Dragon Bones (18 page)

Catherine’s eyes widened as she remembered the conversation from yesterday.

“Do you really think she sent the day worker to ‘a watery grave’?” Hulan asked.

“That was a joke! We picked on Lily because she was such an easy target. All she cared about was her career—”

“And the others don’t?”

“Inspector, Site 518 isn’t exactly the path to fame and fortune.”

Unless you stole from the site, Hulan thought. But Catherine was already wealthy, and if she wanted fame, all she had to do was slip on some Versace and return to the social whirl of her economic class. “Okay, I accept that,” Hulan said. “So let’s go back to last night. You’re walking together through town. You must have talked about something.”

“Lily was fishing for what my father was going to bid on at the next round of auctions, but the truth is, he doesn’t share that information with me. I’m only his daughter, not his curator.”

“He’s old-fashioned, you mean.”

“He believes women have their place. Look, he’s wealthy, he’s a widower, and the kinds of women he meets…. Well….”

“It’s hard to get his attention.”

Catherine nodded. Hulan thought about Catherine in a new light. How could she compete with the other women who must flow through her father’s life? Hulan didn’t think that Catherine’s dressing and acting like Electra would have much appeal to Stuart, or would it?

“Still,” she resumed, “he values your opinion.”

Catherine cocked her head questioningly.

“I heard the two of you talking yesterday,” Hulan explained.

“At lunch,” Catherine remembered brightly, “of course.”

Hulan acknowledged that this was so, but Catherine had also given her an opening. “I heard you before that too. Your father said something about you running out of time….”

Catherine winced. Hulan waited.

“My father….” The words closed in on themselves, and the young woman tried again. “My father wants the best for me. For him that means a good marriage.”

“Another old-fashioned view—”

“But still as common as air,” Catherine finished bitterly. “I’ve told him that his views are so antiquated they belong in one of the Site 518 pits.” After a moment, she added, “My father is very hard to please.” Another beat, followed by “All men are when you think about it.”

“Is that why you’re here? To prove something to him?”

“Maybe to myself. How pathetic is that?”

They talked for a few more minutes. Catherine had no idea where Lily had been going. She regretted now that she hadn’t asked, but at the time she honestly hadn’t thought about it. They simply weren’t that close.

“How about your father and Lily? Were they close?”

“Do you mean did they”—Catherine searched for the appropriate words until she settled on—“have sex?” When Hulan nodded, Catherine laughed and her whole face changed. She appeared for a moment as she truly was behind the facade—young, open, and naturally beautiful. “Probably, although Lily
definitely
wasn’t his type.” Still smiling at the idea of it, she added, “Don’t get me wrong. He had a lot of respect for her. She helped him a lot with his collection.”

“But she wasn’t as knowledgeable as you.”

“I know more history and art. She knew more about the business of art—museums, auctions, private collections, and financial transactions above and below the table.”

“Was Lily the person responsible for artifacts disappearing from Site 518?”

“Probably.”

“Do you have any knowledge of her taking artifacts out of the country, whether from Site 518 or elsewhere?”

Catherine answered with determined frankness. “Over the years Lily obtained amazing pieces for Cosgrove’s to put up at auction. Where she got them,
how
she got them, I don’t know, but if she did it illegally, it wouldn’t surprise me. If my father bought some of those pieces, well, that wouldn’t surprise me either. He’s a man of many passions, and he doesn’t take no for an answer.”

Hulan thought about that, then asked, “Will you be going down to the dam site with him?”

“My father? Oh, I’m sure he’s halfway there by now,” Catherine answered, her lightness returned. “But, no, I wasn’t going with him. I’m part of the Site 518 crew. I’ll be here all summer.”

Hulan had gone about as far as she could with these preliminary interviews, and she still had other people she wanted to see. She and Hom walked with Catherine as far as the lotus pool, then said good-bye. Then Hulan and the captain went to the restaurant’s veranda, where a couple of Hom’s men reported that the search of the interior and exterior of the compound had been completed. No murder site or blood trail had been located. Someone had gone to considerable lengths to make this element of Lily’s murder an enigma. Hulan would come back to this, but for now she and Hom went on to the dining room, where Officers Su and Ge sat at small tables interviewing employees one on one. Everyone else sat at the larger banquet tables, smoking cigarettes and drinking tea. A hush settled over the room while Hulan spoke quietly to Su and Ge. Hom took a chair between his men, lit a cigarette, and exhaled the smoke through his nose.

With the limited scope of questions on which Hulan had insisted, the two officers had been able to get through twenty employees, most of whom were on the day shift and hadn’t arrived until this morning. None of this first group had ever observed Lily Sinclair in an argument. None of them had seen or heard anything near her room. Three people had caught sight of her in town last night. No one admitted to being an All-Patriotic Society convert, but then, Hulan hadn’t expected that anyone would at this point.

“We’ve had a good beginning together,” she announced to the room. “If Officer Su or Officer Ge has already spoken to you, you may go. I may still call on some of you individually.”

Hom leapt to his feet. Before he could voice his objections, Hulan continued, “Captain Hom will preside over the rest of the interviews. You must be as honest with him and Officer Ge as you would be with me in Beijing.” The thinly veiled threat was met by sullen silence. “Officer Su, please come with me.” With that she and Su left the room.

Hom was right behind her, though. “You can’t dismiss those people!”

She turned to face him, trying to keep hold of her temper. “
You
will not tell me what to do.
You
will not tell me how to run an investigation. If
you
do, you will become the subject of
my
interest. Do you understand?”

Hom’s face bloated in ill-disguised anger.

