The Lemoncholy Life of Annie Aster Read online

  Annie carried it gingerly to the closet door and looked at Cap’n, one eyebrow raised.

  Cap’n wrinkled her nose, shrugging.

  Tossing it on the box, Annie wiped her hands on her skirt several times and closed the closet door. She went to the nearest desk, ignoring a specimen jar containing an enormous tapeworm, and started sifting through the papers that littered its surface. There were unpaid invoices, a smattering of correspondence regarding David Abbott’s show, and a note from Culler approving a transfer of funds. She looked from this last item to a pair of filing cabinets.

  “Got an idea?” asked Cap’n.

  “Getting one.” Annie scanned the headings on the file cabinets and opened a drawer. She withdrew a file, then sat in one of the chairs with her feet propped up on the desk. “Well, Cap’n. What do you think we have here?”

  Cap’n tilted her head back to peer out from under the bowler’s brim.

  “It looks to be Mr. Culler’s financial ledger. Danyer’s also.” Annie scanned it. “Well, well, they have been a pair of busy bees. Their investments are nicely diversified, and it looks like their funds are managed by”—she shuffled through the file—“New York Life.”

  Annie rested the file under her chin and closed her eyes. Snickering under her breath, she wandered back over to the filing cabinet and began opening more drawers.

  “What are you looking for?” Cap’n asked.

  “Order forms. It seems that Mr. Culler and Danyer will be selling quite a large portion of their assets today.”

  “They will? Ohhh.”

  Sharp kid, thought Annie. She turned her attention back to the file. “And they are going to place the proceeds in…” Annie considered various options, and a malevolent grin oozed onto her face. “Tesla Electric! Oh, yes, I think Tesla Electric will do quite nicely.” She rummaged through a drawer full of documents and held up a stack of order forms. “Here we are. Now, let’s see.” She glanced about the room. “Cap’n, have you seen anything with Mr. Culler’s signature on it?”

  Cap’n got up from her lookout station and began to leaf through the papers on the desk opposite the one occupying Annie’s attention.

  After reviewing the forms, Annie looked across the room to see if Cap’n had any luck and immediately sensed that something was not right. Cap’n was sitting in front of an open drawer. As Annie got up to join her, Cap’n reached inside and removed a tray, placing it on the desk. She turned to Annie, her face blanching.

  Annie hurried over to see what had ruffled the girl’s feathers. From across the room, the tray appeared to be a smaller version of the entomology board resting on the wall, this one containing a rather spare collection of small insects pinned and on display. A closer look, however, proved to be confusing. Eraser heads? she wondered. Colored eraser heads? As odd as it would be to find insects pinned to a board, this was altogether stranger. She took it from Cap’n’s hand to examine it more closely, and her stomach lurched.

  “Emma was right,” Cap’n said.

  Pinned to the board and painted in a comical variety of pastel colors were the end digits of pinkie fingers. They were in various stages of decomposition, but all swollen and monstrous, and below each specimen was a name. Annie only registered a few—Fabian, Raven, even a Culler—before her eyes fixed on two labeled pins that lacked specimens. They read Abbott and Cap’n, respectively.

  She threw the board back in the drawer, which she slammed shut. “We’re leaving.” She reached for Cap’n’s hand, shaking violently, but the girl had other ideas.

  “No.”

  “Cap’n!”

  “No! This don’t change nothing.” She glared at Annie, repeating, “It don’t change a thing.” She handed Annie a piece of paper.

  It was a letter from Mr. Culler to a client demanding $320 by the end of the week lest he confiscate property. His signature at the bottom of the correspondence was an ostentatious display.

  Annie stared at Cap’n for a second, giving the adrenaline time to dissipate, then took the demand notice to the far desk and sat down with a blank piece of paper to practice his signature. Half a dozen efforts later, she glanced up to see Cap’n sitting at Mr. Culler’s desk with an open box before her and a cigar protruding from her mouth. Her nose was furrowed, and she was searching through the pockets of her overalls.

  “What on earth are you doing?”

