The Girl Who Wrote in Silk (12 page)

“So this is confirmation that the sleeve was made earlier than we thought. Are you saying that Mei Lien McElroy lived in Seattle either before or after she lived on Orcas?”

“It looks that way. Though we know it probably wasn’t after 1889 because no evidence exists of her work after the fire. But there’s more. After I got your message an hour ago with Mei Lien’s name, I did some searching and found a Liu Mei Lien listed as clerk and translator in a store in Chinatown owned by Liu Huang Fu, probably her father since Chinese women didn’t traditionally take their husband’s family name. There’s no record of what happened to either of them. I thought maybe they left Seattle after the fire, but it seems Mei Lien left Seattle before the fire.”

“How do you know that?” The raindrops were getting fatter so she moved back under cover of the tree.

“Because I found her marriage license to Joseph McElroy. They were married in Port Townsend. I don’t know how they met or how or when she moved to the town, but they were married there on March 4, 1886. Orcas Island is listed as their residence.”

Inara couldn’t sit still on her rock, but the rain, falling harder now, kept her under the tree. She moved restlessly within the small dry circle. “Daniel, we’re getting there. We’re finding her!”

He laughed. “We are. And I’ve got some ideas about the picture on the sleeve, but I want to talk to you about that in person. Can we meet soon?”

Remembering the toilets, Inara groaned. “I can’t leave the island right now. We had a delivery fiasco today, and after I hang up with you, I’m going to meet with my builder to see how we can shift schedules around and not have this time wasted.” She thought for a moment. “Maybe I can come down for a day next week, but I’m not sure.”

“What if I come to you?”

“To Orcas? You’d do that?”

“Sure. I have all weekend free. I’ll shoot for the first ferry Saturday morning.”

“You don’t have to go so far out of your way. Why don’t I check my schedule and come up with a plan for next week?”

“Inara, it will be my pleasure to come see you.” His voice deepened when he said it, sending her nerves dancing.

Cool
it, Inara. This is only a business meeting.
“Saturday it is, then.” At least he couldn’t see the dopey smile that was surely on her face.

She gave him directions to Rothesay, then hung up.

Oh
God, I have a crush on him
, she realized as she stared at the rain falling in sheets now. She decided to wait it out a little longer under the tree. The only constant in Pacific Northwest weather was that it constantly changed.

So she had a crush on the professor. Big deal. She didn’t have to do anything about it, that was for sure. And she certainly didn’t need anything distracting her from the hotel.

She crossed her arms over her chest. She’d play it cool and keep things professional. That was all he probably wanted anyway. He was coming here not to see her, but to see where she’d found the sleeve. Yes, that had to be it.

She played their conversation over again in her mind and paused on the information he’d discovered. Liu Mei Lien had worked in her father’s store when Seattle had been little more than a logging town. This was back when Duncan Campbell was just starting his business. They might have run into one another on the street and not even known they’d both end up on Orcas Island.

How had Mei Lien ended up here? And why did she embroider the sleeve, then stick it under the stairs? Was the rest of the garment hidden somewhere else in the house?

Just then the shiny spotted head of a harbor seal popped up from the water and seemed to look right at her. Inara held her breath, not wanting to move and scare her away.

The seal didn’t move. She just floated there, staring right at Inara as though she was as fascinated by Inara as Inara was with her. Finally, after several long minutes, the seal turned and dove beneath the black water.

Inara waited, but the seal didn’t resurface.

The water was like her sleeve mystery, she decided. It seemed so pure and uncomplicated on the surface, yet below were all kinds of secrets.

The sleeve knew something. It knew something about Mei Lien’s life that Inara had yet to discover, and it had something to do with Rothesay. Which meant it had to do with her family and herself. She knew Daniel would find out what that was. And who knew? Maybe it would be something compelling she could use in the hotel marketing materials.

Funny how a few months could completely change a life, she mused as she stared at the water, its surface dimpled by rain. She’d become a landowner, a soon-to-be-hotel owner, and she was chasing down answers to a mysterious embroidered sleeve with the help of a very intriguing professor.

