by Dianne Day
When he didn’t say any more I asked, “What about the cows?”
“We lost one.”
“Well, for heaven’s sake, Quincy, a cow shouldn’t be too hard to find out here on the point. There’s only just so many places it could go. In fact, I should think we could spot a lost cow from the lighthouse platform.”
“Not this’un you can’t. She’s not lost that way. She’s dead.” Quincy looked at me with mournful eyes. “And two of ’em are sick. I reckon as it might be something in the water what’s causing it. I reckon maybe you and me, we best be darn careful till I get this figgered out.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
KEEPER’S LOG February 5, 1907
Wind: NW moderate, increasing in p.m. Weather: a.m. fog, clear by noon; cool; increasing swells Comments: Lumber schooner down from Vancouver reports Alaskan storm headed S—this is the cause of increasing wind and swells
Our water had been poisoned. Not at the source, thank God, which is a well that also serves the dairy in the Point Pinos woods, but at a large tank where the water is held after flowing (downhill) through a pipe from the source. The lighthouse must have such a tank as a safety measure, in case of fire.
Of course I had to report the poisoning to the Lighthouse Service, as it caused expense. The water had been analyzed, and now the tank must either be thoroughly cleaned or outright replaced. I was for replacement, but of course the decision was not mine to make—that duty fell to some bureaucrat overseeing the Lighthouse Service.
On Monday morning I received, by messenger, a toxicology report: The water tank had been poisoned by the addition of kerosene. The concentration should not have proved fatal; therefore the cow that died must have had some constitutional weakness, probably of its complex digestive system, as that would be where the poison was absorbed. The sick cows had showed signs consistent with what the report suggested: a staggering gait, an attitude of stupor, decreased appetite, and poor milk production. Over the weekend, while we waited for the report, they had begun to improve; nevertheless I was so guilt-ridden that I wanted to have the veterinarian back now that the cause of the poor cows’ problem was known.
The animals were Quincy’s responsibility, so he was taking this even harder than I. He kept puzzling over how such a thing could happen, and I did not think I would be doing any favors by suggesting the various possibilities that leapt into my mind. Quincy is a complete stranger to malice—therefore the idea that someone might have poisoned the water tank intentionally simply did not occur to him. Of course to me it did, and so when Quincy had fetched the veterinarian, I set off on foot with the explanation that I had business downtown.
Once in downtown Pacific Grove, I hopped a horse-drawn trolley car for Monterey. With the toxicology report in my leather bag, I was on my way to the hospital to see Dr. Frederick Bright.
I confess I am no great fan of hospitals, which seem to me to have more to do with sickness and suffering than with making people well. I was glad to know where I was going this time, so that I could stride breezily along looking neither left nor right. Illness is so depressing, not to mention ill-smelling, and it seems that the available cures do not smell much better.
The dead smell worst of all. Even though I had no previous experience of such things, it was not difficult for me to conclude when I entered the pathology suite that an autopsy was in progress. My nose led the way, and I peeked through the double doors. Dr. Bright, easily identifiable by his unusually full head of white hair, was bent over a body; further details of the procedure were mercifully unavailable to me, due to his assistant’s stance, which blocked much of my view.
The smell was really not so horrible once one got used to it. Soon my insatiable curiosity compelled me through the doors, first one step and then another. Being absorbed in their ghoulish task, neither doctor nor assistant noticed my presence. I moved a few more steps to one side, and then I could see what they were doing. What they were doing was eviscerating a corpse. They were wrist-deep in gore.
Without looking up, Dr. Bright barked, “Whoever you are, you’ll have to wait. Outside, please!”
I didn’t argue; I’d seen enough. My mother, rest her soul, used to belabor me with that old saw about curiosity killing the cat. From as far back as I can remember I’d refused to believe this, and had been delighted when at about age ten or so I’d learned the rejoinder “Satisfaction brought it back!” With indecent glee I’d hurled those words in her face, and with her great patience she had regarded me, saying, “Someday, Caroline, you will learn.”
