Josiah's Treasure (3 page)

“I did it, Mrs. McGinnis,” Sarah announced to the empty entry hall, her voice echoing off the curving staircase. Out of habit, she brushed fingertips across the solitary painting hanging above the demilune table tucked against the wall. A painting she’d done of
her family farm, a watercolor almost as wispy as her memories of the place, the gilt frame rubbing bare down to the wood where she touched it all the time. “Mrs. McGinnis!”

Rufus, their orange tabby, jumped down from the padded chair that was his observation post on the second-floor landing, his claws tapping rapidly across the floor. Sarah stripped off her gloves and threw her hat onto the table. It bounced against the floral wallpaper along with her discarded reticule, the keys inside releasing a satisfying clink. “Mrs. McGinnis?” Sarah peered at the empty dining room, the darkened front parlor to her right.

The housekeeper, wiping her hands on her apron, bustled through the kitchen doorway at the far end of the dining room.

“There you are,” said Sarah.

“
Wheesht
, lass, stop screeching, I heard you,” Mrs. McGinnis chided, shaking her head. A strand of brown hair escaped from the tidy bun at the base of her neck. “And where else would I be at this hour? Gone for a stroll?”

Sarah smiled, patting her hair and finding more than a few strands of her own unwound. She jabbed hairpins home. “It
is
a beautiful day.”

“And
nae
time for someone like me to enjoy it.”

Sarah clasped the other woman’s fingers. They were gritty with flour, strong as bands of iron, chapped from lye. Warmth and support and fortitude all wrapped up in the hands of a servant.

“I did it,” Sarah repeated. “I have the keys to the storefront and a six-month lease. On my terms.”

The other woman’s answering grin, the light in her sea-blue eyes, was infectious. When she smiled, she was so pretty that Sarah wondered, yet again, why she had never remarried after becoming a widow. Wondered why she had spent the last six years tending first to a crotchety old prospector and now to Sarah.

Mrs. McGinnis enfolded Sarah within her arms. She smelled of vanilla and Castile soap. “I knew you would, lass.”

“I must have been the only one who doubted.”

“You need more faith.”

Sarah made no comment; they’d had this conversation before and she did not need to reply.

“Mr. Pomroy was difficult, but I think he just wanted to challenge me to make certain I was resolute.” She dropped onto the chair against the wall and wiggled out of her half boots, freeing her aching feet. For Mr. Pomroy she had bothered to purchase new ones, as if the sight of buff Dongola leather might have swayed his faltering opinion of her worth. Dollars and cents. A plugged nickel. “I had macaroons with Minnie and then stopped by the storefront on the way back home. The shop is going to need some work to get into shape, but the girls and I can do it. The space should be ready in a couple of weeks.”

“So quickly?”

“We have to open the shop as soon as possible and bring in income. Mr. Samuelson’s loan and the proceeds from the sale of Josiah’s land in Placerville won’t pay the bills forever.” Sarah massaged the cramps in her toes and looked askance at her boots. She wouldn’t be buying shoes from that store again. “I can’t wait to show the girls. Cora will love to paint in that second-floor room. The light is perfect for even the most detailed work. And of course there’s a nice area for the lithograph press, and there is even a small corner room for Emma to work on the accounts that is well lit by gas lamps. It’s nearly a miracle to have secured the space at such an excellent price.”

Mrs. McGinnis rested a hand on her shoulder. “Mr. Josiah would be proud of you.”

“Yes.” The aching twist she felt in her heart was a constant companion. “He would.”

The housekeeper dropped a kiss to the crown of Sarah’s head and stepped back. “Change out of that frock afair Miss Charlotte arrives with Anne and Emma for instruction this afternoon. You don’t want paint on yer best outfit.”

“Lottie . . . I almost forgot.” After a final rub of her toes, Sarah
stood. “First, I’d like to spend a minute with Josiah, though. Then I’ll go change.”

In her stockinged feet, she entered the parlor just off the entry hall. Rufus slunk down the stairs and followed her inside.