Dahlia had been right to force her to come back.

Saturday, July 7—present day

Rothesay Estate, Orcas Island

The man who climbed out of the green Volvo looked only vaguely like the suit-wearing professor she’d met a month ago. He was even more attractive than she remembered. Today his black hair was mussed just enough to make her want to slide her fingers through it. He wore a snug, long-sleeved black Henley over jeans and black boots.

“Inara, this place is beautiful.”

She stepped off the porch and met him with a handshake.
Keep
it
professional
, she reminded herself. “Thank you. I appreciate you making the trip up here. How long was the ferry wait?”

His lips spread into a smile that shot directly to her stomach. No wonder his class was full of girls.

“An hour,” he answered, his warm gaze on her. “Not too long.”

“Want a tour?” she offered on impulse, needing to move and put a layer of professionalism back between them before things got too sticky. “I’m turning the manor into a boutique hotel that I hope to have open by next summer.”

His eyebrows shot up. “Impressive. I’d love a tour. You sure you got time?”

“I’ll make the time.” She led him up the front steps and through the main doors, all the while explaining the history of the house and pointing out the changes Tom’s crews were in the process of making. Forty-five minutes later, they were in Dahlia’s kitchen, peering into the hole where she’d found the sleeve.

“It’s amazing the sleeve was preserved as well as it was, considering it sat in there for a hundred years.” Daniel shook his head as he shined the flashlight she handed him into the hole. “I wonder why the mice didn’t eat through it.”

“That’s exactly what I wondered. Disgusting, isn’t it?” Inara’s hip bumped against his, and suddenly she wasn’t thinking about the sleeve or mice.

He was still bent over, looking under the stairs, but he glanced her way and smiled in a way that made her suck in her breath. To hide her reaction, she jumped to her feet and busied herself by filling the teakettle and placing it on the stove. “You brought the sleeve today, right?”

He stood up and clicked the flashlight off. “The purses I mentioned too. I’ll go get them.”

While he ran out to his car, she fit the step back into place, then washed her hands, made tea, and placed some store-bought cookies on a plate, wondering all the while if he felt the sparks between them too or if she was imagining them. When he returned carrying two flat black boxes and with a duffel bag slung over his shoulder, she grabbed the cookie plate off the table and slid it onto the counter out of the way. “The table is clean if you want to lay them out.”

“Thanks. I want to show you the purses first. You’ll see what I mean about them being similar to the sleeve.” He set the boxes on a chair and pulled a cotton cloth from the duffel bag. After spreading the cloth over the table, he pulled out two pairs of white cotton gloves and handed her a pair before slipping on his own.

“Contrary to what one might think, these purses weren’t used by women, but by men who attached them to their belts to carry money, fans, tobacco, opium, spectacles, even chopsticks.” He opened the top box and pulled out three silk purses of different shapes and colors, each with embroidery decorating the front and back. Two had tassels hanging off the sides. He laid each on the cloth. “We believe purses this ornamental were purchased by men here in the United States to send money or gifts to relatives in China.”

He lifted the red one and handed it to her. “This design is much more traditional than that on the sleeve, but if you look closely, you’ll notice the same random-stitch embroidery in the background. I’d been under the belief that random stitch wasn’t invented until much later, but these purses and your sleeve are proving otherwise.”

She studied the purse and was taken aback by a symbol she recognized. “Is that a swastika?”

Daniel nodded. “Don’t worry. It has nothing to do with Hitler. The swastika is an auspicious symbol used since antiquity by many of the world’s cultures. It means good luck or good fortune. Nothing evil about it.”

“Oh.” She set the purse down and lightly touched the narrow blue one. “These are amazing. You say they were sold in Seattle before the Great Fire?” The fire of 1889 destroyed most of Seattle’s business district and led city leaders to create a new plan that included brick buildings that wouldn’t burn, as well as the regrading of streets to minimize the steep hills early residents had to climb.

