A City Tossed and Broken (12 page)

She is sharper than Mrs. Crandall, however. Earlier we were sitting in the parlor and she was going over what was in the larder — food is scarce — and lamenting that she only had a few eggs left and no hope of getting more. What could she do with only three eggs? I suggested she whip the eggs into a mayonnaise and stir it into the fish soup. I asked her if she had garlic. Papa had taught me this trick.

She stopped what she was doing and gave me a quick surprised glance, for what rich man’s daughter knows how to make a garlic mayonnaise?

I said I used to slip downstairs to the kitchen and talk to the cook in Philadelphia.

“I see,” she murmured.

I then spoiled my explanation by rising in order to clear the table. I sat down quickly with a thump. I don’t think she noticed.

It is not easy to remember that I am a rich girl who never spent time in a tavern kitchen, never cleared a table.

The sisters are polite to each other, but it’s rather like the past three days — dynamite could go off at any moment.

Tomorrow I am going to tell Mr. Crandall the truth.

April 22, 1906

Sunday

4
P.M.

Oh, diary, I am trapped worse than before.

This afternoon Mr. Crandall called me into the study. He had skipped church in order to walk to Russian Hill to check on his house. It is still standing — the neighbors who remained were able to save his, as it stood in the middle of the ones they were saving. Mrs. Crandall is already making plans to return.

He asked if I had something to tell him. I felt my heart start to beat so quickly. My face flushed. He saw my discomfort and sighed.

Then he told me that upon inspecting his house he met a young man who was searching for me. Could I guess who that was? I said no, my heart still threatening to leap out of my chest.

“Your fiancé,” he said.

My face registered my shock, but luckily he thought I was only surprised at being caught out.

“You might have told me,” he said.

I couldn’t speak, which he took for embarrassment. I was remembering Lily’s face in the moments right before the world exploded.
I am running
to
something,
she had said. Now I know what she was planning. Not to run away, but to run away with someone and get married.

She was in love. That was the light I saw in her eyes.

“He has been searching the city for you,” he said. “He was quite overcome to hear that you are, indeed, alive. He had been at the house and saw that it had been burned to the ground.” Then he hesitated. “I am not your father, Lily. Yet I am here to protect you, to stand in for your father. This young man is not suitable for you.”

He drummed his fingers on the desk and began his lecture while I wondered,
Who is Lily’s sweetheart? Who could it be?
And suddenly such sadness washed over me. I thought of her happy face, ready to start her life. It wasn’t fair that at her happiest moment the walls came crashing down.

And what of this man, her fiancé? Panic and shame hit me with the force of a slap. Mr. Crandall had no doubt told him that Lily was alive. He had despaired, and then he had been handed his happiness, and now I would have to tell him that she was dead. He would lose her twice. I would have to deliver that unimaginable pain.

I had stopped listening, but then I heard Mr. Crandall say this:

“In short, Mr. Jewell is not a gentleman.”

And my mind stopped short and turned around.

Andrew Jewell? And
Lily
?

And suddenly I remembered Lily on the train, always taking that walk while her mother napped, and that glimpse I saw of her, standing with a tall, slim man, their backs to me. . . .

But he’d seen us on the street just a few days before. He’d heard Mr. Crandall call me Lily.

Or perhaps I was mistaken. I must have been mistaken. Or else why was he here?

My mind whirled. Could Andrew Jewell have loved Lily?

“And I must urge you to dissolve the engagement.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” I said. “It was a mistake.”

It was almost comical, Mr. Crandall’s look of surprise. His mouth dropped open. It was clear he hadn’t expected his lecture to work quite so efficiently.

“I’m happy to hear you’ve come to your senses,” Mr. Crandall said.

“I will write to him,” I said.

“That would be difficult, as he has no home, along with half of San Francisco,” Mr. Crandall pointed out. “In any event, he is waiting in the parlor.”

I had to break off just now as there was a knock on the door. Mrs. Flynn has brought me a cup of tea. As she changed the dressings on my hands, she said gently that I could stay as long as I liked in her house.

