A Dying Note Read online

  A Dying Note

  A Silver Rush Mystery

  Ann Parker

  Poisoned Pen Press

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2018 by Ann Parker

  First Edition 2018

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017951352

  ISBN: 9781464209796 Hardcover

  ISBN: 9781464209819 Trade Paperback

  ISBN: 9781464209826 Ebook

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  Poisoned Pen Press

  4014 N. Goldwater Blvd., #201

  Scottsdale, AZ 85251

  www.poisonedpenpress.com

  [email protected]

  Printed in the United States of America

  Dedication

  For Barbara Peters, editor extraordinaire,

  who encouraged me (and my protagonist) to “go West”

  to San Francisco

  Acknowledgments

  This book may not have taken a village to write, but the people I’d like to thank would certainly constitute a large neighborhood.

  First off, thank you, dear family, especially Bill, Ian, and Devyn, for hanging in there with me. Second, I’m grateful to the friends, writers, critique partners, and beta readers/proofers who offered suggestions and support for various stages of the writing/re-writing process: Bill McConachie, Camille Minichino, Carole Price, Colleen Casey, Dani Greer, Janet Finsilver, Jonnie Jacobs, Kate Wyland, Margaret Lucke, Mary-Lynne Pierce Bernald, Penny Warner, Priscilla Royal, Rita Lakin, Trevor Lamberson, Staci McLaughlin, and Wendy McConachie. Special thanks and endless gratitude to Camille Minichino and Dick Rufer for letting me hide out in their guest room for some serious writing sprints and for their friendship over many decades. Devyn McConachie gets a super-duper shout-out for her last-minute-to-midnight reads of certain critical sections and her help with “final words.” (Note to Devyn: You have the makings of an excellent copy editor!) Thanks also to the Facebook group Colorado Writers and Publishers and to the Poisoned Pen Press “posse” of authors—we’re all in this together!

  In the research arena, Colleen Casey deserves a tip of the hat and a dozen roses for sharing her vast knowledge of San Francisco’s history and loaning me bags of resource books, as well as for her encouragement and patience in answering my many questions and her infectious enthusiasm for the city and all its aspects. The San Francisco Public Library and particularly the San Francisco History Center and its librarians were wonderful resources and always helpful—I will be back! Stephen Parker supplied much-needed and appreciated “musical assistance.” Also, thanks to Emperor Norton (aka Joseph Amster) and his insightful Time Machine Tours of San Francisco. All errors, omissions, and slips into alternate realities are mine.

  And here’s to the folks of Leadville, Colorado: you and your lovely mountain town and its history are always in my mind and my heart (and, as you’ll see in this latest book, never far from my protagonist’s thoughts as well).

  Mary-Lynne “Persnickety” Pierce Bernald—thank you for lending me your name.

  Maddee James and the crew at xuni.com—three cheers, a whoop, and a holler for designing and maintaining my website. (For those interested in taking a gander, www.annparker.net and www.annparker.com will both take you there.)

  Janaki Yasanayake—thank you for creating the wonderful map of 1881 San Francisco for A Dying Note.

  Last, but never least, I am grateful to Barbara Peters and Robert Rosenwald and their staff at Poisoned Pen Press for their support, encouragement, and direction. “Thanks” is too small a word for all they do, but it’ll have to suffice for now.

  Chapter One

  San Francisco, Mission Bay

  Sunday, November 6, 1881

  Not my hands!

  Throat crushed, blood gurgled, words choked so they screamed only in the mind.

  Sight dimmed—towering bales of hay faded into gray shapes under a near-full moon.

  Touch heightened—sharp pieces of straw stabbed into shaking fingers scrabbling to gain purchase on the wharf’s rough planks.

  Smell overwhelmed—a cesspool, an open sewer, bubbled below the splintered planks of the wharf.

  Vomit rose, nowhere to go, choking further.

  How did this happen? Why?

