Emperor Norton's Ghost Read online

  By the time I returned, as I’d intended, Frances had wrapped the purple shawl decorously around herself. Leaving aside the fact that her satin skirt was inappropriate for the hour of the day—and I did wonder what she had on her feet—she looked quite decent. I brought the coffee to the table, along with my mug and a cup and saucer. Of course, I was shocked by the bruise and what her words implied, but I would not be ill-mannered enough to comment unless she chose to bring it up herself. So as I poured out, I merely asked, “Now, how may I help you, Frances?”

  She slipped one hand into the V of the wrapped shawl, and I steeled myself, thinking she was about to show me another, probably worse bruise upon her bosom, but instead she withdrew an envelope that had been hidden there. A heavy, squarish envelope of creamy paper, such as was used for invitations or correspondence from important personages. Her eyes, I noted, were very bright.

  “When Jeremy left this morning,” Frances said, “Cora brought me this, as well as your card. The note was hand-delivered to the house before breakfast today.”

  I held out my hand. “Shall I read it?”

  Frances nodded. “Please.”

  Inside the envelope was a note folded in half, in the informal style. The top of it was centrally embossed with a circular seal, after the manner of a notary’s seal, but I gathered this was someone’s personal mark. In the center appeared an L, wrought in exceedingly loopy fashion; what exactly the doodads were around the edges I could not readily discern. I opened the note and read: Mrs. McFadden, Kindly come to me at Octavia Street tomorrow morning at ten o’clock. There is a matter we must discuss. It was signed A.L.

  “A.L.?” I inquired.

  “Abigail Locke!” said Frances excitedly. “It must be she, she’s the only person I know on Octavia Street with those initials.”

  “But that is not where we went for the séance,” I observed.

  “No. She lives on Octavia. Of course she doesn’t do the séances in her own house. Would you?”

  “No,” I agreed, refolding the note and passing it back to Frances, “I don’t suppose I would, now that you mention it. How curious that she should send for you. I could have sworn Mrs. Locke never wanted to see either of us again after what happened. In fact, she said to get out and never come back.”

  Frances grimaced. “I can’t believe she would treat me like that. I still haven’t remembered any of what happened. Could you be wrong, Fremont? Could she have been speaking not to us but to some unwanted spirit presence?”

  “I honestly don’t think so.” I propped my elbow on the table and leaned my chin against my hand in thought. An idea was forming, but I—lifelong skeptic that I am—was having a hard time accepting it. Finally, reluctantly, I said, “I suppose she could have been more upset with whatever, or whoever, it was that spoke from your mouth than she was with you or me personally. Perhaps she has had second thoughts about sending you away. Surely anyone in her line of work, anyone honest that is, would want to look into your experience further. And to encourage the natural talent you appear to have.”

  Frances nodded vigorously; many curls came tumbling down. “Oh, Fremont, I do need help! And I certainly could use some encouragement. I really don’t know what’s happening to me. I don’t dare tell Jeremy, and I live in fear that one of these—these trances or whatever they are will come upon me when he’s in the room. He doesn’t usually sleep in the bed with me, he has his own room, but sometimes he falls asleep right after, you know …”

  Her voice trailed off and she looked very distressed indeed. She seemed to shrink within her own skin, and her eyes lost their verve.

  I knew, of course, that many men beat their wives. Even the most respectable men. They can get away with it because who is there to stop them? It was none of my business. Michael was right, of course—I should stay out of these husband-and-wife things. “Frances,” I asked nevertheless, “why was it that you were unable to get dressed before coming here this morning? And whose slicker did you wear to cover your dressing gown?”

  She blushed, something I’d never seen her do before. “The slicker is so old, I don’t know to whom it belongs. It hangs on a peg in the room where I arrange flowers, and anyone who has to go out in bad weather can wear it. The gardener wears it rather routinely, I believe, but then he always leaves it on the peg for the next person.” Her eyes beseeched me; she did not want to have to answer my other question.

  “You must tell someone,” I urged, just above a whisper.

