No Rest for the Departed, page 1
No Rest for the Departed
Detective Nick Greaves has always been haunted by the death of his younger sister, and that pain is brought vividly to the surface when a dead body fished out of the bay turns out to be her former beau. Certain that the man was murdered to cover up what he knew about his sister’s tragic end, Nick is determined to find the man’s killer. And when Celia turns up information that could be crucial to his investigation, he reluctantly agrees to accept her help.
But no sooner do they begin their search than it becomes clear that powerful forces are at work to stop them. First Celia is threatened when she looks into the shady dealings of a wealthy family’s fashionable auction house, and then an innocent man is killed when he’s hit by a bullet intended for Nick. With mounting evidence pointing to high-end smuggling and police corruption, Celia and Nick must face down San Francisco’s elite to catch the killer—and to find answers that may finally let Nick put his demons to rest . . .
‘Title Page
Copyright
No Rest for the Departed
Nancy Herriman
Copyright © 2024 by Nancy Herriman
Cover design and illustration by Dar Albert, Wicked Smart Designs
Published by Beyond the Page at Smashwords
Beyond the Page Books
are published by
Beyond the Page Publishing
www.beyondthepagepub.com
ISBN: 978-1-960511-64-5
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Dedication
To Vicki T.
Chapter 1
March, 1868
San Francisco
Well, shoot, thought Owen Cassidy as a gust of wind coming off the cold bay sliced through a torn seam in his jacket. I should’ve worn another undershirt. Although wearing another undershirt would’ve required him to own a second one that was clean. Or, now that he considered the situation, required him to own a second one at all. Which he didn’t.
He’d never had to worry about the number of shirts he did or didn’t own when he’d worked at Roesler’s Confectionery, where it was snug and comfortable. But he didn’t work there anymore. Mr. Roesler had reached his limit with Owen getting involved in Mrs. Davies’s and Mr. Greaves’s murder cases and fired Owen. He couldn’t really blame his old boss. But he did miss being around all those candies, the smell of chocolate lingering in the air, the gleam of sparkling clean glass display cases. The warmth. Nothing was sparkling clean or smelled half as good at the wharves. Maybe he should be thankful for the breeze, because he was sure it would smell a whole lot worse if it wasn’t always windy.
“Cassidy!” the customs officer—Mr. Brodie, if Owen recollected properly—shouted. He was sorta fond of shouting. Or maybe he was only sorta fond of shouting at Owen. “Those cases have been weighed and recorded. You’re free to load them onto your boss’s wagon and get them delivered, you know. Rather than just stand there.”
Owen tugged at his jacket collar, not that raising it did a lick of good against the wind piercing the jacket’s seams, and conjured up thoughts more pleasant than how cold he was. Such as the fact a dead body probably wasn’t going to turn up, like one did the last time he’d been hired to handle crates.
Shoot, Cassidy. Might be bad luck to think about that.
“Cassidy!” Mr. Brodie called again, scowling. It was a sad fact that plenty of folks both shouted and scowled at Owen and he was getting used to it. Seemed to happen all the time. Not Mrs. Davies, though. She never scowled at him. Well, not all that often, at least.
“Yes, sir!” Owen yelled back over the high-pitched screech of a ferry whistle signaling that the boat was departing from a nearby pier.
“And get out of the way. Passengers are trying to get to their conveyances.” With a jerk of his head, Mr. Brodie indicated the handful of new arrivals making their way down the gangplank a steamer had lowered not thirty feet distant.
The longshoreman who’d hauled the crates off the steamer didn’t bother to stifle his laughter. Thick with muscle, he probably never felt the chill off the bay. “If you’re scared of hoisting cargo, kid, you might want to find another job.” He added a few more words about how scrawny and worthless Owen was, but the sound of barrels rattling along a plank drowned most of them out. “And you are in the way.”
Owen scuttled aside but not before sneaking a look at the passengers, jostling each other to be the first person to reach the carriage for the What Cheer House or maybe the one that would take them to the San Francisco and San Jose railroad depot. A mix of folks, their clothes creased and crumpled, coming in from Canada along with the cargo. Respectable but not made of money like the people who disembarked the big Pacific Mail steamships that made the two-week journey from Panama and let folks off at the Folsom Street wharf. Folks who’d come all the way from New York or maybe even Europe. Passage that far wasn’t cheap. Bet they all had more than one undershirt.
“C’mon, Cassidy. Let’s get this loaded.” The driver for McCann and Company had climbed down from the wagon seat and proceeded to lower the tailboard.
