No Pity For the Dead Page 13

  A young woman was making the rounds, talking with the customers who weren’t so drunk that they might paw her. She bore a familial resemblance to the man behind the bar, making Nick wonder whether she was the fellow’s daughter or sister. She’d been evading a rambunctious fellow’s attentions when she noticed Nick.

  Ignoring customers’ attempts to flag her down, she walked over to him.

  “I haven’t seen you in here before,” she said, greeting him with a welcoming smile, her gaze sharp as a hawk’s. On the outside, she looked like a schoolmarm, but Nick was well aware that looks could be deceiving. “Welcome to the Golden Hare. The first drink is always on me.”

  “Maybe later,” he said, spying Matthews as he slipped through a doorway at the end of the hallway, a man who could be the twin of the monster guarding the front door ushering him through. It wasn’t much of a stretch to imagine that the doorway opened onto a set of stairs that led to a basement room where men like Nash played faro and men like Dan Matthews lost money to them. “Right now I’m trying to catch up with my friend Dan.”

  “You’re with Mr. Matthews?” she asked, her gaze flicking toward the hallway door. “By all means, join him. I’ll see you later.”

  Nick tapped his hat brim and strolled across the room, nodded at the barkeep, and walked up to the sentry.

  “I’m with Dan,” he said to the fellow.

  Two deep-set eyes stared back at him. “He didn’t say to expect nobody else.”

  “He didn’t? Well I’ll be danged. How’d he forget? Must be skunked, eh?” Nick laughed.

  The man gave him another lookover and rapped on the door. Nick heard a number of bolts being thrown, and the door swung wide to reveal another man as burly and ugly as the sentry.

  “I’m with Dan!” Nick repeated, which satisfied him, too.

  He barged past, reaching for the stair railing. A series of lanterns flickered in the dark at the bottom of the steps, casting shadows, and he could hear the faint sound of clinking barware and the murmur of voices.

  “Better not be lyin’,” the man called after him as Nick reached the hallway and strolled along it.

  A number of doors, firmly shut, led off the hallway. At the far end, however, one stood ajar, revealing a large room blazing with gaslight, smoke thickening the air. He could see a good dozen men clustered around a long table covered in glazed cloth, coins glinting on the surface, the gamblers hunched in silent concentration.

  “Red wins.”

  One of the gamblers stalked off, leaving an empty spot at the table through which Nick could see the dealer at the far end, a man in enveloping black robes, a wire mask on his face concealing his features and a large floppy hat covering all of his hair. The getup guaranteed Nick would never be able to identify him again and prosecute him. He didn’t see Matthews, though. He’d have to search the other rooms.

  Just as Nick turned to leave, a man strode into view to take the empty place at the table. No, not a man, a kid. A scruffy Irish kid who had no business being there. So much for his investigation into whether the goings-on at the Golden Hare had anything to do with Nash’s murder. He had a more immediate problem.

  “Excuse me, gentlemen,” he called out. “That there’s my kid brother.”

  Owen gaped over being caught and took off across the room, looking for another door to escape through. There wasn’t one, though.

  “C’mon now,” said Nick, chasing after him, gamblers shouting complaints and the dealers hastily scraping cards and dice and winnings off the tables.

  One of the sentries—Nick didn’t know which one; they all were the same amount of burly and ugly—charged into the room, summoned by the uproar.

  Nick reached Owen, cowering in the corner, and yanked him to his feet. “I’ve got you. Ma’s gonna whip you to kingdom come.” He pulled Owen past the guard, who tried to stop their exit. “It’s okay. He’s done this before. I’ll see he gets the strap.”

  “What?” screeched Owen. “You ain’t!”

  “I ought to,” said Nick, dragging him down the hallway, which looked far longer than it had a few minutes ago. If they could reach the stairs, they might be safe. “Let’s just get out of here first, before somebody decides we both need a whipping.”

  “But, sir—”

  “And stop with the ‘sir’ stuff.” They made it to the bottom of the staircase. “You’re my disobedient brother, got it?”

