A Dying Note Read online

  “Purple and white?” Flo made a moue of distaste. “I would never!”

  “Exactly. If you include the color pink, I’ll know for some reason you cannot come. And we shall have to try something else.”

  Inez paused, thinking. “It might be a good idea for you to visit Mrs. Young’s millinery on your way back to the hotel. Tell her I sent you, and buy a ribbon or something, just so you have actually met her and know where her place is. That way, if I send messages under her name, no one will think twice about it.”

  Flo tucked the card in her sleeve and stood.

  “Now,” said Inez, “we need to prepare for your exit.” She rummaged through the stack of sheet music on the table, finally choosing “Better Late Than Never,” thinking that the title sounded ominously appropriate.

  Inez turned to Flo. “As we head out through the showroom, I will hand you this and suggest that your daughter try this piece, since she enjoys popular music. I will mention that I do not generally go to the homes of my pupils, they usually come here. I will add that we can talk further about it later, and we can set a time when I can come and observe her level of proficiency. That will set things up if you should call and someone else picks up the phone. Deal?”

  “Deal.” Flo smiled, a small smile of relief. “Partner.”

  Chapter Seven

  Following Mrs. Sweet, de Bruijn discovered, had not been difficult.

  After a late breakfast in the Palace Hotel’s dining room, she had announced Mr. Gallagher had given her permission to go shopping. He had nodded, and said, of course, Mr. Gallagher had told him.

  When, in fact, it was exactly what he had persuaded Mr. Gallagher to do.

  De Bruijn settled in the anterior room of the suite and waited until she emerged, ready for the street. He’d accompanied her to the hotel entrance, much to her obvious annoyance. Once there, he had raised his hat in farewell, reminded her she was expected back by the dinner hour, and headed back inside.

  At the bell station, he met the bellboy he had made arrangements with earlier. In the luggage room, he traded his black frock coat for a checked sack jacket, his black top hat for a brushed gray derby. He gave the bellboy a generous tip and proceeded to the entrance. A pass of coin from his hand to the doorman yielded not only the direction Mrs. Sweet had gone but an added bonus: she had inquired about the address of a famous millinery not far from the Palace.

  He made a few other minor alterations as he walked, donning a pair of tinted spectacles pulled from an inner pocket, smoothing down the slight curl at the ends of his mustache. Mere changes of surface appearance. The trick was to also change the gait, to bring the shoulders in and down slightly, other slight variations that would encourage her eyes to slide over him, should she look in his direction.

  It turned out she had not walked far, and her rose-colored parasol made her easy to spot among the late morning strollers and shoppers.

  Better and better.

  He waited by the hotel until the parasol was a block away, then followed her.

  Now, less than two hours later, he watched from the shadows in front of the stock exchange.

  How convenient that the exchange was not far up the street from the music store. He could loiter, glance at his paper, smoke, stroll up and down the sidewalk, blend in with the clusters of men—brokers, speculators, operators—who came and went from the building. It was easy to linger unnoticed with those who stood outside waiting for hacks, private carriages, the next horse-trolley. The building provided an endless stream of men, anonymous with their hats and coats. As anonymous as he was.

  He waited, wondering if he’d get a glimpse of the store’s proprietor.

  While Mrs. Sweet’s doings were of interest to his client, who had tasked de Bruijn with finding his wayward son, the “finder of the lost and stolen” was engaged in his own personal search as well. Almost two years ago, he had made a promise to a woman, Drina Gizzi, and thus to her daughter Antonia, to protect and take care of them. He had failed to fulfill that promise, and now bore the burden of being at least partially responsible for Drina’s death. He hoped to do better by Antonia, once he found her. It was a search he hoped would yield results once he had the opportunity to meet the “S” half of D & S House of Music and Curiosities, a person he strongly suspected would be a woman named Inez Stannert.

  He reflected again on how much easier all this would have been if Mrs. Stannert had been listed in the city directory. But she had apparently settled too recently in the city for that to be the case.

