Dandy Detects by M. Louisa Locke

Dandy Detects:
    A Victorian San Francisco Story

    By M. Louisa Locke

    Smashwords Edition

    Copyright 2010 Mary Louisa Locke
    Cover design Copyright 2010 Michelle Huffaker

    Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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    This is a work of fiction. Names, characters,
places, and incidents either are the product of the author's
imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual
persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or
locales is entirely coincidental.

    ####

    Barbara Hewitt sat by the open window,
drinking in the faint breeze that barely touched the flame of the
candle sitting on the table in front of her. It was nearly eleven
at night, yet her attic bedroom refused to release the accumulated
heat of the day. While only her second September in the city of San
Francisco, she was already familiar with the odd habit the weather
had of producing the first searing temperatures of summer just in
time for the fall school term.
    Today her students at San Francisco Girls
High had wilted under the requisite five layers of clothing that
female modesty dictated, and she had noted that none of them had
been willing to forgo the newly fashionable polonaise wool dresses
that had clearly been specially tailored for the start of school.
She smiled to herself, thinking of the dampness of their knitted
brows as they struggled over their first English literature
essays--essays that she was trying to finish grading by candlelight
so that she could return them in the morning.
    A raised voice and a sharp sound shattered
her reverie, and she looked out the window into the illuminated
back room on the top floor of the house across the alley. A lit oil
lamp revealed in stark detail the tableau of a man and a woman and
a dog. The shaggy black dog was clutched in the arms of the woman,
who was sitting at an upright piano, her shining blonde head bowed.
The wide-shouldered man loomed over her, his hands pressing down on
the lid that covered the piano keys. The sound Barbara had heard
probably came from the man slamming the lid down, since the soft
notes of a Beethoven sonata had now been replaced by silence. But
it just as well could have been the sound a man’s hand made when it
came forcibly against the delicate skin of a woman’s face.
    Barbara remembered another room, on another
breathlessly hot night, and another furious man. But that room had
also contained the increasingly frantic wails of a three-year-old
boy, a sound that had driven her across time and space to end up in
this attic in Mrs. Fuller's O'Farrell Street boarding house. She
stood up and turned her back on the window, taking up the candle to
move across the room to an adjoining alcove where her young son lay
asleep. Jamie was now eight, and he slept in that deep, drugged
state that healthy children effortlessly achieve. She briefly
stroked his sweat-darkened short hair that the summer’s sun had
burnished golden, and her heart turned over.
    She then noticed that Dandy, Jamie's terrier,
was sitting upright on the bed, staring alertly at her. The
candlelight revealed the blaze of white on his chest and the white
around his neck and front paws. The white patches looked so much
like a starched white shirt against his black fur that Mrs.
O'Rourke, the boarding house cook and housekeeper, had exclaimed,
"Oh, Jamie, with that squashed-in face, if he doesn't look like a
street tough trying to pass as a high-class gent. A dandy right
enough, all dressed up in his fine evening clothes."
    Dandy, ears erect on