Free Dead Bolt by juliet blackwell Page A

did you find all this out? I tried to do some research down at the California Historical Society and found nothing on the place—not a single newspaper reference.”
    “Hmm.” Brittany tilted her head. “Well, I looked up the real estate listing, and then I did a simple Google search. Took me all of, oh, four seconds. You should give it a try—I know you prefer old-school methods, and it’s true that there’s a lot of ephemera that can only be found in musty libraries. But you never know what Google will dig up for you.”
    I used the Internet for all sorts of things, from tracking down vintage items on Craigslist to comparing lumber prices. But when it came to investigating the area’s historic homes, I was steadfastly old-school in my approach: I went straight to the California Historical Society. It had never occurred to me I could get much useful information online.
    “Here’s what I downloaded.” She handed me a short stack of papers. “The Carters sound like a charming family: The two women were at each other’s throats so much, Charles must have decided he needed a break. He boarded a ship bound for South America without his wife.”
    “Where was he headed?”
    “Chile. His brother, Andre, had invested in a sugar plantation there.”
    “Chile? That seems unusual.”
    “Actually, a lot of early immigrants to San Francisco were Chilean. The shipping routes ran up and down the western coasts of the Americas, connecting the two. Ghirardelli came from there.”
    “As in Ghirardelli chocolate? I thought he was Italian.”
    “He was, by way of Chile . . . or maybe it was Peru. Somewhere down there. Chocolate wasn’t a sweet food, traditionally. But he figured out how to extract the cocoa butter to make chocolate candy.”
    “Good man.”
    Like most locals, I avoided the famous tourist triangle of Fisherman’s Wharf, Ghirardelli Square, and Pier 39 like the plague. Still, some of my happiest memories were visiting the area as a child with out-of-town relatives. We inevitably stopped by the Ghirardelli chocolate factory tasting room, and I would always double back to the end of the line to get more free samples. Speaking of chocolate . . . dessert was sounding good about now. I wondered if Brittany would consider splitting a piece of the flourless chocolate cake à la mode. After all, it was wheat-free.
    “So,” I said as I wrested my thoughts from dessert I didn’t need, “Charles Carter abandoned Leviticus?”
    “Luvitica.”
    “Oh, right. Wonder what they called her for short.”
    “Right? Anyway, this article said that Charles died of kidney failure during the sea voyage. And get this—the sailors put his body into a keg of rum.”
    I choked on my iced tea. “Why would they do that?”
    “It wasn’t unheard of at that time. It was hot on those ships; the alcohol preserves the body. They threw the ‘unimportant’ people into the sea if they had the misfortune to die aboard, but Charles was a wealthy man, so I guess they needed to send him home.”
    “Seems like a waste of good rum.”
    “Yeah, really. Anyway, the keg was returned to the family at some point.”
    “Wow. So the women and Andre continued living in the house?”
    She shook her head. “Andre disappeared sometime after Charles left, and was never heard from again.”
    “So Dominga lost both her sons? And continued living with the daughter-in-law she despised?”
    She nodded. “One son dead; one who disappeared. Luvitica gave birth to a baby boy a few months later. That son, who they referred to as Junior, grew up in the house. As an adult, after his grandmother and mother passed on, Junior needed money and turned the home into a boardinghouse.”
    “When was that?”
    “In the twenties. He ran it for the next forty years, believe it or not. This area wasn’t as posh as it is now, and there was lots of labor needed in the early years of the city. Junior died in the sixties, shortly after selling the house to Hettie