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"Yes. What he specifically says is 'my most valuable
possession.' That could be anything. Unfortunately he himself-that
is, if this automatic writing of Frances's is really a
communication from the ghost of Emperor Norton-''

"Do you think it is?"

"I don't know. Well, of course I don't
really
think so.
How can one think that? It's just that Frances is so convinced, and
I did see her that one time when she was definitely in a trance. .
. . Wish, I don't honestly know what to think about any of these
things. I only know there will be answers if one keeps on going,
and that's what I've decided to do."

"Makes good enough sense to me. All right, we're about to cross
Grant Street. Now watch this-" Wish strode along a few steps ahead
of me, peering between buildings. We were getting into the edge of
Chinatown, and so the buildings seemed to huddle closer together,
to take on a different character, somehow less imposing yet more
secretive about whatever might be going on behind their
facades.

And then, all of a sudden, Wish Stephenson disappeared. I was
left standing on the sidewalk with the sounds of the City around
me: The street traffic; the pattering of feet, most of them Chinese
in their soft shoes; the sounds of music, the distinctively
different harmonies of the East and the West, filtered through the
cracks around closed windows and doors.

A moment later, barely more than time to get my breath back
after it had unexpectedly caught in my throat, Wish popped out
again.

"Don't do things like that to me!" I exclaimed, for although I'd
known he was likely to show back up immediately, there are times
when what you think is most likely to happen is not what happens at
all.

Wish held out his hand. "Come on!"

I took it and he pulled me into the narrowest alley I had ever
seen. But it did go through, all the way through to Kearney. By
making a kind of zigzag through the two narrow streets, we had
traversed the Emperor's two blocks in a northwesterly
direction.

"This is quite amazing," I said, as I had that realization.

"Now what?" Wish asked when we came out onto Kearney.

I reached into my bag for Frances's papers, but paused before
drawing them out. Wish and I had stayed longer in the City of Paris
than either of us had realized. Time had gotten away from us
somehow, for night was falling. One of those rare, clear nights
when the sky turns a deep blue violet that steadily darkens to deep
purple and then to black. On the second and third levels of the
buildings around us, where people lived over their businesses,
lights were coming on. Some were electric, but many had the softer
glow of candles inside the pleated white paper lanterns that the
Chinese use when they want light primarily to see, rather than to
be decorative or festive.

There is something about that hour of the night, when you can
look through the windows of people's homes and find them for a
little while unguarded, before they realize the dark has come and
they should close the shutters, draw the drapes, pull down the
shades . . . something about it that is both beautiful and sad. Why
sad, I could never say, I only knew that was how I often felt, and
I had never tried to express it to anyone, not even to Michael.

So I said to Wish Stephenson, "It's too late to continue this
now. It's time to go home. I'll make a note of where we came out,
and return here another day."

"Yes, I suppose that's wise." Wish sounded a bit disappointed.
He took my elbow lightly in his hand and tried his best to tame his
long stride to match mine. He talked of inconsequential things, and
I paid him little heed. My melancholy mood had taken over, and he
sensed it. He did not try to josh me out of it, for which I was
grateful. And even though it took him far out of his way, he
accompanied me on the streetcar home to Divisadero Street, on
account of its being dark outside. And I, who am so independent,
unaccountably allowed him to do it.

Half that night, I sat by my window in the dark, looking out
over the City, gripped by melancholy and also severely chastened.
Not that Wish had chastened me, oh no, he was far too good a
creature for that; I had chastened myself. Wish had merely said, as
he stood on the top step outside the door to my half of the house,
"Fremont, there was something I took it upon myself to do after you
left this morning, because I knew it had to be done, and I hope you
aren't going to mind. I don't want to give the impression I'm
trying to interfere with your case."

At those words a knot had formed in my stomach, and it hardened
as Wish went on to explain that, while his mother was making her
phone calls, he had quietly slipped down to the SFPD and put out
the word on Ingrid Swann's husband. "Otherwise," he had concluded,
"we'd make enemies of the police and they'd never cooperate with
us. I know you don't like them, Fremont, because of the way you
were treated when your friend Alice was murdered, but still,
private investigators and the police department have to get along.
We are, after all, trying to do the same things, and we can do it
better if we work together."

He was right, of course, and I'd told him so. Not only that, I'd
thanked him profusely for saving me from a blunder that could have
been bad indeed. In my eagerness to garner publicity and praise for
J&K, I had overlooked the very point on which Wish had been so
sensitive.

As I sat by the window in the dark, a part of me argued: Of
course Wish was sensitive to things like our relationship with the
police, because he used to be one of them, he'd been trained to
think like that. Which didn't necessarily make that kind of
thinking right. . . .

For even deeper down inside of me, in another, darker place
entirely, there was a stubborn, usually hidden woman who did not
agree with Wish at all. This was my most dangerous self; this was
some wildness in me that did not believe justice was necessarily
accomplished within the so-called law. And I knew, oh yes, I knew,
that when the wild part of me rose up she would not be denied.

So I sat through the dark hours and struggled with myself,
because although I had some skills and some training, and according
to Michael, my mentor, excellent instincts, still it was perfectly
true that I did not know what I was doing. I was wandering in this
strange world of ghostly emperors, mesmerists and somnambulists,
mediums and murder. And I felt as if I were wandering in circles,
getting nowhere at all.

It was a long time before I slept, and when I awoke I did not
feel refreshed.

