If Walls Could Talk (21 page)

I could feel myself relax as I passed through the double doors of the historical society. Given all the time I spent here researching the houses I worked on, it always felt a bit like coming home.

“Why, if it’s not my favorite research librarian,” I said to the woman at the main desk.

“Why, if it’s not my favorite historic contractor,” Trish-the-librarian replied.

I smiled. “That makes me sound like someone who lived a long time ago.”

She let out a raspy chuckle. Trish Landres was petite and mousy, almost the visual stereotype of a librarian. Tortoiseshell glasses perched on an upturned nose, and a sprinkle of freckles pointed to red hair now gone mostly gray, cut short in a no-nonsense style. Not long ago I learned that Trish loved salsa dancing, had been to Cuba twice, and worked with Pastors for Peace to help finance their shipments of medical supplies to the island nation. It gave her a secret, swashbuckling aspect that one wouldn’t suspect from her gray tweed pants and simple blue cardigan.

Unfortunately, right after I arrived, a whole gaggle of women looking into their family genealogies came into the library. I hesitated to bring out the manila envelope in front of them. So in the meantime I gave Trish the rundown of what I was looking for with regard to the family that had originally built Matt’s Vallejo Street house.

She spent some time rummaging in the files, then came back with several documents.

“Here’s a picture of Walter, Bess, and their children,” Trish said, pulling out a paper file with copies of old sepia-colored photos. “They were a very prominent family, so you’re going to find more than usual about them, and their home.”

It was a staged family photograph, typical of the era. Bess was lovely, with light eyes and dark hair. The children were young and dressed in the formal flounces of the day: the baby in his christening outfit, and the eldest son wearing short pants, jacket, and ascot tie at the neck. Walter was bearded, looked to be a good deal older than his young wife, seemingly stern and capable. Easy to believe he was a bank president.

“Uh-oh, the genealogical research group is calling me over,” Trish said. “They’re good people, but a tad needy. Why don’t you look through these photos and I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

I always feel a little tingle run up my spine when the history of a house begins to unfold before me. I could practically see these characters within the walls of the Vallejo Street home.

Another photo showed Bess’s parents and her “spinster” sister, the ones who lived in the twin house next door, in what was now Celia Hutchins’s place. There were more pictures of houses standing side by side, as well as a group photo of the extended family out in front of the residences. I noted a few original exterior details of the house to mention to Jason Wehr.

One more picture caught my eye. It was the front parlor, done up in high Victoriana—and with a central table and a crystal ball. Except for the carved limestone fireplace, the room was the spitting image of Celia’s basement séance room—almost as though she had copied it directly.

“Do you know anything about this photo?” I asked Trish when I could get her attention back from the genealogists. “It looks like the setting for a séance, doesn’t it?”

“It certainly does,” Trish said as she checked the reference. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Buchanan signed on to the Spiritualist movement, at least for a while. It was popular in the last few decades of the late eighteen hundreds. Even the most respectable academics of the time were researching the possibility of talking to spirits beyond death, and assessing mediums’ abilities to produce ectoplasm, that sort of thing.”

“Have you ever heard any rumors about the Buchanan house being haunted?”

“No, but we don’t really deal in that sort of thing,” Trish said.

“Apparently they have to disclose it in real estate sales.”

“What, you mean if the owners think their house is haunted?”

“That’s what I hear.”

“Huh. Takes all kinds, I guess.”

Trish helped me pull up several more resources on the computer before turning back to the genealogists.

I learned that Walter Buchanan, the wealthy and respected president of Western California Bank, married Elizabeth Spenser, known as Bess, in 1864. Walter had the twin homes built as a wedding present to his young bride so that her family could live right next door.

Walter and Bess had two healthy sons, but lost a young daughter to influenza. The family was clearly prominent and very active in San Francisco’s nascent social scene. They threw frequent gala events, and Bess was involved with charity work.

But then Walter was involved in a scandal.

