The Illusion of Murder

by McCleary, Carol

  Regrets that I have devised this scheme are welling up in my throat as Madame Xi Shi appears, floating in the air, coming to the table. A tiny light from the front of her clothes gives light and shadow to her frail features.

  There are murmurs, a gasp I think from the widow Murdock, and a whisper to me from Sarah: “Nicely done.” She’s talking about the showmanship.

  The small candle I insisted upon gives away the trick, at least to me, closest to the spiritualist. I can make out that she is sitting on a pillow placed on a small platform painted black, the tubular shape conveying an impression of bamboo. The assistants carrying her are covered completely in black, appearing as just the slightest hint of movement in the darkness.

  Very clever. Without the candle, I would not have seen anything except the glow of her features from her own light. That tiny light takes another shade off the darkness, enough for me to make out that people at the table are all focused on the spiritualist.

  When I had first seen her, she reminded me of a ceramic doll, one of those beautiful China dolls craftspeople in Hong Kong make so cleverly. Tonight she strikes me as a goddess of the exotic and mysterious East, a deity of the shadow world.

  Madame Xi Shi lowers her head and puts her hands in a prayer form, and we hear the whisper of wind, a cold stirring that causes the candle to flicker and which gives me a shiver.

  Wind? The portholes are covered; the entire room is cloaked in heavy black drapes. I don’t know and don’t want to think about it.

  A sound comes from Madame Xi Shi. Not words, at least not any that I can understand or even distinguish as words of another language, but more of a hum, a chant, and Chee Ling’s voice finds us in the darkness.

  “Madame Xi Shi’s spirit contact is a Tibetan monk whose physical body passed beyond sorrow three hundred years ago but whose spirit is strong. He is her guide into the world beyond.”

  A childhood memory flashes in my mind: After my father died, my mother stood in front of my father’s casket, looking down at him. The minister stood beside her. She asked him, “How long does it take for a soul to leave its body?”

  His answer never left me. “It depends if the person died peacefully.”

  Mr. Cleveland died violently. Does this mean his spirit is still here waiting for justice? Maybe she really will summon John Cleveland’s spirit.

  The hum slowly rises, until it fills the room with its powerful tone.

  A ghostly image flashes across the room and everyone gives a start.

  Cenza giggles and that releases the tension in the room.

  “Probably a light trick—” Von Reich says, but is silenced by a loud hiss from somewhere in the room. Chee Ling, no doubt.

  Another voice is heard, a deep rumble, and I sense someone is behind me. I want to look, but in truth, I’m afraid to. This is all getting too real for me.

  A dark mass materializes behind Madame Xi Shi, more a shadowy darkness that doesn’t seem to have any definite shape to it.

  It floats closer to her and an animated conversation erupts between the dark mass and Madame Xi Shi, words that sound like the gibberish I once heard in a holy roller church; “speaking in tongues” some call it.

  A gong sounds and then complete silence as the dark form vanishes into the night air.

  A strange guttural noise emits from Madame Xi Shi and she sits upright, and stares right at me.

  She opens her mouth and an eerie male voice comes out. “Amelia—”

  “You poor man!” Lady Warton shouts. “You were murdered! God help you! You were murdered!”

  She stands up and grabs her chest and starts gasping for air. Her breathing becomes labored and she falls back into the chair. “My heart! My heart!”

  Frederick quickly throws open the door to the corridor to let in light and jerks the covering off the electric light next to the door.

  “Someone get the doctor!” the captain shouts.

  * * *

  I’M IN A FOG. Imprisoned by stunned arms and legs to my chair, unable to move, unable to talk, as the drama around Lady Warton unfolds. A prisoner to my own sense of shame and doom, I don’t even turn my head as she is taken out of the room in a wheelchair.

  The ship’s doctor hovers over her as Von Reich wheels her out. Lord Warton comes at me and Frederick is suddenly there, restraining him.

  “You’re a devil!” Lord Warton spits at me. “If this ridiculous trick of yours kills my wife, it will be on your head and I’ll make sure you are prosecuted!”