If Mother were still alive, I reflected as I walked back up the corridor to Dr. Bright’s office, I would write her a letter tonight—she would be glad to know that my curiosity had at last found its limit. I shall in future be content to take people upon the merits of their outsides, accepting the fact that their insides are better left alone … at least by me.
Dr. Bright’s office was unlocked. Leaving the door open, I went in and spent a few moments prowling around in search of something to read. I did not know how long I’d have to wait, and these days I do not do well with my thoughts unoccupied. At last I found something I thought I might understand—a tract about the use of mesmerism in surgical procedures. Then I selected the least-cluttered chair, moved its stack of papers to the floor, and sat down to read. The article was interesting, but I could not help noticing that the patients on which these mesmeric experiments had been tried were all women, while the surgeon and the mesmerizer were both men. This made me suspicious, although I would have been loath to put my suspicions in words.
Dr. Bright still smelled faintly of autopsy when he came into his office, but at least his hands were clean. “Aha,” he said, “Miss Sherman, is it?”
I stood up to greet him but found I was reluctant to offer my hand, due, no doubt, to knowledge of where his had so recently been. “Fremont Jones, Dr. Bright,” I said.
“Fremont, yes, I knew it was some sort of Army man’s name. You’re the one from the lighthouse; I remember you now. Wanted to know about the Jane Doe a while back.” He plunked himself down in the chair behind his desk, which received him with a squeaky groan. “So what’s it this time?”
“I am in need of advice, and a confidant,” I said, feeling my stomach sink at the risk I was taking. I had reached the place where I did not feel I could trust anyone at all.
“And you chose me?” He chuckled and rubbed at the tip of his nose. “I’m flattered, to tell you the truth, really flattered.”
“I hope you will tell me the truth,” I said, and reached into my bag. I brought out the toxicology report and handed it to him. As he read it I watched his face intently. I expect that in time I will be a better judge of whether or not someone is lying to me than I have been in the past. At least I have learned, from experience, to be cautious.
“So?” After a quick read-through he looked up with beady black eyes.
“So I should like to know if this contaminated water, which sickened two cows and contributed to the death of another, would be lethal to humans. Or would it merely make us sick?”
He frowned, and rubbed at his nose again. “If you drank it, sure, it’d make you sick, but I doubt you’d die of it. For one thing, the water would smell and taste funny. You wouldn’t be likely to drink much before deciding there was something wrong with it. You’d be sick at home for a few days, maybe even in the hospital, but that’s all.”
I said, “Hmm,” and fell to thinking.
“Somebody tried to poison you, Miss Jones?” he asked jauntily, bending forward to fish in a cigar box on his desk. “Smoke? Some ladies do you know.”
“No, thank you.” I smiled. “That is not one of my vices.”
“You don’t mind if I do?”
I shook my head.
“What are your vices, Miss Jones?”
A good question—which I would have refused to answer had he been a younger man. As it was, I gave the matter some thought before replying, “I suppose my most gla
ring fault is a lack of good judgment. Also I have very little patience. Even the thought of injustice makes me wild, and there is so much of it—” I stopped short, biting my lip before I could say too much.
Dr. Bright grinned, his beady eyes jumped, and the moist inner membranes of his mouth gleamed as he pursed his lips and let out a few smoke rings. “That’s what I thought. It’s Jane Doe, isn’t it? You still all in a twist about her?”
Maybe it was the smoke. I really hate cigars. Or maybe it was the lack of depth in those black eyes. Whatever; I decided to, as it were, take the information he had already given me and run. “Not a twist, exactly. It’s just this terrible curiosity of mine. Her body was taken from the funeral home, but Mr. Mapson said the papers were lost so he didn’t have the names of those who had taken it. I admit I was rather persistent; I may even have implied some criticism. And, I don’t know, when there was a problem with our water, I—uh—” I broke off, shrugging helplessly and making my eyes as big as they would go.
