Celestial Girl: The Omnibus Edition (A Lily Modjeska Mystery)

Celestial Girl: The Omnibus Edition (A Lily Modjeska Mystery)

Prologue

Blood on the Barbary Coast

Book 1

The Heartland

1

A Precipitous Departure

2

Stranger on a Train

3

Lady Desperado

4

A Rendezvous at the Wash Pump

5

Pretty May

6

The Law of Gum Shan

7

Echo Canyon

8

A Brown Tweed Suit

9

At Miss Osmond’s Hotel

10

Horseback Ride

11

Neither the Dead nor the Living

12

Arrival, with Revelations

Book 2

Jewel of the Golden West

1

Endings and Beginnings

2

Fool for Love

3

Dining on Pink

4

An Evening's Perambulations

5

Jenny

6

The Sea Nymph

7

Signs of a Struggle

8

Bloody Glove

9

Lord Carnation Hands

10

Headlines

11

A Sincere Proposal, with Improprieties

12

Notorious

13

The Science of Wu Hsing

14

The Consequences of Becoming Notorious

15

Quick and Quiet

16

At the Temple of Supreme Pleasure

17

The Month of May

18

Cumshaw

19

A Price on One’s Head

20

Ebeneezer’s Theory

21

Babe in the Woods

22

Peace of Mind

23

Puzzles

24

Anomalies Abound

25

At the Cobweb Palace

26

Confessions

27

A Hot Bath

28

The Long-Suffering Sweetheart

29

Mournful Numbers

30

Big Mike

31

Secrets Hidden Within

32

Napa

33

Mysteries and Ciphers

34

The Midsummer Jamboree

Book 3

The Celestial Kingdom

1

Bold and Swift Action

2

A Grave Undertaking

3

A Rescue, Earnestly Attempted

4

The Harbor Master

5

The Customs Clerk

6

Never Separate

7

A Momentous Decision

8

Aboard the Oceanic

9

First Glimpse

10

The House of Double Happiness

11

An Expedition to the Countryside

12

Boxers and Bones

13

Promises

14

The Pulse of Life

15

Captain Jacob

16

T'ai Chi

Book 4

Terminus

1

The Girls

2

Boxes and Bones

3

Lula

4

Homecoming

5

What He Did With Her

6

Celestial Girl

Prologue

Blood on the Barbary Coast

July 8, 1896. San Francisco, California.

He had been thirty, tall and achingly handsome, with corn-silk hair and cornflower eyes, the sort of man women fell in love with even when they knew they shouldn't. Chill fog haunted the waterfront at midnight, ghostly whorls of it eddying over restless waves so black they could have been India ink. The sounds of revelry one always heard on the Barbary Coast--men's drunken babble, sporting ladies' blowsy shrieks, the tinkle of an off-tune piano--drifted from Three Fingered Jack's, along Battery Street, and down to the Embarcadero.

I found Billy Highsmythe in the richly appointed cabin of his yacht. No one should have endured the horrors he had. No one should have witnessed the sight I saw.

He had sighed and mumbled through the gag. How I remember his tortured sigh!

I had not succumbed to Billy Highsmythe's charms, but I'd met the man and knew what he was--a United States immigration inspector charged with enforcing the Exclusion Act of 1888 and the Geary Act of 1890. These were stringent laws, I came to learn, in a series of federal measures aimed at the Chinese, law-abiding and otherwise. Laws enacted during times when rabble-rousers won feverish applause and approbating shouts whenever they decried the Yellow Peril. Laws that caused havoc in Chinatowns across America and debased the way men and women lived. Laws that promoted all manner of graft and corruption. Laws that led, one could say, to murder.

Billy Highsmythe had been a scoundrel and a roustabout. He'd seduced virgins, smoked opium, swilled whiskey till dawn. He was the sort of man a genteel lady should avoid at all costs. I confess I boarded his yacht that night fully cognizant of my own peril. It was an impetuous thing to do after I'd fled across the continent to extricate myself from another murder. Then again, it was an impetuous thing in these last years before the turn of our century for a lady to go sleuthing.

It had been a moment when one feels the hand of destiny and cannot turn back, against all better judgment. Yet I cannot say my fateful trek across that gangplank to Billy Highsmythe's yacht was the beginning of the mystery. The mystery of the Celestial Girl began the day I first saw her.

Book 1

The Heartland

1

A Precipitous Departure

June 1, 1896. Toledo, Ohio.

I did not look back.

It was a scorching morning when I abandoned everything I had known. Exhilaration and nervous anxiety competed for my heart. As elated as I was to leave, I was well and truly scared.

A lone crow cawed and wheeled overhead in a summer sky bleached white by the relentless sun. Insects droned in the limp cornfields. The pollen of new-mown hay suffused the stifling air, pressing itchy red thumbprints into the corners of my eyes. Heat shimmered off the macadam and pooled in mirages as false as my marriage had been.

The gossips agreed my husband had been murdered, though the police hadn't officially declared the cause of his death or formally interrogated me. Not yet. I seized my carpetbag and closed the door to our cottage on Shoreline Road where the macadam crumbled to dust and dandelions. I had never been fond of the weathered clapboard or the landlord. The weaker sex will get the vote when hell freezes over, Mr. Grimal cheerfully assured me every time he came to collect his pound of flesh. I'd cheerfully neglected to pay the rent for a month.