  Frances bowed her head. Her words came out hard, and broken, as if torn from her in chunks: “When I do something that displeases Jeremy, he hurts me. In the beginning—I mean when we were first married—I didn’t think he really meant to do it, I thought he just lost control momentarily, and because he’s so big … and I do bruise easily …” She raised her head, and I was glad to see some defiant spirit in her eyes. “But now I know he means to have me utterly at his bidding. If I do anything at all, the least tiny thing, that he doesn’t wholeheartedly approve, he hurts me. Not on the face and neck, not where Cora and the other servants can see, but on my body.

  “What is almost worse, lately he has taken to locking up all my clothes so that I cannot go out anywhere without his approval. There are new locks on the wardrobes and on the chests of drawers, and only Jeremy has the keys. In the morning and again in the evening, he unlocks them and stands over me while I choose what to wear. Sometimes he will not even let me choose, but insists on making the choice himself. Yesterday and today he said I did not need any clothes at all because I was not to go out. You see, Fremont, he knew I’d lied to him that night I was with you.”

  “How could he?” My voice quivered a bit with more outrage than I could conceal.

  Frances shrugged, and sipped her coffee before replying. “He suspected. And then he made me tell him.”

  I didn’t have to ask how he’d made her; I’d seen the evidence on her arm, and I didn’t doubt there was more still on other hidden parts of her body. “So you told him we were out—did you also say where we went?”

  Frances’s golden-hazel eyes seemed unusually large and forlorn as she admitted, “Yes, I told him about the séance. I told him everything. I really believe, if I had not, he would have killed me.”

  “And yet, in spite of all that, you want to accept this invitation.” I gave the note back to her. Suddenly there was a dangerous feel to that rich paper. “You want to go to Octavia Street to see Mrs. Locke.”

  Frances leaned toward me and her eyes glowed again. With hope, I thought. She said, “Yes, oh yes, I do! Fremont, what if I do have some sort of natural talent for talking to the spirits? What if that’s what’s really happening to me? Can’t you see—I’d so much prefer that to worrying that I might be losing my mind!”

  “Frances,” I said in my most no-nonsense tone, “of course you’re not losing your mind. What, precisely, are you talking about?”

  She shivered, pulled the shawl up closer around her neck, bit her lip, and darted her eyes nervously around the room, as if to satisfy herself that we were alone. “Well, I’m not sure, and that’s the worst of it. I feel—not all the time, but just sometimes—I feel as if I’m not alone. There’s a sort of, I don’t know, a presence with me. Like when you’re in a room and someone comes in behind your back, and you know they’re there before you can see them. Know what I mean?”

  I nodded.

  Now Frances gazed over my shoulder with a faraway expression, as if she were looking into infinity. “It’s not an evil presence I feel, it’s good. I don’t know how I know that, I just do. And it’s trying to say something, to communicate with me.”

  “I suspect this presence is trying to communicate through you rather than with you, if what happened at the séance is any indication. I’m certainly not much help in this matter. I wish I could be, but I don’t know the first thing about it.”

  “You believe me, don’t you? I mean, you said you heard the … the voice that came out of me. Surely
that must be why Mrs. Locke has summoned me, don’t you think so, Fremont? How can I not go?”

  “Yes …” I said slowly, “it’s very tempting. But are you sure you can get away? What makes you think tomorrow will be any different from today? Or did you think to run away again in dressing gown and slicker?”

  “No. I will be very, very good and contrite tonight. I’ll promise anything. And then Jeremy will go to work as usual tomorrow morning and all will be well. That is, if you can come for me in your car? Will you, Fremont? Oh, say that you will!”

  I confess I did not like it. I was uncomfortable, and not because Michael had told me to be wary of Frances, and not to get between her and her husband. It was something else I could not quite define, some nascent sense that warned of something wrong. But it was all rather vague. In the end I could not deny help to a friend, and a repressed friend, at that.

  “I will come for you,” I said. “I’ll manage it somehow.”

  “Oh, thank you!” Frances gushed.

