The Bohemian Murders

by Dianne Day

  She rolled her eyes. She wore a pumpkin-colored knitted garment—a very long sweater, I suppose it was—that kept slipping off her shoulder. The garment itself was shapeless, but sometimes when she moved one could see her large nipples poking against it. I began, God help me, to see more of a reason for corsets.

  Since Artemisia made no response except for rolling her eyes, I asked, “And how old are you?”

  “Thirty-five,” she admitted readily, then laughed and winked, “a regular old hag!” Then she sobered. “He’s too old for you, you know. He’s forty-five.”

  “I do know.” I got up and made tea. Perhaps it was the pending storm that made the atmosphere tense, or perhaps it was the direction our conversation had taken; no matter which, my hands trembled and I spilled more tea leaves than I got into the net tea ball. “But I’m not sure that age has that much to do with anything—whether it’s my age, or yours, or his. If Michael is drinking so much that he’s injuring his health, couldn’t you at least try to, to—”

  “To what? Just what do you think a person can do to stop another person from destroying himself?”

  I brought tea, sugar, milk, and lemon to the table. I am sure my brow was furrowed, for I was out of my depth. “Surely it is not that bad? I must admit, I’ve never known anyone who is overtly self-destructive.”

  “Lucky you.” She sighed, stirring milk and a very large amount of sugar into her tea.

  I sipped and continued to ponder. “With Michael, you know, you never can tell,” I said after a while. “It could be an act. He may not be as badly off as you think.”

  “Oh, he is. Believe me. Even I can’t keep up with him anymore.”

  I winced involuntarily. “Then maybe you could distract him. Get his mind off whatever is bothering—”

  “Tormenting,” Artemisia corrected me. “Don’t belittle.”

  “All right, tormenting him. I just don’t understand why he won’t get involved in looking for Phoebe! It makes me so angry! Really, Artemisia, he’s being terribly selfish. I just want to … to shake some sense into him!”

  She smiled and raised her cup. “Yes, sister! That’s the spirit! And that reminds me: I have news about Phoebe. That’s really why I came.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I waited with bated breath for Artemisia to tell me her news about Phoebe.

  “You know I went to the sheriff,” she said, tugging at her recalcitrant sweater, “and reported her missing when none of those telegrams we sent paid off. So I just thought you’d want to be kept up-to-date.”

  “That is thoughtful of you. I do appreciate it.” I gritted my teeth, wanting to shout, Get on with it!

  “We had two deputies in Carmel all day Saturday talking to people, asking all sorts of questions about Phoebe and her habits. By implication, about all our habits. It was rather annoying, actually, so I had to go around later and tell everyone it was for a good cause. The Petersons in particular were upset, but then Oscar is so overly sensitive.”

  “Mimi doesn’t strike me as a particularly sensitive type.”

  “No, she isn’t, but when Oscar gets upset, then Mimi gets upset that he’s upset—if you see what I mean.”

  “Of course. I’m sorry for the inconvenience; I know how unpleasant it is to have the police prying into one’s life. But Phoebe is missing.”

  “Yes, well, there’s more.”

  She waited for me to ask. It was clear that Artemisia was intent on wringing every last drop of appreciation out of me; what she did not seem to realize was that I am far more likely to give it freely, and resent being wrung. So I merely raised my eyebrows in an interrogatory manner.

  While we had this little war of wills the rain began. Flung against the lighthouse walls by the wind, it made enough noise to startle Artemisia. She jumped and her eyes darted around the room.

  “The storm has begun,” I commented.

  “I suppose I really had better be going. It sounds a little worse than I thought we were in for.” She reached back for her coat and, still seated, proceeded to shove her arms into its sleeves.

  Curiosity won out over stubborn pride and I asked, “Before you leave, will you tell me the rest?”

  “Oh, there’s not much more. Just that one of the deputies came back this morning to tell me they’d searched the coast as far up as Half Moon Bay and as far down as Point Sur, and there’s no sign of Phoebe. I told them she wasn’t fond of camping, so there’s no point going into any wilderness areas. At least they’re working on it, which is more than you seemed to think they would do.” Now she stood up to work on the coat’s buttons.

