The Girl Who Wrote in Silk (10 page)

They made it no more than one block before they noticed people running excitedly toward the beach north of town. Two men rushed from a saloon, nearly knocking Mei Lien down in their hurry to jump into a friend’s waiting carriage and then they too took off to the north.

“Probably nothing more than an expected ship coming into port,” Joseph guessed, leading her onward.

But then a group of young men her age raced past and Mei Lien caught the words “dead body.”

The feeling of the water demon’s tentacles wrapping around her flashed into her mind, bringing a sense of foreboding. She stopped in the center of the sidewalk and grasped Joseph’s sleeve with trembling fingers. “We need to go to the beach.”

The line between his brows deepened. “You wanna see the ship?”

She shook her head, her feeling of unease growing. “Joseph, we need to go now. They said a body has been found on the beach at Point Hudson.”

“The authorities will take care of it. It’s no concern of ours.”

She stepped closer to him and lifted her eyes to his, not caring if anyone watching thought her behavior inappropriate. “You don’t understand. The men on Campbell’s steamship, they worried about bodies washing ashore. I think that’s what happened.”

Horror filled his gaze as he realized she was referring to the night he’d found her. His mouth dropped open as if he were going to say something, but instead he grabbed her hand and started pushing past people and horses, heading for the beach north of town.

Mei Lien hurried to keep up, fighting to keep hold of her satchel and Joseph’s fingers at the same time, the whole while whispering prayers to the ancestors that she was wrong in her suspicion of what they’d find.

The wooden sidewalk soon gave way to dirt and then the graveled beach that ran under the high bluff. Ahead, where the beach widened, a large crowd including women and small children had gathered around what Mei Lien knew must be the body, blocking her view of it. She let Joseph tug her along the beach, though each step felt harder and harder to take.

Her breath came in shaking gasps, and she knew it was from more than just the physical exertion. She should turn around and run away, she told herself. Run away now. But just then someone moved and she caught a glimpse of bright red cloth.

Everything inside her stopped.

No. It couldn’t be.

Joseph tugged on her hand. With a look of concern, he tugged again, harder. Stiffly, she forced her feet to move.

The wind chose that moment to shift, and the smell it carried made her already shaking stomach heave. She let go of Joseph’s hand to cover her mouth and nose.

“It looks like her feet were eaten by crabs!” a young boy’s voice cried out in fascination.

Mei Lien froze. Red jacket. Female. Deformed feet.

Slowly, afraid to move too fast, for surely she would break if she did, Mei Lien pushed through the crowd until she could fully see the body.

She lay on her back, her arms and legs splayed as though rough waves had picked her up and thrown her here on the beach like seaweed. Her beautiful red jacket with embroidered green and gold dragons and blue phoenixes hung limply over her torso, the fabric ripped in places and muddied. The red skirt Mei Lien knew should be there was missing. Long black trousers, typically worn under the skirt, twisted around frail-looking legs and were pulled up to the knees, revealing naked tiny feet that had been wrapped tightly and not allowed to grow since childhood, the misshapen toes bent under so far they almost touched her heels. Most of the skin was gone, revealing putrid flesh and bone.

Mei Lien finally let her gaze lift to the face. Grandmother stared unseeing at the gray sky. Raindrops splashed in the sockets where her eyes should be and on her matted white hair and swollen face where the flesh had been torn off in chunks by sea animals that had mistaken her for food.

Pain erupted inside of Mei Lien. It came from so deep she had no choice but to let it come out of her or it would have torn her to shreds. It burst forth as a wail and dragged Mei Lien to her knees beside her grandmother’s body. After that she didn’t know what she said or did for a long time because she was lost in the black hole of her grief.

Time did not matter. The people watching her and talking about her did not matter. She wanted nothing more than to be back in their house in Seattle that awful morning this all started. She would lift Grandmother onto her back and pull Father with her as she ran and hid in the woods before the white devil came to take them away and murder them. Grandmother did not deserve this end.

And if this had happened to Grandmother, Mei Lien knew the same or worse had happened to Father. A rolling pain in her chest brought up another wail of grief that she could not contain.

The very last of her hope fizzled out like an ember left in the rain.

Her stomach twisted, then violently heaved, sending its contents upward. She turned just in time, emptying her stomach onto the rocks near Grandmother’s feet.

When nothing was left and the cramps had lessened, she fell limply onto the cold, wet rocks, knowing this was the last time she’d be near Grandmother. She would never again hear her breathing in bed beside her. Nor would she ever again hear her father’s voice calling to her, calling her
my
son
, which he always made sound like an endearment.

