The niece finally pulled the map from a stroller pocket. The laminated folio had seen a great deal of use. Unfolding the worn sheet, she sat down on the bench to study their location.
“I think we’re heading in the right direction,” the niece said after a brief inspection. “Funny, it puts us right on the track of . . .”
She stopped and looked up as the stroller began to rock back and forth. Isabella stabbed at the net cover, urgently signaling to her person.
Rupert poked his head up through the blankets, stretched his mouth into a sleepy yawn, and turned his gaze toward the fountain—and the object that was causing his sister’s tizzy.
His blue eyes opened wide as his furry face registered shocked surprise; then he ducked back down into the stroller’s passenger compartment.
Brow furrowed, the niece glanced at the fountain—and sharply drew in her breath.
A human image had formed in the splashing water. It was something less than solid, but dense enough to cause the moving water to divert around its shape.
The niece stared at the figure in the fountain, dumbstruck.
The liquid silhouette was that of the murdered intern.
He was emphatically pointing toward the park entrance—and across the street to the northern terminus of Leidesdorff Alley.
Chapter 38
LEIDESDORFF ALLEY
BEFORE THE NIECE could utter a word, the figure in the fountain disappeared. The water resumed its regular bouncing rhythm, shooting out the spigots in the fountain’s center base, rising ten to twelve feet into the air, and then pattering like rain back into the frog-ringed pond.
Stepping tentatively toward the nearest stream of water, the niece reached with her free hand to touch the outer droplets. The moisture that coated her skin was a regular liquid consistency—with no apparent transformative properties.
Crouching to her knees, she squinted at the metal spigots, trying to identify the device that had been used to manipulate the spray.
There was nothing to indicate the application of a special effect, no sign that the fountain had been altered in any way.
Wiping her wet fingers on her pants leg, she struggled to wrap her mind around what she had just seen.
What could have possibly caused the water to form the shape of the murdered City Hall intern? Why had he been pointing toward the park exit?
“And was he wearing rubber-soled sneakers?” she asked, thinking of the previous day’s footprints. She hadn’t had time to look at the apparition’s feet.
“I must be losing my mind,” she said, returning to the stroller.
“But then again,” she added with a shrug toward the passenger compartment, “here I am, talking to my cat.”
Isabella glared sternly up through the mesh netting and sniffed her offense.
• • •
TRYING TO REGROUP, the niece once more focused on the map.
Both the figure in the fountain and the City Life mural had directed her toward a path she had studied before—and traveled directly beneath.
A half block off of Montgomery, Leidesdorff Alley had been the subject of the niece’s first Oscar-inspired treasure hunt. Below the narrow side street lay a secret tunnel that ran across the financial district. Near Market’s busy thoroughfare, the tunnel system branched out, threading through the multi-layered underground BART and Muni systems to the Palace Hotel. On the north side of the financial district, the tunnel’s main access point was in Jackson Square—through a hidden door in a basement wall beneath the Green Vase showroom.
The tunnel’s path, like Leidesdorff Alley at ground level, traced the edge of San Francisco’s original shoreline, a marshy landscape that was filled in during the city’s massive Gold Rush–era expansion into the Bay.
The niece had stumbled across the tunnel entrance two years earlier while exploring the Leidesdorff-related treasure her uncle had been researching before his apparent death. Leidesdorff and his tulip-shaped cuff links had been the key to the location of a set of valuable diamond jewels—and an important clue to the sleeping potion used to facilitate her uncle’s disappearance.
The caper eventually culminated in a kitschy cat show at the Palace Hotel, where Rupert and Isabella modeled elaborate costumes fashioned out of the diamonds, followed by a race back through the tunnel to the Green Vase basement and a showdown intended to trap her uncle’s long-term nemesis.
“Maybe it’s just a coincidence,” the niece murmured to herself, looking up from the map and through the park gates to the opening of the nondescript alley. But she couldn’t dismiss the correlation.
William Leidesdorff marked the beginning of the weird and wonderful journey she’d begun when she and her two cats moved into the apartment above the Green Vase. She’d left behind a secure but tediously predictable career as an accountant and taken on a pursuit of endless mystery.
It was difficult for her to imagine ever going back to her previous life—even with all the hassles she’d had to endure from her crazy neighbor.
No, she thought resolutely. This had to be it. A path down Leidesdorff Alley was just the type of route her uncle would have devised.
Isabella sent up a trill of agreeable cat chatter as the niece slid the map into the side pocket and pushed the stroller across the street.
Chapter 39
THE NOSE KNOWS
THE NIECE ROLLED the cat-filled strolled into Leidesdorff Alley. Raising her hand to block the sun’s overhead rays, she peered down its short length. No more than a single car’s width, the alley stretched a few short blocks, wiggling from one side to the other as it cut through the downtown financial district.
Other than a sandwich shop that had recently opened at the alley’s midway point, there was nothing much of note. To the casual observer, it was just an empty service corridor, flanked by the solid brick-and-concrete walls of the adjacent buildings.
But the niece knew better.