In 1872, two men, Charles Nelson and Andrew Giametti, arrived at the San Francisco branch of Western California Bank and deposited several canvas bags full of the bounty from their latest prospecting venture: a small fortune in uncut diamonds, sapphires, emeralds, and rubies. A bank officer, apparently knowing on which side his bread was buttered, alerted his president.

Walter Buchanan had the stones assessed by a local jeweler, who pronounced them to be genuine. He then sent a sampling to an attorney in New York who personally had them appraised by none other than Charles Lewis Tiffany. Tiffany confirmed their value.

Excited, Buchanan contacted Nelson and Giametti, offering them possible financial backing to properly exploit their gemstone claim. The men refused to divulge the secret location of their site, but they took two of Buchanan’s trusted employees on a long train trip, blindfolded, then transferred them to mules, in order to show them the gem field. The excited men eventually returned to San Francisco with thousands of carats’ worth of rubies and diamonds, describing the field as being “peppered” with gemstones. Conservative estimates stated that the dirt contained five thousand dollars’ worth of gemstones per ton, which meant that a crew of twenty-five men could wash out a million dollars’ worth of gems each month.

Buchanan put together an elite group of investors, including a senator who was able to cut through federal red tape. They set up the Golden State Mining Company, backed by more than two million dollars of their personal money. Their first order of business was to buy out the two original prospectors for a fraction of what the gem field was estimated to be worth.

A newspaper photo showed a smiling Walter Buchanan, with Nelson on one side and Giametti on the other, holding their entwined hands aloft in a victory sign. The accompanying article heralded the discovery of priceless gems in California. The coveted location of the gem field was kept secret.

The prospectors left town with their money and were never heard from again. But then . . . the anticipated fortune did not materialize.

“The really sad thing is, his wife, Bess, took their children and left, as did the rest of her family,” Trish said, rousing me from my reading. I glanced over to see that the genealogists were now absorbed in their own research, flipping through files and reading microfiche. “Walter remained in the house,
both
houses, actually, all alone. After some months he seemed to grow despondent over his loss of face in San Francisco society, and finally he shot himself in the head, an apparent suicide. The houses sat empty for several years, but eventually his adult son moved back in, and later he sold off the twin house.”

“I don’t understand—what happened with the gem field?”

Trish shrugged. “Who knows? Played out right away, maybe? A lot of those claims didn’t amount to what people hoped, but this case was unusual because it was so high profile. Buchanan made a public proclamation about it, so when the gems didn’t materialize, he was something of a laughingstock. There were some people who thought Buchanan had double-crossed his fellow investors and kept the jewels for himself. But with his suicide, I guess he proved them wrong.”

Which all begged the question: If the map I had found in the journal really was the map to this gem field, why would anyone be looking for it? Could there still be something there? Or was the map just a worthless piece of paper, valuable only in a historical sense?

I made copies of several of the photographs and articles. This was going to be one doozy of a scrapbook for Matt, assuming he’d still be interested after everything that had gone on.

“I wanted to show you one more thing I found,” I said to Trish, bringing out the Norton notes and spreading them on the counter.

“Well, would you look at that?” Trish said. “Aren’t they fun? Where did you get these?”

“In Buchanan’s house. Do you know what they are?”

“Sure. You mean you’ve never heard of Emperor Norton?”

“No. Who was he?”

“You grew up around here, and everything.” Trish sighed and shook her head. “The way we teach local history in our schools—or don’t teach it, more like—really is a scandal. Norton was this fellow who came to San Francisco back in the 1860s. He was an entrepreneur for a while, but then he went off the deep end. He started telling everyone he was the emperor of the United States.”

“Emperor?”

She nodded and smiled. “But here’s the best part: The locals started going along with it. He’d walk down the street in a costume with a big sword and people would act deferential toward him, sort of playing along.”

“Sounds very San Franciscan, somehow.”

“Doesn’t it?”

