Mrs. O'Malley's Midnight Mystery

  Mrs. O'Malley’s Midnight Mystery

  A Victorian San Francisco Story

  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.

  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 © 2020 by Mary Louisa Locke

  All rights reserved.

  * * *

  Cover design © 2020 Michelle Huffaker

  All rights reserved.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Other Works by Author

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  Sunday evening, October 2, 1881

  Beale Street, San Francisco

  * * *

  Mrs. O’Malley put down her sewing as she heard a key in the door to the tiny two-room flat, smiling as her oldest daughter, Bridget, who everyone called Biddy, swept in.

  “Oh, Ma, you made my favorite, molasses cookies,” Biddy said as she hung her hat and cloak on the peg by the door and made a beeline for the plate of cookies cooling on the old wooden kitchen table.

  “Did you have a good time with Mr. O’Doyle?” Mrs. O’Malley asked quietly, not wanting to wake her four boys, who were asleep behind the curtain that turned a corner of the kitchen into a bedroom each night.

  Mrs. O’Malley had known and always liked Frank O’Doyle, ever since the young man and Biddy were young scamps tearing around the neighborhood together. She had heard he now had a good job clerking in his uncle’s grocery store north of Market. Her daughter hadn’t mentioned him for some time. As a result, Mrs. O’Malley was pleased when Biddy told her of her plans to spend the evening with him this Sunday.

  Recently, her daughter had started going out on weekends with two of the young women she clerked with at the Silver Strike Bazaar. As far as Mrs. O’Malley could determine, this meant Biddy walked around Woodward’s Gardens with her friends until some young men struck up a conversation with them and offered to treat them to dinner. Young men whose names and jobs remained a mystery. Biddy assured her this was a perfectly harmless way of spending an evening out, but Mrs. O’Malley worried.

  Biddy finished the cookie in two bites, then she said, “We went to the chop house on Folsom and Ninth. Not much else is open on Sundays. Frankie sprang for a full dinner with all the trimmings. Good thing it wasn’t raining so we could walk back here instead of taking the omnibus. Otherwise, I might be still so stuffed I wouldn’t be able to eat one of these cookies you made special for me. Oh, Ma, look what Frankie brought us.”

  Her daughter pulled a string bag out of her purse and showed her three large, slightly bruised onions, an oddly shaped turnip, and two small tins of sardines, saying, “The tins got a little banged up––look, they came all the way from France! He says as long as the cans aren’t punctured they’re still good, but his uncle doesn’t like to sell them that way.”

  “That was kind of him.” Mrs. O’Malley picked up the strip of dark pansy-colored satin she had been working on and began to sew the small neat stitches that created a ruffle for the bottom of a wealthy woman’s fancy dress.

  Biddy added, “I told him I wished he was still working as a butcher’s boy. A couple of pork chops would have been a treat. But then, every stray dog in town would have followed me home.”

  “Why don’t you put the sardines up on that top shelf? Your sister Alice has been going on about wanting something she calls high tea for her birthday treat––read about it in one of her books. I believe if I make scones with clotted cream and mash up those sardines and put ‘em on those little crackers you bring home from the Silver Strike, that might just do.”

  “That’s a smart idea, Ma. All four of the boys will turn up their noses at it, but it will make her feel special.” Biddy put the food away and then sat down on one of the benches around the kitchen table and reached out for a second cookie.

  “That’s the last one, Biddy. There’s just enough for everybody to have two for their school lunches tomorrow. That plus hard-boiled eggs and the last of the apples are going to have to do them. Always a bother when I get paid on Saturday night––with the groceries closed on Sundays. I’ll do the shopping tomorrow morning, if you can drop off the washing on your way to work.”

  Mrs. O’Malley worked nights, cleaning, for the Sisters of Mercy at St. Mary’s Hospital, a couple of blocks up on Rincon Hill. It was hard work that didn’t pay all that well, but it was a welcome blessing for a widow with seven children to feed. When her husband died four years ago, she had needed to be able to stay home during the day with the three youngest––Alice who was only four then, and the youngest of her two sets of twin boys, Callum and Connor, had just turned one. This was one of the only jobs that gave her that choice. She continued to do piecework as well to help pay the rent.

  Biddy nodded and then yawned. “Make sure I’m up by five-thirty, then. Gives me time to bathe and press my blue dress before I leave. Need me to work on the second ruffle for awhile before I go to bed?”

  Biddy had worked in the dressmaking department of the Silver Strike before getting her clerking job there last winter. She had asked Miss Minnie and Miss Millie Moffet, the two elderly dressmakers who now ran the department, if she could bring some finishing work home with her for her mother. After seeing a sample of Mrs. O’Malley’s work they had readily agreed. Biddy had been helping her out with piecework off and on since she was eight, but tonight was supposed to be her daughter’s one evening to just enjoy herself, so it was good of her to offer to help. That was Biddy, always willing to lend a hand.

  She said, “Thanks, dear. But I shouldn’t have any trouble finishing both ruffles before morning, so you can take them back and pick up some more. You know, if I don’t have something to keep me busy, the night just drags.”

