Dark Justice: Portia of the Pacific Historical Mysteries

Dark Justice

Portia of the Pacific Historical Mysteries

Volume 5

JAMES MUSGRAVE

All rights reserved.

ISBN:  978-1-943457-40-3

Published by EMRE Publishing Fiction

San Diego, CA

Dark Justice

By

James Musgrave

© 2020 by James Musgrave

Published by English Majors, Reviewers and Editors, LLC

An English Majors, Reviewers and Editors Book Copyright 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner, except for a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

This novel is a work of fiction. Please see the Historical Notes for specific references to historical characters and the use of their names and histories.  Other names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

English Majors, Reviewers and Editors Publishers is a publishing house based in San Diego, California.

Website: emrepublishing.com

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DEDICATION

To women, who deserve our utmost respect and appreciation.  At the very least, they have the right to determine their destiny, which includes life and death decisions about what they can do with their bodies.

Other Works by This Author

Forevermore:  A Pat O’Malley Historical Mystery

Disappearance at Mount Sinai:  A Pat O’Malley Historical Mystery

Jane the Grabber:  A Pat O’Malley Steampunk Mystery

Steam City Pirates:  A Pat O’Malley Steampunk Mystery

The Digital Scribe:  A Writer’s Guide to Electronic Media

Lucifer’s Wedding

Sins of Darkness

Russian Wolves

Iron Maiden an Alternate History

Love Zombies of San Diego

Freak Story:  1967-1969

Catalina Ghost Stories

Portia of the Pacific Historical Mysteries

Chinawoman’s Chance

The Spiritualist Murders

The Stockton Insane Asylum Murder

Portia of the Pacific Historical Mystery Trilogy

The Angel’s Trumpet

Abortion isn’t a lesser evil, it’s a crime.  Taking one life to save another.  That’s what the Mafia does.  It’s a crime.  It’s an absolute evil.

—Pope Francis

"Looking through the bent-backed tulips

To see how the other half live

Looking through a glass onion."

—The Beatles, Glass Onion

Sit and drink pennyroyal tea.  I'm anemic royalty. 

—Kurt Cobain, Pennyroyal Tea from Nirvana’s In Utero.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1:  Journal Found in the Park

Chapter 2:  Honor Lost

Chapter 3:  Deep Discovery

Chapter 4:  Quickening

Chapter 5:  Legal Gametes

Chapter 6:  Head of the Earth Woman

Chapter 7:  Scarlet Sisters

Chapter 8:  Patriot Press

Chapter 9:  Criminal Trial, First Day

Chapter 10:  Criminal Trial, Second Day

Chapter 11:  Hunt

Chapter 12:  Four Corners

Chapter 13:  Truth Revealed

Next Mystery, The Dancing Murders.

Chapter 1: Vagabonds

Historical Notes

About the Author

Chapter 1:  Journal Found in the Park

SAN FRANCISCO CALIFORNIA, Golden Gate Park, June 20, 1887.

My name is Penelope Farmer.  I am on my way to the clinic in Chinatown when I see the head of a crow. At first, I think it might be a voodoo doll, or charred food. It is lying on the path in front of one of the long benches in Golden Gate Park. I bend over to see it better. I can see the pitch-black head feathers, shiny with oil; the single eye, a milky film on its black pupil; the smoky-gray beak, opened slightly, as if the head has been lopped off mid-caw; no blood, no gore; just a warning message from one of my mother’s Navajo dreams.

My mother, Haseya, which means she rises, in the Navajo tongue, has been dead for three years.  I was eleven at the funeral.  I remember my mother teaching me about the power of dreams and tribal destiny.  But my father says I need to learn to be a True Woman, without the superstitions and ghastly visions of my Native heritage.  He appoints a private tutor, Mrs. Althea Crutchfield, who teaches me the basic skills of reading and math required for the True Woman of wealth.  Due to her emotional and physical frailty, a True Woman, according to Mrs. Crutchfield, needs to be protected by a male family member.  She is not supposed to think on her own, as that is the role of her protector and the other men of the Great Society. 

Three years before my mother dies, when I am eight, my father is full of attentive love.  He takes mother and I to all the best stores in San Francisco.  He praises my progress in my lessons and buys me all the books I ask him to get me.  He even takes us on a trip to Arizona territory, where father and mother first met on the reservation, and where my mother sold blankets and hand-crafted jewelry in the tribal store.  That is when my mother first began to cough up blood, and I met her tribal medicine man.  His name was Hástin Yázhe.  He was tall, and he wore strange clothing.  There was a young woman, also wearing native dress, who followed him all around, as if she were his shadow.  He told me her name was Ajei and that she was a mute.

