Maids of Misfortune: A Victorian San Francisco Mystery

by M. Louisa Locke

  Kathleen then put her head together with Patrick to give him his orders. Annie regarded them both fondly. Beatrice's nephew, Patrick, seemed different out of his police uniform, a bit older and more sophisticated, with his derby tipped back on his copper-colored hair, and his mustache waxed to dangerous points. Kathleen herself looked quite fetching in light blue poplin, and, while her dress didn’t have a satin bow in the back, it did have a very smart blue and white striped satin underskirt. She had made the entire outfit herself, with just a little help from the Misses Moffet, the expert seamstresses at her boardinghouse, and the color she'd chosen made the blue of her eyes even more intense. No wonder Patrick was acting so proud and pleased.

  If you didn’t count Annie being dressed up as a servant on her night out, none of them had come in costume, but they all had bought masks at the door. Kathleen now turned back to Annie, insisting that she tie hers on. "You don't want to be recognized here. It wouldn't be fitting. Like I said before, Ma'am, a lady like you wouldn't be here, unless as one of the organizers, and then you wouldn't be dressed like this."

  Annie looked around and saw the correctness in Kathleen’s statement. While there were a number of couples scattered throughout the hall whose evening gowns and top hats and tails proclaimed them as ladies and gentlemen, they were universally standing at the edges, accompanied by black robed nuns or priests. They were clearly supervising, not participating, in the festivities. The other men and women who lined the walls, clustered around the punch tables, and danced down the center of the ballroom were younger, more gaily dressed, and, she thought, having a great deal more fun than their betters.

  As she tied the mask on she whispered to Kathleen, "Won't Mr. Dawson be out of place? All the other gentlemen seem to be escorting their wives."

  Kathleen shook her head. "No one will pay him no mind. Soon there'll be plenty of young men of his sort around. They come later, after the theater and such, looking for merriment. Our boys don't like it, but what can they do? It's open to the public."

  This answer puzzled Annie. But before she could ask Kathleen to explain, she saw Mr. Dawson standing in the entrance to the ballroom, clearly scanning the crowd. Kathleen began to wave madly and darted over to him, Annie following more slowly. When Kathleen had first told Annie that Nate Dawson might show up, since Patrick had seen him earlier that day and told him about finding a lead to Nellie, she had been pleased, thinking that this would give her a chance to discover if he had made any progress tracking down Matthew’s assets. Nevertheless, as she walked towards him, she felt apprehensive. She doubted that he would approve of her being here, dressed as she was, and she hadn’t thought about the awkwardness of not being able to tell him what she had been doing the last two days.

  The first words out of his mouth confirmed her fears.

  Nate made an abbreviated bow and murmured, “Good evening Mrs. Fuller. I am surprised to see you here; it was my impression that you were out of town. I don’t suppose it would do me any good to point out that your attendance at this affair is totally unnecessary and highly irregular?” Without waiting for a response, he turned his back on Annie and moved further into the ballroom, tying on his mask.

  Why did he have to be such a prig! Annie said to herself. It was a shame, because when he wasn't being so stiff and judgmental he could really be quite charming.

  The waltz that had been playing ended at that moment, creating a bustle of activity as people began to leave the floor. Kathleen gave her an encouraging nod and slipped into the crowd of people heading for the refreshment tables across the room. Annie smiled at her retreating back and fleetingly entertained the cowardly thought of following her and losing herself in the throng of dancers. Instead, she straightened her spine, thereby permitting a little more breathing room, and she turned to look at Nate, who was staring out at the dance floor.

  The dark silk mask had turned him into a mysterious stranger. His dark eyes glittered in the gas light, and, with his long black hair and dark complexion, the mask gave him the look of a Mexican bandit. She had seen a real bandit once, when she had been a child. He had been a wild, ferocious man with hard brown eyes, tied to the back of a cart in the Los Angeles plaza.

  She’d asked her father what he had done wrong and he had replied, "He has had the misfortune of living past his time and trusting in the honor of Americans. He was trying to take back what we stole from him. But he will be tried by our justice and not by his own. And he will lose."