“I’m going to Site 518,” she went on. “Officer Su will drive me. You will stay here and arrange round-the-clock guards for the guesthouse and Site 518. We will
not
have a repeat of what happened to Miss Sinclair.”

David left the vultures’ cave and approached a group of day workers, who told him that they came to the dig in the morning, left in the evening, and got paid once a week.

What happened if someone unearthed an artifact?

“We are told to call for Dr. Ma, and he comes.” The man who spoke was so thin that his belt was wrapped twice around his waist. “Then the others arrive, and they all work together.”

Was anyone ever alone with objects that were found in the ground?

“This is a big place, but there are many people and eyes everywhere.”

What about at night?

“Everyone goes home.”

A man with a shorn head added, “Except for Dr. Ma.”

“And the vultures,” someone else called out from within the gathering. “They also sleep here, but they are good men.”

This was met with murmurs of agreement.

David backtracked. “You’re treated well?”

Someone else in the crowd spoke up. “We are peasants. We move dirt here, we move dirt on our farms, no difference.”

“Do any of you remember Brian McCarthy, the American?”

“He drowned.”

“We tell the foreigners to be careful of the river.”

“Did he steal things from Site 518?” David asked. He felt a subtle shift from curiosity to wariness. “What was he interested in, can anyone tell me?” The workers began drifting away. David called out after the retreating backs, “What about the other accidents? Your friends Wu, Yun, Sun, and the others?” But by now he stood alone in the mud and rain of Site 518.

The difference between the day workers and the Chinese graduate students was that the latter were smart enough not to answer any of his questions, so David marched back up to the museum representatives’ cave, where he was greeted with more shots of
mao tai.
The vultures’ tongues loosened, and they began to gossip about Michael Quon, the wealthy American. He’d traveled to many important sites—to the Xia palace at Erlitou, to the Neolithic settlement of Banpo, to Xi’an for the terra-cotta warriors, and to Zhoukoudian, where Peking Man was found. But the question on all of the vultures’ minds was, Were all Americans as rich as Michael Quon? Were they all able to travel freely like some modern-day Da Yu? They agreed they must be, because Miller and his daughter were also rich.

“But Miss Miller works here,” Li Guo pointed out to his companions.

“And we’re grateful for it!” Hu practically hooted.

“Hu misses his wife,” Li explained. “We tell him you can look, but we need to care for Miss Miller, because she’s the smartest of all of the foreigners.”

“Smartest?” David asked.

The vultures nodded enthusiastically but said they admired Dr. Strong more than anyone else on the site. “He once knew more about our ancient cultures than anyone alive. Even now you can hear him say important things if you have patience.”

They’d liked Brian too. At the beginning of last summer, he’d talked to the vultures a lot, then he’d gotten into hiking with Michael Quon. The two of them explored caves, and the vultures remembered Brian coming back one day and announcing that the caves were “like a mother,” although they had no idea what he was talking about.

“But he was different when he returned this year,” said Hu. “Don’t you agree?”

“Yes, he only wanted to talk to Dr. Strong or Professor Schmidt,” Li admitted.

“What about?” David asked.

“Dragon bones—ancient oracle bones used for divination,” Li answered, again revealing his hidden expertise. “For hundreds of years during the Qing Dynasty, the farmers along the Yellow River who dug them up believed them to be the bones of dragons and sold them to doctors who ground them up for traditional Chinese medicine. Then about a hundred years ago scholars realized that the markings on them were actually ancient writing, dating back thousands of years. Many people—including Dr. Strong—spent years trying to decipher the meaning.”

Since that time, five thousand characters had been identified on oracle bones, of which half had been deciphered, with half of those proving to be directly connected to contemporary language. This was the first step in demonstrating that China had the oldest continuously used language in the world while establishing that the lists of the Shang emperors found in ancient texts were accurate. Those emperors were not mythical. They were actual men.

So what had sparked Brian’s interest in dragon bones?

“The boy had become interested in symbols and language, which is why he wanted to talk to only Schmidt and Strong,” Li answered. “He was particularly curious about the Xia culture of the Yellow River.”

Why?

“Because in draining the world of floods, Da Yu created arable land. He taught the people how to farm and raise animals. He taught them rituals of divination and sacrifice. We believe Yu was the beginning of what today we would call civilization.”

“But why was Brian so curious about the Xia if they lived on the Yellow River?” David asked.

The vultures didn’t know.

By the time Hulan arrived at the site, David was more than a little drunk. The vultures were his comrades now, and they patted him on the back and shook his hand and made a few more off-color remarks before sending him away with Hulan with the admonition that “strong branches tremble when the petals shake.”

David’s wife was not amused.

DAVID AND HULAN WALKED THROUGH THE RAIN ALONG THE TRAIL
toward the Wu house. “I’ve been thinking about Lily’s mutilations,” David said, “and wondering if they’re purely unique to this killer or have some specific reason behind them—say punishment for Wu Huadong’s drowning.”

“Ma said Lily couldn’t have been involved in Wu’s death.” Hulan dodged a puddle, then edged back next to David.

“But what if the scholars’ teasing accusations that Lily sent Wu to look for the tripod in the whirlpool turned out to be true?” David adjusted the satchel strap on his shoulder. “What if Brian and Lily were
both
responsible? Someone out there could be sending a very potent message, only no one’s understanding it.”

“Actually, David, I understand it quite well. The All-Patriotic Society lieutenant said the group would make me pay for killing that woman in Tiananmen Square. The best punishment would be to discredit me by proving that I’m incompetent.”

He was astounded by the leap her mind had made. “Why? And how?”