Bloody Lessons: A Victorian San Francisco Mystery

by Locke, M. Louisa

  Annie got a better appreciation for Mr. Emory’s talents as a politician as he effectively swept away any problems she or Nate brought up with this little “scheme.” She would have to teach only two classes a week, from 2-3 p.m. on Wednesday and Friday afternoons, although she could come as early in the afternoon as she wanted and stay until five when the school was locked up. She would be able to use Hoffmann’s office to meet with students, and, since his office contained the personnel files, she would also be able to look through those files for possible motives among unhappy staff members. She would get paid, not just for the teaching but also for any investigating she did, and, finally, she could stop whenever she felt she had collected all the information she possibly could at the high school.

  Since late afternoon was Madam Sibyl’s least busy time––the women had to get home to prepare for dinner and the men weren’t yet ready to leave their offices––she wouldn’t lose much revenue and might actually come out ahead, depending on how much she made in the investigation. One positive outcome would be that they would no longer need to ask Barbara to gossip about her colleagues. Annie had never tried to teach anyone anything, and that was the most frightening part of the whole plan, but she knew Laura and Barbara would help her design her lessons.

  “Oh, Mr. Dawson, you shouldn’t let the boy pester you so,” the musical tones of Mrs. Anderson broke into her thoughts. While Annie and Emory had been talking, Nate had gone into his office to compare the letters Emory had been able to bring with him to the notes that Hattie had received. But now he had returned and was sitting at the end of the table with Mrs. Dorthea Anderson, whom Emory called affectionately Dot. Nate had placed her four-year-old son, Jack, on his knee and was doing a bit of “This is the way the ladies ride” with him.

  Mrs. Anderson looked exactly the way Annie had imagined she would from Nate’s description. She was what was commonly called a “fine figure of a woman.” She’d blushed very prettily when Nate introduced her, and she was batting her wide-set cornflower blue eyes quite charmingly at him now. She also had gotten very teary when Nate questioned her about getting any nasty letters, inanely repeating that she couldn’t imagine who would be so mean as to impugn her good name or to suggest that Mr. Emory or Mr. Hoffmann had behaved improperly. What Annie couldn’t determine was if Dot Anderson was really as dim as she appeared or if she was just a very good actress.

  Her son, on the other hand, was adorable, and as Annie watched Nate send the child giggling back to his mother, she couldn’t but think about how devastating it would be if she couldn’t give him children of his own.

  *****

  “Well, you and Emory got along just fine,” Nate commented to Annie as the cab took off down Market.

  As promised, he was escorting her home, and she was enjoying the chance to lean close to him in the dark shadows of the cab. The storm that had blown in Saturday night had passed, but the sky remained overcast, with the full moon just a hazy orb.

  “Yes,” she replied. “He was certainly not what I expected. Having met him, I am less inclined to think that there is anything improper about his relationship with Mrs. Anderson.”

  “Yes, I suppose. He does act more fatherly towards her than anything else.”

  “And if there was something untoward going on, I doubt she would have flirted so shamelessly with you in front of him.” Annie looked over at him to see how he would take this. The lamps along Market cast just enough glow for her to see him frown.

  “Annie, I assure you, she was just being polite…oh, you’re teasing me,” he said, putting his arm around her.

  Annie laughed but thought to herself that she needed to keep her eye out for some Girls' High teacher, or student for that matter, who might not like Dottie Anderson batting her blue eyes at the men in their lives.

  Thinking of possible motives, Annie said, “Nate, I know you told Emory that the letters the school board received and the notes to Hattie were very different, but do you think this means they were written by different people?”

  “On the surface they were different. The notes to Hattie, as you know, were written in block letters with very black ink, and the lined composition paper gave the impression they were written by a child, although the content was very adult. And, as you saw, the letters Emory brought were written in blue ink, on ordinary white letter paper, and the hand-writing was cursive but very shaky and slanted backwards.”

  “I see.” Annie wished she had been able to spend more time studying the letters Emory had brought. “But I hear some hesitation in your voice.”

  “It’s just that I think there may have been an attempt to disguise the hand-writing in both cases, pretending to be a child in the case of Hattie’s notes, and writing with the left hand in the case of the other letters,” Nate said. He continued, “My brother is left-handed, and I used to try to write the way he did to get him in trouble, but my parents could always tell when a note was legitimately written by him. These letters looked the same way mine did.”

  Annie saw that they were passing the Palace Hotel and would soon be turning onto O’Farrell. The ride was going too quickly for her. She said, “What could you learn from the actual content of the letters?”

  “I don’t know, but I would like your opinion before I say anything. Here, I made copies of them and of Hattie’s notes.” Nate slid several sheets of paper out of his inside jacket pocket and gave them to her. “Tell me what you think after comparing them.”

  As she folded the papers to fit them into her purse, he continued. “I do hope your job teaching bookkeeping will shed some light on the accusations against Mrs. Anderson and Thomas Hoffmann. I gather Hoffmann will be expecting you tomorrow.”

