The Other Side - J. D. Robb [64]
Yours with great sincerity,
Angiolina Darlington
June 24, 1895
Miss Darlington:
Arrive 27 June, 1:28 p.m., on Boston train. Trust conveyance from station to Smoak’s won’t put you out.
H. Cleland
One
Only Lexington Street and a hundred feet of lawn on either side of it separated Mr. Smoak’s Boardinghouse for Gentlemen and Mrs. Mortimer’s Boardinghouse for Ladies. One of the principal entertainments at each was observing the comings and goings of the occupants of the other, either from windows or their nearly identical front porches.
Angiolina Darlington usually had better things to do, but today she’d been watching from the window seat of her cramped, second-floor bed/sitting room for nearly an hour when, at about three in the afternoon, a horse-drawn van pulled up in front of Mr. Smoak’s. The driver jumped down from one side, and a man in a checked coat and dark trousers jumped down from the other.
Mr. Cleland, she presumed. She put on her glasses to see him better. He looked nothing like the man she’d been expecting. Vague as that was. What did a “spirit investigator” look like? No telling, but she’d been thinking of someone at least middle-aged. This gentleman looked hardly older than she (twenty-eight, not that that was young), and in addition, at least from this distance, he appeared . . . normal. Perfectly sane, which struck her as an even more interesting feature than his above-average good looks. Oughtn’t a man whose profession was “spirit investigator” to have a sort of mad scientist quality about him? At the very least he should look eccentric. He should look like—well, he should look like her grandfather.
Oh, and he had a dog. Medium size, brown and white, some sort of terrier. He released it from a wicker hamper, and it ran around Smoak’s front yard in excited circles, relieving itself on the bushes.
Heavens, Mr. Cleland did have a lot of luggage. She’d assumed he was exaggerating, to drive up his price. Well, this was embarrassing. She muffled an aghast laugh as he and the driver hauled out bag after box after crate after carton in the hot June sun and lugged it all into the house. Which box contained “Astra”? she wondered. The biggest one, no doubt; “Astra” must be a giant spirit telescope or some such thing.
There, that was the last of his belongings. Mr. Cleland paid the driver in coins, not bills—that eased her conscience a bit. They tipped their hats to each other, he went inside, and the driver drove away.
She should go across the street and greet him. She’d thought of waiting for him to come to her, but now it seemed the least she could do—make the first move.
“Get up, Margaret,” she told the cat in her lap—named after Margaret Knight, inventor of the flat-bottom paper bag- making machine.
At the wardrobe mirror, Angie decided she didn’t like what she was wearing anymore. It was fine this morning, when she’d thought Mr. Cleland would be white-haired and strange, but now . . . Oh, it was hopeless anyway. Since she’d spilled motor oil on her best blouse trying to silence the squeak in her grandfather’s automatic hat-tipping machine, she was down to three summer dresses and a handful of skirts and shirtwaists.
Good thing I’m not vain, she thought, leaning in toward the freckled mirror to adjust her hair, pinch more color in her cheeks. Her grandmother’s onyx brooch made her look . . . like her grandmother. She took it off. Now she looked plain, “spartan,” as Mr. Cleland would say. She put the brooch back on. Scowled at herself. “To hell with it,” she said, and went out.
Two
Miss Angiolina Darlington didn’t look like the woman Henry Cleland had been expecting. Vague as that was, and not that he’d given it much thought: a paying customer was a paying customer. From the tone of her irritating letters, though, he’d thought she’d be older, and either big and boat-bosomed, like Mrs. Beckingham, or raisin-faced and stringy from pinching her precious pennies.
Instead she was younger than he, and tiny, not much over five feet. But with a carriage