“You seem none the worse for it,” Dr. Bright commented.
Quincy and I were none the worse for it because our drinking and cooking water does not come from the tank, but rather from a pump at the kitchen sink that is connected directly to the waterline. But the person who put the kerosene in the tank would not have known that, and I wasn’t going to tell the coroner. If someone was trying to scare me, I wanted that person to consider me scared. In fact I was scared—but I do not relate to being scared in the same way that some, one might even say most, women do. So I shrugged again and said, “At least I’m. all right now. I just want to be sure to stay that way!” I stood up and slung my leather bag over my shoulder. “Thank you for the information, Dr. Bright. You’ve been most helpful. I won’t bother you again.”
“No bother, no bother!” He came around his desk and patted me on the shoulder in an unfatherly fashion. “You come back anytime!”
“Thank you so much.” I forced one last smile at considerable strain to my facial muscles, then set off at a brisk pace.
I was so distracted that I lost my way in the medicinal wilderness and had to ask directions of a nurse in order to get out. I had hoped Dr. Frederick Bright might become an ally, one who had access to information from the police. I needed to know if Jane Doe was Sabrina Howard, and if so, what she had known that was so important it had to be buried with her. If I could not find out quickly, and quietly, it began to look as if some of us would be buried as well.
And what, I thought as I swung onto the streetcar, about Phoebe?
At last! I found a letter of reply from my singular policeman friend, Wish Stephenson, in the afternoon post. I was so eager to read it that I tore the envelope open and began my perusal as I walked back from the mailbox to the lighthouse, wind flapping the letter’s two pages.
Dear Fremont:
As you may have gathered from the delay in my reply, Miss Sabrina Howard had not been reported as a missing person to any precinct of the San Francisco Police Department at the time I received your letter. I am happy to say—that is, as happy as one can be in the circumstances—that she is now on the books. Her case has been assigned to someone else, but I may be able to work a swap and get on it. I’ll let you know.
Sabrina Howard was, as you suggested, an actress who had appeared at several of the theaters around town, most recently the Rialto. Her real name was Sara Mae Horvath, age nineteen, from up around Placerville. Her father’s dead, and her mother runs a boardinghouse up there. Sara Mae, or Sabrina, apparently wrote home regularly and sent money when she could. It was the mother who finally reported her daughter missing—said she hadn’t heard from her since right after Christmas and that was very unusual. The two women who shared lodgings with Sabrina are just barely cooperating with the police. They claim she had friends out of town and often visited them for extended periods of time, so they didn’t think there was anything wrong with her being gone for so long. Except their noses were all out of joint when she didn’t send her share of the rent at the first of the month.
I wish you could come up here, Fremont. I think another woman would get more out of these women Sabrina lived with, and as you know we have no females on the police force. I know you can’t come—that’s just Wish with some Wishful thinking. (Yuk, yuk!) Never mind. Maybe if I can get the case assigned to me I might be able to get more out of them myself.
I told the investigator assigned to the case that I had an anonymous tip about an unidentified body matching Sabrina Howard’s description found in Monterey Bay. So he contacted the coroner’s office down there, and they told him they didn’t have any unidentified bodies. Anybody ever tell you, Fremont Jones, you get yourself in the darndest messes?
I’ll write again when I have something more.
Your friend, Wish Stephenson
P.S. Here’s a photograph of Sabrina Howard. She was really pretty!
Photograph? What photograph?
I looked in the envelope—no photograph. I had walked to the lighthouse as I was reading, gone through the door, and now was sitting at the kitchen table. I sorted quickly through the other mail, to no avail, and then realized that in my haste to get at Wish’s letter, the photograph might have dropped out when I’d ripped open the envelope.