  However, he was in no hurry. Now that he knew where the store was, he could visit at his leisure, when the time was right. Mrs. Stannert, if she was the manager or part-owner, was not about to vanish into thin air. She had a stake in San Francisco now.

  Besides, he wanted to be certain that Mrs. Sweet had no other destination after her visit here.

  At that moment, a tall gentleman opened the front door to the music store with a flourish, executing a bow of a decidedly European nature as Mrs. Sweet emerged.

  Was this perhaps the “D” half of the business?

  Mrs. Sweet smiled up at him, and touched her hair, her hat, flirting a bit. De Bruijn had seen this dance many times before. And what was that in her other hand? A flash of white, fluttering as she moved.

  Papers of some kind.

  De Bruijn casually unfolded his newspaper and adjusted the brim of his hat, watching closer.

  The gentleman held up a card between two fingers, offering it to Mrs. Sweet. Too far away to tell what it was. Perhaps a calling card? Although it seemed on the large side for such. Mrs. Sweet hesitated, then nodded and accepted it, tucking it into the papers which she then rolled and stuffed into her handbag. A musical score, perhaps? But Mrs. Sweet had no musical talents, unless one counted her undeniable ability to play the men around her. She looked around, no longer focused on the gentleman. De Bruijn noted that even at a distance, Mrs. Sweet seemed nervous. He wondered again what was on the card.

  The European—Italian, perhaps?—stepped into the street and hailed a passing hack, which came to an obedient stop. Mrs. Sweet entered the carriage. De Bruijn stepped forward, waved down a horse and driver heading in the opposite direction, gave him his instructions, and settled in to wait and see where Mrs. Sweet would take him next.

  Chapter Eight

  The empty lunch pail banged against Antonia’s leg, over and over, but the stinging blows were nothing compared to the tongue-lashing and verbal bruising she’d suffered that day.

  First, Miss “Persnickety” Pierce had whapped Antonia’s arm good and hard because Antonia had memorized the wrong passage for recitation lessons. Then, the snickers from the class had punctuated Persnickety’s equally sharp “Antonia, pay attention!” And now, she had double the number of lines to memorize for tomorrow.

  She hated it.

  Hated it.

  Hated standing in front of the class and stumbling through some poem about a stupid skylark. Who cares? And then, at noon, she’d been forced to stay inside and write on the blackboard “I will not daydream in class” fifty times. Now, heading down Market, Antonia was ready to slug someone with her Swinton’s Reader. Preferably one of those snotty kids who stood behind her in line and whispered, loud enough for her to hear, how stupid she was.

  It enraged Antonia, because it wasn’t true. She knew her times tables better than anyone else in the class, and could do division and fractions faster than the others. Just because her penmanship was, in Persnickety’s words, “Atrocious!” and she found the reading, reciting, and memorizing downright boring, well, that didn’t make her stupid.

  Now, if they were reading something interesting, like “The Mutiny of the Hispaniola” by Captain George North, she’d show them all. The third installment of Treasure Island was in the Young Folks magazine she’d pinched from the stationer’s on her way home from school on Friday. Th
e same magazine she’d stuck into her Swinton’s that morning, hoping to sneak a peek at it during the noon break.

  Antonia swung the book at the end of the book strap, back and forth in time to her steps. She stopped short of the Dupont intersection, debating whether to cross and walk up Dupont so she could go past the Olympic Theater, which was always kind of fun, or go another block up Market to Kearney so she could ogle the Sherman, Clay music store that Mrs. S liked.

  A horse-drawn trolley clattered by on its steel rails. She watched enviously as some boys she recognized from her school dashed low and fast to the back of the horsecar, jumped onto the stairs and grabbed hold for a free ride up Market, crouching, laughing, and hanging on.

  She thought longingly of her days in Leadville, when she’d dressed as a boy and worked as a newsie for The Independent newspaper. All the other newsies had thought she was a boy, and treated her like one of them. They’d been her friends and called her “Deuce,” because of her odd eyes, which had been fine by her. And she’d sold lots of papers, and been just as good as all of them.

