by Dianne Day
Dr. Bright made a grunt of acknowledgment and moved off toward the place where I’d been standing before his arrival. He was bandy-legged, I noticed, and walked with an odd little hitch in his gait. His hair was so thick and heavy that the breeze off the bay barely stirred it, whereas my own reddish-brown topknot was blowing down strand by strand. He put his black bag on a rock and waited, jiggling up and down with impatience. I heard him mutter something that sounded like “Come on, come on!”
They did come on, and it was a sight I might wish to forget, but I know I will never be able to as long as I live. A brawny man in hip boots came striding through the surf with the drowned woman in his arms. Her dark hair was hanging down like a dripping curtain and her scarlet dress was sodden. White silk stockings trailed in tatters from her legs; one shoe was missing. The sky behind the man with his tragic burden was streaked with long rose ribbons and the sea was turning purple as the sun went down.
A small crowd of people, alerted by the horn on the firehouse that summons the ocean rescue, had begun to gather but they kept a respectful distance and an equally respectful silence. I stood apart, still stroking the coroner’s horse, but I went forward when I heard Dr. Bright say, “Put her down right here. After I’ve done a brief examination, we’ll want the people to come forward, see if somebody can identify her.”
Good luck, I thought as nausea rose in my throat, for the one shoe was not all that was missing. So was half her face. I looked away, into the stricken eyes of the man who’d carried her.
“The fishes been at her,” he said. Someone in the front row of bystanders heard, repeated, and a murmuring rippled through the crowd.
“How—” My voice broke. I tried again. “How long do you suppose she has been in the water?” There was not much odor; the body was not decomposed, merely … eaten. Somehow I found that hard to bear; it made me feel inside as if my spine were a blackboard and someone was scraping his fingers down it.
“Not long,” said Dr. Bright, “thirty-six hours at the outside, I’d guess, but I’ll know more when I get her back to the laboratory. It’s a shame about her face, though. Be that much harder to get an identification.”
“The, um, the dress is distinctive,” I said. That was my final contribution. I couldn’t bear to look anymore at that poor woman. What I had not seen at first was that the bodice of her red dress had been ripped open—by a large fish, or an angry person before she fell into the water, who could tell?—and the fish had eaten away at the one breast thus exposed. They had nibbled at her fingers and at the toes of her shoeless foot. But the dress was indeed distinctive and I guessed it would have been expensive because it looked like velvet. I certainly wasn’t going to touch it to find out for sure. I further guessed that her underclothes would be even more informative, for the inch of petticoat that showed beneath the hem of her dress was quite fine. That is, where the sharp teeth of the fish had not pulled the lace into tatters.
Somehow one does not think of fish as having teeth. But obviously some species must—the proof was there on the sandy ground before me. I moved back a few steps, staying close enough to see and hear all that went on. I was certain one of the people who came forward when Dr. Bright beckoned would know her. A woman who wears exquisitely made clothes cannot be a waif or a stray. But one by one each man and woman shook his or her head and moved on.
Last to come was a personage of some repute, by the name of Euphemia Wells. Hettie had pointed her out to me and warned that I should be careful of Euphemia, whose leadership in Pacific Grove goes back to its founding some thirty years ago. Hettie had also told me that the town was founded as a summer religious retreat for one of the larger Protestant denominations, so the religious influence is still strong, which was why my transgression at the boardinghouse had been dealt with so severely.
Euphemia is a large woman, with a bosom like a shelf. She wears outmoded dresses of black bombazine and I have never seen her hatless. Even at seven in the morning, if you should happen to be out for breakfast or having your morning constitutional and you pass Euphemia, she will be wearing one of those dreadful forward-sloping hats. The hat will be black also, and her dress will rustle stiffly (not, God forbid, enticingly) as she moves by. She rustled stiffly now, and her corset creaked as she bent down to get a closer look at the poor drowned woman.
