Free The Bohemian Murders by Dianne Day Page A

was laughing with the enemy. “Y-you must understand,” I gasped, “it is not their—uh—preferences I’m laughing at, but your powers of description.”
    “Oh, quite,” she replied, which for no reason at all set us both off again.
    “Well, to business,” Artemisia said, wiping her eyes—carefully, for she wore something to blacken her lashes. Instantly she was sober as a judge, reaching down beside her chair where she had placed a large, flat leather bag. “Here is my latest creation. You must guard it with your
life,
Fremont. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done. With words, that is.”
    Her handwriting was a careless scrawl, but legible. The title of her book was
The Merchant of Dreams.
I flipped to the last page, which was numbered one hundred and fifty.
    “It’s a novella,” she explained. “It’s going to be a terrific sensation. You’ll see why when you type it. My publisher will be so pleased to get a manuscript that is typewritten. Did you know they are beginning to prefer it? I predict the day will come when they no longer accept manuscripts done by hand.”
    “That can only be good for me! I charge ten cents a page, Artemisia. And since I am only typing part-time, it’s difficult for me to say exactly how long it will take.”
    “Well, no matter. As long as it doesn’t take forever. I’ll stay in touch.” She folded her hands on top of her bag and cocked her head to one side, considering. “Why haven’t you been back to Carmel? Did we in some way offend you? I, at any rate, thought we would be seeing you on a regular basis. Actually I assumed you weregoing to rent the cottage Misha arranged for you. But he told me you’d changed your mind.”
    I felt my face begin to flush, so before answering I pretended to have dropped something under the desk and bent down to retrieve it. When I straightened up again the flush was conquered. “Sorry,” I said, “where were we? Oh yes, the cottage. After getting the lay of the land, so to speak, on the Monterey Peninsula, I decided that my typewriting service would do better in this location. And then I met Mrs. Henrietta Houck, the keeper of the light at Point Pinos, and she asked me to take over for six months so that she could have time off for personal reasons. Between the two, I haven’t much time to go visiting.”
    Artemisia looked at me for what seemed an excruciatingly long time, her large, dark eyes gleaming and teeming with thoughts I would have given almost anything to read. Finally she said, “You are a serious, hardworking woman, I see.”
    I sat tall. “I have my moments of levity, but I’ve chosen to earn my own way—if that is what you mean.”
    Her eyes narrowed. “You think Misha has become a playboy.”
    It was a statement, not a question. I did not respond.
    She waited.
    I waited. Until I began to feel like an elementary schoolchild in a staring contest, and then my devilish sense of humor rose to the occasion. “As long as he hasn’t become twangy,” I said.
    KEEPER’S LOG
    January 18, 1907
    Wind: NW, moderate to gusting
    Weather: Cold; heavy clouds, rain, and drizzle
    Comments: Two passenger steamships from N in but not
    out (laying over for better weather?)
    Try as I might, I could not get away from my office the next day to go to Mapson’s Mortuary. Not that I’d look a gift horse in the mouth, but there is a certain perversityin the way one can sit for days, bored to bits with nothing much to do, and then the work comes all in a clump.
    So it was that virtually on the heels of Artemisia’s novella another Carmelite arrived with an even lengthier manuscript in need of typing. This was none other than the Medium Brown Man, whose actual name proved to be Arthur Heyer. His book was a collection of local legends, under the title
Ghostly Tales of the Central Coast,
and while Arthur was still prattling on about how he had collected his legends, Braxton Furnival loomed larger than life through the door, quite