THE CRICKET CAGE

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Kate Butler’s younger sister Dulcey, nicknamed Cricket for her lively ways, always got her way. When Kate, with her fickle cat, Vanya, traveled west from Boston to a job on the San Francisco Chronicle, Cricket insisted that she first visit Ferry’s Lee, Cricket’s estate on Puget Sound. Kate complied. It had been five years since Cricket had married Captain Hazard Ferry, a wealthy merchant in the China trade, and left Boston, taking Septima, the Butler family nanny-housekeeper to help her adjust to her new life in Washington Territory.
Since then, Kate, whom Hazard had courted first, had buried herself in work, campaigning against the wretched conditions prevalent in late nineteenth century factories and mental institutions. She had almost become a victim of her reforming undertakings in asylums, befriending a patient who turned against her and risking her own sanity.
Kate hadn’t been expected at Ferry’s Lee until morning. A half-breed girl, dressed in Indian fashion, answered the door and left Kate standing in the entrance. Kate walked into the first room she came to. It was filled with flowers. A coffin stood at one end. Kate prayed it wouldn’t be her old friend Septima. She forced herself to walk over and look down. Cricket was in the coffin.
The cause of Cricket’s death was supposed to be a stroke but Kate was suspicious. Cricket was having an affair with Leighton Olney, a talented but penniless political leader. Hazard seemed to be involved romantically with the half-breed girl. Kate investigated and found reasons to believe Cricket’s death was suicide or possibly murder. The staff and residents, including a vicious macaque, of the strange house at Ferry’s Lee, as well as an attempted expulsion of the Chinese from Seattle complicated Kate’s detection. So did a misunderstanding of the motives and actions of Hazard, Olney, Septima and Cricket herself. That misunderstanding threatened Kate’s life and Vanya’s.