Deadly Proof: A Victorian San Francisco Mystery (14 page)

“Yes, Miss Childers said Mrs. Sullivan hated him.”

“I don’t know that I would go that far. She certainly felt he was inappropriate with the young apprentices. I even once heard her giving him a hard time over that.”

“Yet she seemed pretty distraught when she came out of his office Friday night.”

Seth looked at him, and he said, “Well in my experience, you don’t have to love a person or even like him all that much to be upset if he dies in your arms. And that is what had just happened to Mrs. Sullivan. I’d be a darned sight more suspicious of her if she’d remained cool in the circumstances.”

Thursday, early morning, July 8, 1880

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“TO DRESSMAKERS: TO LET—FINE SUITE OF TWO OR THREE ROOMS”
San Francisco Chronicle,
August 4, 1880

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“D
o you know if the Misses Moffet have any appointments this morning?” Annie asked her maid, Kathleen.

The young woman put her tray on the bedroom’s small table and replied, “No, ma’am, Miss Minnie mentioned that they wouldn’t be going out until after lunch.” Kathleen looked into the teapot and asked, “Would you like another pot of tea?”

“No, thank you. I’ve an appointment with the board of the Ladies Protection and Relief Society this morning, so I will need to leave in an hour. But I thought I might go up and see the Misses Moffets before I left.”

Annie stood in front of the mirror in the corner of the room, trying to coax the last of her curls up into the braided twist that worked best when she was going to be wearing a hat most of the day. As she did with increasing frequency, she found herself thinking about her future life with Nate, imagining the day she would be looking into the mirror and see him standing next to her.

After a miserable first marriage, followed by years of penury and dependence on her late husband’s family, having this bedroom all to herself had been her idea of heaven. Now, the vision of breakfasting with him, watching him shave at the washstand, or sharing the old blue comforter with him in bed at night sent her heart aflutter.

“Let me get that, ma’am,” said Kathleen, coming over and deftly securing the recalcitrant strand in place with a hairpin.

“Oh, that’s perfect, Kathleen. Did I tell you that the light finally dawned on Mr. Harper, my notions salesman, that Madam Sibyl and Mrs. Fuller were one and the same? I have been leaving the cards I had printed up that read
Mrs. A.E. Fuller, Financial Advice and Accounting,
in a bowl on the table for the past three months, and I noticed that several weeks ago Mr. Harper picked one up. He didn’t say a word until yesterday afternoon, when in the middle of my ‘Madam Sibyl’ blather about what his star chart said, he interrupted me. Said he found it odd that this Mrs. Fuller and Madam Sibyl worked at the same address, and would I, Madam Sibyl, recommend that he consult this Mrs. Fuller if he needed some help reconciling his end-of-month accounts?”

“Oh, ma’am, what did you say?”

“I told him that since I
was
Mrs. Fuller, I would find it presumptuous to recommend myself but that I would be glad to give him the names of several satisfied customers if he would like to check me out. He looked confused, then, thank goodness, he laughed!”

Annie smiled, thinking back to the conversation. In the past four months, she had worked hard to shift away from using her pretend clairvoyance as Madam Sibyl as the source of the income she needed to supplement what she made from the boarding house. She’d tried different approaches to make the transition from clairvoyant to financial advisor. If she thought that the client didn’t really believe in palmistry or horoscopes but just came to get her advice, she could be fairly direct, asking if they would mind if she dropped the pretense. Sometimes she would simply ask if she could drop the costume (wig, heavy cosmetics) as the first step. Increasingly, she just left out the new business cards, hoping her clients would get the hint.

Not surprisingly, the women who came to her, whether for financial or more personal domestic advice, were the most accepting when she took the direct approach. Nevertheless, she had lost a few women and even more men as clients in the process. Most simply stopped coming, while a few got quite hostile, lambasting her for being a charlatan. She found it interesting that these were often the clients who’d been most resistant to taking her advice in the first place or were most unhappy with their lives and were glad now to have someone else to blame.