“Humph!” she snorted, backing off. Then she gave me the evil eye, for absolutely no reason I could think of, but she soon enlightened me. “Distinctive dress, my foot. It’s disgraceful, that’s what kind of dress it is! Only a certain sort of woman wears such a dress, and you won’t find that sort of woman in Pacific Grove. If you want to find out who she is, you’d better ask those bohemians on the other side of the hill!” With that, she rustled and creaked away.
By “the other side of the hill” she meant Carmel—where Michael Archer lived, with those bohemians.
A year ago I would have gone ahead to Carmel even though night was falling as the coroner bore the body away. A year ago I would not have let little things like dark, seldom-traveled roads and inexperience in handling a rig get in the way of satisfying my curiosity. A year ago—that is to say, before the earthquake—I had not yet had certain experiences which have since caused me to make some attempt at occasional prudence.
There are only two ways to get to Carmel—that is, assuming one does not go by water: by the Old Mission Road or on Seventeen Mile Drive through Del Monte Forest. The latter is a picturesque, winding route that was built mainly to impress the guests of the Hotel Del Monte in Monterey. Indeed that drive gets its name from the seventeen miles between the hotel and the forest’s Carmel gate. The Old Mission Road is more direct, but goes over a hill (the very one aforementioned by Euphemia Wells) so steep that anywhere but in California it would be called a mountain. Furthermore, that hill is supposed to be haunted—and while I do not believe in ghosts, if ever there were an apt place for one it would be the summit of Carmel Hill. There is something about the summit that compels a look over the shoulder to see what might be behind.
“It can wait until tomorrow,” I said aloud, giving a shake to the reins. Hettie’s bay mare, Bessie, twitched one ear backward but obliged me by picking up her pace. If the drowned woman was from Carmel, or had any connection to Carmel, Michael would know—and he would still know tomorrow morning.
Meanwhile I still had to drive through the Point Pinos woods on my way back to the lighthouse, at twilight, when tree trunks seem to waver in the gathering gloom and creatures that hunt at night come out with their glowing eyes. I am a city person—all my life I have lived either in Boston or San Francisco—and there are times, especially at night, when in the midst of all this glorious nature I feel isolated and alone.
CHAPTER TWO
KEEPER’S LOG
January 10, 1907
Wind: SW light
Weather: Cool, a.m. fog
Comments:
I noted the wind direction and the early morning fog in the log; I would add to this, on the basis of my observations, as the day went on. I presumed Hettie would approve my frugality with words. I had patterned my style of log-keeping after hers, and she was nothing if not concise. There were no wasted words in her log; I daresay there had been no wasted words, or anything else wasted, in the entire life of Henrietta Houck. I had never heard of a female lighthouse keeper before meeting her. Now I knew there were others, but probably few, male or female, of such exacting standards.
She had been gone since just before Christmas; she’d trained me during the two weeks prior to that. There was definitely a serendipity in our meeting that night on the sidewalk, for although on the surface we seem not at all alike, Hettie and I are sisters under the skin. It did not take either of us long to figure this out, or to see that our respective wants and needs dovetailed exactly: She desired to take a trip (for what purpose she did not say), but the deputy provided by the naval lighthouse service had proved unsatisfactory during his training and so she had dismissed him;
I wanted to stay near, but not in, Carmel until I had at least tried for a while to understand what was going on with Michael. Six months at the lighthouse suited me exactly. It not only gave me a place to live, but also a small salary—a great help to me in my reduced circumstances.
Hettie’s assistant, now my assistant, is a man named Quincy. He is taciturn, with the sort of tanned and weathered skin that men get from spending their lives on or near the sea. He might be fifty, or he might be a hundred years old; the only thing one can say for sure about Quincy’s age is that it is doubtful he’ll see forty again. He is thin yet muscular, in a wiry sort of way, and his shoulders have a slight stoop. He usually wears a battered old felt hat with gray locks of longish hair straggling from beneath its brim, and his eyes are such a dark gray they are almost black. He cannot read or write; otherwise Hettie could have turned the lighthouse over to him in her absence. But this lack of literacy is a small deficiency when one considers that he can (and does) do everything else there is to be done about the place.