  “If you’re sure. Then I guess I will turn in.” Biddy got up and stretched. She said, “Shall I get Callum and Connor up before I go, and is the kitten in with them?”

  “The kitten’s in the next room. Don’t let him out when you go to bed. I can’t have him snagging this material with his sharp little claws. I’ll be glad when he gets bigger and starts earning his keep. As for the boys, no need to get them up. They were both good about going to the privy before they went to bed, and I think they’ve finally figured out how to wake up enough to use the chamber pot.”

  “I hope so! I don’t remember the older twins, or either of my sisters, still wetting the bed at five.”

  “Poor things. You gave all the older ones such a hard time, they didn’t dare.”

  Biddy grinned and said, “I suppose the fact that I was the one who was going to have to put the sheets to soak may have had something to do with it.”

  Mrs. O’Malley looked at her daughter with affection. Only the Blessed Mother knew how the family would have survived without Biddy’s help, especially after her husband, Brian, died in seventy-seven. Even when he was still alive, making decent wages as a bricklayer, Mrs. O’Malley had needed to do piecework to help feed their growing brood.

  When the depression hit in the city in the mid-seventies, work for Brian became scarce. That’s when Biddy left school to take over minding her brothers and sisters and help Mrs. O’Malley
sew in order to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads. Brian hated that both his wife and oldest daughter had to work, but it couldn’t be helped. Unlike some men, who just blamed everyone else and drank away their troubles, her husband had gone out, day after day, looking for any sort of work. When he did get a job, it was back-breaking and paid little more than pennies a day.

  Yet he would come home each night and pretend all was right with the world so that his family wouldn’t worry. Until the night, in the middle of making her laugh with some outlandish joke, he’d keeled over, dead. The doctor said it was apoplexy. Mrs. O’Malley knew he’d worked himself to death.

  She worried that Biddy was going to burn herself out the same way. She was so like her father, from her dark-red hair and merry blue eyes to her open face, broad smile, and generous heart. Maybe too generous.

  Mrs. O’Malley smiled at her daughter and said, “Off to bed with you. You have a long day tomorrow and no need for you to start off with too little sleep.”

  Near midnight, Mrs. O’Malley carefully folded the completed ruffle and put it in her sewing box on the floor at her feet and enjoyed the peace and quiet. Even the usual noises from the street below had died down. After a moment, she stood up and went to the old chipped sink where she had put her baking pans to soak. She’d used up the last of her flour to make bread for tomorrow. That, plus a fry-up of the last of the corned beef, would cover breakfast. She hated when the shelves got this bare. Even with Biddy giving her nearly all of her wages, it was always touch and go when they got to the first of the month and she had to pay rent.

  After washing and drying the baking pans and putting them away, she took her purse from the bottom plank of the shelves next to the sink and took out two quarters. She stiffly climbed up on the chair that sat under the shelves so she could reach the old tea tin she kept on the top shelf as her savings bank. Biddy, a good half a foot taller than she, was the only one in the family who could reach this high, even using the chair. Pretty soon the older twins, Bri and Bennie, who at ten were almost as tall as Mrs. O”Malley, would be able to get up here if they wanted. But for now, as her dear father would have said, it was “safe as houses.”

  The older twins’ recent growth spurt was one of the reasons it was hard to make the grocery money last, but so far, she had resisted their pleas to let them go out to work. Her niece Tilly’s stories about the two boys who lived in the O’Farrell Street boardinghouse where she worked and their jobs selling papers hadn’t helped.

  The problem was that once she let them go out to earn money on weekends, they’d start to push her to let them leave school and work full time. And when the two boys joined up to get their way, they were hard to handle. Bri would go on and on about all the reasons he and his twin brother should be able to do something, and Bennie would just get louder and louder, as if sheer volume would win the argument.

  She continued to resist because she had promised herself they would finish grammar school. By then they’d be fourteen, and she hoped to get them apprenticed to a decent trade. Maybe if they went to a different school, they wouldn’t complain so, although she had to agree. Silver Street Primary, where they went now, was awful, with a run-down old building and over a thousand children crammed into drafty rooms, some of which were no more than outdoor sheds. Showed what the city politicians thought of the people who had to live in this neighborhood, which was a jumble of rooms for rent squeezed between the iron works, lumber mills, and breweries.

  When she moved to these rooms over a hardware store on Beale Street after her husband died, she had told herself the rooms and the job were only temporary. Working nights at St. Mary’s eased her mind since she was only ten minutes away from home in case there was a problem with the younger twins, who were only one at the time. The job working for the nuns also had the benefit of providing her meals from the hospital kitchen, which cut down on the food bills.

  Even now, when all of her children were school age, she felt working nights was best for the family. She got back home before five-thirty every morning, so she could supervise getting everyone up, fed, and out of the house. Then again, in the afternoon, she was there when the children got home from school, making sure they had a good supper before she went off to work at seven. During the day, while Biddy was off to work and the children were in school, she could do things like the grocery shopping, baking, and preparing dinner and still snatch the four or five hours of sleep that seemed to be all that she needed before going to work. And at night, both Biddy and Deirdre were there to watch their younger siblings.

