Locked Rooms

by Laurie R. King

  “We need to know if Norbert senior left them all clean.”

  “Yes, I know,” I said. I sighed—but quietly, to myself—at his insistence that we were investigating a case. There was no point in saying that it was quite likely that the papers were the remnants of some last-minute business letters of my father’s, draughts later rewritten and dropped into a post-box, so I got out my note-book and wrote down the instruction to myself: Norbert——fireplaces cleaned?

  I glanced over the previous pages, added one or two facts that I had neglected to make note of earlier, then said to Holmes, “Mrs Greenfield was actually very helpful in sorting out our times in San Francisco.”

  “And she assured you that your family was all here during the earthquake and fire.”

  “She did, yes. You were right, Holmes. But we did come and go a number of times, so my memory of England isn’t entirely wrong, either.”

  I had been born in England, in January 1900: That much I knew. What I had not known was that we came here when I was just over a year old, in the spring of 1901, at which point Mrs Greenfield met my mother. Eighteen months later, according to Mr Long, my parents and I had gone walking on a wave-swept beach and met him and his father.

  We lived in San Francisco for three years that time, leaving again for England in the summer of 1904. My brother was born in February of 1905, so it was probable that Mother, finding herself pregnant, preferred to give birth among her own people. However, once he was six months old, they returned here, arriving just after the couturier on Post Street had opened in September 1905—although my “aunt” vaguely thought that we had stopped in Boston for a time on the way, with my father’s family.

  Which may have been when the coloured window and the small furry dogs had lodged themselves into my young mind.

  We lived in San Francisco from September 1905 until the summer of 1906. Many of my parents’ friends had fled the shattered city in April, but Mrs Greenfield was quite clear that Mother had insisted on staying on until at least June, assisting with the early weeks of the emergency, before the demands of her young family took her back to England.

  This time, without my father. For the next few years, he had lived half the year here and half in England, taking a train to New York and sailing back and forth across the Atlantic in order to be with his family, until finally in the summer of 1912, Mother relented and joined him in California. Two years and three months later, they died, and I had gone away for good.

  I laid my scribbled notes in front of Holmes, who glanced at them thoughtfully. “When I first met you,” he said, “I heard a solid basis of London in your voice, with a later overlay of California. Clearly, the influence of very early childhood had been put aside. I shall have to look into this—it would make an interesting monograph.”

  “Why don’t I remember it?” I protested, then flinched at the tight strain of agony in my voice. “I can understand the early years, but don’t people remember things from when they were five or six?”

  He studied me appraisingly. “You do honestly wish to know?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Holmes. Why wouldn’t I want to know about a large chunk of my missing life?”

  “I can think of a number of reasons,” he said, his grey eyes unwavering in their intensity.

  “Well, I can’t. It’s vexing. And more than a little humiliating. Why wouldn’t I want to feel whole?”

  “If, for example, you discovered that your parents were not the paragons you think them?”

  “I loved my parents and respected them, but they were hardly paragons,” I scoffed. “My father was easily distracted and my mother could be cold. And after all, disillusionment is a part of growing up.”

  “And if the disillusionment was more serious? If, say, you discovered your father was involved in some act of criminality during the earthquake?”

  “What sort of criminality?” I asked sharply.

  “Perhaps whatever it was that happened during the Fire, the thing that so upset Mr Long’s loyal father.”

  I tried to picture my father in the rôle of a criminal, and failed. I shook my head. “Holmes, he was an ethical man. And my mother enormously so—she never would have put up with a real wrongdoing. No, I can only say that, if he did something criminal, there would have been a reason for it.”

  “She would not have put up with it, you say. And she left for England a few weeks after the Fire.”

  “Wouldn’t any woman with two small children?”

  His gaze neither changed nor left me, and I shifted uncomfortably. What was he getting at? Why did I feel suddenly uneasy, as if a masseur were closing in on some bruised and tender spot?

  But Holmes said nothing further; in its way, that was even worse.

  Chapter Nine

  Friday morning, faced with a plethora of urgent tasks and troubling questions, I decided that the two things preying most heavily on my mind were my need for a dress for the evening and the continued lack of communication from Dr Ginzberg. As soon as we had finished our breakfast, and after a glance at the changeable spring sky, I put on a light rain-coat and crossed Union Square to the dress shops.

  It took a couple of hours to find a frock and shoes sufficiently formal for an evening out, but since my other options were a kimono or salwaar kameez, I persisted, arranging for the necessary alterations (my height exaggerated the hem-lines past current fashion and into a concern for propriety) and to have my purchases sent to the hotel. Back on the main street, I threw out my hand for a taxi, ducking quickly inside it and watching the street behind us for a while: no tail.

  I gave the driver Dr Ginzberg’s address, which was both her home and the office where we had met those last times, after I had been released from hospital and before I had left for England. The taxi pulled up in front of a building that looked almost right although the walls were a different colour, and when I got out to ring the bell, the plate said “Garbon.”

