Uneasy Spirits: A Victorian San Francisco Mystery (39 page)

Annie chose not to tell Mrs. Nickerson that Laura de Force Gordon was no longer the editor of the
Oakland Daily Democrat
. Instead, along with Clara Foltz, another local San Francisco woman, she had plans to be the first woman admitted to the California bar. Mrs. Nickerson might not be as excited about associating her “darling girl” with anyone quite so controversial.

Annie, on the other hand, had been delighted when Mrs. Hunt had introduced Mrs. Gordon this morning. Nate and she had talked about Gordon and Foltz this summer when the newspapers reported on their success in getting the “Lady’s Lawyer Bill” made part of the new constitution. Perhaps she could arrange a meeting between Nate and Mrs. Gordon. He kept talking about how old-fashioned his Uncle Frank was concerning the law; maybe Mrs. Gordon could be their new law partner. That would shake things up.

Annie smiled and shook her head.
I need to stop thinking about Nate and concentrate on Mrs. Nickerson.
Annie had missed the last thing Evie May’s mother had said, but she simply murmured agreement, which she had discovered was all that was necessary to keep Mrs. Nickerson’s words flowing. But, now that Mrs. Hunt and her friend Mrs. Gordon had taken Evie May for a walk to see the animals in the Zoological Gardens, she should work harder to direct that flow into useful channels.

“
Mrs. Nickerson, do tell me a little more about yourself. You said you were from Lynn, Massachusetts? Is that where the rest of your family still lives? You do have other children besides Evie May?”

The other woman’s perpetual simper dimmed slightly at this question, and she patted at the frizz of hennaed bangs on her forehead, as if to assure herself they still held their curl, before answering. “Oh, yes, I had four children in all. The two boys, Sammy and Tom, high-spirited lads, went out at a young age to make their own mark in the world. Nan, my oldest girl, married young and left home when Evie May was just a little tyke. I couldn’t complain. I married near the same age, so you might say she took after her own mother. But I miss them all sorely. Thank goodness for my precious Evie May.”

Here Mrs. Nickerson took out a handkerchief and fluttered it in the direction of her eyes, which remained stubbornly dry.

Annie noted that none of the names of the older siblings matched the names of Evie May’s “protectors” as she patted the woman’s hand sympathetically and said, “I can imagine she must be a real comfort to you, particularly after you lost your husband. How old was Evie May when her father died?”

“
He passed on just two years ago. A sad blow to us both. My husband may have had trouble with his boys, but he treated his girls like princesses. Nan’s marriage hit him hard. He didn’t feel the boy was worthy of his precious girl. But I told him, a girl like Nan, everyone said she got my looks you know, can’t stay forever in her father’s pocket.”

Annie noticed this last statement had the ring of a well-practiced complaint, and she wondered if there had been some jealousy between Nan and her mother. Annie mentally replaced Mrs. Nickerson’s hideous orange-dyed hair with a natural shade of red, stripped away the thick layer of powder to imagine a porcelain complexion, looked at a face bloated by water retention for the delicate features hinted at by the neatly shaped ear and chin, and concluded that, in her prime, Mrs. Nickerson might have been quite a beautiful woman. Her light-green eyes were still striking and could have outshined even those of Arabella Frampton if they didn’t always look so desperate.

“
Quite right,” Annie agreed, to what she wasn’t sure. “After your daughter Nan moved away, I expect that Evie May became the apple of your husband’s eye.”
Why is it that I keep speaking in clichés when I’m talking to Mrs. Nickerson
?

“
Oh, yes. He cosseted her so. In the evenings he trained her to bring him his slippers and pipe and dram of whiskey. Then she’d sit on his lap and they’d whisper together. I’d ask them what the joke was, and they’d never tell me. Made their own little world they did. That is until Evie May started having the fits.”

“
How distressing,” said Annie, wondering if the “fits” were the strange blank interludes she had witnessed when Evie May was deserted by one spirit and not yet inhabited by another.