“At a Chinese store on Washington between Third and Fourth. A man named Huang Fu Liu—or, since Chinese naming conventions place the family name before the given name, Liu Huang Fu—owned it and lived above the shop in a tiny apartment. Immigration documents show he arrived in Seattle in the spring of 1868 with his wife and mother. Vital records show a daughter was born in August of that year and the wife died soon after.”

He picked up the blue purse and handed it to her as he kept talking. “What’s interesting is that all mentions my research team have found of that store in newspaper ads and settler journals say the owner had a son.”

Inara studied the blue embroidered purse, not sure what she was supposed to be looking for in the embroidery. “You have a research team?”

“Yeah. I pulled together some grad students to help me with this project. Hope that’s okay with you?” He cocked his head to the side, sending a lock of black hair over one eye.

The sleeve really was a big deal, she realized. “Why are you doing all this? It’s not like I’m paying you.”

A thoughtful smile spread across his face. “It’s grabbed hold of me like nothing has in a long time,” he admitted with a toss of his head to move the lock of hair away. “I come from a family very proud of the fact that we can trace our history back centuries into ancient China. Add that to the fact that I spent a lot of time at the Wing Luke as a kid. Before he died, my dad worked there and often let me tag along. I grew up surrounded by history. It turned me into an Asian history buff. Your sleeve is an enigma I need to decipher. I plan to keep working on it until we know the whole story, or as long as you’ll let me.”

She nodded, her mind going back to what he’d said earlier. “Okay, so if accounts say the store owner had a son, do you think the birth records were wrong?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. The records could have been right, and for some reason, the family lied and presented the baby as being male. Or, they could have been wrong.”

“Why would someone say their baby girl is a boy?”

Daniel crossed his arms. “Historically, and occasionally still today, a male heir has been preferred to carry on the family name because they can physically do more labor and because it is a son’s responsibility to care for his parents in old age. Once married, a daughter becomes part of her husband’s family and no longer part of her parents’. Maybe the father didn’t like the idea of one day losing his daughter when he’d just lost his wife. Also, we need to consider that Seattle in 1868 was a rough town populated largely by fishermen, loggers, and trappers. If it were me, I’d be worried about my daughter’s safety in a place like that.”

“So they lied to keep her safe?”

Daniel just shrugged. “Maybe. Or maybe the baby really was a boy.”

Inara carefully laid the purse back on the cloth. “So we don’t know. But am I understanding you correctly that the person who made the purses that were sold in the Chinatown store is the same person who made my sleeve? And because the baby’s name was Mei Lien and we know Mei Lien McElroy lived here as Joseph’s wife, it was probably the same person?”

Their hands bumped as they both reached for the third purse, which made them freeze. In his eyes she saw she wasn’t the only one feeling the attraction between them. It quickened her pulse, and though she tried, she couldn’t look away.

“Yes,” he answered with a slight hitch in his voice. “I do believe so.” He blinked, breaking their eye contact, and picked up the gold purse. “Yong Su agrees with me. And Mei Lien was not a common name. The fact that it shows up both places we found this embroidery is not a coincidence.”

Inara let that sink in. “So now what we need to figure out,” she said, studiously avoiding looking at Daniel to keep her pulse in check, “is why she made a robe and then cut off its sleeve. And where’s the rest of the robe?”

“Maybe the subject of the embroidery can tell us. I’ll get out the sleeve.” Daniel carefully wrapped up the purses and returned them to the flat box, which he then placed beneath the other flat box. Opening the second box, he reverently lifted out the sleeve. He laid it, and the tissue paper it rested on, over the cotton fabric. “Yong Su agreed with me that the embroidery is telling a story.”

He stepped to the side in a clear invitation for her to lean over the sleeve. “Look here, where the sky seems to be covered in dark swirls that signify fog or night.” He pointed. “Right there. That’s the Chinese symbol for lie or lying, telling a fib. I didn’t even see it until Yong Su showed me.”

