The Girl Who Wrote in Silk (25 page)

Together she and Daniel described the sleeve and what they knew of Mei Lien.

“So she just disappeared?” Cassie asked as she stacked their empty plates. “Her husband died and her son was sent to an orphanage. No one knows where she went?”

Daniel nodded as he sat back and crossed his hands on his belly. “An islander wrote in his diary of seeing the boy leave the island with his aunt and household belongings sometime around Thanksgiving of the same year the father died. No mention was made of the mother. The diary’s author said he was jubilant to see the ‘dirty Oriental’ go.”

At the derogatory term, Daniel’s family members scowled, Cassie most of all. But when Cassie spoke up, Inara realized her scowl hadn’t been caused by the racist term, but by something else entirely. “You mean to tell me the aunt took him from his home and ditched him at an orphanage?” Her perfectly formed eyebrows disappeared beneath her bangs. “What kind of person does that?”

Inara cocked her head to the side, struck by the realization that she’d been so focused on Mei Lien all this time she hadn’t stopped to consider how terrifying it must have been for the child. How abandoned he must have felt. And betrayed.

Nate’s son, Luke—Inara’s adorably ornery nephew—was the same age as Yan-Tao was when all this happened, around seven. Inara would sooner slit her own wrists than see harm come to that innocent little boy. She would never, under any circumstances, dump him at an orphanage.

Because she wanted to look at the boy’s face again herself, Inara asked the group, “Want to see the picture of Yan-Tao that Daniel found?” She reached for her purse.

“It’s the last evidence we’ve been able to find of him,” Daniel said as Inara set the blue folder on the table and flipped it open. “The very next year after the picture was taken he wasn’t listed in any of the school’s records.”

Yan-Tao looked so sad. Inara handed the picture to Margaret but looked at Daniel. “You didn’t tell me that. What do you think happened to him?”

He shrugged and leaned back in his chair. “He was fourteen. In those days that was old enough to get a job and support himself. He could have gone anywhere. We’re still looking.”

Margaret handed the picture to Vera. “Poor kid.”

Vera scowled down at the picture. “This isn’t some poor kid. This is my father-in-law.”

Daniel shook his head. “That’s not your father-in-law, Grandmother. That’s Yan-Tao McElroy.”

Cassie stopped clearing dishes and moved behind her grandmother’s chair to see the photo.

Vera pursed her lips. The warning look she shot her grandson clearly said a good grandson would never correct his grandmother. “You’re wrong. This is my father-in-law, Ken Chin, as a young man. I’m certain of it.”

At hearing the name, Inara froze. When she turned to Daniel, she saw he looked just as thunderstruck as she felt. Ken. Kenneth. The name was on Yan-Tao’s birth certificate as his middle name. Could they possibly be the same person?

Ridiculous
, she decided. It would be too much of a coincidence.

Slowly, Daniel’s head turned toward his grandmother, his eyes huge. “Do you have a picture of your father-in-law as a young man?”

Vera’s eyebrows lifted and her head tilted to the side as though she was dealing with a simpleton. She slapped the picture in her hand with the backs of her fingers. “It’s right here.”

Daniel’s expression didn’t change. “No, another picture. One we can look at to compare.”

With a look of total disgust for her grandson, Vera pushed to her feet and turned to go inside the house. It was the first time Inara had seen her standing, and she realized she must be no taller than five feet. For an eighty-five-year-old woman, she moved surprisingly quickly. “Well,” she snapped when she reached the glass sliding door. “Are you coming?”

They all glanced at one another, then, as one, they got to their feet to follow Vera inside. As she rounded the table toward the sliding door, Inara grabbed the photo of Yan-Tao that Vera had left on the table.

Vera led them up the stairs to the second-floor landing where open doors showed four bedrooms and a shared bathroom. Inara easily identified what had been Daniel’s room by the poster of Ken Griffey Jr. and another of a flashy red corvette hanging on the walls. She was dying to go inside the room and get a better glimpse of who Daniel had been as a boy, but he was already pulling down the folding ladder that led to the attic.

“Go on,” the tiny woman ordered her grandson, waving her hands impatiently. “In the chest in the corner.”

“Do you need some help?” Inara called as she dubiously eyed the darkness Daniel had disappeared into. Spiders she could handle. Mice, not so much.

“Nah,” Daniel’s voice called down. “I found it.”

They heard a creaking sound followed by a thump. A second later Daniel reappeared holding a green, cracked leather photo album. “There looks to be some interesting stuff in that chest. Is it all Ken’s?”