  The why was clear. The how? It had only been words at first. Hot words flung back and forth like weapons, hurled like stones. Then, all that had been uncovered slipped out. The lies, the larceny, the truth. The truth had shoved them past words, into the realm of no return. A hard shove. A shove back. A wild swing that connected, yielding a yelp and curse.

  A returning blow, but not by a hand. Something heavy, crushing, landing on the throat.

  Even now, with breath trapped behind blood and broken cartilage, words clamored, shouted out to be set free, to be heard:

  Not my hands!

  Then a command, but was it from without or within? Spoken or thought?

  On your knees!

  Rolling over, pain flared. Palms pushed flat on boards, trying to pull the knees up to obey the order. Limbs rebelled, juddering on the planks, no longer servants of the brain.

  Hearing remained—ever faithful. Nearby, the dull thuds and creaks of anchored ships. At a distance, muffled shouts too far away to help. Beyond the wharves, clamor wafted from the saloons, cheap restaurants, and bawdy houses squatting near the drawbridge that spanned malodorous Mission Creek.

  Sounds grew closer, ragged breathing, rapid tempo, from high above the fingertips, stinging and raw, above the cheek resting on the planks, wet with blood. Finally, the voice spoke, crackling with anger, aflame with a rage as intense as the fire that engulfed a hay scow a fortnight ago, burning through its mooring and sending it adrift, flaming bright, on an ebb tide out into the night-dark bay.

  “Did you think you would get away with this? Destroying me? Destroying us?”

  Not my hands!

  This time, the trapped words must have escaped, because the voice above came closer, answering. “Not your hands? Very well. That, I can grant you.”

  The blow to the back of the head shattered the vision of warped wood boards into splinters. Those splinters flew up, whirling, changing into thin, stinging shards of pain. Another blow, and another. The pain spun into clamorous song piercing all thought, drowning all words, the music of life spilling out in red, red sound, before falling into darkness and silence.

  Chapter Two

  San Francisco Business District

  Monday, November 7, 1881

  The church bell cacophony began at six in the morning.

  Just as it did every day.

  And just as she did every day, Inez Stannert, startled awake by the clamor, rolled over and tugged her pillow over her head, damning the day she’d leapt at the chance to move into the rooms above the music store she managed.

  Living quarters, gratis.

  It had seemed such a good deal at the time, when the storeowner, celebrated violinist Nico Donato, had made the offer.

  However, after she and her twelve-year-old ward, Antonia Gizzi, took up residence above the shop at the corner of San Francisco’s Pine and Kearney streets, Inez realized that, surrounded as they were by churches of every possible denomination, the daily calls to prayer were nearly deafening. She considered it a sadistic trick of Fate—a particularly ironic variety of Hell, ac
tually—that she should be constantly reminded of the heavy presence of Christian faith. Particularly given that her absent lover was a minister.

  Pillow clutched to her ears, Inez allowed herself a moment to compare the competitive clanging of the nearby houses of worship here to that in her previous life. In the high mountain town of Leadville, Colorado, the distant sound of church bells took wing, a seductive call to soul-lifting contemplation of Heaven and the promises of eternal life. Here in San Francisco, Inez suspected a more insidious intent. It was no secret that the density of churches in the “golden city” increased in proportion to their proximity to Chinatown and the Barbary Coast, in hopes of luring lost souls into the fold with promises of eternal salvation and dire threats of eternal damnation. The D & S House of Music and Curiosities was situated close to the two unsavory neighborhoods as well as near the city’s business district. Thus, Inez suffered the torments of the damned at regular hours throughout the day when the bells vied with each other.

  Still, their discordant clanging served to rouse Inez and Antonia in good time on school days.