He was talking faster now. “And look here, on the ship’s hull, there is this symbol that we believe shows markings on the ship, if it existed, but hidden in the stitching there’s something about dumping cargo. Plus, there are demon figures in the water with the human bodies and walking on the decks. It’s common in Chinese mythology for serpents or evil spirits to be in the water, but walking like a man on a ship?” He shook his head. “Highly unusual.”

Inara stopped listening to him as her attention caught on the markings on the ship’s hull. She knew those markings. Not the hidden ones, but the apparent markings. The ones that had probably been painted on the actual ship.

She knew the symbol, recognized the stylized
C
and
L
. It wasn’t the name of the ship, but the name of the shipping company.

It was Duncan Campbell’s ship. Premier Maritime Group, the company her dad had taken over from her mother’s father when he retired, used to be called Campbell Lines—CL.

Her own family’s ship was depicted in this work of art!

She opened her mouth to tell Daniel when her gaze landed on the demons and the dead bodies. She swallowed and did not say a word. Mei Lien wouldn’t have created these horrifying images on Duncan Campbell’s ship without a good reason.

A tremor shook Inara’s body.

What
does
this
mean?
She didn’t know, but it couldn’t be good.

Maybe there was more to Duncan Campbell than family lore and history books depicted.

“Why do you think Mei Lien embroidered this steamship?” Her voice sounded shaky to her own ears so she smiled, hoping that would keep Daniel from noticing.

He was too caught up in the story on the sleeve to give her more than a quick glance before flipping the sleeve over to the other side where the picture continued. “I think something important happened to her on this boat. We know she went from Seattle to Port Townsend and Orcas Island. Perhaps it was on this ship that she met her husband, Joseph. Maybe it was an abusive relationship, which would explain the demons. But I think it’s something else.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, look at this. On the bow of the ship are the English letters
POP
.”

“Pop? What does that mean?”

“There was an ocean steamship named the
Prince
of
the
Pacific
,
POP
, that holds an important place in Seattle history.” Here he pulled out a chair and sat down. He then slipped off his gloves and ran both hands through his hair as though he’d just awakened. “On the morning of February 7, 1886, all the Chinese living in Seattle, about three hundred fifty people, were rounded up and forced onto the
Prince
of
the
Pacific
, which sailed that afternoon for San Francisco.”

Sensing this was going to be a long story, Inara also pulled out a chair and sat. “Why were they forced?”

“It was during the era of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which was an immigration law banning Chinese from the United States except in very small numbers and allowing in no laborers at all. But the prejudice went much further.” He had a distant look in his eyes, as though his soul could remember the pain even though he hadn’t personally lived through it. “All up and down the West Coast, Americans of European descent—white Americans—tried, often successfully and usually brutally, to force all Chinese out of their communities.”

He propped one ankle on the opposite knee and fiddled with the gloves in his hand. “White culture viewed the Chinese, including those born on American soil, as temporary sojourners draining their country of resources. Once the railroads were built, Chinese laborers looked to settle and find new jobs. Combine that with the recession of the 1880s and white men worrying about losing jobs to hardworking, low-pay Chinese, and you’re sitting on dynamite.”

She sat forward. “So they decided to force the Chinese to leave the country even if they didn’t want to go? How could they do that?”

He shrugged. “They just did.”

She looked at the sleeve, at the demons forcing the Chinese out of the city they called home, and felt shame. “They should be teaching this in school. We should know about what was done.”

But then her gaze landed on the water. It was dark, swirling with vortexes and half-hidden demons and what looked to be snakes. But there were also bodies. Dozens of bodies floating in the water, some with mouths open as if screaming, others obviously limp and lifeless.

And in the middle, right where the inside of the elbow would be in the sleeve, was one female figure with arms and legs splayed and, strangely, a smile on her face.

“See here?” Daniel went on, pointing to characters on the sleeve, unaware of the turmoil filling Inara. “Here above this woman are the Chinese characters for father and grandmother. I don’t know why they are in the water.”

Whatever it all meant, it made her feel sad. “Did the ship reach San Francisco?”