Twenty-Four

How the Japanese tradition of tucking slips of paper with lines of poetry in “fortune crackers” led to the fortunes in modern cookies is a mystery, but no one can resist reading them —or being amused.

ANOTHER MONDAY, ANOTHER NEW EMPLOYEE. ARE AND I got to the shop early, taking a moment to relax and enjoy our double mocha (me) and doggy biscuit (him).

Hayden still had a couple of weeks to work at the restaurant, which was closed Mondays, but he’d wanted to get a jump start here, and arrived ahead of schedule. I got him settled in the nook and went over the paperwork. Issued him an apron and a pocket-sized notebook. Then training began. Vanessa was new enough to hover, listening in to catch what she might have missed, and experienced enough to pipe up now and then with her own newcomer’s advice. I had a good feeling about the crew.

Teaching my new hires about the world of spice was a welcome antidote to yesterday’s physical and mental exercise. After Arf and I took the bus home from the CID, I’d called Roxanne. I’d hauled out my Seattle history books and peppered my dad, the retired history teacher, with questions about the regrades. I was sure I was right about the Gold Rush and what I’d seen in the alleys. But I wanted to understand the lay of the land, literally and figuratively, before I shared my thoughts with the detectives. At this point, it was all very interesting, as Detective Tracy would say, but I had no proof that it meant anything.

For her part, Roxanne had contacted the genealogist and emailed her the documentation we’d gathered so far. The woman could see us this afternoon.

Genealogy. Now there’s a hobby for you.

Meanwhile, spice beckoned. Two August brides, best friends, came in to sign up for our wedding registry. That gave me a chance to show Hayden and Vanessa how it worked.

“You’re getting married soon,” I said to him after the brides had left.

“She’d gobble this up,” he replied. Food jokes come with the territory. I suggested he register, as much for practice as for the gifts, and left him and Vanessa to work their way through the form. Hayden would bring his fiancée in later to choose among the spice grinders, gift boxes, and other good things.

I kissed my dog and left him in the shop. The genealogist kept an office on Jackson Street, and I didn’t want to be late.

But when I saw Rose from the Red Lantern at the bus stop, I had to say hello.

“Best thing on the food walk, your shrimp dumplings,” I said. “Second best, your sesame balls.”

“What I wouldn’t give for a couple of sesame balls right now, and some tea.” Her skin was drawn, the circles under her eyes a faint green. “I just brought my old auntie home from the hospital. I wish she’d come stay with us, but she’s lived in the CID her entire life. She’ll never leave.”

“Isn’t there an assisted living facility around here, one focused on the Asian community?” I was sure my mother had said Aki Ohno had been instrumental in developing one.

“She doesn’t want to live with all those old people,” Rose said, and we both burst out laughing. Then her bus came, and I rushed to meet Roxanne.

She was waiting for me on the sidewalk. Despite her makeup, a bruise bloomed on her cheek, her palms red and raw. I dismissed any suggestion that she’d thrown herself to the sidewalk on purpose to deflect attention from herself as a murder suspect. It was a long way from taking a swing at your brother-in-law when you were a pissed-off teenager nearly twenty years ago to bashing a man in the head with a brick and pretending you’d found him that way. Besides, nothing connected her to Terence Leong except the Gold Rush. Means and opportunity, but motivation? She’d been working in the building. Why had he been there?

Had you asked me what I expected a Chinese genealogist to look like, I would not have described Gloria Wong. A striking woman of seventy or so, she was slender and taller than I—at least five eight. Her salt-and-pepper bob brushed the turtleneck of her tomato-red sweater, the perfect shade for her coloring.

“What a fascinating mystery,” she said, after Roxanne made introductions. “Thank you for calling me, Roxie. You and I haven’t worked together for ages—not since you were tracing the provenance of that sword and wanted to confirm its history.”

Roxie? I hid my surprise. Even Nate didn’t call her that, and he’d known her since she was a kid.

“Right. The museum was offered a sword we suspected had been acquired during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, though it was much older.” Roxanne directed the explanation to me. “We wanted to make sure it hadn’t been stolen. Gloria was able to use the identifying marks on the blade to track down the family it was made for, then helped us facilitate its return.”

“We did a good deed,” Gloria said.

Antique oak bookcases held books and objects. A carved stone Buddha seated on a corner table reminded me of the statue in Roxanne’s bathroom. A poster identified the major dynasties of China, while another explained the Jia Pu system, the record of a clan’s lineage and history, and noted the types of records and data commonly kept. A third listed the major immigration laws and events affecting the Chinese in the United States.

Gloria noticed my interest. “Traditionally, the Chinese kept detailed genealogies that go back at least to the 1600s, and in some families, much further. As you’d expect from a society that venerates its ancestors. Sit, sit.” She gestured to a pair of modern black leather and chrome sling chairs across from her glass-topped desk.

“Sixteen hundred?” I said.

“Happily, I didn’t have to dig nearly that far back to answer your questions. Clients often think genealogy requires spending hours in dusty catacombs, mixed with modern computer magic.” She pointed at the large monitor mounted on her desk but facing us, no doubt for showing clients documents and other findings. “And there is some truth to that. I could do more with more time, of course, but we can be pretty sure who sent these letters and who they were referring to. We start with the letters themselves. I understand enough of the old script to get the gist. Dr. Locke did a good job.”

