The Bohemian Murders (18 page)

I
felt hot, and damp myself in that most intimate place, when, on toward dawn, I left the typewriter. After opening the shutters of the watch room window, I went up the winding stairs and out onto the platform that surrounds the lantern. I did not know which galled me more: that Artemisia had the power to arouse me along with her Heloise, or that this same Artemisia who wrote so convincingly—not to mention erotically—was in love with my Michael.

“For shame, Fremont!” I said, astonished by my thoughts.

The wind took the words from my mouth and blew
them away, even as it cooled my fog-damp face. The wind …

The story of Heloise’s dream was stuck in my head, and somehow the wind-lover brought to mind a vivid visceral memory of Michael’s kissing me in the lighthouse kitchen. As an antidote to such pointless passion, I said with conviction: “He is not my Michael, and never will be, not even if he should ask me to do the unthinkable and marry him!”

That did it: I cooled right down. I have strong convictions about marriage, one of them being that it fosters an unhealthy way for men and women to relate to each other. Marriage endorses possessiveness, especially in the man, who is literally likely to look upon “his” woman as merely one more possession. But women do it too.
My
husband, they say, emphasis on the
my.
That I, who feel so strongly about the independent worth of each and every human being, should have even thought the words “my Michael” filled me with consternation.

Yet you do love him,
said the Voice.

“What does that have to do with it?” I responded crossly.

Deep within my memory, from some forgotten spot where the schoolgirl had stored her lessons, Shakespeare’s words came bubbling up into consciousness:

and so on; I could not remember the rest.

“Hmm,” I said. I was not so obtuse as to be unable to see the point some part of me wanted to make. But should I heed it?

I gripped the railing and looked out to sea, where through dense white fog I could just discern the humped outlines of the Point Pinos rocks. Looking like ghost-birds veiled in their own emanations, a flock of cormorants slid silently by. Drops of fog fell fresh on my skin. I
breathed deep, and deep again; the air tasted both clean, like springwater, and salty like the sea. Above my head the beam of the Point Pinos Light threw itself against an opaque wall, but the deep voice of the foghorn regularly moaned a warning, so all was well.

But not for Jane Doe, who was perhaps Sabrina Howard; and probably not for Phoebe Broom, either. If anything had happened to Phoebe, I was certainly responsible. I had involved her; the sketch for which I had been hit in the head and (I very much feared) she had been kidnapped, or worse, had been my idea. I could not let self-protectiveness or pride get in the way; I had to do something, and I had to start in Carmel.

As I went back inside to make the day’s entry in the log, I realized that this was a new month. Always with a new month there is the possibility of a new beginning. Unfortunately February is my least favorite month of the year, so it did not seem particularly auspicious.

I had the answer to one question, anyway: Yes, I should pay attention to the part of me that remembered Shakespeare’s counsel—
Love is not love which alters when it alteration findes.
…

At midmorning it was still foggy. The wind had shifted slightly to blow out of the northwest rather than the west, and with the shift had taken on a wintry nip. I noted this in the log and wrote in the “Comments,” which I’d left blank earlier:
logging schooner and freight steamer in from S.
Then I closed the logbook and went looking for Quincy.

He was nowhere to be found. I wrote him a note, using simple words that I hoped he would be able to read:
Gone to Carmel. Please take watch. Thank you, Fremont.
Then I wrestled with harness and traces until I got the rig put together, said a few encouraging words to Bessie, and took off for Xanadu. Michael’s cottage, that is.

It was a good thing I had learned to trust Hettie’s little mare, for the fog was thicker going over Carmel Hill than I had yet encountered during daylight hours. There
were times when I could not see past the horse’s ears. And a time near the summit when Arthur Heyer’s ghost story about the demon-child grabbed me and I was sure I heard someone crying. But I found no demon-children; instead, an idiot in a motorcar found me. He was driving much too fast for the poor visibility and almost ran over the rig. Bessie was magnificent; she expressed her displeasure by putting back her ears, but she stood stock-still and waited for the idiot to whiz on by.

“If he goes over the edge it will serve him right,” I remarked, and the mare whickered her agreement.

Eventually I found the opening among the trees that marked the Ocean Avenue turnoff. In the little village of Carmel there was less fog, but: everything was gray and drippy. The car that had almost run me down sat dripping in front of the Pine Inn, so I surmised the culprit was a tourist who didn’t know any better than to go tearing around blind. I went on past, started to lay the reins on Bessie’s neck for the turn onto Casanova, then thought better of it. Instead I pulled her into a wide U-turn and went back up to Lincoln and along to Phoebe’s cottage.

I did not even get down out of the shay. I didn’t have to; Phoebe’s cottage looked so forlorn it was perfectly obvious that no one was home. No lights shone through the windows, no smoke curled from the chimney. An emaciated black-and-gray-striped cat lay listlessly sprawled on the front steps, raising its head for a moment to stare at me with glazed eyes. A stray, probably. But maybe not. I had thought to continue on my way, but now I did get down from the carriage.

“Here, kitty, kitty,” I called softly, feeling a bit like a fool. My parents had not believed in keeping animals as pets so I never had one as a child. Father, particularly, thinks it is evil to bend nature’s creatures to one’s will. I have heard him on occasion expound upon his conviction that the Fall of Man occurred not when Eve ate the apple but when Adam named the animals—presumably the first step toward domesticating them. Therefore I know almost nothing about dogs and cats, not to mention horses, cows, canary birds, etc. My personal
opinion, though, is that once a species has been domesticated the damage is done and we must take care of them.

