It turned out she had not walked far, and her rose-colored parasol made her easy to spot among the late morning strollers and shoppers.
Better and better.
He waited by the hotel until the parasol was a block away, then followed her.
Now, less than two hours later, he watched from the shadows in front of the stock exchange.
How convenient that the exchange was not far up the street from the music store. He could loiter, glance at his paper, smoke, stroll up and down the sidewalk, blend in with the clusters of men—brokers, speculators, operators—who came and went from the building. It was easy to linger unnoticed with those who stood outside waiting for hacks, private carriages, the next horse-trolley. The building provided an endless stream of men, anonymous with their hats and coats. As anonymous as he was.
He waited, wondering if he’d get a glimpse of the store’s proprietor.
While Mrs. Sweet’s doings were of interest to his client, who had tasked de Bruijn with finding his wayward son, the “finder of the lost and stolen” was engaged in his own personal search as well. Almost two years ago, he had made a promise to a woman, Drina Gizzi, and thus to her daughter Antonia, to protect and take care of them. He had failed to fulfill that promise, and now bore the burden of being at least partially responsible for Drina’s death. He hoped to do better by Antonia, once he found her. It was a search he hoped would yield results once he had the opportunity to meet the “S” half of D & S House of Music and Curiosities, a person he strongly suspected would be a woman named Inez Stannert.
He reflected again on how much easier all this would have been if Mrs. Stannert had been listed in the city directory. But she had apparently settled too recently in the city for that to be the case.
However, he was in no hurry. Now that he knew where the store was, he could visit at his leisure, when the time was right. Mrs. Stannert, if she was the manager or part-owner, was not about to vanish into thin air. She had a stake in San Francisco now.
Besides, he wanted to be certain that Mrs. Sweet had no other destination after her visit here.
At that moment, a tall gentleman opened the front door to the music store with a flourish, executing a bow of a decidedly European nature as Mrs. Sweet emerged.
Was this perhaps the “D” half of the business?
Mrs. Sweet smiled up at him, and touched her hair, her hat, flirting a bit. De Bruijn had seen this dance many times before. And what was that in her other hand? A flash of white, fluttering as she moved.
Papers of some kind.
De Bruijn casually unfolded his newspaper and adjusted the brim of his hat, watching closer.
The gentleman held up a card between two fingers, offering it to Mrs. Sweet. Too far away to tell what it was. Perhaps a calling card? Although it seemed on the large side for such. Mrs. Sweet hesitated, then nodded and accepted it, tucking it into the papers which she then rolled and stuffed into her handbag. A musical score, perhaps? But Mrs. Sweet had no musical talents, unless one counted her undeniable ability to play the men around her. She looked around, no longer focused on the gentleman. De Bruijn noted that even at a distance, Mrs. Sweet seemed nervous. He wondered again what was on the card.
The European—Italian, perhaps?—stepped into the street and hailed a passing hack, which came to an obedient stop. Mrs. Sweet entered the carriage. De Bruijn stepped forward, waved down a horse and driver heading in the opposite direction, gave him his instructions, and settled in to wait and see where Mrs. Sweet would take him next.
Chapter Eight
The empty lunch pail banged against Antonia’s leg, over and over, but the stinging blows were nothing compared to the tongue-lashing and verbal bruising she’d suffered that day.
First, Miss “Persnickety” Pierce had whapped Antonia’s arm good and hard because Antonia had memorized the wrong passage for recitation lessons. Then, the snickers from the class had punctuated Persnickety’s equally sharp “Antonia, pay attention!” And now, she had double the number of lines to memorize for tomorrow.
She hated it.
Hated it.
Hated standing in front of the class and stumbling through some poem about a stupid skylark. Who cares? And then, at noon, she’d been forced to stay inside and write on the blackboard “I will not daydream in class” fifty times. Now, heading down Market, Antonia was ready to slug someone with her Swinton’s Reader. Preferably one of those snotty kids who stood behind her in line and whispered, loud enough for her to hear, how stupid she was.
It enraged Antonia, because it wasn’t true. She knew her times tables better than anyone else in the class, and could do division and fractions faster than the others. Just because her penmanship was, in Persnickety’s words, “Atrocious!” and she found the reading, reciting, and memorizing downright boring, well, that didn’t make her stupid.
Now, if they were reading something interesting, like “The Mutiny of the Hispaniola” by Captain George North, she’d show them all. The third installment of Treasure Island was in the Young Folks magazine she’d pinched from the stationer’s on her way home from school on Friday. The same magazine she’d stuck into her Swinton’s that morning, hoping to sneak a peek at it during the noon break.
Antonia swung the book at the end of the book strap, back and forth in time to her steps. She stopped short of the Dupont intersection, debating whether to cross and walk up Dupont so she could go past the Olympic Theater, which was always kind of fun, or go another block up Market to Kearney so she could ogle the Sherman, Clay music store that Mrs. S