I took only what I could cram in my carpetbag: my fancy blue silk dress, a change of stockings, my Chantilly lace camisole, my wedding band--a plain gold ring inscribed inside, For My Sweet Lily Love J P--a bargain one-way ticket on the Overland train, and a thirty-two caliber double-action Colt revolver.

And the gold? I hid the gold in a very safe place.

I was vexed when I discovered Johnny Pentland possessed a Colt. It cost fifteen dollars in the Sears, Roebuck catalog. Fifteen dollars was a whole month's rent or the price of the Stanhope gig I coveted or a foundry man's fortnightly wage. Our economy in the heartland still suffered from the depression of 1893 and the subsequent bank panic. Our president's ruinous fiscal policies and foolhardy reliance on debt had done little to remedy the crisis. I'd been scraping the rent together for longer than I cared to recall.

It's an engagement in Cleveland, my husband had told me the day before he died, another hellishly hot morning in late May. He bounded out of bed, lit a cigarette. In a moment the smoke steadied him and he dressed with swift sure movements as I watched with sleepy admiration. Black gabardine trousers over long lean legs, the calfskin belt with a solid silver buckle, boots of polished morocco leather. Johnny Pentland always dressed well.

He strode to the closet, pulled out his Crown Prince trunk, undid the hasp, and threw open the lid.

How I hated that trunk! How long will you be gone this time?

Not one moment longer than I have to be away from you, sweetheart. Five weeks ago it had been an engagement in Cincinnati. How pleased he was to be leaving me again.

I sat up in bed in my thin cotton nightgown, drew my knees to my chin, clasping my arms around them, and watched him pack shirts and socks and nightclothes. I loved his deft long-fingered hands, the ace of hearts tattooed on the pale swell of his biceps. Johnny Pentland was such a handsome man, his lean jaw clean shaven, his chestnut hair threaded with silver. No other man had struck the spark of passion in me before he strode into town one day and rescued me, at the cusp of twenty-seven years, from an old maid's fate.

Fifteen years my senior, he savored life, and why not? He was a man who did as he pleased. I reign as my own lord and master, he would proudly proclaim. His gray eyes sparkled with lively anticipation of his impending engagement in Cleveland.

What's it about? I wanted to know. Johnny had said the Cincinnati engagement was a tobacco speculation. He’d returned in a fortnight with severe dyspepsia, gaunt and exhausted from some ordeal that seemed excessive, even to my credulous judgment, for a tobacco speculation.

He returned to the bed, then, as I knew he would. He stubbed out his cigarette, waving away the smoke before I could cough, reached for the pint he kept on the nightstand, and rinsed his mouth with whiskey. The picture of solicitude, he unwound my arms from around my knees and gazed deeply into my eyes.

Your eyes, Lily, they're so blue. Turquoise blue, with those dark lashes all around them. Like jewels! Like sunlit pools! Did I ever tell you that?

Last night at dinner. Is it another tobacco speculation?

And your hair? He ran his fingers through my unkempt curls tangled by slumber. Like honey-colored silk.

More like frizzled straw. Like the Cincinnati engagement?

Orange blossom honey. He struck a pose. ‘In twisted braids of lilies knitting the loose train of thy amber-dropping hair’, eh?

Distract me not with Milton’s poetry, sir. Or another line of work?

He tickled his fingertips over my ribs to my waist, squeezing giggles out of me. And your figure? Like one of God's own little angels.

Oh, indeed. I'd seen him ogle fashionably well-endowed ladies in town. Everyone admires Lillian Russell's bosom and bustle, I said, intent on flushing him out. Mr. Grimal says I'm scrawny.

Never mind Lillian Russell, and Mr. Grimal is a damn fool. He trapped my hands, wrapping his fingers like manacles around my wrists. You're a sprite, a blade of grass. A nymph! ‘Oh, sweetest nymph that liv'st within thy airy shell.’ You're my sweet little innocent angel. And your bosom--

Never mind my bosom. Tell me what it's about, Johnny!

He kissed my eyes, first the left, then the right, his lips pressing my eyelids closed as if his kiss would blind me. I've got a friend employed by a shipping company. Ports of call throughout the lakes. He drizzled succulent kisses down my cheek, down my throat. My friend needs a man to handle a load of cotton from New Orleans. Make some speculations. If I do well, my friend may hire me.

Did I believe him? How I wanted to! I returned the pressure of his lips with my own kiss, freed my hands from his grip, and skimmed my palms across his smooth, cool skin. You mean a permanent position?

A permanent position. He suggested as much in his last wire. Johnny grinned at my plain astonishment and seized my hands again, capturing my wrists in one hand and pinning them above my head against the pillow. He gazed down like a mesmerist until I lost myself in the gray mists of his eyes while he stroked my breasts, persuading my nipples into dainty erections as his own erection bulged in his trousers.

Next time we'll go to Cleveland together, you and me. I'll buy you a house on a hill and a pair of mares. What do you think of that?

Oh, Johnny, that would be wonderful!

But I freed my hands a second time, annoyed at how he hatched plans and schemes without consulting me. The New Woman, declared the suffragist Dr. Mary Putnam-Jacobi, was the mistress of her own destiny. How I longed to be a New Woman! I traced the ace of hearts on his biceps with my fingertips. What about reigning as your own lord and master?

I shall become lord and master of the whole bloody shipping company, he said grandly. You needn't worry, Lily. You needn't worry about anything anymore.

He seized the hem of my nightgown, plowing the tensile cotton to my waist. Unbuttoning his trousers, gabardine pooling to his knees, he freed his engorged penis. Then he knelt between my thighs and entered me in his gentle, courtly way.

