And her eyes . . . well, they were a gray-blue like the sheen of ice on a winter’s lake. About as damned lovely as any eyes he’d ever seen.
“I am Detective Nicholas Greaves,” he said. “I understand from Officer Mullahey you wanted to speak to me about the Chinese woman who was found yesterday morning.”
“I do.” Those eyes lowered to look at his hands, still gripped around her arms. “And you may release your clutch on me, Detective.”
“Excuse me, miss,” he said, letting go.
“Mrs. Davies,” she corrected, and brushed her hands down the sleeves of her jacket. A wedding band glinted on her left hand.
“So, whatever you’ve got to say about that girl, I’m listening, Mrs. Davies.”
Inside the detectives’ office, Wagner got up from the chair. “Can I go now?”
“Mullahey, get him out of here.” The man had stuck to his story, despite Nick’s attempts to force him to confess.
Mullahey complied, dragging the man toward Mrs. Davies, whose wide skirts were blocking the aisle. She moved aside.
“I must see her.” Mrs. Davies felt for her bonnet and rearranged it upon her head. One tendril escaped her efforts to contain her hair, and the strand quivered against her cheek. He didn’t suggest she fix it. “I must know if it is my friend who has been murdered.”
“That isn’t possible.”
Taylor had come to stand nearby and was shaking his head. “She’ll insist,” he murmured.
“Thank you, Taylor.” Nick focused on Mrs. Davies. Definitely very pretty. “Let me describe her for you. She was wearing a dark blue dress and—”
“And had black hair and Chinese features, I do suppose?”
Her superior-sounding accent made her sarcasm all the more pointed. “Mrs. Davies—”
“I know you must think me forward to come here and make these demands,” she interrupted again. “But I have to see the body. Li Sha was a close friend, and I feel responsible for her.”
“I am not taking you to view the body, ma’am.”
“If you will not take me to her, then I shall go and speak to the coroner and have him show me,” she said. “I am no delicate creature who will faint at the sight, if that is what you are worried about.”
“I might’ve been having thoughts along those lines.”
“Then I have reassured you.”
She squared her shoulders, calling to mind all of his dead sister’s fierce determination, puncturing his resolve.
“All right,” he conceded, startling Taylor, whose brows leapt up his forehead. “I’ll take you to the undertaker’s where the body has been stored for the coroner.”
He reached for her arm again, but she evaded his grasp. “I can make my way upstairs on my own, Mr. Greaves.”
To prove it, she nodded to Taylor and started for the stairs.
“We can use . . .” Never mind telling her to use the side door out into the alley. She was already halfway up the other steps, her back as flat as a board and her skirts swishing as she moved quickly out of sight. Delicate? She was as delicate as a chunk of granite.
Watch yourself, Nick.
“If the captain asks where I am, Taylor, tell him I’m with the coroner.” Grabbing his hat off the rack just inside the doorway, he bounded after her.
• • •
She felt a fool.
Celia bolted across the foyer of city hall, startling a clerk carrying an armful of papers, and burst through the front doors. She pressed a hand to her side and gulped in air. She had been unnerved by a handsome detective whose every finger she could still feel upon her arms and had let her response vex her into rudeness.
Such a fool.
“Oh, Celia, do calm down,” she grumbled, slowing to take the few steps down to street level.
“Celia? What a fine name.”
It was that detective, the uninterruptible one with the spaniel brown eyes, his hair a thick sable wave. She wanted to touch it. That was what she had been thinking while his hands had clutched her arms. She wanted to touch that gorgeous hair.
“Do you always sneak up on ladies?” she asked, lifting her chin to hide her embarrassment at having been caught talking to herself.
“Not always.” With a slow scan of the street around them—was he always watchful? she wondered—he joined her on the pavement.
“Just sometimes,” she said.
“If the need arises,” he responded.
A tall man, he looked down at her. His eyes, shaded by the brim of his clove brown flat-crowned hat, did not blink. He must intimidate criminals with that gaze. It strayed to the bit of hair trailing down her face, and she stuffed the errant strand back into the chignon at the nape of her neck.
“I was named after my mother,” she explained. Cecilia Eglinton Walford. Her mother’s name was one of the few things she remembered about the woman, a blurry face and form from her childhood.
“Celia is not a common name,” said Mr. Greaves. “Short for Cecilia, I’d guess?”
“You guess correctly, Detective,” she said, “but even in America, only my closest friends address me as Celia.”
“I might be an uncouth American, Mrs. Davies, but I don’t make a habit of calling ladies by their first names,” he said. “Are you ready to go to the undertaker’s or have you changed your mind?”
“I intend to go. Stubborn as a government mule, is that not what you Americans say?”
One corner of his mouth quirked. “Only a blind man would compare you to a mule.”
Leaving her dumbstruck, he stepped out smartly, heading south to where the buildings closed in about the road, their awnings stretching over the pavement. She hurried to match his pace, her boot heels rapping against the planks. He walked so rapidly she feared they would crash into the customers and businessmen crowding the walkway.
“Whereabouts in England are you from?” he asked, not the first query she had anticipated from him. Perhaps he intended to distract her from the task that loomed ahead.