I do not like to have to rely on people for things, because then what is one to do if those one relies on are not available? However, I do find myself relying on Quincy. He positively adores being asked to do things; his eyes get all shiny with pleasure. They were shining as I explained to him that I needed to go to Carmel, so would he please hook up Bessie to the shay? And would he mind, if it wasn’t too much trouble, taking the watch for a couple of hours?
“Righty-o!” Quincy said. It is his favorite expression.
• • •
The sun shone through the morning fog with a glowing pearlescence as Bessie and I set out to climb Carmel Hill. Near the summit I hopped down from the shay and walked the steepest part to give the horse a break. The fog was like an army of wraiths, swirling among the dark shapes of tall trees, obscuring the view, creeping along the surface of the road. I hurried, tugging at Bessie’s halter, and as soon as the angle of the slope leveled off, jumped back into the carriage.
“Go, Bessie!” I yelled, flapping the reins. The mare took off like a bat out of hell. It was an interesting descent, what with the two-wheeled shay tipping this way and that from our speed. The farther down we went, the more the fog cleared, until the sun broke through just as the road took a southerly bend that would soon lead us to Carmel-by-the-Sea.
Michael has built a cottage for himself on a street called Casanova, which he says means “new house” in Spanish, but I think he is only trying to divert me with that definition. I suspect rather that the name of his street has gone straight to his head, for I gather his behavior in recent months has been similar to that of the Italian Renaissance fellow with the same name—the one who got himself jailed in Venice for his excesses. So I was not unduly surprised when Michael answered my knock on his door in a state of semi-undress. That is to say, he was wearing trousers and a black and gold brocaded vest over nothing else, unless one wanted to count the dark hair that whorled about his chest in the most fascinating manner. Behold, the new Michael!
“Hello, Misha,” I said.
“Hello, Fremont,” he replied sleepily, leaning in the doorway with his black eyelashes at half-mast. His trousers drooped at the waist, exposing his navel.
“I apologize,” I said, “if I awakened you.” Not that it wasn’t high time to be up and about—it was early but not that early. I was trying not to stare but my eyeballs had acquired a will of their own. I couldn’t keep them on his face to save myself, and now my glance strayed past his shoulder in the direction of what I supposed was his bedroom.
One of his eyebrows quirked upward in a way that was achingly familiar. Ignoring my apology he said, “You’re the last person I expected to see. Isn’t it a little early for social calls?”
Everything around us was so quiet that I could hear the swish of Bessie’s tail, and the chitter of a squirrel in a live oak tree, whose branches curved down to embrace the cottage. I said, “This isn’t exactly a social call.”
For a moment I thought a shadow of disappointment fluttered in Michael’s changeable eyes. They are like the sea, those eyes, changing from blue to green to shades of gray according (I have come to believe) to the man’s inner weather. At the moment they were bluish gray and rather cold. He said, “Then there must be some sort of problem.”
“N-not really.” I fastened my eyes on his face and willed them to remain there this time. I had just discovered that men have nipples, though I couldn’t imagine what for; actually I had never thought about it before, which I suppose is what comes of not having any brothers. And only the one sexual experience, which I do not like to think about. Jerking my mind back on track I said, “I know it is rather rude to arrive unannounced—”
“Especially,” he interrupted, with that damn eyebrow going up again, “considering that you have led me to believe Carmel is the last place on earth you’d like to be.”
“Never mind that; I was upset. I didn’t mean—Well, just never mind. My point is that, since there are no telephones in Carmel, or for that matter Pacific Grove, I could hardly help coming unheralded. As it were.”
Michael smiled at my awkward explanation. It was a slow, sensual sort of smile that took the chill right out of his eyes. He has a mobile mouth, which is perhaps his best feature, made all the more attractive by an off-center dent in his chin. “Fremont,” he said at last, “will you come in?”
