The Peculiar Case of Agnes Astor Smith Read online

  The Peculiar Case of Agnes Astor Smith

  by

  Constance Barker

  Copyright 2018 Constance Barker

  All rights reserved.

  Similarities to real people, places or events are purely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter One

  My name is Abigail Bean, and there is nothing special about me. Or at least there wasn’t, until I took a job with a strange and wonderful—and terrifying—woman named Agnes Astor Smith.

  I met Miss Smith for the first time on the 24th of December in 2015, after answering an ad in the paper, which I had found entirely by chance the day before. As a denizen of Seattle, Washington, my morning coffee ritual is almost religious in nature; I never fail to stop at my local coffee shop, The West Roast, at precisely seven o’clock in the morning, for fear of possible damnation to lethargy and foggy-headedness for all eternity.

  That morning, as I settled into one of the coveted plush leather chairs, which were bound to be unavailable if I arrived too late, I happened to notice a newspaper lying open on the little driftwood coffee table that separated two pairs of the precious seats. It wasn’t so much the newspaper itself that caught my attention, as much as the distinct circle of red ink highlighting a particular block of text.

  As I settled into my morning caffeine prayers, my eyes were drawn again and again to the red circle, and in the end my curiosity got the better of me, as it often did. I picked up the paper and read the circled words with first passing, and then mild, and finally piqued interest. It read as follows:

  “Wanted: Assistant. Full-time. Equitable pay. Requisite Skills: Typing, organization, keen intellect. preferred skills: attention to unusual details, insatiable curiosity, suspension of disbelief, appreciation for classical texts, fencing, covert observation. paid holidays, full benefits, boundless adventure. to apply, arrive at my residence promptly at 2:22pm, christmas Eve.”

  I could see right away why someone would have circled the ad. It was certainly amusing. Who had gone to the trouble to play such a farce in the paper? Employment ads weren’t free, after all, and without an actual address or phone number, no one was likely to respond. I put the paper back where I had found it, and continued my light roast mass.

  After a few minutes, I picked the paper back up and read the ad a second time, and for a second time I put it down. What sort of person would prefer an assistant who could fence? Or who had some skill at ‘covert observation’? I began to daydream something in the vein of Indiana Jones. Perhaps the ad itself wasn’t, in fact, an ad, but a kind of code. Spies in books often used such methods.

  It wasn’t my intention to pick apart the ad looking for some code, but I nonetheless took up the paper a third time and read over the text yet again. It occurred to me, on this read, that there was a conspicuous lack of capital letters throughout. Unable to help myself from imagining this to be purposeful, I took note of the capital letters when they did occur.

  W-A-F-E-R-S-T-E.

  Waferste. Well, so much for that idea. How many messages between spies were garbled by an inattentive typesetter throughout the age of print? Then again, maybe that only happened in books.

  The time was creeping up on me, and I had a job to get to. I finished my coffee, and left the shop.

  Five minutes later, I returned, and picked up the paper again. It was a curiously specific time, wasn’t it? Two twenty-two in the afternoon? Why on Earth would a person be so precise? Though I reminded myself that it was almost certainly an ad placed in jest, I folded the paper and stuffed it into my purse. At best, I would gradually come to understand whatever hidden message might be nestled in it, and at worst I would throw it in the recycling bin later on.

  After all, what harm could there be in enjoying a little puzzle?

  At that time, I worked in a framing shop just five blocks from my apartment. At twenty three years old I lived alone with my cat Baxter (short for Lord Baxter Bartholemeow III, I like to joke, on account of his regal, aloof nature that seems a bit overdone at times, even for a cat.) I’m neither terribly thin nor particularly thick. My grades in both high school and college, where I got a bachelors of arts in humanities and culture, were a mix of B’s and A’s. My hair is almost blonde, and almost brown, and my eyes are a greenish-hazel-brown. I am of average height. In fact, almost everything about me is entirely that—average.

  My job at the little framing shop was to build frames to order. It was simple, direct work that involved little creativity or thought other than to measure carefully, tap gently with a rubber mallet, and put the staples where they would be least obvious.

  As such, I had the freedom to ponder the curious little ad from the moment I arrived until I took my lunch break. As soon as I settled down to eat, I took it out and read it again.

  Perhaps it was a matter of mental percolation, or psychic digestion. I’m not sure. But when I read the ad this fourth time, it occurred to me that the apparently nonsense word, Waferste, might in fact not be nonsense at all, and that the ludicrously specific time—which ought to have been, rationally, something like half past, or quarter after, or even on the hour—may itself be part of the message.

  Once upon a time, I would have had to shelve my theory until I could consult a map. Owing to the miracle that is the modern phone, however, I was thankfully able to put my wild imagining to rest then and there. The chances that a person like myself were to stumble upon some secret message in an employment ad were, I had to accept, exceedingly low bordering on entirely nil.

  I searched for an address. 222 Wafer St. East.

