The Spook Lights Affair

18

The hansom clattered its way through a teeming traffic of other cabs, private carriages, baggage drays, and trolley cars, and finally deposited Sabina in front of the Southern Pacific depot at Third and Townsend streets. Carrying her overnight bag, she hurried inside to the ticket window and from there to the southbound platform. She needn’t have hurried, however. Her train had just arrived in the station, twenty minutes late, and would not be departing again for another twenty minutes or more.

The delay was not surprising. There had been two daily passenger trains between San Francisco and San Jose since 1864, Sabina had been told, the year the first commuter railroad west of the Mississippi, the San Francisco & San Jose Railroad, had been completed. The Central Pacific had taken over the SF&SJ four years later, and Southern Pacific had bought CP in 1879 and doubled and then tripled the number of daily round trips down the Peninsula. One would have thought that this was more than enough time for the railroad to develop a competent level of comfort and on-time service, but that was not the case. The two previous times Sabina had made a southbound trip, she had suffered delays and a number of other annoyances. This trip was to be no different, it seemed — the third time not the charm.

Waiting passengers had already crowded aboard and Sabina was forced to take an aisle seat next to a middle-aged matron who smelled as if she’d bathed in a mixture of lavender water and gin. The woman was not the talkative sort, fortunately. Once the train jerked into motion, she alternately dozed and looked out the window at the passing scenery. Sabina was relieved not to have to fend off idle chitchat; she bought and ate a sandwich and a chocolate bar from a vendor passing through the car, then sat quietly with her thoughts.

She hadn’t slept well last night, her active mind going over and over last evening’s conversation with Arabella Kingston and what it might portend. The more she considered it, the stronger her hunch had become — strong enough this morning for her to pack her overnight bag and make arrangements with a neighbor to tend to Adam. If she was right in her surmises, this day away from the city would be well spent.

The Peninsula south of San Francisco seemed remote to most people who lived in the city. Small towns strung together between the Bay and the heavily forested Coastal Range — South San Francisco, San Bruno, Millbrae, Burlingame, San Mateo. And Palo Alto, home of the new Leland Stanford Junior University that had been founded three years previously by Leland Stanford Senior, the railroad tycoon and politician, in honor of his son who had died of typhoid fever two months before his sixteenth birthday. A coeducational and nondenominational institution of higher learning for the sons and daughters of the wealthy, such as those in Virginia St. Ives’s circle — though Sabina had heard that it had been struggling financially since the senior Stanford’s death in 1893.

When the train arrived at the Burlingame station, Sabina was among the first to disembark. The brand-new building impressed her; it was said to be the first edifice in the new Mission Revival style, its roof covered in eighteenth-century tiles from the Mission San Antonio de Padua at Jolon and the Mission Dolores Asistencia at San Mateo. Two hansom cabs stood waiting out front. Sabina asked the driver of the first if he knew where Badger Hill was, and when he said he did, she hired him to take him to take her there.

The cab traveled a few blocks down the California Mission Trail, a six-hundred-mile arterial connecting the former Alta California’s twenty-one missions, four presidios, and several pueblos, and stretching all the way from Mission San Diego de Alcala in San Diego to Mission San Francisco Solano in Sonoma. Flanking the packed earth roadway here were a variety of humble homes and businesses — a small hotel, three or four taverns, a dry goods and grocery, a livery stable and blacksmith shop. These soon gave way to open country, and after a quarter mile or so, the driver turned off onto a side road that curled up into low hills grown thickly with pines, redwoods, chestnuts, and bay laurel.

It had been warm down on the flats, but a sharp wind had begun to blow as they climbed. The wind whispered and moaned in the trees, and carried the scents of pine and bay laurel; the latter, resembling tumeric, was almost overpowering. A white-tailed deer, startled by the hansom’s passage, vanished in a flash. Here and there driveways indicated habitation, as did occasional glimpses of a roof or a chimney.