  “Leave her alone!” Sarah yells at him as she puts her arms around my shoulders.

  I can’t say anything; all I can do is shake my head as Frederick guides the irate husband out of the room.

  The captain is suddenly in my face. “What is Lord Warton talking about?”

  Frederick comes up to the captain and answers his question for me as I sit paralyzed.

  “Nellie, the Wartons, and Herr Von Reich witnessed the murder of a man, John Cleveland, at a Port Said marketplace. She also feels I had some part to play in it.”

  I cringe when he says the words.

  “The moment the name Amelia was uttered, it became obvious that she had concocted this farce to smoke out the killer. She only had the best of intentions.”

  “Nonsense!” The captain glows with anger. “That makes no difference. What in heaven’s name were you thinking?”

  I have no answer. I am lost.

  “The poor woman has had a heart attack!” Now he’s yelling. “You may have killed the wife of a British peer with a cruel and tasteless joke. Everything I have heard about you is true. You are a troublemaker!”

  The first officer has arrived and the captain turns to him.

  “Officer, escort this woman to her cabin. You are not to leave without my permission,” he snaps at me. “You will not cause any more trouble on my ship. If you do, I will have you put in chains.”

  The first officer reaches for my arm and Frederick is suddenly there again. “I’ll escort her for you.”

  Frederick offers me his arm and I slowly rise and take it, my knees so weak I must walk stiffly to keep from collapsing.

  Ahead of us in the hallway, Cenza, walking with the Murdock woman, turns and laughs. “Everyone has a price,” she shouts.

  I have no idea what she is talking about. Suppressing the urge to vomit, I keep up with Frederick, walking stiffly, like a zombie.

  When we get to the cabin, the first officer pardons himself. “Sorry, Miss Bly. You know the whole crew is rooting for you.”

  I just shake my head. I have let them down, too.

  Frederick puts his arms around me and gives me a hug. I let him pull me into him, but I don’t squeeze back. I am completely drained of emotion.

  He holds my head in his hands. “I know your motives were pure.”

  I bend my head down, unable to meet his gaze. “I’m an idiot. I should be shot.”

  “The captain won’t go that far. I hope.” He smiles. “Just joking.”

  “Thank you for protecting me. You are truly a gentleman. And more than I deserve.”

  Escaping into my cabin, I shut the door behind me and stagger to my bed.

  I’m still sitting on the edge of the bed, my life passing before my eyes, when Sarah opens the door. “Bread and water for the prisoner,” she says.

  She has a bottle of champagne and a small cake.

  “You’ll be happy to know that Lady Warton has not slipped off to the spirit world. In fact, she never went to the ship’s infirmary, but had them take her to their stateroom.”

  “To her room? After shouting ‘heart attack’? Now I know what she meant when she said everyone has a price.”

  Sarah sets down the “prison food” and gives me a look. “Lady Warton said that?”

  “No, Cenza, the one in red. She laughed at me and said everyone has a price.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Chee Ling the Eunuch, the spiritualist’s mouthpiece, henchman, whatever. He sold my sche
me to other people.”

  “Ah, well, that explains that.”

  “Explains what?”

  “Why Lady Warton’s heart attack sounded so contrived. I’ve died from a broken heart on stage much more realistically than her pathetic moans and groans.”

  I bang myself on the forehead. “They set me up. The whole bunch of them. I should be shot for my stupidity.”

  “Don’t say that too loud, darling. The captain might hear.”

  PART VII

  Day 68

  EAST ON AN IRON HORSE

  NELLIE ARRIVING IN SAN FRANCISCO

  59

  I arrive at the gateway to San Francisco Bay on January 21, 1890. A gray morning with wet chill air and choppy seas adds to a sense of gloom and doom that grips me as I stand on the deck of the tugboat and look back at the Oceanic as it slowly fades into a dark shadow in a bank of fog.

