No Comfort for the Lost (26 page)

Elizabeth pushed Celia away. “We don’t need your assistance,” she said, leading Emmeline to the settee beneath the front window. She fanned her daughter with her hand. “Rose, please fetch the police. This woman is deranged and is upsetting my daughter. And she has trespassed in our house.”

But Rose didn’t move. She was fumbling through the pockets of her plain russet dress.

Barbara continued, “I told Joseph . . . Mr. Palmer . . . I wouldn’t say anything about the necklace. At the funeral.” Emmeline let out a moan. “I let him know that I wouldn’t tell anybody he’d given it to Li Sha, or that I thought he’d later taken the necklace from her, to keep the gift a secret. But when I said that, he looked so confused . . .”

“Are you meanin’ this necklace?” asked Rose, retrieving what she had been searching for in her pockets. She pulled out a silver chain and locket. “I found it beneath the stove this mornin’.”

The moment froze like a photographic portrait captured on albumen paper: the necklace suspended from the maid’s fingers, glinting gold; Emmeline, her hand covering her mouth, staring at the locket as though it might lunge and bite; Elizabeth’s face a livid shade of red; Barbara’s eyes wide.

“It’s Li Sha’s,” said Barbara, breaking the spell. “The one he gave her!”

Celia stared in horror at Elizabeth and Emmeline as full realization dawned. It all made terrible sense. She had suspected the wrong Palmer.

“She does know, Mama!” Emmeline cried out.

“Emmeline, calm yourself,” snapped Elizabeth.

Emmeline struggled up from the settee and crossed the room to grab Celia’s arm. “It was an accident. Li Sha came here looking for Papa. She wanted money, just like you said, and Mama got angry. So very angry.”

“Emmeline, you don’t know what you’re talking about.” Elizabeth, too, rose from the settee. “You’re confused. The laudanum you take makes you imagine things. And you were ill that evening—”

“I didn’t imagine what happened, Mama. How can you say that?”

Celia focused on Emmeline, who was trembling and struggling to breathe. “What happened that night, Emmeline?”

The girl tightened her grip on Celia’s forearm, cutting off her circulation. “Mama didn’t mean to hurt Li Sha with Papa’s sword bayonet from the war. It just happened.”

“Emmeline, come sit down and rest.” Elizabeth spoke sharply and came to her daughter’s side. “You’ll have another of your attacks if you do not calm down. And stop telling Mrs. Davies your fancies.”

“But they’re not fancies!” she shouted, causing Rose, who’d been watching in shocked silence, to gasp. “I’ll confess to killing her, Mama. You know I didn’t mean to, but I can say I did.”

“Em, no,” said Barbara, her voice breaking.

“You did not kill Li Sha, Emmeline dearest,” said Elizabeth, slowly. She stroked her daughter’s cheek with the back of her fingers. “You’re talking nonsense.”

“But, Mama, it
is
my fault! I can make the police understand it was an accident,” she said, wheezing. “We should’ve told them right away.”

“Emmeline, honestly!” Elizabeth dragged her daughter away from Celia, the girl releasing her grasp only at the last second, jerking Celia’s arm. Celia’s fingers prickled with the sudden return of blood. “You know the laudanum makes you have strange dreams sometimes. That’s what you’re remembering.”

Behind the two Palmer women, Barbara had started to inch toward the hallway leading to the front door.

“She was here, Mama,” exclaimed Emmeline, her cheeks spotted with color. “You have to say she was. Please. She’d come to see Papa, but she found us instead. Because we didn’t go to the society meeting that night.”

The expression on Elizabeth’s face changed, her eyes taking on a look of calculation. Assessing, Celia supposed, how readily Celia would accept what Elizabeth was about to say. More lies. Who
hadn’t
been fabricating falsehoods since Li Sha’s death?

“It’s true she came here, Celia,” Elizabeth said, her gaze unwavering. “I admit that. She’d come to ask for money—we’d been generous to her before and since, as you know—but I refused. Neither of us hurt the girl, and she was very much alive when she left this house.”

“But that’s not what happened at all. Tell the truth,” pleaded Emmeline, clinging to her mother. “Li Sha was going to tell everybody that Papa went to the Barbary Coast every Monday night to visit Chinese prostitutes and that he was the father of her child!”

“Holy saints!” murmured Rose.

Hatred flashed across Elizabeth’s face. “It was an utter lie.”

Dora had insisted that Li Sha had been true to Tom. Celia still wanted to believe Dora, and she wanted to believe in Li Sha. But the girl had made a dangerous claim in order to persuade Elizabeth to give her money, and she had paid a terrible price.

“I was upset by the gossip such talk would cause,” said Elizabeth. “Do you understand what it’s like to scratch a living from a parched farm, Celia? I suspect you don’t. But that is what I came from.”

At the parlor doorway, Barbara bumped into the large vase Elizabeth used to hold gentlemen’s canes and umbrellas. Elizabeth, engrossed in her account, apparently did not hear the tiny clink of porcelain against the oak floor.