Shortly after the doctor in San Francisco says my mother has contracted consumption, our medicine man appears at our door.  He says he has medicine to help us both.  He tells Mrs. Crutchfield to give it to us both from now on, three times a day, after our meals.  Mrs. Crutchfield was a nurse at one of the orphanage schools in which she taught, so she knows how to give us the three injections each day.  My mother and I feel much better. 

My mother even has a dream that first night we started our Navajo medicine.  She sleeps beneath the Dream Catcher to prevent bad dreams.  She says her husband, my father, Aloysius, is going to change.  The week after this dream, she and I are working in the garden, and we see a coyote wandering on California Street next to our Nob Hill home.  My mother screams and runs back into the house. But I stay, and I watch, entranced, as the ghostly gray cur begins to walk on his hind legs and then takes off, at great speed, running down the hill like a human.  That same night my father begins to beat my mother after she fails to pay him proper respect.  She screams and curses at him in Navajo, something she has never done before.  I know she is dying, and she takes out all her anger and fear on him. 

But one year later, on the night of a full moon, as I pull mother’s body up on the pillow, I can feel her ribs under the night dress, and her breathing is a constant wheezing.  Just as the moon radiates through the bedroom window upon her thin face, I see the long snout and white fangs of the coyote.  My mother has transformed her voice into yips and yaps.  That’s when she first tells me about yee naaldooshii, the skinwalker we saw the week before in the front yard.  We were both too afraid to speak of it until now.  She tells me this creature is the tribal witch who can take the form of an animal and haunt a person who is inflicting harm upon someone in our tribe.  As a result, Navajo Holy People wear only two animal skins, the sheepskin and the buckskin, and then only for ceremonial purposes.  When I ask her into which animals the skinwalker can change, my mother says that it is usually a coyote, owl, fox, wolf or crow—although a skinwalker witch does have the ability to turn into any animal she chooses. 

On the second night after the full moon, just before my mother dies of consumption, she asks me, her eleven-year-old daughter, to come close to the bed.  When my mother moves her hand and brings it to her lips, I know she wants to whisper something, so I lean forward and I can feel her thin fingers form a circle around her lips against my ear.  "I am yee naaldooshii, she says, yipping and spraying saliva.  And so are you," she whispers.  The final vowels become a howling echo, and then my mother dies.

Three years later, when I am fourteen, my father begins to visit me at night.  Outside, I can hear the coyote howl, and I begin to create my own myth, my personal Navajo legend.  I am transformed into my mother, taking her place, and what father starts to do to me is because I am now possessed by the spirit of Haseya.  During the day, as I do the chores, go shopping, instruct the mansion staff, everything, I do it just as mother did.  And, in the bedroom at night, I can feel his probing hands, his great weight, his sweaty skin, and his kisses.   I can hear his whispers of affection, his grunting, and can watch, with fascination, at the rising tumor below his waist.  I am Haseya.  One night, I bleed on the sheets for the first time.  When he leaves, I stand at the bay window in my mother’s night dress and howl at the coyote standing alone outside in the foggy San Francisco night.  Perhaps I am not the yee naaldooshii, the skinwalker.  I am protecting my father from the tribal curse.

Two years pass, and when I stop having my monthlies, at age sixteen, I am afraid to tell my tutor, Mrs. Crutchfield.  She might take me off my Navajo medicine.  Thereafter, the City Library becomes my only escape.  Kind Mrs. McMillan, the Head Librarian, shows me all the books I need to learn about my body and how it functions.  After I learn I am pregnant, I know I need to act, before it is too late.  I start to read the newspapers.  Among all my father’s ads for female patent medicines, are other ads; they tell women about places to go where their menses problems can be addressed in person.  Magic words like vagina, uterus, umbilical cord, placenta, and still birth fill my dreams, complete with the drawings from the books. 

At first, I admit, I want to poison or hang myself. Killing myself seems to be the only solution.  I am too ashamed to approach anyone about what is happening with my father.  I read the articles about other girls and women in my same predicament; they break the laws, use abortifacients such as father sells, and then they become prostitutes.  Often, they die at the hands of women like Madame Restell, in New York City, who is called the Abortionist Vampire.  The female abortionist’s image in the Police Gazette is especially dreadful.  Below Restell’s haunting figure is a flying vampire, a baby held in its clenched jaws.  In the article, the author quotes from Lord Byron’s poem, The Giaour:

"Thy victims ere they yet expire

Shall know thy demon for their sire,

As cursing thee, thou cursing them,

Thy flowers are withered on the stem."

I am terrified of meeting such a person.  Is she another kind of yee naaldooshii?  Yet, after week fifteen, I become more horrified of my future than I am of my present. 