  A small woman answered, but that was her only similarity to my psychiatrist. I explained about my search in increasing detail, but so little was her response that I began to suspect that she was either dim or deaf.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Do you speak English?”

  “But of course I speak English,” she said with a light accent of Southern France. “However, I do not know the person for whom you search.”

  “Perhaps she has moved. Do you mind telling me who sold you the house?”

  “It is merely let, through an agency on Geary Street, but I do not believe the owner is named Ginzberg. Something with a B, I think it was. Baker? Bolton?” She shook her head. “No, I can’t remember. It has been five years we live here, and always we pay to the agency.”

  “Perhaps they can tell me. They’re on Geary, you said?”

  “Not too far from the start of the Panhandle—you know the narrow strip of green that leads into Golden Gate Park? One or perhaps two streets to the east.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and had stepped off the small landing when her voice stopped me.

  “Are you the person who sent a letter?”

  “I wrote to this address, yes. Twice in fact.”

  “There was one last month, from some place with the most interesting stamp. I did not remember the name on the address.”

  “That was from Japan, yes.”

  “Most such letters are caught by the mailman, who sends them to the agency. The Japan letter came here, and I gave it to him the following day, to take there. Perhaps as you say, they will know.”

  I thanked her and went back to the waiting taxi and asked the driver if we might explore the area to the south of the Panhandle for an estate agency, but it turned out that he knew the place, and drove directly to the door. Again, I had him wait in case this, too, proved a brief visit.

  The office was staffed by a solitary woman, who should have been three or four. Two ’phone lines rang the moment she put down the receivers, three people waited to speak with her, and clearly she was not g
oing to give me much of her attention.

  I waited with limited patience, and when I reached the head of the queue, I took from my purse a five-dollar bill and laid it, and a piece of paper bearing the Ginzberg address, on the desk in front of her. She looked at it, looked at me, and rang off the telephone she was speaking on, laying it and its brother onto the desk so they would not interrupt.

  “Thank you,” I said, giving her a smile. “I can see you’re busy, but I need to find a woman who used to own one of the houses your agency manages. Her mail gets forwarded here, so I assume you know where she is.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Dr Ginzberg. I think her first name—”

  “Sure, the mental doctor. She doesn’t own the house, and I don’t know where she is. We just stick anything that comes for her in an envelope and send it along with the monthly cheques to the hospital. Not that she gets much anymore.”

  “Do you have a name there?” I asked, ignoring the impatient shifting of the man behind me.

  “Not particularly. Just the business office.”

  “Thank you,” I said again, and left her to her popularity.

  At the hospital, I suggested to my driver that he might want to leave me, as I could easily find another taxi at the busy door, but he shrugged and said he’d go and get some lunch, and wait for me down the street. I paid him off, in case he decided to leave, put my head down, and forced myself to enter the dwelling-place of fear and pain.

  One step inside the door, and the smell seized me by the throat, making my legs go weak and my head begin to whirl. If coming to San Francisco had filled me with dread, this building was the very centre of that horror, and the smell of cleaning fluid and illness made the memory of those weeks rise up in the back of my mouth. Physical pain and raw abandonment and an excoriating sense of guilt slammed into me, fresh as the week I first woke here. I would have turned on my shaky legs and bolted for the door had a nurse not noticed my distress, and come to take my elbow.

  “Miss,” she repeated, “come sit down, you’re about to faint.”

  Obediently, I took the chair she dragged me towards, and felt her cool hand pushing gently but firmly against the bare nape of my neck, forcing my head down. I took a breath, then a few more; the dizziness passed somewhat, and I sat upright.

  “Goodness,” I said with an embarrassed laugh. “I hadn’t expected that.”

  “Not to worry, it’s always the strong ones that get the feet knocked out from under them by hospitals,” she replied cheerfully. “Had an Irish longshoreman in here this morning, one look at the needle and—phht—out cold. Were you looking for someone?”

  “Actually, it’s the business office. I’m trying to track down a doctor who worked here ten years ago.”

  “I couldn’t help you there, I’ve only been here three, but I can get you to the office.”

  Several turns and a stairway later, the more distressing odours and sounds faded, and the office itself could almost have been anywhere. Almost. I thanked my guide, and went through the door.

  Two more recitations of the details of my quest were required before I was set before an authority in a suit and tie instead of dress and stockings. I gratefully sank into the indicated chair, pulled off my gloves as an indication of my intention to see this enquiry through, and gave a third, somewhat more detailed version of the story.

  At the end of it the man in the suit sat back and laced his hands together over his waistcoat.

  “You were a patient here?”

  “After the accident, yes, in October and November 1914. After November, I moved to a convalescent home, and saw her in her private office until I went home to England.”

  “And you saw Dr Ginzberg during that whole time?” I detected a note of apprehension in his voice, at his awareness that he was seated across from a former mental patient, and I tried to look reassuringly sane. However, this did at least indicate that he was familiar with Dr Ginzberg’s practice; I gritted my teeth behind my friendly smile, and prepared to grovel.

