Mrs. Clements smiled. “Yes. She was quite a good seamstress. I was sorry to let her go.”
“When was that, ma’am?”
“Oh, round about last October, I believe it was. My business had slowed to a trickle and I just couldn’t keep her on. It darn near broke my heart too. She and that sweet baby of hers and all. I knew she needed the money. She said you were workin’ the gold fields. That right?”
“That’s right. I just came out on the Portland.”
“Ah,” she nodded. “That explains the fancy duds. You must have hit some pay dirt, then.”
“Some,” he said.
“Well, I heard she went down to southern California with the young lady who lived next door. They turned out to be good friends.”
Gus pulled another hundred out of his wallet and handed it to the woman, who looked surprised as hell. “Thanks for giving my wife employment when she needed it,” he said.
When he left the dressmaker’s, Gus hailed a hackney and went straight over to the train station to book a ticket for Los Angeles the following day. As luck would have it, the railroad had put in a spur to Temecula, so he reserved a seat all the way through. He headed back to the Madison Hotel where he was due to have dinner with C.J. and Ethel. They were expecting Mattie to be with him and it was going to be damn embarrassing to tell them he had to go all the way down to Los Angeles to fetch his wife. But it had been so long that a few more days wouldn’t matter, he told himself. In the meantime, he’d talk to C.J. about an idea he’d had regarding using steam to melt the permafrost. Maybe they could work together and manufacture some kind of contraption that would speed up the digging process.
Then there was John Anderson. He was thinking John might want to partner with him in some business that supplied the miners who’d surely be heading back up north. By the looks of the crowds on the waterfront, the demand for those goods—and the means to transport them—was going to skyrocket. He had a lot of ideas and a lot to think about. Maybe it was actually better he had a few more days before picking up Mattie and Annabelle. He told himself that, but he didn’t really believe it.
CHAPTER SIX
The Double J Ranch sprawled over several hundred acres in the Temecula Valley, and as far as Gus could tell from the seat of the horse he’d secured to find the place, the Jones family was doing fairly well. It looked like they raised wheat and other crops as well as ran cattle. The man who managed the stables in town had provided decent directions and Gus found the place easily. After tying his horse to a nearby post next to a small watering trough, he knocked on the front door of what looked to be the main residence. It looked more like a Spanish hacienda than a typical farmhouse, but that was the case with many of the buildings in this part of the state.
After several minutes and no answer, Gus walked around the back of the house to see if maybe someone was outside and hadn’t heard his knock. He found a young woman with long reddish-blonde hair working in what looked to be a kitchen garden. She had a basket next to her that was half full of just-picked vegetables—tomatoes and cukes, lettuce and radishes and green beans. Gus hadn’t seen such fresh produce in a long, long time.
“Excuse me, ma’am?” He stayed at the edge of the plot in case she spooked easily. “Uh, Miss Bethany Jones?”
The young woman glanced over her shoulder and scrambled to her feet when she saw him. “Oh. Yes, that’s me.” She wiped her hands on her apron and looked around as if searching for reinforcements. “May I help you?”
“I hope so, ma’am. I’m looking for Mattie Wolff. I understand she moved here with you from Seattle. I’m her husband, Gus.”
The woman stopped moving and stared at him as if he had just dropped his trousers. She took so long to answer that Gus was afraid she’d had a mental fit of some kind. “Ma’am?” he prompted.
Miss Jones closed her eyes briefly as if to collect herself. Finally she spoke. “Uh, um. Mr. Wolff. Why don’t we go inside?” She gestured for him to precede her and waited while he walked up the back steps and into what was the sun porch of the house. “Please, sit down,” she invited, pointing to a grouping of chairs around a small wooden table. “May I get you something to drink?”
“No thanks. I’d really just like to see Mattie and Annabelle. Are they close by?”
The young lady sat down across from Gus and looked at the table for a minute before sighing and meeting his eyes. “I haven’t seen Mattie or Annabelle in quite some time,” she said.