She stopped in front of a nondescript wall near the alley’s entrance and studied a historical marker that had been mounted, shoulder height, onto the brickwork.
The square plaque featured a relief-style sculpture of William Leidesdorff’s head and shoulders. The metal surface had been stained a dark brown, perhaps in recognition of Leidesdorff’s Caribbean roots. The son of a St. Croix sugar plantation owner and a West Indian slave, Leidesdorff had been born with a dusky complexion that allowed him, during a time of racially drawn boundaries, to blend in and mix with different cultures and social classes.
The plaque’s center portrait image was surrounded by a series of smaller scenes, each one depicting a seminal event from Leidesdorff’s life.
After leaving St. Croix at a young age to work on the shipping vessels that moved goods up and down the East Coast, Leidesdorff eventually established a successful transport business in New Orleans. There, he fell in love with a debutante from a wealthy society family. They were set to be married—until her parents found out about the groom’s mulatto ancestry. With the wedding called off, a broken-hearted Leidesdorff sailed up the Pacific coast to the wilds of Upper California, then a Mexican territory.
Along with a Russian maid, who bore a strong resemblance to the New Orleans fiancée, Leidesdorff built a new life for himself in the frontier town of Yerba Buena (the predecessor of San Francisco). This renaissance was unfortunately cut short when Leidesdorff died under suspicious circumstances days before the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill.
Leidesdorff was buried in San Francisco at the Mission Dolores, a site that the niece, memorably accompanied by Montgomery Carmichael, had visited during her first treasure hunt.
In order to give the niece time to examine the gravesite, Monty had distracted the supervising priest with questions about pursuing a career in the ministry.
“I don’t think the father ever recovered from that experience,” she said, shaking her head as she recalled the scene.
• • •
“MRAO,” ISABELLA CALLED up
from the stroller. In her opinion, the niece had spent long enough staring at the plaque. It was time to get moving.
“Onward,” the niece replied, grabbing the stroller’s handle and giving it a strong push down the alley.
They soon reached the sandwich shop, which was starting to percolate with midmorning customers. Around the corner from several legal and accounting firms, the alley location had proven to be a convenient niche.
A few tables had been spread across a small patio on the alley side of the building. The outdoor eating area was framed by a line of distinctive black posts, each one topped by an iron horse head with a flat nose and a metal ring threaded through the mouth like a bit.
The niece braked the stroller, yielding to a patron who had just exited the sandwich shop carrying a paper bag with an early lunch.
As the door swished open and closed, Rupert’s orange ears suddenly perked. Something had awakened his sleeping sonar. From the stroller’s cat compartment came a loud snuffling sound, followed by a disbelieving “Mow?”
Isabella looked at her brother, puzzled at what he could have possibly sensed that she would have missed.
Rupert snorkeled in another volume of air, seeking confirmation. After the recent switch to diet cat food, his smelling skills were, if anything, amplified by the dissatisfied rumbling in his stomach.
Yes, he thought jubilantly. It was just a sliver of a scent, but he was confident in his nasal analysis. He had expertise in just one area, but on this topic he commanded full feline respect.
Lifting his head, his furry chest puffed out as he made the gleeful pronouncement.
“Mreow!”
Bemused, the niece looked down at the stroller.
“What’s got into you?” she asked with a laugh.
“Mreow!” Rupert repeated, this time a forceful statement as he stared with intensity at the sandwich shop.
“Don’t be silly,” the niece said placatingly. “You don’t eat sandwiches. And besides, that takeout bag was marked pastrami, not chicken.”
Rupert’s face registered panic and confusion as the niece pushed the stroller past the shop. In the stroller compartment beside him, his sister added her voice to the cause, to no avail.
“Don’t worry,” their person said. “When we get back to the Green Vase, I’ll pour you a big bowl of your new diet giblets.”
Rupert’s sorrowful howl echoed down the alley.
• • •
DISTRACTED BY THE cat commotion inside the stroller, the niece failed to notice a white cargo van parked around the corner from the sandwich shop. The vehicle had received several additional dents and scrapes on its exit from the Sonoma forest, and the windshield now bore a long crack across the passenger’s viewing side.
Minutes earlier, two men, grungy from their months of camping in the woods, had retrieved a covered painting from the van’s rear cargo area.
The niece and stroller bustled past the sandwich shop just as Sam and Oscar hung the artwork on a wall inside. Having been painted in the cabin near the cooking fire, the canvas had absorbed trace amounts of fried chicken scent.
The painting was a near-perfect replica of Victor Arnautoff’s City Life.
Chapter 40
THE LETTER O
AS SOON AS the niece departed Redwood Park for Leidesdorff Alley, the Previous Mayor stepped from behind a wide trunk about fifteen feet away from the frog fountain.
A few weeks back, he’d hired an off-duty detective to conduct occasional surveillance on the woman who owned the Green Vase antique shop. He’d tracked the woman’s daily jogs, her trips to the grocery store, and any other outing from Jackson Square. Nothing had tripped the radar as unusual—until today.
The cat-occupied stroller was a clear indication that this excursion was different. The woman was clearly on the hunt for something.
