Kathleen Catches a Killer Read online

  Kathleen Catches a Killer

  A Victorian San Francisco Novella

  M. Louisa Locke

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Copyright © 2017 by Mary Louisa Locke

  All rights reserved.

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  Cover Design © 2017 by Michelle Huffaker

  All rights reserved.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Other Works by Author

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  Sunday, late evening, December 26, 1880

  San Francisco, California

  She should go to bed. At half past ten, it was already too late for Patrick to stop by. He knew she always went to bed early on Sunday night. She just sort of hoped he’d make an exception tonight.

  Kathleen Hennessey walked over to where the small Seth Thomas clock sat on a shelf in the boarding house kitchen. She took the clock down and wound it with a small key and then turned the wheel at the back of the clock to set the alarm for four-thirty. Each night she took the clock back with her to her room tucked away behind the kitchen pantry. Even though she was usually awake before the shrill bell rang, she still felt better having it with her, just in case.

  Her bedroom never got much light from its single window facing the narrow side yard. But on winter mornings, it was pitch black, and she couldn’t count on the sun waking her up. She wouldn’t be able to hold up her head if Mrs. O’Rourke, the cook and housekeeper, came down from her attic room to start breakfast and found her still asleep.

  Kathleen sighed. Monday mornings, washday, always came so early, and she should go to bed. Instead, she shooed Queenie, the kitchen cat, out of the rocking chair and sat down, still holding the wooden clock. Too many things to think about.

  First of all, there was all the excitement of the past few weeks and the role she had played in helping her mistress solve the crimes going on at the Silver Strike Bazaar. Then came her mistress’s extraordinary revelations Christmas Eve, followed by Christmas Day itself, with all the merriment of gift-giving and hard work of preparing and serving a scrumptious Christmas dinner.

  And then there was today, the day after Christmas, and her eighteenth birthday.

  Really, except for the fact that Patrick hadn’t been able to come by, it had been a lovely day. After mass, her three brothers took her out to lunch at a nice restaurant––their treat. Colin, seventeen, was almost a man now. Soon he would finish his apprenticeship and start to make good money as a bricklayer. Aiden, only fifteen, had joked that with the skills he was learning as an apprentice carpenter, and Colin’s skills as a bricklayer, someday they could start a construction company and become rich, with their little brother, Ian, as the brains behind the enterprise.

  Kathleen was grateful that Aiden agreed that their youngest brother needed to stay in school as long as possible. Colin was another matter. Like their father, Colin had a dark side, and he thought that school was a waste of time. She worried it was Colin who had convinced Ian to start working as a newsboy after school and weekends. Ian was only eleven, and she so wanted him to have the opportunities that his older brothers never had, to go further than the fourth grade in school and have the time to just be a boy.

  Kathleen sighed again.

  Ian looked tired at lunch, having been up by four to get his share of the Morning Call to distribute. But he’d frowned at her when she mentioned her fear that his work might hurt his grades. She’d let the subject drop. Ian had a good head on his shoulders. Besides, she didn’t want to ruin her birthday lunch.

  For a long time, she hated that her birthday came the day after Christmas. Her mother would try to set aside something special for her––a piece of candy, a hair ribbon. Something different from the presents she and her brothers found in their stockings on Christmas morning––like the lumpily but lovingly knitted socks, new caps from the second-hand store, or a comb with all of its teeth. All useful…all very un-special.

  After her mother’s death, her father seemed to have forgotten she even had a birthday. And the boys…the day after Christmas, they were too busy playing with the small toys Santa brought them to think about her. Toys she had bought with the few pennies she snuck from her pa’s coat pocket when he was dead drunk.

  Then, when she was twelve, her pa died, the boys were farmed out to live with different uncles, and she was sent to work as a scullery maid for mistresses who didn’t even bother to learn her real name, much less her birthdate. And the day after Christmas became just like any other day––filled with hard work and terrible loneliness.

  All that changed nearly three years ago when the young widow, Mrs. Annie Fuller, hired her to help Beatrice O’Rourke run the O’Farrell Street boarding house.

  Mrs. Fuller, now Mrs. Dawson since she married the lawyer Mr. Nathaniel Dawson, turned out to be an entirely different kind of mistress. She not only called Kathleen by her name and paid her decent wages, but she treated her like a real person…like family. And she always remembered Kathleen’s birthday.

  For instance, early this morning, even as Mrs. Dawson was busy packing so she and her husband could catch the first train to San Jose, she had taken the time to give Kathleen a special card and a wonderful gift. A beautiful cameo pin that would go perfectly with both her brown herringbone suit and the smart navy tweed outfit that her mistress and master had given her for Christmas.

  She couldn’t wait to see how Patrick reacted when he saw her all fancied up, with the new suit, and pin, and the matching hat that had been Laura Dawson’s Christmas present to her. Hadn’t Mr. Nate’s sister been sly? Noticing how much Kathleen had wanted the hat when she’d tried it on at the Silver Strike Bazaar.

