Thursday, April 10, 2025

Mrs. O'Malley's Midnight Mystery, Chapter Three, scene 1

Welcome, I’m Mary Louisa Locke, the author of the USA Today best-selling Victorian San Francisco Mystery series and the Caelestis Science Fiction series. In this daily newsletter, I reflect on my life as an indie author trying to age gracefully. Occasionally, I will also publish some of my shorter fiction in this newsletter to read for free.

Daily Diary, Day 1681:

Brief check-in: Yesterday another sunny day, bookended by fog, I got in two walks, and some writing. Today, as usual for a Thursday, will be busy with noon zoom meeting and a phone call afterwards. But here is what fog looked like as it retreated in the morning.

Throughout the month of April, I will be offering, for free, the seventh short story in my Victorian San Francisco mystery series, Mrs. O’Malley’s Midnight Mystery. These posts will come out every Tuesday and Thursday. This story, right on the border between being a short story and a novella, actually has chapters, so below is the third chapter, scene 1. (And if you are impatient, you can just go and buy either the ebook or audiobook for only $1.99.)

Mrs. O’Malley’s Midnight Mystery
by M. Louisa Locke
Copyright, 2020

Chapter Three, scene 1:
Friday, early evening, October 7, 1881
O’Malley’s, Beale Street

Most Fridays, which was Kathleen’s usual night off, Patrick would pick her up at the O’Farrell Street boardinghouse around seven. By this time, dinner at the boardinghouse would have been prepared and served, so little Tilly only had to handle helping Mrs. O’Rourke with the clean-up on her own. This schedule also left Patrick and Kathleen plenty of time to go out to dinner and go dancing afterwards before heading home. She tried not to stay out past eleven on those nights; otherwise, she was too tired the next morning when she still had to rise at five-thirty to get the oven going. However, this evening she’d asked permission to leave at four-thirty in the afternoon in order to meet Patrick at the O’Malleys at five.

Kathleen liked October in San Francisco––the warm days, the cold nights, and festivities of All Hallow’s Eve. She didn’t even mind the rain, which often blew in from the ocean. This afternoon, with the sun still above the dunes to the west, the walk down the three and a half blocks to Market had been so pleasant that she decided to walk the rest of the way to Beale Street. She always enjoyed the bustle of Market, liked peering in the shop windows, watching the carriages as they pulled into the center courtyard of the Palace Hotel. She even enjoyed inspecting the well-dressed men going down Montgomery to the Nevada Bank, wondering if any of them were one of the Silver Kings. Kathleen knew that her mistress, Mrs. Dawson, didn’t think much of the men like James Flood who made their millions in silver mining. She said they weren’t honest and treated their workers poorly. But Kathleen knew that Mr. Flood and his three partners had started out poor, and it made her proud to think that fellow Irishmen had done so well. She’d even heard rumors that James Flood’s wife, Mary, had started out a parlor maid!

However, when she turned off Market, down Beale Street, she felt an uneasy chill. Looking around, she realized the large, two-story factories that lined Fremont and First Street, the next streets over from Beale, were blocking the setting sun. But the chill was more than physical. The men lounging in shadowed saloon doorways stared at her and made rude comments, a small knot of boys and girls planted in the middle of the sidewalk refused to move, forcing her to step onto the street to pass, and two old grandmothers checking out the bin of potatoes in front of a grocer’s looked at her with undisguised suspicion as she passed by.

She suddenly felt conspicuous in her navy-checked polonaise, which was the Dawsons’ last year’s Christmas present to her, the nicest dress she’d ever owned. She usually reserved the outfit for Sunday mass, but Patrick had told her that after their meeting with Mrs. O’Malley he wanted to take her to one of the better restaurants in North Beach that he’d heard about. She hoped the O’Malleys wouldn’t think she was taking on airs.

She found herself hurrying up, wishing she’d accepted Patrick’s offer to come by the boardinghouse to escort her to this meeting. Then she gave herself a mental shake. She had relatives that lived near Sixth and Mission, and if she remembered correctly, her own family had lived briefly on Fremont, before the Second Street cut had opened the area to the larger factories. And the hostility she felt from everyone she walked by had simply been because she was a stranger to the neighborhood—a stranger who was dressed far better than any of the women she passed. She wondered what it was like for Biddy to travel to and from her job at the Silver Strike Bazaar each day. She didn’t imagine very many of the people in this neighborhood worked, much less shopped, in one of the grand emporiums north of Market.

As she crossed Folsom, she was relieved to see Patrick standing in front of a hardware store, halfway down the block, waiting for her. She noticed he’d changed from his uniform, which was rather a disappointment. She loved the way he looked in the dark navy suit––the long frock coat with its nine brass buttons and the large seven-pointed gold star prominently displayed on his chest. But she was pleased he’d worn his own Sunday-best suit, a black worsted that showed off his broad shoulders. While his tall-brimmed derby hid his lovely copper curls, his thick, highly waxed mustache gave him a distinguished air of seriousness that was immediately banished when he broke into his wide smile.

She did love him so.

“Well, my darling, aren’t you looking like you’re ready for some fine dining? Hope this doesn’t take long,” Patrick said. “Shall we go on up? Don’t want to hang around long on the street.”

“Yes, let’s do. Biddy told me that the stairway to their rooms is behind the hardware store, so I think we need to go through here,” she said, pointing to a narrow opening between the hardware store and a shoe repair shop.

Patrick took her elbow and helped her over one particularly large damp spot in the dark passageway, saying, “Besides the fact that I didn’t want to wear my uniform at Sergio’s tonight, I thought it better not to advertise my profession. Word of a strange copper in the area might tip off these men, if they are actually criminals.”