Vera nodded as she accepted the album Daniel handed down to her. “Yes. When he passed away, we cleaned out his apartment and found the chest in his closet. I planned to go through it one day, but forgot all about it until now.”

Daniel disappeared again as Vera flipped open the photo album. Without a word she turned the open album toward Inara. “See for yourself. That’s the boy in your picture. I’m sure of it.”

Inara took the album and peered closely at the grainy, sepia-toned photograph Vera’s arthritic finger pointed to. Margaret and Cassie gathered on either side of her.

It was rough around the edges, like it had been carried around for years before finally ending up in this album. In the print she could make out a group of five Chinese men standing next to a machine of some sort that was loaded with dirt. In the background a large Victorian house teetered precariously atop what looked to be a desert butte but was clearly in Seattle because the familiar view of Elliott Bay spread out behind them with the Olympic Mountain range in the distance.

“He’s the one on the left, holding the shovel,” Vera told them with a harrumph as she crossed her arms. “They’re working the Denny Regrade. It was his first job in America after he arrived here from China. That must have been, oh, around 1909. The same year as the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, which he attended.” Pride filled her voice. “He borrowed a suit to go and loved telling stories about the half-naked men from Polynesia and the grand exhibit from China.”

The Denny Regrade was something Inara had learned about in school. After the great Seattle fire of 1889, which completely destroyed the main business part of town, the founding fathers, Duncan Campbell among them, decided the steep hills of the city needed to be lowered and the mudflats that were in the city center at that time, now Pioneer Square, needed to be filled. The regrade effectively made the city much easier to navigate. Existing buildings, like the one perched atop the butte in the picture, were either moved to other locations or destroyed.

Inara had to admit, the boy on the left looked a lot like the boy in the picture she’d brought upstairs with her.

Cassie bent over the photo, her head swiveling back and forth from it to the picture of Yan-Tao McElroy. “They look so much alike,” she said with a note of disbelief in her voice as she looked up at her grandmother. “But it can’t possibly be the same person. You said Great-Grandfather spent his childhood in China. In Beijing.”

Vera drew herself up. “He did. He was the youngest son of a fourth-rank civil official. His connections allowed him into America during the time of the Exclusion Act as a merchant. He opened his first store not long after that picture was taken.” Her eyes darted to the side. “He didn’t like to talk about his past, but I learned these things from my husband who was very proud of his father.”

“He could have lied,” Cassie said, echoing Inara’s thoughts.

Vera gasped and slammed her palms on her narrow hips, making Inara very glad she hadn’t been the one to voice the thought. “Chins do not lie!”

Cassie just shrugged, unaffected by the reprimand, as she stepped back from the album and cast a curious glance up the ladder. “What’s taking Daniel so long?”

“Daniel, come down here and give us your opinion,” Margaret called up the stairs. She cast a worried glance between her daughter and mother-in-law before walking to the base of the ladder and looking up. “Daniel?”

Daniel’s face reappeared at the dark opening. He wasn’t smiling. “Come look at this stuff. It’s amazing.”

Margaret looked questioningly at Inara, then Cassie and Vera before turning back to Daniel. “Who? All of us?”

Daniel didn’t explain. He just jerked his head in a distracted nod and disappeared again. With a shrug Cassie stepped past her mother and climbed quickly up. Margaret raised her eyebrows to Vera. “Do you want me to help you?”

Vera shook her head then shuffled over to a chair propped against the wall beside a sofa table displaying family photos. “I’ll wait here. My old knees can’t take the climb.”

Margaret shot Inara a look that confirmed her suspicion that Vera’s knees were perfectly healthy and the woman simply didn’t want to climb into the attic. “Shall we?”

Inara bit back her grin and followed Margaret up the rickety ladder. In the attic she saw a pool of light coming from a bare lightbulb tacked to the rafters. Daniel and Cassie knelt beside a battered wooden trunk and were lifting items out of it and placing them on the floor around them.

“If Ken Chin and Yan-Tao McElroy were really the same person, then we might find clues to what happened to Mei Lien in all this stuff.” Daniel kept pulling items out and piling them on the floor around him. “Help me look at everything.”

Clothing, loose and framed pictures, a leather dog collar, an old pair of shoes, and various other trinkets whispered of untold stories. A carved wooden boat, clearly a child’s toy, lay half-hidden by a worn and tattered blanket. Curious, Inara joined them on the floor and reached for the boat. It was hand-carved and varnished to be waterproof. Years of use had darkened the wood and rounded its corners. She could almost picture young Yan-Tao playing with it on her beach.