  If only she was wearing trousers now, and not the hot, itchy wool stockings, and her petticoats and skirts, all wrinkled and fussy, and the bonnet that kept flapping down over her eyes, she’d be out there too on the street car. She bet she’d be able to hang on longer than any of them, maybe hitching a ride all the way to—

  Someone shoved past her, bumping her sore arm hard. The lunch pail clattered to the boardwalk, and her book strap caught. The leather strap ripped from her grasp, burning her palm and carrying its bound contents tumbling off the walkway and into the street.

  “You no-account so-and-so!” shouted Antonia, enraged, as the older boy who had shoved her sprinted to join his mates on the car. The book strap had broken, and the Swinton’s, along with the Young Folks magazine she’d hidden within its pages, were now lying in the dirty gutter.

  The boys hooted at her and one yelled back, “Ooooo, savage as a meat axe!”

  The commotion brought the conductor pushing to the back of the car. The boys jumped off and raced to the other side of Market, laughing, as the conductor shook a fist at them. Fuming, she grabbed her lunch pail and prepared to clamber into the gutter. She’d get it from Persnickety for sure now. That ruined book would probably result in a thrashing, more “I will not…” sentences scratched up at the chalkboard, and a note from the teacher to Mrs. S.

  A shadow moved over her, and a voice from behind said, “Hold on there, Miss.” An older boy—she’d seen him around at school—took a long step into the street. He scooped up her things, then hopped back up to the boardwalk, saying, “That Charlie, he’s a hoodlum, heading for the lockup sooner rather than later, or I miss my guess.”

  “Thanks,” muttered Antonia and held out her hand.

  He didn’t give her things back, so she finally looked up into his face. A friendly pair of blue eyes regarded her. He pushed his cap up. The sun whitewashed his freckled face and put an extra shine into his burnished red hair. “I recognize you,” he said cheerfully. “You go to Lincoln, right? Me, too. I’m Mick Lynch. You are—?”

  Antonia hesitated. She didn’t give up her name readily. It was a habit her maman had drilled into her. “Names hold power,” she’d said. “Never give your name to those you do not trust.” And Mrs. S had told her, “You are under no obligation to share your name in a casual situation with people you do not know.”

  Still, he’d helped her. He’d told her his name. And he still had her book and magazine. “Antonia Gizzi.”

  “Gizzi.” He grinned. “You part Guinea, then?”

  Antonia reached out for the strap. Questions about her background—“Where are you from?” “What are your parents?”—made her uncomfortable, because she didn’t know. Maman had never said, and Antonia had never asked.

  So instead, Antonia shot back, “You Mick the Mick, then?”

  He nodded, unperturbed. “Yep. Sometimes. Mostly folks call me Copper Mick, ’cause of my hair, and ’cause my da’s a copper. A detective in the force. When I’m out of school, I’m going to join the force too.”

  “Copper Mick,” said Antonia, “can I have my books?”

  “Oh! Sure. Here, let me fix this first.” He tucked the book and magazine under his arm, swiftly knotted the broken leather strap back together, then snugged the book and the crumpled Young Folks into the loop, remarking, “You like this magazine? Me, too. You must be pretty smart if you’re reading this. Lots of fellows in my class, I’m in seventh grade, can’t read a lick of anything. Have you been reading Treasure Island in there? Wish they’d do more’n one chapter at a time. It’s a crackin’ good story.”

  Surprised, Antonia responded, “Yeah! That’s my favorite.”

  “Mine, too.” Copper Mick handed the bundle to her, adding, “How about if I go with you a bit?”

  She shrugged. “It’s a free country.”

  They started walking.

  He asked, “You live on the other side of Market? How come you don’t go to Denman Grammar, then?”

  “What’s with the questions? I thought it was your pa that was a detective,” said Antonia, then added, “I’m in Miss Pierce’s class in fifth grade. And I can take myself home. No need to go out of your way.”