  Annie remembered his words because her father had seemed so sad, and because it suggested that life was not always fair, something that life had taught her well in the intervening years. Annie sighed and made her way over to see if she could engage the disapproving Mr. Dawson in polite conversation.

  Chapter Fourteen

  After Annie informed Nate that the two of them were to wait near the entrance, while Kathleen and Patrick searched the ballroom, a guarded conversation ensued, where Annie asked Nate questions about how his investigation into Matthew’s assets was going, and he gave civil but short answers. She was pleased to discover that after checking with local brokers he had finally accepted that she was right about Matthew’s finances, and he even seemed willing to consider as plausible her belief that Matthew had been murdered.

  The most surprising revelation came after he asked her politely if she would like to sit down on two chairs that had been vacated near the entrance. Once they were sitting, Annie tucking her feet demurely under her skirt to hide her ankles, Nate had cleared his throat and raised his voice above the noise of the band, saying, "Yesterday afternoon I finally obtained official access to his bank account for the past year. What I found clearly supports your contention that his financial position had been improving steadily."

  Annie interrupted, "But didn't you tell me when we first spoke about this that, according to the bank, Voss was insolvent?"

  "Yes,” Nate replied. “But it turns out this was only because Voss came to the bank last Friday afternoon and withdrew a substantial sum, leaving only enough for day-to-day expenses. He also got access to his safety deposit box and probably removed other paper assets he might have, since it contained nothing of monetary value in it when we opened it on Tuesday."

  Here Nate paused for what was clearly dramatic effect. "In fact, we now know that on Friday afternoon Matthew Voss left his bank with over a thousand dollars in bank notes. Possibly a good deal more than that, if he was carrying all his paper assets with him as well! Since there was no sign of this money in his house, the question becomes, of course, what happened to it and his other assets?"

  Annie nodded, thinking to herself, that this all began to make sense. Matthew had gathered his assets in preparation for making Samuels an offer. Perhaps trading some of his stock for Samuel’s shares in the business. I wonder why he didn’t tell me he was planning all this. Probably worried I would advise against it. The value of his stocks were bound to go up more in the next half year; he might not be getting full value for them if he traded now.

  Nate broke into her thoughts. “Mrs. Fuller, you don’t seem surprised at all. Did you suspect something like this? Don’t you want to know what he wanted the money for?”

  “I already know….” Annie swallowed the rest of her sentence; acutely aware that she had almost revealed information she had learned as a servant. She then continued, “I mean, I know he was up to something. Tell me, what have you learned?”

  Annie then listened to Nate repeat what she already knew about Matthew’s dinner announcement the night he died and she voiced what she had been thinking since she first heard about these plans, saying, "Jeremy Voss must have been fit to be tied. From what I understand, full control of the business would be the last thing he wanted. Whatever could Mr. Voss have been thinking?"

  "He was probably thinking it was about time his son did a little work," replied Nate. "And Jeremy Voss should have been pleased. If his father made him a full partner, Jeremy would get a nice steady income from one o
f the most prosperous businesses on the west coast. Not a bad start to married life, I'd say. There are plenty of young men who would jump at the chance to be doing so well in their twenties."

  "But what about Samuels," she interrupted, "would he have been willing to sell?"

  "I think he might have been very pleased to do so. Yesterday, as I made the rounds, several people mentioned that Samuels got himself into heavy waters the year before last. Lived beyond his income for a while when the economy was at its worst. Someone mentioned a few outstanding gambling debts, plus whispers that he was having trouble paying the tailor and such. Not unusual, by any means, but distressing to a man of Samuels' stature in the community. The money Mr. Voss would have given him to buy him out might have come in handy."

  "This certainly does seem to rule out the idea that Mr. Voss cashed in all his assets to pay off some huge debt or pay off some blackmailer. He must have planned to use the money to buy out his partner's shares in the business. But why hadn't Mr. Samuels mentioned this to anyone? He didn't, did he?" asked Annie, looking up at Nate.