I couldn’t meet her eyes.

“You don’t know me,” I said.

She turned over my hands very gently so that my red, blistered palms showed. “I know enough,” she said.

Now I’ve wrapped a borrowed shawl around myself. My whole body is shaking as I contemplate what I am facing, what I have to do.

But let me go back to when I walked into the parlor to see Andrew Jewell.

It took every bit of courage I possessed to walk through that door. I didn’t know what I would find, an anxious fiancé overjoyed at seeing his beloved . . . and then crushed by the new information that she had perished. Or would I find someone who had guessed my deception?

I wasn’t sure what would be worse.

He was standing by the window when I slipped inside and closed the door after me. I didn’t say anything for a long moment as he turned. We stood facing each other and then, slowly, he smiled.

“So, Jock Bonner’s daughter,” he said. “Do you want to tell me what scheme you’ve been working?”

I hesitated, not knowing what to say or where to start.

“Come, come now. Shyness doesn’t become you. What happened to Lily, first of all?”

“I am sorry to tell you this, Mr. Jewell, but your fiancée was killed instantly the morning of the quake. I realize now that she was on her way to see you.”

“Yes. I had persuaded her on the train journey to run away together.”

“You must be experiencing great grief right now.”

“Terrible grief,” he said. “I am on my knees.”

“Yes, I can see how much the news has affected you.”

He didn’t miss the scorn in my voice. “Poor Lily,” he said. “Such an unhappy girl. So ready to have someone to depend on. I would have
tried
to make her happy. It was not to be.”

“So you really meant to marry her?”

“That was the plan.”

“But Mr. Sump would have disinherited her.”

“I had some reasons to convince him not to oppose his daughter’s choice.”

“You mean you would have blackmailed him.”

He smiled. “Such an ugly word for persuasion.”

I sat down, shocked at the depths of this man’s cruelty. Poor Lily. He hadn’t loved her at all.

“Now,” he said. “Tell me what happened, and how you have managed to fool Mr. Crandall.”

I told him how Mr. Crandall had found me and at first just assumed I was Lily, and that I didn’t correct him. That I wanted him to agree to give the tavern back to my parents since Mr. Sump had cheated them out of it. He could make things right.

He just laughed. “You little fool, Crandall is as crooked as Sump,” he said. “Now he gets to handle all the money. I can imagine how that thrills him. He wants to
be
Sump. Now he can be. He’ll never agree. Unless . . .”

I watched the calculation in his face. He studied me closely for a moment. “So Lily is dead, and you are alive, and now you are an heiress to the Sump millions. You’re quite the gambler for a young lady.”

I deserved that, but I didn’t like hearing it. “And you are a two-bit thief who would take advantage of a sweet, trusting girl like Lily,” I said.

“Hardly two bits, petal. And Lily was . . . not so sweet. She wanted an escape, and I provided one. Is what I was going to do much worse than what you did, Miss Bonner?”

“I had a reason.”

“Oh, we all have
reasons
.”

His smile made me feel cold. Fear coiled inside me. I realized that I had no idea how far this man would go to get back what had almost been in his grasp.

“I’m going to tell Mr. Crandall the truth,” I said, starting toward the door. “This has gone far enough.”

He grabbed my arm. “Oh, no, you aren’t, petal,” he said. “We’re in this together now.”

“No,” I said. “I’m not like you. I know of your association with Mr. Sump. I know he paid you and I know how much. I know that you were involved in the scheme to cheat my father out of our tavern.”

“What a suspicious little mind you have. I’m impressed.”

“I don’t have mere suspicions. I have proof!”

There is where I made my error, diary. I spoke without thinking because I was so afraid and angry.

He cocked his head and narrowed his gaze. “You have proof, you say? How? Where?”

I didn’t answer, and he took my hand and squeezed it. The burns I had sustained from Friday screamed in protest, and I let out a gasp of pain. He merely asked me
where
again. And squeezed.

“A ledger!” I gasped. I fell back on the sofa as he released me.