As she got more jobs on her own, like her work with the WCPU, the less urgency she felt in forcing her Madam Sibyl clients to accept that all the palmistry and so forth was just a charade. And every couple of weeks another one would make the leap, as Mr. Harper had finally done.

“Is Mr. Dawson coming by today?” Kathleen asked as she put the breakfast dishes on the tray. “He sure seemed disappointed when he dropped by yesterday.”

“I am sorry to have missed him,” Annie replied. “But he said on Tuesday that he’d be too busy all this week with this new case, on top of his regular legal work, to come by in the evenings. He is going to court this morning to ask for a postponement of the arraignment, which is when a client pleads guilty or not guilty. If the judge turns him down, he’ll have to be ready for a trial as soon as next week, and I might not even get to see him this weekend. Unless, of course, his client pleads guilty.”

Annie had sent him a note yesterday telling him about Mrs. Richmond’s surprising suggestion that she recommend Annie to Mrs. Rashers, who was looking for an accountant. She didn’t want to agree to this proposal if Nate felt that this would be somehow unethical, given that he was defending the woman who might very well turn out to have murdered Mrs. Rashers’ husband. She hadn’t heard anything from him yet.

Annie told Kathleen she hoped to get back to the boarding house by lunch and that she would stop in the kitchen when she returned. The young servant bobbed a curtsey and gave one of her cheery smiles and left. Before turning away from the mirror, Annie smoothed the light brown wool material of her bodice over her hips and wondered how difficult it would be for the Moffets to redo this polonaise top into the shorter basque style. Even though summer in San Francisco continued to surprise her with its mild days and often chilly nights, she still got hot mid-day wearing either her navy wool or this dress with its extra drapery over the underskirt. She simply refused to wear the old black silk dresses any longer, except on Wednesdays when they still comprised her Madam Sibyl costume. Even if they were lighter and more comfortable. Too many reminders of her years of widowhood and totally inappropriate for a new bride to be wearing.

Which was why she wanted to know if Miss Minnie and Miss Millie were at home this morning. She really needed to consult the elderly seamstresses about a dress for her wedding. She could probably postpone deciding on the other details about the coming event, but if they didn’t have time to make her a new dress by the second week in August (and the last dress they made for her took at least two months because they were so busy with other clients) then she would need to find something ready-made.

While she could neither afford, nor did she want, the kind of elaborate outfit she had worn at her first wedding, neither did she want something that would embarrass Nate, particularly if he was planning on inviting the law firm clients. Which was what Mrs. Stein seemed to think he would want to do. She wondered why he hadn’t mentioned this to her. Was he afraid she would object because she’d reacted so badly last fall when he temporarily thought about going into politics? She needed him to know that she was as supportive of his work as his was of hers. Nevertheless, in trying to please Nate, the last thing she wanted was to put Miss Minnie and Miss Millie into the impossible position of trying to create something special for her in too short a period of time.

*****

A
few minutes later, Annie went up the back stairs to the attic where the Moffets had their rooms, thinking back to when she’d made her decision to rent to them. When she first opened the boarding house, she worried it would bother Beatrice to share the attic with boarders. But it soon became obvious that she couldn’t afford not to use every available space in the old home she’d inherited to generate income.

Beatrice made the decision easier by pointing out that she never spent any time in her quarters during the day and that “having some company there at night will be comforting.”

However, Esther Stein, who with her husband had been the first boarders to move in, was the person who suggested that Annie rent two of the attic rooms to the elderly dressmakers.

“If they could rent both of them together at a reasonable price,” Esther had said, “I am sure that they would be glad to do any of the fine mending of linens for the house at a discount, which would help considerably in keeping your costs down.”

She also laughed and said if need be she would pay for that mending herself for the convenience of having her own dressmakers living upstairs. “This way if I indulge too much at table they would be able to let out the seams in my clothing immediately.”

Annie had never regretted her decision to take in these two elderly ladies, even if she might have gotten more income by renting the two rooms at a higher price. For one thing, they ate like birds, kept the tablecloths and sheets in repair, and insisted that any dressmaking they did for Annie would be at barely above cost. And what exquisite work they did.

