ROZ REACHED AROUND expecting to find Nick asleep beside her, but all she found were crumpled sheets. And they weren’t even warm. But he wasn’t far away. She could hear his voice through the open bedroom door, somewhere downstairs.
Retrieving a silk dressing gown from a hook behind the door, Roz moved out onto the second-floor landing. Nick stood at the bottom of the stairs, speaking into the telephone, having an animated conversation.
“Even by Western standards, this was a highly unusual killing,” Nick was saying. “The means alone is enough to make it noteworthy beyond San Diego. It’s not every day that you come across murder via incoming tide. There’s also the revenge motive, prompted by the victim’s own sinister past. And first and foremost, a letter from Mr. Archer’s assassin. It truly is unprecedented, not just in these parts, but all of California and the West….”
Rolling her eyes, Roz perched herself on the top step, hoping that her husband would soon finish the conversation. They did have somewhere to be—a matinee at the Leach Opera House. And not just any performance. The incomparable Lillie Langtry making a rare appearance in San Diego, starring for two days only in a drama called A Wife’s Peril. An ironic topic, given the fact that Langtry’s own marriage had recently come unraveled. After years of estrangement—and untold indiscretions—Jersey Lil had recently finalized her divorce from Irish landowner Edward Langtry. Nothing like a scandal to fuel attention. Demand for tickets to her San Diego appearances had been so intense that the opera house management had shifted the entire orchestra to one side of the stage in order to accommodate more seats. Nick had purchased the tickets as a means to make up for missing so many evenings and weekends over the past few months.
“That’s a very generous offer,” Nick continued. “No, I haven’t sold the story to anyone else in Los Angeles. It’ll be your exclusive.”
So that’s what he’s up to, Roz thought to herself. He’s selling the bloody Archer story to another publication. She wasn’t going to carp about anything that would convey more money into the household. But employing their telephone as a business tool was another thing altogether. It had seemed like such a brilliant idea at first—getting themselves a telephone at home. One of the first domestic lines in San Diego. Something to brag to their friends and neighbors about. But now Roz wondered if they had been too hasty. The bloody thing had become, in very short order, another way for Nick to blur the line between home and work.
“Tomorrow?” Nick blurted out. “You want to run my story tomorrow? That means I’d have to write and somehow dispatch the story today … I fully understand that news has a limited shelf life. But today, sir? That’s a tall order … I’d have to go into town, the telegraph office. Yes, Mr. Otis—an extra twenty dollars would certainly sweeten the pot.”
What? Roz thought to herself. Did Nick just say what I thought he said? Has he lost his bloody mind?
She sprang to her feet, ready to confront her husband. But then she heard the door slam. She could hear his boots along the front porch. Roz raced back into the bedroom and parted the curtains in time to see Nick galloping down the path on his chestnut steed. As the tears began to roll down her cheeks, she slumped onto the bed. She had never thought of herself as much of a weeper, but it seemed to come easy these days. Too much pent-up emotion. Almost constant frustration. A growing notion that she was wasting—or had already squandered—the best years of her life.
You had to shake your head in wonderment and maybe even laugh. Things were so different in the early days of their marriage. Nick rushing home from the office to be with her. Candlelit dinners and holding hands in the plaza. Nick flinging open the bedroom windows, the sea breeze flowing through their darkened bedroom, as they made love until dawn. Nick’s intensity frightened her a bit. But gradually, she had surrendered unconditionally to his passion. Roz became warm and secure within their union. It began to define her life. She wanted—she needed—no one else but Nick.
Now that seemed like such a long time ago. Like another life in a different place. What had gone wrong? Why had Nick retreated so far into himself? Were their courtship and newlywed days nothing more than an aberration? Was he showing his true colors now rather than before?
As a Roman Catholic of good standing, Roz did not believe in divorce. “In sickness and health” still meant something to her. And there was the upside to consider. There weren’t a lot of women who could say their husband had never raised a hand against them. Nick didn’t drink much, and he certainly did not gamble. As far as Roz could tell, there were no other women in his life. If work remained his only vice, perhaps she had no right to complain. On the other hand, it still rankled. How a relationship could be so remarkable, so fresh, so scintillating and then so utterly broken, with no notion of how to patch things and a partner who didn’t seem to want to try. For the first time, Roz flirted with the notion that she could perhaps live without Nick.
Damned if she was going to let him ruin another day. If Nick had other things on his mind, so be it. She would attend the theater on her own. With that, she picked herself off the bed and moved across the hall into the bathroom.
