by Dianne Day
“Good morning,” I said pleasantly, turning around.
“Were you expected?” Patrick inquired, as if this were his home, and blissful Frances just sat there with a wide, foolish smile on her slightly swollen lips.
“In a way, yes, and in a way, no,” I replied cryptically.
“I don’t see how it can be both,” said Patrick, each word uttered distinctly, as if he must be extremely careful of whatever he might say to me. I supposed he might feel that way, that he must be careful, particularly if he had something to hide.
And here not more than two or three days ago I had mentally removed this man from my list of murder suspects because he’d said so convincingly that he’d been in love with Abigail Locke.
“I wonder …” I mused aloud, then caught myself. What I was wondering was whether Patrick could have been sincere when he’d said that—he’d certainly looked sincere—and then so soon fallen for Frances, with what appeared to be equal intensity. Could such a thing happen, if the man were not a bounder or a cad? I really didn’t know. I should have to ask Michael. Maybe.
I shook my head a little, then started over. They were both gazing at me in a kind of stupor. “Never mind. What I really must say is, although what you do when you’re together is none of my business, I do have a considerable interest in both of you as my clients. As long as you’re my clients, I feel honor bound to try my utmost to keep you out of harm’s way.”
They nodded in unison. Really it was rather sweet.
“And if ever there was a place where doing what you were just doing could put you—as my mother, who came from Virginia, used to say—right smack dab in harm’s way, this would be it!”
“Oh!” said Frances, the light of understanding finally gathering in her eyes. So she wasn’t hypnotized, or mesmerized, whatever they were calling it. I chose to believe that was good. Frances went on, “We didn’t mean to. We meant to work. Patrick brought some new materials for me to work with, to psychically read for him. We just—”
“It was my fault entirely,” Patrick said. Suddenly realizing that he was sitting while there was a lady (myself) in the room standing, he popped up out of his chair, then with a sweep of his hand offered the chair to me.
I took it, though there were other places I could have sat. I did it to establish authority. I was the one who would set the rules here, and make these two comply, or we should all be in a great deal of trouble.
“You couldn’t help yourselves?” I inquired brightly.
Frances nodded, taking me with perfect seriousness. “That’s right. We couldn’t.”
Oh my! It was all I could do not to roll my eyes.
Frances rushed on: “It’s safe, really. Jeremy has gone to work. Cora is my friend, she won’t interrupt; and besides, I’ve bribed her, so even if she isn’t really my friend—I mean sometimes, not often, I make mistakes about who my friends are. Anyhow, I know at least that she’ll keep quiet as long as I pay her.”
“Frances,” I said, “I have reason to believe Cora spies on you for Jeremy. She is probably working both sides of the street.”
“Fremont!” Frances appeared scandalized. “Have you no shame? How can you use such a figure of speech! And about Cora, too.”
Ignoring this, I turned to Patrick. “What was so important as to bring you over here this morning? I mean, considering that we’ve just had a talk about how you could get Frances in some serious trouble if her husband finds out that you’re even working with her. Much less … doing what you were doing with her.” For a moment I wished I’d simply said “kissing” because the other sounded somehow dirty, which was hardly fair—what I’d witnessed could only have been termed dirty by someone who knew little about the real meaning of love. I felt like a mother with two unruly children whose behavior was going to get us all in trouble.
“Frances called me,” he replied, with a finality in his voice that said more clearly than words: That explains everything, she calls, I come, nature of this beast. End of story.
“And you called,” I said to Frances, “because …?”
Frances flushed delicately along her cheekbones. Nowhere else, just the cheekbones. It was exceedingly becoming. “I wanted to get started on this new technique Patrick is going to teach me. It’s called, um, Patrick?”
“Extrasensory perception. ESP for short. The experiment is for the mesmerizer to be the sender and the somnambulist the receiver. I will choose a card at random, hold it up before my own eyes, and concentrate. Frances will see the card through my eyes and tell me what she sees. This test yields scientifically quantifiable results. It was devised in England many years ago, and recently brought to this country by the American Society for Psychical Research.”
“It is a way of establishing credentials,” Frances said eagerly.
“Yes!” said Patrick, unconsciously (or so it seemed) reaching his hand out across the table and opening his palm, into which Frances placed her own hand with equally unconscious and natural grace.
Egad! I thought. The star-crossed lovers.
I sighed. “All right, you two, repeat after me: We will find another place to work.”
“We will,” they began, then broke off, looked at each other, then back at me; whereupon Frances said reasonably, “What could be more open and aboveboard? If we meet at my house, is it not a guarantee that we are … that our intentions are …”
“Yes, well, you already see the flaw in that argument, no doubt.” I nodded in an exaggerated manner. Frances nodded with me, and Patrick turned his head away. He was beginning to reason again, to see the light, to get the point. I proceeded to drive it further home: “If Cora had witnessed what I just witnessed, I should be very much afraid she would report it to Jeremy. And then, Frances, you know the least that could happen. As for the worst …”
“I get in more trouble when I go out,” Frances argued. “No one knows Patrick is here, any more than I daresay they know you are here. He came in by the back, and he will leave by the back, and in between, if necessary, he can hide in the wardrobe.”
