by Dianne Day
7
———
A Far and Lonely Place
I was in an agony of conscience for the three days that passed before the newspapers reported Abigail Locke’s murder. I had not thought it would take that long for someone else to find her body. In the interim, I had plenty of time to reflect upon Michael’s question, How well do you really know Frances McFadden? For she did not call me, nor did she come by, and I dared not call or go to her. They were a very long three days indeed.
I was not idle, however. Since I was so badly in need of distraction I actually accomplished a great deal. To be fair, so did Michael and Wish Stephenson. The former, during one of his quiet forays out of the house, obtained for J&K a contract with a shipping company, which would be enough all by itself to keep Wish busy for several weeks to come. The job consisted of working as a clerk in the shipping company office under a false identity, in order to catch out a clever embezzler of both money and goods.
I knew Wish would not like being confined indoors, but frankly, as I thought he had gone somewhat off his head over poor Tara Fennelly and the cemeteries, I was glad he would be kept busy in one spot for a while. Wish’s own great accomplishment, before starting work at the shipping company, had been to impart the results of his investigation to Papa Fennelly in such a way that the poor man was able to acknowledge the futility of any continued search for his daughter. He also paid his bill. I did not think he would ever quite stop looking for her, though.
As for myself, during those three days I went at last with Michael to choose a suitable firearm; then submitted—with disgusting docility—to his lessons on how to shoot it properly. As I did not want a pistol or a revolver, and a rifle would hardly have been practical, I obtained a gun that falls somewhere in between, in both appearance and power. It is called a Marlin 44–40 carbine, with lever action, and it holds seven rounds of ammunition. It looks like a short shotgun, with a barrel fourteen inches long, and just jacking the shot into the chamber in itself sounds a formidable warning.
My hope is that the very sight of this weapon in my hands will prove a deterrent, because I am not yet a very good shot. It has an adjustable sight, as Michael showed me, but how I am to make much use of an adjustable sight in the heat of the moment—one assumes one would primarily need a gun only in the heat of the moment—I’m sure I cannot imagine. Wish teased me for choosing a weapon that is not the latest, as these carbines have been around since the nineties; but Michael is pleased, and that is what really matters.
Michael would probably not be nearly so pleased with me when he discovered the other thing I’d done during those tense days of waiting. I had put together a daring new disguise, with which I planned to deceive him successfully at last. Not—I hasten to say—for the same purpose that a woman usually (or so one has heard) deceives a man, but for the purpose of following him undetected. Once I’d achieved that, Michael could have no further objection to considering me a full-fledged investigator on my own.
On the morning of the third day after Frances and I made our grim discovery, I was sitting in the breakfast room on Michael’s side of the house, sipping coffee and thinking how to set up a tail, to use investigator’s jargon, on my lover later in the day. He had gone out to a certain bakery he favors to bring back breakfast pastries—Michael has a notorious sweet tooth, and he has been converting me to his wicked ways. The problem I wrestled with was, how to keep him from knowing about my new disguise ahead of time. In the past we had planned these forays well ahead, when he would deviously dart about town and I would tail him, or attempt to. He would tell me he expected to come out of thus and such a place at this particular time, and I was to pick up the tail there.…
It will work, I thought, I can still do it that way, provided—
The sound of Michael coming in the front door interrupted my stream of thought. “I’m back!” he called out when he was yet in the hallway, in an eager-sounding voice that made me smile. “Wait till you see what I have, Fremont!”
“I shall grow fat just by looking at it, no doubt! Well, let’s have it.”
Grinning, Michael tossed the bag to me, then settled back in his own chair and opened the newspaper he’d also bought when he was out. I opened the bag and nearly passed out from the delicious smells that rushed forth. I hadn’t realized I was so hungry! Greedily licking my fingers in the process, I arranged the pastries on a plate I had previously set in the center of the table for that purpose. They were still warm from the bakery’s ovens, drenched in a sugar glaze, sticky with pineapple and cherries and custard. Perhaps saying that Michael has a sweet tooth is an understatement.
“Good Lord!” he exclaimed from behind the newspaper.
“I presume you do not expect me to answer to that expostulation,” I said calmly, pouring more coffee, for the moment focused only on which pastry to choose first. Should it be the pineapple? No, the cherry. I reached for it, and slid it onto a smaller plate.
“This will be of some interest to you, I think,” Michael said. “I’ll read aloud: ‘Mrs. Abigail Locke, a Spiritualist medium who commanded some local respect, has been found dead in her residence on Octavia Street. Mrs. Locke, forty-three years old, had apparently met with foul play. Her body was discovered by Mr. Patrick Rule yesterday afternoon. Mr. Rule, while not a medium himself, has provided professional assistance to Mrs. Locke from time to time, and he had become concerned when he did not hear from her regarding preparations for a séance at which Mrs. Locke was to officiate this evening. Due to the condition of the body, it is assumed that the medium had been dead for some time prior to the discovery. Persons with any knowledge that may shed light on this tragic event are asked to come forward to the Fillmore Police Station.’ ”
Michael lowered the paper a couple of inches and stared at me over the top of it. “What do you think of that, Fremont?”
