Josiah's Treasure (2 page)

He stopped and faced her. Red blotched his neck above his collar.

“It is precisely because we were friends that I am working so hard—unsuccessfully—to convince you to see sense, Miss Whittier, despite what I may or may not have said to Josiah,” he answered. “If those men do not come through with their offers of money and your shop fails, think how that will crush those girls of yours. Young women to whom you’ve promised a great deal. Are you willing to bear their disappointment and upset?”

He was right; they would be crushed and might blame her. She wouldn’t let it happen, though.

“There’s no need to worry, because I will not permit the shop
to fail.” Sarah closed the gap between them and peered into his face. He had to understand. He had to see. “I don’t care what you said about Josiah—he wasn’t being sentimental when he encouraged me. He was shrewd and you know it.”

“You are very determined.”

“If I intend to be a success, I have to be.”

“Which is why Josiah Cady took to you like a tick to a dog, Miss Whittier.” He softened the assessment with a hasty smile that twitched his mustache.

A spark of hope flickered. “Take a chance with me, Mr. Pomroy. Six months. Lease me the space for six months, and I will prove to you my shop is a viable business.”

She saw the retreat in his eyes. Her hope bloomed into a flame. He was going to concede; she was going to win.

Sighing, Mr. Pomroy opened the nearest door. His personal office sat hushed in the dim morning sunlight, exhaling the scent of cigars and leather chairs, beeswax polish. “The paperwork is on the desk. Allow me to fill in the necessary details and the shop is yours. For six months.”

The strain she had lived with for weeks, and longer, released from Sarah’s shoulders like a watch spring uncoiling. “Thank you. You won’t regret your decision.”

Sarah swept past her new landlord. After he modified the rental agreement to include her name and the length of the lease, she signed both copies, folding one carefully and tucking it into her reticule.

“Here is the first month’s rent,” she said, handing him the money. Eighty-five dollars. An unimaginable sum not so many years ago.

“You will have a one-week grace period for a missed rental payment, with a fifteen-percent penalty fee. Miss that payment and you will be evicted from the premises,” Mr. Pomroy said, kneeing aside his rolling chair so he could access the center desk drawer. He glanced at her. “You do trust these girls you’ve hired,
correct? They are not going to do anything to, shall we say, cast you or your business in a bad light?”

“They may have made bad choices in their pasts, Mr. Pomroy, but I assure you, that is behind them.”

“Good, because after the last disgraceful tenant we had in that space, my partners and I would prefer not to discover the name of a client in the newspapers again.”

“You will not have any trouble from us.” She extended a gloved hand, palm up. She was thankful it didn’t shake. However, she had practiced forgetting her transgressions far longer than she’d practiced her steely-eyed gaze. “So if everything is in order, might I have the keys to the shop?”

“I believe so.” He slid open the drawer and slipped his copy of the paperwork inside. From the same drawer, he extracted two sets of iron keys.

“Front door. Alley door,” he said, identifying each key with a flick of his forefinger. “The next rent payment is due on the twenty-fifth.”

He dropped the keys into her hand. They were heavy and reassuringly solid, and she closed her fingers tightly around them. “You will see my check on the twenty-fourth. Good morning, Mr. Pomroy. And thank you again.”

“Prove me wrong to worry, Miss Whittier.”

“I shall,” she answered.

Sarah rushed out of the office, past the prying stares of Mr. Pomroy’s clerks, down the narrow hallway. Grinning, she burst through the front door of the building, into the din of Montgomery Street. She had done it. She had persisted and won.

You always believed I would, Josiah. Even when I didn’t believe it myself.

While pedestrians rushed by, Sarah gripped her reticule tightly and breathed in the energy of the city. Inhaled the aromas she so strongly associated with San Francisco—the iodine tang of the bay and the metallic sharpness of factory smoke and steam engines,
the acrid reek of horse manure and construction dust. The sweet spiciness of food intermingling with the lye from laundries in the Chinese quarter two blocks distant. The warm yeastiness of a bakery.