The shades had been pulled against the noonday light, and the room lay dim and quiet. All these months later the sweetness of Josiah’s cigar still lingered, clinging to the drapes and the Turkish rug covering the mahogany parlor table, as unwilling to relinquish the memory of him as she was. Sarah had always tried to shoo Josiah off to his upstairs library to smoke, but he loved to sit in his overstuffed red velvet chair by the bay window and critique the neighborhood happenings. Nobody could convince Josiah to do anything other than what he set his mind to.

Sarah trailed a hand over the lace-trimmed antimacassar spread across the back of the chair, the indent of Josiah’s weight still visible in the nap of the velvet seat cushion, and felt salty tears rise in her throat.

“I didn’t want this house and that bit of property, Josiah, if it meant I had to lose you.” The dearest friend she’d had. A replacement for the parents, the family she’d lost.

If he were alive, he might laugh his gruff laugh at her sentimentality. Right before pain shot through his green eyes. The sight of it, though, would be gone as quick as the spark of a lightning bug, ephemeral. As if the pain had never truly existed.

Sarah crossed the thick carpet, plush against her toes, to the corner of the parlor where an easel held a painting draped in black crape. She flapped the fabric over the top of the frame. It was the first work he had commissioned from her, a portrait of him seated in his favorite white wicker chair out in the garden. One leg was thrust forward, a cigar clamped in his left hand and a sly, all-knowing smile tilting his mouth beneath his thick, graying mustache. In the portrait, Sarah had been careful to erase the most obvious signs of Josiah’s ill health, highlighting
the details of the garden instead. The little fountain bubbled at his back and his roses bloomed all around in dense profusion, a halo of vermilion and gold and salmon. A marble statue of a chubby cherub perched on its pedestal to Josiah’s right, an ironic counterpoint of innocence, he’d claimed, to all the wickedness in his soul.

He’d bought an elaborately carved walnut easel for the portrait and set it in the most prominent location in the parlor, in the far corner where it was easily spotted by folks entering the room. He would grin at the painting and tell anyone who cared to listen that Sarah had painted it right after she’d arrived in San Francisco. He would insist that she had been the quickest portrait artist he’d ever met and that, for a reasonable fee, she could paint their portraits too. Sarah would find herself blushing from head to toe as their visitors smiled politely and ignored Josiah’s hint. They were there to smoke his excellent cigars and to eat Mrs. McGinnis’s delectable meals, not to commission a painting from a young woman who had an irritating tendency to speak her mind and whose past had never been explained to everybody’s liking.

“I signed the rental agreement for the shop this morning, Josiah,” she said to the portrait, while Rufus slithered between the easel’s legs, making it wobble. His bent tail, broken in a skirmish that had occurred before she’d rescued him, slapped against her skirt hem. Sarah pulled a handkerchief from the pocket of her skirt and swiped dust from the frame. “I think Mr. Pomroy is of the common opinion that I’m foolish for wanting to help the girls, but I won’t let his opinion or anyone else’s stop me. It’s going to happen, Josiah, just as you said it would.”

She returned the handkerchief to her pocket. It was silly to talk to the painting, but she always felt comforted when she did.

The doorbell sounded in the hallway. Restoring the black crape over the painting, Sarah looked over her shoulder and smiled, expecting to hear Mrs. McGinnis’s footsteps coming from the
kitchen to answer the bell.

Lottie and the girls were very early.

“They’re here already, Rufus.”

They would be so pleased with Sarah’s good news.

Daniel frowned. It seemed no one intended to answer the doorbell, but the house hadn’t been abandoned. The steps were clean and the greenery in the front garden maintained. The cut leaded glass in the double door was spotless, and he could’ve sworn he’d seen movement in the hallway beyond it.