  "No. Samuels was supposed to have dinner with the Vosses the night Matthew Voss died, but he had to cancel because of a business appointment down the peninsula. Instead, he telegraphed from out of town, rescheduling to meet Mr. Voss on Monday morning. Once we knew what to look for, it was all there in Voss’s appointment book, the dinner and the rescheduled meeting for Monday morning at ten o’clock. So it is quite possible that Voss had kept his intentions completely secret, and Samuels insists that he had no knowledge of what was planned until Mrs. Voss told him after the funeral."

  Annie stood mulling all of this new information, trying to make sense of it, trying to fit it in with what she had learned from her two days living with the Voss family. It appeared that so far she had learned nothing from her sojourn in the Voss household that Nate hadn’t learned for himself, with considerably less physical effort!

  She turned to Nate and said, “Have you told any of this to the Detective, I believe his name is Jackson, who is in charge of investigating Mr. Voss’s death? Doesn’t it prove Mr. Voss didn’t commit suicide?”

  He frowned down at her, but then answered. "Yes, I spoke to Chief Detective Jackson this morning. In fact, that was where I ran into Patrick and found out about his plan to track down the Voss maid at this event. Detective Jackson didn't have much time for me, but he did tell me they were looking into the possibility it wasn’t suicide. He expressed interest in what I found out at the bank and in your list of investments as well.”

  Nate went on, “However, I found their suspicions about Jeremy Voss troublesome. Jackson said Jeremy’s been refusing to answer any questions about that night, and he seems to have been pretty much on a steady diet of alcohol since his father’s death. Mrs. Voss told me that she is worried his lack of cooperation will get him in trouble.”

  "What do the police suspect?" Annie leaned closer to hear him more clearly and was momentarily distracted by the interesting scent, a mixture of tobacco smoke and pine needles, which clung to him.

  "Well, turns out that Jeremy and his father had an argument right after dinner. Jackson told me they learned about this from the parlor maid. Evidently this Nellie promptly went into hysterics when she came back from her night out and learned that Mr. Voss was dead. Jackson said she went on and on about it being a judgment on Matthew Voss, because of his 'bullying ways.' And that she said there was a terrible quarrel between Matthew and his son in the study after dinner. The lady's maid confirmed this story. I guess she was hanging about on the stairs after dinner to check on the parlor maid. Both women said Jeremy left the house right after the argument, but since he has his own key, nobody knows when he came back."

  “Are you saying that because he had an fight with his father the police suspect Jeremy of murder?" Annie pulled back. "From what Mr. Voss told me, disagreements between them happened all the time."

  “But Mrs. Fuller, the police don’t know that, and that’s why Jeremy’s lack of cooperation is such a problem. It might help if we could talk to Nellie and see if she can shed some light on the exact nature of the argument.”

  “I suppose they were fighting over his father’s plan to make him a partner. When you think of it, Mr. Voss was, in effect, threatening to put an end to Jeremy's artistic life for good. Maybe he said he'd cut Jeremy off completely if he didn't go along,” Annie said. “But I just don’t see Jeremy deciding to kill him. Poison seems so pre-meditated. I could see Jeremy lashing out in anger, hitting his father. But not poison. And why take the money and assets! Much of it would come to him eventually. He's worse off now than if his father lived to carry through his intentions."

  Nate remained silent for a second then he said, "I don't know. Maybe he had poison around because he had been flirting with the idea of suicide himself? Just for the romance of it. Who knows what these artistic types will get up to. So, when he has the fight with his father, he leaves the house, walks around and gets himself into a state. Comes home, gets the poison, goes to his father's study, pretends to reconcile, and gets him to drink the poison. Then he forges the suicide note and just goes up to bed."

  Annie shuddered at this picture, but she just couldn’t reconcile it with the impression she had gotten of Jeremy the previous evening. He certainly felt guilty about something, but she thought a murderer would be more controlled than he was. She said to Nate, "I still don’t understand why he would take the money? Why not leave it?"