The Previous Mayor hoped it was her uncle Oscar. He had some serious questions to ask his old friend.
So after receiving the alert from his surveillance man earlier that morning, the PM had rushed down to the financial district. He had intended to follow the woman into Leidesdorff Alley, as his detective had departed for a much-needed coffee break, but he couldn’t leave Redwood Park without a closer inspection of the fountain.
• • •
THE PREVIOUS MAYOR circled the fountain’s perimeter, examining the center spigots and each brass frog, trying to ascertain the trick that had been used to generate the human image in the liquid curtain.
He crouched at the fountain’s edge, watching the aerated streams shoot upward, crest at their high point, and then disperse into droplets that sprinkled back to earth. Pulling off his leather gloves, he reached his hands into the spray, at one point nearly falling into the surrounding pool, but he could see no mechanical means for creating the illusion.
Nor did the water spirit reappear.
Puzzled, the PM expanded his search. He tiptoed through the landscaping, checking for a projecting lens or other electronic equipment that might be hidden in one of the massive redwood trunks or beneath the spreading ferns and flowering cyclamen.
But he found nothing.
Finally, he sat down on a bench to think. As he stared at the fountain, puzzling over the hauntingly familiar image that had materialized in the water, a damp spot appeared on the seat next to him.
The imprint was just the right size for the rear end of a skinny young man who had once ridden his bicycle up and down San Francisco’s steep hills.
The Previous Mayor was a cynical man—forty years in state and local politics tended to have that effect on a person. But over the course of his long life, he had developed a healthy respect for the spiritual world. He had experienced his share of odd events.
He wasn’t beyond believing in a real-life actual ghost, but he still felt silly speaking the name of his dead friend, particularly since he halfway expected an answer.
“Spider?”
The air beside him shimmered, generating the faint outline of a human silhouette.
Startled, the PM jerked away from the image. His hands shook as he reached for the brim of his bowler. He was no longer trying to come up with a rational explanation for this strange phenomenon. If this was a hoax, he could only applaud the trickster for creating such a spectacular ruse.
Cautiously, he leaned forward.
“Spider, I’m so sorry . . .”
His voice caught with emotion. His chin trembled as he struggled to speak.
He felt a light pressure on his shoulder, a comforting, consoling gesture.
Regaining his composure, the PM voiced the question that had plagued him for the last two months.
“Who did this to you?” After a steadying swallow, he added, “That night at City Hall?”
Spider looked at the ground, his translucent face one of intense concentration. The appearance in the fountain had drained his energy levels. It was taking all of his strength to make himself visible on the bench. With the toe of his sneakered foot, he drew a circle on the pavement.
“What’s that?” the PM asked, urgently trying to discern the meaning. “A circle?”
Spider continued to focus on his foot, forcing it to make another swirl.
“An O,” the PM murmured, watching the ground.
“No,” he said as the foot faded from view. He shook his head adamantly. “It can’t be.”
He shifted his gaze back to the bench, but the apparition had disappeared, leaving him alone and with even more troubling questions than before.
The Lieutenant Governor’s Residence
Chapter 41
LIGHTHEADED
HOXTON FINN STRODE briskly up a steep sidewalk in one of San Francisco’s most fashionable residential neighborhoods. Traditional apartment buildings intermixed with multistory homes, both of which had been renovated, often several times over, and converted into condos and co-ops.
The architectural design of the older homes along with the close proximity of all the structures,
sometimes less than a foot apart, allowed little room for formal parking. Occasionally, a garage would be carved into a once-submerged basement, the narrow, claustrophobic slot accessed by a steep driveway no wider than a compact car’s width. Given the technical difficulties of navigating into the cramped subterranean spaces and the few available openings, parked cars lined the street.
The neighborhood’s parking inconvenience was more than offset by the scenery. Even at street level, the elevated vantage point of this prime location provided a stunning view of the bay that swept from Alcatraz all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge.
The location’s beauty was lost on the gruff reporter striding forcefully up the block.
Hox popped his notebook against his left thigh, thinking about his upcoming meeting with the Lieutenant Governor. He hoped to gain some insight into Spider Jones’s intern duties, especially the projects on which he had been working right before he died.
No fan of the frog-phobic former mayor, Hox had given the politician a number of irreverent titles, the most benign being the Light Governor. But if Hox was feeling cheeky or even slightly grumpy, he quickly switched to a more derogatory nickname: Lightheaded.
The meeting would take place at the Lieutenant Governor’s penthouse condo. The digs were far too posh for the politician’s government salary, but Lightheaded had married into money. It was the wife’s fortune that enabled their high standard of living—just another strike against him, as far as Hox was concerned.
Almost as bad as marrying a movie star, he thought with chagrin.
With an irritated sigh, Hox looked back down the hill at the slender man trailing fifteen feet behind. The news station’s stylist, carrying his full kit of shears and beautifying tools, had stopped to catch his breath. Face flushed, he stood panting on the sidewalk.
“Come on, Humphrey. Try to keep up!” Hox hollered a belligerent encouragement.
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