matter how gently we worked and despite all the art in Holmes' hands, time after time they crumbled into flakes and dust.
At the end of it, we were left with sore knees, black hands, and seven fragments large enough to preserve words.
Five of them, rather to my surprise, were type-written, as far as we could tell on the Underwood in my father's library, which had a marginally skewed lower-case
From the top sheet, three fragments survived:
tates Army.
y conscience of the
has chosen to
may not reveal
Good friend—GF —
felt that I owed
and his stalwart
From later pages, the two fragments we deciphered were:
shoot looters
the earthquake—
had himself stolen
those looters actu-
myself witnessed three
the least justified
ured it wouldn't be healthy
full of money.
The newspaper cuttings appeared to be from the period immediately following the quake, for one had the bold headline “URNS!!” which was more likely, considering the size of the font, to be an article concerning the destruction of the city than the archaeological discovery of some Greek jars.
The other appeared to be about a man and his new wife who had lost each other for days after the Fire, then discovered that they were half a mile apart in Golden Gate Park. With either of the newspaper bits, however, it could have been the opposite side that was of importance, and in both cases that obverse was illegible.
We left the plates arranged on my mother's writing desk and went through the kitchen to sit on the stoop, where Holmes lit a pipe and I worked to find a comfortable niche for my kinked spine.
The jungle of the garden was oddly appealing, particularly in the quiet of late afternoon. I could hear the sound of children's voices somewhere far away, and closer in, a woman singing softly.
“Do you make anything of those fragments, Holmes?” I asked.
“Very little. The words might be provocative, suggesting some act of violence during the earthquake, and money, but any conclusions built upon them would have foundations of air. If the fragments have any value, it may come to light later in the case. Clearly, the house was fairly thoroughly cleaned before your Mr Norbert turned the key and walked away—unless the fireplaces were scrubbed and the carpets rolled up before your parents actually left. I don't suppose you remember?”
“Norbert senior arranged for the cleaners to come in and roll up the carpets, to ‘protect his clients' assets' as his son put it, put on the dust-covers, and clear out the ice-box. They may have scrubbed the fireplaces then, although September tends to be warm in San Francisco, warmer here than the actual summer. They could have been cleaned at any time.”
“We need to know if Norbert senior left them all clean.”
“Yes, I know,” I said. I sighed—but quietly, to myself—at his insistence that we were investigating a case. There was no point in saying that it was quite likely that the papers were the remnants of some last-minute business letters of my father's, draughts later rewritten and dropped into a post-box, so I got out my note-book and wrote down the instruction to myself:
I glanced over the previous pages, added one or two facts that I had neglected to make note of earlier, then said to Holmes, “Mrs Greenfield was actually very helpful in sorting out our times in San Francisco.”
“And she assured you that your family was all here during the earthquake and fire.”
“She did, yes. You were right, Holmes. But we did come and go a number of times, so my memory of England isn't entirely wrong, either.”
I had been born in England, in January 1900: That much I knew. What I had not known was that we came here when I was just over a year old, in the spring of 1901, at which point Mrs Greenfield met my mother. Eighteen months later, according to Mr Long, my parents and I had gone walking on a wave-swept beach and met him and his father.
We lived in San Francisco for three years that time, leaving again for England in the summer of 1904. My brother was born in February of 1905, so it was probable that Mother, finding herself pregnant, preferred to give birth among her own people. However, once he was six months old, they returned here, arriving just after the couturier on Post Street had opened in September 1905—although my “aunt” vaguely thought that we had stopped in Boston for a time on the way, with my father's family.
Which may have been when the coloured window and the small furry dogs had lodged themselves into my young mind.
We lived in San Francisco from September 1905 until the summer of 1906. Many of my parents' friends had fled the shattered city in April, but Mrs Greenfield was quite clear that Mother had insisted on staying on until at least June, assisting with the early weeks of the emergency, before the demands of her young family took her back to England.
This time, without my father. For the next few years, he had lived half the year here and half in England, taking a train to New York and sailing back and forth across the Atlantic in order to be with his family, until finally in the summer of 1912, Mother relented and joined him in California. Two years and three months later, they died, and I had gone away for good.
I laid my scribbled notes in front of Holmes, who glanced at them thoughtfully. “When I first met you,” he said, “I heard a solid basis of London in your voice, with a later overlay of California. Clearly, the influence of very early childhood had been put aside. I shall have to look into this—it would make an interesting monograph.”
“Why don't I remember it?” I protested, then flinched at the tight strain of agony in my voice. “I can understand the early years, but don't people remember things from when they were five or six?”
He studied me appraisingly. “You do honestly wish to know?”
“Don't be ridiculous, Holmes. Why wouldn't I want to know about a large chunk of my missing life?”
“I can think of a number of reasons,” he said, his grey eyes unwavering in their intensity.
“Well, I can't. It's vexing. And more than a little humiliating. Why wouldn't I want to feel whole?”
“If, for example, you discovered that your parents were not the paragons you think them?”
“I loved my parents and respected them, but they were hardly paragons,” I scoffed. “My father was easily distracted and my mother could be cold. And after all, disillusionment is a part of growing up.”
“And if the disillusionment was more serious? If, say, you discovered your father was involved in some act of criminality during the earthquake?”
“What sort of criminality?” I asked sharply.
