Victorian San Francisco Stories by M. Louisa Locke Read Free Book Online

be busy as can be at the factory this spring and summer. And, just as you predicted, Blochmann and Cerf were awarded the contract for the foundation work for the new section. With this new seawall and all, you can be sure I will see a good return on my investments for both companies. Cement . Who would have ever thought, after a lifetime casting my lot with wood, I would make money on cement?”
    Annie and Madam Sibyl’s first client grinned broadly at each other, in perfect harmony.
     
    The End

    Dandy Detects
     
     
    Barbara Hewitt sat by the open window, drinking in the faint breeze that barely touched the flame of the candle sitting on the table in front of her. While it was nearly eleven at night, her attic bedroom refused to release the accumulated heat of the day. While it was only her second September in the city of San Francisco, she was already familiar with the odd habit the weather had of producing the first searing temperatures of summer just in time for the fall school term.
    Today, her students at San Francisco Girls High had wilted under the requisite five layers of clothing that female modesty dictated, and she had noted that none of them had been willing to forgo the newly fashionable polonaise wool dresses that had clearly been specially tailored for the start of school. She smiled to herself as she thought of the dampness of their knitted brows as they struggled over their first English literature essays--essays that she was trying to finish grading by candlelight so that she could return them in the morning.
    A raised voice and a sharp sound shattered her reverie, and she looked out the window into the illuminated back room on the top floor of the house across the alley. A lit oil lamp revealed in stark detail the tableau of a man and a woman and a dog. The shaggy black dog was clutched in the arms of the woman, who was sitting at an upright piano, her shining blonde head bowed. The wide-shouldered man loomed over her, his hands pressing down on the lid that covered the piano keys. The sound Barbara had heard probably came from the man slamming the lid down, since the soft notes of a Beethoven sonata had now been replaced by silence. But it just as well could have been the sound a man’s hand made when it came forcibly against the delicate skin of a woman’s face.
    Barbara remembered another room, on another breathlessly hot night, and another furious man. But that room had also contained the increasingly frantic wails of a three-year-old boy, a sound that had driven her across time and space to end up in this attic in Mrs. Fuller's O'Farrell Street boarding house. She stood up and turned her back on the window, taking up the candle to move across the room to an adjoining alcove where her young son lay asleep. Jamie was now eight, and he slept in that deep, drugged state that healthy children effortlessly achieve. She briefly stroked his sweat-darkened short hair that the summer’s sun had burnished golden, and her heart turned over.
    She then noticed that Dandy, Jamie's terrier, was sitting upright on the bed, staring alertly at her. The candlelight revealed the blaze of white on his chest and the white around his neck and front paws. The white patches looked so much like a starched white shirt against his black fur that Mrs. O'Rourke, the boarding house cook and housekeeper, had exclaimed, "Oh, Jamie, with that squashed-in face, if he doesn't look like a street tough trying to pass as a high-class gent. A dandy right enough, all dressed up in his fine evening clothes."
    Dandy, ears erect on either side of his round forehead and slightly bulging eyes reflecting the candle glow, cocked his head and wrinkled his short muzzle to emit a soft, questioning, "Woof."
    "Shush, Dandy," Barbara whispered. "Don't wake up Jamie. I am sure everything is all right.”
    *****
    “Gracious me, I do declare that if this heat continues, I shan’t be able to eat a bite. Now, dear sister, I do insist that you take some