Just then Cassie gasped, drawing Inara’s attention to where she pointed at the tattered blanket. Beneath the dirt and grime, Inara could make out intricate embroidery work that looked very familiar.

As Daniel lifted it, the cloth fell open from its folds to reveal more embroidery. In fact, every inch Inara could see was covered in embroidery.

In shock she looked at Daniel. “Could that be…?” She couldn’t finish the question. It was too unbelievable.

Daniel gently unfolded the rest of the cloth and spread it open on the floor away from the other items and trunk. “Oh my God.”

Inara couldn’t speak. Too many thoughts were flying through her mind at once to allow even one of them to form into words. All she could do was stare at the intricately embroidered robe, its left sleeve missing.

The implications slammed into her, causing the attic to spin and the air in her lungs to dissipate.

Her ancestor hadn’t just murdered hundreds of innocent people: he’d murdered people directly related to Daniel.

And if she told him and his family the truth now, it would destroy their relationship. His family would sue her family, ruining all of them

He’d hate her. Hate her very existence and everything she came from because her family had launched their fortune on the blood that now flowed through his veins. And worse, she’d known about the murders and had kept it from him.

But she had to protect her family and protect her mother’s memory. And she had to do it at the expense of her own relationship.

She swallowed, working hard to keep the bile down that now pushed into her throat.
Deep
breath. Deep breath.

“This looks like a deed to a house,” Margaret said, interrupting Inara’s panic attack. “And look, Inara, it’s on Orcas Island.” She held the sheaf of yellowed papers out to her.

Trying to keep her hands from shaking, Inara took the papers and skimmed the legalese printed there as an invisible fist squeezed her skull. “It’s my house,” she croaked. No wonder the woman at the county records office hadn’t found a transfer of deed to her house. The deed had been stashed with a little boy’s belongings all these years. And, oh God, this was proof that Yan-Tao had become Ken Chin. And it was also proof that Rothesay didn’t belong to her. It belonged to the Chin family.

“Let me see that.” Cassie got to her feet and took the papers from Inara’s hand. After a moment of silently reading, she looked up. “Grandfather Ken was Yan-Tao McElroy.”

The three Chins started talking at once while Inara gave into the force pulling her down. She sank to her knees on the floor, unable to do anything but watch the emotions of the family before her as her own strangled her.

It was Daniel who noticed her first. He glanced at her with a laugh that immediately changed to a look of concern. “Inara, what’s wrong?”

“Rothesay,” was all she could manage.

It took him a moment, but she saw on his face when it clicked. “You’re worried this means you’ll lose Rothesay.” He turned to his sister. “Cass, is this deed legal?”

She glanced from Daniel to Inara with concern before she placed a comforting hand on Inara’s shoulder. “Oh, Inara, don’t worry. This was the legal deed, but with adverse possession law, the property fully belongs to you now. We can’t take it from you, nor would we want to.”

Margaret and Daniel seconded her reassurance, but Inara couldn’t help but feel she wasn’t the rightful owner of Rothesay. It had always belonged to Mei Lien and still did, no matter her fate.

Sunday, August 12—present day

Chin residence, Seattle

“I wish I had the sleeve with me,” Inara muttered even though she didn’t mean a word she was saying.

Daniel wanted to study the robe further, so they’d all come downstairs to the Chin’s dining room table, which Daniel had draped with a clean sheet from his mother’s linen closet.

He shot her a grin bright with excitement. “Not to worry. I have pictures in my car.” His wide-eyed gaze returned to the robe as he dug in his jeans pocket and pulled out his car keys. “Cass, go get them for me, will you? They’re in the briefcase in the trunk.”

Cassie grumbled but did as her brother asked, returning a short time later with Daniel’s briefcase, which she set on the dining chair closest to her brother.

“I don’t see why you’re all so excited about this dirty thing. I would have thrown it out had I known it was there,” Vera grumbled from the corner, though Inara noticed she had positioned herself where she’d see and hear everything.

Inara too wished Vera had thrown it out.

The thought made her feel like such a traitor.

“It’s so filthy.” Cassie leaned over the robe not touching it. “Surely he didn’t wear this thing with only one sleeve? He’d have looked ridiculous.”

“If his mother gave it to him, maybe he carried it around like a security blanket.” Margaret rubbed Cassie’s back. “Remember the one you wore to threads?”

