Maids of Misfortune (20 page)

Chapter Twenty-eight:
Tuesday morning, August 12, 1879

As day followed night, the day after washday found Annie ironing. Some of the routine morning chores, like raking the coals out of the kitchen range and delivering breakfast trays, had become easier with practice, on this her fourth day as a servant. But ironing was a different matter, and she was finding the second time around that ironing was even more difficult than it had been last Friday. Lifting the heavy irons badly exacerbated the pain in her shoulder and arms. Try as she might, she seemed unable to determine which of the four irons heating up on the top of the stove was the right temperature. The only reason she hadn’t yet ruined any of the sheets she was ironing was that she carefully tested each iron on a scrap of cloth before using it, but this was enormously time consuming. To make matters worse, the day was unusually hot for San Francisco in August, and the whole kitchen felt like the inside of an oven. The only advantage that the ironing of sheets and handkerchiefs had over some of her other chores was that it gave her a little time to think about what she had learned the day before.

While she hadn’t had success in finding the missing assets, she did feel she had found some important information about the members of Matthew’s household. Everything she had seen or heard reaffirmed Annie’s impression that Miss Nancy didn’t like Matthew’s business partner, Malcolm Samuels, and that at the very least she was extremely jealous of her sister-in-law, Amelia. If either of them had turned up dead, Annie would put the angry old woman at the top of her list of suspects. But kill Matthew? Because he decided to close up the house and take his wife to Europe? It seemed unlikely, unless the older woman was deranged. And the ledgers Miss Nancy had taken suggested otherwise; it was more like she was looking for proof that either Samuels or her sister-in-law were responsible for Matthew’s death. On the other hand, the ledgers may have been simply the household accounts, and Miss Nancy may have just remembered where they were and acted on impulse. Annie needed to get a better look at them. Maybe she would get a chance the next morning when Miss Nancy left to do the marketing.

Then here was Jeremy, who was acting like a young man with a guilty conscience, but she still felt his motivation seemed weak. Despite Nate’s suggestion that Jeremy might have killed his father in a fit of anger over his thwarted artistic dreams, this seemed rather farfetched, since he was clearly worse off now than when his father was alive. While Annie could imagine either Jeremy’s mother or his aunt killing Nellie on his behalf, if they thought she was threatening Jeremy in some fashion, she was having difficulty imagining either one of them killing Matthew to protect his son.

Then, maybe she was looking for too complex a motivation. According to Nate, Matthew had brought home nearly $1,000 in cash on Friday night, an enormous temptation to someone like Nellie or Cartier, and they would have had twenty-four hours to arrange with someone from outside to help stage a suicide to cover a plain and simple robbery. This seemed a rather more sophisticated murder than she would associate with Nellie or her boyfriend, Jack. She again speculated that the mysterious gentleman in Nellie’s life who prompted Jack’s jealousy was some sort of skilled confidence man or professional burglar. The same scenario could fit Cartier as well. Annie found Cartier’s emotional response when the police questioned her about Nellie’s death, combined with her secret correspondent, very suspicious.

Thinking of mysterious gentlemen reminded Annie of the gentleman who had been hanging around the alley Friday night. He said he was looking for Jeremy, but that could have been a form of misdirection. Perhaps he was the
friend
Cartier was supposed meet but who stood her up on Sunday. If he was her accomplice in Matthew’s murder, she might have even made up the story about him not showing. The Chief Detective certainly hadn’t appeared convinced by her description of how she spent her Sunday afternoon off. For that matter, no one had seemed to have a very convincing alibi for Sunday afternoon, and Annie didn’t envy the police in their job of trying to confirm the truth of everyone’s stories.

Oh well, that is their job. My job is to make sure I have searched every nook and cranny of this house for the missing assets,
Annie thought as she folded another less than adequately ironed sheet and put it in the basket at her feet.

