No Comfort for the Lost (5 page)

“Ah.
Oui.
” Hubert Lange stepped around the table. “Do you mind if I continue?” He gestured at the pill roller. “It is a most important order.”

“Not at all. Please do.”

He formed a thin tube out of the reddish paste. “You have come for your gum arabic, no?”

“I have. You were not here when I stopped by earlier.”

“Ah yes. I was called away to make a delivery.” She noticed his hands were shaking. It was not like him to be so agitated; he must be very upset by Li Sha’s death. “Was not Thérèse here?” he asked.

She was glad he asked the question; now she did not have to think up a reason to inquire about Tessie’s peculiar actions. “No, she was gone as well.”

“I must speak to her about leaving when I am away.” He flipped over the mahogany roller, revealing the twenty-four channels carved on the other side, laid the paste tube atop them, and began pressing out pills. “We cannot have the customers going to the other shops because we are not open.”

“I was on my way home when I spotted her heading for the Barbary.”
A trifle disingenuous, Celia.
“I thought it so unusual, I decided to follow her.”

He glanced up then and peered at her through his spectacles. “You follow my daughter?”

Celia flushed. However, in for a pence, in for a pound.

“I’m far too curious at times, I suppose,” she said, hoping she sounded as though she realized she’d been silly. She probably had been silly. “I know how much you worry about her, though. So I thought I should tell you that when Tessie was in the Barbary, I saw her talking to a rather unpleasant-looking man.”

“A man in the Barbary?” he asked, stroking the flat paddle forcefully across the grooves, the pills dropping into the shallow trough at the end. “Perhaps she did not go to speak to this man you saw, but he stopped her. You know how it is in this city. The men, they can be so . . . what is the word? Brazen?”

Tessie hadn’t seemed alarmed by the man’s advances, though. “So you don’t believe the man was an acquaintance of hers?”

“Not at all. Who would she know in such a place?” asked Mr. Lange, applying a trembling fingertip to his spectacles and sliding them up the bridge of his nose. “I thank you for the concern, Madame Davies, but you do not need to worry. I will tend to Thérèse.”

He picked up a labeled jar from the table. “Here is your gum arabic,” he said, and waved a hand at his pills. “And as you see, I am most busy, so . . .”

“Yes, of course. I will leave you to your work,” she answered, taking the glass jar and leaving behind the money she owed him. “Good day.”

She exited the shop, pausing to look back through the window. Mr. Lange returned her gaze, his mouth set in a grim line. She waved jauntily and headed up the street.

“There is something wrong there,” she said to herself.

Not only had Tessie’s behavior been strange, but her father’s agitation was out of character. She’d known the Langes since she and Patrick had arrived in San Francisco and she’d gone to him for medication to relieve some chest congestion. She’d always liked Hubert Lange and had thought him a decent man. Otherwise she wouldn’t have asked him to take on Li Sha. She wouldn’t have entrusted the girl with someone who would not be good to her.

“I took him for the plainest harmless creature that breathed upon the earth . . .”

“And I may also have been mistaken, Mr. Shakespeare,” she said, drawing a quizzical look from a shopkeeper in apron and shirtsleeves who was sweeping his doorstep.

She hurried on, not liking her thoughts.

• • •

N
ick pushed open the door to his rooms and was greeted by a cold, wet nose pressing into the bag in his hand. He grinned. “Hey, hey, hold on there, Riley.”

After tossing the bag containing two baked potatoes onto the parlor table, followed by his hat and neckcloth, Nick stooped to ruffle the dog’s sloping ears. A shaggy-coated, speckled mix of greyhound and setter, Riley wagged his tail in response.

“You hungry, boy?” Nick asked. “Well, it’s just potato peels and oats for your dinner tonight. Sorry.”

After taking Riley down the steps and out into the boardinghouse’s tiny backyard, he returned alone to his upstairs rooms. He lit the coal oil lamp on the table, keeping dark the rest of his top half of the house—one parlor, one bedroom, one small storage room, and a space his landlady flattered by calling it a kitchen.

“Riley’s comin’ up!” shouted his landlady, Mrs. Jewett, from the base of the stairs, and Riley trotted through the door Nick had left open. He followed Nick into the kitchen as he prepared a meal for the dog before sitting down to his own.

