Uneasy Spirits: A Victorian San Francisco Mystery (41 page)

“
Actually, sir, they just made the announcement of his appointment official this morning. Those that worked under him in the sixties when he was Chief before say he’s a straight shooter. Be good for the department to have an experienced man at the top. Rumor is there’s even to be money for some new hires and new uniforms, blue like in New York City. The men are right excited about that.”

Nate looked at the pale gray police uniform McGee was wearing, which always reminded him painfully of the Confederacy and his older brothers’ deaths, and he nodded. “Have you come off patrol, or are you still on the night beat?”

“
I did get put on day patrol last month. However, seeing that it’s All Hallow’s Eve and there tends to be mischief done this night, some just harmless pranks, some not so harmless, we were asked to beef up patrols. I go on at eleven. I can wear the uniform off-duty, long as I don’t have on the badge or gun. I locked them up in Aunt Bea’s pantry, till it’s time for me to leave.”

Annie had come up to him and Patrick during this last interchange, and she said, “Patrick, your aunt asked me to give you this bowl of apples to take outside. I gather that we are about to have a round of ‘snap the apple.’ Are you going to use the apricot tree again this year?”

“
Yes, ma’am. Kathleen’s middle brother, Aiden, has already shimmied up and tied the rope. Aunt Bea won’t let us do the candle, says there’ll be no singed faces at this party, so we’ll put an apple on each end of the stick. Doubles your chance to get one, although with Aiden swinging the rope, I doubt it’ll be all that easy. Ma’am, sir, I best get out there.” McGee bobbed his head and threaded his way through the crowded kitchen.

“
Candle?” Nate asked Annie.

“
Yes, evidently an ‘old country’ variation on the game. Last year, Patrick’s older brother put a lighted candle on one end of the stick and the apple on the other. One girl had already set her bangs on fire before Beatrice heard what was going on. You should have seen her! She sailed out of that kitchen and into the yard like a fully gunned frigate and smacked the young man upside the head with a wooden spoon, calling him every kind of fool. I gather he wasn’t invited to come tonight. I just hope he isn’t out creating some of that mischief Patrick was speaking about. Would be a shame if he has to arrest his own brother.”

“
Can I get you something to drink before we go outside?” Nate asked.

“
Please do, and why don’t you get us some of those little round cakes that have just come out of the oven?”

Annie then turned away from him to greet Jamie’s mother, who accompanied the two spinster seamstresses, Miss Millie and Miss Minnie, into the kitchen. Nate bowed politely and moved over to say good evening to Mrs. O’Rourke and get the refreshments. He always had the uneasy feeling these two former Southern Belles, who had to be in their late sixties at least, compared him to the gentlemen friends of their youth and found him wanting.

While Nate piled a plate high with small nut-filled cakes and oatmeal cookies, Mrs. O’Rourke handed him a glass cup of punch and said, “Please drink up, Mr. Dawson. I think you will find there is just a hint of rum alongside the fruit in this punch. A recipe that Annie’s Uncle Timothy, god rest his soul, taught me when I was just a young kitchen maid. Made it the night our Annie girl was born, right in this house, right in the room she now has for her own. Annie’s mother and father were fine folks, and they’d be so proud of their little girl.”

They both looked over to where Annie and Mrs. Hewitt were getting the two old ladies settled in the chairs next to the fireplace. Biddy, the Framptons’ servant, brought them a plate of cakes and some punch. Just then Dandy ran into the kitchen, yipping excitedly, followed by Jamie, who had come to drag his mother outside to see him try his hand at snap the apple. Nate became aware that the fiddling had stopped and there was much clapping and laughing coming from the back yard.

“
Master Jamie, you put the leash back on Dandy before he trips up someone,” said Mrs. O’Rourke. “That’s right, and hand the leash over to your ma if you’re going to try for the apple. I’ll be out in a second to watch.”

Mrs. O’Rourke glanced around the kitchen to make sure everything was under control, and then, with a small frown, she turned to Nate and said, “I worry if Dandy is underfoot that someone won’t see him, he’s so small. But I couldn’t tell Jamie to leave him up in his room, with him being the hero and all for saving our Annie.”