  Inez had the coffee boiling on the small stove in what passed for their kitchen when Antonia finally dragged herself in, rubbing her eyes, her black hair an untamed mane. Inez brought over a mug of coffee, liberally laced with milk and sugar, set it on the table by the hairbrush, comb, and ribbons, and pointed wordlessly to the chair. Antonia sat and sipped, wincing as Inez attacked her hair with taming implements. With her locks finally plaited and beribboned, Antonia said, “I don’t see why I can’t cut it all off.”

  Inez smiled grimly. And with that, you’d be dressing as a boy and running loose through the city in trousers, just as you were in Leadville, when I first met you and your mother. May she rest in peace. But all she said was, “You have beautiful hair. Hair like your mother’s.” She smoothed it with one hand. “Treasure it as a gift from her, just as you treasure your little knife and her fortune-telling cards.”

  Antonia sighed and nibbled at the thick slice of bread slathered with butter. “It’d just be easier,” she mumbled. Then, apropos of nothing, “I don’t want to go to school anymore.”

  Inez crossed her arms, silver-backed hairbrush in one hand. “What brought this on?”

  A stubborn silence was her only answer.

  Inez set the hairbrush on the table. “Did you not finish your lessons this weekend? Is that the problem?”

  Antonia pinched off a corner of her bread and rolled it into a tight little ball of dough, before finally replying, “The kids are hoity-toities. The teachers all high-and-mighty. The school is stodgified and I’m not learnin’ nothing. I can learn my numbers and letters fine helping you in the music store.”

  Suspecting a deeper reason, Inez pressed. “Before we left Leadville, you were looking forward to school.” She let the statement hang there.

  Antonia’s gaze flickered to the side.

  “What happened?”

  At Antonia’s silence, Inez said briskly, “Well then, I’ll accompany you to school today, talk to your teacher, and get to the bottom of this.”

  Antonia’s eyes widened in alarm. “No!” She clenched her jaw, then said in a low voice, defiant, hardly above a whisper, “I cut a boy.”

  Inez flashed on the small but deadly salvavirgo Antonia carried with her everywhere. At first glance, with its little blade folded away, it looked the most innocuous of weapons. Delicate little flowers were carved into the ivory at the top of the handle where the blade folded; a small inlaid figure of a fox gazed over its shoulder where a palm would naturally curl around the grip. But Inez was very aware of its sharpness and the speed with which Antonia could whip it out and open it.

  “I didn’t hear about this. I would have thought the principal would send me a note.”

  Antonia laughed, a short bark. “It was after school, last week. And d’you think that ninny’d tell anyone he was beat up by a girl?”

  Inez briefly weighed whether a good whipping might be in order. It was exactly what her parents would have done, and did do, when she dared to be uppity and huffish.

  One look at Antonia’s face, which had something hurt and bruised about it, changed her mind.

  “Why did you do it?”

  Antonia looked up. Her straightforward bi-colored gaze—one eye blue, the other brown—met Inez’s query without wavering. “He said only gypsies had eyes like mine and called me the bastard of a gypsy whore.” The slight trembling of her mouth, which she tried hard to control, convinced Inez that she was telling the truth.

  “You were not wearing your glasses?” Inez had bought a pair of tinted glasses for Antonia to keep her unusual eyes concealed.

  Antonia looked down at the uneaten crust on her plate. “I was. I told him to leave me alone, but he wouldn’t. He pulled my glasses off my face and threw them on the ground. At least they didn’t break. He’s always doing things like that to kids in the lower grades. Smashing their glasses, tossing their lunch tins into the streets, giving them a black eye.”

  “Well, it sounds like you taught him a lesson, then. Perhaps he will think twice before picking on someone smaller than he is. In any case, dropping school is not an option. The value of education is not simply in learning one’s sums and the rules of grammar. School provides a place where one becomes familiar with the way things are done, how to negotiate one’s way through life and society. Such lessons extend to how to deal with bullies without resorting to physical fights.” Inez added pointedly, “Too, you know our situation here. We dare not cause any trouble for Mr. Donato, no hint of impropriety or unbecoming conduct from you or from me.”