Owen hefted the freight Mr. McCann had consigned onto the wagon bed. It wasn’t too heavy, really. This time it was a shipment of stearine and adamantine candles along with several cases of boots and shoes. Considering the contents of the cases, he realized he could sure use a new pair of boots. Maybe a pair of French screwed-sole ones that might hold up better than his brogans. But how could he afford new boots when he couldn’t afford a second undershirt? Shoot.
Owen was reaching for the final box when a woman shouting on the gangway distracted him.
“No, I do not need your help.” She was the last one off the steamer and moving down the plank like she meant to get someplace in a hurry. Except she’d been last, so maybe Owen was misunderstanding the speed with which she walked, her hands clamped on her heavy brown skirts to keep them from recklessly swaying. “Please, get out of my way.”
“Sorry, miss,” said the unfortunate porter who’d been carrying her trunk, only to be scolded. He dropped it at the foot of the gangway with a thud. “Won’t be bothering you any longer.”
The porter marched over to a family struggling to load their luggage into a waiting carriage and offered his services. The woman frowned after him before turning her attention on the crowd of people on the wharf. Her gaze settled on Owen. She was really pretty in an almost strange way, with unusually high cheeks and large eyes, a fringe of black hair peeking around the edges of her silk bonnet. Had he seen her before? He couldn’t recall, but he did realize he was gawping and looked away before she scolded him, too.
He did risk another look, though. The fellow she must’ve been searching for hurried up to her. After a hasty exchange of words, he hoisted her trunk and hauled it off. She followed at a steady pace. But before she disappeared into the throng, she turned and stared at Owen one last time, making him shiver.
• • •
“I’m worried about Mr. Greaves, Mrs. Davies.” Mrs. Jewett finished buttoning the top of her checked rust-colored bodice, tidying her lace collar to fall demurely in place around her neck. “And I don’t think he’d mind me telling you, as you two have become so close.”
Celia, seated at the large walnut desk in her clinic’s examining room, smiled to herself. There was a time not so long ago when Mrs. Jewett felt quite differently about her. Questioned the reason why a supposedly respectable English widow was visiting her tenant at his rented rooms. But Celia had only gone to Nicholas’s rooms in hopes of persuading him to allow her to assist in a murder investigation. The first of several murders in the past year, as matters had transpired. How gruesome, frankly.
“You make it sound as though we are engaged to be wed, Mrs. Jewett.” They had briefly kissed, shared words of affection, but she and Nicholas Greaves were most certainly not engaged to be married.
“He wants to marry you, Mrs. Davies. I know he does.”
Did he?
Celia glanced out at the street, visible between the panels of the lace curtain fluttering at t he window. Her view was of houses ranged up Vallejo, a glimpse of Telegraph Hill rising behind them, and the road that swirled dust after a lengthy dry spell. One of her neighbor’s dark-haired children, too young to attend school, playing with a doll out at the curb. A view she would give up were she to marry Nicholas Greaves. Neighbors she would give up as well.
With a small sigh, she completed her notes about Mrs. Jewett’s condition—she was undergoing the menopause, or the “change of life,” as more polite folks preferred to call it—then closed her notebook, cleaned the nib of her pen, and got to her feet.
“A warm bath will help you immensely, I believe. But I expect you do not have the time to draw a warm bath and take care of yourself.” Instead of constantly tending to Nicholas, whom Mrs. Jewett doted upon like a son.
“I don’t, Mrs. Davies. I haven’t ever had that sort of time, come to think of it.”
“In lieu of some much-needed pampering, I recommend compound rhubarb pills. They might help ease some of your discomfort. The apothecary on Montgomery should be able to provide those for you. Tell him I sent you.” She handed her a note with instructions for the man.
“Thank you.” Mrs. Jewett tucked the folded paper inside her embroidered bag. “I would have gone to my regular physician, but this is a delicate matter and I don’t always like speaking with him about womanly concerns.”
“I am flattered that you trust me with your care.” She’d never come to Celia before today, though. Maybe the reason for this morning’s visit had more to do with Mrs. Jewett’s worry about Nicholas than her discomfort around her physician. “Now, tell me why you are concerned about Mr. Greaves.”
“Why, those letters, of course.” The other woman’s forehead creased. “Hasn’t he told you about them?”
Secrets, Nicholas? Too many secrets between them, even still. Patrick Davies had been fond of keeping secrets, and those secrets had destroyed their marriage.
“What letters, Mrs. Jewett?” Celia asked, attempting to sound dispassionate and likely failing.
“He hasn’t told you.” She shook her head. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“Well you have, so you may as well explain what these letters were about.”
She drew her fringed shawl around her shoulders. “Some fellow, some awful-looking fellow who scared the life out of me, dropped them off,” she said. “Along with a photograph of Mr. Greaves with his two sisters, taken a while back.”