I read other magazines, such as the Woodhull and Claflin Weekly, and Revolution, the Women’s Suffrage magazine.  The articles explain domestic incest, voluntary motherhood, rape, and the prosecution of women who have no legal rights.  Men and parents can place their pregnant daughters into insane asylums, or imprison them in private hospitals, or force them to give birth and then steal the child from the mother, selling it on the open market through agencies.  Church organizations can use these bastard children, as working slaves, inside orphanages. 

These magazines understand my problem, so I call and make the appointment with Mrs. Honora Fulbright, a midwife.  Fulbright advertises in one of the women’s magazines, and she is the woman who is performing the procedure today.  Mrs. Fulbright charges what I can afford, so I steal the money from my father. 

Today, I am mentally distraught, and my Navajo medicine is making me see things.  Finding this crow’s head is especially macabre.  As I am also an amateur ornithologist, I know about crows and their murders.  I know how crows track each other; like women, they form covens in which they share their experiences in a complex process of interpersonal communications.  If one is injured on the ground, the entire murder will fly over its body, circling and cawing maniacally, until there are enough of them, and then they will land near their wounded comrade.  They will watch after, protect, and feed the incapacitated one, sometimes for weeks, and their animosity toward approaching enemies is cunning and vengeful. 

I realize that this crow’s head is a spirit sign, from my dead mother, for me to meditate upon.  A human enemy has done this, and crows remember their enemies.  I also know the crow can be a yee naaldooshii, a skinwalker.

I sit down on the park bench, my ruffled blue dress blowing haphazardly in the ocean’s winds.  As I stoop over to view the crow’s head, my small straw hat, with the thin elastic chin band, snaps off, and rises from my black hair, upward, floating toward the cumulus puffs high in the cobalt sky.     

I stare down at the crow’s head, and I close my eyes; in my vision, my body replaces the crow on the ground the same way I replaced my mother.  Except, in my vision, I have no head, only a torso, arms and legs.  From my dreamer omniscience, I look up.  Flying around in concentric circles, instead of crows, are other women, and my body is in the center.  Each woman is a personification of the different stages in a pregnancy.  The ones, like me, at fifteen weeks, have small bumps protruding at their midsections.  Others, if they are pregnant for the first time, begin to show that bump later, as their stomach muscles have yet to become stretched from previous births.  Still other women are larger, each one soaring above, like a gigantic child’s balloon, her stomach displaying the harbinger of future life, budding inside her womb, like the Truth itself. 

The flying women disappear, and my father, Aloysius, appears next.  He is outside, in the garden, on Nob Hill.  He never stands in the garden.  There is a murder of crows flying just above his head.  He reaches up, snatches one of the crows out of the air, and pulls it down to him.  He yanks a knife from the sheath at his belt and holds the blade next to the squirming crow’s neck.  He stands, great and tall in his black top hat, tuxedo, and gleaming spats; he slices the head off the struggling crow; the head falls to earth, splattering speckles of blood on his white ankle covers; he curses and carries the crow’s blood-spewing body inside the house.  He walks resolutely over to the iron cauldron inside the pantry and drops it into the roiling water.   This is where he makes his Dr. Goody’s Female Menstrual Potions. 

SOMETHING’S GONE TERRIBLY wrong! the girl screams. 

Mrs. Fulbright stands at the end of the barber’s chair in the kitchen, the metal probe in her gloved hands, her two children screaming next-door in the parlor.

The heroin tablets are working.  The girl stares, in a mesmerized fog, down at the bloody sheet, which covers the lower half of her body.  Her legs are spread wide apart, held in stirrups, and the blood is quickly soaking the sheet and the mattress beneath it.

The Chinese midwife doesn’t know what to do.  Her supervisor, Dr. Liu Wei, comes into the room from next-door.  He frowns and turns toward her.  The look on his face is both concerned and angry.

What are you doing?  Who is this child? Dr. Liu Wei says.

They both watch the girl as she spreads her arms out, like a bird of prey, and screams, My father, Aloysius Xavier Farmer, did this to me!  He has impregnated his only daughter.  I am not my mother.  It is I, Penelope Farmer, and my death must be avenged!

Chapter 2:  Honor Lost

THE TOY MANSION, FIFTEEN Nob Hill, San Francisco, June 23, 1887.

Trella Evelyn was home from college.  She was reading in the library when the chimes told her somebody was at the front door of their new home.  Mrs. Mary Hopkins, who had allowed them to stay with her at One Nob Hill for three years, had now become too demented to maintain her household.  Her deceased husband’s attorneys had taken over the mansion and forced all non-family members to find other accommodations.

Ah Toy, with a loan from her Uncle Pete, was able to purchase the new home at a reasonable price.  They decided to save as much as they could, however, so while Trella and her four siblings were home for the summer, they would take turns doing the duties which would have normally fallen to the mansion’s staff.  Their grandparents, Elias and Talitha Shortridge,