The Bohemian Murders (31 page)

“Aha!” My exclamation caused Junior to stop midmonologue. I held up my prize: a shoe that, if I were not much mistaken, would be an exact match to that on Sabrina Howard’s one shod foot when her body was recovered. “This shoe, Junior—do you remember where and when you found it?”

He took the shoe in his dirty, gnarled hands and brought it up to within an inch or two of his ruined eyes. Shaking his head he said, “Ain’t worth nothin’, this shoe. One shoe don’t do a body no good. Thought I might find t’other, that’s why I kep it. A pair of ’em would bring a pretty penny, that’s fer sure. Good leather, that.” He handed it back to me.

“How much will you take for this shoe? I’d like to buy it.”

Junior named a price that was certainly high for a single shoe, but I didn’t dicker because I wanted him to rack his brain for me. “Where, exactly, did you find it?” I asked again, since he seemed to have forgotten my question.

More sandpapery
scritch-scratch.
“Wasn’t too fer from where I live. Found it stuck in the rocks above the tideline. Couldn’t think how it woulda got there. Couldn’t’ve washed up that high, weren’t stuck so hard you couldn’t pull it right out.”

“So you found the shoe on Point Joe,” I said with a sinking heart. For although I could easily imagine the scenario—the desperate struggle, the stuck foot, the twisted ankle, the shoe wedged in the rock as she fell to her doom—that location was not the place where Sabrina’s shoe should have been found.

Junior straightened up as best he could, turned, and gestured down the coast to where Point Joe was visible as a finger of land extending into the sea far across the shallow curve of Spanish Bay. “Called after my pa, Point Joe, that’s right.”

Like a huge red India-rubber ball the sun slipped beneath the horizon, for one moment blazing with such splendor that both Junior and I were rapt. “Reckon I be blessed to live where I can see that every night, even if the old house Pa built be falling apart,” Junior said when the last sliver of scarlet flashed and died.

“I reckon,” I agreed, with an involuntary sigh. I stuck the shoe in my pocket and began to shove the other stuff back into the burlap sack. “But to get back to the shoe,” I persisted, “when did you find it? How long ago?”

“Oh, it’s been a while. More’n a month.”

So not only the appearance of the shoe, but the timing was right for it to have been Sabrina’s. I asked Junior to come back to the lighthouse with me so I could pay him, and as we were walking I recalled his keen sense of direction when he’d told me how to find Braxton Furnival’s house. He had wandered this stretch of coast all his life; surely he could help with this dilemma?

It could do no harm to ask. “Junior, tell me something. The current flows southward along the coast, doesn’t it?”

“Yep. Now that’s mostly, but it depends. You got your wind, you got your waves and your swells relatin’ to the direction of the wind, and o’ course you got your tidal currents.”

He was losing me but I didn’t interrupt.

“Then you got these other deep currents come up from time to time, like we been having this winter.” Junior wagged his head back and forth rhythmically, like a metronome. “Haven’t seen such a winter since back before the turn of the century. Too many storms, bad weather.”

“What about these currents we’ve been having this winter?”

“Odd, that’s what they are. Odd. Back last month we had us a warm current up from the south with a northerly flow. Came along with them storms started south of the Sur. You remember.”

“So last month if something went into the ocean, for example, and got caught in one of these currents with the northerly flow, it would travel up the coast, not down? North, not south?”

“Exackly,” said Junior, “you got it. You live by the water long enough, you get to know these things.”

“That’s very useful. Thank you.”

I paid him, said good night, and took my prize up to the watch room. The shoe was new, barely worn on the sole but deeply scarred along one side. I believed it was Sabrina’s. I believed she had been hit over the head and thrown into the ocean at Point Joe, and from there she had drifted not down to Carmel but up to Point Pinos, because of that anomalous warm current with the northerly flow. Perhaps the shoe was not perfect evidence, but I thought it could be used to shake up the murderer, perhaps enough to get a confession. First thing tomorrow I would send a telegram to Wish Stephenson.