“Poor little thing, poor kitty,” I said in what I hoped the cat would interpret as a sympathetic tone. She—or he, I had no idea which—did not run or so much as cringe from the touch of my hand. She was limp and light when I picked her up. In the carriage she dug her claws into my lap and made a pathetic, halting attempt to purr.

I took the cat to Xanadu. With her limp, furry body hanging over my arm like a black-and-gray-striped muff, I banged on the door, shortly thereafter interpreted a grunt from inside as an invitation to come in, and did so.

Due to the grayness of the day, the inside of the cottage was quite gloomy. A single lamp burned on the dining table. Involuntarily I tightened my grip on the cat, and she wriggled. Michael sat slumped over his elbows at the table like a dark shadow, and he was not alone. Either or both of them may have greeted me; it was difficult to hear anything over the roaring in my ears.

Nevertheless I advanced; not for all the tea in China would I have revealed the tiniest part of my true feelings. “Good morning,” I said. My voice was steady and clear. “I wonder if either of you has anything we might feed this cat. It belongs, I think, to Phoebe and is quite starved.”

“Oh dear!” Artemisia exclaimed.
Deshabille,
one of those rare words that looks like it sounds, could not even begin to describe her appearance. Her hair looked as if it had blown loose during a windstorm and frozen that way. The kohl she used to darken her eyelids had smudged in a raccoonish manner. She was more or less wearing one of those intentionally ragged layered things of hers, but without its underdress. In other words, when she moved and the layers shifted, one could see right through it. Like a naughty show in a stereopticon:
Flash, flash.
Now you see it, now you don’t.

I put the cat down on the table. Kitty blinked and looked up at me, made a sort of peep, and began a wobbly exploration. Artemisia leapt up with a flash of nipples and dark triangle;
I
blinked. From the direction she went and the sounds she subsequently made, I presumed
that she was getting the cat something to eat. I did not follow her with my gaze, because Michael had captured my eyes.

There is a Russian fellow who for the past two years has been taking the tsar’s imperial court by storm—he is called Rasputin. In magazines I have seen photographs of this Rasputin, who did not look all that different from Michael at the moment. Michael’s eyes burned in his head, burned into me; his dark brows were drawn together in the scowl of all scowls. He wore a nightshirt open at the neck. Black hair, sometimes shot with silver, curled everywhere: his chest, his arms, over his forehead, down into his collar, on the bare legs that stuck out beneath the nightshirt. Rasputin is said to be both a miraculous healer by powers of mesmerism and a terrible debaucher. At the moment I could believe Michael also capable of either or both those things.

Love is not love which alters when it alteration findes
 …

The cat wobbled over to him, delicately sniffing, and curled her tail under Michael’s chin. His burning eyes never leaving mine, he began to stroke her, which oddly gave me hope.

He had not asked me to sit down at the table. I did so anyway, directly opposite him. “Are you growing your beard back,” I asked, “or have you just forgotten to shave for the past several days?”

The corners of his mouth twitched, that sensual mouth, but he did not reply. Artemisia was chopping something, in sharp counterpoint to a low, continuous rumbling from the cat. A strong odor hung about Michael, both acrid and ripe, a combination of alcohol and something I could not exactly define, but I suspected it was sex. I have not had enough experience along those lines to know for certain.

“Fremont—” his voice cracked and his tongue showed pink for a moment as he moistened his lips “—this is not a convenient time.”

“I do apologize. If you had a telephone I would have called first.”

Artemisia returned with a bowl of something, which
she put on the table. The cat came running over. “Chicken,” she said.

Michael picked up both cat and bowl and set them on the floor, saying as he did so, “The cat should have water too. I didn’t know Phoebe had a cat, did you, Art?”

“No, I didn’t, but then I hardly pay attention to such things. Oh, bother! There’s no water in the pitcher. I shall have to go out to the pump, Misha.”

He was very involved with the cat, hunched over, supervising the eating process with repeated murmurings of “not too fast, puss,” and so did not reply. I suppose I might have offered to go, as “Art” was barefoot and hardly dressed for the outside, but I did not. Instead I offered her my shawl, which she accepted. This shawl is black, knitted rather than crocheted, I have no idea by whom—another find from the donation bin when I was homeless after the earthquake, living in Golden Gate Park. Not a very grand garment, yet when Artemisia covered herself with it and flung one end back over her shoulder, the shawl took on an allure that it had never had on me.

“I should not have done that,” I muttered after she went out the door, “now I’ll never be able to bear wearing it again.”

“Your generous, helpful nature gets you in trouble every time,” said Michael with a touch of sarcasm, straightening up. “Now what exactly did you want? Aside from something to feed the cat.”

“First, I want you to send your friend away. Or should I say your lover? At any rate, I need to speak to you alone,
Watson.”

He shook his head. Hair fell in his eyes and he didn’t bother to flick it away. “No. I can’t do that. Not even for Sherlock Holmes.”

I sat up as straight and tall as I was capable of. “Surely you mean that you
won’t
do it. You can if you want to.”

His eyes were burning again. “You could have gone out aboard the
Katya
with me too—but you didn’t want to. I needed to speak to you. Alone. And you did not want to be alone with me.”

“Alone on dry land is not the same as alone in a boat in the middle of Monterey Bay, and you know it!”

“Do I?”

A volatile silence shimmered between us. Artemisia broke it by banging through the back door with a pitcher so full she kept slopping water and muttering, “Damn! Damn!”