He took a step back from the front door and stared up at the house’s facade. Ornate didn’t begin to describe the carved frames surrounding each window or the scrollwork flourishes atop the columns supporting the porch roof. At the cornice, brackets curved like the unfurling leaves of a fiddleneck fern and were painted an eye-catching peach shade in contrast to the pale cream of the wood exterior. There were more splashes of peach paint to highlight a detail here, the dentil design there. And only a blind man could miss the massive bay windows projecting from each floor, plus two on the left side of the house, sunlight sparkling off the glass.

“You did make a profit off gold, Josiah.” Anger rose in Daniel’s throat. “Although I expected a grander house than this.”

Which made Daniel question where the rest of the money had gone. Undoubtedly into a fat bank account someplace.

Next door, a middle-aged woman peered through her shutters at him. When he didn’t smile a greeting, she let the wood slats drop back into place. Her house was even more ornate than Josiah’s and a floor taller. Up and down the length of Jones Street stood the signs of San Francisco prosperity, a jumble of turrets and bay windows. A recently erected church, its granite stones solid and sturdy compared to the wood houses surrounding it, towered on a distant corner. Hammers pounded on an adjacent
street, another home under construction. Every structure teetered on the edge of vertigo-inducing hills, clinging to the soil as if one false move would send them tumbling into the choppy waters of the bay.

The neighbor’s front door opened and a Chinese boy stepped onto the porch. Daniel had seen dozens of Chinese immigrants in San Francisco, but the sight of another managed to astonish him again.

The boy, who looked to be in his early teen years, stared at Daniel. His piercing eyes were dark as two bits of coal and his hair was the glossy blue-black of a crow’s wing. He looked a bit like a bird, watchful and waiting.

“Hullo,” Daniel called across the gap of twenty feet. “Do you know if anyone is home here?”

The Chinese boy folded his arms across his thigh-length tunic and didn’t answer.

“This is the Cady house, correct?” Daniel asked. Maybe the lad didn’t speak English. That would make him a pretty useless servant, though.

“Yes,” the boy finally said.

Daniel nodded and pressed the bell again. Someone had to answer the door eventually, and he’d stand here forever until they did, if it were required.

The handle of the rightmost door jiggled and then opened. A woman a few years younger than him—twenty-one or two, if he tried to guess—with mahogany hair and eyes the color of chocolate, stood in the doorway. A servant, he supposed, though her brown-striped dress was of a better material than he’d seen most servants wear and her corseted back was as straight as the tortured spine of a society miss. She was missing shoes, however. Strange.

“Yes?” She appeared confused, as if she’d been expecting someone else.

“I am looking for my father.”

A crinkle formed between her brows. She was actually rather pretty, and her gaze, shrewd. It had taken in the worn cuffs of his coat, the scuffed toe of his left boot, the dirt he could no longer clean from his trouser legs. The search for Josiah had taken longer and been more arduous than Daniel had expected, and he wasn’t one to stop for a new suit of clothes simply to make an impression on his father. As a result, he looked like a beggar. Which, by some folks’ definition, he precisely was.

“You have the wrong house,” she declared.

“Not according to that boy over there.” Daniel thrust his foot forward to prevent her from closing the door, which she looked ready to do any second. “I’d like it if you’d let me in so I don’t have to wait for him out here on the porch. And don’t worry; you won’t get in trouble with him. Just tell him I was being difficult.”

The corner of one eye twitched, the sole indication his comment hadn’t been well received. “I am not a servant worried about getting in trouble with anyone. I own this house.”

He hadn’t expected that. “He’s already skipped town . . .”

Her gaze softened. Had he sounded that crestfallen? “I don’t know who it is you are searching for, but if you need help, the Unitarian church on Geary Street runs a benevolent society—”

“I don’t need a benevolent society,” Daniel snapped. “I need to know where to contact my father.”

“Miss Whittier,” the middle-aged matron next door, who had come onto her front porch to stare along with her servant, called across. “Do you need any assistance there?”

“No, Mrs. Brentwood, I’m fine,” Miss Whittier answered, her attention hastily returning to Daniel. “I suggest you seek out the mission, sir. I also suggest you remove your foot so that I might shut my front door without damaging it.”