I thanked God or whatever had led me out onto the platform to find Joe, Junior through the binoculars, and then I silently thanked Junior for being such a pack rat,
because I’d been close to accusing the wrong person of Sabrina Howard’s murder.

I struggled in my bed, twisting and turning, caught in the bedclothes. I was having a nightmare from which I could not break free, a nightmare like the ones I’d had for so long after the earthquake. I dreamed of fire, of San Francisco, of my whole world burning. Burning and burning and burning!

Wake up, I told myself, wake up!

Finally I did. And there was smoke, and it wasn’t a dream.

I
coughed, fought my way out of the bedclothes, and leapt to my feet. Automatically I reached for my robe at the foot of the bed and with shaking hands put it on, even as I tried to gain control of the fear that raced through every nerve and vein and sinew. I threw back the blackout shutters, without which no one could sleep in a lighthouse; the revolving light immediately came round and revealed thick gray smoke seeping over the window-sill. I’d left the window cracked for ventilation. The small patch of my brain that remained unparalyzed by terror told me I might not be in immediate danger. This fire was outside.

“Quincy!” I had been sleeping with my walking stick beside the bed. I grabbed it and unsheathed the hidden blade with a swish, letting the base of the cane fall wherever it would. I hadn’t the patience to wait for the light to revolve around again, and the floor was black as pitch so I couldn’t find my slippers. Barefoot and blind, I tore
out of my bedroom beneath the eaves. Up or down? No time to debate. I went down, based on a hasty conclusion that the barn and Quincy’s lean- to were on fire, not the lighthouse itself.

Smoke rose through the stairwell, gray and wispy, winding its way up to the height of the lantern. Smoke that came through the open front door …

“Hey-a-a-ah!” I yelled at the top of my voice, and yelled again, as a year or more ago I had instinctively learned the reason for war cries; and I charged full tilt at the bulky figure silhouetted against the open door when once again the light came around. My robe and gown billowed with the speed of my flight, and my long, unbound hair streamed out behind me. I daresay I must have appeared a screaming banshee—but this banshee was no specter, she was armed, and knew how to use her blade.

The intruder was no match for me, especially as the light had gone as quickly as it came. I felt the tip of my blade pierce flesh, heard a grunt and the sound of something heavy, with a metallic clunk, dropping to the floor.

“Back!” I commanded. “Move back! As you’ve already learned, I know what I’m doing. I wouldn’t hesitate to slash your throat.”

He backed into the doorway, and when the light came around I saw it was Pete Carlson. For the space of a heartbeat this confused me, but then the fleeting light gleamed for a moment in his eyes before moving on, and they were the same eyes. The eyes of my attacker, the bandito in the woods.

“You bastard!” I said, jamming the tip of the blade into his throat.

“Hey!” He sounded scared. As he went on he began to whine. “Leave off, lady. None of this was my idea. I’m just the hired hand!”

“You can tell me later. And believe me, you will—you’ll tell me everything!” I tossed hair out of my eyes. “But right now you’re going to help me undo some of the damage you’ve done here.”

“Hey, I didn’t touch the lighthouse. Lighthouse is gov’ment property. I’m not that stupid.”

I pulled the tip of my blade back an inch from his throat. “Bully for you. Now turn around. That’s right.” I put the rapier’s point between his shoulder blades. “Move!”

As soon as I went through the doorway I saw fire-glow on Hettie’s carefully cultivated rectangle of lawn. I heard the roar and crackle and lick of flame, tasted bitter ash on my tongue. I shot a glance over my shoulder and saw: The barn was burning.

San Francisco’s post-earthquake conflagration had left me with a morbid fear of fire. For months afterward the simple stoking of a cookstove’s belly had been too much; I would cringe before it, my hands would shake. Yet now, fueled by my own rage, I knew I could face this fire without the slightest hesitation. Relentlessly, step by step, I drove before me the man who had hurt me and my friends and invaded the sanctuary of my home.