The cold sensation that Gus had felt at the rooming house returned, accompanied by an inner alarm that told him something was definitely out of place. “What are you talking about?”
“I—” the young woman started to cough and reached into her apron pocket for a handkerchief. “I’m sorry,” she said after she got herself under control. “I was about to say that Mattie doesn’t live here. Neither she nor Annabelle live here. She—”
“Wait a minute,” Gus said, his voice rising. “I was told that Mattie and Annabelle left Seattle to come down here to live with you. Now where in the blazes is she?”
Miss Jones spoke slowly, as if she were choosing each word one at a time. “You don’t have to raise your voice, Mr. Wolff. I…I will tell you what I know.”
Alarm bells were clanging in his head by now, threatening to drown out the lady’s voice. Gus forced himself to stay put and listen. “Go on,” he said.
“We did leave Seattle together—me, Mattie, and little Annabelle. We took a steamship to San Francisco, where we were to transfer to a train to come down here. Much as you did, I assume?”
Gus nodded. “Continue.”
“Well…” at that point the lady stood up from her seat and held onto the back of the chair. “We…we stayed in San Francisco for a few days and Mattie met a man, a man she said she had known a long time, since before she met you. She…she said she wanted to stay and visit with him for a few days and would follow me down here. But she never did.”
“Who was this man?” Gus asked abruptly. “What was his name?”
“Um…Roger…uh no, Robert. Robert Something. Everton, I think. Robert Everton. She called him Rob and said she had known him growing up.”
“I don’t believe this,” Gus muttered. “So why didn’t she follow a few days later like she said?”
Miss Jones sat down again and reached out to touch Gus’s arm. “Mr. Wolff, when you didn’t come back as promised, Mattie felt very alone. The last word she’d gotten from up there was that several miners had drowned on the same river you were prospecting. She thought you were dead. Do you understand?”
“Dead? But why would she think that? I told her in my letter—”
“Mattie received no letter from you, sir. Not the whole time she was living in Seattle.”
It was Gus’s turn to get up. He began to pace the room. “That’s ridiculous. I specifically paid the messenger to deliver my letter as soon as his ship arrived.”
“All I can tell you, Mr. Wolff, is that she knew you would have contacted her if you could, and because you didn’t, it must have meant that, well…”
“… that I was gone and she was free to be with someone else. I get your meaning.” Gus paused to consider his options. San Francisco was on the way back to Seattle. He could stop there, pick them up, and continue on. He would find a way to forgive her. Somehow. “So, where do I find this Robert Everton? Did she leave an address for you to reach her?”
Miss Jones bit her lip and shook her head slightly. “I think he’d been just passing through as well, but I’m not entirely sure. Mattie told me not to worry; she said that she and Annabelle would be safe with him. I assumed at some point I would hear from her again, but I never did. I know this is not what you wanted to hear.”
“No, ma’am, that is not what I wanted to hear.” Gus turned to leave, the significance of what the young woman had told him just beginning to sink in. “Thank you for your time. You can always reach me through the Madison Hotel in Seattle. If you hear from her,
I would appreciate it very much if you would contact me.”
“Of course.” Miss Jones walked Gus through the house and let him out the front door. He heard the tinkling of a bell from upstairs, then a faint cry of “Bethany!”
“My father,” she explained. “He has not been well.”
“I’m sorry to hear it, ma’am. Thank you again.”
“Good day,” she said and closed the door.
Gus retrieved his horse and retraced his route back to the town of Temecula. It was a warm summer’s day. The sky was a piercing blue with no clouds to be seen, and the air smelled fresh and earthy, like those vegetables that had just been picked. It was a day for sharing a picnic and a nap near a meandering stream, or havin’ a lemonade while rockin’ on a squeaky porch swing. It was not a day to find out your wife and daughter were gone to hell knew where.