Mrs. Nickerson started, as if she hadn’t realized that she had been speaking out loud. “Simon has explained to me that this was just Evie May beginning to communicate with the spirit world. I wish my husband could have understood that. He got extremely angry with her, and she would disappear for hours, days at a time, leaving me alone to fend . . . it wasn’t a pleasant time. But then he became ill with a chronic bilious complaint, completely bed-ridden for the last four years of his life. Seeing him so weak, delirious at times, when he had been such a strong, handsome man, just broke my heart. As you may well imagine, I was prostrate with grief. Evie May took over. She was so good to us both.”

Annie was appalled at the thought of Evie May taking care of a sick father and a malingering mother, at what age? She would have been no more than nine or ten when her father became ill, even younger if her mother was being truthful about her daughter’s age.

“
Oh, Mrs. Nickerson, didn’t your husband’s family do anything to help you out?”

“
No, they did not.” Mrs. Nickerson stiffened. “His father was a pig-headed tyrant. Soon after we married, he completely cut off all support. Heartless man, he didn’t even come to Sewell’s funeral. My mother-in-law tried to help a little from time to time, but she wouldn’t openly go against her husband. She gave us just enough to keep us from starving. It was awful.”

For the first time Annie had a sense of kinship with this woman, remembering with bitterness how her own father-in-law had treated her after her husband’s death. No wonder Mrs. Nickerson and Hilda Hapgood had developed an odd sort of friendship; they both had disinheriting fathers-in-law to bond over. But Evie May, what effect had all this wretched experience had on her?

“
However did you manage, once your husband died?” Annie asked.

“
The spirits guided Simon Frampton to us, and he became our savior.” Mrs. Nickerson smiled and sighed heavily. “Evie May and I had moved to Boston and into a dirty, crowded boarding house when one day I insisted to Evie May that we just had to have some pleasure in our lives. With the few pennies I had left, we went to the local theater where Simon and his wife were giving a public demonstration. Evie May volunteered to come up on stage . . . well you could have knocked me over with a feather, this wasn’t like her at all . . . and the spirits possessed her. She began to declaim such beautiful poetry. I had never seen nor heard the like. Simon came to us after the show and explained to me about the spirits and Evie May’s talents, and he just took us under his wing.”

“
How did Evie May feel about all this?”

“
She is ever so grateful. Simon is like a father to her, better than her own father in fact. If only that woman wasn’t so jealous. Just because she didn’t want to have any children, she begrudges Simon the chance to raise Evie May as his own, train her talents.”

To raise Evie May as his own?
Did this mean Simon planned to adopt Evie May? As her guardian, he would have full control of her and any money she would make. He wouldn’t need Mrs. Nickerson anymore.
I wonder if Mrs. Nickerson understands the implications of that, or is she so deluded that she thinks that it will be Arabella he won’t need anymore?
How foresighted of Flora Hunt to have Mrs. Gordon, an expert in California law, come to this meeting. Annie hadn’t thought that there might be legal issues involved in trying to protect Evie May from Simon Frampton, or her own mother for that matter, but clearly there were.

Annie noticed that Evie May was walking back towards their table, chattering excitedly to both Mrs. Gordon and Mrs. Hunt, who each held the girl by a hand. A striking difference from when Evie May and her mother first arrived at Woodward’s Gardens. Then Evie May had been very shy and non-communicative. At least her mother had dressed her appropriately for her age and sex today. Her outfit was a loosely-cut Basque top and contrasting gored skirt made of a soft light-brown tweed, trimmed with dark-brown velvet, and her hair was held back with a matching velvet bow. As she watched the girl tell her mother about seeing the camels, and the bears, and the huge buffalo, Annie thought to herself that this was the first time she’d seen Evie May just being Evie May.

Until the girl, taking advantage of her mother’s attention being claimed by Mrs. Gordon, turned to Annie and in Eddie’s distinctive tones said, with a cock of the head and a wink, “Maybelle sends her love and said to tell you to watch out. The bad man isn’t very happy with you.”