It took Roz a good hour to compose herself. She wiped the tears away and took a bath. Sitting at her vanity, she brushed the knots from her long red hair, parted it straight down the middle and pulled it into a tight bun at the crown of her head with a few short, curly bangs covering her forehead. Next, she considered her freshly scrubbed face, still lusciously moist and pale despite her years beneath the Western sun. She could not go out without at least a touch of make-up—a hint of arrowroot powder on her cheeks and bit of color on the ample waves that comprised her lips. Pulling back and considering the full effect, Roz liked what she saw in the mirror.
Everything except her rather ample breasts. They were assets at present—if one could actually call them assets—because contemporary fashion dictated that the ideal woman have plenteous bosoms above an hourglass waist. She laughed out loud at a thought from the past. Cradoc had often told her to throw away her corsets because her body was naturally perfect. She smiled at the memory of something that had happened on a long-ago afternoon, Cradoc deftly “undoing” her corset with a buck knife before making love on his balcony in broad daylight—a most radical act for an Irish Catholic lass.
Catching herself in a moment of weakness, Roz blocked the thought from her mind. Why was she even thinking about Cradoc Bradshaw, dredging up the past?
She moved from the vanity to the bedroom wardrobe. The racks inside slouched beneath the weight of clothes she had made for herself since coming out West. The outfits never failed to remind her of the career she had relinquished in order to marry Nick. Back in the day, she had been a damn good seamstress and dressmaker, earned her living that way after arriving in San Diego. Roz had made a name—and a tidy sum—designing and sewing frocks for the wealthy matrons of Banker’s Hill and the big haciendas. Many of her customers had pleaded with her to keep working after marriage. But Roz had demurred with what, at the time, seemed like a perfectly legitimate excuse. She needed the time to devote herself to becoming a proper wife and mother, although in the intervening years she had become neither. It was a painful realization that if she had stuck with it, her fashions would now be on sale in all of the best stores in San Diego and possibly other cities.
Having completed her makeup, Roz slipped into a pair of black stockings and gartered them above the knees. Next, she donned knee-length cotton drawers and a silk chemise. Her corset of choice was an equipoise, braced by stiff cotton rather than whalebone and therefore much less likely to restrict her breathing or movement. She could actually bend over and slip into her own riding boots rather than begging Lupe’s assistance. Over this, she secured a corset cover and a bustle around her waist. Last but not least came one of her favorite creations—a scarlet riding habit and black waist-length, jet-bead jacket. Reaching into the wardrobe, she snatched a black lady’s top hat with trailing veil and looked at herself in the mirror again. Not bad if I may say so myself.
She had already asked Lupe to accompany her to the play. The girl might not understand much of what Miss Langtry would say—in a British rather than American accent. But at least she would get the gist, and Roz could fill in the gaps with a whisper now and again into Lupe’s ear. After a quick lunch, they started down the hill on the buckboard.
Clattering past the migrant camps and churches around the eastern edge of town, Roz found herself pondering Cradoc again. One couldn’t help but think what life would have been like with him rather than Nick … if Cradoc hadn’t gone away when he did … or if he had returned sooner.
Her liaison with Cradoc had been an entirely different sort of relationship than the one she later forged with Nick. Both of them young and not a care in the world. Concepts like marriage and family the last things on their mind. She had only recently escaped the yoke of her working-class Irish Catholic upbringing and was basking in the glow of liberation. She and Cradoc had made love, for sure. But they were really more like friends who relished one another’s company rather than a modern-day Romeo and Juliet. Roz had never told Cradoc she loved him, and he had never uttered those words to her. Neither had there been any discussion of a mutual future. In retrospect, that had probably been a grave mistake. But a moot point given what happened later.
Roz never intended to go straight from his bed into that of another. Nick and Cradoc were about as close as two men could be. And if not for Cradoc, she would never have met Nick. She especially enjoyed his humor, and eventually she counted Nick amongst her inner circle. And he was always the perfect gentleman. Not even a hint of romantic interest in Roz until long after Cradoc led a posse south of the border and failed to return.
Nick had pledged to look after Roz in his absence—nothing more than any good friend would offer. And he remained true to his word, calling on Roz every few days to see if she needed anything, every so often inviting her for tea or lunch with other friends and acquaintances. Everything strictly on the up and up.
Four weeks later, survivors of the posse trickled back from Mexico with tales of a bloody skirmish and great loss of life. Among those missing was Cradoc Bradshaw. In her grief, Roz turned to Nick. And before she knew it, she had fallen in love with the man, both his unbridled passion for her and the zeal with which he went about his quest for journalistic success. Roz eventually convinced herself that she could spend the rest of her life with Nick, and in no time at all, he asked for her hand, and they were married.
There was no way for them to know that Cradoc had survived—largely, it seems, on the strength of his longing for Roz. And equally, there was no way to foresee how betrayed he would feel upon his miraculous return to San Diego.