Hungry Spirits [Spirits 04] (21 page)

Besides that, it was entirely possible that Sam might want to get married again. In fact, when I thought about it, he might well be a lonely person. Why else would he be at our house so often? And at least Lucy was a nice person. If Sam had to marry somebody, Lucy seemed a likely and plausible choice.

She whirled around again and took my hands. “Thank you, Daisy. You know I had thought Marvin Halliday and I would marry, but he. . . .”

Oh, dear goodness. That’s right. I finally recalled that Lucy’s beloved had also been lost in the war. Cursed war. Cursed Kaiser. I squeezed her hands. “I know, Lucy. What a dismal aftermath, huh?”

Tears filled her eyes. “Dismal is a good word for it.” And she let go of me to snatch her handkerchief and wipe her eyes.

Bah.

But it was a crisp, sunny November day, and we endured the church service. Also, everyone was looking forward to Thanksgiving, which was the following Thursday. I think Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays. Not only do we always have a wonderful meal, thanks to Aunt Vi, but my birthday would fall on the Wednesday after Thanksgiving. I’d be twenty-two, by gum! And Aunt Vi would bake a delicious meal and a lovely cake, and I’d get presents. I know it sounds childish, but I liked getting presents. Well, who doesn’t?

I also appreciate Thanksgiving because it’s the one day in the year when we all concentrate on our blessings rather than our burdens, and I regret to say I dwelt a lot on my many responsibilities in those days—more than I should have, I’m sure.

Not only that, but Thanksgiving hymns are some of the loveliest, in my opinion, second only to those dedicated to Christmas. I generally prefer Thanksgiving and Christmas hymns to Easter hymns, which tend to be gloomy because of Good Friday and all. The Sunday of which I write, the choir sang “Come Ye Thankful People, Come,” which is one of my very favorites, and the organist truly outdid herself during the collection of the offering with a perfectly gorgeous medley of Thanksgiving music.

And then, after feasting on one of Vi’s more delicious meals, we went for our Sunday drive.

In Southern California, we don’t get the glorious fall leaves my father speaks of fondly—he’s originally from Massachusetts—but the weather sure shone upon us that Sunday, even if our leaves turned more yellowish than red and orange. Except for the evergreens, of course, which remained . . . well, green. Sometimes in November we get horrible winds the newspapers call Santa Anas. They knock the oranges off both of our trees, and sometimes entire branches. More than one of the magnificent pepper trees on our street had been uprooted by a windstorm. I am also prone to get hideous headaches during windstorms. No evil winds marred our Sunday drive that day.

In Altadena, which is a little town just north of Pasadena, there is an extremely charming street called Santa Rosa. It’s the town in which Mrs. Bissell, the dachshund breeder, lives, only she’s a little north and east of Santa Rosa. The street is lined with great big deodar trees, and every time I drive up it, I think of Rudyard Kipling’s
Under the Deodars.
Not that Kipling or his book has anything to do with this saga; I only mention it. Anyway, the long line of deodars on Santa Rosa originally lined the drive of Colonel F. J. Woodbury, who used to have a huge ranch up there and after whom a big east–west street in Altadena was named. Now Santa Rosa is lined not merely with deodars, but with huge, gorgeous houses, and it’s still nice to drive up.

So we did. Drive up Santa Rosa Avenue that day, I mean, and we all enjoyed the beautiful fall day. Ma and Pa and Vi sat in the backseat so that Billy and I could sit together in the front street. I doubt that Billy would have cared much one way or the other. What he wanted was to be able to drive the machine himself, but he couldn’t. He didn’t complain, however, and the day was quite enjoyable. He held Spike on his lap, and Spike had his nose stuck out the window, his ears flapping gloriously in the breeze.

We didn’t share a cross word all day long, wonder of wonders, even though I couldn’t get the image of that cache of morphine syrup out of my mind’s eye. But I didn’t bring up the subject again with Billy. Not ever. Perhaps I should have. I don’t know, and I suppose it’s no good second-guessing oneself.