Several cups of coffee, combined with general good health and
comparative youth, soon had me functioning as if my night had not
been such an unmitigated sinkhole of worry and indecision. By the
time the Stephensons, mother and son, had arrived at J&K, I was
ensconced at my table/desk and deep into planning, with calendar at
hand.

Today's date was April 6. My father would arrive on the ninth,
in three days, staying over my birthday, the tenth and returning to
Boston by train on the eleventh. I rather wished, as he was coming
so far, that he could stay longer, but gathered from the tone of
his correspondence that this was not possible-I supposed, because
of Augusta. I stared into the distance, lost for a moment in
amorphous thought, only vaguely aware of Edna's scurrying about the
kitchen to set a fresh pot of coffee on to perk, and the soothing
drone of her son's voice on the telephone out in the office. I
could not seem to make my mind grapple with the essential question:
Why, after all this time, was Father coming here for this
particular birthday? Why now and not last year, my first birthday
post-earthquake (we San Franciscans tend to mark everything now by
whether it happened before or after the Great Quake in 1906), when
I had wanted so much to see him that I had practically begged him
to bring Augusta and meet me at the Hotel Del Monte in Monterey for
just a few days. His flat refusal had been such a bitter
disappointment at the time that I had tucked away my longing to see
him deep in one of those back closets of the mind whence it would
be difficult, if not impossible, to retrieve. And now, all unbidden
and unexpected, he was coming. Alone. It was rather strange.
Wonderful, but strange.

Edna reeled through the conference room on her way back to the
office, patting me on the arm in passing with a cheery, 'Working
hard already, eh, dearie?" that broke my reverie. It was just as
well, for I'd been getting nowhere.

"Hard enough, Edna," I called after her, missing the beat by not
very much. And then Wish came in to tell me his schedule, and the
telephone rang again-new clients, I hoped-and so the day got off to
a start.

I had to see Frances. I had tried calling, on the off chance
that one of the servants might pick up the telephone in Jeremy's
study and I could persuade him or her to bring the lady of the
house to the phone. That had not worked; the study must have been
sitting locked, and the telephone in it, because it rang and rang.
That left me no choice but to pay her a call, which in turn did set
up the choice of whether I should go in by the front door as a
guest or surreptitiously by the side with my own key.

I walked over to the McFadden mansion. The day was as fine, for
weather, as the previous night had been. Such perfect days are rare
in my foggy city, and we who live here treasure them. Of course the
sun could be shining brightly in one neighborhood while another
could be shrouded in fog; or it could be raining on one of the
City's hills but not on any other; and so it went. One accepted
good weather as the gift that it was, and enjoyed it while one
could, which, as I thought about it, seemed not too bad a way to go
about living one's life in general.

When I sighted the large house that was my destination, I slowed
my pace but did continue walking. As I approached, I wanted to be
sensitive to the place itself . . . not that I believed myself to
have psychic powers, but rather that I thought a finely tuned
instinct to be one of the private investigator's best weapons. And
as I've said, during my training Michael had confirmed something
I'd already suspected: I did have good instincts. I just had never
paid much attention to them before, and now I tried to-at least,
whenever I thought of it.

Sometimes there are houses, or certain well-defined outdoor
spaces, that one can read rather like a book. They have a certain
mood to them, as if at some indelible point in time something had
happened there so momentous that the event and its lingering echoes
of energy had become embedded in the place forever.

What was it I felt from the McFadden house?

I drew closer. It was as if a kind of aura surrounded the house
itself, a field within whose bounds the house could grab you and
draw you inevitably in; but if you stayed beyond that invisible
perimeter you were safe and could pass by unscathed. I let the
house have me. I would indeed enter in, but on my own terms; and so
I used my key and went in by the side door.

Disturbance. That was the aura this house exuded. Not violence
so much as simple turmoil. Things moving, nothing ever truly quiet,
nothing ever really still. No peace, no love, no . . . quietude. A
favorite word of my mother's, that had been: "quietude." And it had
been she who engendered that atmosphere in our Boston home.

Having crossed the garden room, braved that hall space near the
kitchen, and entered the back stairs, I paused, still sharpening
all my observational senses. There had been bacon here for
breakfast.

The smell of it lingering in the air made my mouth water-though
since I'd learned bacon was sliced pork belly (Michael told me; I
hadn't particularly wanted to know) some of the pleasure of eating
it had been ruined. Whatever midmorning routines the housekeeper
and the maid-and the gardener if he should happen to be
about-maintained, they were apparently at them. There was no
talking and carrying on, but there was a sense of general busyness
in the air. And of course that ever present
dis
quietude. Ah!
Yes, that was the word that described the atmosphere of Frances
McFadden's house to a T: "disquietude."

I silently thanked my dead mother for her powers of description
and went on up the stairs as quickly and soundlessly as possible,
holding my skirts up close to my body, so that I would not trip or
brush against anything that might be knocked down and thus cause an
alarm. I passed through the stairwell and out into the second-floor
hallway uneventfully. The door to Frances's little suite of rooms
stood open and I headed straight to it. Rapped lightly with my
knuckles once, and then again. If she was inside, she took no
heed.

So I went on in.

Frances was there. She was not alone.

THE MESMERIST and the somnambulist were deeply engaged with one
another. In point of fact, if I were any judge (and by now I should
be, Michael being not at any disadvantage in this department), they
were engaged in one of the deepest kisses I had ever had the
luck-bad or good, it depended how one looked at it-to intrude
upon.