They made outfits for some of the wealthiest women in San Francisco, and she’d certainly never have been able to afford their dressmaking skills at full price. Between the two dresses that Esther and Herman Stein had commissioned for her as presents, and her two wool polonaise dresses, all of her wardrobe, except those detested black silks, were original creations by Miss Millie and Miss Minnie. They’d also made a lovely bronze walking dress for Laura and helped Kathleen sew her own “good tweed” outfit.

She learned over time to respect the two women for more than their sewing skills. Miss Minnie’s loquaciousness and Miss Millie’s silence might have branded them as eccentric, but they were wiser about the ways of the world than she’d thought possible. And their generosity and cheerfulness were constant reminders of the importance of embracing life, no matter what it threw at you. Because it turned out life had thrown a good deal their way.

They’d certainly had more than their share of tragedy—although they never spoke of it. Well, of course Miss Millie never spoke of it, because she never spoke at all. But neither did Miss Minnie, who talked all the time. Instead, what she talked about was growing up in Natchez, Mississippi, in the first decades of the century when everything was magical. Their father, a successful steamboat captain, provided them with a gracious life that included servants, beautiful dresses, music lessons and French tutors, debutante balls, and “gentlemen callers.” Miss Minnie’s stories about this particular species of ideal Southern manhood intimidated Nate, who grumbled that, after hearing Miss Minnie, Annie would find him sadly lacking.

However, Esther said she’d heard from a woman who’d grown up in Natchez and was an inveterate gossip that this magical life ended for the two women when their father’s steamship exploded in the mid-1820s. While he survived the explosion, he hadn’t insured the boat or the goods it was carrying. As a result, he went bankrupt and never recovered from the loss, forcing Minnie and Millie to use their sewing talents to supplement the family’s income.

Tragedy continued to stalk the Moffets, with the father dying of drink and their older brother losing his life soon after in another steamboat explosion. Natchez may have been at the center of the cotton boom of the next two decades, but Minnie and Millie Moffet spent those years sewing their youth and marriage prospects away in a decaying old mansion, taking care of their aging mother and their younger brother, Jasper.

According to the inveterate gossip, after their mother died in 1850, leaving the derelict home to that younger brother, he promptly sold it and dragged them out to San Francisco where he was going to make his fortune. What he did, instead, was continue to expect his sisters to support him with their sewing, while he drank and wrote bad poetry for local literary magazines.

Miss Minnie told a different story. She and her sister thought it a wonderful privilege to nurture Jasper’s literary talents, and they sincerely mourned his passing from liver failure two years ago. They didn’t even seem to blame him when they discovered he’d mortgaged the North Beach home they’d bought with their dressmaking profits, forcing them to sell the house to pay for his debts. Esther said that when she’d gone to tell them about Annie’s boarding house, she’d found them huddled together in a small, dank basement, where they could barely see to sew.

Not that they complained about those former accommodations. However, every time Miss Minnie told the story about how “dear Mrs. Stein” came and escorted them to the O’Farrell Street house, her joy was palpable. Annie found her fulsome compliments uncomfortable, particularly when the older woman rhapsodized about the smaller of the two rooms where the sisters slept. This tiny attic room barely held the small wardrobe, dresser, and bed the sisters shared, but Miss Minnie always referred to it as “warm and snug” and confided to everyone that they “slept like queens,” because, after a life-time of sharing a narrow single mattress, they now had a double bed.

As Annie came up the stairs, she saw that the door to the second room where they did their sewing was open. She rapped on the door frame before entering at Miss Minnie’s hello. She did feel better about how well this room suited the two women’s needs. Large and airy, the dormer windows on both the south and eastern sides of the house let in light throughout most of the day. It was also spacious enough for a worktable for cutting material and laying out patterns, two dressmaking mannikins, two comfortable chairs under the eastern windows, and a tall wardrobe where they could hang the dresses they were working on to keep them from harm.