My mouth had gone so dry that the delicious pastry became impossible to chew. I had to force it down with a gulp of orange juice before I could reply. I had expected this of course, and had planned what I should say, so I said it: “How ghastly!”
“That is the same medium who presided over the séance you went to with your friend, is it not?”
“The same,” I nodded. After the initial shock, I was now experiencing an odd sensation of relief, like a tingling that flowed through my veins, down my arms, into my toes. There would be no more waiting. Let the games begin.
“And you haven’t seen her since that night, I assume.”
“Mmuf,” I said noncommittally, having stuffed a large bite of pastry into my mouth just in time. I haven’t seen her alive anyway, I thought. When is a person not a person? When he or she is dead. The personhood is gone. Perhaps that was proof of the existence of an immortal soul?
“What about your friend?”
“Frances?” I swallowed and reached for my coffee. “What about her?”
The black eyebrows drew toward each other. “One assumes she may be upset by this news. To me it is an upsetting coincidence—”
“I expect she will be,” I said quickly, treading upon Michael’s words before he could produce any that proved harder for me to handle. “In fact, if it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll call around to her house later on this morning. That is, if you would not greatly mind answering the telephone for an hour or so.”
“Perhaps,” Michael said gravely, putting the paper down beside his plate, “I should come with you.”
“No, I really don’t think that’s necessary. You don’t even know Frances; she’s my friend, not yours. She would feel awkward and so would I.”
“I see. I hadn’t thought of it that way.”
I reached for the paper and removed a section to read. We finished our breakfast that way, both of us focused on our respective parts of the newspaper like an old married couple. And like many an old married couple, the silence between us was more strained than intimate.
After a while Michael consulted his pocket watch, cl
eared his throat, and said, “I’ll go on and open the office. I have nothing in particular planned for this morning.” He paused. “Fremont, kindly look at me.”
I complied. “Yes?”
“If anything the least untoward happens when you are at the McFadden house, I want you to telephone me. Surely they do have a telephone?”
“Yes, of course they do. However, my understanding is that the instrument is kept in Mr. McFadden’s study and Frances does not have ready access to it. Therefore, I cannot promise to do as you ask.”
Michael blew out a long, disgruntled breath, rubbed his hair the wrong way upon his head, got up from the table, and stamped to the breakfast-room doorway. There he stopped. My heart had begun to beat too fast. It was not like him to be this upset over my independent streak, and so I wondered what he knew that I didn’t. However, I pretended to continue to read my newspaper while peering around the edge of it from time to time. He was standing there rubbing at the back of his head in a way that already had his hair looking like a brush. He does this only when he is upset.
Finally he turned back around. “See here, Fremont, I’m coming with you to McFadden’s. If you wish to meet with your friend privately in her own part of the house, that is fine with me. I’ll sit in the drawing room or wherever I’m put, and wait for you. I will not intrude, but I’m going to be there.”
“Why?” Now I folded the paper and put it aside. “What have you learned about Jeremy McFadden that you haven’t chosen to tell me, Michael? You’re afraid he may be there, aren’t you?”
Michael came back and sat down. He leaned across the table toward me, and his changeable eyes were like blue electricity. “He is a rough man, a jealous man, and a powerful one. In business he is said to play fair; he is not dishonest, which is more than can be said of many of San Francisco’s most wealthy men. But the women in his life have not always fared well.”
“I am not surprised,” I said. Although I was, a bit—surprised by the good parts. I cannot see how a man who is fair to his workers can turn around and beat his wife.
Michael put his hand over mine at the table and grasped it fiercely. “You won’t marry me, I accept that, but your decision has certain consequences. One of them is that you appear to be without protection.”
“Another is that I am not accepted socially, yet Frances accepts me,” I said dryly, “that’s why her friendship is so important to me. I don’t wish to offend her husband, Michael, you may be sure of that. At least, not as long as she remains under his roof. I will be careful. I won’t anger him.”
“No,” Michael said, shaking his head. With the merest twitch of a muscle, his jaw set in an implacable line. I had seldom seen him thus, and never since we’d begun, in our own fashion, to live together. “That’s not enough. You know I seldom refuse you anything, Fremont, but this I cannot do. I have my limits. I will not let you go to McFadden’s alone today, of all days. The medium who was murdered has been a bone of contention in that house. Your friend Frances may be involved in this somehow, which makes it dangerous. You must allow me to accompany you.”
Now, although I am hardly the damsel-in-distress type, I found myself warmed and touched by Michael’s concern. So I put my other hand on top of his, smiled … and then I remembered something. A mischievous twinkle came into my eye as I said, “Oh dear, you’ve caught me out. I’d hoped you would never have to know.”
“Know what?” Michael withdrew his hand slowly from between mine, with a suspicious glint to his gaze.
“We-e-ell, the other night when I went out with Frances, and her husband came home while I was still there, I … well, I allowed him to believe I had a husband. I said you were very generous and did not mind in the least if I went about town doing good deeds after dark. So if he’s there this morning …”
“Ah. I see. I’m to be caught in your lie. That’s hardly fair.” He complained, but he seemed amused. “Especially considering that I would be glad to swiftly make you an honest woman—at least on that particular point.”