Damned if something didn’t feel square about the whole situation. Even if Miss Jones was right about Mattie not getting his letter, would she really have taken off with some stranger? He caught himself. Not a stranger, apparently. Somebody she’d grown up with. Had she ever mentioned an old friend named Rob? He didn’t remember. And he couldn’t check her childhood home in Seattle because Mattie hadn’t grown up there; she and her ma had come from someplace else. St. Louis, was it? Kansas City? He cursed himself for paying more attention to the way her breasts looked beneath her shirtwaist than the life story she had tried to tell him when they first met.
He pondered his options. He could stay in Seattle and begin the search from there. He could move to San Francisco; maybe he’d uncover some clues. He could…but who was he kidding? He had to get back to the Yukon pronto, and he knew it. Shorty and Porter were holding down the fort, but they needed him. Several more of the claims they’d secured needed to be dug over the winter in time for the spring cleanup. The new restaurant needed to be finished; supplies had to be managed. He simply had to get back.
But that didn’t mean he couldn’t continue the search. He’d stop in San Francisco anyway and hire a private investigator. He’d locate that messenger Ed Barlow and he’d look for Mattie and Annabelle. No telling where the trail might lead. He had the money to do it, and what good was it anyway if he couldn’t share it with his family?
With that plan in mind, August Wilkerson Wolff bought a return ticket to Seattle by way of San Francisco, wrapped up his business in the states, and took the first available steamer back to the gold fields.
CHAPTER SEVEN
December 1899
San Francisco
“I don’t know what to tell you, sir. We were able to track that fellow Ed Barlow and found that he’d been killed in a bar fight. But I’m very sorry to say your wife and little girl seem to have vanished.” The Pinkerton agent laid his papers on Gus’s desk and stood there tapping his fingers on the hat he held in his hands. No doubt he felt like horse manure having to tell his client a thing like that. Or maybe he thinks I did ’em in. Gus snorted. He’d asked Mr. Fenton to meet him at his suite at the Palace Hotel with the detective’s final report. Fenton had been searching for Mattie and Annabelle for two long years with nothing to show for it, and the trail had apparently grown stone cold.
Gus tapped a pen on his desk blotter. “What about that Robert Everton character? You’re telling me after all this time you’ve had no leads, no clues, no inkling as to where he might be, either?”
“We did turn up a Robert Everton, sir, but he died of old age back in Cheyenne six months ago. His family had no idea who Mattie Wolff was. They’d never heard of her.”
“Hell and damnation,” Gus muttered. Sooner or later you had to cut your losses. He stood up and shook the detective’s hand. “Well, thank you for your work.” He handed the man a bank draft. “I hope this covers your last round of expenses.”
The detective looked down at the amount; his eyes grew big and he swallowed. “Uh, yessir. I imagine this covers it and then some.”
Gus smiled grimly. “Just don’t spend it all in one place.”
“Sir,” the agent said, looking at Gus with something akin to pity in his eyes, “I just want you to know from all of us at the Pinkerton Agency, you’ve been a good and generous client and we’re grateful for your business. We’re sorry as can be we couldn’t find your loved ones, but we’re still gonna keep our eyes peeled. If anything turns up…anything at all, we’ll be sure to let you know.”
“I appreciate that, I surely do,” Gus said, shaking Fenton’s hand. He saw the detective out, returned to his desk, and poured himself a Jack Daniels. “You’d cost me a couple of sawbucks back in Dawson,” he mused aloud as he held up the glass. He downed it in one swallow.
The anguish he’d felt over Mattie and Annabelle’s disappearance had dulled over time. Early on his fears of foul play had been relieved, since any homicides concerning women had been followed up on. The mystery of their whereabouts had become virtually the only downside in Gus’s otherwise fortunate life.
Two additional years in the Yukon had made him richer than ever. He’d sensed the gold strikes would soon play out on the Klondike and he was right; even now the rush was on to Nome. Shorty was headed that way, hoping he’d win the lottery twice in one lifetime. He and Gus had parted ways as lifelong friends.