  “Thank you.” I relented. “I do really appreciate your coming over in this bad weather just to tell me. I also received some news today.” I reached into my skirt pocket and took out the photograph. “This is Sabrina Howard, who has disappeared from San Francisco. She is also the Jane Doe that Phoebe sketched, but since the body and the sketches have all disappeared, there is only my word for it that Sabrina and Jane are one and the same.”

  Artemisia plunked her hat on her head and tied it down with the scarf. “I think you should tell the sheriff, Fremont.”

  “No, thank you. Having been disbelieved in the past by officers of the law, I am hardly eager to subject myself to that sort of treatment again. Besides, the one policeman in San Francisco whom I do trust has taken on Sabrina’s cause. Believe me, he will make a far more valuable contribution than I ever could.”

  “You’re probably right.”

  I walked with Artemisia to the door and opened it—no simple task against the thrust of gale-force winds. I had to raise my voice to be heard over the howling. “Perhaps you’d better stay here. This is bad!”

  “Don’t be silly!” To my great surprise, she stretched up and kissed my cheek (I am half a head taller than Artemisia), then continued, “I’ll get wet, of course, but the car will take me home quickly. It hasn’t been raining long enough to turn the roads to mud yet.” She started down the path, but then turned back. Rainwater streamed off the sides of her hat onto her shoulders. “Fremont, I meant what I said about Misha. I’m worried about him. Go to see him, please. And make it soon.”

  KEEPER’S LOG

  February 9, 1907

  Wind: S, slight

  Weather: Sunny and mild

  Comments: Storm debris still washing up along bay; one shipwreck to be salvaged off Aptos

  The storm stayed for four nights and three days. Quincy kept shaking his head and saying how unusual it was for a storm to be so severe and to last so long. Like the voice of doom he lamented how much worse this winter had been thus far than any in recent memory. I reflected, but of course did not say, that if Quincy ever had to make it through a New England winter he would be hard-pressed. This was the third winter season I had experienced in California, and it did not seem so bad to me. Anything short of a blizzard would have seemed a relative lark, I suppose.

  Our young cypress trees did not go down in the wind and rain, but many trees did fall in the woods of Point Pinos, and all over the Monterey Peninsula. It is an awesome, terrifying thing to wake in the night hearing the crack of one of nature’s giants, and the great, tremulous groan of its fall to earth. More than once I thought we were having another earthquake, and my heart tried to jump out of my chest before my mind could take control.

  Therefore it was with joy that I opened my eyes to sunlight early that morning. Barely taking time to don robe and slippers, I ran up the winding stairs and out onto the circular platform around the lantern. The sky was a tender new blue, with that scoured clarity that comes especially after storms. The familiar shapes of the Three Sisters, which had been obscured for days by rushing waves and pounding surf, were still there unchanged. Deer daintily picked their way, heads down, through the dunes, eating tender roots exposed by wind-shifted sands. Pelicans, cormorants, gulls of every stripe and color were wheeling, diving and feeding now that they could do so again with impunity. Far across the bay, the moun
tains scrolled their dark blue silhouette against the lighter blue sky. And I turned eastward, stretched my hands to the pale, winter-gold sun, and said a silent good morning. These quiet moments, this closeness to nature, I would miss when I went home.

  Home: San Francisco. Four months and nineteen days until Hettie was due. I wondered if I could last that long. But then I thought: Of course I can! It is easy to be optimistic on the morning after the storm is over.

  After breakfast Quincy set off to survey the damage in the woods. He was particularly concerned, he said, about the butterflies. It seems there are monarch butterflies that winter in the forests of Pacific Grove by the thousands, and falling branches and tree trunks would damage their cocoons. As we had already ascertained that our cows were all right, I told him that I hoped he would find the sleeping butterflies the same.

  While washing the breakfast dishes, I felt an unexpected and unwelcome frisson of anxiety, the first in several days. Happy as I was to see the sun again, I had to admit I’d felt safer during the storm. No one was going to venture out in Nature’s fury to do mere human mischief. I had even finished typing Arthur Heyer’s ghost stories, by lamplight with eerie wind accompaniment, and had not been scared for a minute. Not much, anyway. Yet now … I glanced quickly over my shoulder toward the kitchen door. There was no one there, of course.