  “I did, yes. I was fourteen years old and had just lost my entire family. Dr Ginzberg was extremely helpful to me. I thought I should return her kindness by showing her how things turned out.” Was this the place to drop casual mention of a donation to the hospital, I considered? Perhaps not just yet.

  “I see,” he said, reassured that I was not about to launch myself in a lunatic rage across the desk. He seemed to be wrestling with a decision; I was just opening my mouth to play the money card when his eyes came up to meet mine. “Well, Miss Russell, I’m very sorry to have to tell you this, but Dr Ginzberg died several years ago. It must have been shortly after you knew her, and she was . . .”

  But the growing noise in my head obscured his words, although I could see that he was talking, could see too when he stopped talking and his eyebrows came together in an expression some part of me recognised as concern. Then his mouth moved again and his hand came out but I couldn’t hear him, couldn’t hear anything but the roaring of a great waterfall, and for a while it was hard to see anything as well.

  With no helpful nurse around to press her cool hand against the back of my neck to force my head down, it was a wonder I didn’t end up on the floor. I came back to myself to find that my body had assumed the head-down position under its own power, my forehead resting on the heels of my hands, lungs pulling in, slow and deep. It could only have been seconds that my awareness faltered, because two suited legs had scarcely had time to clear the desk on their way to the door.

  “I’m all right,” I croaked.

  He paused, out of sight, and I cleared my throat and repeated the assertion, with sufficient strength this time that he could understand me.

  “Can I get you something?” he asked, sounding nervous. “A glass of water?”

  “That would be good, thank you.”

  By the time he returned, I was sitting upright, feeling the colour seeping back into my face. I drank the water, thinking somewhat nonsensically that Holmes would have given me brandy, and placed the glass on his desk. My hands were steady enough to reassure him.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” he said. “I should have realised that the news would be a shock.”

  “How did she die?”

  His long pause made me think that perhaps he had already told me, while my ears were filled with the rush of receding blood, but by that time I was more concerned with the information than reassuring him as to my sanity. I looked at him sharply and said, “Please, how did Dr Ginzberg die?”

  “She was hit on the head. The police thought . . .” and for the second time, his mouth moved while no sound reached me. I waited calmly until his face muscles were still before I asked him to repeat himself. His gaze flicked to the door and back, and I thought that if he got up to summon help, I would physically stop him and force the information from him. Fortunately, assault proved unnecessary.

  “Someone broke into her office at home, where she met patients. Apparently he thought she was out, but she was not, and she disturbed him in the process of ransacking her desk for money. He hit her with a statue she had on the desk, and left her for dead. She wasn’t found until morning. She never regained consciousness.”

  There. I had it now, and hadn’t fainted or gone deaf again. I could handle this. I heard myself speak, and sat wondering at my ability to appear rational.

  “When was this, precisely?”

  “Precisely, I don’t remember. But it was in the early weeks of 1915.”

  “That’s not possible.”

  “Er, well, I suppose I could be mistaken, although I think—”

  “I’d appreciate the date, if that’s available.” It could not have been so soon after I left for England, simply could not.

  “I could have my secretary research it,” he said, clearly uncertain why it would matter.

  “Thank you. Another question: Why is the hospital still receiving the mail addressed to her home?”

  That question made hi
s body relax into surer ground. “We administer Dr Ginzberg’s estate. She left everything to the hospital, for the benefit of mental patients. Some of her holdings we sold, others we retained as income. The house is one of those.”

  “Where do letters go?”

  “She didn’t have much family. We generally open letters, and if they are business we answer them, if personal—there are few of those anymore—we send them to a cousin of hers who lives near Philadelphia. I believe the cousin is getting on in years; her communication has become quite . . . eccentric.”

  “Was an arrest made?”

  “Not that I’ve heard.”

  “Do you know the officer in charge of the investigation?”

  “I met him, but years ago. His name slips my mind.”

  “Perhaps your secretary could look that up as well?”

  “If you like. Although as you are not family, I don’t suppose he’d have much to tell you.”

  “We’ll see,” I told him, a trifle grimly. Although Holmes tended to travel under an assumed name—currently he was using a favourite, Sherrinford Holmes—if necessity called I would not hesitate to send him in under his own name. There wasn’t a policeman in the world who would turn down a conversation with Sherlock Holmes. “Well, thank you, Mister, er . . .”

  “Braithwaite,” he provided.

  “Of course.” I pushed myself out of the chair, obscurely pleased that I did not fall on my face. My feet seemed remarkably far away.

  “Miss Russell, let me arrange a car for you.”

  “That won’t be necessary; I have a taxicab waiting for me. I think.”

  Still, his sense of responsibility demanded that he arrange for an escort, who proved to be the secretary occupying the desk outside of his office door. The woman was at least sixty and so thin she might have snapped in two had I leant on her firmly, but fortunately that did not prove necessary: The tonic of leaving the confines of the hospital restored me to a degree of normalcy. Once outside of the doors, I thanked her, and even remembered to give her my various addresses for the information she would be unearthing for me.