“And the notes?”

“He started issuing them himself. In his mind he had his own government, so why not his own money? And the merchants along North Beach went along with that, too, accepting the scrip as legal tender. A lot of people wound up using the notes locally.”

“Do you think they’re worth a lot?”

She shook her head. “I’m sure they’re worth something, but it’s only for their historical value. In a case like this, finding them behind a wall, they could be used to help date a house to the 1860s or 1870s, but you already knew that. Anyway, Wells Fargo Bank has a bunch of them in its San Francisco history section. You know the main office with the stagecoach?”

I nodded. I turned one of the notes over to show the scrawl on the back. “What about this? Looks like a name.”

“Does that say . . . Giametti?”

“He was one of the prospectors, right?”

“He was, yes. That’s odd. . . .” She checked the others, all of which had a similar flourish on the back. “It’s as though someone—can we assume Buchanan?—was treating them like checks, signing them over to Giametti.”

“Giametti wasn’t from here, either,” I pointed out. “Would he have known what this was?”

Our eyes met.

“You think Buchanan tried to buy him off with Norton notes?” I asked.

“Maybe.”

“Listen, could I leave this stuff with you? I made copies of it all, but it really belongs here. I’ll double-check with the owner, but I assume he’ll be happy to donate them to you.”

The “hidden treasure” law stipulated that any items found in the walls belonged to the homeowners, no one else. There had been a handful of court cases involving contractors who had found large sums of money or other valuables hidden in walls and other nooks and crannies, and either secreted them away or laid claim to the booty through logic that essentially came down to “finders keepers.”

It dawned on me that I hadn’t yet mentioned what I had found to Matt. Even so, if it turned out to lead to anything valuable, I was clear on the concept that it belonged to him, not to me. And at the moment he had a few other things on his mind. I still had to break the news to him about his crate of goodies and his now less-than-grand piano.

“Sure. I’ll keep them at my desk until he can officially sign them over.”

“Thanks for everything, Trish,” I said as I helped gather up the articles on the gem field scam. “As usual, you’re a gold mine of information.”

“I have to say,” Trish said, “there’s been a whole lot of interest lately in this house, and the gem field.”

“Really, from whom?”

“We don’t take names, but we had a police detective in here not long ago. And a couple of others as well.”

“Could you describe them?”

“Is something going on?”

“I’m just curious.”

“A blond woman came in a while back, said she was a neighbor. One fellow was big—chubby. And the other you probably know—he mentioned he was the architect on this house.”

“Jason Wehr?”

“Could have been. As I say, we don’t take names. Sorry.”

I
called Graham and told him what I had learned about the Norton notes, and about the map I had found in the binding of the journal.

“I’ve never heard of a Jumping Falls, or a Cheeseville for that matter.”

“The Stanislaus River is still there,” I said.

“Yes, but it was dammed up at one point. And it’s gotta be a hundred miles long. No way to figure out the exact location of the map.”

“It sounds like something up in that region, though, right?”

“Sure it does. That whole area is rife with gold mines and historic land claims, that sort of thing. But none of that matters much; the map’s probably just a memento, as worthless as those Norton notes.” I could hear someone in the background shouting to Graham, and his reply that he’d be right there. “Listen, I’ve got a meeting. But I’d like to take a look at that map. How about tonight?”

“I’d like to, but I have plans with Luz and another friend.”

“Tomorrow, then? Wait—Thursday’s a busy day for me, back-to-back meetings. It would have to be evening again. Will that work? Thursday dinner?”

“Sure,” I said, wondering if this was a date. He was awfully businesslike about it, making sure to mention he was busy during the day, like it was yet another work assignment.
Let it go, Mel
, I thought to myself. If the man was still interested, surely he would have looked me up in the last couple of years? He still spoke with my father from time to time, and I’m certain that nosy old guy had let Graham in on the very public secret that I was available. Repeatedly, no doubt.