  “Yes. Fortunately, on Wednesdays I don’t have any clients after two, so I can meet with him at three. My first class, I gather, would be Friday. Not much time to study up on my Mayhew. But Nate, look, we will be at the boarding house soon. Can’t we take advantage of the fact that we are all alone and you aren’t the one driving the horses?”

  Nate responded with alacrity, much to her satisfaction.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Wednesday afternoon, January 28, 1880

  "...Board of Education Special Investigating Committee, met in the Supervisors' Room at the new City Hall and heard testimony in the matter of the anonymous letter heretofore received by the Committee insinuating that Miss Susie Jacobs, a teacher in the public schools, had obtained her certificate by means of having had previous access to the question being asked at the examination.”––San Francisco Chronicle, 1880

  “Mrs. Fuller, I am pleased to meet you.” Thomas Hoffmann stood up and came around his desk to greet Annie. “I apologize for how crowded the office is, but when John, Principal Swett, took over Girls' High in ’76 and hired me as his vice principal, he offered me the larger of the two offices. He said he would be traveling so much, looking after our interests in Sacramento, it would be better for me to have the larger one. What I didn’t know is that the man with the larger office also got all the student and personnel records. As you can see, any extra square footage has been more than taken up with those filing cabinets.”

  Annie smiled and shook his hand warmly, saying, “Well, for my purposes, this is just perfect. Thank you for agreeing to have me here. I know it is quite unorthodox, but whatever does come of my investigation, I promise you, your students will at least get my expertise in double-entry bookkeeping.”

  Annie had arrived at Girls' High, an imposing four-story building located near Hyde Street on the north side of Bush, just after classes were dismissed for the day. She felt quite transported back to her days at the New York Female Academy when a stream of young women pushed past her as she entered the vestibule. Barbara had told her how to find the vice principal’s office on the first floor, across from the assembly room. She’d promised to come find her when the Literature and Debate Society meeting was over. They could walk together to Clement Grammar and walk the rest of the way
home with Laura and Jamie. Meanwhile, Annie had at least an hour to get acquainted with Mr. Hoffmann and learn everything she could about what her class would expect of her on Friday.

  After telling her where the students were in the text and discussing with her the topics he’d planned on covering in the next few weeks, Mr. Hoffmann said, “I am sure you will do an excellent job. I just wish I could help out in your investigation as well. I am at a loss to explain why anyone would attack either Emory or myself for the hiring of Mrs. Anderson. Before her marriage, she taught the art classes at the Bush Street Primary School for over five years. She is also a very accomplished pianist and was active in her normal school drama society back in Ohio. We were delighted she would be able to teach our music classes and take our theatre group in hand as well as teach art.”

  Annie responded, “I am sure she is qualified; the question is, were there any other persons who applied for her job who might have seen themselves as more qualified? Particularly if they had the highest level teaching certificate that is usually needed to teach high school, a disappointed candidate might see this as a way to strike back.”

  Hoffmann nodded and walked over to a file drawer, saying, “I understand that is the most logical explanation, and I have found the correspondence related to that position. You might as well start there,” he said, handing a file folder to her. “I suppose you will want to go back some years, in case there is an applicant for another Girls' High position who chose to use Mrs. Anderson’s appointment to express their dissatisfaction. You will also want to speak to Miss Della Thorndike, currently our Normal Class teacher; she was the person who reviewed all the files and selected the candidates I should interview.”

  Annie was impressed. He was being extremely helpful and not at all defensive. She wasn’t sure she would be as cooperative if she were the focus of a malicious letter to her employer. All Emory had shared with her about Hoffmann was that the Vice Principal was in his mid-forties, had a wife and three children, and that he had written a well-received master's thesis on something called the prime number theorem. He was also a handsome man with a full head of glossy brown hair and a neatly trimmed mustache and goatee, and he wore his expensively tailored suit with ease. There was money somewhere in his life; she wondered if it was his or his wife’s. He also seemed to have a very slight accent, and she wondered if he had earned his master’s degree at a German university.

  She hated bringing up the delicate matter of the accusations of impropriety, but she needed to know what his response would be. She said, “Thank you, I will take this file home with me, if that is acceptable, then start to look at the other files on Friday. However, I did want to get your reaction to the other part of the letter…the part that…”

  “Suggested I was having an improper relationship with one of my students?” Hoffmann finished her sentence. “Of course I completely deny the accusation, but, then again, even if it were true I would say that. What I can say is that I try very hard not to do anything that might lead to a whiff of scandal. However, talk to any man who teaches young women over the age of twelve, and you will find that at some point there have been rumors. Young girls get crushes on male teachers, often the only men in their lives that have time for them. They also get jealous of other girls who might get a better grade or more attention from a male teacher.”

  “I would imagine that female teachers also have to deal with this phenomenon,” Annie responded, thinking of her all-female academy.

  Hoffmann chuckled dryly. “And it isn’t just female students who cause problems. Yes, Mrs. Fuller, you are quite right. Yet I have found that the rumors generated about male teachers and female students are more likely to be taken seriously by parents and school boards. That’s one of the reasons I welcomed your offer to help discover who is behind this particular rumor. I know it isn’t true, but I am very aware that if it is not disproved or the person behind it isn’t found and discredited, it could still ruin my career.”

