged by how she looked and not by who she was. She was Chinese, and that was enough to allow Wilkie to think that he owned her and could do as he please. That he might have felt a shade of fondness for her didn’t matter to me.