“Do you know the regions of England?”
“I might. Try me.”
“Hertfordshire.”
“Hmm. Can’t say I’ve heard of that one,” he admitted, not slowing his pace. A pair of Jewish men in long beards and sober black clothes, busy discussing commerce, were forced to hop out of their path.
“It is a lovely area,” she said. “You should visit sometime.”
He laughed. “Don’t see that ever happening.”
So many years had passed since Celia had seen Hertfordshire’s gentle hills dotted with sheep, the hedgerows and low stone walls, bluebells in the woods, the sparkle of sunlight upon winding streams. So many years since she’d heard her father’s rumbling laughter, smelled her mother’s delicate perfume, been the brunt of Harry’s quick wit. Now they were gone.
All of them, gone.
“Bad memories?” Mr. Greaves asked, sounding sympathetic. She questioned what she had allowed to show on her face. The pain, perhaps. The loss.
“Many good memories, actually,” she replied.
“What brought you to America?”
“My . . .” She hesitated. “My husband, Patrick Davies. He thought we would do better here than in England.”
Patrick had been encouraged by his brother to take advantage of the “wonders of America,” and she hadn’t protested his plans; she had been too eager to leave the past behind.
“Every immigrant’s story,” Mr. Greaves said.
“I suppose it is,” she said. “Patrick ended up serving during your civil war. My husband is Irish, and he responded to the placards seeking recruits from Ireland that plastered virtually every light pole in Philadelphia, where we first moved upon arriving from England. Perhaps the U.S. Army was right about the Irish making good soldiers, because Patrick always did enjoy a fi
ght, and he signed on.”
“There isn’t a fight going on in San Francisco that I’m aware of,” Mr. Greaves said, a trifle sarcastically. “Other than the usual scrapes in the Barbary or down by the docks.”
“My husband’s interest in the war did not last beyond the time he’d volunteered to serve. Patrick developed gold fever, collected me in Philadelphia, and we came to California three years ago to make our fortune.”
He peered at her. “The gold rush is mostly finished, too.”
“San Francisco is the proverbial ‘land of plenty,’ Mr. Greaves. This city bustles with growth and the chance of prosperity.” The din of a milk wagon rattling across uneven cobblestones, the cry of a corner huckster proclaiming the healing powers of sarsaparilla, and the pounding of hammers emphasized her point. “The idea of going west and striking it rich appealed to Patrick. Besides, his younger brother was already here.”
She frowned as she thought of Tom and his relationship with Li Sha; her death touched too close to home for many reasons.
“Patrick was a restless sort who hated to stay in one place for long,” she added. “However, settling in San Francisco did not satisfy him either. Within a few months of our arrival, he took to the sea, finding work on various merchant vessels.” He’d been eager to get away. From her.
“You don’t seem like a woman who would care for a restless sort, ma’am.”
“You do not know me, Detective.”
He was watching her closely; she could feel his gaze on her face. She did not care to explain that Patrick had provided her with a reason to awake every morning when, after Harry’s death, she’d been far too willing not to bother. She could readily describe the precise shade of her husband’s weary blue eyes, the pitch and timbre of his voice, the feel of his fingertips against her warm skin at night. She could recite the exact words she had been unable to speak, the ones he had needed to hear to keep him content. It was far too late to wish both she and Patrick had been less blind to the mistake they were making by marrying; far too late to wish that the hot flush of passion that had once fused them together had not turned to ash.
Far too late to wish she had not been so troublesome, so easy to leave.
They crossed an intersection, dodging carts and runnels of sewage. Detective Greaves took her elbow to help her onto the curb. “Restless or not, your sailor husband shouldn’t have let you come to the police station alone. Unless he’s off on a boat right now.”
“It is a more permanent absence than that, Mr. Greaves,” Celia replied stiffly. “He is believed perished off the coast of Mazatlán in a steamer accident.”
Mr. Greaves paused, his fingers on her elbow contracting. “My deepest apologies, ma’am.”
“However, I’m not certain he is deceased,” she said, a knot hard in her chest. “I hired a man to locate him, and he is the one who learned of the accident, which occurred last summer. Apparently, the boiler exploded,” she explained, telling the detective more than she had intended. “However, Patrick’s name was not on the shipping company’s official logs, and his body was not among those recovered.”
Leaving her not quite a wife, not quite a widow.
The detective glanced over. Whatever he thought was concealed in his unreadable expression.
“So he might return one day,” he said, releasing his hold on her arm.
Like a resurrected Lazarus. Or a bad dream. “It is possible, though unlikely. Nonetheless, I wish to be absolutely certain.”
“Until then, you’re managing on your own?”
Celia halted. “Detective Greaves, I question how this conversation is relevant to your investigation.”
“I’m simply curious, Mrs. Davies. It goes with the job.”
“Does it, now.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She turned on her heel and continued walking. “I have a small inheritance and am gainfully occupied. I am a trained nurse and run a free medical clinic for females who cannot afford regular care or who have been turned away from hospitals.”
“I take it your clinic work is how you meet Chinese girls with whom most ladies would have nothing to do.”
