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"I won't stand in your way as you are now standing in mine," I
said pointedly, poking him in the chest with my walking stick-I was
not going anywhere these days without it-"but as for the rest, we
shall see. As I said, there is something I need to discuss with you
both. Shall we join Frances?"

"As you wish." He stood back and motioned me ahead of him with a
bit of a flourish. "To your left."

I entered the room, which was something like a library but
without so many books. There were shelves on one wall with only a
few; but the room's main feature was a large round table in the
very center, and at the table sat Frances McFadden with a map open
before her, and something like a locket on a chain dangling from
her hand.

"Oh, hello, Fremont!" She looked up at my approach. Though the
inside of this house was gloomier than most, owing to the heavy
curtains at seemingly every window (one supposed a medium like
Abigail Locke would have wanted the means to shut out the light
whenever she preferred), there was plenty of light from an electric
chandelier overhead. In her peach dress, with her red-gold hair,
Frances McFadden positively glowed in that light.

"I'm surprised to see you. I thought you'd be with your father
again all day."

"He left this morning. I saw him off on the ferry. Whatever are
you doing with that locket, Frances?"

"It's not a locket, it's a pendulum. I'm letting it choose the
places I will visit clairvoyantly. It's great fun, and good
practice, Patrick says. What are
you
doing here?"

Though I hadn't been invited, I sat down at the table, choosing
a place near the windows from which I could see the door into the
room. Patrick had not come in with me, he had disappeared into the
bowels of the house somewhere, and that worried me. Not much, but a
little. I said, "I was concerned about you when I found you weren't
at home. At my house, that is. I seem to recall we had an agreement
about your keeping out of sight. Someone may have tried to kill
you, you know."

"Me? That's nonsense. It was your bed that got slashed. And
besides, you weren't even worried that much yourself. You didn't
even tell me until the next day. Anyhow, Wish says it wasn't
anything personal to either of us. Most likely it was just a
burglar who was angry that you didn't have any jewels or anything
good to take."

I frowned. It is one thing to be charming and lighthearted,
quite another to be irresponsible. "Wish and I were both trying to
protect you, because we thought you had already been traumatized
enough. The truth is, even though the intruder is not likely to
return to Divisadero Street, he could conceivably follow you if you
leave the house, Frances, and now you have led him here-"

"Where Patrick will take care of me!'' She beamed, then turned
her head to the door a fraction of a second before the man himself
appeared there.

Egad!.
I thought.
She is so attuned to him she knows
when he is about to enter a room.
Criminals or not, whether or
not they had lied to me about not knowing each other previously,
Frances and Patrick were most certainly in love now. Not only that,
but he had already begun taking care of her, because he looked
quite domestic, carrying a tray bearing cups, saucers, and a
steaming pot of coffee.

"I really do not require refreshment," I protested, but quickly
gave it up as a lost cause. Being forceful would get me nowhere
with these two. I should have to be devious instead, and I might as
well sit and drink coffee while planning exactly how to do
that.

"Fremont, truly," Frances said while pouring out prettily,
"Jeremy doesn't want me anymore. He won't waste any time on me now.
He thinks I'm soiled. He'll just wash his hands of me, cast me off,
get his divorce, and that will be an end of it where I'm concerned.
I won't fight him, I don't want any of his dirty old tainted money.
I want to be like you-I want to earn my own!"

Accepting a cup, I tried not to grimace. Frances was not exactly
prepared to earn a living in the same way I had been prepared, but
I couldn't tell her that. "You're sure about Jeremy? It strikes me
that a man who was so possessive of you that he would physically
hurt you, and lock up your clothes and so on-"

"That was before he thought I'd been with Patrick"-heightened
color came up in her already rosy cheeks-"when he thought he was
the only one who had ever, well, you know, touched me in that
particular way. He said so, specifically. You remember. I told you
that word he called me. It's as if I'm dirty to him now."

"Don't talk about yourself that way, dearest," Patrick said,
reaching out and taking her hand. "You could never be
dirty.
Only the worst sort of mind would think so."

"You're so sweet," Frances said.

For the moment, I might as well not have been in the room, and
that was fine with me. I had some thinking to do.

Suddenly I had it, an inspiration! Oh yes, a real, true,
bonafide inspiration . . . and it came in the form of none other
than the Emperor Norton himself. Just as I had seen him so recently
in my dreams.

I got the lovers' attention by rapping on the table with my
knuckles, and then I explained to them in some detail what I had in
mind. Briefly, it was this: That they should give Frances's spirit
mentor, the Emperor, his due. For if they did not, he might become
angry, and then things would not go well. What the Emperor wanted
(or so I said, and indeed I was convinced of it myself by the time
I'd finished) was that Frances should take on the pursuit of his
lost treasure. She herself, with Patrick along if she preferred,
must follow the instructions he had set out in the automatic
writing.

While they were doing that, I boldly stated (although I had no
idea whatever how I would accomplish it), I should bring the
investigation into the murders of the mediums to a successful
close. After which both Patrick and Frances could leave San
Francisco and go East with impunity.

Patrick took up my cause with alacrity. Apparently it made sense
to him that the spirit of the Emperor, who was very real to
Frances, might not otherwise take kindly to Patrick's whisking her
away from him-as it were.

And so it happened that some twenty minutes later I, waiting
just around the corner in the Maxwell, saw Frances and Patrick set
off up Octavia Street and turn on the next corner up onto Green
Street, walking toward Van Ness. Off on Emperor Norton's quest, no
doubt, which might or might not be a wild goose chase.