She did not feel the stones or the rain or the biting wind, nor even the stares of the people around her as she lay prone beside her grandmother’s rotting body. With eyes squeezed shut, she clung to every memory she could summon of their happy life in Seattle. She wrapped images and moments around herself, burrowing inside what used to be and what still should be.

She stayed that way until no tears were left inside her. Until nothing was left inside her. Until her memories had caught up to the present and refused to soften. Only then did the rest of her surroundings start to come back into focus.

“Let me pass, sir! I can help him calm down. He’ll go to sleep and stop making such a scene.”

Mei Lien turned her head to see the owner of the voice she knew was talking about her. A tall man so thin and pale that he reminded her of a sail mast was trying to push past Joseph and get to her. He held a black medical bag in one hand and a white handkerchief in the other, which he repeatedly dabbed against his nose.

“I’ll take care of him,” Joseph replied in a voice brooking no arguments. “He’s my servant. No one is to touch him, and if you are here to take possession of the body, you’ll do so with as much respect as you would any citizen of Port Townsend. Do you understand?”

The tiniest flicker of warmth lit Mei Lien upon hearing Joseph’s words. He was standing up to this man because of her. No one but Father had ever fought for her before.

She ignored their conversation after that, knowing Joseph would protect her and make arrangements for Grandmother’s body. Only now did she notice the crowd had dispersed, no doubt driven off by Joseph, or no longer interested in a lowly Chinese body. She was glad. This moment, her last with Grandmother, was a time for privacy.

She pushed to her knees and took a deep breath to steady herself for what needed to be done. Then, trying not to think about what could happen to a body that had been in the water for so long, she gently pulled Grandmother’s pant legs out from under her and tugged them down until they covered her feet. Grandmother would have hated how undignified she looked to all those people who had found her.

After another deep breath taken through the fabric of her own sleeve because of the smell, she reached out her fingers to smooth Grandmother’s hair. The moment she touched the puffy soft skull, she cringed in horror. Grandmother’s scalp felt like it might slip right off her bones if Mei Lien pressed too hard. Shuddering, Mei Lien made certain to be gentle as she completed the task, even though every muscle in her body strained to turn away.

“Mei Lien.” Joseph was there beside her, talking so softly she knew the doctor could not hear him. He laid his hand on her back and upper arm, urging her to stand. “It’s time to go. Come. The doctor will see her properly buried. I’ve made certain of it.”

Mei Lien looked at Grandmother one last time, seeing her as she’d been the last day they spent together embroidering. Grandmother had insisted that Mei Lien needed to start preparing for her someday wedding, so they’d been working on the slippers traditionally given to the groom’s parents. Grandmother had told her stories of her own wedding and marriage, and her face had seemed to grow younger with the telling, her eyes clearer, her smile softer. That was the image, Mei Lien decided, that she would keep with her. Not this one before her now.

“Good-bye, Grandmother,” she whispered in Chinese. “I will honor you all the days of my life.”

She allowed Joseph to pull her to her feet and she turned away, heading back toward town. She did not look back at Grandmother’s body because she was holding so tightly to the picture in her mind of Grandmother in life.

“Come,” Joseph said once they were back on bustling Water Street. “We’ll stop here for a warm meal before we do anything else.” He pulled open a heavy door and held it for her to precede him inside.

He must have forgotten to pretend she was his servant, she mused, though she was too tired to remind him. With a nod she walked inside—but jerked to a stop when the buzz of conversation ceased. She raised her eyes to find every face in the room staring at her.

Joseph bumped into her back. Then she felt his body stiffen as he too noticed the attention they’d drawn.

The building seemed to be a boarding house and this, its dining room. Scores of tables lined up across the room, almost all filled with pale-faced men, some with their wives. She saw two Indian women, squaws they called them in Seattle, eating at a table with two white men and their three small children. Even the squaws stared at her.

“Excuse me, sir. Can I help you?” A matronly woman approached, wiping her hands on her starched apron, her question aimed at Joseph.

“Yes, ma’am.” Joseph pulled his hat from his head but Mei Lien kept her own on, knowing it helped her disguise. “We’d like some supper, please.”

The woman pursed her lips as her eyebrows jutted into her hairline. She looked Mei Lien over from her feet to the top of her head. “By ‘we’ do you mean you have another companion arriving shortly?”

“No, ma’am. It’s just myself and my servant here.”

The woman’s expression turned to stone. “I’d be happy to offer you supper, but your servant will have to eat in the kitchen.”

Mei Lien was too tired to feel anything but acceptance of her situation. She simply turned and walked back through the door they’d come in. She wasn’t hungry anyway. When Joseph didn’t follow her immediately, she stopped and waited for him on the street corner, watching carefully for him and worried what would happen to her if they got separated before he’d helped her find a place to live and work.