But mining had always been a means to an end, and Gus had parlayed his stakes into other winning gambits. He’d gone in with C.J. Berry to market a new method for placer mining using steam and it was already reaping profits. With John Anderson he’d started a mining supply company flexible enough to follow the rush wherever it led. And he and his partner Porter Wilson had moved their restaurant from Dawson City to Seattle and were about to open another in San Francisco. Porter knew good beef when he saw it and could cook up a steak like nobody’s business. It was a surefire formula for success.
Gus was starting talks with other investors to launch a new steamship line to Asia, and he’d bought several pieces of prime real estate in California. No doubt about it: when it came to making money, he’d come a long way from the kid whose family couldn’t afford to feed him.
Once he’d left the north for good, he’d decided San Francisco would indeed make the best home base. It was close to all his business interests, but more important, it was the last place Mattie and Annabelle had been seen. In his more fanciful moments he imagined turning a corner and there they’d be, running up to him, pretty as a picture. At this point, seemed like everything about Mattie and Annabelle belonged to a world of make-believe.
He poured another shot and drank it. The whiskey went down smooth and fired up his insides.
A new century was days away. The world was changing and it was a great time to be alive. Except for one thing: who could he share it with?
Willing women weren’t the problem. Hell, he could bed one right now and wouldn’t even have to pay for it. But finding someone to come home to every night, to make a family with, was another kettle of fish. He’d long since faced the fact that he and Mattie hadn’t been right for each other. But she’d been a good woman and given him a beautiful little girl. Part of him wanted to wring her neck for taking Annabelle away. But the bigger part of him hoped and prayed that wherever they were, they were happy. He held on to that thought with all the strength he had, and braced himself to face the future alone.
PART TWO
The Artist
CHAPTER EIGHT
July 1896
New York
“Amelia Ruth, what do you think you’re doing?”
Her father’s harsh tone broke Lia’s concentration as she worked to fill in the shading of the charcoal study she’d begun an hour earlier. She closed her eyes and said nothing in the hope that he would go away, but instead he came farther into the library, stopping by the window seat where she was positioned to capture the afternoon light.
“I’m working on a landscape for my drawing class,” she finally responded. “I’m taking advantage of the morning light, you see.”
“What I see
is that you’re wasting time on nonsense when you should be seeing Madame LeFever for your fitting. Didn’t you and your sister have an appointment this morning?”
Lia pressed her lips together, willing herself to remain calm. “I cancelled it,” she said. “I think this marriage is, as you would say, ‘ill advised.’” She put down her sketch and turned to him directly. “Father, I don’t think I can do this. Truly. Emma loves George with all her heart, and he loves her. It’s abhorrent for me to marry him when they should be together.”
Her father, dressed impeccably as always, began to pace the room. He was an elegant, small-statured man with dark hair and a substantial mustache, now infused with gray. He rarely raised his voice to either his servants or his daughters, but everyone who knew Richard Monmouth Bennett sensed immediately where they stood in relation to him, which could usually be described as “beneath.”
“In case you haven’t noticed, your sister is already married,” he said. “And even if she weren’t, young George is the last of his line and needs an heir. Emma isn’t capable of providing such, and you are therefore elected to take her place.”
An incipient feeling of despair began its familiar journey from the pit of her stomach up into her throat. She already knew every step in this choreography, but for reasons she didn’t understand, she felt powerless to change the routine. Yet she tried. She always tried.
“Father, doesn’t it matter to you that I don’t love George and that he doesn’t love me?”
“What do you know of love?” Her father practically spat the words. “You are, what, twenty-two? You have no idea what that word means in its deepest, most spiritual, most heavenly sense. And trust me, you do not want to know, for when you lose that love, it is a pain that defies description.”
The Art of Love: Origins of Sinner's Grove Page 5