  He grinned and said, “Sorry! My ma says I take after him. My da, that is. Always with the questions and pestering folks. That’s what she says, then my da says, ‘Chip off the old block!’ My da also taught me to help folks whenever I get the chance. I’ve got six sisters, all younger’n me, and two brothers older.” He added, “How about I walk along, just to be sure those b’hoys don’t come back and give you six kinds of heck, if you excuse my language?”

  Antonia didn’t say that she’d heard and said much worse, instead opting for a nod. He seemed friendly enough, plus it’d be fun to talk to someone about Treasure Island.

  Remembering what Mrs. S always said, Antonia suggested, “Let’s cross at the corner. My aunt, Mrs. Stannert, doesn’t like me jumping into the streets.”

  Mick shortened his stride, apparently realizing Antonia had to scamper to keep up with him. “You and your folks live with your aunt?” he asked. “Us, too. We’re surrounded by relatives. Aunt, uncle, four cousins in the flat next door. My grandmother is in the upstairs flat with my oldest brother, Danny, and his wife. They’ve got a wee ’un. How many in your family?”

  More questions she didn’t want to answer. She always felt queer saying it was just her and her “aunt.” Antonia pushed the tinted glasses up her nose, staring at his hands, all freckles and knobby knuckles. “Do all coppers yak as much as you do, Mick the Mick?”

  It seemed no matter what she said, it just rolled off his shoulders like rain off a rubberized raincoat. “The gift of Irish blarney,” he said. “We’ve all got it. You should see us around the supper table. Everyone talking at once, Ma yelling, ‘One at a time, one at a time!’”

  They stopped at the corner of Dupont and Market, joining a cluster of adults—women with shopping baskets over their arms, men with their newspapers, canes, and cases, and a few other kids. Antonia thought they might be Mick’s schoolmates the way the boys nodded at him and the girls looked slantwise at him and giggled in that silly way girls did when they wanted a boy to notice them.

  A traffic copper standing in the middle of the street was waving his white-gloved hands this way and that like he was conducting a band. He blew his whistle and gestured for the group to cross. As Mick and Antonia approached, the policeman saluted, saying, “Well, now Master Michael Lynch, does your ma know you’re taking the long way home from classes today?”

  Mick touched his cap in response. “Afternoon, Officer Daniel Lynch. Just making sure the little lady doesn’t get further bothered by the local hoodlums.”

  “Ah. Good boy.” The officer winked, whether at Mick, her, or both, Antonia wasn’t sure.

 
Once they’d crossed the street, Antonia said, “I’m thirteen.” The words just slipped out. She wasn’t sure why she’d said anything at all, except that “little lady” made it sound like she was one of those first grade girls who wailed and sobbed when their pigtails were pulled.

  She didn’t really know how old she was. Her maman had said she was twelve in Leadville. Mrs. S said Antonia seemed small for her age, so maybe she was younger, “Although your extreme precociousness would argue against that,” Mrs. S had said. After listening to Antonia recite, watching her do her numbers, and wrinkling her nose at her penmanship, the school principal had suggested Antonia had some “catching up to do” and plunked her in grade five, much to Antonia’s frustration.

  She tipped her head up to see his expression from beneath her bonnet brim.

  “Thirteen?” His red eyebrows shot up. “You are a pipsqueak, aren’tcha?” But there was nothing mean in his face or in his tone. Or suspicious. He seemed more amused than anything.

  “That copper back there. Officer Daniel Lynch,” she tried to imitate his brogue. “Is that your brother?”

  “Surely ’tis. And you can believe that I’ll be getting nothing but the third degree from my family tonight. You think I ask a lot of questions.” He shook his head. “Well, now, Miss Antonia Gizzi, how far do we go up Dupont?”

  With a start she realized they had walked nearly five blocks and stood even with Pine Street. “I turn here.” She glanced down Pine toward the waterfront.

  “I might as well walk with you one more block and turn right on Kearney. I’m not going to cross Danny’s corner again. He’ll make me stand with him in the middle of the street until I tell him everything.”