“I dragged myself up from poverty,” Elizabeth continued. “I escaped my family, who are still digging in the dirt back in Missouri like there’s gold in the mud instead of sorrow. I found a husband who would make me rich and provide a comfortable, respectable life. Who’d take me away from that hell. Away from my father.” Elizabeth’s expression hardened. “I didn’t want Li Sha to ruin the life we have here. I was terrified of gossip and tried to get her to leave before the neighbors spotted her. You understand, don’t you, Celia?”

Should she agree? Should she try to placate her? Celia glanced over the woman’s shoulder and noticed Barbara moving deeper into the entry hall as unobtrusively as she could. Where was Mr. Greaves? Had Addie failed to find him?

Off to Celia’s right, Rose muttered a string of prayers.

“Rose, please hush. You’re giving me a headache,” said Elizabeth, and with a snivel the maid fell quiet.

“But Li Sha didn’t leave,” Emmeline said, stepping between her mother and Celia. “I have to tell her everything, Mama. I can’t bear the guilt anymore.”

“Stop, Emmeline,” warned Elizabeth.

“Mama only wanted to scare her. I saw it all,” Emmeline continued, undeterred by her mother’s efforts to silence her. She pressed a hand to her chest as if to help her lungs move air. “I was upstairs, trying to sleep,” she said slowly, “but I heard them shouting at each other in the kitchen, and I came downstairs to see what was going on. Mama had the bayonet in her hand, and she swung it at Li Sha. She didn’t hit her with it, and Li Sha didn’t look scared at all, which made Mama angrier.”

Emmeline’s brow furrowed. “And then I saw that Li Sha was wearing the necklace.
That
one.”

She pointed at Rose. The maid goggled at the necklace, forgotten in her grip.

“The necklace was meant to be mine, Mrs. Davies,” Emmeline said. She’d turned an alarming shade of red as her breath hissed through her lips. “Papa promised it to me. I saw it one afternoon in the jewelry shop, and he told me I could have it. But he never gave it to me. Instead he gave it to
her
.”

Elizabeth squeezed her eyes shut while her daughter spoke.

Emmeline’s gaze was glassy, distant. “I ripped it off her neck, breaking the chain. I must have scratched her, because she hollered like a cat and then tried to grab it out of my hands. She was quick, and she managed to slap me. And then Mama . . .” She looked back at her mother, who had turned her face aside. Tears fell down Elizabeth’s cheeks. “And then Mama slashed at her. She was only trying to defend me. Weren’t you, Mama, weren’t you?”

“Emmeline,” Elizabeth sobbed.

“It was awful. There was blood everywhere, splattered on the floor, on the table, on the stove. Red, bright red, like the banners in Chinatown.”

Rose screeched, dropped the necklace, and crumpled to the floor, moaning between bouts of tears. The rest of them were transfixed like insects trapped in tar. Celia had stopped watching Barbara’s progress, and her cousin had disappeared from view. Had the front door opened? She hadn’t heard.

“And Mama . . . Mama cut her again. I tried to stop her. I dropped the necklace and pushed Li Sha out of her reach,” said Emmeline, her eyes widening, her breath coming in asthmatic gulps. “And then Li Sha tripped, I don’t know why, and tumbled backward. She must have hit her head on the edge of the stove, because after she fell to the floor, she didn’t move. There was blood coming from her nose and everywhere and she stopped breathing and then she died! It was awful!”

A blow to the head in the right location could be quickly fatal, thought Celia, causing the brain to swell.

“That prostitute attacked my daughter,” said Elizabeth, her voice so much smaller than usual, tight and choked.

“I never thought somebody could die so easily,” said Emmeline, shuddering. “Mama panicked and told me to fetch an old blanket from the attic. I brought it down and we wrapped her in it. Mama brought out the buggy, and I helped her put Li Sha in the back. It was so hard, she was heavier than I could carry, and the rain made everything slippery. Then we drove her into the city.”

She paused. Celia wondered if Emmeline had felt forced to help her mother. The girl, always frail and quiet, had likely never thought to refuse Elizabeth’s demands.

“We didn’t know where to take her,” Emmeline said. “But eventually we found a quiet wharf and dragged her out of the buggy, unwrapped her, and rolled her into the bay. I was so certain somebody would see us and stop us, but nobody did. We came home and burned the blanket and cleaned the kitchen as best as we could before Rose arrived for her first day of work the next morning.”

“All that cleanin’,” murmured Rose, apparently aghast to have helped scrub away the evidence of a crime.

Emmeline stared at the necklace where Rose had dropped it. “I searched for the necklace whenever Rose wasn’t in the kitchen, but I couldn’t find it. It must have gotten kicked beneath the stove deeper than I could see. I tried to explain to Papa what had happened, but he didn’t want to hear. He said to let Tom take the blame and that I wasn’t to speak about that night ever again.”