“Of course that old miser had to write everything down. Well, that makes things more interesting, doesn’t it? Where is this ledger?”

I told him I had buried it in a fireproof box.

He paced around the room. Despite the pain in my hand, I felt a kind of numbness. I couldn’t think of what to do or how to stop this. It was as though a spool of thread had fallen from my lap and was now busily unraveling itself as it rolled away across the floor.

“This was a brilliant stroke, Miss Bonner! We have him now. The question is, how best to work the scheme. . . .”

He told me his plan. We follow through on the engagement. We marry quickly. No one will find it odd — it’s what people do after disasters, seek a new life, he said.

“Once you marry, you can control Sump’s money,” he said.

“You mean you will control it,” I said.

“We will seek an equitable disbursement,” he said. “Don’t worry, we will share in our good fortune. After a suitable period, I will run off. Poor Lily Sump, deserted by her no-good husband. You will go on with your life, with or without Sump’s money, that’s none of my concern. My guess is that you will get quite used to feeling comfortable in silks and satins, and will remain Lily Sump. Unless some long-lost relative shows up, that’s always a danger. But that’s your dilemma.”

He told me not to be so shocked, that he had to make his way in the world just like any man, and did I think Mr. Sump was anything less than a crook himself?

I told him there was a flaw in his plan. Mr. Crandall was my guardian and he would never agree to the marriage.

“You let me handle him,” he said. “Remember, we have the ledger.”

I didn’t like the way he said
we
, diary.

In a match such as this, the one who is afraid, who shows that fear — loses. He could see how afraid I was. He knew he had me cornered.

He told me I had no choice. It was either this, or jail. He would have no compunction, he assured me, turning me in to the police. He would play the grieving fiancé. Sympathy would be on his side — how terrible it was, he said mockingly, to walk the charred streets of San Francisco looking for his love, find out she was alive, and then have his hopes dashed! I would be thrown into a cell and no doubt Mr. Crandall would turn the key.

“Do you know what they would do to you?” he said. “To someone who would take the identity of a poor dead girl?”

“I can’t go to jail, I’m only fourteen,” I said.

“Really? Such a prodigy! What impressive criminal skills you have at such a young age. Don’t worry, there are worse places than jail for criminal children.”

There was a knock at the door. “Is everything all right?” Mr. Crandall asked through the door.

Jewell grabbed my bandaged hand and pulled me to my feet.

“Let us tell him the happy news,” he hissed in my ear.

I have to keep stopping and walking around the room. I feel as though I can’t breathe. As though the smoke rising from the ruins is inside my lungs. I cradle my hand against my chest. It feels hot and painful.

Mr. Crandall coolly informed Jewell that I was under his guardianship and could not marry without his permission until the age of twenty-one. As I was only sixteen — or, at least, that’s what Mr. Crandall thought — Mr. Jewell would have to wait five years.

“And mark my words, you will wait every second of it,” he said.

Jewell played his part to the end. He said in a revoltingly steady voice that he would wait every one of those seconds in order to achieve the dream of union with his beloved.

Mr. Crandall snorted.

“I know who and what you are, Mr. Jewell,” he said. “And if you think I would allow my client’s daughter to marry you, you are mistaken.”

“Say what you wish, Mr. Crandall.” He turned, his next words to me. “I am not giving up.”

As I saw him to the front door, he said in my ear, “I will come for you, and we will dig up that book.”

April 23, 1906

Monday

3
A.M.

I will leave and he will never find me.

But where will I go?

4
A.M.

Jake’s eyes are haunting me.

5
A.M.

If only I could go back and change everything. Everything.

How can I extricate myself from this web I have woven?

3
P.M.

We have returned to Russian Hill. Mr. Crandall got his automobile back, much the worse for wear, but still running.

We said good-bye to Mrs. Flynn and it was obvious that this would not mark a new beginning for the two families. Mrs. Crandall made it clear that she did not approve of her sister’s choice in husbands or appreciate her pretty, modest house. She had bigger ambitions. It was also clear that Mrs. Flynn bid us good-bye with relief.