Back in the parlor, Nick removed his coat and his belt holster and laid his notebook in the pool of light cast by the lamp. He dotted his pile of potatoes with a precious sliver of butter and studied his notes. As was typical at this point in a case, he had very few suspects.

Make a list, Nick. Always make a list.
That had been among Uncle Asa’s earliest advice. So he did, jotting it down in his notebook.

Tom Davies. Possibly angry Li Sha had moved out. Would be easy for him to lure her to the wharf.

Wagner. Worked at the wharf and had a history of violence aimed at foreigners.

The Langes. Too early to truly suspect them; neither seemed to have a motive, although it appeared Miss Lange hadn’t much cared for Li Sha, which he suspected had to do with Tom Davies.

One of the “strange men” whom Lange’s neighbor had noticed around the store. Motive or means unknown.

An unidentified member of the Anti-Coolie Association who’d decided Chinese women made good victims, too.

“Not much here, Riley.”

The dog lapped up the last scrap of his food and sprawled atop Nick’s feet. Nick leaned back in his chair, which creaked beneath him, and kneaded his left arm. The ache suggested he’d probably have another nightmare tonight about the war and a towheaded boy in an oversized gray coat.

Nick tightened his hand around his arm, remembering that battle and that boy. The kid—thirteen? fourteen?—had materialized like a ghost among the smoke and the shattered tree limbs. The kid had frozen in his tracks, his crudely hemmed coat sleeves dangling over his dirty hands, a piece of twine wrapped around his waist to secure a knife to his side, mismatched shoes on his feet. Nick had wondered that they were sending children to fight. The boy should have been safe at home, not slogging through woods where scraps of combatants were trampled underfoot until the remains of men became indistinguishable from the sticks and leaves and stones. He had wondered that war had come to this. Wondered long enough for the boy to lift his bayoneted Enfield and pierce Nick’s arm to the bone.

His closest friend had run to Nick’s side and blown a chunk out of the boy’s head, but not before he’d taken a bullet meant for Nick. Guilt. Lord, how it had bloomed. Kept him in a hospital longer than he should’ve stayed. Destroyed the contented man he’d once been. Eaten away part of his soul.

He flipped shut his notebook and stared into the shadows.

• • •

“
I
t’s nothing, right, ma’am?” Dora Schneider asked Celia the next morning in the clinic.

“I believe you simply have a touch of bronchitis, Dora,” said Celia, folding away her stethoscope and returning it to its mahogany box.

“Good, because I can’t afford to miss a day of work or they’ll sack me for sure. And you know how hard it is to get a job if a woman doesn’t want to be a domestic,” she said.

Dora must have been fetching once, with her pale blond hair and laughing eyes, before the smallpox had scarred her skin. The disease had not scarred Dora’s spirit, however.

“You should recover quickly. You’re strong.”

The girl coughed, a thick rattle. “But see, I sound like I’ve got the consumption.” She secured her corset over her chemise and tugged on her bodice. “The other girls on the floor stare at me like I’m a leper. I hate being sick.”

“You will need to rest more than you probably do, however, if you wish to prevent the cough from worsening.” Celia selected a bottle containing an infusion of comfrey root from among her supplies, meticulously arranged on her examination room’s shelves. The medication should help thin the secretions in Dora’s lungs and speed her recovery. “Take some time to rest this weekend, if at all possible.”

“Rest?” Dora laughed, which brought on another bout of coughing. Celia handed her a handkerchief and she blew her nose loudly.

“When am I gonna rest, Mrs. Davies? The boss is trying to get us to learn to use those newfangled Grover and Baker sewing machines, and I just hate the thing! Work all day at the clothing manufactory, then have chores when I get home.” She returned the handkerchief to Celia, who dropped it into a basket from which it would be collected by Addie at day’s end.

“Dora, I would like to ask you something about Li Sha. The police are trying to discover where she was staying in the days before she was killed.”

Death from homicide by person or persons unknown.
That was what the report from the coroner’s inquest had stated. Detective Greaves’ assistant, Officer Taylor, had brought her the news that morning and told her she could claim the body and plan the funeral. “Do you have any idea? Had you seen her?”

“That’s easy, ma’am.” Dora hopped down from the thigh-high armless bench Celia used as an examining table. Uncle Walford had built the table for her when she’d begun talking about opening a clinic, shortly after Patrick had signed on to a merchant vessel and sailed away for good. Her uncle had done so much to help Celia right her world after it had been upended by a husband who had abandoned her on their eighth wedding anniversary.