“I’ve sent them to a linguist for a more precise translation,” Roxanne said. “Though I don’t know when we’ll have it.”

“Good.” Gloria rested her hands on the leather desk protector. I tried to remember the word for it. A blotter. “I cross-referenced the names on the deed abstracts you sent with other records. It would be helpful to inspect the deeds themselves, but that can wait. We don’t need the full history of the Gold Rush block right now. We want to focus on one particular owner. Chen King Liu, in the traditional style of naming. Or King Liu Chen, in western style.”

Not Wu Fong. No matter what style or name—F.H., Fong, or Francis Wu.

“Now, who was he?” she continued. “For that, let’s look at the census records.”

She inched her laptop closer and clicked a few keys. A handwritten census record popped up on the monitor, one name highlighted.

“This is 1920. We see your man, King Lui Chen. Occupation: herbalist. Still there in the 1930 census.”

She gave us the look of a parent watching a child beginning to unwrap a present and get an idea what’s inside.

“There’s more we can learn from the census, including when and where he was born, or where he says he was born, and the members of his household. We’ll come back to Dr. Chen in a minute.” Another record appeared on the screen. “Death certificate for Pearl Wu, in 1931. Her address is that of the Gold Rush. She’s not listed as being under any doctor’s care, which is interesting. The practice of Chinese medicine was not legal then, so the official record keepers would not have acknowledged a Chinese doctor.”

“What did she die from? Do we know?”

“Beyond heart failure, no. That’s all the record says. But see this?” Gloria pointed at the date. “She died not long after she was released from detention. It has to have come on quickly. If she’d been sick, they wouldn’t have released her.”

“If it came on that fast,” Roxanne said, “could anyone have saved her?”

“That, I couldn’t say. You’ll need to consult a medical expert with knowledge of treatments at the time. But it’s hard to blame Dr. Chen. The combination of the long voyage and detention might have weakened her. Detainees were subject to constant medical exams and interviews. The process could have made her reluctant to consult a western doctor.”

“So Mr. Wu waits months for his wife, then loses her. Were there children?” I asked.

Gloria Wong opened her hands, her lips pressed together. She didn’t know. “Many Chinese of that era believed that if there were no descendants, no one to tend the grave, the soul would wander, restless.”

And haunt the Gold Rush?

“What happened to Dr. Chen? Don’t tell us he sold the building and went back to China.”

“Ah, now we’re in luck. I found him in San Francisco, where he appears to have worked in an herb shop in Chinatown. You may know, herb shops were often fronts for clinics, until the laws changed. Lots of references to him in local records and the press, well into the 1960s.”

Had Fong dropped his plans for revenge, as counseled by his friend, or had his efforts failed?

“When Dr. Chen died,” the genealogist continued, “his obituary ran in both Chinese and English-speaking newspapers. He was well regarded.”

“Family?” Roxanne said.

“Predeceased by his wife. Survived by his daughter and granddaughter.”

I peered at the screen. The newspaper page was old and yellowed, the print not easy to decipher.

“I sketched it out for you.” The genealogist slid a neatly printed chart across the desktop.

And if I understood all the lines and squares and thises and thats, Gloria Wong believed the man who’d run the pharmacy in the basement of the Gold Rush, the man who’d been unable to save Pearl Wu, wife of Wu Fong who very likely became known as Francis Wu—that man had been Terence Leong’s great-grandfather.

WE FOUND a table on the mezzanine at Fortunate Sun, away from prying ears. Keith brought a pot of green tea for Roxanne—I was still adderbabbled at the thought of anyone calling her Roxie— and his house-brewed chai for me, made with green cardamom I’d sourced from the monsoon forests of southern India. Someday, I’d get there in person. Then he set a small plate of egg tarts on the table and left.

“My head is swimming,” Roxanne said, the steam from our drinks perfuming the air between us. “Wu Fong was Francis Wu, Bobby’s father. We haven’t documented that yet, but it seems pretty clear. Was he so unhinged by his wife’s death that he—”

I held up both hands and she stopped. Gloria Wong had planted more questions than a farmer in springtime. But before we dove into the mysteries of the Wu family and Dr. Chen and Terence Leong, we had some air to clear.

“I know what happened when you were sixteen. Nate told me.”

She set her tea on the table and slumped in her chair.

Finally, she opened her eyes and spoke. “You’ve done an amazing job of never letting on that the assistant curator of Asian antiquities at a major art museum was a juvenile delinquent.”

“Considering what you do,” I said, “and that you brought me into this mess involving small, possibly valuable objects that you’re responsible for, and now the box of letters has gone missing, I think you owe me the story. The whole story.”

“I swear to you, Pepper. I did not take the letters. I’m showing everybody the pictures I took. You. The cops. Gloria Wong, who looks like an elegant bookworm but puts up with nothing from nobody. Why would I do that, if I wanted to keep the originals hidden for my own gratification?”

I wondered, too. I said nothing.

