The Bohemian Murders (15 page)

I peered around Braxton’s shoulder, but Mapson hardly glanced at me. Instead he pulled a well-practiced, mournful face and held out his hands, palms up. “Wish I could help you but I can’t. The Jane Doe’s gone, and that idiot assistant of mine lost the paperwork. I don’t even know who she got released to.”

I
n spite of the bad weather I set out for Carmel on Monday at the earliest possible time. I was beginning to think that if I waited for it to clear I’d be waiting until spring. The previous day the weather was the worst I’d yet seen here: The wind flung rain and surf-spawned mist at the lighthouse with such force that often it was impossible to see through the glass, either in the watch room or from the lantern, and it howled around the tower like some demented ghost in one of Arthur Heyer’s stories.

When the rain stopped and the wind died in the early morning hours, around 3:00 A.M., the change was so abrupt that the very silence woke me. Naturally enough, I expected that the day would dawn to those glorious blue skies one sees after storms, so clear and clean they seem scrubbed. But no; when I went up to the watch room at six o’clock and looked out, I was seriously disappointed. Not that I cannot enjoy Nature in all her guises, especially on Point Pinos, where every one of those guises has its own particular beauty—but it would have been so much more pleasant to do what I had to do in better weather.

“At least it is not raining,” I observed to myself and to Bessie, who put one of her ears back. Apparently the comment did not rate the attention of two ears. The horse was in fine fettle after being confined to quarters, so to speak, for two days straight. I was in similar fettle after being likewise confined, albeit by a half day less than the horse.

On Saturday, Braxton had returned me from Mapson’s to the lighthouse considerably worse for the experience. I did my best to keep my physical and emotional distress from him—physical in the form of a renewed headache so intense that persistent nausea accompanied it; emotional because the loss or disappearance or abduction of Jane Doe’s body filled me with such a variety of emotions that I doubt I could have named them all even had I been entirely well. Not for a minute did I believe the story Mapson had foisted on us: that some of Jane Doe’s relatives had arrived and taken her away for burial. Braxton, however, brightened right up and said, “That takes care of that, then!” And I thought: Hah!

Subsequently Braxton had taken me home. Whereupon Quincy, who seldom says much of anything unless prodded, took one look at me and gave me the dickens for going out. He insisted that I—in his words—“stay put for a while!” So I did; he spent the rest of Saturday afternoon and much of the evening in the watch room rather than coming and going—I think to be sure I didn’t cheat.

Sunday I was a good girl, even if I did not go to
church: I honored the Sabbath (not to mention my head injury) with a day of rest. I watched the storm and read all of Arthur’s ghostly tales; the two went quite well together. I did not consider the reading of the tales as work, even though it is perfectly true that I can type faster and with fewer mistakes when I do not actually read while I am typing. Lack of absorbing reading material was the only fault I could find with Hettie’s well-ordered house, and one that could easily be remedied. A single idle day reminded me that I should obtain a card for the public library.

Just before supper last night, Quincy came into the kitchen with one hand behind his back. “You look a deal better, Fremont,” he said.

I turned from the stove, where I was stirring a cream sauce to which I intended to add some leftover chicken and peas, and said, “Thank you. I feel much better this evening than I have since it happened.”

Quincy ducked his head, cleared his throat, shuffled a bit, and then looked straight at me. “I found this,” he said, bringing the hidden hand from behind his back and thrusting it at me.

I dropped the spoon. “My leather bag!” I cried, grabbing it up. Quickly I looked inside. A useless activity—the bag is so capacious that looking into it is a good deal like peering into a cave. So I dumped the whole thing out onto the kitchen table.

“Found it in the woods,” Quincy said, scratching his ear and watching me prod through the collection, “not too far from where you said you was attacked.”

“Thank you!” I said fervently. My nose warned me that the cream sauce could not be left alone for long; I went back to the stove and removed it from the burner, then returned to pick up and snap open the little purple cloth pouch in which I keep coins and a few rolled-up bills. Looking into it, I thought: How very odd!

I laughed, sounding false to my own ears, but maybe Quincy could be fooled. “I guess the bandit picked the wrong person to rob,” I said with a shrug, “and when he saw what a paltry haul he’d gotten, he just threw it away.” I shook the purple pouch; it jingled obligingly.
“The bandit took the currency but couldn’t be bothered with a few coins. And of course all this other stuff,” I made a sweeping gesture across the table, “is worthless to anyone except me.”

In fact there were several dollar bills still rolled up in the change pouch. Nothing whatever had been stolen from my bag; it had been flung to earth with all its contents intact.

“I reckon,” Quincy said.

I thanked him again, profusely, as I scraped things off the table into the bag: a small comb and brush; a couple of hair clips; a black grosgrain ribbon that had come unwound (black ribbons are what I most often use to tie back my hair); a box of honey pastilles with the picture of an extremely self-satisfied cat on it; tiny scissors in a green velvet case—they are supposed to be for embroidery but I use them on my nails—a few hairpins; some pencils; a couple of disreputable-looking handkerchiefs; a small notebook, the stub of a ticket from the last moving picture show I went to in San Francisco; etc. These items disappeared under Quincy’s fascinated gaze, and then he excused himself.

I tried to salvage the cream sauce, with some success, while my thoughts and fears boiled out of control. Only the sketches of Jane Doe were missing. For those sketches I had been viciously attacked; but the last laugh, so to speak, was on the bandito—he didn’t know about Phoebe, and Phoebe had more.