  I frowned at her effusiveness and raised a finger to my lips in that universal gesture for silence. “It will be easier for me if Michael knows nothing of this,” I said quietly. “Now, can you get back to your house on your own? If I drive you, I’ll have to tell him I’m going out, and I’d rather not.”

  “I don’t want to cause trouble for you, too, Fremont. I never thought he might object,” Frances whispered, reaching for my hand and squeezing it tightly.

  “It’s all right,” I hastened to assure her, “my life is very much my own, but the car belongs to him. That’s all.”

  “Oh, I see.” She giggled, then covered her mouth. I smiled in return—she was irrepressible. “Well, then,” she said, “we shall do fine, I’m sure. Until tomorrow then?”

  I nodded. “Until tomorrow.”

  ———

  I stayed on my own again that night, which caused Michael to raise a dark eyebrow, but no more than that. If he had heard me and Frances talking in the kitchen, he said nothing of it, for which I was grateful, because I really did not want to discuss it. We were not in agreement, and that was that.

  By morning I had invented a dental appointment for myself, which necessitated my taking the Maxwell and Michael’s watching the office for an hour or so. While I was not entirely happy with this subterfuge, on the other hand I did not want him to be concerned about me either. What harm could possibly come of my driving a friend a few blocks in broad daylight, at ten o’clock in the morning, in a perfectly respectable part of town? Though to be honest, it was a gloomy, gray sort of day, so “broad daylight” did not precisely apply.

  I drove right up under the porte cochère, as Frances had suggested. She was waiting just inside the door, and in only a matter of seconds she had seated herself beside me in the auto and we were off for Octavia Street.

  “You’re quite nicely dressed this morning,” I observed, “so may I assume you had no further problem with your husband?” She did look lovely, like a whiff of spring in a pale green suit of fine wool with a fitted, waist-length jacket; the sleeves, the collar, and the skirt were trimmed with narrow grosgrain ribbon in a darker green. Wider ribbon of the same type made a flat bow at the back of her upswept hair.

  “You are looking well yourself, Fremont,” she said in return, but she lied. I wore my usual blue skirt and white blouse, beneath a long knitted coat-sweater in a rather repulsive shade of garnet—another remnant of my refugee status after the earthquake. The sweater was warm, and the morning was cold, that was what mattered.

  “Jeremy is in a contrite phase,” Frances continued, “he brought home flowers last night. For a few days now I will be able to do no wrong. I must enjoy it while it lasts. Oh, Fremont, I’m so excited about this invitation!”

  “Perhaps it would be wise not to get one’s hopes up,” I suggested, though I was somewhat excited myself. This Spiritualist stuff intrigued me mightily. “After all, you don’t know the purpose of the meeting yet. You don’t want to be disappointed.”

  “But even to be invited is an honor. To her home, Fremont! By her invitation! Abigail Locke may not be the most sensational medium in San Francisco, but she is the most respected by—well, by people like you and me.”

  “And who is the most sensational?” I asked, curious. Having successfully negotiated a long downhill section of street, I glanced at Frances as I stopped at the corner for a tattered-looking fellow to cross. Frances had that same bright-eyed, feverish look I recalled only too well from the séance.

  “Ingrid Swann, but she’s a fake. Or so I believe. She attracts the largest crowds because she’s very beautiful. Even the men adore her. She works with a cabinet in a dark room and excels at extruding ectoplasm.”

  Ugh! I thought. Out loud I wondered, “What good does it do her to be beautiful if she’s going to do her act in a dark room? And how does that attract the men? It sounds remarkably unattractive to me.”

  “I don’t know, I’m sure, but it does. I even saw Patrick there once. I suppose he was spying for Abigail—to find out how Ingrid does it, you know. Extrudes the ectoplasm, I mean. It really is most odd. The ectoplasm comes out of her mouth—”

  I interrupted: “Excuse me, but here’s Octavia Street. You will have to watch the house numbers, if you don’t mind.” Ectoplasm from the mouth, indeed! There had to be easier ways this Ingrid Swann could have earned her living.