  Owen nodded and hung his head. “Aw, now, don’t take me back to Ma. She’ll tell Pa, and I’ll be black and blue come tomorrow!”

  Good job, kid.

  The door at the head of the staircase was standing open, and the upstairs guard was waiting. “Didn’t Dan want to see you?”

  “He musta slipped out.” Nick jerked Owen’s arm. “But I did find my kid brother. What’re you doin’ here, lettin’ children in?”

  Owen, keeping up the act, struggled in Nick’s grip, managing to deliver a kick to the sentry’s shin in the process. The man yowled, and Nick and Owen tore past him.

  “Thisaway!” cried Owen, headed for the rear of the building. “There’s a back door.”

  “I won’t ask how you know,” said Nick, running to catch up.

  “Hey! Stop there!” The sentry hobbled after them, his shouts raising a ruckus in the main room. Chair legs scraped across the wood floor, and a man hollered for them to stop or he’d shoot.

  Damn, thought Nick as he followed Owen down the sour-smelling hallway. They reached a steaming kitchen area with a greasy floor, the rear door propped open with a chipped stoneware crock.

  The thick-faced cook looked over from the pork chops he was frying on the cast-iron stove. “How’d you get back here?”

  “Just visiting.” Nick shoved Owen through the doorway, kicked away the crock, and slammed closed the door behind them.

  Owen skidded on a pile of kitchen scraps overspilling a vat out back. “Which way?”

  Nick wedged shut the door with a barrel he rolled over. Fists pounded on the other side. “Any way.” The barrel scraped against the gravel, and the door opened a crack. “I don’t care! Just keep running until I say stop!”

  They hurtled through dark alleyways, dodging traffic as they crossed one road and then another. Several blocks distant, Nick finally called for a halt.

  “Phew, we made it!” Owen declared. “That was fun. But don’t tell Mrs. Davies, okay? She’ll wallop me sure as I’m standing here.”

  “I should tell her, and that was not fun,” said Nick. “What in God’s green earth were you doing down there?”

  “Looking for Dan,” said Owen, his chest heaving as he sucked in air. “It’s his favorite place.”

  “A favorite place you’ve visited with him before?”

  “Uh . . .”

  “Which means ‘yes.’”

  “Sorry, Mr. Greaves,” said Owen, shamefaced. “Only Dan weren’t down there, was he?”

  “No, he wasn’t. See anybody you knew, though? Like my boss, for instance?”

  “Your boss?”

  “Never mind,” said Nick, hoping for the day he could catch Eagan breaking the law. “You’re going to get yourself killed if you keep on playing detective, Cassidy.”

  “You’re still alive.”

  “I won’t be for long if I have to keep rescuing you.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Celia yawned into her hand as she extinguished the lamp in her examination room. She’d had a patient waiting for her when she’d returned from Mrs. Lowers’ shop, and more paperwork to take care of than she liked. Worrying about who might have murdered Virgil Nash was consuming precious time. She was neglecting her duties, the ones that she had faithfully pursued since she’d left Hertfordshire for the hospital in Scutari during the war in the Crimea, and the realization was unwelcome.

  I should leave the sleuthing to Mr. Gr
eaves.

  She would not examine why she found it so difficult to do so.

  Celia went to shut the curtains, pausing to peer through the blinds at the street. What—or rather, whom—am I searching for? A murderer?

  The rings rattled as she hastily drew the curtain closed. She headed for the stairs, bound for bed. From the kitchen, Addie called out a good night.

  “Good night,” Celia answered, pausing to extinguish the lantern her housekeeper had left burning on the upstairs landing’s table. As she snuffed the flame, she heard what sounded like Barbara’s voice coming from her bedchamber.

  “Barbara? Is anything the matter?” she asked through the closed door.

  “No. I’m fine. Good night.”

  Celia opened her cousin’s door anyway. Barbara, pink-cheeked, shot bolt upright in her bed, having just tucked something between her mattress and the frame.

  “Are you certain you are fine?” Celia asked. “Is your foot hurting you because of the damp?”

