Emperor Norton's Ghost Read online

  This edition contains the complete text

  of the original hardcover edition.

  NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.

  All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  EMPEROR NORTON’S GHOST

  A Bantam Book

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Published in association with Doubleday

  Doubleday hardcover edition published September 1998

  Bantam paperback edition/June 1999

  Grateful acknowledgment to San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library for reproduction of the frontispiece of Emperor Norton.

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1998 by Dianne Day.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 98-2809.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  For information address: Doubleday.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-41986-6

  Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Random House, New York, New York.

  v3.1

  DON’T MISS FREMONT’S BESTSELLING ADVENTURES

  THE STRANGE FILES OF FREMONT JONES

  MACAVITY AWARD WINNER FOR BEST FIRST MYSTERY NOVEL

  “One of the most refreshing heroines to appear in years … Day rates top marks for her crisp, witty dialogue … cleverly conceived plot, and darkly menacing touches.”

  —Booklist

  FIRE AND FOG

  “This delightful mystery begins with a bang … and things get more and more complicated from there.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  THE BOHEMIAN MURDERS

  “A special treat. Highly recommended.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  EMPEROR NORTON’S GHOST

  “A lively and atmospheric mixture of sharply observed detail and high drama.”

  —Amazon.com

  DEATH TRAIN TO BOSTON

  “An extremely appealing book … great fun to read.”

  —The Book Report

  And coming soon

  CUT TO THE HEART

  RAVES FOR DIANNE DAY AND FREMONT JONES

  THE BOHEMIAN MURDERS

  “Thrill to the third in this exciting series featuring the liberated Fremont at her bravest.… This knockout setting draws you in like no other. The Bohemian Murders conjures up the murkiest mystery—you can just hear the waves and smell the fog. Bravo.”

  —Mystery Lovers Bookshop News

  “A plucky heroine, a darkly handsome suitor in the wings, and a glimpse back into history all add to the charms this series has to offer.”

  —Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine

  “Light, entertaining and ever-so-slightly racy, The Bohemian Murders is perfect summer reading.”

  —Wisconsin State Journal

  “An attractive and involving historical.”

  —Library Journal

  “Fast-paced machinations keep the reader turning page after page with anticipation.”

  —Carmel Pine Cone

  “By the third book in a new series, most new sleuths tend to flounder. Not that plucky Bostonian Caroline Fremont Jones … The strong-minded Fremont surrenders neither her independence nor her intelligence.… This liberated woman has come too far ever to go back.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  FIRE AND FOG

  “A winner.”

  —Monterey Herald

  “Day’s decorous, spirited heroine is as charming as ever as she picks her way through a world of rubble where every acquaintance could be a killer.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “One of the best books of 1996 … showcases Dianne Day’s incredible storytelling abilities.”

  —Mostly Murder

  “Great fun.”

  —Nashville Banner

  “An attention catcher … you won’t put the book down in a hurry.”

  —The Times & Democrat

  “A distinctive and appealing voice.”

  —Library Journal

  “A delightful period mystery.”

  —Booklist

  “Excellent, involving tale.”

  —Bookwatch

  THE STRANGE FILES OF FREMONT JONES

  “Dianne Day provides a delightful heroine and a lively, twisty, intriguing mystery.”

  —Carolyn G. Hart

  “Wonderfully fresh … as much a quirky, turn-of-the-century character study, a love letter to a city, as it is a traditional romance/whodunit.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Chilling … Day won’t disappoint even the hard-core suspense addict.”

  —Carmel Pine Cone

  “Foggy period atmosphere, a dash of dangerous romance and several rousingly good-natured action scenes.”

  —Star-Tribune, Minneapolis

  “A fascinating novel.”

  —The Virginian-Pilot

  “[Fremont Jones] could be the Victorian ancestor of contemporary sleuth Kinsey Milhone. An enjoyable introduction to a new series.”

  —Castro Valley Forum

  “A fine, buoyant literary style … A spirited, likable heroine.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “An enchanting book … an extraordinary adventure and a delightful read.”

  —Library Journal

  Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Defender of Mexico

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  1 Spirit Shock

  2 Into the Fray

  3 Father, Dear Father

  4 Pure Evil

  5 Threshold

  6 Cross on Crimson

  7 A Far and Lonely Place

  8 A Ghostly Advent

  9 Mesmer Eyes

  10 Approaching the Unknown

  11 Bargains Are Struck

  12 A Dreadful Message

  13 A Disaster?

  14 Dead Space

  15 The Spirits Are Moving

  16 The Emperor Rules

  17 The Hands of Time

  18 The Mesmerist and the Somnambulist

  19 A Cruel Turning

  20 Blind Justice

  21 Cries in the Night

  22 Naked We Come Forth

  23 A Paterfamilias in the Midst of Everything

  24 Not Quite Happy Birthday

  25 Will-o’-the-Wisp

  26 Someone’s Sleeping in My Bed

  27 A Dreadful Denouement

  Epilogue The Emperor Is Satisfied

  Dedication

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  1

  ———

  Spirit Shock

  As recently as a week ago I would not have thought that I, Fremont Jones, should ever find myself in a place such as this. I peered surreptitiously through the dim light in an effort to see if the others present were handling the eerie atmosphere with more equanimity than I. I was, in point of fact, decidedly uncomfortable. Even apprehensive. Only loyalty to my new friend—whose risk was, after all, far greater than mine—kept me in my seat; otherwise I should have bolted. Facing resolutely forward, I sneaked a look at her from the corner of my eye.