  My stomach fluttered a moment when I saw the little icon settle down on a location just outside of the city proper, not adjusted for some misspelling or to the nearest available address, but precisely on the target. 222 E. Wafer St.

  It was real. I put the paper away, and ate my lunch in something of a daze. What was waiting there, at 222 East Wafer Street? Was there anything? Probably it was a game. Someone had circled the ad; had it been part of a private scavenger hunt, perhaps? An inside joke among friends? Was it some kind of scam meant to get the poor sap who stumbled on it invested so they couldn’t help but check it out, only to be sold on some pyramid scheme?

  I had no way to answer these questions for myself. Not here; not now.

  At least, not without taking a bit of a chance—the sort of thing that, generally speaking, I prefer not to do—and checking it out for myself. I had nothing to lose, really. And if it was a really clever pyramid scheme, who knew? I might actually get rich, or lose my shirt.

  So there I was. Christmas Eve, two twenty in the afternoon, bundled up to my ears against the
cold and the freezing drizzle, parked just a short distance from what appeared to be a house divorced from time and stuck in the urban sprawl like a rare flower somehow staving off the choking presence of an encroaching mass of tangled woody thorns. It was three stories high, with tall windows that peaked into elegant points, all the glass in them stained like that in an old cathedral, but with pictures of flowers and suns and moons instead of doves and martyrs and angels.

  The tall iron gate in front of the place was slightly ajar, and though it was surrounded by a tall stone wall I could see through the bars of the front gate that the grounds within were well kept, even thriving despite the season. Roses, no doubt fake, appeared to be in bloom near the house itself, and the short grass was vital and green—likely sprayed with some kind of dye to keep up appearances during the brutal North Washington Winter.

  My car was a rental. No buses came this far out and I didn’t have a car of my own. I left it parked on the curb across the street from the little manor and checked the time again. Two twenty-one. If was I right about the double meaning of the time, I would be as prompt as it was possible to be. Already my cheeks were warm with embarrassment, and it took an effort of nerves to keep my feet walking across the street, through the iron gate, past the remarkably realistic plots of flowers and grass, and up to the wide, tall, solid door at the front of the house, which was atop seven worn granite slab steps.

  I waited until my watch read two twenty-two exactly. It seemed appropriate, my knuckles hovering over the door until the second hand ticked over from 59 to 60. Only then did I knock, sharp and loud enough that I winced when I imagined someone on the other side being startled from it and approaching quickly to shoo me away. “Another damned fool answering that ridiculous ad,” they’d say as they waved me off, “if I find out who put that thing in the paper, I’ll prosecute to the full extent of the law.”

  Suddenly anxious, I rehearsed a sincere apology in my head.

  Or, at least, I tried to. I wasn’t given much time. Not half a tick after I knocked, the door opened with unexpected quietness, and a woman in a fencing suit—which made it clear she was a woman—answered the door, and pushed a screen covered fencing mask up and off of her face, resting it atop a head of hair that was a swirl of vivid red and virgin white. Eyes that were impossibly green sparkled at me as the corners of her lips curled into a warm smile that put the lines of her face on display. Not really the deep lines of an old woman, but also not the shallow grooves of a middle aged person; they somehow managed to give her a kind of ageless appearance, so that I couldn’t have put her into any particular decade at all save that she certainly wasn’t young.

  “Ah,” she said with a clear, strong voice that had substance to it in that one syllable that most people can’t manage with a whole sentence. “You’ve arrived for the interview. Wonderful, my dear. Come in, come in, it must be dreadful cold out there.” Her accent wasn’t local, but wasn’t specific to any place either.

  Dumbfounded, I did as she said but cautiously. I hadn’t even brought a resume, I realized. It hadn’t occurred to me, in all the daydreaming and postulation, that this could actually be a real interview. Why would it be? Who hired an assistant with an ad that contained a secret message critical to actually making it to the interview?

  “Hang your coat on the hook by the door, if you please,” the woman said. She picked up something from a corner inside the ornate, cherry wood lined foyer, and turned to me as I finished hanging my coat up. She held up two fencing foils, their thin blades dangling toward the ground. Her eyes narrowed a little as she looked me over. “Can you fence?”

  At first I didn’t answer.

  “Can you at least speak?” she asked, patiently but with the slightest urging behind it.

  “Ah... no,” I said. I flushed. “I mean, I can speak, of course. Obviously. But I... can’t fence. Is that a problem?”

  “One we can remedy,” the woman assured me. “Well, in that case let me get changed. Have a seat in the library, there’s a fire in the hearth to warm you up.”

  “I’m afraid I... didn’t bring a resume, ma’am,” I said, uncertain now that I even wanted to stay. It all seemed so... what? I couldn’t have said. Unreal, or surreal maybe.

  But the woman only waved a hand. “Oh, no. A resume won’t be necessary, Miss...?

  “Bean,” I provided, and shuffled forward to offer her my hand. “I’m Abigail Bean.”

