there this morning?”
“‘Course he’s there this morning. Never leaves since you put him in charge of the camera boxes. Wasn’t it you talked Abner into that?”
Jeremiah tossed the sludgy dregs into the dust. “I better ask Hupa what he knows. Obliged for the coffee. Mind if I leave Esther here?”
“Suit yourself.”
THE OLD OFFICE was little more than a toolshed on Spain Street, having been abandoned for equipment storage for several years after the newspaper had moved to Santa Rosa. Chickens from the neighboring adobe of a Chinese family protested Jeremiah’s approach to the shady doorway they were loitering in. The door opened, and a small, compact man of about forty stepped out. The face was a blend of Indian and Anglo-American, accentuated by freckled jowls and spectacles perched on a broad nose. He had a large smile on his face and an envelope in his hand. “Hoping you would come by. This is for you, my friend.”
Jeremiah embraced Hupa before taking the envelope. “Abner?”
“Don’t think so, Brother Mac. Some stealth involved. And look at the hand.”
The address was in a delicate floral script. “Not Abner’s chicken scratch, that’s for certain. Stealth?”
“I step out to the privy, first thing of the morning,” Hupa waved his arm to the alley between buildings, “and I come back and find it tacked to the door.” He grimaced. “Stealth.”
“It’s probably for my wife and me, both.” Jeremiah pulled on the corners of his horseshoe mustache. “Historical society is my bet.”
“Why here and not your home?”
“San Francisco people. Might know I’ve done some work here, might not know where our place is. So, what are you about today?”
“Oh!” Hupa waved him inside and closed the door carefully behind him. “Big things, Brother Mac. Catching old shadows.”
The building was awash in clutter and dust motes: thin rays of light through slits in the fabric covering the windows, bottles, jars, and machinery gathering cobwebs. There was a cot in one corner, a tall oil lantern and stacks of newspapers beside it. In another corner was a table with a large camera box and various plates and jars of glass. The jars held white powders.
“I’ve always marveled at this,” Jeremiah said. “So, you’re practicing some heliography?”
“Bringing some old shadows back to life, Brother Mac. Gifts to the visiting heroes.”
“Abner’s idea?”
“Too much money if it wasn’t. These chemicals. It’s why I sleep here. Lot of money and dangers in these chemicals. Watch.”
Jeremiah leaned over Hupa’s shoulder. “Dangers?”
“Very poisonous. If a child should touch and accidentally lick his finger, that’s the end of that child.” He measured powders from the jars, mixed them carefully in what Jeremiah assumed to be water, and dipped a plate of glass into the solution, using a cradle of twisted fence wire. A man began to emerge as if rising to the surface from deep underwater: narrow face, ferret eyes, aquiline nose, a neat, curling line of black beard.
“It’s Fremont.”
“Right. You think he’ll like it?”
“That must be over thirty years old.” Jeremiah looked from the photograph to the black box that may have taken it, that strange magical eye into the past, a dark room in which light enters through a tiny aperture and projects an image of the world inside the wooden vessel. Here was John Fremont captured during the Bear War. Hardly a hero to Hupa, he thought, nor to himself. “How could you do these old daguerreotypes? I thought the image already got used or printed off the plates.”
“Still captured. Never really dead.” Hupa smiled. “Today I got the power to bring them back to life.”
DANVERS HAD WAITED for him. “What’s the story? That ’breed know anything?”
Jeremiah let the sheriff examine the envelope before extending his hand to retrieve it. “We, my wife and I, figure this has to do with the mission restoration, so...” The sheriff examined the wax seal, then passed a close look at the ornate penmanship on the other side. Jeremiah felt as though he’d seen that chirography at some other time in his life.
“It ain’t addressed just to your wife. Why don’t you open the damned thing?”
He slipped it into the pocket that still held shotgun shells. “I better let her look at this. She’s expecting word from the society.”
“Ah, McKinley.” The sheriff wagged his hand in disgust. “You modern marriage types are... Well, don’t take this personal, but in my humble opinion you’re just a pack of henpecked utopians.”
“Sounds like a direct quote from the esteemed Editor Stiles, Danvers.”
The sheriff shrugged. “Well, I happen to agree with the man on occasion.” He leaned to his left and spat tobacco juice onto the porch. “Rare occasion.”
Since the arrival of the Reverend Harris in Santa Rosa in 1875, the word utopian had taken on suspect connotations throughout the region. “I hope,” Jeremiah said as he untied his horse and mounted her, “that you won’t confuse the faithful in the Fountain Grove Community with those of us who favor the rights of women to vote, same as a man.”
“If God wanted us equal he would’ve made us equal, but he didn’t.” His face was red. “Besides, the damned letter’s addressed to you, too!”
Right, Jeremiah mused, it’s addressed to me. Not to Sheriff Charles Danvers. He crossed the square and started back up the valley. The mare was sweating, and he decided to take her down to his favorite waters between home and town. The fields soon gave way to the aromatic bay and oak trees by the sparkling creek. He dismounted and let the horse wade and drink as he broke the wax seal.
This was a deep bend dear to Jeremiah’s youth, a place where he’d come many summer days after field labor to swim and read the books the professor had given him, a kind of baptism of cold mountain water and slanted sunlight mixed with the words of the long dead, perceived through the dappled movement of trees and water. Now, in midlife, he sat on a granite boulder familiar to those youthful afternoons and puzzled over a missive whose entirety was a single biblical reference: Deuteronomy 22:22.
Although he’d been somewhat self-schooled in divinity, he couldn’t recall the specific passage. He knew it indicated one of the Mosaic laws. Who in the wide world had had the time or the inclination to send a Digger Indian boy with that telegram and to leave this note? He wondered if Lucinda had a notion. If this were a kind of joke...
He smiled. One man in his acquaintance, whom he hadn’t seen in decades, was returning to Sonoma County today, a pedagogue who made light of the Bible and the tenets of the Old Testament. Jeremiah knew that this sort of mysterious skulduggery wasn’t beyond his old mentor, Elijah Applewood, who had once, during a monotonous and ill-sung ballad in a San Francisco saloon, slipped him a note bearing a single notation: Hebrews 13:8.
To which