  No, all in all, the only disappointment today came when Patrick had to cancel his plans to join her and her brothers for lunch. The past few months, between his regular job with the police and his second job working security for the Silver Strike, it seemed he didn’t know whether he was coming or going. But the note he’d sent round promised to make it up to her Wednesday evening, her night out. He said he’d take her someplace special to celebrate.

  A sudden rap on the door startled her. Could it be Patrick come to surprise her?

  She got up from the rocking chair, put the clock down on the kitchen table, and went over to the back door, whispering, “Patrick, is that you?”

  “No, Kathleen, it’s me. Mary Margaret. Please let me in.”

  Mary Margaret was a friend who worked as a maid just a few streets away, and it was highly unusual for her to be out at this time of night. Opening the door, Kathleen said, “What is going on? Is there something wrong with Mrs. Ashburton?”

  She then noticed that her friend was staggering under the weight of several baskets and over-stuffed carpet bags, and as she pulled her all the way into the kitchen, she said, “He
avens above, what ever are you doing with all this? What’s happened?”

  The young woman dropped everything with a thump and wailed, “I’m turned off. No notice, no references, nothing. Whatever will I do!”

  “Shush, girl,” Kathleen said. “You don’t want to wake the boarders. Let’s get this wet coat off so you can get dry.” She stood on tiptoe to gently unpin the hat that was askew on her friend’s head. “You’ll feel a heap better once you’ve calmed down.”

  Mary Margaret was a tall, slender brunette with a warm, sunny disposition, who prided herself in always being as neat as a pin. Tonight, she was damp, wind-blown, and her eyes were red from crying.

  Kathleen took her coat and hat and pointed to the sink, saying, “You can use the towel there. I just put out a clean one. Then you sit right down in that rocker and warm yourself by the stove. I’ll make you a cup of tea while you tell me everything.”

  Kathleen had known Mary Margaret forever, both of them attending mass at St. Joseph’s since they were children. But once Kathleen started working at the O’Farrell Street boarding house, just two blocks up from where Mary Margaret worked for the Ashburtons on Eddy Street, they’d became fast friends, even timing their trips to the local shops so they could get in a daily chat.

  Mary Margaret started working for the Ashburtons as a scullery maid at the age of thirteen. That was ten years ago. Mr. Ashburton was alive then, and in addition to Mary Margaret, the household included a cook, a manservant, and a lady’s maid. But when the master died unexpectedly of apoplexy five years ago, all the other servants but her were let go.

  Since then, she’d been the maid-of-all-work, cooking, cleaning, and caring for Mrs. Ashburton, a frail woman in her sixties. A woman who, until tonight, Kathleen would have said was a kind mistress who appreciated Mary Margaret’s devotion to her. Not that mistresses didn’t dismiss their servants every day, often for no reason, with no notice. But the last thing she would have expected was to hear that Mrs. Ashburton had done so…and during the holidays no less.

  After putting the kettle on to boil, Kathleen pulled a wooden kitchen chair over to where Mary Margaret sat sniffling in the rocker, taking the young woman’s hands and rubbing some warmth back into them. She said, “In the morning when Mrs. O’Rourke comes down, she’ll know what to do. Tonight you can have the trundle bed next to mine.”

  Mary Margaret gave a deep sigh and said, “I knew I could depend on you. It was just such a shock. I didn’t know where to go, what to do. As I stood on the corner of Eddy and Taylor and saw a light on, up on the second floor of this house, I thought maybe you’d still be up.”

  “That would be Mr. Chapman’s room, the young man I’ve told you about who’s sweet on Mrs. Hewitt, our school teacher. Mr. Chapman likes to stay up late reading when he has the room to himself. His candle will be burnt down to its socket in the morning when I go in to make the bed.” Nodding encouragingly, Kathleen said, “Now, you just tell me exactly what happened.”

  It took two cups of tea for Mary Margaret to tell her story between bouts of tears and indignant anger. At first, Kathleen had trouble following her friend, who kept being side-tracked by her worry that her mistress would not get her proper medication in the morning if she wasn’t there to remind her. Eventually, she came to the main point, which was that when she came back home after her regular Sunday evening out, there was a man in the house who said he was Rafe Ashburton, Mrs. Ashburton’s son.

  Kathleen leaned back in surprise. “Her son! And you’d never met him before?”

  “No, I hadn’t. As I’ve told you, the mistress has a daughter and son-in-law I’ve met. They live down in Los Angeles, and the daughter brings her two boys up here every August to visit.”

  “That’s right. But you didn’t know there was a son?”

  “Oh, I knew he existed. But he left home about twelve years ago, before I started working for the Ashburtons. Cook said he was a real handful. Drank. Couldn’t keep a job. Ran with a fast crowd. In trouble with the law. Constant fights with his father. She said there’d been one final argument over some scandal and the master threw him out.”

  “No word from him since you’ve been working there?”