At any rate, the Monday following that lovely and peaceful Sunday, I got yet another frantic call from Mrs. Kincaid. Her wedding was to take place the following Sunday, and Billy and I were invited. I wanted to go, mainly because I’d get to see Harold Kincaid and Edie Applewood, my old school chum who, as I’ve already mentioned, worked as lady’s maid for Mrs. Kincaid. Billy wasn’t so keen on going, but he said he would. I wasn’t counting on that, but I determined not to nag him. If he decided to go to the wedding, fine. If he didn’t, well, I’d miss him, but that was fine, too.
I
sure intended to go. The reception was going to be held at the Valley Hunt Club, which was a fabulous place, and which I only ever got to see when rich people invited me.

This wedding of Mrs. Kincaid’s to Mr. Pinkerton had garnered me oodles of bucks over the past several months, due to her nervousness about embarking on another marriage. I didn’t think she needed to worry. Mr. Pinkerton seemed to be a genuinely fine gentleman. Not that one can always tell about things like that, of course. But I’d known him slightly for years and years, and he’d always been pleasant and kind to me—and to Mrs. Kincaid, too. He was a heck of a lot nicer to her than her previous husband, the dastardly Eustace Kincaid, who was serving time in the state penitentiary—which was a good place for him in my considered opinion—for fraud and theft.

At any rate, after I finished cleaning up the breakfast dishes, I changed into one of my spiritualist outfits and set out for Mrs. Kincaid’s, Ouija board in hand in the lovely little traveling bag I’d sewn for it years earlier.

That day, because Mrs. Kincaid had begun to annoy me a little and I didn’t feel in the mood for anything perky, I selected a long-sleeved dress of dull gray wool with a dropped waistline and black trim. With my black shoes, handbag and coat, I looked like a widow woman in half-mourning. That was a fine look to achieve for a person in my profession.

Mrs. Kincaid didn’t care what I looked like. She probably didn’t even see me, she was so involved with her own petty problems. Well, I considered them petty. She certainly didn’t. So I sat with her, pulled my Ouija board and accompanying planchette out of their carrying cases, set the board on the lovely mahogany coffee table in the drawing room, we put our fingers lightly on the planchette, and the planchette spelled out answers to Mrs. Kincaid’s questions. The answers were the same as ever, mainly because the questions were the same as ever.

Billy has a point about how ridiculous it seems for people to ask the same things over and over and expect to get different answers.

After our session, I decided to see if I could find Edie, so I tiptoed up the back stairs and started looking through the chambers. I felt kind of like I’d broken into a royal castle or something, because there were so many rooms so beautifully furnished, but sure enough, I discovered Edie tidying up Mrs. Kincaid’s brushes and combs in a perfectly gorgeous dressing room that led off a sitting room. Mrs. K’s bedroom occupied another end of the suite of rooms dedicated to her sleeping and reading pleasure. She also had her own bathroom. I know for a fact, because Harold has told me as much, that there were two other suites of rooms in the upstairs of that house, I guess for Stacy and Harold himself before he moved out.

I’m not sure I’d like to live in a huge house like that. I’d feel like I should invite another family or four to live with me.

I peeked around the corner and said, “My goodness, Edie, this place is fantastic.”

She turned and spied me. “Ain’t it grand?” she said with a broad grin. “I wouldn’t mind living here.”

“
I thought you did live here.”

“
Well, we do, but we have quarters downstairs off the kitchen. Still, they’re nice quarters, so I don’t mind.”

“
I remember those quarters. They’re like a little apartment, aren’t they, with a sitting room and a bathroom and a bedroom. Very nice.” I’ve often wondered why some people have so much and other people, some quite deserving, have so little, but I’m no philosopher and haven’t come up with an answer that’s satisfied me yet.

“
They are very nice, and they’re perfect for us. One of these days, Quincy and I want to start a family, but we’re going to wait until he’s saved up enough money to buy a house.”

A family. That sounded so nice. I mean, I had a wonderful family, but it didn’t include any children of my own. I had to settle for my siblings’ children when they came to visit for holidays—which meant I’d see them the following Thursday. I looked forward to it.

I gave Edie a brief hug. “Is everything crazy around here, what with wedding preparations and everything?”

Edie rolled her eyes. “You have no idea.” She hesitated, frowning, and then said, “Actually, you probably do, since she calls you all the time. I’ll just be glad when it’s all over.”

“
Are they going anywhere fancy on a honeymoon or something like that?”