  "Because then there wouldn't be a good reason for his father's suicide. So, he took the money, and the other assets his father had brought home. Maybe he didn't realize that most of the stocks are not negotiable."

  “But why would he be insisting, then, that his father didn’t commit suicide? I would….”

  Nate interrupted, “Where did you hear that he said that his father didn’t commit suicide?”

  “Oh, well…isn’t that what you said, that after the funeral he insisted that his father was well-off? I guess I assumed that he was using this as proof that his father didn’t kill himself.”

  Annie felt a hot blush stain her cheeks, and she hoped that her mask would keep Nate from noticing. This was the second time she had almost revealed information that she shouldn’t know. She needed to be more careful.

  “I don’t know what Jeremy meant, Nate replied. “That’s just the point, neither the police nor I have been able to talk to him since Tuesday, and it looks suspicious. As the Voss lawyer, it’s my duty to protect him--even from himself. I am hoping that we can find Nellie, learn a little more about what happened, and maybe find someone outside the family that the police can investigate instead.”

  “But why would Jeremy be so unaccommodating. If he were the murderer, wouldn’t he be doing everything he could to appear innocent? I can’t imagine he would be that stupid,” Annie exclaimed.

  "No, I don't think he is that stupid, Mrs. Fuller," Nate replied. "But remorse can cause a man to do strange things. Just consider that if he is the murderer he may be feeling so guilty he wants to be caught. It wouldn't be very pleasant to have your father's death on your hands, now would it?"

  Chapter Fifteen

  "I'm sorry Mrs. Fuller," Kathleen said between light gasps, "no one's seen Nellie Flannigan, and with her red hair she should be pretty hard to miss. I've been thinking that if she just got another job she probably hasn't gotten the night off. Patrick found one person who thought he had seen her boyfriend, Jack. Supposed to be wearing a black and white checked suit and a red cravat. Fancies himself a bit, I says, to be wearing a get-up like that. But we haven't spotted him yet. We thought it might help to dance a bit, in case he was on the dance floor. But so far, no luck."

  Patrick and Kathleen’s arrival broke the rather strained silence that had grown up between Nate and Annie, and she greeted them with relief. "That's all right, Kathleen. I don't have to leave for another hour or so. Keep looking. But go ahead and continue to dance. Might as well have some fun while you're
at it."

  Patrick wiped his forehead, made a small bow, and led Kathleen back onto the floor. They did look like they were enjoying themselves. Annie watched with some envy, wondering what she would say if Mr. Dawson asked her to dance. When she was much younger she had loved dancing with her father, but her husband hadn't liked to dance. He had usually been found in a back room playing cards or smoking with his cronies at parties.

  Nate, who had risen at Kathleen’s approach, still stood, and he stiffly asked her if she would like him to get her some punch.

  "No, thank you, not yet, but feel free to get yourself some if you want." Why am I so disappointed that he didn't ask me to dance? Annie thought to herself

  Nate hesitated a moment then replied, "Well, maybe I will have some myself, but I think I'd like to stretch my legs a little first. Maybe walk around the room; see if I can catch sight of the sartorial splendor of Nellie's young man. Can't imagine there are too many men here tonight with red cravats."

  Annie looked at him, perplexed by the self-conscious note to his voice. Then she noticed he had his hand in the breast pocket of his jacket, where most men kept their cigars, and the light dawned.

  "Oh, that is certainly a good idea. And why don't you stop and have a smoke while you do so? I'll be fine here. Maybe I'll check out the punch table at that and have a chat with the good Sisters."

  Nate looked properly chagrinned and said, "Are you sure you'll be all right? You could accompany me."

  Annie laughed. "Now, Mr. Dawson, I know I am a disreputable woman, but even I would have some qualms about standing around with the gentlemen smoking a cigar."

  When Nate stammered out that she had misunderstood him, Annie shushed him and sent him on his way, the interchange having restored her good humor.