Sabina was not comfortable here. A city dweller for all her life, wild places intimidated her — none more than the vast Rocky Mountains surrounding Denver and the isolated wilderness deep in the Owyhee Mountains of Idaho where she’d met John. Strange that this should be: the cities where she’d resided had been filled with danger, and she’d been abroad both night and day on their most perilous streets. Her uneasiness with the natural world was not rational, compared to the threats presented by footpads, pickpockets, confidence tricksters, and the like, but she couldn’t seem to banish it. She felt almost relieved when the driver turned onto another road, short and evidently a dead end, and stopped at the foot of an overgrown, vine-tangled driveway.

“Badger Hill, miss,” he said.

Sabina looked up the drive. It was rutted and clogged with encroaching vegetation, and most of the plant shoots were new and appeared untrammeled. Six months or more must have passed since Arabella Kingston’s parents last came to The Gables. One would think people of their means would have thought to employ a gardening staff, at least on a part-time basis, but evidently not. When they dismissed servants, they must make a clean sweep.

She stepped down and asked the driver to wait for her.

“Don’t you want me to take you to the door, miss?”

“No. I would rather surprise my … relatives.”

“Relatives?” The man’s thick eyebrows met in a dark line over his beaky nose. “You sure somebody’s here? Doesn’t look like any equipage has been over this lane in some time.”

“No, but I’m hoping somebody is.”

He gestured at her overnight bag, which she’d left on the carriage seat. “Won’t you be staying?”

“Possibly not. My surprise may not be a happy one.”

“Family troubles, eh? I’ve got plenty of that myself,” he said ruefully. “But miss, I can’t afford idle time. Every fare helps me to feed my wife and little ones.”

And to buy your daily ration of beer, Sabina thought, but not unkindly. “I’ll pay you well for your time.”

“Ah. Well, then, in that case…”

Sabina took two dollars from her reticule. “There’ll be two more after the return trip, as well as your regular fare.”

“That’s generous of you, miss.” In the fading light, the driver’s eyes gleamed as he accepted the coins. “Very generous indeed.”

“If I’m not back by” — she looked at her timepiece — “by five o’clock, drive up to the house and call for me.”

“Five o’clock. Hour and a half, eh?”

“Yes.”

“Right, miss.”

He seemed honest and trustworthy enough to do as bidden, and not to go rummaging around in her overnight bag in the interim. Not that he would find anything except her night things and toiletries if he did. Her derringer and all else of value was safely tucked inside her reticule. She gave him a nod and a brief smile, turned, drew her cape more tightly around her shoulders, and began making her way up the overgrown and wind-swept lane.

The Kingston summer house, on first sight, seemed impressive: three wings in French chateau style, flanked by trees and fronted by a long reflecting pool around which the carriageway looped. But as she approached, Sabina saw that everything was in poor repair. The pool’s water was low, murky, and raddled with weeds; the house’s paint was cracked and flaking; tiles were missing from the roof. Off to one side stood the carriage barn, a two-story structure whose upper floor would probably be the servants’ quarters. Both buildings had a dark, vaguely desolate appearance in the heavy tree shadows and waning afternoon light. No wonder Arabella Kingston had disliked coming here during her childhood summers.

The buildings and grounds showed no outward signs of recent or present habitation. Sabina went to the front door of the house, paused for a moment to listen. There was no stirring of activity behind the ornately carved mahogany door. A heavy brass knocker in the shape of a lion’s head was mounted in the middle of the panel, but she wasn’t about to announce her presence by using it. Instead she tried the matching brass door handle. Securely locked.

The wind seemed stronger and colder now, lashing at the surrounding trees; Sabina bent into it, holding her bonnet in place as she moved to her right around the house. Curtains screened all the windows on that side, and when she tried the latches she found that they, too, were tightly fastened. But when she turned the corner at the rear, she discovered a small window whose sash was raised an inch or so.

She raised the sash a few more inches — it slid easily, making no sound — and examined it and the latch. Both bore fresh-looking scratch marks, indicating that the window had been forced. A brief smile touched her mouth. Now she was fairly sure that she hadn’t embarked on a wild goose chase.

When the sash had been lifted up as far as it would go, Sabina considered the size of the frame. She would fit through it — just barely. She looked around for something to stand on so she could reach the sill. There was a woodpile next to what appeared to be a shed; she carried an armload of logs to the window, arranged them into steps, and proceeded to climb up. As she straddled the sill, she heard a ripping sound — the side seam of her bodice giving away. Drat! Now her favorite traveling dress had been damaged, perhaps beyond repair. She seemed to be having all sorts of difficulties with clothing lately.