  *****

  “What did you think of Mr. Hoffmann?” Barbara Hewitt asked Annie as they crossed Bush at Leavenworth.

  “Very personable and straightforward. It can’t be easy to face accusations of wrong doing and have some strange woman poking around in your business, but he was very helpful.”

  They turned onto Leavenworth, which swooped down steeply all the way to Market. Annie could see Potrero Hill and Bernal Heights framed by the higher peaks of the San Bruno Mountains further south down the peninsula. The low-lying winter sun threw out a few shafts from the grey clouds that had filled the sky all day.

  She turned up the collar of her coat and said, “More importantly, Barbara, you work with him. What do you think of him?”

  For a moment, her companion was silent. Annie knew Barbara had been very glad to learn that Annie’s investigation meant she was off the hook as the primary source of information about Girls’ High. What Annie didn’t know was if this meant she wouldn’t help out at all. She studied Barbara’s face while she waited for her to respond. She was taller than Annie by several inches, a handsome, not beautiful, brunette, with a long oval face framed by a fringe of tight curls. Her eyes were hazel. Jamie must have gotten his brown eyes from his father, the never-mentioned Mr. Hewitt, although she and her son both had long dark lashes that Annie envied. Barbara often looked very tired, and the ink that seemed permanently to stain her fingers testified to the stacks of essays she had to grade as the teacher of English literature and composition. Her mouth was of a generous size, but she seldom smiled. When she did, Annie felt she had earned something of value.

  A smile now caused two dimples to appear on her face, and Barbara looked over at her and said, “Don’t fear, I will cooperate. You know it makes me uncomfortable to talk about my fellow colleagues, but I can see how such accusations can create a poisonous atmosphere, and I don’t know of anyone else I would trust more than you to get to the bottom of everything. Vice Principal Hoffmann appears to me to be a very talented teacher of mathematics and an able administrator. I believe he was a Union officer in the war, so he has a natural authority. But he does have a temper. It is my impression he doesn’t suffer fools gladly, perhaps as a result of his Germanic heritage. He is also one of the last men I would expect to be taken in by a pretty face, whether on a fellow teacher or a student.”

  Annie laughed. “My, my. You will need to expand just a bit on that, if you don’t mind. Let’s take the pretty face first. So you don’t think it likely that he would have shown favoritism in hiring Mrs. Anderson?”

  “Well not for her pretty face. I am sorry, that was a bit spiteful. I feel sympathy, of course, for any widowed woman who has to make their way in the world with a small child, but I find her constant…I don’t know how to describe it…her constant attempts to captivate everyone she meets, male or female, rather distasteful. ”

  Annie was impressed with Barbara’s acuity and said, “Exactly. I guess it might be a kind of insecurity, as if she has to make everyone love her. But I confess I was left with the feeling she was being insincere when I met her last night.”

  They stopped at Sutter Street and waited until a horse and wagon lumbered past before crossing. Annie then went on, “But you think that Mr. Hoffmann is too astute to be taken in? Do you think he would hire her for Mr. Emory’s sake, as a favor for a friend?”

  “I don’t know. From what I have heard about Hoffmann’s relationship with Principal Swett, however, I would say that he is a very loyal person. If Swett mentioned that Emory was a good friend to teachers and that Mrs. Anderson was highly recommended by him, I could see this swaying him in his decision. I am even newer to the city than you are, but it’s obvious that politics have a lot to do with the hiring choices that are made in this school district.”

  “So you think that the motives for these notes are political rather than personal?” Annie asked.

  “Not necessarily.” Barbara hesitated. “You said that Laura’s friend Hattie also received anonymous accusa
tions as well. Do you think those notes are connected to the letters about Mr. Emory and Mr. Hoffmann?”

  Annie hadn’t given Barbara any details about the notes they had found among Hattie’s letters, and she hoped that the content would never come out, but she did feel it was important that Barbara understand the personal dimension of her investigation. Choosing her words carefully, she replied, “We don’t know for sure. But I have compared the letters the school board received to the notes directed at Hattie, and I can tell you that there were some similarities in phrasing and word choice that made me think they might have been written by the same person.”

  Barbara remained silent, and Annie got the distinct impression she was upset. They were now at Post Street, so she waited until they had crossed and were continuing down Leavenworth to resume their conversation. Annie continued, “If they were written by the same person, then it does seem more likely it was a personal grievance by someone who was passed over for a job. Hattie was hired at the last minute, and Mrs. Anderson didn’t have the appropriate level teaching certificate. I can understand why a primary teacher, for example, who has seen his or her salary slashed this year, might feel resentful.”

  “Yes, yes, that might be it,” Barbara replied. “Would it be helpful if you found someone else who got a similar letter?”

  “Well we were hoping that Mrs. Anderson had received one, but she says she didn’t, although I am not sure I believe her. Do you think there is someone else?”

  “I can’t really say at this point,” Barbara responded, beginning to walk more quickly. After a block of silence, she said, “Just in case there was someone, if they spoke to Mr. Dawson about…anything, it would be confidential, wouldn’t it? He couldn’t reveal their name if they didn’t want him to?”