Sherlock Holmes: The American Years (40 page)

As we walked downstairs, Mrs. Bannerman gave Holmes directions to the boarding house where Jo lived and to Dr. Jenkins’s office. She showed us to the door herself, and as we left, said again that she would certainly help if she could. “I really don’t want trouble here. I just hope they’re all right,” she said sweetly, looking deeply into Holmes’s eyes. “You will tell me, won’t you?”

“But of course,” Holmes said, with a bow.

Dr. Jenkins’s office was on the way to the boardinghouse. He was seeing a patient in his surgery, but when he finished, he showed us into his study and offered us a glass of sherry. He was a spare, graying man, with steel-rimmed spectacles and a weary air of having seen enough sickness and death to have despaired of finding any divine plan in it. When I mentioned Miss Duverger, he shook his head. “A hopeless case,” he said. “There’s nothing left to do for her.”

Holmes told him what Mrs. Bannerman had said. “Oh, God,” he sighed, and closed his eyes. “That Annie. I tried again and again to tell her, but she wouldn’t—couldn’t—accept that it was the end. I’ve seen mothers like that with children; they just can’t stop fighting.”

He remembered mentioning a sanitarium in the Colorado mountains. “Run by an old friend of mine, Harvey McKinnon, so I know the place is on the up and up. No one but quacks promise anything with this disease, but mountain air seems to help in some cases. Not Josette, she’s too far gone. But Annie wouldn’t listen; she had to have some hope, even a false one. So I gave her the name. Not that she could afford it; a woman in the life doesn’t make that
kind of money. So I told her about a specialist I know in San Francisco, Silbermann. That was awhile ago, though. At this point, Jo probably couldn’t make the trip.”

He was surprised and saddened when Holmes told him the two women had left St. Helena. “Honestly, she was too sick to travel; I saw her just the other day. It would have been kinder to let her die in her own bed.”

After thanking the doctor, we rode to the boarding house, where the landlady, a gray sparrow of a woman, told us, with much fluttering, that Miss Duverger and her friend had left that morning. “She was too weak to walk; the porter had to carry her to the carriage.” She was puzzled when Holmes said we were trying to find the women and asked to look in Miss Duverger’s room. “I haven’t cleaned it yet,” she apologized.

“Better yet,” Holmes said.

The room was small and plain. Nothing of Miss Duverger’s was left in it except a couple of dog-eared novels, a jar of flowers and an empty medicine bottle on a table next to the bed. Holmes looked through the room and from under the bed pulled a small pasteboard trunk. In it, wrapped in an army blanket, were a pair of men’s pants, a blue shirt, a hat, and a blue bandana. “She must have forgotten that,” the landlady said. “But I can’t imagine why she’d have those clothes. No man ever came to see her except Dr. Jenkins.”

Holmes closed the trunk and asked her to keep it until he could send a man from the sheriff’s office for it. Her eyes widened in alarm. “The sheriff? What have they done? They seemed like such quiet girls.” Shaking her head, she said, “I should have listened to my sister. She told me not to let to women like that.”

As we walked from the house to the street, I asked Holmes whether those were the clothes the robber had worn. He nodded.

“So she did give someone the information about the payroll. Is he still here, do you think, or is he meeting them in San Francisco?”

“Neither, I suspect,” Holmes said, but when I asked him to explain what he meant, he shook his head. “I don’t know enough yet.”

I wasn’t surprised when Holmes told me he intended to start for San Francisco on the next day’s train. “I would go sooner, if it were possible. The trail is already getting cold,” he said. “If Miss Duverger dies, it will be that much harder to find Miss Greenwood; she’ll be free to move almost anywhere and far less conspicuous without her invalid companion.”

I gave him the address where we’d be staying in San Francisco, and of my parents’ home in Edinburgh. “Please,” I asked him, “let me know whether you find the robber. I feel like a reader forced to lay down a book just as the story becomes exciting.”

But the days that followed were so filled with breaking up our camp, moving our possessions to San Francisco, and setting up our temporary household there that I thought of the stagecoach robbery only in passing, to wonder idly whether I would ever learn the end of the tale.

We had been in San Francisco only a day or two when Sam answered a knock on the door, and I heard a familiar voice ask for me. Fanny was in the kitchen, but the damp air had played havoc with my lungs, and I was coughing the afternoon away before the fire in the sitting room. Sam, all excitement, brought Holmes into the room. When Holmes saw me, he stopped and apologized. “Mr. Stevenson—you’re ill, I see. I’m sorry if I’ve disturbed you.”