Daniel said nothing as he popped open his briefcase and pulled out a stack of photographs and a pair of cotton gloves. He slid the gloves on and leaned over the robe, ignoring the photos for now.

“The style of the robe is just as I suspected. It’s that of a Dragon robe, but without the rank badge or dragons,” Daniel said, though Inara wasn’t sure if he was talking to them or to himself.

She swallowed hard and forced herself to focus on the robe and not the fear raging through her.

The robe had what she’d call a Mandarin collar. The left side of the robe crossed over the right and attached under the right arm with toggles made out of braided embroidery threads. The right sleeve tapered down to a cuff that partially covered the wearer’s hand.
Horse-hoof
, Daniel had called it, just like the cuff on her sleeve.

Stains and tears dotted the fabric. It was so worn and yellowed she had no idea if it had originally matched the vibrant blue silk of her sleeve, although she knew it must have.

Even through the degradation of the fabric, she could clearly see the detail of the images embroidered there. With thread that had once surely been bright with color but was now dulled and dirty, the picture on the right sleeve was of a white man holding a darker-skinned baby. Both were smiling so wide, the man’s white teeth showed. Farther up, near the shoulder, the baby had grown to a young boy who stood with one hand on the head of a black dog. Both waited on the porch of a house and watched as the white man worked a horse-pulled plow.

Inara felt goose bumps prick her arms as she recognized Dahlia’s section of the house without the rest of the manor attached to it.

The boy had to be Yan-Tao, watching Joseph plow the very same plot of land where her kitchen garden now lay.

“As you can see,” Daniel told them, completely caught up in his inspection, “the bottom ten inches are scenes from what must be Imperial Beijing during the time of the Qing Dynasty. See that building there? It looks like the outside of the main gate to the Forbidden City. Nothing like that existed in America at the time. If, as evidence suggests, it was Mei Lien who embroidered this robe, then we can assume this is where she documented their family history rather than personal experience, since she was born here in Seattle.”

Above that section and up to the halfway point where the wearer’s waist would be were scenes that were much more rural. Daniel pointed to a row of what appeared to be shacks or huts made of wood planking. “If this were to come across my desk without my knowing the history, I would swear this is depicting a rural village in China. Look at the Chinese faces on these men gathered around the table set in front of what looks to be a general store.”

“What about this person?” Inara asked, pointing to a man in an American- or British-style black suit and hat walking down the opposite side of the street.

“Again, if I didn’t know Mei Lien made this, I would believe he was a businessman or foreign ambassador visiting China. But it’s got to be early Seattle, before paved streets and brick buildings.”

“Look at these trees on the ridge up above the town.” Cassie pointed higher up the robe. “I assume Seattle was nothing but forest before the city was built?”

“Think of the historical significance,” Margaret breathed. “Not just for our family, but for Seattle. It’s astounding.”

“If that’s Seattle, then up here must be Orcas Island,” Inara mused aloud, then instantly regretted it. The more they learned, the closer Daniel would be to connecting the dots and knowing her family was responsible for the horror depicted on the left sleeve. She had to clench her hands into tight fists to keep from grabbing the robe and running from the house.

Daniel moved around the table to get a better look at the chest portion of the robe. “I think you’re right. Look at this man. It’s the same face as on the right sleeve and done with such detail that he’s obviously important. He’s got his arm around the Chinese woman who, if I’m not mistaken, looks familiar to me. Her face could be the same as the one on the drowning woman on Inara’s sleeve.”

“So that’s Joseph and Mei Lien?” Margaret asked. Inara held her breath for the answer.

“I think it is.”

Daniel’s family grew silent as they looked for the first time at the couple who, it was starting to seem likely, were their ancestors. Inara searched the pictures for images of Rothesay.

They were everywhere. The curve of the beach and even the types of rocks and white shells. The steep rise of an evergreen tree–covered mountain rising up behind the apple orchard. Astoundingly, even the slick head of a seal sitting offshore staring at the woman alone on the beach.

And…the cabin.

There was no mistaking the cabin. It looked exactly like the one she and her siblings played around as children. The same cabin that today was being reclaimed by the forest, its roof fallen in, moss blanketing the log walls.

“Look on the shoulder there, right where the left sleeve was cut off.” Margaret pointed but was careful not to touch the fragile garment. “It looks like the threads are gradually darkening, like a cloudy sky or deep water.”

