Still groggy, I struggled to sit up.
“I napped longer than I meant to,” I murmured.
Cora gestured that I should lie back down.
“Flossie said you needed the rest. Go back to sleep! I didn’t mean to rouse you . . . We only wanted to make certain you were all right and to say good night.”
“But . . . Tackett?” I said, worried.
“The last we heard, he was sick, drunk, and shittin’ up a storm,” Henrietta said. “Or should I say, the last we smelled—hah! Can’t keep his food down, yet still demandin’ his whiskey, o’ course. Oh, but you ain’t gotta worry yerself. Cora brought the two of ’em a fresh bottle, and Blanche is stayin’ in with ’im. They oughtn’t give you much trouble.”
Cora rolled her eyes.
“Her Royal Highness had the nerve to order me to carry a fresh bottle of whiskey and two glasses in to them on a little tray! Can you imagine? The nerve.”
Of course, I could imagine. Henrietta shrugged this off. “The p’int is, the sooner they get in their cups the better, and you can just rest your weary head.”
Cora tucked my quilt back around me, a kind gesture from her. While Flossie was quite maternal, Cora was usually too busy being glamorous. But at the moment she appeared genuinely concerned.
“Sleep,” she urged. “We’re off now, and we only wanted to tell you.”
The two of them left the kitchen. I knew they were headed through the sitting room to the front hallway. The clatter of boots shook the ceiling above my alcove. It was the familiar sound of the other girls trooping down. Their footsteps sounded jaunty, merry. Tonight there would be no inspection; I knew from the happy staccato that everyone was relieved.
I listened as, one by one, their boots tapped along the front hallway, over the threshold, and down the porch stairs. I tried not to think that I was now alone with Tackett and Blanche. An eerie sense of quiet filled the house. I strained to listen harder.
Nothing.
I stared at the sloped ceiling and willed myself to go back to sleep. But the drowsiness I had felt only minutes earlier moved further and further away, like a receding tide. I finally gave up.
I knew I ought to be glad for the peace and quiet, for the fact that, whatever she was doing, Blanche wasn’t storming into the kitchen. But that night I could not enjoy the silence. There was something peculiar about it; it was somehow too immense. The more I tried to ignore it, the more I was gripped by a queer, unsettled feeling. Something was wrong. I rose from bed and quietly padded around the boardinghouse, peering into empty rooms, unnerved. The pit in my stomach tightened as I neared the door at the end of the second-floor hall. Tackett’s room. I took a breath and held it, then leaned in close, eventually resting my ear against the thin wood.
Nothing.
I felt a sudden shiver of icy fear. I jumped back as though stung and hurried downstairs to where I’d always felt safest: the kitchen. Once there, I lit a fire in the stove and admonished myself. I was being foolish, of course, allowing my imagination to get the better of me.
I spent the next two hours doing every chore I could think up. I scrubbed the stains out of the laundry. I scoured the privy, usually my least favorite task. Then I wandered the house, feeling lost, until I finally set to work wiping the grease and smoke from the glass shades of the gas-lamps.
But when all this was done, I was again left empty-handed. I felt my gaze move as if by its own volition to Tackett’s room above. Eventually, my body followed, and I found myself once again standing in the hallway outside his door, holding an oil lamp.
My hand was trembling when I reached up to knock. The sound echoed menacingly.
I waited.
Nothing.
I knocked a second time and waited.
Still nothing.
“Mr. Tackett, sir?” I called. “Miss Blanche?”
Still nothing.
Finally, I gripped the doorknob. I remember my knuckles were white. I pushed the door open and released the handle. The hinges gave a plaintive groan.
All was dark and quiet within. I worried that they might be sleeping, but in my gut I already knew this wasn’t possible. The terrible smell in the room hit me like an anvil. A smell of bile again, but something else, something metal—like iron, perhaps, and a third odor, too . . . a rotten scent I couldn’t quite place. The trembling in my hands began to move through my body—a cloud of black fear widening and tightening, buzzing until every inch of me quivered.
“Mr. Tackett? Miss Blanche?” I repeated. I carried the oil lamp across the black room, its circle of light blooming into the darkness like a terrible flower. I set the lamp down on the nightstand beside the two figures and—after taking a breath—reached a hand towards the bed.
I steeled myself as I drew back the sheet.
Tackett stared at me with milky, sightless eyes. His mouth was slightly ajar, the corners crusted with foamy saliva gone dry.
The greater shock was Blanche. She lay next to Tackett, her body contorted into a most unnatural position, her pink silk dress soiled with her own excrement. There were other signs of disarray, too: when I pulled back the sheets further I spied pools of vomit and urine, and the bed-clothes beneath both of them were rumpled as though given a good thrashing. I do not know how much time passed as I stood staring; I could not look away. It struck me all at once that not only were Tackett and Blanche dead but they had died a most violent death. The trembling in my hand became uncontrollable. I uttered an involuntary shriek and let the sheet drop, cringing at the volume of my own voice. But of course there was no one to hear. My next realization stopped me cold. I was alone in a house with two corpses.
Cora. Flossie.
I found myself in motion. I fled the room, stumbling down the stairs and out the front door without so much as stopping for my shawl.
8
There was a damp chill in the air—as there so often is when evening arrives in San Francisco—but I barely noticed. My blood pumped furiously, and I stumbled over my feet as I ran. The streets were loud and busy, filled with a cacophony of horses whinnying and drivers scolding one another in brash voices. The overpowering odor of manure moldering in the gutters was an unexpected relief: alive and earthy after the putrid scent of death I’d just encountered. My ears filled with the frenzied plinkety-plonk of a dozen player pianos, their tinny notes spilling out from the saloons. I rushed past a man urinating against the side of a building. He gave a lecherous laugh as I glanced at him but I barely took notice. I continued on, passing other Barbary Coast revelers and breathing in the wafting odors of ale and tobacco and the floral spice of opium.
When I arrived in front of the dancehall, I was sweaty from running, and the city’s steep, sloping streets had knocked the wind out of me. I looked between the two entrances; the one closest to me was a paying entrance for men, and a short distance away was a free entrance marked LADIES, though it was well-known that nary a true “lady” had ever graced this door.