Daffodil Hill
an excerpt

Weatherly bounced back outside. Seeing their faces, she smirked. “Let me guess. You used that opportunity to talk about whether or not I’m crazy.” She sat down and took out a pack of cigarettes. Shaking one out, she queried “Well? Did you decide to trust me?” Abashed, the three nodded. She lit up and took a long drag. Exhaling, she smiled. “Good. I’m a trustworthy girl.” She tapped her smoke into an ashtray on the floor by her chair. “Okay. Class is in session. Daffodil Hill lecture number 186. How our little town grew, became a pit of violence and despair, and then settled into the picture of paradise it is today.”

She leaned back in her seat and her tone sobered. “We were founded in 1848 by gold miners. One of the richest spots in the state for gold, and the town held 15,000 people two years later.” She laughed. “Today there’s only about 800 here. Anyway, I’m assuming you all know enough about the California Gold Rush that I don’t need to explain the basics to you.” The group nodded. “I’ll just say that the gold here was bountiful. Amazing, really. You could find gold here like you’d find sand at the beach.

‘Right now, we’re sitting where the center of town was then. Well, it was more like a camp then. There are four hills surrounding us, and those four hills are where most of the gold was.” She pointed as she spoke. “Stockton Hill, French Hill, Negro Hill and, of course, Daffodil Hill.”

Dexter interrupted. “Negro Hill?”

Weatherly grimaced. “Great name, huh? A black man was the first one to discover gold on it. So, three years pass. It’s 1858, and the town is overflowing with people from all over the world. Wealthy people. Hotel Rankin started as a den of equity. A brothel. A bar. A place to gamble. People that get that rich that quick and are miles from any kind of proper city, they don’t know what to do with their money. Prospectors pissed away thousands of dollars on prostitutes and whiskey. Criminals come to town because they heard that everyone here is rich. I keep saying people, but I really mean men. If you happened to be a woman in Daffodil Hill in 1851, you were a whore.

So everyone here is rich beyond their wildest dreams. Then they look around. That black guy’s rich, too. So is that Chinaman. They’re sleeping with our white women and they’re drinking next to us at the bar and they’re next to us at the sluice box during the day. The racial tension is out of control. So is the crime.” Alex raised his hand and Weatherly smiled. “Yes?”

“What’s a sluice box?”

“Excellent question.” Weatherly said this pompously, but shot Alex a quick grin as she spoke. “It’s a long shallow wooden box with a mesh grill at the bottom. They used it for panning. So the racial tension. I’m not saying that it was the white prospectors that started it. There’s not nearly enough evidence to know for sure, but if you look at our history, it was probably them.” She stabbed out her cigarette and waved her hand idly at the smoke.

“Okay. So we’re back to 1851. The year everything went to shit. Daffodil is starting to look more like an actual town. Most of these buildings were built that year. They had to be rebuilt after the fire, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Starting in April of that year, every week for seventeen weeks straight, a man is murdered. The first two were stabbed, and the general consensus is that they were knifed and robbed. Par for the course. There’s known bandits in town, now, and everyone’s just a little bit more cautious at night.

The next man is hacked to death with an axe, and things are looking a bit more serious now. Then it gets gruesome. The fourth murder is really foul. The guy’s missing all of his fingers, and someone took a long time killing him.

So the town forms a posse. Anytime there looks like trouble, someone runs to the top of the courthouse and rings a giant bell. Everyone floods the streets, and it ends up being more trouble than it’s worth. Guns are going off all over the place, people are falsely accused, all the fun kind of stuff that happens under mob rule.

The next guy is mutilated. Unrecognizable. They think it was an axe, but they can’t be sure. It looks more like a wild animal got him, but an animal wouldn’t place him neatly in a bed for a prostitute to discover. This happens 12 more times. 12 more people are killed over the next three months, including 5 ladies of the night. They got the worst treatment. One was skinned alive.” Weatherly took a huge sip of her coffee. Her hands were shaking as she set the cup back down.

“Finally they find someone. Some guy that was caught stealing. He confesses to some of the murders, but denies the women. He also says he killed a man up in Sutter Creek. They hang him. That night, a fire starts in the courthouse. It destroys half the town before they can put it out. That’s the beginning of the end. Most of the gold was already gone anyway, and a lot of people left after the first few murders. By 1852, the town is dead again. There’s some actual mining going on over towards Sutter, and there’s some merchants who stayed, but the town has never been the same.” She dropped her head and studied the table for a minute.

“I don’t think they hung the right guy. I’ve down a lot of research on the area, and I think that he was in Sutter Creek during the worst of the murders. I’ve read everything I can get my hands on about that year, and I think it was a serial killer. I don’t think they killed him the night of the fire.”