Annie appeared at this moment at his side and said, “Good, you got the cakes. Let me take the cups. We need to go out and watch Jamie. You come too, Beatrice.” She grabbed the two cups and was on her way out, shooing Mrs. O’Rourke in front of her, before Nate had a chance to ask what Mrs. O’Rourke had meant about Dandy saving Annie.

Nate paused at the door, stunned at what he saw. Annie’s aunt and uncle had the good fortune to buy the property on O’Farrell in the 1850s, before the city lots had been sub-divided, so they hadn’t been forced to build one of the narrow row houses that dominated most of the city. Not only did this mean there was actually a tiny bit of space between the house and its neighbors, but also the back yard was comparatively spacious, and every inch had been transformed for this party.

Snaggle-toothed jack-o’-lanterns leered down from the tops of both side fences, and two torches placed at the end of the lot added to the light that spilled out of all the back windows. The large garden plot at the back of the lot, stripped and readied for winter, now hosted a traditional All Hallow’s Eve bonfire; carefully tended by several older men, who, Annie whispered, were Kathleen’s uncles. The laundry lines were down, and the right side of the paved yard had been turned into an improvised dance floor, with chairs and stools and crates pushed to the edges for seating.

On the left was the apricot tree and a dangling rope was tied around a lower limb, ending in a stick with apples stuck on both ends. A young man, probably Kathleen’s brother Aiden, was in the tree madly swinging the rope and twirling it to the frustration of a younger boy and the general laughter of the watching crowd.

“
The boy trying for the apple is Kathleen’s youngest brother, Ian,” said Annie. “She is determined that he stay in school, not be apprenticed like her other two brothers. She says he’s the smartest of them all and he should be given the chance to get a profession. She gives most of her wages to the uncle who took him in when her father died, so that he won’t send him out to work. She’s hoping that Ian and Jamie will take a shine to each other, thinks Jamie would be a good influence on him.”

Nate smiled, thinking about the friendship he had developed with Tim Newsome, and the scrapes they got into, and he wondered who would influence whom. Ian finally got his apple, to great cheers, and came over to slap Jamie on the back and push him into the circle for his try. Looked like Kathleen might get her wish.

While they sipped their punch and ate their snacks, Nate and Annie stood with Barbara Hewitt and watched the younger children try for their apples. Mrs. O’Rourke disappeared into the kitchen at some point and then came out with a large cake on a platter, which occasioned a shout and much pushing of young ladies to the fore. Kathleen, Biddy, Biddy’s cousin Tilly, and about six other girls of varying ages, whom Nate didn’t recognize but assumed were some of Beatrice’s nieces, stood in line, each getting a slice of the cake.

Annie leaned over to Nate and said, “It’s
barmbrack
cake. Beatrice has baked a ring in it, and tradition has it that the girl who gets the slice with the ring will marry within the year. Oh, my, look at Patrick, he seems to be taking a great interest in who’s going to get the prize!”

“
Saints preserve me, I’ve got it!” shouted Biddy, waving the ring in the air. “Nearly swallowed it, don’t you know. I hate to think what that would have foretold!”

One of the older lads, who had been anxiously watching the girls eat their cake, came over to Biddy and whispered in her ear. When she laughed, he pulled her over to the dance floor, where couples were congregating as the fiddler began a tune. Nate asked Annie and Mrs. Hewitt if they wanted to take a seat around the edge of the dancers, but Mrs. Hewitt said she needed to check on Jamie, and Annie looked up at him and said she would rather join the dancers. Nate readily agreed, mentally thanking Tim’s wife Lydia for the lessons in Irish country dancing he’d gotten at her family parties. What followed was a lively interlude where he got to swing Annie repeatedly in his arms.

Laughing, Annie finally pulled him from the floor, saying, “Nate, that’s all I can do, let’s leave it to the youngsters.”

“
I guess you are right, there goes the youngest one at the party.” Nate followed her, making sure to keep his arm tight around her waist, as he pointed to Mrs. O’Rourke, who had just been cajoled by one of her brothers-in-law to join the dancing. Soon the pavement was crowded with the older generation who were now showing the younger how a true Irish jig was performed.