I stood up to greet him. “I’m not all that sick,” I said with more valor than I felt. “It’s good to see you again. Come, sit down.”

“Not now, I’m afraid,” he said, “I’ve come on urgent business.”

“Really!” I replied, welcoming a distraction from my personal ills. “What is it?”

He looked around. “Is Mrs. Stevenson here?”

A little surprised, I answered, “Yes, she’s—” A movement caught my eye and, looking toward it, I saw Fanny in the doorway, smoothing her apron. “Fanny,” I called to her, “it’s Mr. Holmes.”

Fanny hurried in. “Mr. Holmes, how good to see you,” she said warmly, and turned to me with a stern look. “Louis, you should be resting.”

“I know—it’s you Mr. Holmes has come to see,” I told her.

A little flustered, Fanny turned back to Holmes, who seemed unsure how to begin. “It’s about the stagecoach robbery,” he said.

We both stared at him, Fanny as curious as I was to find out where she fit into the case.

“We’ve tracked down the robber, and we’re at the point of making an arrest.”

“Really! That’s good news,” I said. “How did you find him?”

“I’ll tell you. But at the moment, the situation is rather difficult. You remember that one of the women was gravely ill.”

“Yes—Miss Duverger.”

“You have a good memory. She is still alive, though at death’s door, from what I understand. But we are about to arrest her companion, Miss Greenwood.”

Fanny’s eyes widened, and her hand went to her lips. I started to speak, to ask further about the robber, but Holmes continued before I could get a word out.

“Miss Greenwood is quite desperate on her friend’s account. I think it will go more easily if we have someone with us—a woman—who can care for Miss Duverger.” He turned to Fanny. “I remembered that Mr. Stevenson praised your skill as a nurse, though I fear there will be little even you can do for her. The purpose of having you there is to reassure Miss Greenwood that her friend will be cared for in her last hours. It’s a lot to ask, but do you think you could help?”

Fanny didn’t hesitate. “Why not? Where is she?”

“Wait,” I said, with an upwelling of husbandly protectiveness. “Is my wife going to be in danger?”

Holmes didn’t hesitate. “No. There are only the two women.”

“So where is the robber?”

“Quite safe.”

“You’ve arrested him, then?”

“Not yet, but we will shortly.”

I didn’t feel much mollified, but Fanny had already left to gather her things. I pulled my jacket and hat off the coat rack and put them on. In a moment, Fanny was back, in shawl and bonnet, and carrying a small satchel. She looked at me in alarm and frank disapproval, and I answered her before she could speak. “I’m not letting you go there by yourself.”

Had we been alone, she would have quite overpowered me, but with Mr. Holmes present she felt constrained from quarreling. “Louis, you’re crazy,” she sighed, with a dark look and a shake of her head. She turned to Holmes. “I’m ready,” she said.

A four-wheeler was waiting outside for us, and Holmes directed it to an address I didn’t recognize. On the journey there, he was his usual uncommunicative self. His silence was catching,
and Fanny and I said hardly a word, though I kept her little hand wrapped tightly in mine. As the cab climbed hills and turned down one street after another, I lost track of its route, and when it finally stopped we were in a part of the city unknown to me, on a block of tall, funereal houses set close together like black cypress trees in a windbreak. The hills and the sea fog cut off any long view, and the street and houses seemed confined in a small space, like a stone castle in a fishbowl.

As Holmes was paying the cab driver, a man in a tweed suit appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, on the sidewalk beside us. He nodded a curt greeting and spoke to Holmes in a low voice. “Nothing new since you left, sir. Shall I stay out here?”

“No,” Holmes said. “Come inside. Mrs. Stevenson is here, and I think it’s time to speak to Miss Rostov.”

“Holmes!” I whispered, caught up in the general trend toward
sotto-voce
speech. “What do you mean, Miss Rostov? Where is the robber?”

Holmes looked at me almost pityingly. “Miss Rostov is Miss Greenwood. Mrs. Stevenson is in no danger, I assure you.”

Fanny placed her hand on my arm. “Louis, calm down. Don’t you think I can take care of myself?”

“With an armed road-agent?”

“I’d say you’ve got him pretty well outnumbered,” she answered, with a glance that took in the three of us.

Not at all comforted, I collected myself and followed Holmes and the rest up the steps.

