From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:
Just when I opened my book to write, everyone came home so I had to stop. No one must know that I know. Gladys told me that Suzanne was in bed with a man and that in the middle of the night he shot her and she died right away. She said the man was not Mr. Leonard. Then she said that it served Suzanne right because no good woman ever sleeps with a man. I said that Grandmother sleeps with Grandfather every single night, and she is a good woman and she is always telling everyone how good she is. Gladys says that is different but I don’t see why? Anyhow Gladys is lying because Suzanne was better than just plain good. She was dear and sweet and pretty and kind and gentle and I told Gladys so and she got mad and she called Suzanne by words that I never heard before and I don’t know how to spell. “Slut” was one of them. I can remember that one because it is short. When I asked her what it meant she said if I ever repeated it that she would wash my mouth out with kitchen soap so it must mean something ugly and I know that “slut” was something that Suzanne wasn’t.
As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I have not been able to find any information about Suzanne. In my newspaper searches, there were very few mentions of the name, so it apparently was not popular at the time. I wondered whether it was not her given name or perhaps a nickname.
In previous searches when I tried to find mention of her as a dancer, I searched for “dance",” “Scheherazade,” and “ballet.” None of those words yielded success in the San Francisco papers available online through 1912 and 1913. After reading about Suzanne’s death, I looked through a few week’s worth of papers, searching the obituaries and for articles about a woman’s violent death. No reports of anyone being shot, although there were articles about someone named Shirley who had been stabbed to death in Half Moon Bay. Could Suzanne’s given name have been Shirley? After searching further, I discovered that Shirley was the last name of a man who was killed in a fight at a bar.
So Suzanne remains a mystery. Suzanne was one of the few adults Hilda loved and felt accepted by, perhaps the first person she cared about who died when she was old enough to understand the concept.