  Antonia’s hand curled into a fist around the compressed ball of dough.

  Inez continued, “Next time, if there is any trouble at all, you will tell me right away. If I had known about this incident on Friday, I would have made sure that you were not bothered again.” The steel in Inez’s tone made it clear that these were not empty words, but a promise.

  Inez faced the stove and poured herself a cup of coffee. “Run along now. Be sure to pick up your lunch at Mrs. Nolan’s, and be careful crossing Market.”

  “I’m not a baby,” said Antonia.

  Inez turned and crossed her arms. “Excuse me?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Antonia muttered.

  Bonnet tied under her chin, tinted glasses masking her eyes, empty lunch bucket in hand awaiting Mrs. Nolan’s sourdough sandwich and dill pickles, Antonia slung the book strap over her shoulder and headed to the stairs that would take her down and out to the street.

  The door to the outside world slammed defiantly. Inez winced. She hated to be strict, but they both had to mind their Ps and Qs in San Francisco.

  She carried her cup to the table, sat, cut herself a slice of bread, and buttered it, thinking. If they lived elsewhere, somewhere away from the store, it would provide them with more breathing room, less “walking on eggshells.” They were paying Mrs. Nolan for board, perhaps they should consider moving into her boardinghouse. Inez immediately rejected the notion.

  Mrs. Nolan was in business precisely because Inez had provided a little added financial backing to her in return for a small percent of the profits. Inez preferred to keep her various business agreements at a distance. She had made an exception when taking lodgings above the store, where they had a modicum of privacy. Living cheek-by-jowl with Mrs. Nolan, who was a notorious gossip, they would not.

  She shook her head. “Too close for comfort,” she said aloud. “Better to deal with the church bells here.”

  She sifted through a small stack of paperwork she planned to take downstairs and address before the store opened at noon. Her hand hovered over a small envelope, different from the rest. It was addressed in an authoritative masculine hand to Nico’s sister Carmella, a charming young woman of twenty.

  Inez knew the owner of that hand—pianist Jamie Monroe. J
amie was one of the clique of young musicians, most of them new to town, who vied for Carmella’s attention. When Carmella was not in the store, they sometimes approached Inez for advice about sheet music or where they might find a decent laundry that didn’t over-starch collars. Of course, they also hung about waiting for Nico to appear and perhaps drop a casual comment about a certain theatre looking for a steam piano player, or a particular music hall in need of a flautist to fill in for a regular. If they were really lucky, the elegant violinist—so sought after, so successful—might offer a word of advice or encouragement, or even a referral. She knew they looked up to him thinking, “Someday, that could be me!”

  Of all those young men, Inez suspected Carmella favored Jamie above the rest. She couldn’t point to anything overt between them. Mostly, it was the subtle glances they exchanged, the way Carmella’s smooth olive complexion “pinked” at the mention of his name. However, Nico kept a close eye on Carmella, especially where the young men were concerned. As far as Inez knew, none of the musicians had formally declared their interest in Carmella to her brother.

  The note had been slipped under the door leading to the living quarters. Jamie knew better than to slide a missive addressed to Carmella under the shop’s doors, front or back, in case Nico should spot it first.

  Tapping the envelope on the table, Inez debated.

  It would be unwise to become a go-between, a carrier of secret notes, even inadvertently. If Nico found out, there could be repercussions that would damage their business relationship. She could not afford that. Not now. Not after all the time and effort she had devoted to the store.

  Signore Nico Donato was volatile where his sister was concerned, and well connected. His possible reactions to Antonia’s playground transgressions would be nothing compared to what he might do to them if he found out Inez had encouraged an “unapproved” relationship between Monroe and his sister. He could spread stories, damage their reputations, throw them out, and dissolve their business relationship. It was possible she and Antonia could manage on the investments Inez had made, in addition to her silent partnerships with some of the small women-run businesses in the city. But if those women suspected Inez of any improprieties or financial uncertainties…