  Abigail Locke’s house on Octavia Street was an unimposing buff-colored carpenter-gothic-style structure, whose finest attribute was a bay window at one corner. Invitation in hand, Frances stood on the stoop and rang the bell while I waited one step below. I had offered to remain in the Maxwell, but Frances wouldn’t have it.

  “Why isn’t she answering?” Frances fretted, pushing the doorbell again.

  “Perhaps she’s in the back.” I turned my head and looked over at the bay window, through which I could see a round table with a lamp on it. In spite of the overall gloom, the lamp was not lit, which surprised me.

  “Oh, bother,” said Frances, when still no one came. She stood on tiptoes, shielded her eyes with her hand, and leaned against the door, peering through a little oval of fancy pressed glass that had been set into the wood. Then she lost her balance as the door began to move, swinging inward of its own accord.

  6

  ———

  Cross on Crimson

  Wait, Frances! Don’t—” But my protest came too late. She had already stumbled through the door and her voice, calling out, cut off my own words.

  “Mrs. Locke?” she called. “Abigail, are you there?”

  Silence.

  We looked to the right, into the parlor: no one there. To the left, into a small sitting room: no one there either.

  Frances took a few steps forward. “Mrs. Locke? It is I, Frances McFadden, come to keep our appointment.”

  I snatched at her elbow, intending to restrain her, but just as I did so she moved another few steps and I missed. So I let her go and stood stock-still to assess the situation. This house was entirely too dark. It would have been dark in any case, since the woodwork was all walnut or mahogany, or stained in imitation of those fine woods; but it was midmorning on a gray day—there should have been a light burning somewhere. On the stairs, or here in the hall, or shining forth from the kitchen door.

  Furthermore, it was too silent. I would have guessed its occupants were sleeping, except that the door had been unlocked, and in this city, even in a good neighborhood, one does not go to bed—or remain there—without first locking the front door.

  Nor does one sleep to midmorning when one has sent out an invitation. My mind was all full of alarms. I broke my own silence, and stillness, and strode after Frances, who by now had advanced almost to the end of the hall. She was peering curiously into the dining room when I caught up with her. I said in a harsh whisper: “We should leave. We should not even have come in. Something is not right here!”

  In an odd, flat tone of voice, not matching my whisp
er at all, Frances pronounced one word: “No.”

  My mind worked fast and clean as a lightning strike. I grabbed my friend’s hand and pulled her after me, back up the hall. Speaking low and fast, I said, “We’ve seen enough. If Mrs. Locke is in this house, she will be upstairs. No one has been down here this morning.”

  “Then we will go up,” Frances declared loudly, wrenching her hand from mine with a vicious twist of her wrist. “I must see her!”

  Oh, help! I thought, and warned, “This feels like a trap to me.”

  “Don’t be silly, Fremont,” said Frances, sounding more like herself as she rustled up the stairs. “Who would want to trap us?”

  “Any number of people I can think of,” I grumbled under my breath. But I followed her.

  “Mrs. Locke, are you here? Mrs. Locke, it’s Frances, I’m concerned about you!”

  The stairs went straight up without a turning, and so deposited us at the rear of the house on the second floor. It was slightly brighter up here, as the dark wood stopped at chair-rail height and the walls had been covered with a cream damask wallpaper. Thinking that if we must do this it had best be done quickly, I took charge.

  “Her bedroom will be at the front, no doubt,” I said, moving ahead of Frances and marching purposefully onward.

  “I wonder where everyone is,” Frances fretted. “I would have thought she’d have a maid.”

  I myself would have thought the hawk-faced Patrick would be somewhere about; I rather doubted mediums could afford maids. I reached the front bedroom a few steps ahead of my friend. The door was open. The medium slept in a monstrous great bed with an ivory canopy … but I did not think she was sleeping. In the doorway I turned. “Don’t touch anything,” I said, for I knew with a certainty what we would find, and that Frances would not be satisfied until we’d found it.

  Until we’d found her.

  Yes, the shape in the bed was indeed Abigail Locke. And she was indeed dead.