“I do not comprehend why anyone would send him another print of a photograph he already owns.” Celia was familiar with the daguerreotype Mrs. Jewett referred to; she’d seen it herself on the occasion of her boldly visiting Nicholas’s rented rooms.
“I don’t think he does either, Mrs. Davies. Not so far as I can tell,” said Mrs. Jewett, keen to tell all, now that there was no turning back. “The letters were from his sister Meg. Addressed to a friend with the initial S. She’d written them in the months before she died.”
“He showed them to you?” Celia asked, certain she no longer sounded dispassionate but rather a trifle jealous.
“Oh, no, Mrs. Davies. I snuck a look.” She paused as she comprehended what she had just admitted. “Only because I care about him so greatly, you understand. He was terribly upset when those parcels arrived. He thought I couldn’t tell, but of course I could. He’s not as difficult to read as he likes to think he is.”
In the beginning of their acquaintance, Celia had found Nicholas frustratingly difficult to read. Closed. Reserved when around her. He had less to fear from his landlady, she supposed.
“Isn’t it possible that the person who gave Mr. Greaves those letters merely wished for him to have items that had once belonged to his sister?” she asked. “A sentimental souvenir, albeit a few years late.”
Mrs. Jewett frowned. “And send some smelly thug to deliver them to my door? Menace me?”
“I concede that the choice of courier challenges my idea, Mrs. Jewett.”
“Just so,” she replied. Perhaps Nicholas should employ Mrs. Jewett to help with his cases. She appeared to have caught the detecting bug. “More significantly, the letters came with a note, which said it was time he learned the truth about his sister before it was ‘too late.’ Too late, Mrs. Davies!” she exclaimed. “And no signature to give a clue as to who they were. They want to scare him. That’s what I think.”
“But why?” Celia mused aloud. And why now? Years after his sister had taken her own life.
“That’s what I was hoping you might be able to work out.”
“Not easily accomplished when he has not even informed me of those letters or the warning, Mrs. Jewett,” she said. “Has he received anything else from this mysterious sender?”
“Nothing since the final parcel two weeks ago,” she said. “It’s been keeping him awake at night, though. Rustling about. I hear him pacing in his room at all hours.”
“Nothing at all for two weeks?” The length of time explained the inattentiveness she’d noticed in him recently. He’d been distracted by those letters. “There may no longer be anything to worry about, Mrs. Jewett. Perhaps the threat is past.”
“You don’t really believe that, do you, Mrs. Davies?”
Not only had Mrs. Jewett caught the detecting bug, but she was beginning to sound like Owen Cassidy.
“I fail to see what I can do to help,” Celia replied crisply. “Mr. Greaves has not confided in me, so he does not want me to know about the letters, nor does he want my assistance in the matter. I assume he is attempting to discover the identity of the person who sent him those parcels and what they meant by doing so, and will resolve the affair without my interference.” As Nicholas might term her involvement.
“Now, Mrs. Davies, I am very disappointed. I thought you’d want to get to the bottom of this situation and sort it out,” she said, just as crisply. “Because I’m not sure that Mr. Greaves actually wants to find that person, or understand what they meant by sending him those letters and that photograph. He claims he’s tried to track down the fellow who made the delivery, ask him what he wants, but he hasn’t had any luck.”
“Then that is all it is, Mrs. Jewett,” she said. “He is not avoiding finding this individual. He has merely not been successful.”
“If Mr. Greaves really wanted to find them, Mrs. Davies, he would’ve,” she insisted. “No, I think he’s scared to learn more about his sister. Truly scared.”
• • •
“Do you want me to keep looking for the fellow who delivered those letters, sir?” asked Nick Greaves’s assistant. Taylor sucked on his cigar, the tip flaring orange, then released the smoke, tendrils drifting off on the breeze.
Nick paused at the edge of the sidewalk, the North Beach and Mission railroad car rattling by, the horse’s hooves clattering over the street cobbles. It was a gray day, heavy with clouds, suiting his mood. “We’ve done all we can, Taylor.”
“You’re sure you don’t want me to keep asking about him?”
“I’m sure,” Nick said, crossing the street after a crate-laden wagon, come up from the wharf, had lumbered past behind the horsecar.
“Doesn’t seem right to leave a dangerous fellow like him wandering about on the streets, though,” Taylor said, unwilling to let the topic go. “If you don’t mind me saying so, sir.”
“We don’t know that he’s actually dangerous, Taylor.”
However, the fellow had scared Nick’s landlady so badly that for days Mrs. Jewett would startle every time somebody knocked on the front door. One time, her nerves getting the better of her, she’d taken a cleaver with her to answer the bell. The sight of a woman hoisting a massive knife had terrified the butcher’s delivery boy, who dropped the wrapped chops he’d been delivering and run for his life.