  “It is a genuine pleasure to meet you, Miss Bean,” the woman said. She took my hand firmly, shook it and smiled broadly. “My name is Agnes Astor Smith. You may call me Agnes, or Miss Smith, but never Astor. I never cared for that name. I picked it up in Paris after one too many glasses of the most delicious Bordeaux, and consider it one of the poorer choices I’ve made.”

  “Why don’t you change it?” I asked.

  Miss Smith laughed, a throaty, full, infectious sort of laugh, and spread her arms wide in a gesture of wry admission. “My dear, I ask myself that every third Tuesday.”

  I opened my mouth, realized that I was too confused to respond, and closed it again. Miss Smith didn’t seem to mind, or possibly notice, as she turned and walked further into the house. I followed, expecting that she would lead me to the library where she’d asked me to wait. Instead, she turned and ascended a broad, sweeping staircase and called back to me, “I’ll be down shortly.”

  “Miss Smith,” I asked, nervous about all of this for reasons I couldn’t quite pin down, and anxious not to waste the woman’s time, “I think I’ve made a mistake. To be honest, I didn’t expect this to be... well... real.”

  Miss Smith turned on the stairs and regarded me with that timeless, patient smile again. “If that’s so, Miss Bean, then why, pray tell, did you answer the ad?”

  Absent any other answer that felt sufficiently honest, I said the first thing that came to my mind. “I suppose I was curious?”

  “With more conviction, my dear,” Miss Smith said.

  More conviction? I tried to puzzle out what she meant, and in the end could only gamble on a guess. “I was curious.”

  Miss Smith smiled at me, and winked one bright eye. “Perfect.” She turned, and continued up the stairs.

  “Wait,” I said quickly as she turned the corner at the top, “I mean to say I’m not at all prepared for an interview. I’m not even sure I’m qualified, I’ve never been an assistant before. I can’t fence, and... what did you even mean by ‘covert observation’? Or for that matter ‘boundless adventure’?”

  “Details, Miss Bean,” Miss Smith said, not stopping in her ascent, “easily attended.”

  “So, you want me to stay, then? To interview for you?” I asked, just to be sure.

  Miss Smith paused, and gave me a quizzical look. “Interview, Miss Bean? You already did. You’re hired. Now go have a seat in the library and make yourself comfortable. I assure you, there’s no shortage of work to be done, and we’ll be heading out momentarily to get to it.”

  “What work...?” But she vanished into the upper floor of the house.

  I stood awkwardly for a moment, and looked back at the foyer, at the large door that led back out to the cold, and the strange yard, and my rental car and, I would soon realize, to the mundane.

  I should have left. I should have gone back to my old life then. Back there was the comfort of an average existence, the gentle tide of everyday, where nothing really good or bad ever happened.

  In that moment, however, I chose instead the unusual, the extraordinary—I did it out of curiosity, my old nemesis. I turned away from the mundane, and sought out Miss Smith’s library instead.

  Chapter Two

  Miss Smith’s library could easily have doubled as a small museum. The ceiling was high enough that a balcony from the second floor overlooked the lower level, and the walls were composed of bookshelves, save for the wall directly above the fireplace where a healthy fire crackled softly and lent the room an inviting warmth. Opposite the hearth were two glass doors that led
out to what appeared to be a small solarium dotted with chairs and sofas in gold and orange, barely discernable through the fogged, wavy glass.

  I perused the books on the shelves low enough to get a good look at, and found that Miss Smith had a considerable collection of antique tomes, all of them exuding the smell of worn leather and ancient paper and ink. They also commanded a strange sort of silence, so that I walked softly over the hardwood floor from an irrational worry about making too much noise. The books were undoubtedly valuable, so I refrained from taking any of them off the shelf—but some of the spines displayed titles in foreign scripts. Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Cyrillic, and more. I saw only a few in my short exploration that were titled in English, and they were, all of them, of an old dialect, with odd titles.

  “Of the natures of the lower heavens and what they may shew the wyse and learned,” one of the spines read in slightly flaked gold lettering. “Thee infallible profesies wych do proceed from thee spheres and places of subtle essences,” read another, these letters in relief, long ago having lost whatever gilding they might have had.

  There were books of poetry, and folklore, and flowers, and various animals from birds to varieties of cats and their habits, types, and in one some cases what they represented in various schools of thought like omens and ancient depictions in art from one end of the globe to the other. As many books as there were, which were in some other language, and given that there were almost certainly many thousands of books in this one room, I gave myself over to imagining that every conceivable subject known before the twentieth century must be represented Miss Smith’s library.

  I also imagined that Miss Smith must be obscenely wealthy to house such a collection, or to live in a manor like this one. It could even have been a converted cathedral, for all I knew. It certainly had the right shape.

  By the time Miss Smith came back to the ground floor and found me in the library, I hadn’t actually made it to one of the chairs near the hearth. I had only made it halfway along the perimeter of the room, enchanted by the odd collection. Miss Smith took a seat, but didn’t say anything to me right away. She merely watched, as though we were in no particular hurry.