She stepped back as a flock of tourists scuttled up the sidewalk, bound for the sights of Chinatown with a policeman as guard, eager to peep at vivid red joss houses and opium dens. If he took them farther north, they could venture into the saloons of the Barbary Coast, jangling with piano music and drunken laughter. Sarah watched them disappear around the corner and wondered if they felt the city’s vibrancy too. If they could sense its limitless possibilities, where people from every walk of life scraped and struggled to be better than they were before they arrived. To become someone new, just like she had done.

“Miss Sarah!” Minnie Tobin hurried along the asphaltum sidewalk, her faded gray dress kicking wide, brown curls bouncing beneath her straw bonnet. “Have you done it?”

“Minnie, how did you manage to get here?” She was the first young woman Sarah had plucked from the streets, the ragged daughter of a drunken grocer, a girl with a cheerful disposition, enviable spunk, and a gift for painting. Her father had plans to marry her off to his brutish best friend, consigning her to a life not much better than slavery. But not if Sarah had anything to say about it. “Your father allowed you to leave the grocery early?”

“I snuck out.” Minnie’s grin dimpled her cheeks. “I had to know if we’d got the shop. I couldn’t concentrate on stacking tins of meat, knowing you were down here today, fighting for us.”

“Here is your answer.” Sarah held out the two sets of keys and jingled them. “We have the shop.”

“Oh, thank goodness!” Minnie leaped into Sarah’s arms and hugged her tight, knocking her hat askew. “That’s wonderful!”

“It is wonderful, and an incredible relief.” Sarah extricated herself from Minnie’s grasp and dropped the keys into her reticule.
“What do you say . . . chocolate macaroons from Engel-berg’s Bakery as a treat?”

“It’ll have to be quick, if I’m to make it back to the grocery before my pa returns from his lunch. Don’t want him to find me gone.” Minnie’s voice conveyed her dread.

“Then quick it shall be.”

Buoyant, Sarah planted one hand atop her hat, clutched Minnie’s arm with the other, and strutted down Montgomery.

“Miss Charlotte will be pleased about the shop,” Minnie said as they paused at the intersection, waiting for a cable car to collect its passengers and make the turn, clearing the roadway.

“Lottie never doubted I would be able to convince Mr. Pomroy to lease us the space.” But then Lottie had endless faith, far more than Sarah could ever claim. Enough to convince her father to invest in the shop against his lawyer’s wary nature.

“I never doubted, either, Miss Sarah,” said Minnie, her nut-brown eyes full of trust.

Sarah’s heart constricted.
I will never let these girls down. Not a one.
“Thank you.”

“ ’Welcome, miss,” Minnie replied with a dimpled smile. “What’s next?”

“Tomorrow I plan to go to the storefront and make a list of any necessary repairs.” A lengthy list already existed in her head, but she had been too superstitious to commit it to paper. “Then I’ll make down payments on the equipment we need—first and foremost the lithograph press—take you and the others to see the space, and begin tidying and organizing. In a week, the first of our supplies should arrive. We can start to move in then.”

“That’s so exciting, I think I’m gonna burst!”

“Please don’t, because I need you whole,” Sarah teased.

The cable car clanged up the road, and they hurried across the cobbles.

“I predict Whittier and Company Custom Design Studio will be a roaring success,” Minnie proclaimed with a dramatic wave
of her forefinger. “Because if anyone can do it, you can, Miss Sarah.”

“If anyone can do it,
we
can.” Sarah squeezed the girl’s arm. “Remember that.”

Minnie giggled and Sarah joined in, the sound of their carefree laughter snatched by the breeze swirling along the street, carried off with the fog lifting into the blue, blue skies. Their spirits lighter than a bubble floating.

And hopefully not
, thought Sarah with a shiver,
just as fragile.

“A
ccording to the city directory,” the hotel clerk spread his fingers across the pages of the book and pointed, the freckles dotting the backs of his hands looking like splashes of orange paint, “he’s listed as having an address on Jones Street, sir.”

Daniel squinted at the entry, upside-down from his vantage point across the waist-high desk. There he was. After all the months Daniel had searched, he’d finally located the man. In a San Francisco directory, owned by every hotel in the city, plain as could be.