  Of course? Wiping my soapy hands on my apron, I walked quickly through the downstairs rooms. Someone could be there. I did not normally lock the outside door during daylight hours, nor had Hettie. Crime in Pacific Grove, she had told me, was practically nonexistent.

  “Well, not anymore,” I muttered. The poison in the water tank had changed all that for us here at the light-house, even if Quincy still thought it had been an accident. I went to lock the door, but with key in hand I paused. If I locked it, Quincy would want an explanation. “Miss Hettie never locks it,” he would say.

  Yet if I did not lock it, how many more times, for how many more days and weeks would I be looking over my shoulder with that cold, sick fear in the pit of my stomach? I shuddered and locked the door. I would tell Quincy that being attacked in the woods by the “robber” had spooked me, and that he must simply carry his key on his person from now on.

  I went about my routine duties in a distracted state. Just as the storm had kept the mischief-makers away from the lighthouse, it had kept me inside … and I could not stay in here forever. Not that I would want to …

  Yet as I went about my duties, slowly working my way up to the top of the lantern, I realized that I was feeling a bit like a princess locked in a tower—but with one difference: Those princesses were always wanting to get out, and I wanted to stay in. If some prince came and called for me to let down my hair so he could climb up, I would simply tell him I’d cut it all off!

  From the highest point in the lighthouse where one could stand, I looked out through the glass. “ ‘The mirror cracked from side to side,’ ” I muttered, then finished the quotation: “ ‘ “The curse has come upon me!” cried the Lady of Shalott.’ ” The curse came upon her when she looked out at the real world, instead of watching its reflection in her mirror. The curse then compelled the Lady of Shalott to go out into that real world, where she died. Very prettily of course, as the poem had been written by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

  I rather doubted I would die so prettily when my time came; certainly I was not ready yet. I most definitely did not want to go outside, where the danger was, through the woods, and over the steep, taxing hill to Carmel—yet that was what I had to do. If my time came, then at least I would not take it docilely, lying down with my hands folded, like the lady of the poem.

  “Hah!” I declared, and my breath clouded the glass. I rubbed the moisture away with the tail of the apron I still wore, then went down to the watch room to do some planning that had nothing whatever to do with the lighthouse. Unless, that is, one considers the health and safety of the temporary keeper as having something to do with it.

  Noon is about the earliest one can go to Carmel and expect the majority of the Carmelites to be up and functioning. I dropped in first on Arthur Heyer, to deliver his completed manuscript. I had never been to his house before. It was called Heyer and Heyer. I understood the pun, of course, but to me it sounded an awful lot like a law firm. Still, I preferred it to Xanadu. “Pleasure domes,” I muttered, thinking of Artemisia’s breasts. I wondered if the same comparison had ever occurred to Michael.

  Heyer and Heyer was palatial by Carmel standards. The structure actually looked as if a good deal of planning had gone into it, as well as professional construction; perhaps an architect had even been employed. Certainly some landscaping had been done—the plants and bushes and flowers and trees showed hints of discipline amid their profusion. The gray-shingled house had a porch with a railing all the way around it, broad windows with diamond-shaped panes, and a front door painted blue. I tethered Bessie to a tree branch and went up and rang the bell. This was a real bell tied to a leather thong, not the kind of bellpull one finds in most houses nowadays.

  Arthur appeared not from inside, but from around the back of the house. From the condition of his hands and knees, I surmised he had been gardening.

  “Hello, Arthur,” I said, coming down off the porch. “Are you the gardener, then? I was just remarking to myself that your house is a cut above most of the cottages around here, especially the landscaping. Did you do all this yourself?”

  “Oh, no. Not exactly. Welcome, Fremont. Excuse me if I don’t offer my hand, but as you see—” He held his dirty hands out in a rueful gesture.

