The Bohemian Murders (20 page)

Dr. Bright still smelled faintly of autopsy when he came into his office, but at least his hands were clean. “Aha,” he said, “Miss Sherman, is it?”

I stood up to greet him but found I was reluctant to offer my hand, due, no doubt, to knowledge of where his had so recently been. “Fremont Jones, Dr. Bright,” I said.

“Fremont, yes, I knew it was some sort of Army man’s name. You’re the one from the lighthouse; I remember you now. Wanted to know about the Jane Doe a while back.” He plunked himself down in the chair behind his desk, which received him with a squeaky groan. “So what’s it this time?”

“I am in need of advice, and a confidant,” I said, feeling my stomach sink at the risk I was taking. I had reached the place where I did not feel I could trust anyone at all.

“And you chose me?” He chuckled and rubbed at the tip of his nose. “I’m flattered, to tell you the truth, really flattered.”

“I hope you
will
tell me the truth,” I said, and reached into my bag. I brought out the toxicology report and handed it to him. As he read it I watched his face intently. I expect that in time I will be a better judge of whether or not someone is lying to me than I have been in the past. At least I have learned, from experience, to be cautious.

“So?” After a quick read-through he looked up with beady black eyes.

“So I should like to know if this contaminated water, which sickened two cows and contributed to the death of another, would be lethal to humans. Or would it merely make us sick?”

He frowned, and rubbed at his nose again. “If you drank it, sure, it’d make you sick, but I doubt you’d die of it. For one thing, the water would smell and taste funny. You wouldn’t be likely to drink much before
deciding there was something wrong with it. You’d be sick at home for a few days, maybe even in the hospital, but that’s all.”

I said, “Hmm,” and fell to thinking.

“Somebody tried to poison you, Miss Jones?” he asked jauntily, bending forward to fish in a cigar box on his desk. “Smoke? Some ladies do you know.”

“No, thank you.” I smiled. “That is not one of my vices.”

“You don’t mind if I do?”

I shook my head.

“What are your vices, Miss Jones?”

A good question—which I would have refused to answer had he been a younger man. As it was, I gave the matter some thought before replying, “I suppose my most glaring fault is a lack of good judgment. Also I have very little patience. Even the thought of injustice makes me wild, and there is so much of it—” I stopped short, biting my lip before I could say too much.

Dr. Bright grinned, his beady eyes jumped, and the moist inner membranes of his mouth gleamed as he pursed his lips and let out a few smoke rings. “That’s what I thought. It’s Jane Doe, isn’t it? You still all in a twist about her?”

Maybe it was the smoke. I really hate cigars. Or maybe it was the lack of depth in those black eyes. Whatever; I decided to, as it were, take the information he had already given me and run. “Not a twist, exactly. It’s just this terrible curiosity of mine. Her body was taken from the funeral home, but Mr. Mapson said the papers were lost so he didn’t have the names of those who had taken it. I admit I was rather persistent; I may even have implied some criticism. And, I don’t know, when there was a problem with our water, I—uh—” I broke off, shrugging helplessly and making my eyes as big as they would go.

“You seem none the worse for it,” Dr. Bright commented.

Quincy and I were none the worse for it because our drinking and cooking water does not come from the tank, but rather from a pump at the kitchen sink that is
connected directly to the waterline. But the person who put the kerosene in the tank would not have known that, and I wasn’t going to tell the coroner. If someone was trying to scare me, I wanted that person to consider me scared. In fact I
was
scared—but I do not relate to being scared in the same way that some, one might even say most, women do. So I shrugged again and said, “At least I’m. all right now. I just want to be sure to stay that way!” I stood up and slung my leather bag over my shoulder. “Thank you for the information, Dr. Bright. You’ve been most helpful. I won’t bother you again.”

“No bother, no bother!” He came around his desk and patted me on the shoulder in an unfatherly fashion. “You come back anytime!”

“Thank you so much.” I forced one last smile at considerable strain to my facial muscles, then set off at a brisk pace.

I was so distracted that I lost my way in the medicinal wilderness and had to ask directions of a nurse in order to get out. I had hoped Dr. Frederick Bright might become an ally, one who had access to information from the police. I needed to know if Jane Doe was Sabrina Howard, and if so, what she had known that was so important it had to be buried with her. If I could not find out quickly, and quietly, it began to look as if some of us would be buried as well.

And what, I thought as I swung onto the streetcar, about Phoebe?

At last! I found a letter of reply from my singular policeman friend, Wish Stephenson, in the afternoon post. I was so eager to read it that I tore the envelope open and began my perusal as I walked back from the mailbox to the lighthouse, wind flapping the letter’s two pages.

Photograph? What photograph?

I looked in the envelope—no photograph. I had walked to the lighthouse as I was reading, gone through the door, and now was sitting at the kitchen table. I sorted quickly through the other mail, to no avail, and then realized that in my haste to get at Wish’s letter, the photograph might have dropped out when I’d ripped open the envelope.