Always a gentleman, my Johnny.

I wrapped my legs around his waist in the way I knew he liked, crying out as he thrust and withdrew and thrust again. How could I know the shuddering of his climax, the sweet throb of my own, would be the last we shared?

Yet foreboding welled in me like the taste of ashes in his kiss.

He bounded out of bed, buckled his belt, lit a cigarette. Impatient now, eager to be off to his shipping speculation, he strode to the washroom and hastily shaved. I rose from the bed and lingered at the door, watching his dexterous ministrations with lather and a straight razor. He splashed on Murray and Lanman cologne, a clean spicy scent I loved. He took a swallow from the pint of whiskey he kept next to the washbasin, pulled on a freshly laundered shirt.

Johnny, I said, holding up the black gabardine vest as he thrust his arms through, the grocer wants to know when you'll pay him. Meyer's Smoke Shop has gotten quite insistent. And the whiskey dealer says--

Johnny turned and shook his finger in my face. You are not to speak with McMullen.

But I saw him in town. He chased me.

You tell that scoundrel he can speak to me if he's got something to say. He pushed past me, returning to our bedroom. Never mind. I'll go have a word with him before I leave town. You tell the grocer and Meyer's Smoke Shop I shall pay them when I return from Cleveland. They needn't worry. He slammed the lid of the trunk, closed the hasp. Go fetch me the savings, Lily.

To undertake the tobacco speculation, Johnny had required a temporary commitment of our entire savings--one hundred dollars. I drifted to the parlor, dragging my feet, and took the tin cash box from my little writing desk. I grit my teeth and counted out the savings. Five long weeks had fled since the tobacco speculation. The cash box held sixty dollars in creased Bank of Toledo certificates.

Our entire savings again? I doled out thirty dollars.

I'll need more than that. He seized the rest of the currency from my hand.

Johnny, give me something to tide me over in case the grocer refuses me more credit.

The grocer will not refuse you more credit, he said, but he relinquished fifteen dollars. I will double our money on this venture.

You said that about the tobacco speculation. Twenty dollars in Bank of Lexington certificates is not doubling our money.

I expected the anger that glittered in his eyes, but not the abashment and a wary, furtive look I'd never seen before.

I will double our money, he only said in a tone that permitted no further protest. I'll take care of you, Lily. I promise. You needn't worry. Horse's hooves clattered on the road outside our cottage. There's my cab. The blackguard's actually on time. Go tell him I'll only be a minute.

Johnny. I hadn't mentioned his cobbler, his tailor, his barber, the landlord. I shall seek employment. Mr. Engh told me he could use another seamstress.

You, work in a shirt factory? Johnny laughed in a skeptical tone I did not appreciate. I adore you, sweetheart, but you can't sew worth a damn. Besides. I happen to know Engh pays fifty cents a day and he works his girls from six to six.

I did not share his laughter. But I'm willing--

You are my sweet little innocent angel. I forbid you to work. Now go tell the driver.

As the driver clucked to his lathered gelding and the cab, a scruffy depot wagon, rattled down Shoreline Road, Johnny had leaned out of the window and blown me a kiss. And then he’d winked, a playful wink, a hopeful wink promising our troubles would soon be over.

When I recalled it, a rakish wink not meant for me at all.

* * *

It's your husband, missus!

A brawny messenger boy banged on the back door and barged into my tiny kitchen as the sun blazed up and hovered like a bonfire on the tinder of the eastern horizon. You must come quickly!

Johnny? Alarm prickled through me and I set my morning cup of tea on its saucer with a startled clatter. I'd made an appointment to speak with Mr. Engh that afternoon, though it was only too true, I couldn't sew worth a damn. My mother had schooled me in literature, the sciences, history, mathematics, and mythology, but she had neglected the seamstress's art. I could, however, figure numbers in my head and practiced penmanship in my diary. Perhaps the shirt factory offered positions other than that of a seamstress. I intended to secure gainful employment any way I could, and Johnny Pentland would have to reconcile himself to that. Still, I hadn't expected to confront him so soon. He's back?

Hurry, missus!

We ran all the way to Lake View Hospital, that brawny boy and I, breathless and sweltering beneath the ceaseless sun.

But we were too late. I burst into the dreadful hospital room stinking of blood and pain just as a doctor tugged limp lids over Johnny's lifeless eyes. The lips I'd kissed only yesterday morning grimaced with rigor mortis. A policeman stood at the bedside, observing Johnny's passing with all the tenderness of a Doberman pinscher.

I'm sorry, madam, the doctor said. A dour pouchy man with wisps of colorless hair pomaded over his balding pate, he bestowed upon me a look of such forbidding sympathy that I had to wonder if Johnny's passing was my only or my greatest sorrow. Once the liver fizzles, there's nothing we can do.

He flung a sheet over my husband's corpse.

No, I whispered, too stunned to scream or weep.

Found the buzzard on his last legs, we did, said the policeman, consulting a clipboard.

I drew myself up, bristling with indignation. I am Mrs. Pentland and this gentleman, sir, was my husband.

Then perhaps you'll know what this gentleman was doing at the Rusty Nail, Mrs. Pentland?

That saloon outside Sandusky, the doctor informed me and coughed discreetly.