  “Not that I ever heard. Until today. I’d left the house around five, in time for evening mass. As usual, before I left, I got Mrs. Ashburton all settled down for the night in her upstairs sitting room. Fire built up, a nice pot of tea and the sandwiches she likes, with a bit of left-over Christmas cake, and her church magazines. I knew she’d be happy, reading and dozing until I got back around eight.”

  “What happened tonight?”

  “I let myself in the back door, giving a shout to the mistress to tell her I would be right up in a second to get her settled. I hung up my coat and went to the stove to poke up the fire and put the kettle on. I always give her a pot of chamomile tea last thing. Helps her swallow her evening medicine. I was just putting on my apron when all of a sudden this man comes bursting through the door from the back stairs, shouting at me, saying, ‘Who are you? What are you doing here?’”

  “Oh my, that must have been a scare. He could have been a robber or something. What did you say?”

  “I said, ‘What am I doing? I’m fixing my mistress her tea. Who are you and what are you doing in Mrs. Ashburton’s kitchen?’”

  “You never!”

  “I don’t know what came over me. But he looked right flabbergasted. Then he said something like, ‘Oh yes. The maid. She said you’d be back soon.’ Then he got all nice, smiling and everything, telling me how he was Mrs. Ashburton’s son and he’d come home to visit, see how his ma was doing. Even asked if I could fix him some tea…maybe one of the sandwiches I’d fixed her.”

  “That doesn’t sound too bad,” Kathleen said. “But how did you come to end up out in the night with your bags and all?”

  That’s when Mary Margaret started crying again, and Kathleen had to pour her another cup of tea to get her calmed down.

  Finally, her friend took a deep breath and said, “I’m sorry I’m being such a goose. But nothing that happened next makes any sense.”

  “So what did he do?”

  “He went upstairs, saying he would tell his mother I was home. I confess I stood at the bottom of the back stairs to listen, and it sounded like the son was arguing with his mother. But it was muffled, like they were behind closed doors. I could barely hear her voice at all. Then, when his voice got louder, like he was coming back into the hallway, I ran and pretended to be looking in the icebox when he reappeared downstairs. That’s when he said that I needed to get my things and leave. Tonight!”

  “Surely he gave you some explanation.”

  “He said Mrs. Ashburton thought it wasn’t respectable for me to be in the house with a single man. He said he was sorry, pretended it was all his mother’s fault for being so old-fashioned.”

  “Could he have been telling you the truth?”

  Mary Margaret frowned and said, “For a moment, I thought maybe he was. But when I said I needed to see Mrs. Ashburton, to make sure she was settled for the night and make arrangements to come back in the morning to see to her, he got angry again.”

  “You thought he was just telling you to leave overnight?”

  “Well, yes, I hoped he was. You know some people don’t like live-in servants. I thought maybe he meant that while he was visiting, I should find someplace else to spend my nights.”

  Kathleen said, “You probably could stay with us if he wasn’t visiting too long. But that’s not what he meant?”

  “No, he said I didn’t understand. I was dismissed…for good. Said he was perfectly capable of taking care of his own mother but that if I didn’t believe him, she would tell me herself.”

  “So you did see Mrs. Ashburton?” Kathleen asked, realizing that she’d begun to wonder if anything the man had been telling her friend had been the truth.

  “Yes, he told me to stay put, then went back upstairs. In about ten minutes, he return
ed, this time with my mistress. She said how happy she was that her son had returned but that she knew I would understand that it wouldn’t be right for him and me to stay in the house. How he was going to take care of her. Then maybe they would take a trip down to Los Angeles to see her daughter. So it was better for me to find another position right away. But her voice was all trembly, and I knew this was his idea, not hers.”

  “So what did you do next?”

  “What could I do? I said I needed to go up to the attic to get my things, but he wouldn’t let me. Said that he would get them…make sure I didn’t leave anything behind. He said this in a really nasty way—like he was worried I might steal something.”

  “And your mistress didn’t object?”

  “No, but he didn’t give her time, hustled her right back up the stairs in front of him. I was so upset, I sort of wandered around the kitchen for a few minutes, pulled out the laundry basket and set it by the back door for Mrs. Kantor to pick up tomorrow, and got my shawl and my knitting basket.”

  “How awful! Of course you were upset. Maybe there’s been some misunderstanding that will be all straightened out in the morning. If not, we will have to find you another position.”

  Mary Margaret looked at Kathleen and shook her head. “I don’t want another position. I don’t hardly remember my own family or the pig farm back in Cork, but I know every square inch of that house on Eddy Street. Been taking care of it and the mistress for half my life. I know how to keep the heat steady in the oven, when the drip pan in the icebox needs to be emptied, how much coal we need to order each month. I know how hot the mistress likes her bath water, which soaps irritate her skin, the way to pin her hair so it doesn’t give her a headache, and how to cook her meals so they won’t upset her stomach. I make sure she takes her medicine on time, call the doctor when she has one of her spells, and rub her back when her lumbago keeps her awake. How’s her son going to be able to do any of that?”