  Frederick, Sarah, and Von Reich are among the passengers lining the deck to see me off or there just to get a look at the first sight of land in nearly five thousand miles. I’m sure the Wartons and the Aussie widow and assistant are on the crowded deck, too, if for no other reason than to make sure I have left.

  Getting off the ship and onto the tug leaves me breathless with anxiety and anticipation and now that the umbilical cord has been cut, I feel a bit disconcerted, a sense of unease and I know the cause: unfinished business.

  So many unanswered questions are still on the ship. Sarah and Frederick—two people I am fond of, yet unable to fully trust because I know they harbor secrets. I feel a warmth toward Frederick that surpasses friendship despite the lies and charades we both practice, though I am not fool enough to believe that he would ever trade the green jungles of Africa for the hard concrete ones of New York.

  Now as the little tug is taking me away from the people I have gone more than halfway around the world with, people who might have the answers to my question, I cannot help but feel loss and despair.

  Worse than my feeling of loss, is my feeling of inadequacy. I failed to expose an injustice. I never learned why Mr. Cleveland died in an Egyptian marketplace. He secreted to me a scarab with a key inside as he whispered a name—Amelia. Who is she? His lover? Who? Certainly she was not that actress in Hong Kong.

  My sense of confidence has been trampled because a man dies in my arms and passes to me the hidden reason for his death, and I have been unable to unravel it.

  “Nellie, stop this!” I tell the ocean air. Sulking and moping won’t heal the wound and definitely won’t make me feel any better.

  I wave good-bye one more time to the Oceanic, Frederick, Sarah, and all the rest, even though I know they won’t see my gesture. I have to accept the fact that I am forever separated from the mystery and must move on.

  Now I have only one thing to do: finish the race in first place.

  It’s no exaggeration of my feelings when I say I would rather die than suffer the humiliation of defeat at the hands of the woman from Cosmopolitan magazine, who shows she is without honor and common decency when she started a race against me without even telling me.

  My estimation is that she has already set sail from a French port. It takes about the same time to cross the North American continent by rail as it does the Atlantic from Calais to New York by ship—if the railroad line over the Sierra Mountains is not buried in snow.

  The news that it is shouldn’t have surprised me—it is January, the heart of winter.

  The mountains becoming impassable because of winter storms is the reason her editor must have chosen the east-to-west route—she would have crossed the Sierras over two months ago.

  Soon I will be at the train station, and from the telegraphic communications that the railroads use to relate status of their routes, I’ll know whether I have already lost. If by some miracle the rails are cleared, we will be neck and neck to the end and I shall have no peace until—unless—I cross the finish line first.

  It is my fondest hope that my competitor is washed overboard in an Atlantic gale and finishes the race in Davy Jones’s locker.

  Moving from the stern of the tug, I turn my back on the Oceanic and go to the bow, having this silly notion that by doing this I will pass through the channel called the Golden Gate a second or two quicker than if I had I been at the rear, fantasizing that these seconds will help me win the race.

  Even though there are still thousands of miles to go, I have a wonderful sense of relief knowing I’m back in my own country where I don’t have to fear arrest or harm for having become entangled in the intrigues of men and nations. Best of all, I don’t have to constantly keep a watch over my shoulder for someone who wants to give me a shove overboard or put a knife between my shoulder blades.

  With the key still hidden in my shoe, I still don’t know what it unlocks, why it was important to Mr. Cleveland, or why others so desperately want it. One conclusion I reached is what to do with it: I’ll turn it over to the British Embassy in Washington, after extracting a promise that they will assist me in contacting Mr. Cleveland’s Amelia. She can’t have the key because it would put her in danger.

  This key has already left two men dead in the marketplace in Egypt and another on a magician’s stage in the middle of the ocean, and very nearly caused the loss of my own life, not once but twice.

  If only I could rub the key like a jinnie’s lamp and have its secret revealed.

  A man comes out of the pilot house and joins me at the bow.

  “Welcome to San Francisco, Miss Bly. I’m Henry Stewart from the office of the Port of San Francisco. It’s my job this morning to get you to the Oakland train terminal as soon as possible.”