“This directory’s over a year old, though. We haven’t received the latest, so I can’t guarantee the address is still current,” the clerk added, apologetic for any shortcomings exhibited by the Occidental Hotel. “Might have moved on by now. Folks around here come and go like ants on a hill.”

“It’ll do for a start.”

Slowly, Daniel spun the directory on the smooth walnut surface until the entry was right-side up. He traced the print with his thumb as if the contact of his skin on paper would verify the reality of what his eyes saw. The noises of the hotel—the chatter of guests lounging on the plump furniture, the tinkle of the piano meant to entertain them, the rattle of the elevator arriving on the ground floor—became a distant buzz. All Daniel noticed, his entire concentration, was focused on two words.
Josiah Cady
, in wavy typeset. He was still alive. Daniel had started to wonder.

I’ve found you at last, Josiah.
Dear old Pa. The scoundrel who had gone to strike it rich in the gold fields never to return or ever send a dime home, leaving his family without the proper means to survive. Daniel felt heat surge, and he curled his fist atop the open book. He had found him, just as Daniel had promised his mother on her deathbed he would, had promised his sisters. An answer to a prayer, if he ever prayed. Which he didn’t. Not any longer.

“You’ve come a long way to unearth the fellow,” observed the clerk, filling the dead silence. He glanced at Daniel’s fist then shot a nervous look at his fellow clerk, helping another guest at the far end of the main reception desk. “All the way from Chicago, eh?”

Daniel uncurled his hand and willed himself to relax. He would save his anger for when he met Josiah face-to-face. “Yep.”

The clerk exhaled his tension and smiled. “One of the fellows who work the dining room says the train can get here from Illinois in just five days. Is that so, Mr. Cady?”

“I can’t tell you, because I didn’t come directly.” No, he’d been traveling since October, poking through every godforsaken mining town between here and the Rocky Mountains, across wind-swept wastelands and craggy snowcapped mountains, searching for traces of the man who had been more in love with gold than with his family. “Where is this address on Jones Street?”

The clerk released a low whistle. “Up Nob Hill, sir. One of the best parts of town,” he explained when he realized Daniel didn’t recognize the name.

“Folks are rich up there, then.”

“Lots of them sure are. Real estate investors, businessmen . . . gold speculators. Wish I’d had the nerve to go mining.” A wistful look crossed his boyish features. “Why? The fellow owe you money?”

“In a manner of speaking.” Thirty thousand dollars, based on Josiah’s final telegram. His father’s take of the profits from the small gold-mining company he and a partner had run. Daniel
kept the telegram, faded and deeply creased, in the inner pocket of his coat. Read it over and over again, a reminder of what Josiah owed Daniel and his sisters back in Chicago. Cold, hard cash. Enough to set himself up in business and build that fine house he had promised to Lily and Marguerite. Because, the Lord knew, he and his sisters weren’t looking for a father’s love anymore. “How do I get to Jones Street from here?”

“Go north two blocks and catch the California Street cable car. That’s your best bet. Only costs a nickel and the views up there are first-rate. You can see right across the Golden Gate, you can! I take my sweetheart on the Clay Street cable line all the—”

“Is it far?” Daniel interrupted the man’s enthusiastic praises.

He shook his head. “Five, ten minutes at most, Mr. Cady.” “Good.”

Without being asked, the clerk scribbled Josiah’s address on a scrap of paper and handed it to Daniel. Tucking the note in his pocket, Daniel headed downstairs and out of the hotel. At the street corner, he had a clear view of the city cloaking the sandy hills until every square inch seemed to be covered by pavement and buildings. Up there, among the jumble of dusty streets and bay-windowed houses, church spires, and telegraph poles, Josiah lived in comfort and security. Oblivious to the surprise he was about to receive.

Daniel secured his hat on his head and stepped off the curb. Five, ten minutes at most to get to Josiah. Not long, but long enough for Daniel to decide exactly what he intended to say to him.

“I forgive you, Father” was not on the list.