  My friend, Frances McFadden, waited alertly, eagerly, for the séance to begin. Her eyes glinted, picking up light from the candles that burned in sconces
on the wall; her lips were parted and her breath came light and fast. In truth I could not comprehend her attraction to Spiritualism—so great an attraction that she would deceive her husband and come on the sly. I was helping her, of course, out of my own curiosity, as well as a profound belief that one owes it to one’s gender to thwart the sort of husband who is forever telling his wife where she may go and what she may do.

  We were eight around the table; when the medium entered, she would make nine. Whether there was significance to that number or not, I did not know. The medium’s empty chair was to the right of Frances, and Frances at my own right. On my left sat a man who smelled unpleasantly of cheap cigars, a bulky fellow whose scratchy tweed sleeve kept rudely impinging upon my more lightly clad arm. The woman beside him I could not readily see, though with the curve of the round table one would have thought she should fall in my line of vision. I mentally pictured a wife shrinking in her husband’s shadow—though I knew neither of them from Adam or Eve.

  Continuing clockwise around the table, in the place of honor as it were, directly across from the medium’s thronelike chair, sat a handsome man with a hawkish profile. He was clean-shaven but had a good deal of dark, wavy hair on his head—in color either black or brown or dark red; it was impossible to tell without staring rudely in the dim light. Diagonally across from me, next to Mr. Hawk, sat a blob of a pasty-faced woman, whose several chins spilled over the high neck of her fancy black dress and thus obscured most of a very large cameo. She breathed with a wheeze. Two more women made up the balance of the table, both middle-aged and unremarkable in bearing and dress, but I thought a great deal of sadness seemed to emanate from them.

  Emanate, indeed! I gave an inward snort. This séance and its oppressive atmosphere must be poisoning my mind—ordinarily I’d have no truck with anything such as emanations, not even in my vocabulary! I should have to watch myself, or I’d become as enamored of the spirit world as Frances.

  The room was stifling, all the windows closed and hung with heavy velvet drapes. I squinted and judged the drapes to be dark green, matching the embossed, brocaded wallpaper whose color was just discernible in the candleglow. The silence was thick, disturbed only by the wheezing of Madame Blob. I heard Frances catch a breath in her throat, a little gasp, and at the same moment the candles began to waver and cast weird shadows as if in a draft, although I had neither seen nor heard a door open. From my friend’s palpable sense of anticipation, as well as by these slight signs of movement, I guessed the marvelous medium’s advent was at hand.

  The hawkish man stood up suddenly, raising his eyebrows in an expectant manner. When I moved as if to stand up too, Frances tugged on my skirt and I subsided. The others sat riveted in place. I thought: It is embarrassingly obvious who is the neophyte here. And I concluded that Mr. Hawk, the only man of passable good looks in the room, must be the medium’s confederate—which showed she had some taste in men at least, though one had to wonder at her choice of vocation.

  “Mrs. Locke!” Mr. Hawk announced, in a voice like a gong. He might as well have prefaced his announcement with “Behold!” for such was clearly his intent.

  I made a swift survey of the table to determine which way I should direct my gaze in order to behold, because for the life of me I had seen no door other than the one by which we’d all entered. She would not come in that way, surely? For that door led only to a large, bare entrance hall, which offered no possibility for concealment of the various engines necessary to work the medium’s chicanery and deception. Everyone knows that these people are fakes; though I must admit that Frances was convinced quite otherwise.

  Suddenly I realized the others were all looking at me! In that same instant I felt a frisson, a sort of premonitory rush, and then—but curiously not before—directly behind me I heard that door, the only door, open. They had been looking not at but rather beyond me, and I turned around slowly and did the same.

  Mrs. Locke, the marvelous medium, was a tiny woman dressed all in lace that may have been white but looked ivory in the candlelight. She moved with dainty steps, and absolutely no facial expression whatsoever, to her chair at the head of the table. She did not acknowledge our presence. Her age was impossible to determine; she was neither pretty nor plain, nor had she any character in her face. She was as near to a mask, or a cipher, as a human being may become. Her male confederate first closed the door and then came with long, efficient strides to assist her into the huge chair, pulling it out, tucking it in, then placing beneath the table a stool for her feet. Despite the fact that her feet could not possibly reach the floor, and that she did need the height of the chair to make her our equal at the table, I nevertheless immediately thought: Aha! The means by which she does her tricks are somehow hidden in the overlarge chair and in that footstool.

