Uneasy Spirits: A Victorian San Francisco Mystery by M. Louisa Locke Read Free Book Online Page B

me, and my father, Edward Stewart. My father’s reputation in this town is still pretty well known, and I made sure to mention his name in the letter I wrote asking for an appointment. However, it is with this fictional dead child I hope to trap them. If I can get them to produce the spirit of a child, when none existed, maybe I can use that to convince Miss Pinehurst’s sister that they are frauds.”
    “ Yes,” Kathleen nodded earnestly. “I will try to tell someone you had a little boy that died, just like Miss Lucy’s nephew.”
    Annie thought about Kathleen’s questions and hoped that she was not depending too much on the young woman. She was nervous enough about her own coming interview with Simon Frampton. She had written a fairly long letter, begging him to accommodate her attendance at his Friday night séance. She needed to avoid attending the same evenings as Sukie Vetch, who attended both Tuesday and Thursday evening séances, since she might realize that Mrs. Fuller and her sister’s boardinghouse owner were one and the same. Annie currently only had one regular client scheduled for Friday nights, at six, so she wouldn’t have difficulty attending the evening “circle,” as Frampton called it, at eight.
    Simon Frampton had written back immediately saying that there was an opening Friday, but that he would need to meet with her Wednesday afternoon to see if her “essence” would be compatible with those of the other members of the circle. According to the newspaper article she had read, Simon and Arabella Frampton hadn’t arrived in the States until 1876, three years after her husband John had wiped out her fortune and killed himself. Her father-in-law had been pretty successful in keeping that information out of the press, so she was hoping they wouldn’t suspect she wasn’t a well-to-do heiress, prime for the plucking.
    In any case, Annie felt sure her “essence” would be found very much acceptable once she dropped the name of her “good friends the Steins,” who were certainly wealthy enough to impress someone who was looking for a new group of people to fleece. She had said in her letter that she hoped to contact her parents, which seemed safe enough. However, at the interview she planned on playing up her status as both an orphan and grieving widow. First time John has actually been of use to me, she thought with some surprise.
    Annie calculated that two dead parents and a dead husband should give the Framptons enough to work with. She hoped they wouldn’t feel the need to investigate her further. The last thing she wanted was to have them sniffing around her neighbors or boarders for information, on the off chance that they would discover that Annie Fuller and Madam Sibyl were the same person.
    The late afternoon sun, which was dipping down towards the Twin Peaks, felt good on her back as she and Kathleen made their way east down Harrison. The south side of the street was a hodgepodge of small, well-maintained businesses, offering a miscellany of services. In this one block you could get your shoes shod, your watch repaired, your chairs caned, your teeth removed, and your thirst quenched. Across the street a wall of tall hedges obscured all but the top floors of what were clearly a series of stately mansions left over from Rincon Hill’s heyday.
    Coming to Fifth Street, Annie noticed a small puddle next to the curb, left over from yesterday’s shower, and she raised her skirts to nimbly skip over it, uttering, “Be careful” to Kathleen, who grinned and jumped over it as well.
    “ That would have been a shame, ma’am,” Kathleen laughed.
    “ I don’t know if Miss Millie would have forgiven me if I had splashed mud on this new dress the first time I wore it. She worked so hard getting the flounce at the bottom right. I wish fashion permitted day dresses to be a little shorter. It’s one thing to be able to sweep the floor with a long train if you are going to a ball, but city