  Cap’n lifted her index finger, pulled a cigar from her pocket, and held it up for inspection. She carefully pulled the cigar ring from the one in her mouth and slid it over the other. Placing the counterfeit in the box, she closed the lid, dropped the box back into the center drawer, and slid it closed.

  Taking the cigar from her mouth and putting it in her overalls, Cap’n grimaced while smacking her lips and returned Annie’s gaze with an expression so steely that it startled her. “Payback” was all Cap’n said. She picked a fleck of tobacco from her tongue, adding, “Fabian was my friend.”

  “What was it?” asked Annie, pointing to the drawer.

  “I rolled gunpowder pellets in the center.”

  Annie opened her mouth to protest but, thinking better of it, shook her head and practiced a few more signatures.

  Holding her scribbles next to Mr. Culler’s signature, Annie grunted in satisfaction and reopened the financial ledger to confirm the accounts he would be liquidating. She filled out a stack of order forms and forged Mr. Culler’s name at the bottom of each.

  Nervously tapping the pen against the edge of the desk, she looked about the room once more before turning to Cap’n. “Let’s get out of here,” she said.

  They tidied the room and left through the fire exit, looking back in alarm as a voice boomed through the hallway.

  “Miserable brat!” shouted Mr. Culler from the lobby downstairs, his voice echoing down the empty corridor. “Who would have guessed he was part greyhound?” He locked one hand into a fistful of hair on the top of his head while the other clawed at the back of his neck and looked as if he was about to unleash a wail before kicking a trash container that spilled over with a deafening crescendo.

  Forcing his rage into his belly, Mr. Culler turned to Danyer. “Find that kid,” he said quietly, a surprisingly delicate smile softening his features. When Danyer didn’t immediately comply, Mr. Culler’s eyes began to bulge from their sockets, a pair of eggs hard-boiled by his anger. “Now!” he yelled. He left Danyer on the stairwell and, wishing a pestilence on all youthful things, stormed up the stairway to his office, sending another trash can to the lobby floor with a swift kick on the way.

  Muttering to himself, Mr. Culler stormed into the office and dropped his valise by the hat stand. Completely out of sorts, he sat at his desk breathing heavily when a tiny stirring caught his eye. He slammed his hand on the desk, cupping it around a cockroach. Picking it up carefully between his thumb and index finger, Culler examined the insect under the desk lamp, fascinated by the translucence of its carapace and the rows of spines running down its legs like a shark’s teeth. He stifled the impulse to put it in his mouth, pulled his macabre collection from the desk drawer, and impaled the cockroach on the pin labeled Cap’n, instead.

  Lighting a cigar, he rested his forearms on the desk and placed his chin on the back of his hands, waiting for the insect’s legs and antennae to stop churning. Suddenly, he yanked the cigar from his mouth, making a moue of distaste. Looking from the cigar to the cockroach, he carefully burned the insect’s legs off one by one, delighted by the slight popping sounds made by the burning chitin in the exoskeleton, and threw the cigar in the wastebasket.

  Outside,pressed against the building directly under his window, Cap’n jolted at the sound of the explosion and turned to Annie. “That didn’t take long,” she said.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-FIVE

  A Plan in Full Swing

  Pardon me.”

  The secretary for the investment division of New York Life glanced up from a pile of papers on her desk, looking somewhat put ou
t. “Yes?” she asked.

  “I have some order forms for Culler Enterprises that need to be dropped off.”

  The secretary started at the word Culler and lowered her pen. “Your name?” she asked.

  “Miss Aster.”

  “Make yourself comfortable.”The secretary gestured to the seating area and hurried down the hall, only to return a moment later with an account manager in tow. She couldn’t hightail it back to her seat fast enough when she saw him take one look at the lounge’s occupant and run his fingers through his hair before arranging a pleasant and, to her mind, completely alien smile on his face.

  “Miss Aster?” he asked, stepping into the lounge.

  “I apologize for coming without an appointment, but my employer, Mr. Culler, insists that I deliver these order forms to you immediately.”