“Hell’s bells!” I said, jumping up and running back outside. The mailbox was beside the road about a hundred yards away, beyond the cypress hedge that Hettie had planted to make a sort of visual boundary. The wind, stiff and cold, did not seem to bother the young cypress trees—already in the few years since their planting they had shaped themselves to it, grown flattened tops and back-swept branches. But it did bother me: It whipped the tails of my tied-back hair in my face with such a sudden gust that the black ribbon came loose and went flying, and so did my skirts about my knees. The cold wind cut through my clothes, through my skin, to lodge in my bones. Had this same cold wind snatched away the photograph, or had Wish forgotten to enclose it with his letter?
I trotted up the track to the mailbox, looking quickly from one side to the other and back again and continually fighting the hair out of my eyes. Yet the loss of my hair ribbon proved salutary after all, for the ribbon caught my eye as it descended sinuously in a lull to drape itself in some tall dune grass. In this same clump of dune grass was caught a square of something whitish. I loped over, seized the square object, and crowed with delight. Yes!
“You are insane,” I said to Artemisia about half an hour later, “but I suppose you know that.”
“I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about, Fremont Jones,” she said, blinking with exaggerated innocence as she untied an orange scarf from beneath her chin. This scarf was confining the brim of an enormous straw hat, all wrong for the season but of course that did not stop Artemisia. Otherwise she was dressed more appropriately for the weather, in a long brown wool coat, smartly double-breasted with brass-rimmed buttons. As it was rather chilly in the lighthouse, she made no move to undo them.
“You’ve driven over here practically in the very teeth of a storm,” I said. “I’m surprised the wind didn’t blow you off the road.”
She shrugged and said negligently, “Cars are heavy. I wasn’t worried.” Then nothing would do but that I must give her a tour of the lighthouse, which she had never been in before; I tried to be patient with all her ooh-ing and ah-ing because I’m well aware that Hettie’s version of lighthouse living is unusual enough to merit a few oohs and ahs. Finally I was able to suggest that we sit in the kitchen at the table, where I could build up a fire in the stove that would warm us and boil water for tea at the same time.
“Although,” she said, draping herself across one of the kitchen chairs, “I would far rather have a drink. You know, Fremont, a drink. It is, after all, that time of day.”
“What time of day?” I asked, looking up from chucking wood into the stove. I knew perfectly well what she meant, so my question was not very nice, but it seems there are times I just cannot help myself where
Artemisia is concerned.
“Teatime in some houses is the sherry hour in others. Not that sherry was what I had in mind, either.”
“Well, I’m sorry,” I closed the stove door with a resounding metallic snap, “but Hettie apparently doesn’t drink because there were no strong liquors, or even sherry, in the house when I moved in. And I never thought to buy any. I can only offer you tea.”
“Then Misha can’t have spent much time here,” she said rather maliciously.
Tit for tat; I could not complain. Since it was tea or nothing, I filled the kettle and put it on. Refusing to be baited on the subject of Misha, I stayed with my former line of thought. “Actually, Pacific Grove is a dry town. I have heard that there was a time, not so long ago, when people were not allowed to indulge even in the privacy of their own homes. There was a law that you couldn’t draw your shades before a certain hour in the evening, to discourage immoral conduct.”
“How boring,” Artemisia said; “I can’t imagine why you’d want to live in such a place, but never mind. I was serious in what I said about Misha. He’s drinking too much, Fremont. Something is tormenting him, and he will not tell me what it is.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. I truly was, but not surprised. Not after what I’d seen, when she herself had been a more-than-willing participant. I joined her at the table. “Is that what brought you here this afternoon?”
“Oh, no.” She began to unbutton her coat, as the room was heating up nicely. “He’s a big boy. If he wants to be all moody and morbid that’s his business, not mine.”
“But if you truly care about him—”
“Sweets,” Artemisia pushed her coat back and leaned toward me, “do you know what your problem is?”
“I suppose you are going to tell me.”
“You’re just too young and way too idealistic. How old are you anyway?”
“I’ll be twenty-four on my next birthday.”