Chapter 7
Emil’s feet ached like a son of a bitch.
But if Olive Becket could traverse the city day after day on foot, then so could he. If only his toes weren’t riddled with blisters like barnacles on a weathered hull. He pulled on his rolled cigarette and glared at his offending boots stuffed with useless gauze. He’d gone soft, grown unaccustomed to the demands of shadowing a suspect. That’s what he got for tossing his old boots when he updated his wardrobe to blend in at The Puget Sound Post over the past year. For lounging around the floating house weeks on end and taking streetcars or buggies anytime he needed to go more than a few blocks.
Cigarette dangling between his lips, he withdrew a small notebook and checked his notes. This was the first time Olive had disappeared into this particular First Hill mansion, though it was no different than many of the other luxurious homes she frequented for piano lessons. Her students were surprisingly upper crust, he’d learned. This was, however, the first house with several buggies waiting out front. A performance, perhaps? Not likely on a weekday, but nothing she did matched his—admittedly narrow—expectations.
The front door across the street opened, and Emil quickly lowered the brim of his hat and bent as if to tie his boot. Several ladies poured forth, including Olive and the dark-haired woman from the New Year’s Eve party. As they neared a sleek Rockaway, a driver stepped down to open the buggy door. Olive, he observed, was shaking her head, and the other woman climbed into the buggy without her. When it and the remaining buggies departed, Olive was left on the sidewalk. She hugged her shawl tighter around her shoulders, sighing so deeply the air plumed around her.
She looked…forlorn.
He frowned at the sharp tug of sympathy behind his sternum. Her emotions shouldn’t matter to him, only her movements. Her scheming. Her interactions with potential anthem writers.
Yet…there was a noticeable dearth of guile in Olive’s routine. His notebook was filled with proof of her endless efforts, marking the number of obligations she fulfilled each day. He’d noticed how hard she worked, how her chin remained tucked against her chest unless she was with a young boy who made her smile. Her brother, he’d soon deduced, though there was no sign of other family.
He’d be heartless not to have sympathy, wouldn’t he?
“Where to now?” he murmured as she set off.
He trailed behind her at a safe distance, ensuring she remained in sight amid the bustling evening streets. She wove between pedestrians, around buggies and wagons, and crossed streetcar tracks without hesitation. Her steps were brisk, purposeful. Hypnotic. They lured him into more base thoughts that plagued him more with each hour. Thoughts decidedly not pertinent to his investigation, but ones from which he had found no escape.
Were her legs lean like the rest of her, defined by miles of walking? Were they brushed with downy hair the same sunlit hue as that beneath her hat? Would they have a hold over him the same way her unremarkable eyes did? It was with some relief when Olive broke her pattern and entered a grimy storefront.
Wait—a pawn shop?
He hustled forward and pressed his nose to the frosted glass, feeling vaguely like a child outside a toy store. Olive stood at the counter talking to the shop proprietor, a grizzled man wearing a rumpled suit two sizes too large. Emil’s gaze drifted over the stock crowding the shelves, to his eye little more than tarnished trinkets, chipped porcelain, and rust-specked tools. He grimaced. Shops like these preyed on the desperate, upselling junk and offering little more than a pittance to those forced to part with their valuables. Then Olive reached into her coat pocket, removed a cloth bag, and set it on the counter.
“Don’t do it,” he said with a sinking feeling.
The proprietor upended the bag, and a flash of gold landed in his open palm—a pocket watch. He held it up to the dim gaslight, his stubby fingers nimble as he turned it this way and that. Even from his poor vantage point, Emil noted the intricate design on the cover. The embedded gemstone that glinted weakly in the murky shop. A ruby, perhaps. Most likely a railroad watch.
It was the type of pocket watch found in mansions in First Hill.
The type that would undoubtedly be missed.
The type that would get one not-so-innocent little lamb into not-so-little trouble.
Emil rubbed both hands over his face and groaned. So Olive Becket was truly a thief. This wasn’t the information he’d hoped to uncover. All he’d wanted was another lead toward the identity of the suffrage anthem writer. A quick solve and an attaboy from Leland Wingate. But no. She had to go and do something foolish. He should be gloating—it turned out Mack and the women from the suffrage society were wrong about their friend after all. But the victory rang hollow.
Because he had an uncomfortable hunch he might be the only one to know the true extent of Olive’s hardships.
The Anderson family might be well off now, but he had vivid memories of difficult times. When money was scarce, and Emil and his brother went to work at a young age. The long days balancing schoolwork and selling newspapers on the street corner, rain or shine. The needling jealousy when other boys his age had time for leisure, or clothing that wasn’t a hand-me-down. He remembered the temptation to earn a little fast cash, deflected only by the knowledge that his mother would box his ears to oblivion.
It seemed he would have to save Olive from herself.
With a resigned growl, he wrenched the pawn shop door open and strode inside. The bell jangled harshly in the cramped shop, and the shop proprietor paused in his scrutiny to mumble, “Be right with you, sir.”
Olive glanced backward, and he saw the instant she recognized him. A tensing of her shoulders, a subtle hitch in her breath.
“Evening, Miss Becket.”
She swiveled slowly, her gaze skittering around the shop, finally landing somewhere between his top button and his chin.
“Good evening, Mr. Anderson,” she replied in a soft, breathless voice.
And his stomach fluttered.
The sensation was appalling. Downright discomfiting. Akin to the horror of a firefly trapped in a glass jar. He was a grown man with a list of conquests that would fill half of Seattle’s Blue Book. His stomach fluttered for no one, especially a mercurial pianist who doubled as a thief of silver and gold. He would remain collected. Unwavering but kind. Professional yet benevolent.
