Thursday, April 3, 2025

Mrs. O'Malley's Midnight Mystery, Chapter 1, scene 2

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 1674:

Brief check-in: Did get in my two walks, but only around 200 words because I spent most of the afternoon talking with my daughter about plans for the summer and then going online to book flights for her and my two grandsons to come visit in August. Will be the first I will have seen them since Covid. Time well spent. There was a surprise shower right before bed (here is what sky looked like near sunset), then rained half-an-inch in about 5 minutes at 5 this morning waking us up.

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 second scene in the first chapter. (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 One: Scene two

Near midnight, Mrs. O’Malley carefully folded the completed ruffle and put it in her sewing box on the floor at her feet and enjoyed the peace and quiet. Even the usual noises from the street below had died down. After a moment, she stood up and went to the old chipped sink where she had put her baking pans to soak. She’d used up the last of her flour to make bread for tomorrow. That, plus a fry-up of the last of the corned beef, would cover breakfast. She hated when the shelves got this bare. Even with Biddy giving her nearly all of her wages, it was always touch and go when they got to the first of the month and she had to pay rent.

After washing and drying the baking pans and putting them away, she took her purse from the bottom plank of the shelves next to the sink and took out two quarters. She stiffly climbed up on the chair that sat under the shelves so she could reach the old tea tin she kept on the top shelf as her savings bank. Biddy, a good half a foot taller than she, was the only one in the family who could reach this high, even using the chair. Pretty soon the older twins, Bri and Bennie, who at ten were almost as tall as Mrs. O”Malley, would be able to get up here if they wanted. But for now, as her dear father would have said, it was “safe as houses.”

The older twins’ recent growth spurt was one of the reasons it was hard to make the grocery money last, but so far, she had resisted their pleas to let them go out to work. Her niece Tilly’s stories about the two boys who lived in the O’Farrell Street boardinghouse where she worked and their jobs selling papers hadn’t helped.

The problem was that once she let them go out to earn money on weekends, they’d start to push her to let them leave school and work full time. And when the two boys joined up to get their way, they were hard to handle. Bri would go on and on about all the reasons he and his twin brother should be able to do something, and Bennie would just get louder and louder, as if sheer volume would win the argument.

She continued to resist because she had promised herself they would finish grammar school. By then they’d be fourteen, and she hoped to get them apprenticed to a decent trade. Maybe if they went to a different school, they wouldn’t complain so, although she had to agree. Silver Street Primary, where they went now, was awful, with a run-down old building and over a thousand children crammed into drafty rooms, some of which were no more than outdoor sheds. Showed what the city politicians thought of the people who had to live in this neighborhood, which was a jumble of rooms for rent squeezed between the iron works, lumber mills, and breweries.

When she moved to these rooms over a hardware store on Beale Street after her husband died, she had told herself the rooms and the job were only temporary. Working nights at St. Mary’s eased her mind since she was only ten minutes away from home in case there was a problem with the younger twins, who were only one at the time. The job working for the nuns also had the benefit of providing her meals from the hospital kitchen, which cut down on the food bills.

Even now, when all of her children were school age, she felt working nights was best for the family. She got back home before five-thirty every morning, so she could supervise getting everyone up, fed, and out of the house. Then again, in the afternoon, she was there when the children got home from school, making sure they had a good supper before she went off to work at seven. During the day, while Biddy was off to work and the children were in school, she could do things like the grocery shopping, baking, and preparing dinner and still snatch the four or five hours of sleep that seemed to be all that she needed before going to work. And at night, both Biddy and Deirdre were there to watch their younger siblings.

Getting enough sleep on Saturdays was more difficult. Yet even the younger twins understood that when she was in the back room with the door closed, they should try to be a little quieter. And on Sundays, her sister-in-law, Jeanne, was good about taking the whole lot of them home with her after mass so that Mrs. O’Malley could get some sleep. Although Sunday was her night off, she’d found that it wasn’t good for her to skip her daytime nap and sleep Sunday nights. When she did that, it seemed her whole body got turned around and she would start to nod off at work at night. That’s why she welcomed the piece work, like the ruffles she was working on tonight. It brought in money and kept her awake through nights like tonight.

No, the job still worked; it was the neighborhood that didn’t. Seemed to get rougher by the day. Saloons on every corner and gangs of young boys…and girls…playing truant while their parents were at work. When all her children were young, she’d walk them to and from school herself to make sure they were safe and kept them indoors with her when they weren’t in school. But now the older boys and Deirdre balked at the idea of being treated like babies, and they insisted they could look after the littler ones on the way to school. But she was more and more uncomfortable with the thought of fourteen-year-old Deirdre walking down these streets, passing by the tough men gathered in knots on every corner. And it was getting harder and harder to keep Bri and Bennie from envying the freedom of the young boys their age who loitered on those same corners.