“Hell’s bells!” I said, jumping up and running back outside. The mailbox was beside the road about a hundred yards away, beyond the cypress hedge that Hettie had planted to make a sort of visual boundary. The wind, stiff and cold, did not seem to bother the young cypress trees—already in the few years since their planting they had shaped themselves to it, grown flattened tops and back-swept branches. But it did bother me: It whipped the tails of my tied-back hair in my face with such a sudden gust that the black ribbon came loose and went flying, and so did my skirts about my knees. The cold wind cut through my clothes, through my skin, to lodge in my bones. Had this same cold wind snatched away the photograph, or had Wish forgotten to enclose it with his letter?

I trotted up the track to the mailbox, looking quickly from one side to the other and back again and continually fighting the hair out of my eyes. Yet the loss of my hair ribbon proved salutary after all, for the ribbon caught my eye as it descended sinuously in a lull to drape itself in some tall dune grass. In this same clump of dune grass was caught a square of something whitish. I loped over, seized the square object, and crowed with delight. Yes!

“You are insane,” I said to Artemisia about half an hour later, “but I suppose you know that.”

“I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about, Fremont Jones,” she said, blinking with exaggerated innocence as she untied an orange scarf from beneath her chin. This scarf was confining the brim of an enormous straw hat, all wrong for the season but of course that did
not stop Artemisia. Otherwise she was dressed more appropriately for the weather, in a long brown wool coat, smartly double-breasted with brass-rimmed buttons. As it was rather chilly in the lighthouse, she made no move to undo them.

“You’ve driven over here practically in the very teeth of a storm,” I said. “I’m surprised the wind didn’t blow you off the road.”

She shrugged and said negligently, “Cars are heavy. I wasn’t worried.” Then nothing would do but that I must give her a tour of the lighthouse, which she had never been in before; I tried to be patient with all her
ooh
-ing and
ah
-ing because I’m well aware that Hettie’s version of lighthouse living is unusual enough to merit a few
oohs
and
ahs.
Finally I was able to suggest that we sit in the kitchen at the table, where I could build up a fire in the stove that would warm us and boil water for tea at the same time.

“Although,” she said, draping herself across one of the kitchen chairs, “I would far rather have a drink. You know, Fremont, a
drink.
It is, after all, that time of day.”

“What time of day?” I asked, looking up from chucking wood into the stove. I knew perfectly well what she meant, so my question was not very nice, but it seems there are times I just cannot help myself where Artemisia is concerned.

“Teatime in some houses is the sherry hour in others. Not that sherry was what I had in mind, either.”

“Well, I’m sorry,” I closed the stove door with a resounding metallic snap, “but Hettie apparently doesn’t drink because there were no strong liquors, or even sherry, in the house when I moved in. And I never thought to buy any. I can only offer you tea.”

“Then Misha can’t have spent much time here,” she said rather maliciously.

Tit for tat; I could not complain. Since it was tea or nothing, I filled the kettle and put it on. Refusing to be baited on the subject of Misha, I stayed with my former line of thought. “Actually, Pacific Grove is a dry town. I have heard that there was a time, not so long ago, when people were not allowed to indulge even in the privacy of
their own homes. There was a law that you couldn’t draw your shades before a certain hour in the evening, to discourage immoral conduct.”

“How boring,” Artemisia said; “I can’t imagine why you’d want to live in such a place, but never mind. I was serious in what I said about Misha. He’s drinking too much, Fremont. Something is tormenting him, and he will not tell me what it is.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. I truly was, but not surprised. Not after what I’d seen, when she herself had been a more-than-willing participant. I joined her at the table. “Is that what brought you here this afternoon?”

“Oh, no.” She began to unbutton her coat, as the room was heating up nicely. “He’s a big boy. If he wants to be all moody and morbid that’s his business, not mine.”

“But if you truly care about him—”

“Sweets,” Artemisia pushed her coat back and leaned toward me, “do you know what your problem is?”

“I suppose you are going to tell me.”

“You’re just
too
young and
way
too idealistic. How old are you anyway?”

“I’ll be twenty-four on my next birthday.”

She rolled her eyes. She wore a pumpkin-colored knitted garment—a very long sweater, I suppose it was—that kept slipping off her shoulder. The garment itself was shapeless, but sometimes when she moved one could see her large nipples poking against it. I began, God help me, to see more of a reason for corsets.

Since Artemisia made no response except for rolling her eyes, I asked, “And how old are you?”

“Thirty-five,” she admitted readily, then laughed and winked, “a regular old hag!” Then she sobered. “He’s too old for you, you know. He’s forty-five.”

“I do know.” I got up and made tea. Perhaps it was the pending storm that made the atmosphere tense, or perhaps it was the direction our conversation had taken; no matter which, my hands trembled and I spilled more tea leaves than I got into the net tea ball. “But I’m not sure that age has that much to do with anything—whether it’s my age, or yours, or his. If Michael is
drinking so much that he’s injuring his health, couldn’t you at least try to, to—”

“To what? Just what do you think a person can do to stop another person from destroying himself?”

I brought tea, sugar, milk, and lemon to the table. I am sure my brow was furrowed, for I was out of my depth. “Surely it is not that bad? I must admit, I’ve never known anyone who is overtly self-destructive.”

“Lucky you.” She sighed, stirring milk and a very large amount of sugar into her tea.

I sipped and continued to ponder. “With Michael, you know, you never can tell,” I said after a while. “It could be an act. He may not be as badly off as you think.”