That saloon. Johnny Pentland never could stay far from drink, I knew that only too well. A fizzled liver, then. But something else jostled in the back of my mind. Hadn't our own Toledo Blade published a scandalized editorial about that saloon? How it was just far enough from our righteous municipal limits to escape legal censure and only too sinfully close to tempt even our most respectable gentlemen into pleasures of a fleshier nature than smoking and drinking? How a lady employed by that saloon had been detained downtown by the Toledo police for conduct unbecoming on a city street?

It's a disorderly house, I said. Isn't that what people say?

Would you care to speculate, Mrs. Pentland, the policeman said with an insolent grin, what business Mr. Pentland may have been pursuing at the time of his collapse?

Speculation, sir, is for the stock market and the race track. I indulge in neither.

The dour doctor handed over the contents of Johnny's pockets--four pennies and a tin cigarette case. I stepped away from the bed and opened the case. I was riffling the rolls of tobacco, wondering where I might resell them, when I discovered beneath them a brass key. Well, well. I curiously turned the key over and around in my hand, acquainting myself for the first time with its shape and heft. It was not the key to our cottage. Johnny never took that key with him on his travels. If I should ever be criminally accosted abroad, he would proclaim, I’ll not allow my assailant to gain possession of the key to my sweet Lily.

Considerate Johnny, I had thought at the time, he does think of me now and then.

What lock did this key open?

We'll want to speak with you again, Mrs. Pentland, said the policeman. After the coroner has got an eyeful of the buzzard.

Coroner? Why must the coroner examine him?

Your husband had a pungent odor on his breath, the doctor informed me.

Sir, I said, he drank.

The doctor coughed again. It's the odor of chloral hydrate, madam. It wouldn't be the first time knockout drops killed a man. Especially a man who drinks.

You know anything about that, Mrs. Pentland? the policeman said. Where were you last night?

* * *

I did not recall walking home, though I must have, for I eventually found myself there. I did not recall climbing into my empty marriage bed, either, but I found myself lying atop the quilt in my sweat-stained dress and suffocating in my corset.

The divine Miss Sarah Bernhardt of theatrical stages in London, Paris, and New York has declared she refuses to wear that stifling undergarment. I ripped off the dress and unlaced my corset, then and there, and flung the thing in the trash bin. Then lay down again in my camisole and drawers, too devastated to eat a midday meal, let alone prepare one.

Horse's hooves clattered on the road outside the cottage, and I sat up, startled at the familiar sound. A wave of nausea coursed through me and a chill shivered down my spine. He’s back. But Johnny Pentland couldn’t be back. Johnny Pentland was dead.

What were you doing in a place like that, Johnny? I whispered, pulling on a fresh dress. What the devil were you doing?

I ran to the living room and peered out through the dusty linen curtains. A slovenly fellow slid a trunk from the bed of a trade wagon, the center panels of which had been painted with gaudy advertisements. I saw a frothy skirt kicked high by a laughing cancan dancer and, in florid letters stenciled above her abundant coiffure, a legend:

THE RUSTY NAIL A GRANDE OLD TIME!

The fellow hoisted the trunk onto his stringy shoulders and staggered to my front door, which I flung open before he could rap his knuckles on the shabby wood.

You the missus? The bloodshot in his eyes was painful to behold. He elbowed past me and, with a labored grunt, deposited the trunk on my parlor floor. Mr. Garver says this belongs to you. Says the hubby owed him plenty. Mr. Garver took a look through his duds. He ain't had nothin' on him but a couple a' coppers and some coffin nails in a tin. Mr. Garver took the belt with the silver buckle as collat--, uh, collat--

Collateral?

That’s the dinger.

Is Mr. Garver in the habit of rifling dying men's pockets and stealing their clothes?

See here, missus. Mr. Garver just wants his proper due. Reckon that means you owe him now.

The fellow presented me with a bill for a night's accommodations and two shots of whiskey.

Embarrassment burned my cheeks. Tell Mr. Garver I shall pay him as soon as a grieving widow is able. Here. I swiped two pennies off the dining table and slapped them in the fellow's grimy paw. Now get out.

They say it weren't the rotgut that got ‘im, he said, stomping off in a huff. Too smooth for his own good, that one.

Johnny Pentland had been smooth, all right.

The Crown Prince trunk sat once more upon my braided rug. I warily circled the loathsome thing, took a breath, and tried to lift the lid. To my surprise, the lid would not budge. I stood back, confounded. I'd never seen Johnny lock his trunk. I’d scarcely noticed the keyhole beneath the hasp. I found my letter opener, jabbed its tip in the lock, and probed and gouged and twisted.

Not a chance. No wonder the proprietor of that saloon had chosen to return Johnny's property in exchange for a grieving widow's promise to pay the bill. The Crown Prince was not only an old piece of baggage abandoned by a victim of Mr. Garver's establishment and quite the worse for wear, it was locked up tight.

The key! Hidden in Johnny’s cigarette case. Mr. Garver hadn’t taken the time to riffle the rolls of tobacco.

Of course the brass key fit. As I unpacked Johnny's shirts and pressed them to my breast like reliquaries emptied of his cherished flesh, I dislodged the corner of what appeared to be the bottom. Soon I was clawing at the cardboard, scratching with my fingernails, only to discover that the laces, lifted just so, extracted the interior from its shell as a crowbar pries out its prize.

A false bottom as false as Johnny.