  “That’s kind of you. Is there any news about the mountain passes? Are they still snowed in?”

  “We won’t know until we reach the terminal, but that was the case two hours ago. You know, there is another route, down the central valley and across the southern desert.”

  “Isn’t that much farther than over the mountains?”

  “Yes, it would add quite a bit of time to your record.”

  A ferry on its way from San Francisco toots its horn at us as we pass through the Golden Gate.

  “The railroad ferry on its way to Sausalito,” Mr. Stewart says. “They say someday there will be a bridge across the Golden Gate channel, but that Frenchman who writes fantastic novels also says someday we’ll fly to the moon. I wouldn’t put my money on either ever happening. At two miles, the gap is too wide and the water too deep to support a bridge. It’s just physically impossible.”

  That “Frenchman” is, of course, Jules Verne, and I am not one to doubt any of Monsieur Verne’s predictions.

  As the tug steams close to a pier in San Francisco, I’m surprised to see a group of people waving and cheering my name.

  “Welcome Nellie Bly! Welcome Nellie Bly!”

  Smiling, I return their greeting. “How did they know I arrived?”

  Mr. Stewart chuckles. “You’re the talk of the town, the talk of the whole country. When news came that you had left Yokohama, everybody got excited.”

  Unlike the Atlantic and Indian oceans, no cable spanned the Pacific, so the news that the Oceanic had left Japan would have traveled opposite my route around the world, transmitted on undersea cables back from the Far East to India, Africa, Europe, and across the Atlantic to New York, then by telegraph wires strung across the continent to San Francisco.

  The fact that a message can be sent as Morse code dots and dashes nearly around the globe over a piece of copper wire is a scientific miracle that makes me believe that almost anything Jules Verne can dream up, people will someday be able to accomplish.

  “If it’s okay with you, we’ll get closer to the Frisco piers as we wrap around the peninsula to Oakland on the other side of the bay,” Mr. Stewart explains. “The people of San Francisco want to get a glimpse of you and it’ll only add a few minutes to your trip.”

  “That’s fine,” I say, dreading the loss of the minutes. “I regret t
hat I don’t have time to see your beautiful city and thank everyone for their support.”

  “Actually, since some of the most famous parts of the city are built on hills facing the bay, you’ll see a great deal right from this tug.” He points at a streetcar crawling up a hill. “That’s a cable car. Do you know how they came about?”

  I shake my head no.

  “A man named Hallidie saw horses being whipped while they struggled on the wet cobblestones to pull a horse-car up a steep hill. The horses slipped and were dragged to their death as the horse-car rolled back down the hill. He decided enough of that and invented a way to pull the cars with an underground cable.”

  “Thank God for Mr. Hallidie.”

  As Mr. Stewart chats about the city’s colorful history, I continue to wave at the people who stand on the piers and cheer me on. The sun has come out and some of the gloom and doom I felt leaving the ship has evaporated, but the anxiety is still with me.

  People are hailing me as the conquering hero, as if my journey around the globe is for all Americans, helping to bond us with so much of the world that knows so little about us—but the race is not won yet and the cheers of success could easily turn into the stings of defeat.

  * * *

  NO BRIDGE HAS BEEN BUILT TO LINK San Francisco with the east side of the bay, either, so the transcontinental railroad ends at Oakland and passengers and goods are transferred by boat to San Francisco.

  Mr. Stewart confers with men waiting at the pier as soon as we dock and returns with a smile. “The train has also been waiting for your arrival in readiness to start the moment you board it. Everyone wants to make sure you win your race.”

  “The pass over the mountains?”

  “Still blocked, but I understand other arrangements have been made.”

  “Still blocked” sticks in my head as I’m escorted to a train that has only one passenger car. I’m staggered when I’m told that it’s a special train just for me.

  The Miss Nellie Bly Special consists of the San Lorenzo, a handsome Pullman car, the engine called the Queen, one of the fastest on the Southern Pacific line, the tender car that carries coal and wood to keep the steam engine going, and a caboose.