———
Cora, the McFaddens’ maid, opened the door to us.
“Good morning, Cora,” I said, extending my hand with a business card. “You may remember me, I’m Fremont Jones, a friend of Mrs. McFadden, and this is my partner at J&K, Michael Kossoff. May we come in?”
First she read the card, then she scrutinized us one by one, and only then did she bid us a good morning. “This way,” she said, and led off down the hall without having invited us to come in. She took us to a room that reminded me of the morning room in my father’s Boston house, which had been my mother’s favorite room. Neither breakfast room nor parlor, it served the functions of both; and in my mother’s case had held her desk, thus serving as her study.
Frances was there, seated by the window, the light all around her like an aureole and a dispirited droop to her shoulders. She looked like one of those paintings of dejected ladies that are so fashionable nowadays.
“Your friends are here,” was Cora’s way of announcing us.
Frances turned her head and gazed at us across the room, as if we’d called her back from someplace far, far away.
And I—curse me—suddenly became all too aware of Michael at my back, and his eye for a beautiful woman, and that Frances fitted the bill. Her dress was a glowing shade of amber, with an ivory lace insert covering her throat and neck. She had not yet done up her hair, only pulled it back, where it fell in a cascade of curls to below her shoulders. I thought, Her husband must like her hair that way, and in my mind’s eye I could see the two of them seated at the breakfast table, she having left her hair down just for him.
Jeremy McFadden was not there now, though the room still smelled of toast. With all my heart I hoped he was gone from the house.
“Frances,” I said, pulling myself together, “may I present my friend and partner, Michael Kossoff? Michael, this is Frances McFadden, who is married to Mr. Jeremy McFadden.”
Michael murmured, “Charmed,” or some such, coming around me and taking her hand in this particular way he has, that I think of as European, though I suppose it is merely Russian—he manages to make a woman feel as if her hand has been kissed when it has only been held for an instant. It is really quite extraordinary.
And while they performed this little ritual I visually searched every nook and cranny of the room, ending by asking: “Has Mr. McFadden left for work already? I realize it’s rather early to come calling, but we have good reason.”
“Yes, he left a few minutes ago,” Frances said, rising from her seat by the window. “I believe we should still have some hot coffee. Would you like some? And shall we all sit at the table?”
I glanced at Michael, eager to have him gone. My motives were perhaps not as pure as one might have wished; whether he knew that or not, he did take the hint.
“I’ve heard,” Michael said in his most suave manner, which is suave indeed, “that your husband has one of the finest libraries in the City. I am a connoisseur of books. If I might examine the library, while you ladies talk …?”
“Of course!” Frances agreed with alacrity, “Though where you can have heard such a thing I cannot imagine. Jeremy is far from a scholar. I believe he purchased the books from someone’s discarded library, merely to fill his shelves.”
“Precisely,” said Michael, “from a great manor house in Ireland that was torn down, or so I’ve heard. And I would dearly love to examine these books.”
I wondered if this was true, as Michael is perfectly capable of making such a thing up on the spur of the moment. In any event, Cora was summoned—and appeared so quickly that she must have been listening right outside the door—and was dispatched to show Michael to the library and to bring coffee to us all.
Frances resumed her seat by the window, and I took the one nearest, perching on the edge of the seat. I was too excited to relax; anyway the chair was rather farther away than I would have preferred, but too heavy to move. After taking a moment to compos
e myself I inquired: “Did you see this morning’s paper?”
She shook her head. “Of course not. Mr. McFadden belongs to the old school and doesn’t want his wife reading newspapers. But I can guess why you’re here. She’s been found, hasn’t she?”
I nodded wordlessly while watching my friend with care and some amazement. She, who had been so upset three days previously, was now far calmer than I. She made no query or comment about my not having called the police that fateful day. She seemed almost … illuminated. Transfixed. As if she were the one who had died and was on her way to heaven.
“Who was it?” she asked.
“I’m sure they don’t know yet; there has scarcely been time!”
“No, I mean who was it that found her?”
“Oh. It was Patrick. His last name, I learned from the newspaper, is Rule.”
Now it was Frances’s turn to nod without saying anything.
“Thank goodness,” I said fervently, “Mrs. Locke had a séance scheduled for yesterday evening, or she might be lying in that bedroom yet. Frances, I simply could not bring myself to report it. I hope you understand.”
She gave a barely perceptible nod.
I went on: “Three days for the body to be found—I thought I should go mad with the waiting!”
Frances darted her eyes to the doorway and visibly stiffened her spine, which I took for a warning, and sure enough Cora came through with a tray of coffee. “We’ll serve ourselves,” Frances told the maid. “Just leave the tray on the table.”
Cora raised her eyebrows and nodded her head once in a skeptical manner, as if to say, I know what you’re about. But she left the room. And a few moments later, when I wandered over with a steaming cup of coffee in my hand, on the pretense of looking at a picture by the door, I found that she had taken the hint and disappeared entirely.