So far, she had been able to pretty much rule out the basement areas and the first floor as hiding places. Even with the threat of Miss Nancy or Cartier dropping in to oversee her work, the excuse of giving everything a thorough cleaning had permitted her ample opportunities to systematically look in cupboards, dressers, side boards, and book shelves, behind mirrors, pictures, and under tables, couches, and chairs. Miss Nancy had actually been so impressed with Annie’s diligence in dusting that she had been moved to give her a compliment. There had been sufficient occasions as well when Wong wasn’t in the kitchen for her to look through all the cupboards, bins, and boxes in the kitchen and scullery. He had walked in a few times to discover her with her head stuck in the depths of a back cupboard, but he hadn’t challenged her airy excuse that she was just trying to figure out where all the pots and pans went.

She had been able to check out all the guest bedrooms while stripping their sheets and dusting; she also felt pretty sure she had done a thorough search of Miss Nancy’s room yesterday. Mrs. Voss’s rooms had been more difficult to search, since she went downstairs so seldom. Annie had given her sitting room only a piecemeal investigation, snatching the chance to look in the ornate cabinets and small writing desk when she came in to clean out the fireplace and do a light dusting each morning. Tonight, however, Annie would be attending Mrs. Voss after dinner because it was Cartier’s night out, so she might find some chances to complete her search, particularly in the bedroom. That left Cartier and Jeremy’s rooms on the third floor. Somehow, over the next two days, she needed to get to those rooms because, when she left the house tomorrow evening for her night out, she would really like to shed her servant masquerade for good.

Annie got her chance to examine Jeremy’s rooms in the early afternoon, when Wong offered to spell her at the ironing. She had just dried the last of the lunch dishes and hadn’t been able to suppress a deep sigh as she turned and looked at the mound of shirts, table linens, and petticoats she still had left to iron.

Wong had smiled gently at her and said, “Miss Lizzie, I think that it might be a more efficient use of our time and talents if I took charge of ironing the more delicate items while you made up the beds on the third floor and cleaned master Jeremy’s room, now that he has finally left the house. You may have to take over for me when we get closer to dinner time, but by then there should only be table linens.”

Annie refrained from going over and hugging him but simply said, “Thank you, Wong. I think that is a wonderful suggestion, and I will be glad to help in any way I can with dinner.”

She then went to the corner where the cleaning implements were kept. She put four dust rags, the bar of soap, a scrub brush, and the tin of furniture wax into an empty pail, then picked up a bucket of hot water and a broom, which was leaning against the wall, nodding to Wong as she started up the back stairs. When she reached the third floor, she stood for a minute, undecided about which of the three rooms dedicated to Jeremy’s use she should start cleaning first.

She wished she were sure Cartier was downstairs with her mistress so she could try to open her door. She had been able to try twice in the past two days, when she was sure Cartier was occupied, but each time she found the door locked, which was suspicious in itself. With Cartier leaving for her night out, Annie hoped for a lot more time to find a way to search the room. Maybe she could get Miss Nancy to agree that she needed to get in the room to tidy it before Cartier came home in the morning. Given the enmity between the two women, she just might be successful. Thinking about this plan, Annie picked up her pails and entered Jeremy's rooms.

He had the whole south side of the third floor for himself, with just Cartier's room and two guest rooms across the hall. Annie had been in his dressing room at the front of the house last evening but not his bedroom or the large back room that acted as his studio. The dressing room was easily searched; Wong evidently kept this room in order. Apart from wiping some water drops from the washstand and giving it a good polish and sweeping the bare wooden floor, there wasn't much to do. She did go through his wardrobe, even taking the time to run her hands through his pants and jacket pockets and tipping over his hats to see if she could find anything. But either Jeremy had not developed the habit that both John and her father had possessed of depositing any stray bit of flotsam and jetsam into their coat pockets or Wong was very thorough in cleaning out those pockets when he put Jeremy’s clothes away. She also noted that Jeremy’s shoes came in all styles; and, although most had rounded toes, there was at least one pair of evening pumps that had pointed ones. Annie had a difficult time imaging him wearing these shoes on a rendezvous with Nellie on the beach.