  Getting enough sleep on Saturdays was more difficult. Yet even the younger twins understood that when she was in the back room with the door closed, they should try to be a little quieter. And on Sundays, her sister-in-law, Jeanne, was good about taking the whole lot of them home with her after mass so that Mrs. O’Malley could get some sleep. Although Sunday was her night off, she’d found that it wasn’t good for her to skip her daytime nap and sleep Sunday nights. When she did that, it seemed her whole body got turned around and she would start to nod off at work at night. That’s why she welcomed the piecework, like the ruffles she was working on tonight. It brought in money and kept her awake through nights like tonight.

  No, the job still worked; it was the neighborhood that didn’t. Seemed to get rougher by the day. Saloons on every corner and gangs of young boys…and girls…playing truant while their parents were at work. When all her children were young, she’d walk them to and from school herself to make sure they were safe and kept them indoors with her when they weren’t in school. But now the older boys and Deirdre balked at the idea of being treated like babies, and they insisted they could look after the little ones on the way to school. But she was more and more uncomfortable with the thought of fourteen-year-old Deirdre walking down these streets, passing by the tough men gathered in knots on every corner. And it was getting harder and harder to keep Bri and Bennie from envying the freedom of the young boys their age who loitered on those same corners.

  Well, that’s why she tried to put some money into the old tea tin every week, which she called her moving fund. Everyone else called it the accident fund—probably a better name for it because it was unforeseen events that explained why after saving for four years she only had a little over $10 in the tin. Accidents like Biddy having words with the Larkson Mills foreman and not bringing in any wages for three weeks until she got another job, or the time Deirdre accidentally let all the water in the stew pot boil away and they had to buy a new second-hand pot, or when Bennie and Bri ruined their winter shoes by turning them into sailing vessels during a torrential downpour.

  Sighing, she added this week’s quarters to the tin and slowly got off the chair, being careful she didn’t fall. She worried about the fact that, every once in a while, her knees would hurt so much from her work, ten hours of scrubbing and mopping, that one of them would buckle. She wasn’t fifty yet, but at the end of a long week, she felt a hundred. She supposed seven children would do that to you. Not that she didn’t thank the Saints every day that all of them had survived the early years of childhood.

  She went over and peeked behind the curtain at her boys. The elder set of twins, Bri and Bennie, had gotten their straight black hair from her, although her hair was now faded by threads of gray. Callum and Connor, the five-year-old twins, like Biddy, were the ones who had gotten the thick, curly dark-red hair of their father, along with a good many freckles.

  She leaned over so she could pull the blanket up over the younger twins. The oven had been banked down for hours now, and the kitchen was beginning finally to cool off. She hated that the boys were sleeping on thin mattresses on the floor. She had a horror of rats getting into the flat, which was the main reason she’d agreed to take in the young gray tabby. What she really wanted was to get the boys some iron bedsteads, get them off the floor, but that wasn’t practical with them sleeping in the kitchen. At least the girls, who slept in the back room, had real bed
s, although the mattresses were old and lumpy.

  She opened the door to where Alice, Deirdre, and Biddy were sleeping, the two iron bedsteads pushed together to make one large bed. The young kitten, a gray tabby who slept curled up against Alice’s chest, lifted his head, blinked at her and yawned, and then snuggled back down. She would have bet that it was Deirdre, the little mother of the family, who would have taken to the cat. But, no, it was Alice, her prim and proper seven-year-old, who had taken over responsibility for him, even being willing to clean out the sand in the box they had for him.

  Softly closing the door to the room, she thanked the Blessed Mother that every one of her chicks was alive and healthy. There were so many ways a child could die or go astray in this day and age, and so many of them she could see just by looking out the kitchen window overlooking Beale Street.

  Maybe, by some miracle, she’d get further ahead in her savings and move them to a safer place. Just fifty dollars would do it.

  There were decent flats for rent down Bryant, past Sixth, and the neighborhood schools were supposed to be real good––newer buildings and better teachers. In addition, once you got up past Fifth Street, there were fewer factories, so less noise and filth. If they moved there, her trip to work wouldn’t be but about four blocks longer, and the North Beach/Mission horsecars and the Omnibus were just a few streets away. Both would get Biddy to her job north of Market.

  Mrs. O’Malley had even seen some three-room places advertised…that didn’t cost that much more than these two rooms. With three rooms, the boys wouldn’t have to sleep in the kitchen. The problem was all the decent places in that part of town were rented unfurnished. Getting an old, second-hand stove and ice box alone could cost $15, much less the expense of getting beds and mattresses, and other furniture like a kitchen table and chairs. The only stick of furniture in this whole place that wasn’t part of the flat was the wardrobe that Biddy had found at a junk shop. And that would cost to move to a new place. The $10 in the tea tin just wouldn’t cover the kind of outlay that moving to an unfurnished place would cost. And she daren’t completely wipe out her funds or, sure as the day was long, a real accident would come along. Then where’d they be?