“Li Sha was with me,” Dora said, brushing her skirt flat over the crinoline with a snap of her wrists. “She begged and begged, and I let her sleep on the floor a couple nights.”

Celia could imagine what Dora’s grim landlady had thought about having a Chinese woman on the premises.

She handed the bottle of comfrey root to Dora, who tucked it into her net purse. “Why had she left Tom’s?” Celia asked.

“Li Sha wouldn’t want me to tell, Mrs. Davies,” said Dora.

“Li Sha is gone now and beyond fretting over having her secrets revealed.”

“But I don’t want to say anything bad about your brother-in-law, either, ma’am.”

Uneasiness swept over her. “That is all right, too.”

Dora’s brow puckered. “They’d fought. Weren’t the first time. But this time he hit her. Never had before. Broke things before, but never hit her.”

“I saw the bruises on Li Sha’s face, but I had no idea Tom had caused them.” Nicholas Greaves had suspected, however.

“She musta thought it would get better with him. We women are always hoping our men will change one day, aren’t we?” Dora asked sadly. “But when Tom had been drinking he could get mighty ornery. He’d promised to stop with the liquor, promised Li Sha because of the baby, but there’d been some sorta worriment at his work and he was upset and took to the whiskey.”

“When did this fight occur?”

“A week ago it was. On Friday. Li Sha came from work at the Langes’, and Tom started shouting. Hit her hard. Said he didn’t believe anymore the baby was his,” Dora continued, her words tumbling one over the other in her haste, now that she had decided to speak. “But of course it was his baby. Don’t know what made him think it wasn’t. Li Sha was true to that ornery cuss. Sorry, ma’am.”

“I know he has a temper, Dora.” It was the reason she avoided Tom, although Celia had attempted to be cordial to please her husband. “I merely hadn’t realized he could be violent.”

“He said some other things, ma’am, mean stuff. Threatened her. She was mighty beat up when she showed up at my door with nothing more than a raggedy carpetbag,” Dora explained. “I still have her carpetbag at my room. Do you think the police will want it?”

“They might, Dora. I’ll ask.”

Dora nodded. “Well, as I said, she came to my place and was hopping mad. Said she was done with Tom. Wouldn’t ever go back to a man like him. And earlier that night, the night she died, she told me she was gonna get some money. Gonna cut stick and head someplace better to raise her baby.”

“I wonder who she thought would give her money.” It was important to find that person, who was either the last to see her or the one responsible for the crime. “She didn’t mention a name?”

“No. I wish I’da asked, but I was in a hurry that night. Me and a friend were going to Maguire’s Opera House to celebrate her birthday, you see. Alice Kingsbury was performing in
Fanchon, the Cricket
. We sat in the gallery and it was lovely.” Her eyes shone. A visit to the opera house would be quite a treat for a seamstress, the daughter of German immigrants, who lived in a tiny room in a lodging house. “I didn’t get home ’til late. I thought Li Sha would be there, but she wasn’t. She never came back.”

“Did she ever talk about the people she worked for at the apothecary shop?” Celia asked.

“Talk about what?”

“Did she ever say they were unkind to her?”

Dora scrunched up her nose and looked uncomfortable. “Um . . .”

“You can tell me, Dora.”

“It was that daughter of Li Sha’s boss. She didn’t much like Li Sha. Because of Tom, you know,” said Dora. “You did know, didn’t you? I think he used to be with that woman, if you know what I mean, before he settled on Li Sha.”

“I was aware Tom and Tessie Lange were friends—”

“It was more than friends, ma’am.”

“They were lovers?”

Dora blushed. “Well . . .”

“I wonder what else I do not know about my brother-in-law.” Dora’s information suggested Tessie had been jealous of Li Sha, the woman who had supplanted her in Tom’s affection.
And jealousy is a powerful—and sometimes violent—emotion.

“Thank you for helping, Dora.” Celia nodded toward the young woman’s net purse. “Sip the infusion twice a day. I want to see you in three days, even if you’re feeling better. If you are worse, come sooner.”

Dora thanked her, and Celia showed her out. Next door, Barbara was entertaining Angelo with an old battered top that skipped over the Cascarinos’ uneven walkway. The boy laughed at her antics. Barbara looked calmer and happier than she had all day.