  I, of course, do not believe in spirits. I believe that when we are dead we go to make dirt, and there’s the end to it; but Frances had declared that one session with Mrs. Locke would persuade me otherwise. That was not very likely—yet I had to allow that I could neither deny nor ignore the eerie feeling that pervaded this room. What, I wondered, was its source?

  I had previously asked Frances what we might expect at this séance. She had replied: “It is always the same yet different, depending on which spirits come through. They come through her, Mrs. Locke. She doesn’t do manifestations—you know, ectoplasmic extrusions and ringing bells and blowing trumpets and all that—she just talks. But not in her own voice; in the voice of the spirits. Oh, and she has a control.” Of course she does, I’d thought, and her control will be a Red Indian or an Arab or some two-thousand-year-old man. But Frances had said, “He’s a little boy named Toby.”

  Now Frances seized my right hand and squeezed the life out of it. She shot me a quick, bright-eyed glance, as if to say, Isn’t this the most exciting thing! And because I myself was so pleased to have a woman friend of about my own age and background, I squeezed her hand back and smiled, although that room was hardly conducive to smiling. A little riffle of nervous anticipation passed through our circle around the table. Mr. Hawk placed a green pillar candle in front of Mrs. Locke and lit it; as he did so, Frances leaned to me and whispered, “Green is Toby’s favorite color.”

  Mrs. Locke said, in a voice like a clear bell, “Thank you, Patrick.” So that was Hawk’s name; it was the only one I was likely to learn here tonight. Part of the appeal of séances must be, I suppose, the anonymity in which one participates. It makes for more of a thrill. Patrick did not acknowledge her thanks, but went about extinguishing the candles in the wall sconces, then took his seat opposite the medium at the table. The room smelled of burnt candles and something else, something sweetish that I did not like, perhaps incense from the pillar candle into which Mrs. Locke now gazed.

  For a moment I studied the medium’s perfectly blank face. Her eyes, I noted, were wide and staring.

  And after what seemed an unbearable length of time she said, “Let us join hands. By the joining of our hands we declare that we are all pure, honest, and determined in our intent to contact the World of the Spirits.” Her voice was high, virginal, of the most convincing sincerity.

  I closed my eyes because the others did; I was unconvinced but wavering. I thought: What harm can it do? Why should I not, for Frances’s sake, let go my disbelief for the next hour or so, and participate with an open mind? I decided that I would.

  The man on my left gripped my hand in a tentative fashion, as if he were afraid of contagion; or perhaps he wanted to bolt and run, as I had earlier. His palm was hard as horn. A laborer, I guessed, perhaps one who works the docks. I wondered what had brought him here. On my other side, Frances’s hand felt hot—my own were cold by comparison. Yet, having given up my disbelief, I was now eager to get on with the séance. Burning with curiosity, I opened my eyes.

  The flame on the pillar candle seemed hypnotic. For a single light it gave a good deal of illumination. Faces were easily read. The two unremarkable middle-aged wome
n now seemed starkly terrified, with almost identical facial expressions; Madame Blob looked pettish, with her eyes closed; Patrick stared abstractly ahead, nobly serene. Frances, her eyes shut tight, was frowning; she began to rock slightly back and forth. And the medium appeared all of a sudden to be in pain.

  “A-a-agh!” she gasped. She twisted about while clinging with great force to the hands of the people on either side of her, one of them being Frances. I fancied—or maybe it really did happen—that a current like electricity shot through all our linked hands. Mrs. Locke slumped forward, then threw her head back. Her neck popped, I heard it, and my own shoulders hiked up to my ears in sympathy.

  “Who is here?” That was Patrick’s orotund tone, with an edge of urgency added.

  Not Toby, I thought, that’s no little kid—though precisely why I had that thought, I did not know. A moment later I was proved right.

  Mrs. Locke groaned. A sheen of perspiration covered her face, now wreathed about with pain. Frances rocked harder; her hand trembled in mine and I gripped it more tightly.

  “Speak to us!” Patrick commanded, “Tell us your name.”

  The medium started to laugh, but this laughter had no merriment in it. Her clear, high voice had gone all low and harsh. And over to my left a small, hesitant female voice said, “Why, he laughs just like my papa!”

  I would not have liked to have someone who sounded like that for my father!

  The hesitant voice acquired more vigor. “Papa,” she said, “we didn’t come to talk to you, we came to talk to Mother. To make sure she’s all right, and to see if she had something to say to us, since she died all sudden-like.”

  Somehow I got the feeling this was not how séances were supposed to go. Patrick apparently agreed with me, for he said, “Leave us, Laughing Spirit! You are not wanted here. Mrs. Locke wishes to speak to her control, the boy named Toby.” In an aside to the woman I still could not see beyond the man next to me, Patrick added, “Don’t worry. Toby will come through and take control. He died when he was just a boy, you see, but he’s a good, strong soul and he’s devoted to our Mrs. Locke.”