Finally Joseph emerged from the boarding house, and Mei Lien knew he’d had words with the woman inside. His face was reddened and his hat crumpled as he plopped it back onto his head. He didn’t say a word about it to her as he gave her a small smile and led her across the street and along the boardwalk.

They tried one more dining establishment and even a saloon before Joseph gave up and went into the next restaurant alone. She waited outside with her back pressed against the wood siding, her hat brim hiding her face from passersby.

When Joseph emerged with two meals wrapped in paper, she shoved off the wall and fell into step beside him, neither of them speaking. Silently they trudged through puddles across the town and up the steep stairs that climbed the bluff. At the top Mei Lien stopped to catch her breath and found the landscape looked nothing like she’d expected. For miles, all but the occasional clump of trees had been cut down. Dotted here and there were grand houses and gardens, all linked by freshly graveled roads.

Without a word, Joseph nudged her with his elbow and she fell into step with him again, walking until they came to a wide, muddy field away from houses or businesses or judging eyes. Out of the rain, under cover of a lone fir tree amid a bramble of blackberry vines, they found a patch of ground dry enough to sit on and eat their lunch of dry biscuits and tasteless ham.

This town was going to take an awful lot of getting used to, Mei Lien thought as she ate in silence. The townspeople may not have driven the Chinese community out, but they sure didn’t welcome its people. What was she going to do to support herself, and where would she live?

Where had that doctor taken Grandmother’s body?

Where was Father?

The questions swirled through Mei Lien’s mind until her head hurt and she couldn’t force another bite past her lips. Setting the rest of her meal aside, she turned her gaze to the water. From this vantage point she could see clear across the water to the land on the other side and far down the sound leading toward Seattle. This town felt so isolated that, if not for the tiny tugboat heading that direction, she might have believed no other cities lay farther down the waterway.

If only she could crawl into her bed next to Grandmother in their upstairs bedroom in Seattle and forget any of this had happened.

Thursday, July 5—present day

Rothesay Estate, Orcas Island

Inara had been at work on the hotel for a month now, and she was thrilled with the progress they’d made so far. She still couldn’t believe her luck in finding Tom that first day. He was a big man with a booming laugh and a brain that seemed to work twice as fast as everyone else’s. He had a way with the crews, making everyone want to do their best work.

At their first work meeting, he’d instantly understood her vision for the hotel and the changes she wanted to make to Aunt Dahlia’s plans. He’d returned four days later with permits in hand, updated plans from the architect, an itemized breakdown of costs, and a crew of ten guys to start working. When anything new came up, he had a smartphone packed with contacts for all the crews and subcontractors they needed.

For the first two weeks, Inara had hung around the construction site all day answering questions and making sure the work was being done according to plan. It hadn’t taken long to realize she was in the way. Tom had it all under control.

After that, she’d fallen into a routine of stopping at the main house in the morning to check in with Tom and again in the afternoon before the crews left for the day. The hours in between she spent in Dahlia’s house, or rather,
her
house—she’d have to remember to call it that now—getting quotes and placing orders for things like paint and professional-grade kitchen appliances, and adding to her growing list of items still to be ordered, like shower tiles and doorknobs. In the pockets of time left at the end of the day, she read through the pile of books she’d ordered on hotel management.

She loved it. Every minute of it. She even loved the line of pickup trucks in her driveway and the country music battling the eighties hits coming from different areas of the manor. Nothing could ruin her fun, not even the unexpected costs that kept springing up, like the totally new, industrial-strength furnace that had to be installed in the cellar under the kitchen.

The blood in her veins raced from the minute she woke until long into the night when she’d finally worn herself out enough to sleep. She felt alive. Each day was another day of rediscovering that she was finally doing what she’d waited her whole life to do—without even knowing what she’d been waiting for. With the hotel, she felt she was finally living the life her mom had wanted for her. Only a small part of her felt guilty for turning her back so easily on her career in international business. Her dad still brought it up every time they talked, asking if she wished she was at Starbucks headquarters right now. Her answer was always no.

But it made her worry. Her father may have given his blessing to this project, but his disappointment in her made the possibility very real that he might snatch away her funding at any moment, without warning. Because of that, she’d spent the better part of two days looking into other options such as a home equity loan, a small business loan, a personal loan from the local bank…but she didn’t qualify for any of them. She couldn’t get around the fact that she already owed thousands on her student loans, and at the moment, she had zero income. She was stuck relying on her dad.