I moved my head back and forth, slowly. “Noooo. When the two of you get involved in anything, whether your mesmerist/somnambulist routine or that other kind of thing, you lose all sense of what’s going on around you. I’ve seen you, I know what I’m talking about. And if we’re to solve these cases it’s got to stop. Otherwise, you’re going to get caught, and Jeremy McFadden will do something drastic. You know he will. Let’s have no more argument on that point. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” they said sullenly—but only after quite a long pause.
“All right,” I said. “Point number two: Frances, I have a report for you concerning that other matter you wanted me to take care of. And Patrick, if you can bear it, why don’t you go downstairs and wait outside for me. I have some questions to ask you, and I can do it while walking with you in the direction of your home, because I have an errand to run over that way when I’m done with Frances here.”
They looked at each other. Frances sighed; Patrick said to her, “She’s probably right. Don’t worry, Frances, we’ll work something out. Meanwhile, keep the crystal ball and practice with it. Write down what you see, and we can discuss it the next time we’re together.”
“When will that be?” Frances asked in a breathless voice. I wondered if he had already made love to her, in the fullest sense that is. My guess was that he had, and that she could not wait to do it again, which I could understand myself, all too well.
“Soon,” Patrick promised. He was already standing, and could not resist bending down to kiss her cheek. He scooped the deck of cards off the table and dropped them in his jacket pocket. And then he left the room.
Immediately I felt as if a load of bricks had been removed from my shoulders. Before Frances could do or say anything to put the load back on, I said quickly, “I have a report for you on our Emperor Norton search. It’s encouraging.”
Then I went on to explain how Wish Stephenson had helped me
find a way to thread through the streets near Union Square so that we ended up in a northwesterly direction, as instructed. I said I had no doubt that if I patiently followed his other instructions as they were given we should find the Emperor’s most valued possession. I ended: “But that means you must keep in touch with him and continue to do the automatic writing, Frances. The City is not now what it was when Norton was alive, and I think he must be made to see that his instructions have to make a kind of present-day sense. Do you think you can convey that to him?”
She nodded thoughtfully. “I think so. He doesn’t come through so clearly now, though. I mean, it’s as if … as if there’s too much noise in my brain. Too many other things going on.”
“Do you suppose you could concentrate on just doing the automatic writing with the Emperor for, oh, say—the next four days? Stay away from Patrick. Don’t give Jeremy any reason to be jealous. And above all, don’t trust Cora. Now”—I reached down into my leather bag and brought out a pad and pencil—“what is Cora’s full name?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“I’m going to investigate her. If I can give you reason to dismiss her, I think you’ll be safer, at least for a while. Now don’t argue, Frances, just give me her whole name.”
“Freeman. If she has a middle name I don’t know it. Just Cora Freeman. I don’t want to dismiss her, she knows the jobs here, I’ll be lost without her.”
This was too much. My patience was gone. So I put my elbows on that little round table and stared hard at Frances, being purposefully intimidating. “You’d best get one thing straight, Frances McFadden. You cannot have it both ways. You cannot continue to have the luxuries Jeremy McFadden can buy you while at the same time preparing yourself to go off seeking fame and glory, not to mention true love, if that’s what you think it is” (there, the blush along the cheekbones again) “with Patrick Rule. So which is it to be?”
“Patrick,” she said without hesitation, “and my new work. I’m good at it, Fremont. It’s the first time in my life I’ve really had something all my own, something nobody can take away from me. A talent, I mean, part of me, the way who you are is part of you. Do you understand?”
“Oh yes, certainly I do. Now please listen to me, Frances. This is important, and I don’t want to keep Patrick waiting down there too long. Do you think you can find out from the servants whether or not your husband was here at home the entire evening and early morning of that day when we found Abigail Locke’s body? I can’t question them myself. As I’ve told you, I believe Cora at least would report anything and everything back to him.”
France’s eyes widened. “Fremont! You don’t think—”
“Yes, I do think it’s possible. A man who would do to his wife what Jeremy has done to you has no love of women, either his wife or any other.”
“I resent that. Jeremy does love me, he has often said so. Of course, his love is of the very possessive type, that is why he, he …”
As she faltered, I stepped in: “Why he punishes you? Because he can’t bear the thought that you might leave him?”
“Yes, that is more or less what he says.”
“He regards you as his personal possession, Frances, and that is not love. Would he kill to keep you close to him? What do you think?”
“Y-you mean would he kill Abigail just so, so …”
“To teach you a lesson. Which apparently you haven’t learned, if that indeed was what he did. And if he figures that out through finding you with Patrick, he may kill again. We mustn’t let that happen. You must stay away from Patrick for a while, concentrate on your doings with the Emperor, see if you can get that information for me. The next three or four days must show some progress for us, because after that my father will be in San Francisco and I’ll be too occupied with him to work on our case.”
Poor Frances. She had gone pale, and seemed shaken. Well, there was no help for it. Anything short of severity would never have obtained her agreement to stay away from Patrick. I hugged her and kissed her cheek, assuring her that I would be talking with her daily one way or another.