The next room proved to be equally unrewarding. She dusted, but apart from the usual toiletries on the dresser, there was nothing of interest in Jeremy's bedroom. After stripping off the sheets, she checked under the mattress, finding nothing. Again, Annie had the strong impression that Wong had been there before her. The room was neat, there was very little dust, the clothes in the dresser drawers were carefully arranged, and there was absolutely no clutter in the room.

In fact, Annie felt little of Jeremy's presence in the room at all; it reminded her strikingly of the guestrooms she had cleaned earlier in the week. Open, airy, fashionably furnished, but sterile, and not a scrap of paper that might represent a piece of evidence.

Annie was quite curious about Jeremy's artistry. She thought it strange that none of the artwork that hung elsewhere in the house was by him, not even in his mother's sitting room. Even if he were a wretched painter, she would think that a parent would be willing to hang a small example of his work, at least in the private rooms in the house. Presumably Jeremy's art had been such a sore subject with Matthew that Amelia didn't dare exhibit it anywhere, or maybe he just talked about painting but never actually painted. In any event, Annie opened the door that connected the bedroom to the studio next to it with great anticipation.

Her first thought was that Wong had clearly not had free rein in this room. Her second thought was that, although incredibly untidy, the room bore impressive signs that Jeremy was really a working artist, not just the dilettante that Annie expected. Unlike the rest of the house, where dark paneling or fancy wallpaper predominated, these walls were painted plain white and hung with a variety of striking pieces of art. A good number of canvasses, their backs to the walls, were leaning all over the place, and paint tubes, turpentine-drenched rags, and brushes obscured the surfaces of every table in the room. A
chaise lounge
sat against one wall, and an easel containing a blank canvas stood squarely in a shaft of sun. Yet, despite the sunshine, the room seemed rather gloomy and cold, giving off a feeling of abandonment. Apparently, no fire had been lit in the fireplace for several days.

Aware of time passing too swiftly, Annie first looked hurriedly at the paintings and etchings hanging on the walls. She determined that they all had been done by people other than Jeremy, many of them with French names. While most of the paintings were rather small, they were all quite lovely, if unusual. Among the oils, pale pastels predominated, and most intriguing of all, she found that when she came up close to some of the paintings, the scenery dissolved into mist or broke up into motes of light. Annie recalled that one of John's uncles had brought a painting like this back from a trip to Paris in '74, by someone named Monet. Sure enough, several of the dissolving paintings bore this signature. All the work hanging on Jeremy's walls was so different from the dark formal paintings to which she was accustomed that she had difficulty tearing herself away from them. But she knew she had to get back to her task before Cartier or Miss Nancy came in to find out what was taking her so long.

Despite her initial impression that the room would be difficult to search because it was such a jumble of miscellaneous objects, Annie found there were actually few hiding places. A container with pipe-smoking equipment on the mantel, a handy wooden carrying-box for Jeremy's painting gear, and a large trunk that seemed to hold an assortment of props were all easily ransacked and found innocent.

Finally, Annie discovered that one of the pieces of furniture that she thought was a table was, in reality, a small desk, almost entirely hidden by stacked blank canvasses. This was crammed full of papers, along with two palette knives, charcoal, pencils, chalk, a ruler, a drawing compass, an empty tumbler with a dusty scum on the bottom, sealing wax, and a small photograph of Mrs. Voss, apparently posed along the seaside. Her fingers trembling in haste, Annie shuffled through the papers. Most seemed to be bills for art supplies or bills from a tailor and a boot maker, including a diplomatically worded request from the former for Jeremy to please pay off some of the debits on his accounts. There were also a few letters, with Paris postmarks, that seemed innocent enough, although Annie's grammar school French was very rusty. But nowhere was there evidence of the thick rectangular sheets of paper that stock certificates were normally printed on nor of the bank notes issued by the Bank of California nor any packets of a mysterious powder marked cyanide.