That's when I found the Colt. A cache of bullets, too. I gingerly picked up the revolver, marveling at the heft of steel. The nickel-plated four-and-a-half inch barrel reflected sparkles of light even with the curtains closed. I swung out the cylinder and examined the chambers fully loaded with six bullets. I eased the grip into my hand, curved my finger around the trigger. A terrible realization occurred to me with the force of a mule's kick. If I knew how to use this gun, I could take my own life right here, right now. Or I could take the life of another. An awful thrill coursed through my blood with a tangible invigoration.

There was more in that false bottom.

The Bank of Toledo certificates I'd grudgingly handed over to Pentland were gone. In their stead I found coins, perhaps four dozen thick gold coins called double eagles worth twenty dollars a piece in any paper currency. The coins amounted to a treasure trove the like of which I'd never seen, much less held free and clear in the palms of my hands.

And I found letters. I removed the neat bundle from its hiding place, untied the pink satin ribbon, and carefully unfolded each page. The letters had been written on parchment of a blushing pink color and drenched in patchouli. Patchouli, that most decadent of scents, redolent of casual dalliances and sporting ladies. Someone else's hand had treated these documents with such sentimental reverence. My Johnny was simply not the type for mementos.

Could I still have said he had been my Johnny?

The return address of each letter was the Rusty Nail. Each was written in a feminine curlicued script and began, My Dearest Johnny. Wanton phrases appeared throughout, such as, My heart throbs at the very thought of seeing you again. Each was signed, Your Darlingest Daisy.

His darlingest Daisy? Throbs? Seeing him again?

Whatever disappointments I may have harbored about my husband, I had never doubted his fidelity. I was his sweet little innocent angel. And I, in turn, had adored the man sincerely, if unwisely, during the twenty-two months of our marriage despite his spendthrift habits, frequent absences, and perpetual drunkenness.

Ah, love.

* * *

I buried Johnny Pentland in Lakeside Cemetery in the loamy soil of a land he'd scarcely known. I stood concealed beneath a thick black veil, defying the pitying gaze of our acquaintances, neighbors, curious onlookers, the town gossips, the insolent policeman, and a crowd of strange ladies and gentlemen I had never seen before. One gentleman sported yellow spats, another a lavender cravat. A tall stout woman attended the event in a pert black hat with a frivolous ostrich feather and a thick black veil that obscured her face and hair as unremittingly as mine masked me. Who were these strange people, and why had they appeared to witness my tragedy?

After the funeral, I flung the love letters in the fireplace, struck a match, and watched the pink parchment catch fire and burn to ashes. I flung my wedding band in the trash bin. Then some perverse sentiment persuaded me to retrieve it. Perhaps I could pawn the thing or hire a goldsmith to melt it down into a meaningless slug that might be worth something for the gold. I wound up tossing the ring in the bottom of my carpetbag.

And the coins? I sewed the gold coins into the hem of my slip, laboring into the night with a thick needle and thick white thread, doubling over the hem, inserting each coin, and stitching it shut twice. A highwayman might seize my carpetbag, but he would have to strip the slip right off me before he'd steal my gold. The garment looked passable if one did not examine my crude stitches too closely and the skirt of my dress properly covered up the whole affair. I did not anticipate any person closely examining my slip or any other item of my intimate apparel in the foreseeable future.

Johnny Pentland had taken forty-five dollars in Bank of Toledo certificates. My hem now concealed fifty-three double eagles. One-thousand-and-sixty dollars in gold. The sum would have paid four years' rent for the cottage on Shoreline Road, the price of the Stanhope gig, and a roan mare to pull the pretty little carriage I coveted.

Where had Pentland acquired such a fortune? And how? Had he earned it? Borrowed it? Stolen it?

Had someone murdered him over it? Would that someone come looking for me?

* * *

The shimmering macadam roasted the soles of my shoes as I sprinted down Shoreline Road. Perspiration plastered my shirtwaist to my skin and ran in rivulets down my neck. The carpetbag banged against my thigh, and I kept shifting the dead weight from hand to hand. It didn’t help.

The train depot lay clear across town, west of the Maumee grain elevator. I kept to back streets and alleys and dirt paths through the tall dry fever-weed. Behind Thompson's Granary and Milling Works, I spied a pair of dogs performing certain barnyard antics, the brindled bitch in heat, her growling squire of a spaniel insistent. Ah, passion. Was that truly what had bound me so ardently to Johnny Pentland? A comical and crude animal drive?

Very well! I desired no further affiliation with persons of the masculine sex. Marriage for the New Woman, wrote the suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, is a condition of bondage. No man, I vowed, would ever again jeopardize my future, my freedom, or my financial security.

I dashed up Beechwood Street, hurried down Main, and gained the depot. My escape lay in plain sight and my heart quickened. Then I spied a scowling fellow in muttonchops, a scuffed bowler, and a rumpled sack suit loitering beside a lemonade concession, and my breath caught in my throat. He peered intently in my direction as I approached. McMullen, the whiskey dealer! Had my late husband spoken with him, as he’d promised? I thought it unlikely. Johnny Pentland had owed him thirty-one dollars.

He followed me as I threaded through the crowd. The gossips had speculated that Pentland had salted away some cash. That he may have been a gambler and a rogue, but he hadn't left his sweet little wife destitute. I ducked behind a roasted peanut concession and watched McMullen march on without me. I had no intention of paying for my late husband's dipsomania, degenerate habits, or spendthrift ways. My secret fortune would provide a whole new start for me, and I had no intention of surrendering one single coin of it to the likes of McMullen. I sprinted to the platform where my train was scheduled to depart.