So now on Monday morning I took the turn from the Old Mission Road onto Carmel’s Ocean Avenue with the rig tipping on one wheel and Bessie at the gallop. Due to the inclement weather no one was about, and I did not have to slow down much until crossing San Carlos Street. I turned to the right on Lincoln, just before the Pine Inn. Phoebe’s cottage, Hibiscus House, was one down from the corner of Fifth and Lincoln; having been there once before, the day I’d brought her home, I located it again with no trouble.

But Phoebe was not at home. I knocked and knocked. I called and called. Bessie whuffled softly, upset, I
supposed, by my nervous urgency. Animals, I have heard, are able to sense the moods of humans.

Holding one hand on top of my still-sore head (as if that could do any good!) I ran around the cottage, peering in all the windows. It was only two rooms, empty of people but crammed full of other things. Behind the house I found a long sort of shed, roofed over but otherwise open to the elements: her sculpture studio. The works caught my attention and slowed me down, the better to look at them. There were several heads in clay, including one of Michael (Misha, Phoebe would say) just begun but already recognizable. One of Oscar Peterson in a melancholy mood. Also in clay, a small but full-length statue of a man I did not know—thank goodness, for he was entirely nude and embarrassingly well endowed! The largest and most impressive piece was a wood carving of a bird-woman: a woman turning into a bird, or vice versa. The expression on her face was fierce—I loved it. And the texture of her feathers invited my touch, I stroked the wood and fancied that it actually felt like feathers.

I walked back to the cottage slowly, pondering the prodigious talent in one small woman’s hands. On the outside, Phoebe Broom was as plain as the sound of her name, but on the inside she was as beautiful and as fierce as that bird-woman. And brave: I remembered how without flinching she had stayed alone with a decomposing body, her talented fingers producing a sketch in record time.

“I must have those sketches!” I said aloud, approaching the back door. Trying the knob, I found it unlocked. I pushed it open, stood on the threshold, and called out, “Phoebe? It’s Fremont. Are you home?”

Of course there was no answer—I hadn’t thought there would be. In no time at all I had persuaded myself that since this was Carmel, not Boston or even San Francisco, no one would mind if I went into an unlocked cottage when its owner was not at home. Certainly Phoebe wouldn’t care if I looked around for the sketches. When I had found them I would leave her a note, if she
still hadn’t returned. I proceeded inside and began my search.

The main room was cluttered and gloomy. Phoebe was apparently an inveterate sketcher. Drawings of all sizes and shapes, on all kinds of paper from the thickest and most expensive to the veriest scrap, littered almost every surface. Checking over them all in the gloom strained my eyes; my head got the tender feeling that precedes an actual ache, and I decided I’d best have some light.

A simple kerosene lantern with a clear glass chimney sat on a big round table that, by the look of things, served both for eating and work space. I went over to light this lamp, and at its base found a piece of paper that at first I took for another sketch. In fact there was a sketch on one side of the paper. But on the other side there was a note:
Dear Everybody
—
I’ve gone away. Don’t know when I’ll be back. Love to all, Phoebe.

My hand, holding the note, began to tremble. I read it again, and then a third time. A prickly feeling started at the base of my skull and traveled down my spine. I have had this feeling before—it is a sign of danger. An intuition, if you will. Or even a premonition.

I bit my lip, took a deep breath, got hold of myself, and put the note back down exactly where I’d found it. Then I again set about looking for the sketches of Jane Doe, and this time I conducted a search that was as methodical as it was thorough. It took a long time; I examined the bedroom as well. When I finished I was certain: The sketches were not there. Like Jane Doe’s body, like Phoebe herself, they had vanished.

When Quincy was giving me the dickens, he’d said something I had since tried to put out of my mind: “A blow like that to the side of the head, specially from somebody comin’ atcha full tilt on horseback, could snap yer head right off yer neck, like a flower off its stalk!” Now, as I drove away from Phoebe’s cottage, those words came back to haunt me.

Clucking and flapping the reins, I took the rig into Del
Monte Forest by the Carmel gate. Bessie tossed her head and pranced, testing her will against mine. She was unfamiliar with this road, it had begun to rain, and she wanted to go home. “We are going back to the lighthouse,” I called out over the noise of hooves and wheels, “but by another route!” The horse was not impressed, but my will prevailed and she settled into her smooth, trotting gait.

The rain was a fine mist, picked up by a burgeoning wind and sharpened into infinitesimal needles that fell like pinpricks upon the skin. The pine forest smelled primeval: rich, earthy, fertile, green. The road twisted near the shoreline cliffs, past Pescadero Point, Point George, Point Cypress, then plunged inland over tree-covered sand hills, but never far from the roaring surf. With Quincy’s words going around and around in my head—“snap yer head right off yer neck, like a flower off its stalk … flower off its stalk … off its stalk”—I suddenly felt dizzy, and a sinkhole opened in the pit of my stomach.

I blinked rapidly and gulped at the cold, wet air. Wrong thing to do; it became harder to breathe than before. Bessie’s iron-shod hooves rang on wood as the shay clattered over a bridge spanning a steep-sided gulley. I was panicking. The tall trees, dark green and threatening, were closing in on me. Trapping me in a forest full of danger, full of shadows, the same sort of shadows that not so long ago had flung a masked bandit in my face.
Snap yer head right off yer neck, like a flower off its stalk!

Had he really tried to kill me? Was I alive simply because he’d misjudged the strength behind his blow? Or had he pulled back mercifully at the last minute? Was he really a he? Or a she? And had this same person, this bandit-who-was-not-a-bandit, made Phoebe disappear? I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, a technique for controlling fear and tension that Michael had taught me in our more comradely days. I would not—absolutely would not—give in to my fears.