While they were gone, I intended to be on a quest of my own. As
soon as they were well out of sight, I left the auto, rummaging
inside my leather bag for a hairpin as I walked back to the house
they had just left.

I was not the least bit certain that the lock would yield to my
amateurish ministrations, and reminded myself to talk to Michael
again about getting a set of lock picks. Wish Stephenson had qualms
about private investigators having tools not available to the
police-and the police are not supposed to pick locks. Though why
they do not do that, when they do any number of far worse things
they are not supposed to do either, I could not imagine, nor did I
waste my time trying. Still, Wish had a few of these pruderies that
were truly annoying and restricting.

"Oh!" An involuntary, soft little cry escaped me when the
hairpin suddenly engaged the tumblers in exactly the right sort of
way and the lock clicked open as if by magic. Such a sweet,
gratifying little sound. How nicely the door swung open.

/
do love being in places where I am not really supposed to
be,
I admitted to myself as I entered the hall, taking care to
close the door behind me. I wondered if Father would find that
shocking or amusing.

Now, the question was, where to go first? I intended to search
the house for Abigail Locke's belongings, looking for anything that
might give a clue as to who had killed her. Of course, if Patrick
had done it, he would have destroyed anything incriminating by now.
But maybe not, one never knows.

Not having the slightest clue what I was looking for, it was
hard even to begin to know where to look. I decided to search the
downstairs first, as there are always more places to hide in
bedrooms if one is about to be caught. There are wardrobes,
cupboards, large chests, and in dire circumstances (as I had
actually been once, in Michael's bedroom, of all places) if there
is no time to find a better place, one can hide under the bed.
Starting in the formal parlor, I looked everywhere that might
provide a hiding place, or even just a container, for something
else; and I found nothing of note. I did find a cache of money, in
twenty-dollar gold pieces, inside a hideous ceramic vase on the top
of an
etagere.
I wondered if Patrick knew it was there, if
in fact he had put it there himself? Somehow I rather doubted that,
and made a mental note to tell him before he and Frances set off-if
they ever in fact did get to set off together. They could use that
money.

Here I was thinking of helping them, while I was also looking
for evidence to incriminate them. How disgusting! It just went to
show the state of my confusion.

In the kitchen the most remarkable thing I found was a whole
drawer full of mousetraps, which smelled of both mice and old
cheese-
eeuw!
And in a funny, deep little drawer set into the
clothes tree in the hall there was a cache of odd buttons, some of
them quite beautiful and some of them odd indeed (such as three
silver ones shaped like ducks). But nothing that had anything to
do, even remotely, with anyone murdering anyone.

I was not really concerned about Patrick and Frances returning
to the house any time soon, so I took my time upstairs. Patrick was
not sleeping in the bedroom where Frances and I had found Abigail
Locke's body, that was evident. In fact, he had kept it intact-if
not exactly like a shrine, then certainly in pristine condition.
Perhaps he simply didn't like to come into the room, which did have
an eerie feel-or was that just my imagination, building upon the
fact that I'd discovered the body there? Whatever it was, a shiver
of the most unpleasant proportions raced down my spine as I crossed
at the foot of that bed. I opened the wardrobe to find Abigail
Locke's dresses-all in either white or cream, not a single bright
or dark color among them-hanging there like little ghosts
themselves.

At one point in searching that bedroom, I could have sworn I
heard someone moaning: "Oooooooh!" Followed by the even worse sound
of a long, outrushing sigh, as if that were their last breath on
this earth. But I ignored it. At that point I was meticulously
searching through a massive chest of drawers.

In a pale pink silk satin lingerie carrier, one of those that
folds like a large flat envelope, tied with a braided silken coil,
I found the letters. Not many, perhaps ten, and obviously
treasured. I sat down on the bed, opened the first one, and read
until I got to the signature:
Willie.

Willie who?

WISH STEPHENSON still had not returned to Divisadero Street when
I got back myself in midafternoon. Hismother was worried about
him, but she clothed her worry in annoyance:

"I'd just like to know what he's thinking," Edna said, "off
doing his own thing, not even a job that pays, when we've got all
these calls coming in all of a sudden. It's irresponsible, that's
what it is, and that's not like my boy at all, not a-tall!" That
perked my ears right up. "All these calls, Edna?" "Oh yes, you just
take a look at these messages, if you please.

There's at least a dozen. I thought maybe if you'd sort through
them, I could call back and start making appointments for you.

For Aloysius, too, if he'd just get on back here. You put 'em in
order, Fremont, from the most important down to the least
important. That way I'll know who to call first."

"I'll be more than happy to do that," I agreed. I took the notes
to my table-desk in the conference room and began to read and
evaluate, which took longer than I had expected-especially when
Edna began to return calls and set up the appointments. It was
certainly a stimulating way to spend the last couple of hours of
the workday.

Wish never did return. Unlike his mother, I did not think that
was particularly remarkable; if anything, I saw his prolonged
absence as a sign that things were finally moving on this
mysterious private concern of his. I told his mother so, in an
attempt to placate her that seemed to work. She did mumble, though,
as she was getting ready to leave at the end of the day, about the
likelihood of Wish showing up at home just in time for supper.
Apparently this was something he had managed with a great deal of
regularity when he was on the police force-even when he was working
the four-to-midnight shift.