  The secretary looked up with a start at the change in the woman’s inflection, and her mouth settled into a smirk as she watched from the corner of her eyes, torn between amusement and disgust while the woman proceeded to play the account manager like a violin. Handing over some order forms before leading him to a corner, the woman said, “Mr. Culler has received news from a very reliable source and is trusting to your discretion—”

  Abandoning even the pretense of work, the secretary strained to overhear as the manager mumbled something, prompting Miss Aster to reply, “Yes, the highest regard. He also said that you might wish to share this information with your more discerning clientele.”

  More heated murmuring was offset by perfectly timed laughter, and the secretary felt a bubble of grudging admiration for Miss Aster, who was making optimal use of her appreciable assets without any appearance of impropriety. He hasn’t got a snowball in hell’s chance, she thought.

  She was right. In the end, Miss Aster and the natural order proved to be too much for the manager, and he escorted her past the secretary’s desk and to the exit. “I will personally attend to the details,” he said.

  “You’re my angel,” Miss Aster purred.

  After they had shaken hands, the secretary looked at the account manager’s retreating back with contempt. She smelled a rat but had no intention of telling him so. While men thought they ruled the world, she knew they were simply there to do the heavy lifting for women like Miss Aster.

  As if reading her thoughts, the woman met the secretary’s eyes. Smiling faintly, she tapped her finger to her nose before holding it over her lips and stepped out the door.

  The secretary watched Miss Aster’s progress as she passed from window to window on the front of the building and wondered what she was up to, hoping it added up to a little mud in her boss’s face.

  She went back to separating carbons as Annie navigated a few blocks before slipping through the door at Cooks Brothers, nodding to the workers who followed her every step while pretending not to. She stepped into the alleyway and made her way into the derelict building where she found her confederate taking, of all things, batting practice. Cap’n had cleverly attached a rope to a support beam and was swinging away at a baseball wrapped in some netting secured to the rope’s end.

  Cap’n dropped the bat and wrapped the cord around the pole. “How did it go?” she asked.

  “I’m afraid Mr. Culler not only lost a lot of money today, but quite a few friends as well.”

  Cap’n snorted, then got on her hands and knees to lift a couple boards from the floor, exposing a cavity. Reaching down with both hands, she began tugging at something inside, falling back onto her tail end with Annie’s suitcase landing between her straddled legs. She adjusted her cap and looked up. “We should get you settled in at the Broadway,” she said.

  Annie helped her up, then took the suitcase and headed for the door. She turned to find that Cap’n hadn’t moved. “Aren’t you coming?” she asked.

  Cap’n ran a hand across her nose. She tugged at the strap of her overalls, clearly bothered by something, then walked to the far wall, leaning against it with her arms crossed. “I can’t figure you out,” she said.

  Annie lowered her suitcase.

  “You know I pick pockets to get by.” Cap’n suddenly became fixated on a piece of loose wallpaper, picking at it while she spoke. “You gave me a dollar!” The words came out almost like a sob but more nearly like an accusation. “I was testing you,” she said, glancing at Annie from the corner of her eye. “When we met. I figured anyone who crossed those two was either stupid, rotten, or both. Either way, I figured I could handle it and get something on Culler I could use. But you weren’t either. I didn’t expect that.”

  Annie walked across the room and braced herself against the wall next to Cap’n. She leaned her head back and closed her eyes, saying nothing.

  “You don’t fit, you know.” Cap’n sniffed, rubbing her nose again before looking over to meet Annie’s eyes. “I see things. Everything about you sticks out—the way you walk, talk, even the color of your skin.” She reached over to finger Annie’s dress. “You’re too pretty by half, and you wear expensive clothes, but they smell old. Really old. And I’ve never seen nothing like this.”

  Annie looked at the zipper Cap’n had exposed.

  “There are two worlds, Miss Annie. The one I live in and the one you live in. There ain’t much trust between the two.”

  And that was the crux of it, Annie realized. Cap’n was struggling to cross the border between need and trust, between a business arrangement and friendship. She reached out to touch the back of the girl’s hand. “I’m not asking for anything you aren’t ready to give.”