As they neared the back of the building, Kathleen noticed the smell of a backyard privy. If you could call it a backyard. Apart from the privy, there wasn’t room to swing a cat, much less hang out washing. They must have to send all their clothes to a laundry. What an expense for a family of eight.

When they got to the top of a set of weathered wooden stairs, she saw a box for mail affixed to the wall, with the name O’Malley neatly painted on its cover. There wasn’t any sort of bell, so as they stood on the narrow landing, Patrick rapped on the door with his knuckles.

The door swung open, revealing a serious-faced girl, whose black curls, blue eyes, and small build strongly reminded Kathleen of a slightly younger version of Tilly. A white apron covered a dark green plaid dress that advertised what skilled seamstresses Mrs. O’Malley and Biddy were. This must be Alice, Biddy’s sister and the cousin Tilly described as bookish. Kathleen wondered if the dress had been put on especially for their visit.

The young girl said, “Do come in quickly or Chester will try to get out.”

Kathleen looked down and, seeing a young gray tabby peeking around the door frame, she scooped him up and said, “His name is Chester? Named for our new president? My, how he’s grown in two months. You’re Alice, aren’t you? Mr. McGee and I have come to see your mother. Is she available?”

“Yes, she’s expecting you. Come right in. She will be with you in a moment,” Alice said politely.

Kathleen moved forward, giving Patrick enough space to follow her and shut the door. Surveying her surroundings, she decided she had never seen such a small room hold so many people…and things. At a table that took up most of the center of the room sat two sets of identical twins. The older pair were boys, with short black hair, about the age of her brother Ian, and the younger twins, no more than five or six, showed their relationship to Biddy by their freckles and curly red hair. The only obvious kinship between the two sets of twins were their blue eyes and their cheeky grins.

To her left, an older girl, slender and dark-haired like Alice and the older twins, stood at a small cookstove, stirring something in a large pot. This must be Deirdre, who gave Kathleen a shy smile, before turning back to start dishing up what smelled like a delicious stew. After filling a plate, she handed it to Alice, who put a thick slice of bread on each plate before placing it down in front of one of the boys. Alice glared at one of the younger twins who started to eat as soon as he got his seat. He stuck his tongue out at her but carefully put his fork down.

Continuing to take in the crowded room, she saw every possible space, horizontal and vertical, had been put to good use.

Above the stove hung two small pots and a long-handled fork and spatula, and next to the stove stood a battered old sink with a faucet. Thank heavens it looked like this place had a cistern that supplied the O’Malleys with running water, because Kathleen hated the idea that they would have to go up and down those stairs to use a common pump in the backyard. Over the sink was a shelf holding an oil lamp that was the one source of light for the small room. Next to the sink stood a chair and above the chair were a number of shelves filled with various mismatched plates, mugs, and food canisters. From the ends of the shelves hung string bags that held potatoes and what looked like other root vegetables.

Across the room, Kathleen spied an old wooden cabinet that appeared to be an icebox. This cabinet also acted as a table, holding a small vase of flowers, and was next to the one decent-looking piece of furniture in the room, a sturdy wooden high-backed chair with cushions. This chair, with a sewing basket on its seat, was next to the only window in the room, and Kathleen assumed this must be the window from which Mrs. O’Malley had observed the three men’s activities.

“Would you like some stew, miss, sir?” Alice interrupted this thought with her question.

“Oh, thank you, no. We’ve dinner plans, but that is quite kind of you,” Kathleen responded quickly. “It smells great.”

“Deirdre made it. She’s quite an accomplished cook already,” Alice said. Then hesitating, she continued, “Would you like to sit down? I don’t know what’s keeping Mother.”

While Kathleen was trying to think of what to say to this unnaturally polite child, Patrick spoke up and said, “Thank you, but we’re fine. However, if you don’t mind, I would like to take a look out your window. It looks out over Beale Street, doesn’t it?”

Taking her nod as permission, Patrick avoided the couple of cloaks hanging on pegs to his right and went to stand at the window.

Kathleen continued her inspection of the room and saw that the wall that must connect to the second room in the flat was equally crowded, in this case with a hip bath that leaned up against the wall, next to a stack of crates holding books and clothes. Higher up, multiple caps and jackets hung from two rows of pegs.

Then there was a door that probably led to the second room in the flat.

For a moment Kathleen was puzzled because there was a clothes line strung from the farthest corner of that door to the window where Patrick stood looking out on the street. Was the line to hang washing to dry? Then she saw that there was a curtain bunched up at the end near the window and realized that when the curtain was spread out, it would block out that part of the room from the rest of the kitchen. The two rolled-up mattresses in the corner indicated that this must be where some of the children slept at night.

Kathleen marveled at how clean and well-organized everything in this room was, despite the fact that if you looked closer, the paint on the walls was peeling, the ceiling showed definite signs of water damage, and the floorboards buckled. And thinking about the sheer noise and energy, much less the mess, that the three children who lived in the O’Farrell Street boardinghouse could create, it was a wonder that a flat that held eight people, five of them no more than young children, wasn’t complete chaos.

The door to the back room suddenly opened and Mrs. O’Malley appeared, welcoming Kathleen and Patrick and asking them to join her in the next room, where they would have more privacy.

Kathleen hadn’t seen Mrs. O’Malley in years, and she was shocked to see the gray at her temples and the lines on her face. On the other hand, the woman was as neat and composed as ever, her plain black dress looked freshly ironed, and her hair was carefully arranged in an attractive coil at her neck.

She had no doubt that Mrs. O’Malley was the one that had kept this family together, ensuring the children were healthy and happy, despite their surroundings. And if she thought that something was out of place in her neighborhood, something that might threaten her children, Kathleen, for one, was going to take her seriously.

To be continued…

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