She gazed over my shoulder, into the past. Folded one arm across her chest, her other fingering the pink-and-rose scarf shot with gold that I’d given her last summer as a thank you gift. Of all the accessories to wear today.

“I was an angry kid,” she said. “My parents were in Thailand on an aid mission, and they parked me in Seattle with Rosie and Nate. Newlyweds, saddled with an angry teenager, though to their credit, they never treated me like a fifth wheel. Nate should have been resentful, but he wasn’t.”

“Not in his nature.”

“I know that now, but then, I figured he just wasn’t being honest with me. Nobody was. My parents, who said Southeast Asia wasn’t safe for a teenage girl, and I’d be better off finishing high school stateside. Why was it safe for them? Why had the schools abroad been good enough for Rosie, but not me? It wasn’t that I wanted to be in Lampang, necessarily, but they shouldn’t have left me behind. They should have put me first, for a couple of years.

“That’s how I felt then, and truth is, I still do. What they did wasn’t fair to Rosie or me.” She sighed and picked up her teacup. “Twenty years, and every detail of that day is burned into my brain. Nate had just bought the boat in Alaska and was home for a couple of weeks. They wanted to play tourist at the Market—eat, shop, poke around. I didn’t want to go.”

“Kristen and I loved hanging out there as teenagers.”

“Would have been fun if I hadn’t been such an idiot, dragging my feet, pouting.” She refilled her cup. “We were Down Under, in the import shop. You know the one.”

I nodded. The lamp with the red silk shade that sits on our tea armoire had come from there. So had the scarf around her neck, a fact I would never, ever reveal.

“They were ogling the jewelry. Opals, I think. I saw this cute little soapstone elephant. I’d always liked elephants. Rode one in India.” The sounds of afternoon tea breaks rose from the main level. “I—I don’t know what came over me. I had money. I didn’t have to steal it. But I grabbed it and stuffed it in my pocket. The owner saw me and confronted me. I whirled around, fists flailing. And Nate . . .”

She stopped, still bewildered after all these years.

“He blames himself,” I said. “Not for getting hit, though maybe for not reacting fast enough to grab your arm. For not keeping an eye on you. But mainly, I think, for not realizing how vulnerable you were.”

“He wasn’t responsible for me.” She shook her head. “Nate has no reason to blame himself. He didn’t want to prosecute the assault, and I think the shop owner would have dropped the matter if my sister hadn’t gotten so uptight about it. Juvenile court. There is nothing so mortifying.”

That, I believed.

“My parents didn’t even come home, not until their mission finished months later. Nate went back to Alaska and it was me and Rosie. Good times.” She shook off the memory and collected herself, almost resembling the self-possessed woman I’d come to know. “But I promise you, Pepper, I have never taken so much as a grape in a grocery store since then.”

I believed that, too.

“The Market,” I said, suddenly realizing. “When we went to the shop last Sunday, then out for lunch. That was the first time you’d been there in all those years, wasn’t it?”

“But not the last.”

I took a sip of chai, then dug in my tote for a notebook.

“So, Wu blamed Dr. Chen for his wife’s death. Bought the building from him a year later—”

“For a pittance,” she said, spitting out the word. “That much we know from the abstracts.”

“The question, and the answer may be in the other letters, is whether Wu hounded Chen to abandon his practice and forced him to sign over the deed to the Gold Rush.”

“One more question. Why would Francis or Fong leave the property to Abigail, not Bobby?”

“Dr. Locke—Henry—says Bobby’s father was older when he was born and wanted a son who would follow in his footsteps. Not one whose ambition was to draw pictures. My guess, he saw the property as his legacy. He’d lost his first wife, but he’d extracted something valuable as payment.” We stared at each other, thinking.

“What if—” we said at the same time, each of us breaking off.

“What if,” I said, “the old man left the hotel to Abigail because he knew Bobby would sell it and spend the money on frivolous things. Avengers comics and The Green Hornet.” I hadn’t told Roxanne about the cardboard cutout in Bobby’s shop or his offer to sell something valuable—I didn’t know what—to the dealer Down Under. “But Abigail, with her impoverished childhood and her sense of duty to family, would hang on to it for Oliver. She as much as told me it would go to him, meaning she’s made a will that bypasses her husband.”

“So Oliver can carry on the family legacy, after her death,” Roxanne said. “How do we prove any of this?”

“I have no idea.” I pulled out my phone. “And that brings us to Terence Leong.”

I brought up the morgue photo the police had given us and laid the phone on the table. I was about to ask Roxanne why she’d lied about leaving the hotel. Why she’d taken the pictures of a lion dancer at the food walk. Who she’d thought it was.

But I didn’t get the chance.

“That’s the man the police were asking about,” Keith Chang said, standing at the side of our table with a fresh pot of tea. A young man was bussing the table behind us. “I didn’t recognize him. But you were off the day they came in, weren’t you? Take a look.”

The busser set his tray down and wiped his hands on his apron. Poked the screen, bringing the picture back.

“Yeah, I know him,” he said, glancing at his boss, then at me. “Well, I don’t know-know him. But that’s the man I ran into in the basement.”