“I ain’t going in that!” Pete wailed. “You can’t make me!”

“Is that so?” I jabbed, forcing him to keep moving. By the firelight I saw blood seeping through his shirt where I had already wounded his left shoulder. “I am armed and you are not. You dropped your weapon, didn’t you? What was it? A gun?”

“Yeah,” he sneered. Suddenly he ducked and turned on his heel to face me, making a grabbing motion with his right hand. In my super-alert state I did not even have to think, but stepped back and with a flick of my wrist slashed his palm. He looked tremendously surprised.

“Any more false moves and I swear I’ll run you through! Now walk toward the barn. You are going to get Quincy out of the fire, and release the animals. If you burn up yourself in the process, it will serve you right!”

The terrified cows were mooing, bellowing, really, at the top of their lungs, while the bay mare’s hooves pounded the walls with the force of John Henry’s hammer. Over and over I yelled Quincy’s name. Just as my captive and I got close enough for me to send Pete through the flames, the door of the lean- to flew outward with explosive force.

Quincy had kicked out his own door. His spare form
hurtled out and he landed rolling in the grass, coughing, wheezing, spitting. The first words out of his raspy throat were “Bessie! Cows!” but I was already ahead of him. Without a shred of mercy I forced Pete Carlson to unlatch the burning barn door and let the horse and the Holsteins out. Sparks sizzled in his hair and burned holes in his clothes and so of course he commenced whining, but he was not badly hurt. I have observed that it is always the bullies who are most cowardly at heart.

Quincy recovered quickly. At what cost to his healing collarbone I do not know, but he tied Pete Carlson to a fence post, muttering all the while, “I told you he was no good, Fremont, I told you he was no good.” Then Quincy and I, using the emergency water tank, put out the fire. The blaze had not been so huge as it had at first seemed in the black of night, and due to the isolation of the lighthouse, I doubted the Pacific Grove Fire Department had been alerted. That was fine with me.

Quincy wanted to go for the police.

“No,” I said, “if you will trust me, Quincy, I have something else in mind.”

“Fremont, I trust you almost as much as I do Miz Hettie, and that’s a fact!” He looked both earnest and comical, with his smudged face and sparse gray hair sticking out from his head in odd directions.

I smiled and patted his arm in comradely fashion. “Thank you. Pete is going to provide me with the answers to some important questions. I’ll tell you later all about it, but for now, would you kindly just keep an eye on him while I go and put on some clothes?”

It was five o’clock in the morning; the sun would not rise for some time yet. The fog had begun to roll in from the south, over the Santa Lucias, while Quincy and I were putting out the fire, and now a dense whitish mist covered everything. I had seen thicker fogs in San Francisco, so I was not at all concerned. There was about five feet of visibility around the Maxwell, which was plenty for me. I turned and addressed Pete Carlson, whom Quincy and I had previously tied with sturdy ropes in the
passenger seat: “Now you are going to tell me some things, because if you do I’ll see to it that you get some special consideration when I take you to the police. And if you do not—well, who knows what I might do?” I paused to let him think about that, then resumed. “My first question is: Do you know the whereabouts of Phoebe Broom?” My heart pounded as I waited for the answer. The longer he delayed, the more I was afraid my hopes were soon to be dashed.

Finally Pete said sullenly, “Yeah, I know.”

With my heart in my throat I asked, “Is she alive or dead?”

Pete laughed. It was an ugly, mirthless sound. “She’s alive. That Mr. Braxton High-Falutin’ Furnival ain’t got the stomach for killin’. He near-bout turned me in himself just for hittin’ you upside the head. Said I could’ve kilt you. As if I’d give a shit.”

I winced, but nevertheless this was interesting stuff. “Then the first order of business now is: You are going to give me directions to wherever Phoebe is hidden.” I started the motor, which Quincy had previously cranked for me.

“Well,” Pete drawled, recovering his confidence, “I just don’t know as I can do that. For all that Brax is a yellow-bellied ladies’ man, he paid me pretty good.”