And then I went downstairs, where Patrick Rule waited outside not far from the rear door, which I closed and locked behind me.
There was no point beating around the bush with him. I’d already tried both courtesy and reason, and neither had done any good. Therefore, without greeting or other verbal pleasantry, I said, “You will get that woman killed, too, if you don’t stay away from her. Is that what you want?”
If looks alone could kill, I myself would have been dead that very minute.
Nevertheless, I did walk Patrick to the house he now occupied on Octavia Street, the former home of the murdered medium Abigail Locke, and as we walked I wondered again about him. He was the only person who had benefited materially from Mrs. Locke’s death. What if his vaunted love for Abigail had been only a pose, the flash of it I’d seen in his eyes a mesmerist’s trick?
I watched him from the corner of my eye as we walked along, and I kept him talking about the uses of crystal balls. For scrying, he said, either into the future or at a remote distance; this latter being now called by psychical researchers by a new term, remote viewing—something that, according to Patrick, Frances was particularly good at. But all the while he was talking I was paying attention not really to that topic but rather to my own internal monologue, which went like this: The newspapers reported that the police did not consider Patrick Rule a suspect. Wish Stephenson had found out from his source in the SFPD that Patrick had an alibi, a witness who placed him at a séance in a private home. The unnamed source did not say who had been the medium at that séance. And I wondered. I wondered if I dared ask.
But in the end, as my last chance approached with Oc-tavia Street and his house, I lost my nerve and did not ask. Perhaps it was because of his height, which impressed upon me that I would be no match unless I had a weapon—and foolishly, I had come out without my walking stick. I vowed never to do that again, at least not when I was working a case. Or perhaps it was because I was reluctant even to hear the name of another medium right then, for fear that person would also become jinxed and fall in harm’s way. Some other things, no doubt, it also could have been.
But it was none of these. In the end, I simply did not think the killer had been Patrick Rule because he reminded me so much of Michael.
Of course, Michael in his spy persona no doubt could kill, had killed, and at this very moment might be planning to kill again.
———
After making a perfunctory stop at the little library on Green Street, only to peruse the new books and find none I wanted to check out, I returned to the house on Divisadero Street. I felt I had spent a profitable morning even if I hadn’t learned anything new, because I was certain I’d made Frances McFadden and Patrick Rule see the error of their ways—at least for now. Frances was going to get information on her husband for me, which I’d been unable to obtain any other way. It was so peculiar, really, how the harder one looked into Jeremy McFadden’s affairs, the cleaner the man seemed to become. Aside from beating his wife—which I happened to think was a rather large aside—he was, as they say, clean as a whistle.
I did not really believe that. I believed that Jeremy had surrounded himself with layers and layers of protection, in the form of paid people (no doubt well paid) who insulated, covered for, and defended him. Lied for him, in other words. Maybe even did very dirty deeds for him—whatever dirty deeds might be required for a particular occasion. Of course, that was what I wanted to believe. I did not like Jeremy McFadden. Certainly the only happy ending I could think of to our drama involved Jeremy’s being put away and Frances’s obtaining her freedom, preferably with at least some of his money to get her a start.
I was heavily preoccupied as I pushed open J&K’s door and heard the little bell ring sweetly.
“Guess what, Fremont!” Edna Stephenson called out as soon as I’d put my foot in the door.
“I can’t pos
sibly, Edna, I’ve been thinking much too hard on the way home. So please tell me.”
“I got us a coupla things you wanted, while you was out. Copies of Ingrid Swann’s and Abigail Locke’s last wills and testaments.”
“How in the world did you do that?” This was good news indeed.
“Just gotta know who to ask,” Edna beamed.
19
———
A Cruel Turning
More friends in low places, is that it?” I asked with a chuckle, reaching for the papers Edna handed to me before I had even shed my shawl.
“Could be, could be,” she nodded. She had taken to wearing her hair in corkscrew curls, a style I had seen nowhere else, uniquely her own. It could have been more attractive if she had not screwed up the curls so tightly that her scalp showed through in between—but then, Edna was Edna, one made allowances.
“Come on,” I cajoled, “who among your army of cleaning persons, secretaries, nurses and/or nursemaids, file clerks, and so on, was it this time?”
“Certain file clerk in the Board of Supervisors’ office. Has access to all county records.” Edna rocked her round body back and forth in the chair, hands clasped over tummy, the picture of satisfaction.
“Um-hm,” I said, now lost in perusal as I perched on the corner of her desk.
By these presents be it known that on this day in the City and County of San Francisco in the State of California, and in the company of two witnesses signed here below …
Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh. Reading as rapidly as possible through the dense legal language, I concluded that the two last wills and testaments held no great surprises but, unfortunately for Patrick Rule, some rather damning evidence. I could not understand why the police were not interested in him as a suspect. Patrick had inherited all of Abigail Locke’s estate, down to the last penny. She had named no other heir and had excluded certain specific relatives by name, for causing me pain and suffering due to their having shunned me and having cast vile aspersions on the nature and value of my true calling.