Well, that’s why she tried to put some money into the old tea tin every week, which she called her moving fund. Everyone else called it the accident fund—probably a better name for it because it was unforeseen events that explained why after saving for four years she only had a little over $10 in the tin. Accidents like Biddy having words with the Larkson Mills foreman and not bringing in any wages for three weeks until she got another job, or the time Deirdre accidentally let all the water in the stew pot boil away and they had to buy a new second-hand pot, or when Bennie and Bri ruined their winter shoes by turning them into sailing vessels during a torrential downpour.

Sighing, she added this week’s quarters to the tin and slowly got off the chair, being careful she didn’t fall. She worried about the fact that, every once in a while, her knees would hurt so much from her work, ten hours of scrubbing and mopping, that one of them would buckle. She wasn’t fifty yet, but at the end of a long week, she felt a hundred. She supposed seven children would do that to you. Not that she didn’t thank the Saints every day that all of them had survived the early years of childhood.

She went over and peeked behind the curtain at her boys. The elder set of twins, Bri and Bennie, had gotten their straight black hair from her, although her hair was now faded by threads of gray. Callum and Connor, the five-year-old twins, like Biddy, were the ones who had gotten the thick, curly dark-red hair of their father, along with a good many freckles.

She leaned over so she could pull the blanket up over the younger twins. The oven had been banked down for hours now, and the kitchen was beginning finally to cool off. She hated that the boys were sleeping on thin mattresses on the floor. She had a horror of rats getting into the flat, which was the main reason she’d agreed to take in the young gray tabby. What she really wanted was to get the boys some iron bedsteads, get them off the floor, but that wasn’t practical with them sleeping in the kitchen. At least the girls, who slept in the back room, had real beds, although the mattresses were old and lumpy.

She opened the door to where Alice, Deirdre, and Biddy were sleeping, the two iron bedsteads pushed together to make one large bed. The young kitten, a gray tabby who slept curled up against Alice’s chest, lifted his head, blinked at her and yawned, and then snuggled back down. She would have bet that it was Deirdre, the little mother of the family, who would have taken to the cat. But, no, it was Alice, her prim and proper seven-year-old, who had taken over responsibility for him, even being willing to clean out the sand in the box they had for him.

Softly closing the door to the room, she thanked the Blessed Mother that every one of her chicks was alive and healthy. There were so many ways a child could die or go astray in this day and age, and so many of them she could see just by looking out the kitchen window overlooking Beale Street.

Maybe, by some miracle, she’d get further ahead in her savings and move them to a safer place. Just fifty dollars would do it.

There were decent flats for rent down Bryant, past Sixth, and the neighborhood schools were supposed to be real good––newer buildings and better teachers. In addition, once you got up past Fifth Street, there were fewer factories, so less noise and filth. If they moved there, her trip to work wouldn’t be but about four blocks longer, and the North Beach/Mission horsecars and the Omnibus were just a few streets away. Both would get Biddy to her job north of Market.

Mrs. O’Malley had even seen some three-room places advertised…that didn’t cost that much more than these two rooms. With three rooms, the boys wouldn’t have to sleep in the kitchen. The problem was all the decent places in that part of town were rented unfurnished. Getting an old, second-hand stove and ice box alone could cost $15, much less the expense of getting beds and mattresses, and other furniture like a kitchen table and chairs. The only stick of furniture in this whole place that wasn’t part of the flat was the wardrobe that Biddy had found at a junk shop. And that would cost to move to a new place. The $10 in the tea tin just wouldn’t cover the kind of outlay that moving to an unfurnished place would cost. And she daren’t completely wipe out her funds or, sure as the day was long, a real accident would come along. Then where’d they be?

Turning back to looking at the small clock on the bottom kitchen shelf, she saw that it was nearly midnight. She shivered a bit. Time for a cup of tea and to get sewing on the second ruffle. The water in the kettle on the stove should still be hot. She went back to her chair next to the window to get her shawl, standing for a moment to look down on Beale Street. At this time of night, when everyone was either at work or home, the street was still and silent. Even the saloon down on the corner of Folsom wasn’t emitting any light or noise from its closed doors. If there was a moon, it was obscured by thick clouds. Looked like it might even rain.

A flurry of motion across the street caught her eye. A man had stepped out onto the stoop of Mrs. Greeley’s lodging house across the way. All she could see was a dark shape in the light cast by the gas lamp a few yards away, then a brief flame of a match lit up a face with a large mustache. The rest of his head was hidden by a derby pulled down over his forehead, and a neck scarf bunched under his chin. Once the match went out, all she saw was the red glow of a cigarette. Last Sunday, just at this time, she had seen three men leaving Mrs. Greeley’s lodging house. She noted it because it was such an odd time to be going to work. Most night shifts started at seven in the evening.

The shape of the man dissolved back into the darkness. Had he forgotten something?

Another sign of movement down the block revealed the local constable, walking up from Folsom. His brass buttons gleamed as he passed under the gas lamp.

Was that the reason for the man’s disappearing act? If so, what did that mean?

To be continued…

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