Excerpt from A Dangerous Business by Jane Smiley, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

One thing about the father was that he was patient. He sat quietly, reading a book, the whole time, and never pestered Mrs. Parks about a thing, slowly drinking a glass of ale. And when she paid Eliza, Mrs. Parks gave her an extra quarter for her evening meal.

As she walked home that night, Eliza listened to the gulls calling all around the bay. The only thing she regretted was that she hadn't been able to discover what book it was that held the father's attention for such a long period of time.

There was a rough one, too. He didn't look rough—­if he had, Mrs. Parks would have sent him on down the street. He had a ready smile, was well dressed. But as soon as he got Eliza into her room, he pushed her against the wall so that she smacked her head. Nor did he apologize. He stepped closer and raised his hands with a grin. She reached over to her bureau and grabbed a candleholder. She didn't smack him—­that wasn't allowed—­but she threw the candleholder at her door, and a minute or so later, as Eliza was sidling away from the fellow, the door opened and Mrs. Parks appeared with her pistol in her hand. She walked over to the fellow, returned his funds, said he had the wrong place, and if he was into this sort of thing, he could go over to the brothel on Franklin Street. He backed out of the room and then ran out the front door. The best thing was that he stumbled down the steps and dropped his dollar coin, and when Mrs. Parks found it among the zinnias in the morning, she gave it to Eliza. Eliza hadn't known that there was a brothel on Franklin Street, and it turned out that there wasn't. Mrs. Parks had been talking through her hat, and she had done a good job of it.

Maybe a week later, Eliza was walking toward the general store that was across from Pacific House. She was looking about at horses and dogs and gowns and shawls, and she saw Mrs. Harwood come hobbling out of the door and down the steps. She also saw that Mrs. Harwood noticed her, but she was exactly as she had been before—­stern, unmoved, indecipherable. Eliza watched her get into the carriage and go up toward Jefferson Street.

When the first of "the girls" disappeared, no one thought a thing of it. Folks disappeared from Monterey all the time, mostly because there was more going on in San Francisco, or even San Jose. Or people took their families and moved down the coast because they thought they would find better hunting there, or some land with more rain. If they were lucky, they came back, gave up on the idea of owning their own farms or ranches, and went to work the way everyone else worked. In fact, Eliza knew that her mother would say that she had disappeared, and that thought was a bit of a prickle to her conscience, but not enough to get her to answer those letters her mother had sent. She thought there was a lot to be said for disappearing, and so she didn't think much of the disappearance of that girl, except to note the day, May 14, her very own birthday. Twenty-­one now, and wasn't that strange?

But in the course of a few days of going to shops, eating here and there, sitting on a bench with a book in her hand, she noticed that people, especially women, spoke of this disappearance differently than they spoke of others—­there was no "That family was only here for a few months—­they might have waited it out and found something more productive," or "Good riddance! That fellow was always out of his head!," or even "Well, you bet they went back to Ohio! Wouldn't you, if you had the funds?" No, what she heard was "What it all comes down to is, those girls know what they are getting themselves into," or "I, for one, think we're better off! Luring our fellows into sin like that!"

Did the woman she overheard saying that know how Eliza herself made her money? Perhaps, though every time she left her rooming house, at least during the day, she made sure to dress modestly, never to eye any fellow, especially never to appear to recognize any of the men or the boys whom she had done business with. A brothel was not a secret, of course, but it had to pretend to be a secret. Mrs. Parks said nothing about the girl who had vanished, except that she worked for an establishment up by the Presidio, that she had been on the job only a few weeks, and that she said to the owner of that establishment that she'd come from Buffalo, New York. Unlike most of the girls, she had come on her own, by ship, and no one knew where she'd gotten the funds or what her original intentions had been. If Eliza had ever seen the girl, she couldn't say. Twice, when she saw Olive in the open area of Mrs. Parks's establishment, she tried to catch her eye and find out what she thought, but Olive avoided her gaze. Eliza did her best to put the girl out of her mind.

Excerpted from A Dangerous Business by Jane Smiley. Copyright © 2022 by Jane Smiley. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.