What, after all, could keep me in Toledo? My father had died miserably of a gunshot wound in the last year of the War of the Rebellion when I was but a babe in arms. Widowed and penniless, my grieving mother had secured a position as a tutor in the Worcestor household. It was there she had properly educated me together with the seven Worcestor children. The master of the household was a textile merchant who had snared his wealth dealing poor-quality uniforms that fell apart after a rain in the same brutal war that had claimed my father's life. No small bitterness to my mother, who was treated no better than a scullery maid despite her aristocratic breeding, education, and native intelligence. Mama had succumbed to the dread consumption a year before I'd married Johnny Pentland.

I had no one and nothing left in Toledo.

And my destination? The Golden State.

What could take me to such a faraway place where I knew not a soul? I could have chosen anywhere, abandoning myself to the whims of chance or the stringencies of fate. Instead I chose the happy prospect of gainful employment. I wiped away the perspiration trickling down my temple and withdrew from my skirt pocket the well-thumbed advertisement I'd clipped from The San Francisco Examiner.

MADAM ZISKA'S BOARDING SCHOOL FOR YOUNG LADIES

SEEKS A TUTOR WITH EXCELLENT CREDENTIALS

PLEASE RESPOND 1125 VAN NESS AVENUE

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

I had bought the Examiner at Forsythe's Newsstand the day after Johnny Pentland died. I had chosen the newspaper by chance from a rack offering The New York Times and The New Orleans Gazette. I had wanted to read a newspaper, any newspaper, that didn't publish lurid speculation about my late husband's controversial demise.

I promptly wrote to Madam Ziska, informing her I intended to relocate and requesting an interview upon my arrival. I confess I expanded ever so slightly upon my credentials. I had never been gainfully employed in my life and claimed my mother's experience as my own. And why not? I had often assisted her with her pedagogical duties during our long hours over the years in the Worcestor library, cajoling our master's arrogant brats. Surely I possessed excellent credentials, if a trifle informal.

I tucked the newspaper clipping into my carpetbag as the Overland train charged down the track.

And oh! What a piece of work! What a marvel of technology! A snorting archangel of modernity! The splendid locomotive ground to a steaming halt, its polished flanks gleaming like ebony, its bloodred cowcatcher cleaving the way. The big brass lantern mounted above the engineer's cabin glared like a Cyclops’ eye, and coal smoke billowed from the diamond-shaped smokestack. It was beautiful!

Passenger cars, Pullman cars, box cars, freight cars, mail cars paraded past me. And then, coupled in front of the caboose, rumbled the most tremendous touring car I had ever seen. Palace on Wheels didn't do it justice. A confection of cerulean blue, the car bore an elegant domed roof the color of old ivory and expansive teakwood observation platforms fore and aft. Silver scrollwork and gold leaf edged eaves and window ledges in our style of Art Nouveau. Trails of pale smoke twisted up from little smokestacks. Inside there would be a private kitchen, a hot bath, perhaps a fireplace or two. The days would be blistering on our journey west, but nights on the Great Plains and in the mountains would grow cold.

What royalty of industry, the stage, or the thrones of Europe possessed such a magnificent means of transport?

Railroaders scurried busily about, restocking the coal car, shoveling mounds of the chunky black fuel from waiting wagons, and refilling the boiler with barrels of water. Passengers disembarked, some departing for their destinations, others taking their ease during the stopover. As people bustled all around, a mustachioed man strolled past me on the platform.

Now, mustaches are quite the fashion among our gentlemen, the more luxurious, the better. Gentlemen are forever preening them, curling and waxing them, catching bread crumbs and gobbets of butter in them. The mustache of the man who strolled past me now was extraordinary even by our indulgent standards. Two wings the color of platinum swooped past the thin line of his mouth and pointed chin to lie upon his modest chest in meticulous ringlets.

His mustache was not the only remarkable thing about him. He was Chinese. A Celestial, as the Examiner referred to residents of San Francisco's Chinese quarter, a colorful tourist attraction in 1896 known as Chinatown. Chinatown, the newspaper cautioned, had been recently disrupted by a troublesome, occasionally violent dispute between rival trade associations, but nevertheless merited a pleasant afternoon’s visit by the curious transcontinental tourist from New York or Boston.

A Celestial. I'd never encountered a Celestial person before.

And what a person he was! He wore a sumptuous robe of scarlet satin with a high collar and drooping sleeves lavishly embroidered with gold-and-black chrysanthemums. A cap of the same exhilarating colors crowned him. His was a high-cheeked, impassive face with a golden complexion, the sharp lines and angular planes suggesting years of tribulation. His almondshaped eyes tilted up toward his temples, autocratic slashes of icy intelligence black beyond the absence of color. His hair was drawn severely back and woven into a platinum queue as long as my arm.

To his right and left marched more Celestials clad in black cotton jackets and trousers, black slouch hats pulled low over their steely black eyes. Long black queues swung down their backs. Beneath their jackets bulged bandoliers of bullets, the distinctive grips of Colt revolvers and, if I was not much mistaken, Smith and Wessons, too.

I was hardly an expert at armaments but after taking possession of Johnny Pentland's Colt, I had studied my copy of the Sears, Roebuck catalog and learned makes and models of personal firearms. I was suddenly glad for my revolver if journeying West was, to these seasoned travelers, such a hazardous undertaking.

I confess I was dazzled by their bold demeanor and jaunty style, the sinister whisper of their slippers. And now preceding them, now lost among them, him like a rare butterfly caught in a thunderhead, the vivid center of their dark vortex.