She shot him a glance. “I would have to own a very hard heart to ignore their plight, Mr. Greaves.”
“I don’t know about that, Mrs. Davies. Plenty of others ignore their plight and seem to get along just fine with the condition of their hearts.”
They turned toward the harbor, which was bobbing with tall-masted ships and smoke-belching steamers, away from the hills that rose at their backs. The detective stopped before a two-story corner building, its stone facade lined with columns and large windows.
Clasping her bonnet, Celia tilted her head to read the massive sign overhead. ATKINS MASSEY’S COFFIN WAREROOMS.
“We don’t have a city morgue. The coroner complains regularly,” he explained, pausing to look at her before he opened the door. “It isn’t too late to turn back, Mrs. Davies.”
“If the girl is indeed Li Sha and she has been murdered, I cannot turn back. For her sake. And for the sake of justice.”
His expression shifted unexpectedly to one of admiration, eliciting her surprise. It had been years since any man had admired her, at least in a way that mattered. The shock, the pleasure of his regard, must have registered on her face, for he smiled.
Briefly.
“After you, Mrs. Davies,” he said, extending his hand.
CHAPTER 3
Inside the coffin warehouse, the noise from the street was muted, and curtains drawn over the windows held back the sunshine as if it had no right to enter such a somber place. Nick dragged his hat from his head and closed the front door behind him, the shop bell’s chime disturbing the hush.
He didn’t immediately follow Mrs. Davies as she strode forward between the rows of caskets. He had gone too far, asking about her husband, but it interested him that she’d shed no grief-stricken tears over the fellow. Nick reminded himself that her feelings for her husband, whether he was alive or dead, were irrelevant. After she viewed the body, he’d gather some information from her and put the widow who might not be a widow out of his mind.
She looked over her shoulder with her lovely ice gray eyes—eyes that could pin him to the spot. He couldn’t afford, however, to be fascinated by somebody connected to a murder investigation.
The undertaker, Atkins Massey, hurried from the back room to greet them, the tails of his frock coat flapping against his legs.
“So sorry to be delayed, Detective Greaves!” Massey swiped a pongee silk handkerchief across his mouth, then stuffed the handkerchief into a pocket. He bowed over Mrs. Davies’ fingers, his muttonchop whiskers brushing her skin. “Have you brought a”—his gaze swept over her—“a person who has affection for that sad girl?”
“Mrs. Davies is here to view the body but not to pick out coffins, if that’s the direction your thoughts are heading, Mr. Massey.”
“If the girl is Li Sha,” she said, “I intend to pay for a coffin as well as obtain a space for her at Lone Mountain Cemetery.”
“In that case, we have an excellent selection to choose from. We can even provide the latest in metallic caskets, if you so wish.” Arms spread wide, the undertaker pointed out the caskets on display, their varnish gleaming.
“Mrs. Davies can deal with caskets later, if that proves necessary,” said Nick. “Is the coroner here?”
“Dr. Harris is conducting a postmortem, Detective Greaves.” His attention shifted to Mrs. Davies. “Such a dreadful business. If you require smelling salts, I am at your service.”
She looked offended by the suggestion. “That will not be necessary, Mr. Massey.”
“I’ll be right back, Mrs. Davies,” said Nick.
He headed for the rear ground-floor area where the undertaker tended to those without kin—a large portion of men in this town—or thos
e who’d died of contagious diseases. Everybody else would be looked after by their families in their own homes.
The coroner was at work in the room he borrowed to conduct postmortem examinations. Bowls, jars, and medical instruments glinted on shelves, and the astringent tang of disinfectant drifted on the air. Pairs of scales and glass beakers and a brass microscope stood on a bench against the far wall, the tools of the man’s trade. The law didn’t require that the coroner be a doctor. In fact he could be anybody who ran for the office, so long as the public voted him in. But Harris was a physician and a good one, and the city was lucky to have him.
Harris was bent over the corpse of a balding male whose purplish feet protruded from beneath a cloth. Fortunately, the coroner’s body blocked the view that might have revealed exactly what he was doing. In his lifetime, Nick had seen plenty of torn flesh and spilled guts, but autopsies always raised his gorge.
“Dr. Harris,” he said, drawing the man’s attention from the corpse. A large incision in the man’s torso was hastily covered. They must have examined Meg like this after they’d found her. It was the thought Nick had every time he saw Harris at work. A thought he wished he could strike from his brain.
“Detective Greaves,” the coroner said with a smile. “You must be here about that Chinese girl.”
“I’ve brought someone who might be able to identify her.”
“Good. The inquest is this afternoon, and I’d like to have a name for the paperwork.” Harris dropped his scalpel into a nearby bowl, then rinsed his hands in another. He wiped them across the clean corner of the bloodied apron tied over his clothes. “Brought in as a drowning victim,” he said, noting that Nick was staring at the male corpse. “Second one this week. Looks to be an accident. Considering the state of his liver, I’d say he was drunk as a loon when he fell into the bay.”
Harris strode across the room and past Nick, shutting the door to the sights within. “So who have you brought? The brothel owner?”
No Comfort for the Lost Page 4