Once inside, Sabina waited until her eyes had become accustomed to the gloom before taking stock of her surroundings. She was in a large kitchen, a handsome black-iron stove holding court over such other modern appurtenances as an oversized oaken icebox, a deep porcelain sink with an attached hand pump, and well-made cabinets and countertops. On one wall was a brick fireplace that looked capable of roasting an entire side of beef.

She crossed the hardwood floor and went through a doorway into a dining room. Tables and chairs and breakfronts were all shrouded in white sheets, resembling misshapen ghosts. A chandelier with many dozens of sparkling teardrops hung above the table, one of the more ostentatious and unattractive ones she had ever seen. She prowled among the ghosts long enough to determine that none of the sheets had been disturbed; thin layers of dust coated them and the floor.

But someone had been in this part of the house recently. Footprints showed plainly in the floor dust.

Sabina followed them through a dining room into the front hall, where a staircase curved upward to the second story and an archway opened into the main parlor. The prints continued into the parlor. Sofas and chairs and tables were likewise covered in there, but one of the sheets had been removed from a large assemblage of ornamental and useless objects — “dustcatchers,” as cousin Callie called them.

The adjacent library contained more ghosts, a fireplace even larger than the one in the kitchen — the wind wailed loudly in the flue, adding to the spectral atmosphere — and more marks in the dust. These led to a row of well-filled bookshelves. Sabina hadn’t the time to do much pleasure reading anymore, but she had devoured books as a girl and there were several old friends among the collection on the shelves: Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, a set of works by Charles Dickens, and King Solomon’s Mines, an exceptionally popular novel by adventure writer and fabulist H. Rider Haggard. There were gaps in a row of novels by Jane Austen and another of Marie Corelli romances. Books recently removed, Sabina thought.

The curving staircase led her to a second-floor gallery. It didn’t look as though anyone had been up here; the floor dust seemed undisturbed. Sabina continued her search nonetheless. Six doors opened off the gallery, one into a bathroom with a huge clawfoot tub and the other five into bedrooms. Each of the bedrooms contained more covered furniture, the two largest with ornate four-poster beds; none showed signs of recent occupancy. Why did two people require so much space and so many expensive furnishings in an isolated home that was seldom used? Sabina wondered. The very wealthy were a breed she had never quite understood. It was as if they had so much money they couldn’t bear not to spend it.

She was at the top of the stairs, about to descend, when a sudden thumping, scraping noise came from one of the north-side bedrooms. For an instant she froze, then her hand darted into her reticule to close around the derringer’s handle. The noise came again, louder. She hurried in that direction, placed the right bedroom by yet another scraping thump, and threw open the door.

Nobody there.

The noise came once more, from behind flowered curtains. She hurried across the room, pulled the curtains wide — and found herself looking at the large, cone-heavy branch of a pine tree that grew close to the house, the wind snapping it against the window glass whenever it gusted.

Wryly, Sabina chided herself for overreacting. She should have known it was the wind. But this remote and half-wild place, with its abandoned feel and its legion of inanimate ghosts, had made her jumpy.

She returned to the stairs and descended. The house was clearly deserted and its only visitor in months had been herself. Was this a wild goose chase after all? She’d been so sure that her hunch was correct.…

Outside, the wind continued to blow strong and cold as dusk approached. Soon the hansom driver would appear, and it would be folly not to return to the Burlingame station with him. But there was still time to search the other building on the property.

Sabina fought her way through the wind to the carriage barn, a large structure built in the same style as the house, with dormer windows at the second story. An outside staircase stretched upward along the near side wall. As she neared the barn, at an angle between the staircase and the closed double doors, a slow prickling sensation began to ripple along her back. She stopped abruptly. The prickling continued, a feeling she’d had several times before. John would have called it woman’s intuition, but she knew it to be instinct born of professional training and experience. She had learned to trust it, and she trusted what it signified now.

This building, unlike the house, was inhabited.