  “Looks like good, honest dirt to me.” I smiled. Here on his own turf, or the turf on him, as the case might be, Arthur no longer looked like a Medium Brown Man. He looked like a farmer, and a happy one at that. I held up a rectangular package, wrapped in brown paper and tied around with string. I hadn’t had a box. “Your manuscript. I finished it last night.”

  “Oh, my. My, yes!” He pinked up, then glanced at his hands and said, “Oh, dear.” Forget the farmer; he was reminding me of Alice in Wonderland’s White Rabbit. He went on, “You just wait right there! Stay on the flagstones, the ground’s all mushy, it’ll ruin your shoes. Or go back up on the porch. Yes, do go up! I’ll just dash in the back way and clean myself up in a jiffy. Then I’ll let you in and we can have a look. Shall we?”

  “Absolutely,” I said, trying not to seem too amused.

  The porch was neat as a pin, unlittered by so much as a single pine needle. Obviously Arthur had been working hard this morning to clean up storm debris. The front yard had already received his attention too. Although the daisy bushes seemed a bit beaten down, and the wild fuchsias had lost a lot of their red and purple buds, dead leaves and downed branches and other unsightly clutter had already vanished from the scene. I was impressed. My own gardening skills, which I learned from Mother, are rudimentary in the extreme; I am good enough at the planning of a garden but not so good at the part that requires digging in the ground.

  “You were going to tell me how much of this you’ve done yourself,” I prompted as soon as he opened the door, although he had not precisely said that.

  “Oh,” he shrugged, then motioned me to come in, “I had someone put it all together for me. More than one someone, to be exact. Architect, contractor, you know, those kinds of people. Poor little rich boy,” he made a face, “that’s me. After I got moved in, I discovered I like to muck about in the dirt and mud. Put the plants in with my own hands, pat them down, water them, and help them grow. Sometimes—” he pinked again “—I talk to them. I think plants like that, it makes them thrive. They like music too—Oh! I’m sorry. I do get carried away.”

  I laughed. “That’s quite all right. I shall have to try talking and music on Hettie’s aspidistras. They are looking rather puny. But shall we be seated somewhere and take a look at your manuscript?”

  “Oh, by all means. Not very hospitable of me to keep you standing in the hall.”

  I had
become so accustomed to small houses that it quite amazed me to walk down an actual hallway with rooms on either side. I guessed there were ten rooms in Arthur’s house, all on a single floor. The room toward which he led the way was directly across the hall from the kitchen at the back of the house. “A library,” I exclaimed from its doorway, “a real library!”

  “Had to have it,” Arthur said, beaming. He rocked back on his heels and stuck his hands in his pockets, in a prosperous banker’s sort of pose—except that his denim trousers were all muddy at the knees and his plaid flannel shirt had one elbow out. Hardly a banker’s sort of dress. He added, “Can’t live without my books.”

  Suddenly I thought of Michael’s books, how they had filled a whole wall of shelves at Mrs. O’Leary’s house, how many trips it had taken to move them all before the fire following the earthquake rushed to claim Vallejo Street … and I wondered what had happened to those books. They were not in his cottage. Subliminally I suppose I had noticed, but I hadn’t consciously marked it before. “Michael, I mean Misha, would love this room,” I said, unable to stop myself from talking about him. “Has he ever seen it?”

  “No. That is, not that I recall. You see I, uh, I … I’m not as gregarious as the rest of them. Professor Storch comes over now and then, and Phoebe used to, but the rest get too, uh, boisterous for me. May we unwrap the manuscript now? I’m so eager to see it!”

  “Yes, of course.” I handed the package to Arthur and could not help smiling as I watched him unwrap it. No child had ever been more thrilled with a birthday present. Here in his own home he blossomed; naturally he would be more comfortable with the quieter Carmelites.

  “Oh my, it does look handsome!” said Arthur, carefully setting the stacked pages down on a handsome, oversized partners desk.

  I moved over next to him. “I did two title pages,” I pointed out, “so that you can decide which you prefer. I am only a typewriter, not an editor, but it did occur to me that the addition of the word ‘California’ to your ‘Central Coast’ designation might be desirable. That way, people in other parts of the country will not wonder, central coast of what?”