Dandy, who had somehow gotten away from Jamie, came trotting up and sat beside them, staring at the dancers as if entranced. Annie picked him up, which reminded Nate of what Mrs. O’Rourke had said earlier about Dandy being a hero. He was just going to ask her about this when she turned and said, “I’m going to take Dandy into the kitchen and see if Mrs. Hewitt is there. I want to check on Miss Minnie and Miss Millie, and I will get us more punch. I’ll be right back.”

Nate stood and watched her weave her way through to the kitchen, stopping and chatting with everyone as she went. He couldn’t help but think how useful she would be if he ended up with a political career since making people feel at ease had never been a social skill he had developed. He’d promised himself he wouldn’t mention the prospective meeting with Hart or his aid and his hope he might get a job in the state attorney general’s office, in case it fell through. Thankfully he hadn’t gotten any summons tonight, and he assumed his meeting would be sometime tomorrow.

“
Mr. Dawson, I am so glad to get a chance to see you,” said Mrs. Esther Stein, who had just come up beside him. “Annie told me I could find you out here. She is supervising the kitchen while Mrs. O’Rourke is having her fling. There are several giggling girls in there, peeling apples and professing to see the initials of their intendeds in the parings, and I was afraid that my presence was putting a damper on their high spirits.”

“
Mrs. Stein, how good to see you. Are you well? And your husband, he didn’t want to join in the festivities?” Nate always felt a bit ill at ease with Mrs. Stein, very much as he would probably feel talking with a prospective in-law. He knew if the Steins objected to his courtship of Annie, it would be hard going. Mrs. O’Rourke and Kathleen seemed very much in his corner, but Esther Stein, he wasn’t so sure of.

“
Herman likes to put his feet up after a big meal. We were trying out the new restaurant that has opened up on Kearney. I must say this party is a good idea; gives the young people something positive to do. The number of young boys and some girls we saw running around the streets tonight on our way home was distressing. Too easy for good fun to turn into bad judgment, with some broken windows and broken heads as a result.”

Nate murmured his agreement, again thinking ruefully of his own boyhood pranks with Tim, and his uncle coming to the rescue, not something he cared to share with Mrs. Stein. Instead he asked her if he could bring her a chair, and she in turn suggested that they take a seat on two chairs that were located near the bonfire since the air was getting chilly.

When they were both seated, Mrs. Stein turned to him and, in a very serious voice, said, “I am glad to have this chance to talk to you, alone. I was hoping to enlist your help in convincing Annie that she must stop these investigations into the Framptons. She could have been killed Tuesday night, and nothing you can say will convince me it was an accident. I think she has gotten too close to something dangerous, just as she did last summer, and I fear for her safety.”

Nate’s head swam, and for a moment he wondered if there hadn’t been a bit more than a touch of rum in the punch. “Mrs. Stein, whatever are you talking about? What happened to Annie on Tuesday night? This is the first time I’ve seen her since Sunday, and she didn’t mention any accident. Wait. Mrs. O’Rourke said something I didn’t understand about Dandy saving Annie, save her from what?”

Mrs. Stein then told Nate, in some detail, about Annie’s close call with the beer barrels, Jamie’s claim to have seen a man run away from the cart, and her own conviction that the incident had been deliberate and life threatening.

“
Then, when I learned that she not only attended another private sitting with that odd sounding young girl, Evie May, on Wednesday, but she arranged a meeting with the girl and her mother and some other local Spiritualists on Thursday, I became seriously concerned. Mrs. O’Rourke said you accompanied her to the séance tonight, and I couldn’t help but wonder if she had told you about what happened since I thought you would be too sensible to give into her if she were really in danger. I know it is hard to say no to Annie . . .”

Nate interrupted her, rising from his chair. “Mrs. Stein, I knew nothing about all of this, nothing at all. I can assure you if I had, I would have . . .” Nate paused, then bowed to Mrs. Stein and said, “If you will please excuse me, I need to talk to Annie this instant. I’m sure you will understand.” He then strode across the yard towards the kitchen.