“
You betcha. They’re going to Paris, France, and then they aim to go to Egypt, believe it or not, and take a trip down the Nile. Or maybe it’s up the Nile. She told me, but I can’t remember. But they’re going to see all those old pyramids and stuff. She’s bought more clothes than you can ever imagine, and I’ve hemmed and fitted all of them at least twice. Still, I don’t mind. She’s very nice to Quincy and me, even if she is a little . . . well, you know.”

I did know. That reminded me of something I’d been meaning to ask Edie for a long time. “I thought Quincy was supposed to become a horse trainer for some racing stable or other.” Edie’s husband, Quincy Applewood, had been born in Nevada and worked on a real, live ranch before he moved to California. He even acted in a cowboy picture, but he broke his leg, which pretty much ended his picture career. He still loved working with horses, however, and Edie’d told me before that he was set to go to work training racehorses.

Edie shook her head. “He decided not to do that after all, when Mr. Pinkerton hired him to tend to his polo ponies.”

I’m sure my eyes bulged. “Mr. Pinkerton plays
polo?
” I couldn’t quite feature the plump, pleasant, pink Algernon Pinkerton swinging a mallet, or whatever those polo stick things are called, from the back of a galloping horse.

“
He doesn’t, but his sons do.”

“
He has
sons?
” Goodness gracious, I hadn’t known that! Talk about wonders never ceasing!

“
Two of ’em. They’re kind of nice, like him, only taller and not so round.”

“
Well, I’ll be darned. I didn’t even know he’d been married before.”

“
Oh, sure. Mrs. Kincaid told me all about it. His wife died young, and he didn’t remarry because he was so crushed at her passing. Well, until now, I mean.”

“
I’ll be darned. How long will this trip to France and Egypt take, do you know?”

“
A couple of months. She’s putting me on board wages, but Quincy will keep getting paid his usual salary because he’ll still tend Mr. Pinkerton’s horses.”

I’d read about board wages in detective novels set in England, but I didn’t know we had them here in the United States, which is probably stupid of me. “It’s good that you won’t be without an income.”

“
Yeah, it is. Not that it matters a whole lot. We eat here and your aunt prepares the meals, so we won’t starve, even if the meals won’t be quite as elaborate during those two months as they are now.” Edie grinned at me. “I’m trying to learn how to cook from your aunt, Daisy.”

“
You are? Me, too.”

It was Edie’s turn to have bulged-out eyeballs. “
You?
Good heavens, Daisy, I remember when you almost flunked that home-economics class because your hard-boiled eggs burned.”

“
So do I,” I admitted glumly. “It’s even worse than that, unfortunately, because Johnny Buckingham has me teaching a cooking class at the Salvation Army.”

Edie’s mouth dropped open and stayed that way until she started to laugh. And laugh. And laugh. I finally got sick of her amusement at my expense, so I said, “Well, I’m going down to see Vi. Maybe she’ll have another hot cooking tip for me.”

By this time, Edie’s eyes had begun to drip with the power of her hilarity and she could only give me a feeble wave, so I hotfooted it down the back stairs, the same way I’d come up—the servants’ stairs, that is to say—and on into the kitchen. My aunt was there, all right, patting some kind of dough around a big slab of what looked like roasted beef.

“
Whatcha doing, Aunt Vi?”

“
Good afternoon, Daisy. I’m preparing beef Wellington for dinner tonight.”

Gee, she’d never prepared beef Wellington for us. “Oh? How come it’s called beef Wellington?”

“
I have no idea. I think it’s named after some famous English statesmen or soldier or something like that.”

“
The Duke of Wellington? I remember reading about him in a history class. Isn’t he the one who defeated Napoleon?”

“
I have no idea whom he defeated, but it sounds like he’s probably the one.”

“
What exactly makes up a beef Wellington, Vi?” I eyed her preparations with misgiving. “It looks like it might be too complicated for my cooking class.”

Chuckling, she said, “It definitely is. And it’s far too expensive for your cooking class, too. It’s a sirloin of beef, roasted and smeared with liver pate, mushrooms and onions, then wrapped in a puff pastry crust, baked until the crust is done and served with horseradish sauce. I’m fixing asparagus to go with it, along with a clear soup, tomato aspic and roasted potatoes.”