  “I know, and that’s just it,” Cap’n said. She walked across the room to lift Annie’s suitcase. “We should go.”

  Annie stood in the lobby of the Broadway, where Cap’n had left her with a promise to meet out front at 6:30 p.m., and tried to shake the impression that she was in the middle of a dream. Nothing, not even the bank, had impressed upon her so completely that the world she now inhabited was a century behind the world she’d left. It wasn’t simply the hotel’s ornamental excess—the elaborate trim applied to every conceivable surface, the ponderous marble fireplaces, the grand mirrors—but the buzz, the general persona of the hotel and the people that occupied it. It was alien and completely up her alley.

  Delighted, Annie pivoted and the lobby responded, spinning slowly about her like a carousel until she almost lost her balance from an unexpected dizzy spell. She walked to the registration desk and wrote a check for her accommodations from the book given to her at the bank. A second spasm of vertigo rocked her as she turned, causing her to drop the room key on the counter. She dabbed her nose with a handkerchief, but there was no need, and reached for the edge of the counter to steady herself.

  “Are you well, madam?”

  She collected the key with a wan smile. “I think I forgot to eat today,” she said.

  “There is a fruit basket in the room. Shall I have a bread board sent up?”

  Shaking off her dizziness, Annie thanked the receptionist and walked up the two flights of stairs to her room on the third floor, oblivious to the crowd of people collecting in the lobby on their way to a magic show.

  She opened the door to her quarters and hesitated, certain she’d been here before. But that, of course, was impossible. Then she made the connection. The room was a dead ringer for the parlor in a custom-made Victorian dollhouse her godmother gave her for her seventh birthday. They’d spent hours playing make-believe with it, and Auntie Liza had used any excuse to buy Annie new “appurtenances.” Her favorite was a tiny wooden table clock whose gigantic likeness was sitting on a shelf in the hotel room’s shallow entryway.

  Annie dropped onto the bed, munching an apple. That little bout of vertigo in the lobby was nothing like the wooziness she felt when her illness was acting up, she decided. In fact, it reminded her of a day not so long ago when she tried to knock on a cabin door. She sat bolt upright. Could it be that Elsbeth was nearby? Should she seek her out? Was it safe?

  That the blood she shar
ed with Elsbeth was stronger than the strange alchemy of the door had been made painfully clear when she first attempted an introduction. Her father’s diary compared the phenomenon to corresponding poles of two magnets violently repelling each other.

  Lying back, she closed her eyes and found herself trying to remember the term used when matter contacts antimatter. Annihilation? Her eyes popped open. Uncertain whether her imagination had trespassed into the terrain of pure science or the ridiculous, Annie made a decision. She couldn’t risk contact with Elsbeth and would take precautions to avoid the possibility.

  Having made that unhappy decision, she attempted to quiet her mind, but it continued to race ahead of her. She rolled a word around in her mouth—daddy—and fussed with a pillow while thinking that somewhere out there, at this very moment, he was preparing for his show. Her throat constricted when she realized that she would never get to know him because he had died— would die?—while saving her life.

  Two hours later, she stirred and looked about the room in confusion. She may not immediately have known where she was, but she definitely knew where she was not. She wasn’t in her own bed in San Francisco. Slowly, she came to herself and looked at her watch. It was 6:15 p.m. She glanced at the clock on the shelf beside the bed, which also read 6:15 p.m.

  Annie closed her eyes for another moment, then, with a start, sprang out of bed and into the bathroom to wash her face and tidy her hair. While she made herself presentable, part of Annie’s mind was wondering at the curious irony of time.The clock in 1895 was counting it at the same pace as her watch from 1995. She found that oddly reassuring.

  Bolting out the door, she headed downstairs and outside while, concurrently in time, Elsbeth was watching in trepidation and fascination as David Abbott disappeared through a door at the Coates Opera House.

  Annie found Cap’n sitting on the steps, holding a paper bag full of peanuts. She looked tightly wound, cracking the husks with her front teeth and chewing purposefully. She chucked a husk into the gutter when Annie appeared over her shoulder.