Other odd people followed in the entourage. Two slim figures huddled anonymously beneath hooded cloaks of heavy black silk, surrounded by another phalanx of scowling militiamen. The slim figures strolled languidly across the platform. They must have been suffocating beneath such stifling garments in the sweltering heat and swirling steam, each of their steps plainly mired in lassitude and reluctance.

An overeager militiaman prodded one of the figures, his impatient fingertips snaking out and striking the figure's slim shoulder. The figure stumbled and fell.

What a bully! I thought, and ran to assist, heedless of the black-clad men and their abundant weapons. I grasped a slender elbow, lifted the figure to its feet.

The peaked hood fell back.

And I glimpsed shimmering ebony eyes in a round little golden face, the pink curve of a feminine mouth, a river of iridescent black hair.

The Celestial girl gazed at me, her eyes beseeching, her brow furled, her mouth taut. Jyou-ming. Ching, ching! she said in an urgent whisper. Please, please, help me, miss.

The mysterious mustachioed man whirled and strode to her side, brusquely pushing me away and admonishing her in a harsh whisper. He jerked the hood back over her head, restoring her anonymity, and spoke a blunt command to her tormenter. Then he turned and confronted me.

And I found myself standing face to face with the mysterious mustachioed man. He gazed at me with an aloof smile and a warning in his fierce black eyes.

2

Stranger on a Train

The Celestial potentate---for surely the mysterious mustachioed man could have been nothing less--abruptly turned away and stalked off with his black-clad entourage.

Who is that girl? I called after him, but my voice issued from my throat as a strangled croak. What are you doing with her?

He ignored me, if indeed he even heard me above the tumult of train and crowd. The potentate, the girl, and half a dozen militiamen promptly boarded the cerulean Palace on Wheels. This remarkable vehicle proved to be a Wagner Drawing Room and Sleeping Car. Four militiamen stationed themselves on the observation platform in back, lighting cigarettes and settling into rattan chairs as though preparing for a breezy picnic on their employer's veranda. Still, there was no mistaking their air of somber vigilance.

The remaining militiamen and the second anonymous hooded figure dispatched to an only slightly less luxurious Pullman Presidential Hotel Car coupled in front of the Wagner. Catwalks had been custom-fitted along both sides of the Pullman, as well as broad observation platforms fore and aft. I'd never seen such unusual amenities on touring cars, amenities plainly meant for surveillance. The Celestial potentate must have specially commissioned them.

I didn't know what I could do to assist the Celestial girl. Dismayed though I was at her distress and her plea for help, it was really none of my business. Nor could I have done much since she was securely sequestered in the Wagner. I climbed the steps into my car, eager to depart.

Now, I'd seen glamorous images of train travel in the ladies' magazines I avidly leafed through at Forsythe's Newsstand. Whole paragraphs extolled the Belgian carpets, velvet draperies, cut-crystal lamps, gilt chairs, upholstered couches, and featherbeds, not to mention the silk-covered cushions. One could enjoy delightful luxury aboard the Overland train on a transcontinental journey. For a price.

We who were on a budget rode in a common passenger car. I confronted a cramped coach equipped with two cheerless rows of twelve double-seats each. My bargain one-way ticket reserved exactly half of a straight-backed wooden bench bereft of even the semblance of a cushion. Quelling panic at the prospect of enduring a five-week journey perched upon this cozy rack, I staked out my territory next to the window in the most secluded corner of the car. I set my carpetbag on the other half of the seat and scowled at my fellow travelers with the intent of discouraging fraternization as everyone boarded and scrambled to claim their own domain.

The train whistle shrieked, signaling our departure. Every seat now accommodated at least two persons and, upon the bench in front of mine, three. There, a squat graying nursemaid suffered the company of two small children, a weepy girl with snot dripping down her chin and her grinning jug-eared brother who invented new means of torturing his younger sibling at a moment's notice. The boy peered over the back of his seat and stuck his tongue out at me. I responded in kind. He returned to his easier prey.

Across the aisle two newlyweds were setting out on a shoestring to seek their prospects in the West, the husband a robust dark-haired boy sprinkled with freckles, the wife a pretty girl with lovely hair the color of autumn leaves and a mouth somewhat burdened by an excess of teeth. They were also setting out to procreate as soon as possible and zealously devoted themselves to preliminaries of the task, kissing and rubbing and tenderly touching.

Scruffy traveling salesmen, gaunt factory laborers, a wide-eyed farmer who nervously picked at the gingham patches on his overalls occupied the other seats. Castaways of our uncertain economy traveled in the common passenger car.

But hallelujah! I'd won my privacy, or at least as much privacy as one could hope for on a common passenger car. Perhaps my cozy rack in all its fullness wouldn't turn out to be so bad. I unbuttoned my collar before it strangled me and unpinned my hair, permitting damp tresses to straggle down my back. Orange blossom honey, indeed.

I unbuckled my carpetbag and fished out a handkerchief, drenching the cotton on my forehead and neck, and stole a glance at my fellow travelers. Everyone was preoccupied, busily arranging bags and lunch baskets, arguing over where a new neighbor's luggage ought to go or a pair of clumsy booted feet. Satisfied no one would notice, I unbuttoned the top four buttons of my shirtwaist and fanned air onto my throat.

Whereupon my right heel began to throb alarmingly.