It hurt that he was so clearly disappointed in her, but she was holding on to the fact that he was going to be blown away by what she accomplished here. Once he saw it, he’d understand.

For some reason, being back here on the island made her feel closer to her mom, which was weird since she’d become a bona fide daddy’s girl over the years since the accident. It was almost as though the nine years had melted away and her mom had just gone on one of her business trips, like she’d turn up any day to pitch in with Inara on the hotel. Of course, her mom would have turned the place into an orphanage or something, but still she’d be proud of Inara.

Every day was filled with decisions she had to make. She first filtered those decisions through Aunt Dahlia’s original plans and then she’d think of what her mom would have liked. A part of her felt like she was doing this for her mom, as though by bringing life back to the estate and sharing it with people, she could undo her hateful words to her mother. Undo the pain that her mom had died with.

If only.

Her mom would have been intrigued by the sleeve too. She’d traveled the world in her too-short life and might have been able to help Inara figure out the sleeve’s history. Not that Inara was doing any work on it. The hotel consumed all of her time so she’d been leaving the sleeve research purely to Daniel, who sent her entertaining weekly emails with small updates, though he hadn’t discovered anything of note yet. Still, she looked forward to his friendly banter and funny stories from the university.

Other than his emails, she hadn’t thought much about the sleeve until yesterday when something happened to change that. Today she couldn’t think of anything else.

Yesterday had been Independence Day, and she’d decided to take a floatplane flight to Seattle her dad had offered so she could spend the holiday with her family, as was their tradition. They typically spent the day at her father’s house in the Magnolia neighborhood with a barbecue, followed by a sunset cruise on her father’s yacht on Lake Union where they anchored in the middle of the lake to watch the fireworks show.

Logistically the day had gone like it always did, but something had felt off and at first she wasn’t sure what it was.

It had started at lunch, when she was sitting at the patio table with her siblings and their spouses while the kids played on the grass. Her dad had gone for an early round of golf and Inara hadn’t yet seen him. She’d had to reassure Nate, not for the first time, that she wasn’t making a mistake in committing herself to the huge project and life-changing career that was the hotel.

The more she told them about her plans, the more her brother seemed to come around, or at least back off. Olivia helped by getting excited by everything Inara told them. When her dad came home and joined them, he’d expressed surprise at the extent to which she was going ahead with the renovations, but when he didn’t object to anything, Inara took that as support.

And then she’d told them about the sleeve, describing it in detail and showing the pictures she’d taken with her phone. They were all fascinated by the mystery the sleeve presented and surprised that no one had found it hidden away in Dahlia’s house all those years.

Everyone was fascinated, that is, except her dad who had scoffed, “It sounds like garbage left by some Chinese servant. Throw it away.”

His reaction had seemed overly heated, which made Inara wonder if he knew more than he was letting on. But what he’d said about the possibility of a Chinese servant wouldn’t leave her.

Sitting at Dahlia’s—er, her—kitchen table with her laptop a day later, Inara thought again of the possibility that a Chinese servant had once lived at Rothesay. Maybe that was who’d hidden the sleeve.

She closed the expense sheet she’d been working on and opened a browser to see what she could find about former residents of the house and if they’d had any Chinese servants. The best place to start, she decided, would be with census records.

She found the right site and started her search by entering Dahlia’s name and the Rothesay address in the search field for the 1940 census, the most recent year available because of privacy laws.

The record that came up showed the residents as Dahlia Campbell, age twenty-five, and a handful of Caucasian servants. No Chinese.

Both the 1930 and 1920 censuses listed only servants as residents, none of them Chinese, but Inara wasn’t surprised. The tradition Duncan Campbell started—living in Seattle and using Rothesay for lavish house parties—must have been going strong until his death in 1932 and probably observed still longer by the rest of the family.

Inara sat back from the computer. Daniel had told her that the sleeve was embroidered sometime in the 1920s or ’30s, so it made sense that the sleeve was hidden under her stairs about the same time or soon after. No one on the census records seemed to be the likely party, but that didn’t mean a Chinese servant or guest, or even a non-Chinese, might have come and gone in a non-census year and hidden the sleeve. And there was also the possibility that the person who hid it hadn’t created the embroidery. Maybe someone bought it, or even stole it, from someone else.

There were too many unknowns and the census records were too vague. What she needed was something more specific about Rothesay’s history and the people who passed through its doors.

Before she talked herself out of it, she picked up her phone and dialed her dad, managing to catch him in his office.

“Question,” she said after a quick hello. “Do you know of any family diaries or journals or records of any kind that tell more Rothesay history?” She was about to mention the sleeve when she remembered he’d already told her to throw it away and concentrate on the hotel. Instead, she lied. “I’m hoping to find descriptions of the original structure and decor for my renovations.”

