Deadly Proof: A Victorian San Francisco Mystery by M. Louisa Locke Page B

O’Farrell to Annie’s boarding house on the off chance he could catch her between clients. That had been a bust as well. He went round the back to the kitchen entrance, not wanting to drag the maid Kathleen upstairs to answer the front door, but he was told that Annie, in her Madam Sibyl alter ego, had just gone in with a client and wouldn’t be available for the next few hours.
    That had been disappointing enough, but then Mrs. O’Rourke, Kathleen, and the boarder Mrs. Esther Stein, began to put him through an inquisition about his plans for the wedding. Did he want a church wedding? How many of the law firm clients would he be inviting for the after-wedding party? Who was going to be his best man? Did he plan on having groomsmen as well? And where was he going to take Annie for their honeymoon?
    He didn’t have answers to any of their questions, except the last, and he didn’t want to reveal his plans for a trip down to Los Angeles until he knew if he would have the time or the money. The three women seemed to think Annie wanted a ceremony with a fair degree of pomp and circumstance, which surprised him. The whole discussion left him feeling inadequate, like he’d already failed his first task as a husband—knowing what his prospective bride wanted on her wedding day.
    He’d fled the boarding house as soon as he could, making the excuse that he had work waiting for him back at the office––which was true enough. Nate, as the junior partner in his uncle’s firm, still got the bulk of the more tedious legal tasks to do. Consequently, he’d spent the rest of the afternoon drafting new codicils to wills for aging men who hoped to manage the behavior of their wastrel sons from beyond the grave and going over complex business contracts looking for the hidden clauses that had been inserted by rival lawyers with the intention of defrauding his clients.
    Now, at nearly five in the afternoon, Nate was hurrying to make his meeting with Mrs. Catherine Rashers. As he came up to the corner of Clay and Sansome, he looked up at the large sign advertising Rashers’ printing company and sincerely hoped that he would learn something of value so this whole day wouldn’t be a total loss.
    *****
    A few minutes later, Nate stood at the door to Rashers’ printing company, overwhelmed by the sights, sounds, and smells of the busy workshop that took up a good quarter of the second floor of the Niantic. All along the right-hand wall were odd pieces of furniture made of two wooden cabinets hinged together, one half slanting slightly downward, the other slanting upward to the wall, both surfaces constructed of rows and rows of different-sized compartments. At each, a man or young woman stood snatching type from the compartments and snapping them on to a stick held in their other hand. Although he’d never seen his sister at work, he knew from Laura’s description that these were the typesetters.
    Along the left side of the room was a row of small tables, each with a set of shallow drawers under them. At one table, a man was tapping with a small hammer on type in a wooden frame, while at another a second man was holding a piece of paper up to the light from the bank of windows along that wall and reading from it.
    In the center of the room were printing machines of different sizes where women sat, steadily feeding blank pieces of paper into a tray, pushing down on a foot pedal or pulling down on a lever, and then taking the finished printed page out and placing it in a stack. With each push of the pedal or lever, there was a distinct thump, and the iron gears whirled one way and then another with a whoosh.
    Thin clothes lines hung horizontally from one side of the room to the other, clamps pinning sheets of different-sized paper onto the lines. Since the inverted metal T’s of gas lines hung down in rows in the opposite direction, in a few places less than a foot above the fluttering paper, Nate couldn’t help but wonder if fire was