  Her cousin folded her arms over her high-necked cotton nightgown. “I said I was fine, Cousin.”

  “Perhaps you are unhappy after all about going to Cliff House tomorrow. I realize that the event might be wearying—”

  “I don’t care about that. I have to go. For Grace. She needs me.”

  Celia considered Barbara in the light from the bedside lamp, which illuminated her cousin’s frown. “Then perhaps this has something to do with what you’ve hidden beneath your mattress.”

  Barbara’s chin went up, but Celia interrupted her cousin before she could make another denial. “Shall I check for myself?”

  Before Celia could make a move, Barbara leaned over and pulled out the item she’d stashed away.

  “Here.” She held out a sepia-toned salted paper print, the face upon its surface clearly visible across the room. “Here, if you have to know.”

  “I do not need to take it from you. I can see it is an image of your father.”

  Barbara set the photograph on her lap and ran a fingertip across its wrinkled surface, the edges of the paper tattered from constant handling. She kept no pictures of her mother, the Chinese woman who’d been employed as a laundress in the gold fields where her father had been a placer miner. Celia remembered the daguerreotype of his wife that Uncle Walford had displayed in his bedchamber, and she wondered where it had gone. Perhaps Barbara had smashed the photograph, wishing to erase the memory of the woman who lived on in Barbara’s face and form.

  “You’re going to think it’s silly, but I talk to him,” her cousin said. “Almost every night.”

  Celia sat on the bed next to her, the mattress yielding beneath her weight. “It is not silly at all, Barbara. Sometimes I talk to the miniature I have of my brother, Harry.”

  There were many nights she’d awoken from her nightmares of Harry as he’d lain dying on a hospital cot in the Crimea, so far from the cool green hills of England, while she’d looked on helplessly, unable to cure him, unable to save him. She had followed her champion, her hero, to war to be near him, only to have her soldier brother die in her arms. So many nights she’d scrambled to find the tiny portrait of Harry and stared at his image until the dream faded and she could sleep again.

  “He was my dearest friend in the darkest times,” said Celia, recalling Harry’s unceasing good humor. “I miss him still. Just as you miss your father.”

  “I’m sure you do, but it’s not the same. If my father were still alive . . .” Barbara stopped and chewed her bottom lip.

  Celia could guess where this conversation was headed. “What is it you wish to say? If your father were still alive, I would not be your guardian? You would not have to endure the unsavory women who come to my clinic? You would not have to worry about being in danger again?”

  Tears gathered at the corners of Barbara’s eyes. “If he were still alive, I might have a normal life!”

  “Whatever you view to be a normal life, perhaps the sort Grace enjoys, is not one you might ever have,” Celia said as gently as possible. “Given who you are.”

  “You mean, because I’m half-Chinese,” she spat.

  “Yes,” she said, and saw her cousin flinch.

  “You could’ve lied.”

  “Would you have believed me if I had? We both understand the situation.”

  Barbara peered down at her father’s face. “I want him back. It was better before. He protected me, and you can’t.”

  “I can only promise to do my best,” said Celia, gathering her cousin close as her tears fell.

  * * *

  “I collected the post, and you’ve got a letter, Mr. Greaves.” Mrs. Jewett held it out for him to take, which he did.

  “You’re up late, Mrs. Jewett.”

  “Somebody’s got to worry about you. See that you’ve come home safe.”

  “Thank you for your concern,” he said, taking in the handwriting on the outside of the envelope, the loops and curls of which he recognized.

  “Bad news?” his landlady asked.

  “I won’t know until I open it. It’s not banded in black, though, so nobody’s died.” Nick headed for the stairs, looking up toward the closed door to his second-floor rooms. Riley was barking happily behind the door, having heard his voice. “I won’t find any women in my room tonight, will I?”

  “No, Mr. Greaves,” she said. “I liked that one, by the way. Very proper and polite with her accent and manners and all. Better than the usual set who come here to see you.”