“Not that I know of. If there were any, they’re gone now.” His voice sounded distracted, which she knew was to her advantage. Otherwise he might see through her lie. “I told Dahlia years ago to get rid of all the old stuff lying around. I know I don’t have anything here.”

“Oh, okay.” She thought of the boxes she’d spied in Dahlia’s attic on that first day she and Olivia were here. Now she was in a hurry to get off the phone. “I’ll let you get back to work. Thanks, Dad.”

By the time she clicked the off button, she’d already grabbed a flashlight and was halfway up the stairs, stepping carefully over the loose second tread and curling runner.

The attic was tiny and layered with at least two decades of dust. It wasn’t really an attic, but a small area under the eaves that had been converted for storage by some not-too-distant relative. At least, she didn’t think they’d had fold-down attic ladders when the house was built.

Wedging herself between stacks of boxes, she started digging through them one by one. Tax records, bank records, receipts for everything from shoes to a new stove to the old Pontiac Dahlia used to drive. There was even a letter and photo from the local artist Dahlia had hired to paint a giant purple dahlia on the side of the car. In the photo, a younger Dahlia stood beaming and pointing to the work of art. Inara could still hear Nancy muttering about the ugly piece of junk, but Dahlia had loved it.

She found pictures of Dahlia and Nancy on vacation in New York, wearing Statue of Liberty crowns, as well as baby pictures of Inara and her siblings, and some of their mother. One box held records from when electricity and plumbing were added to the buildings, so Inara set that one aside to give to Tom, thinking it might come in handy.

Despite all she found, nothing shed light on who might be responsible for the sleeve.

Her phone buzzed in her sweatshirt pocket, and Inara answered while flipping through old phone records.

“Inara, it’s Tom. I’ve been knocking on your door for the last five minutes. Are you home?”

“Oh, I totally forgot! I’ll be right down.” Inara threw the papers back in the box and put the lid back on. Then she climbed down the ladder and rushed downstairs to the front door to let in her builder. “Tom, I’m so sorry. Time got away from me.”

She led him into the kitchen where she motioned toward the stairs. “I appreciate you doing this. I’ve been tripping over that thing since the day I arrived.”

He set down his toolbox and stood back with his hands on his hips as he surveyed the job ahead of him. “No problem. Shouldn’t take long to rip it up and cart the rug out of here. You say the second tread got pulled off?”

“Yeah, but don’t fix that yet.” She explained about the step and what she found underneath, promising to show him the sleeve when she had it back from Daniel. “Dahlia or Nancy never happened to mention it to you, did they?”

“Nope.” Tom grabbed a clawed hammer out of his toolbox and hunkered down on his knees on the bottom step. “Would surprise me if they even knew about it.”

As Tom got to work on the carpet runner, Inara returned to her laptop on the kitchen table and the financials she’d been working on before getting sidetracked with the census research. A few minutes later, Tom grunted and she looked over to see him squinting at the nails he held in his palm.

“What is it?”

“When you told me the second step had a lot more nails than all the others, I figured they’d have been added by later residents. But these all look exactly alike. And old.”

She got up to see. The nails in his calloused hand were thick and squared before they tapered to a point. They looked nothing like nails she’d ever seen. “What are you saying?”

Tom handed her the nails so she could inspect them further, then he sat on the bottom step and rested his arms on his widespread knees. “You can get a good idea about the age of a house by the nails used in the construction. You also get an idea about the owner, or at least the builder, of a house.” He jerked his head as if motioning toward the manor house. “All the nails in the big house are wire nails with the exception of any used in masonry, as one would expect. Masonry requires cut nails, like those you’re holding, for their extra holding power.

“The person who built the manor house used all the latest materials and construction methods available around 1900, and that meant wire nails, which became widely available in the 1890s and are what we still use today. Everything before then was built using cut nails like you hold there.” He paused as a wide grin split his face. “You know, I think I just solved part of your mystery. To find who hid that sleeve, you’ll have to look to someone living here before the manor house was built. Early 1890s at the latest.”

Inara felt dumbstruck. And confused. How would a sleeve embroidered after 1920 have been hidden in 1890?

She needed to talk to Daniel. Maybe he’d been wrong about that date.

As Tom went back to work, she wandered into the front room to make her call. Unfortunately, Daniel didn’t pick up the phone and she had to leave a message. Then, knowing she wouldn’t be able to concentrate on financials now, she decided to go back to her census research at the kitchen table, being careful to stay out of Tom’s way as he worked on the stairs.