Except for the ticking of the clock on the mantel and Emmeline’s labored breathing, silence had descended on the room. Rose had ceased bawling and held a handkerchief to her face, her eyes as wide as a pair of English crown pieces.

Mr. Greaves had asserted that jealousy could be a violent emotion. But it had not been Tom’s jealousy or Tessie Lange’s jealousy that had snuffed out Li Sha’s life. It had been Elizabeth Palmer’s seething hatred.

“You were so happy to cast the blame on my brother-in-law and let him hang for what you’d done,” Celia said to her. “And there were those times when you suggested we leave town. Why, Elizabeth? Were you afraid that Li Sha had told me about her relationship with your husband? Or did you come to think that Barbara, who’d spent so much time in this house, had to know about it? Were you afraid she or I would see that
you
had the greatest motive to kill Li Sha? Is that why you dressed up like a man and left those warnings at our house?”

But it hadn’t been Elizabeth or a frail Emmeline who’d attacked her in the kitchen the other night. Was Joseph Palmer still somehow involved, perhaps helping to hide their crime?

And where
was
Mr. Greaves?

“We had
nothing
to do with any warnings, Celia,” insisted Elizabeth.

“What about Tessie?” Celia asked, her heart knocking in her chest. “Did she know about Joseph and Li Sha, and need to be silenced as well?”

Emmeline turned to her mother, a look of alarm on her face. “Mama, is that what happened?”

“Of course not!” Elizabeth glanced around. “Where is your cousin, Celia? Where has she gone? To fetch the police?”

Out in the hallway, Barbara yelped and flung open the front door.

“No! You can’t leave!” shouted Elizabeth as Celia sprinted for the door. Barbara had stumbled over the doorstep and fallen forward onto the porch.

Celia helped her cousin to her feet.

“Stop!” Elizabeth held a heavy iron poker from the parlor fireplace. She swung it wildly, the pointed end swishing past Celia’s shoulder. The woman struggled with its unwieldy weight, and it clanged against the floor.

“Elizabeth!” Celia shouted, her arm lifted to shield Barbara, who had fallen again and was on her knees in the doorway. “Put it down! We can get the police to understand it was an accident!”

“Mama, don’t hurt them, too,” cried Emmeline, pulling on her mother’s arm.

Celia groped through her reticule for the letter opener and pulled it out. It made a paltry weapon, but she pointed it at Elizabeth anyway.

“Put down the poker, Elizabeth,” said Celia with as much calm as she could muster. “Please put it down.”

The woman’s eyes were wild. She was no longer the beautiful and poised woman in sumptuous attire, with the box at Maguire’s Opera House and the regard of San Francisco society. She was that young woman who’d been desperate to escape a Missouri farm.

“You don’t want to hurt them, Mama,” said Emmeline.

She moved forward just as her mother hefted the poker and swung as hard as she could. Celia turned aside, waiting for the blow, and heard Emmeline scream as the poker struck her.

“Emmeline!” shouted Mrs. Palmer, the poker falling from her grip. Barbara dragged it out of the woman’s reach. Celia hurried to Emmeline, who lay crumpled against the entryway wall, moaning and clutching her arm. Celia helped her into a sitting position.

“Emmeline! I didn’t mean . . .” Elizabeth Palmer collapsed to the ground, her skirts pooling around her, her voice breaking on sobs. “I didn’t mean . . .”

“Mama,” Emmeline said between clenched teeth, her skin pasty.

“Rose,” Celia called to the maid, who remained motionless in the parlor, “bring lengths of cloth so I can immobilize Miss Emmeline’s arm.”

Rose stood and hurried off.

Elizabeth extended a hand to caress the hem of Emmeline’s skirt. “I will take all the blame, dearest. You mustn’t suffer.”

Discomfort creased the skin around Emmeline’s mouth as she looked over at her mother. “We should’ve given her the money, Mama. And then she would’ve gone away, and we could’ve continued on like always.”

“A girl like that would never have left us alone, Emmeline. It never would’ve ended, don’t you see? She would’ve ruined us.”

“We’re ruined anyway,” said Emmeline.

Barbara, who continued to hold on to the poker, had gotten to her feet and was staring out the open front door. “Detective Greaves!”

“Do not move, Emmeline.” Celia clambered to her feet and hurried to her cousin’s side in time to see Nicholas Greaves vault over the picket fence surrounding the Palmers’ house.

“There was no need for that, Mr. Greaves,” she said with a relieved smile. “We are unharmed.”

He bounded onto the front porch, took hold of her arms, and ran his hands down them as if he did not believe her claim. “Is Palmer here?”

“No.” Celia looked back toward Elizabeth, who was hunched over her daughter. Emmeline refused to meet her mother’s gaze. “I was mistaken that he might have killed Li Sha. She died in this house, Mr. Greaves. Elizabeth and Emmeline are responsible.”

“Here, ma’am, here!” shouted Rose, scurrying into the entry hall with strips of cloth.

“I have to tend to Emmeline. I can explain later,” said Celia, returning to the girl.