A servant girl answered the door. “May we come in, Mary,” Holmes said, “and would you please fetch Mrs. Paxton for us?”

Mary stepped aside, and we walked into the entrance hall, on
the left side of which a carpeted staircase rose to the upper floors. Holmes directed us, with the exception of Fanny, to a parlor to the right of the hall. The tweed-suited man took up a position where he could not be seen from the staircase and left me to sit on a chair near the parlor door from which I had a view of the hall and stairs. “By the way,” he said, “I’m Alva Weston, with the Pinkerton Agency.” I introduced myself, and we settled back to waiting.

Mary went silently to the back of the house and returned a minute later, followed by Mrs. Paxton.

Mrs. Paxton was a stout woman, plainly dressed, with her brown hair pulled back into a bun. She was clearly in on the story, and as she introduced herself to Fanny and spoke quietly with Holmes, she seemed entirely self-possessed despite the knowledge that the mistress of a stagecoach bandit was hiding out in her upstairs rooms. At a word from her, Mary climbed the carpeted stairs and disappeared, descending soundlessly a few minutes later. “She says she’ll be right down, ma’am,” she said to Mrs. Paxton, and backed away into the rear of the hallway, to watch, wide-eyed, what might happen next.

No one spoke, and the little noises of the day seemed to fall like raindrops into a lake of silence. I could hear my own breathing, and I stifled a cough. I thought I heard a door close upstairs, and a moment later, without the sound of a footstep, a young woman appeared on the stairs. It was the girl in the photograph, with the same long, dark eyes. She was tall, straight, and slender, and her face had a slightly foreign look, with wide, high cheekbones and pale skin that seemed luminous in the half light of the stairway. Her auburn hair was gathered in a coil at her neck, and the plain dark dress she wore hung loosely on her. She descended slowly
and stopped, halfway down, on seeing Holmes with Fanny and Mrs. Paxton.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“Sherlock Holmes, from the Bank of Calistoga.”

“Oh.” She didn’t seem particularly surprised, but her eyes closed for a moment, and she seemed to grasp the banister more tightly with her left hand.

Weston had moved from his place of concealment to a spot between the stairway and the front door. He and Holmes held pistols concealed at their sides.

Holmes spoke again, in a calm voice. “Miss Rostov, please hand your gun to Mr. Weston, there.”

She walked a few steps farther down the stairs toward Weston, removed her right hand from the folds of her skirt, and handed him a revolver. “It doesn’t matter anyway,” she said softly.

She turned back to face Holmes, steadying herself this time with both hands. “My friend is upstairs. Someone needs to take care of her; she’s real sick. You can go see for yourself. It’s no trick, I promise.” Her words, though weighted by a slight foreign inflection, flew with the headlong earnestness of youth. For all her experience of men and their vices, I thought, she’s still just a girl.

“I know,” Holmes said. “I’ve brought someone to care for her,” he said, with a nod to Fanny. The young woman paused for a second, looking at them, then turned toward the top of the stairs.

From the landing we followed her down a hallway to the right, where she unlocked a door, opened it wide, and stepped into a room. Holmes and Weston followed, and after a moment, Fanny and I joined them.

The room was, in fact, a pair of rooms, a sitting room with
chairs, a table, a small sofa under a bay window, and a bedroom behind it. Miss Rostov had gone directly into the bedroom and was leaning over the bed. Fanny followed her there, and I followed Fanny as far as the door.

A young woman lay in the bed, tucked in like a child under a patchwork quilt and propped up a little with pillows. So thin was she that the coverlet scarcely showed where her small body lay beneath it. Her face was colorless, wasted and haunting, delicate in its outline, with a small, pale mouth and shadowed eyes. Her dark hair was loosely braided, but a few tendrils, damp with perspiration, curled on her forehead. As I watched, her eyes opened and she looked up at Miss Rostov as if trying to see who she was. “Annie?” she asked in a voice hardly more than a sigh.

“Yes,
petite
,” Miss Rostov said, putting a gentle hand on the invalid’s brow and smoothing the damp hair from her forehead. The girl’s lips moved in the hint of a smile, and she closed her eyes as if exhausted by the effort.

Miss Rostov returned to us closing the bedroom door behind her. “Are you going to arrest me now?”

Fanny looked at her and then at Holmes. “I hope not,” she said. “I need to speak with you.” Fanny pulled two chairs together at the table in the sitting room, sat in one, and motioned Miss Rostov into the other.