  As if he’d had all that many women come to his rooms. “She had information about a case I’m working on. Nothing romantic.”

  “Which is a downright shame, Mr. Greaves.” Mrs. Jewett shook a finger at him. “Settling down is what you need. A wife and kids.”

  “What woman would want to put up with a detective?” he asked. He’d seen what being a cop had done to his uncle Asa’s marriage. Tore it in two as easily as paper shredding in the rain, his wife stalking out a few months before Meg also left Uncle Asa’s house, neither of them ever to return. Last Nick had heard, his aunt had remarried after Uncle Asa’s death and was living in the Colorado Territory with a clerk for the U.S. Army. She must have figured Indian attacks were less of a fright than the criminals Uncle Asa had dealt with in the Barbary.

  “My job’s too dangerous, Mrs. Jewett. It’s best I save any poor creature the nuisance.”

  “Don’t think we’re as weak as you’d like to imagine us, Mr. Greaves,” said Mrs. Jewett. “And I think that Mrs. Davies looks like she’s got more than enough backbone to deal with you and your job.”

  Nick thought it wisest not to respond to her observation. He bid her a good night and climbed the steps, Riley’s bark increasing in pitch.

  Upstairs, he unlocked the door to his rooms and kneed aside a slobbering Riley. “Hold on there, boy. We’ll get you outside as soon as I look at this letter.”

  Nick broke the seal and pulled out the note. Riley dropped to Nick’s feet and stared up at him.

  “It’s a letter from Ellie,” he told the dog, who tilted his head to one side. “That’s right. You’ve never met her. She’s not quite as pigheaded as I am and a whole lot prettier. You’d probably like her.”

  His sister had been gone from California since ’61, wed and happy in Seattle, only to lose her husband in one of the last battles of the war. She was back in Sacramento now with her young daughter, the two of them sharing the bedroom Ellie had used before she’d gotten married. He wondered how she felt about that. She was practical, though, and in good graces with their parents. Unlike Nick.

  The note was short, but Ellie had never been one to waste words.

  Nick—

  Come home. It’s time. Father is ready to forgive you.

  Love— E.

  As he gazed down at the letter in his hands, he felt the tug of the bond that linke
d them. They were twins; of course that bond was strong. But it hadn’t been strong enough to encourage him to see her in all these years—or to go to see her now.

  “I doubt he’s ready, Ellie,” he said aloud. “And God knows I’m not ready to forgive him.”

  Riley clambered to his feet as Nick crossed the room and stuffed the note into the drawer of the table against the wall. He slammed the drawer shut, rocking the photograph on the table’s surface. The photograph of him and Ellie and Meg in happier times. Nick stilled the frame with a finger and turned away.

  * * *

  “Thank you so much for coming with us,” said Jane, leaning across the padded bench in Jasper Martin’s hired carriage to whisper to Celia. “I couldn’t have managed this event without you along.”

  Celia patted her friend’s gloved hand, which rested atop her lap rug. The midday sun shone brightly, but the wind whipping through the open front of Mr. Martin’s carriage carried damp and they both huddled beneath layers of wool. She and Jane had accompanied Mr. Martin while the girls had chosen to go with Frank in the Hutchinsons’ rockaway. Celia expected Barbara and Grace were just as cold.

  “Most certainly you could have managed, Jane.”

  “No, I couldn’t,” she said, her other hand squeezing the railing at her side.

  The carriage summited the crest and began the alarming descent to Cliff House, leaving behind the dusty toll road that had climbed the western hills. They had battled for passage amid dozens of Sunday excursionists racing their horses and carriages along Point Lobos Road, one more determined than the next to show off their splendid horseflesh and garner a mention in tomorrow’s newspapers. Celia was glad Mr. Martin’s driver had not felt compelled to speed along with them. The jouncing pace he’d chosen had been quite fast enough.

  Celia stared at Mr. Martin, who was seated up front alongside the driver, his head lolling to one side. She wondered if he was actually dozing or merely feigning sleep, curious about whatever conversation she might have with Frank Hutchinson’s wife.