They all gathered close to the left side of the robe where the sleeve was missing to see what she pointed to. Just above what looked like a perfect replication of Dahlia’s house, the sky indeed looked turbulent with a storm rolling in from the direction of the missing sleeve. It was also the same direction where the original Campbell property had been. That, surely, was no coincidence.

The stormy, dark sky matched what she remembered from the sleeve.

Even after finding the deed to her house, a small part of her wanted to believe it was a coincidence. But the proof was unmistakable. Daniel was a direct descendant of the people her own ancestor had murdered in cold blood.

Mei Lien—or maybe it was Yan-Tao?—had hidden the sleeve as evidence against the family responsible so that one day justice could be dealt. Now Inara had to decide what to do about it.

“Inara, could you hand me those pictures?” She jerked at hearing her name and looked up to find Daniel pointing to the stack he’d left on the table by her hip.

Could her legs carry her that far? He was only three steps away, but they were shaking uncontrollably. She must.

She swallowed hard, and then managed to do as Daniel asked with only a slight falter in her step. When Daniel’s gloved fingers touched hers, she met his gaze and found a tender smile there just for her.

Her eyes smarted with tears, surprising her, so she quickly looked down at the robe, hoping Daniel would think she was just as eager as everyone else to learn more.

He flipped through the photographs until he found one he wanted and carefully set the rest aside. Blowing out a breath that revealed the nerves he must be feeling, he laid the picture on the table where the left sleeve should be.

The embroidered story transitioned seamlessly from the robe onto the photograph.

He opened his briefcase again and pulled out a magnifying glass. Without a word of explanation, he leaned over the seam between robe and photo and studied it for several minutes.

When he drew himself fully upright again, he had a look of wonder on his face. “It matches. The cuts on both seem to match, though I’d like to compare the actual sleeve to the robe to be sure. But the jagged cuts match. It’s as if someone took scissors to it and chopped off the sleeve for some reason.”

“What would make someone do that?” Margaret wondered aloud, though everyone in the room knew there was no answer.

Everyone, that was, except Inara. She could hazard a very good guess why Mei Lien had chopped off that particular section and hidden it away.

Sure, she could have decided to spare her son the horror of what had happened, but Inara had a feeling it was something else entirely.

Mei Lien had known her enemy, Duncan Campbell, was about to take her house from her, however he’d managed it. Mei Lien’s husband was dead and Chinese people at that time weren’t allowed to own property in Washington State. Maybe Yan-Tao could have inherited the house and land since he was half-white, but how would Mei Lien have supported him to adulthood?

No, Inara’s gut said Mei Lien had purposely hidden the sleeve in that house, probably for a Campbell descendant to find. She’d wanted the truth known. She’d wanted Campbell’s family to suffer as her family had suffered.

Maybe not publicly, because what Campbell descendant would knowingly broadcast such damaging family secrets? But privately, the family would be torn apart.

Just as Inara was being torn apart right now.

Mei Lien hadn’t known that the person who found the sleeve would be romantically involved with her very own descendant.

But she was, and if she was smart, Inara would end it now before her family was ruined. End it before Daniel learned more and was hurt by the knowledge of her lies.

But how could she end it? The Chin family had just as much of a right, if not more, than her to pursue the research even if she pulled out.

Vera, who had been silent through all of this, moved around the table to Inara’s side. Inara took a deep breath and steeled herself for whatever the woman might say to her.

“I want to see where you found the sleeve. I want to come to your house.”

“Vera, don’t be rude,” admonished Margaret, but Inara noticed it was only halfhearted.

Inara looked at Daniel and on his face she saw an eagerness shining there that made her heart twist. Swallowing hard to control the acid climbing her throat, she nodded. “I would be honored to have you come up and see the house. It once belonged to your family, after all.”

“Next weekend?” Vera pressed.

Inara noticed Margaret made no reprimand this time. “Sure. Next weekend works.”

At that everyone started talking at once, discussing work schedules and how to shift things around for the trip up to Orcas. Inara looked at the faces around the table. Each one held various similarities to the others and, now she knew, those features could have come from Mei Lien.

Mei Lien—the woman likely murdered by Inara’s own great-great-great-grandfather.

Margaret, Cassie, and Vera had their heads together, all three talking at once about the robe, the hotel, their newfound ancestry.

When she looked across the table at Daniel, she found him looking back at her and her heart lurched. Then he smiled and his eyes filled with a tenderness that bespoke of the special bond he no doubt felt between them because of this shared history.

But there was something else there that scared her even more. It looked like love.

She looked away, ashamed.