*****

That night, the girl sat in the large armchair, wearing a loosely-fitting white dress of a vaguely nautical cut, white stockings, and black three-button shoes. A man was standing over her, and he reached down and tipped her head up with his index finger so that she was staring up at him. He spoke slowly and distinctly, staring back into her eyes until her eyes closed.

The second man, standing in the shadows at the edge of the room, shifted his position. The girl’s eyes flew open and she twisted around in the chair until she was staring straight at him. Her thumb popped into her mouth, and she turned away to drag the china doll out from behind the chair’s back cushion. She began to cradle the doll, humming.

The first man shrugged, took the doll from her, and again tipped up her now tear-stained face, speaking slowly until her eyes began to flutter closed.

“
Mrs. McDonald, Medium. No 9 Mason st. and Market. Sittings daily; meetings Tuesday and Friday evenings, 50 c 8 o’clock p.m.”
—
San Francisco Chronicle
, 1879

Annie’s heart steadily thumped, filling the darkness with a regular beat in counter syncopation with the soft exhalations of breath from the men who sat on either side of her. It was her last séance, and she thought how oddly comfortable she had become with the strange ritual of sitting in the dark, holding hands with relative strangers, temporarily sightless, waiting. For a brief time she had attended a Quaker meeting with a school friend in New York, and she was reminded of the long slow minutes of sitting silently, her mind, like a caged monkey, swinging and shrieking from idea to idea, image to image until, exhausted, it stilled, and she had felt at peace.

Tonight there would be no peace, because tonight, spirits, whether real or not, would soon arrive to shatter the silence and drown out the beating of her heart.
Spirits, real or not? Could Eddie or Maybelle be the spirits of some little children who have passed on? If not, who or what are they?
These thoughts had possessed Annie since yesterday morning when she recognized Eddie peeking out of Evie May’s eyes.

“
On this night of All Hallow’s Eve, the spirits of the departed are closer to us than any other part of the year,” intoned Arabella, dressed in a pale-rose satin gown that glowed in the red light emanating from the cabinet room. An odd dissonant tune from the piano upstairs began to play, soon joined by a slow, soft drumbeat.
Albert and his wife are busy tonight,
was Annie’s first thought. She recognized that she found it easier to mock the obviously manufactured spirit manifestations of the Framptons’ séances than to contemplate the possible existence of real spirits. Spiritualists like Flora Hunt believed that all souls lived on after death, in an afterworld where they continued to develop and progress as spiritual beings, capable, in time, of providing ethical and moral guidance to the living. For Flora, Spiritualism brought peace and an explanation for the strange voices that had spoken through her all of her remembered life. There was no hell or evil spirits in her belief system; All Hallow’s Eve would hold no fears for her.

Annie could see the attractiveness of Flora’s beliefs, but she was seriously troubled by the idea that her dead mother, or father, or heaven forbid, her husband, might live on in perpetuity, struggling to find some way to reach out and communicate with the living, with her.
But what of her lost daughter? Would it bring her any peace to think that, like a Maybelle, she might still exist in some form, searching for her mother?
Annie didn’t know if she could accept that idea.
She also didn’t know if she believed in heaven and hell. In her experience, evil came from the living, not the dead. This was one of the reasons she didn’t believe it was the spirit of Charlie who tried to frighten his mother about her unborn child or pressure his father into betraying his employer. The evil came from the Framptons, not the afterworld. But if Charlie wasn’t a real spirit, what was the explanation for Maybelle, or Eddie? Round and around these thoughts had gone, always coming back to who or what inhabited Evie May.

To her left, Ruckner spasmodically clenched her hand as the volume of the music increased and Arabella commenced to moan, the now familiar signal for a spirit to manifest itself. The lights from the room behind began to flicker, a new phenomena. When the music stopped, a deep male voice rang out, saying, “‘Ding dong dell, Pussy’s in the well.’ Do you hear me little puss? It’s your grandfather, come to speak with you.”

Mrs. Larkson shrieked. Then the voice softened. “Isobel, Isobel, don’t be afraid, my little puss. Remember how we changed the old song? ‘Ding dong dell, Puss is Isobel, Who loves her best? Pa more than the rest.’ Don’t cry little puss.”