The carpetbag could have contained not a single thing more so whatever I took in footwear had to go on my feet. Daydreaming of opening nights at the opera and society soirees, I had declined my Commonsense Soles with their boring flat heels and feeding-trough toes. Instead I wore my Zephyrs with their delicately stacked heels and toes so fashionably narrow that Titania, Queen of the Fairies, would not have been offended to shod her unearthly feet in them.

I reached beneath my skirt and slip and cautiously removed my garter, rolling down my stocking and working off the Zephyr. Oh, drat! My heel had become a raw, bloody thing.

My mother had taught me the vital importance of keeping wounds clean. After Dr. Pasteur's treatment of contagious diseases, Dr. Lister's advances in antiseptics, and the success of the diphtheria antitoxin in 1895, a number of learned physicians had advanced the amazing theory that disease and infection were caused by virulent creatures so tiny they could only be glimpsed through a magnifying device called a microscope.

Very well. I would require boiled water. Surely tea would be available in the dining car. Bandages? I tore the handkerchief into strips and laid them across the top of my carpetbag to dry.

As I was pondering the challenging logistics of my impending medical therapy, the conductor called, All aboard! and the Overland trembled and slowly lurched forward. Peering out my window, I saw the insolent policeman standing on the platform, a Doberman pinscher deprived of his squirrel. I slid down in my seat.

Fare thee well, you nasty beast, I whispered.

Suddenly McMullen emerged from the crowd and strode up to the policeman. I craned my neck and watched anxiously as the two men conversed with furrowed brows. The whiskey dealer abruptly looked up and pointed straight at me. I ducked down again, but he’d caught a glimpse of me. Pointing and shouting, the two men sprinted after my car and leapt up the steps.

Double drat! I abandoned my carpetbag, Zephyr, and bandages and bounded out of my seat. I hobbled down the aisle to the lavatory at the back of our car. The lavatory, a cramped windowless chamber dimly lit by a flickering oil lantern and deeply shadowed even at noon, offered a smeary cheval glass, a chamber pot, and a washstand of black walnut bearing a basin of tepid none-too-clean water. A canvas curtain was all that separated the humble facilities from the rest of the car.

I dashed through the curtain, flung it shut behind me.

Not fair! Not fair! I had nothing to do with Johnny Pentland's death. If someone had slipped knockout drops in his whiskey over one-thousand-and-sixty dollars in gold, it was a matter that should have been resolved between the two of them. I hadn't tasted one drop of McMullen's damn whiskey. My late husband's creditors, his enemies, his schemes--he'd never consulted me about them. Why should I bear the brunt of his troubles now?

Where could I hide? The lavatory contained no cabinet, no closet, no laundry bin I could crawl into and curl up, quiet as a mouse. The best I could manage was to crouch against the baseboards on the floor next to the washstand, knees pressed tight against my breast, and hope the flickering darkness would shield me from someone peering in with the sun behind him, daylight confounding his eyes.

I heard strident voices, the policeman's insolent tenor, McMullen's whiskeyed rasp. Have you seen a lady aboard? A slender thing, blue eyes, her hair unpinned. We have reason to believe--

Suddenly a man burst into the lavatory, flinging the canvas curtain aside and shut again. I shrank back into the shadows and tried to quell the panting of my breath. He paid me no attention whatsoever and tore off his jacket, flinging the garment on a hook by the washstand. He snapped off his cravat, swiftly unbuttoned his vest and shirt, and ripped those garments off, as well. He stood, bare-chested, and cupped water in his palms, splashing his face and throat.

Blast this heat, he murmured to himself. I am ever the fool for love.

That voice! I peered cautiously around the washstand.

Boots of morocco leather. Black gabardine trousers on long, lean legs. A boyish waist, broad shoulders, the swell of biceps.

A chill rippled over me despite the parboil of the car. Had Johnny Pentland returned from the dead to haunt me? My next thought was even more chilling. Had a monstrous joke had been worked against me? Pentland hadn't died at all. An imposter had grimaced on that dreadful deathbed and smooth Johnny had skipped out on his creditors as surely as I was attempting to. A fool for love? Was he bound for a rendezvous with Darlingest Daisy?

But it was not Pentland, and it was not the same voice. The stranger spoke in a deeper register and with a drawl I placed as south of the Mason-Dixon. The stranger's biceps bore no trace of the ace of hearts or any other tattoo and were burnished with a light suntan, unlike Pentland’s pallor. The stranger was tall, much taller than Pentland, with the bold musculature of a younger man. And his boots were not the same. The stranger's boots were those of a well-traveled roamer who had neglected niceties like a shoeshine. Pentland had always kept his boots well oiled and heeled. A man is judged by his boots, he would proclaim. Pentland had owed the cobbler seventeen dollars.

The stranger reached for a towel and caught sight of me. If only I could disappear! I expected him to cry out, to give me away with a shout of indignation, but he did no such thing. Without a word, he calmly removed his jacket from the hook and draped it over me, covering me head-to-toe in black gabardine warmed by his body heat. My senses filled with the spicy scent of Murray and Lanman cologne clinging inside his jacket and the masculine musk of him.

There was a ripping, rattling sound as the insolent policeman and McMullen flung open the lavatory curtain.

Say, there, gentlemen, the stranger said, do you mind? I'm using the facilities. I peeked over the collar of his jacket. He blocked the entrance and flung the curtain closed, but McMullen caught the edge of canvas and belligerently forced the curtain halfway open.

Have you seen a lady? the insolent policeman said, peering inside.

A lady? the stranger said. A lady where?