“Certainly. That is, if it does not greatly inconvenience you.”
He chuckled and moved back, leaving the front door open. As the fog burned off, the day was warming; nearby some ecstatic songbirds had begun to celebrate the sunshine with much trilling. I entered hesitantly, the relative darkness of the unfamiliar room temporarily dimming my vision.
“I’ll put on some clothes,” Michael said, “if you will excuse me for a moment. There is coffee on the stove. As you may surmise, I have just gotten up. You did not, however, awaken me.”
I murmured a word of thanks, then stood straining my ears to hear if any other murmurings, no matter how discreet, came from his bedroom. I have been endowed with unusually acute hearing, which does come in handy sometimes, though lately I would rather have been endowed with something more visible. Large breasts, for example. I had always thought mine were perfectly adequate until meeting the female whose voice I sought to hear from the bedroom.
At any rate I didn’t hear anything other than the sound of a wardrobe opening and closing. Thus reassured I crossed the one large room that serves as living room, dining room, and kitchen, dropping my shawl on a rocking chair as I passed. Michael’s home is a cottage in the true sense of the word: small, cozy, somehow in harmony with all the surrounding elements. All the houses in Carmel have this unpretentious air about them. Actually if I were in an unkind mood I could say that some are little more than woodland shacks. Shack or cottage or whatever, all have been dignified by names; for some reason I cannot fathom, there are no street numbers in Carmel. Michael’s is called Xanadu. After the poem by Mr. Coleridge, the one that goes: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/A stately pleasure dome decree …”
“Hah!” I exclaimed involuntarily.
“Fremont, did you say something?” Michael called out from the bedroom.
“It’s nothing—just that your coffee is rather hot. I almost burned my tongue.” I lied, of course; what burned me was the idea of pleasure domes. Especially since the connotation of Xanadu had to be intentional. Michael built and named the cottage himself.
He did not build it with his own hands, though many—perhaps most—of Carmel’s small population have literally built their own houses. This in spite of the fact that a group of people with fewer practical skills can scarcely be imagined. They are all artists of one stripe or another, with or without connection to San Francisco’s Bohemian Club, who, like Michael, left the city after the earthquake. As, eventually, did I, although I had allowed him to persuade me—to mislead me—with my own willing cooperation.
“A penny for your thoughts.” Michael
picked up his coffee cup from the table and carried it over to the stove. He had snuck up on me. When he wants to, he can move like a cat.
“Save your money. I wasn’t thinking about anything in particular.”
“Then shall we sit and drink our coffee at the table like civilized folk?” He pulled out a chair. “And you can tell me what has brought you to Carmel so early on a winter’s day.”
“It hardly feels like winter.” I smiled and smoothed my dark green corduroy skirt. It was impossible not to enjoy sitting at the table with him. How pleasant the room was, with its glowing wood floors, huge fireplace of golden-hued local stone, and tree-filtered sunlight falling through casement windows. I felt as if I were in an enchanted cottage in a green-gold wood. Around us, all of Carmel seemed suspended in a magical hush. Softly, so as not to break the spell, I asked, “Is it always like this?” “I don’t understand the question.” Michael sipped, looking over the rim of his coffee cup. His eyes had caught some of the greenish light, which turned them turquoise. With his pale skin and arched black brows, high cheekbones and black hair grown so long it curled, he looked exotic enough to live in Xanadu.
“It’s not important.” I shook my head and sat up taller, straightening my spine. “The reason for my being here is, I want you to come with me to look at the body of a woman who was pulled from Monterey Bay yesterday.”
“Why?”
“Because, in the first place, no one who was present at the time—which was a goodly portion of the citizens of Pacific Grove—seemed to know who she was. And in the second place, I’ve been thinking about it and there are some very peculiar things about the way she died.”
“She drowned, one would assume. That is not particularly peculiar for a body found in the bay.”