Between a Wok and a Dead Place: A Spice Shop Mystery

“Are you so eager to get rid of me?” Godith Adeney said to Cadfael, offended. “And just when I’m getting to know sage from marjoram! What would you do without me?”

— Ellis Peters, One Corpse Too Many

PROVING MY MOTHER RIGHT ABOUT HER EyES AND EARS, AKI Ohno had seen Roxanne and me on the sidewalk outside the Gold Rush. When she saw Bobby come by a few minutes later and go in, summoned by the old auntie upstairs, she’d been worried and called her granddaughter. But first, she’d called Abigail, who’d managed to beat Officer Ohno and the police to the hotel.

Bobby had been hauled away by the time the detectives arrived, as the EMTs finished checking us out. Even velvet ropes can leave marks, and Roxanne had a nasty gash on her temple that the EMTs thought warranted a trip to the ER for a scan.

“Not until I know Pepper’s okay,” she said, “and what Bobby was after.”

“The clue’s got to be in the drawing,” I said. “A hidden room. A secret passage.”

“I swear, she sounds like my ten year old,” Detective Tracy said to his partner. “Reading too much Nancy Drew.”

After knocking us out, Bobby had snatched up the drawing, and we’d found it on the floor outside the treatment room where he’d dragged us. I explained as best I could, which left Spencer nodding her head, acknowledging the possibility, and Tracy shaking his.

“You mean to tell me there’s another secret room? Filled with avengers and hornets? Do we need to call for backup?”

I looked at Abigail, sitting behind the hotel desk under Paula Ohno’s watch. “He doesn’t get it. Do you know which room? And where the key is?”

“Down this passage, I think.” She pointed to a long hallway on the map, going the opposite direction from the hall to the plumbing access.

After all these years, and after what Bobby had done to Glee and Terence, Abigail was finally free of her promise to the old man, and it was a visible relief to unburden herself.

Detective Spencer got a text and left. Tracy, Roxanne, and I, along with two patrol officers, traipsed back down the stairs to the pharmacy.

“In an old jar,” Tracy said, repeating Abigail’s reference to the keys. “Does she know how many old jars there are in this rat’s nest?”

Eventually, we found the right jar, and buried in the smelly old herbs, a ring of brass keys. Roxanne nearly bit her nails as the officers inched a cabinet filled with antique bottles and other mysterious items away from the wall to reveal a recessed doorway. Tracy stuck keys into the brass lock until he found the right one.

The latch squealed in protest and I held my breath. As Abigail had said, the door opened onto a hallway. Alas, she had not known which room we were looking for on the long, narrow passage. We used the drawing, and a powerful flashlight held by one of the officers, to follow the twists and turns through thick cobwebs that made Tracy shudder and cough, and we opened every door. As I’d suspected, each room mirrored the one where we’d been held. And each had a door or window that had once opened onto the alley, a connection to the outside world that was now just another eccentricity in a neighborhood packed with them.

“This had better pay off, Spice Girl.” Tracy slipped the final key into the lock. I held my breath. The door opened and the flashlight beam picked out stacks of vintage fruit crates, the labels advertising Washington apples, cherries, and pears.

“Wouldn’t you know,” Tracy said. “It’s always in the last place you look.”

The room held no furniture. Just boxes. Boxes and boxes of old comic books. The collection young Bobby had acquired, ten cents or a quarter at a time. I imagined old man Wu thinking at first that his young son’s interest was nothing more than a hobby, something boys did. American boys. Maybe brought the boy comics. Gave him an allowance, then cut it off, knowing it wasn’t going to bikes and bubble gum and movies, as with other boys, but to sketch pads and thick graphite pencils. And comics and more comics.

Then, when the boy dropped out of college to try his hand in animation, the old man had stashed his treasures where he could never find them. Told him so, all but daring him to fight back, to fight for what he loved.

Much as Bobby wanted to be rid of the building, he couldn’t sell it. Not until his collection had been found. The collection his bitter old father had withheld from him, the collection he’d been trying to recreate, all these years, with his own shop. Had he been trying to sell lesser valuables not to pay for his wife’s medical treatment, but to buy what he’d lost when the old man had hidden the boxes?

Dave Down Under had given me the clue. What Bobby was offering to sell was interesting, he’d said, but incomplete. Whether it was Archie, The Green Hornet, or Spider-Man, serious collectors wanted a complete set, and without those first few issues, the value was minimal.

WE RETURNED to the lobby covered in dust, the basement doors closed behind us, Bobby Wu’s collection once more tucked away in safety. But this time, Detective Tracy had photographs and keys, and the evidence would be safe.

The outside door opened, and Detective Spencer entered, her long black raincoat glistening from the early evening mist. Oliver held the door for a man and woman I did not know.

Behind the hotel desk, Abigail shrieked. At a gesture from Spencer, Officer Ohno stepped aside and Abigail rushed forward. The newcomer opened her arms and they embraced.

A moment later, Abigail took a step back, gripping the woman’s shoulders, then raised her hands to the woman’s cheeks.

“Glee,” she said, her voice cracking. “Glee. I never thought I’d see you again. I am so sorry about Terence. About what my—what Bobby did.”

The man put a supportive hand on Glee’s back, and Oliver moved close to his mother.

“It’s not your fault, Abby,” Glee said. I put her in her midfifties, gracious and attractive. “You did everything you could back then, to help us and keep us safe. Terence knew the risk. I warned him. But he wanted to know our family history.”

I glanced at Detective Tracy, watching this reunion with interest. Abigail Wu had suspected her husband was a killer but hadn’t told the police. How he’d deal with that, I didn’t know, but I had a hunch she’d be facing some pretty uncomfortable questioning.

“You knew Oliver had gone to find Glee, Terence Leong’s mother,” I said to him. “You knew where he’d gone, and you never let on.”

“Allow me some secrets, Spice Girl. Professional courtesy.” I didn’t let him see me smile.

The police had not known exactly where to find Glee Leong, now Glee Webster, here with her husband, John. They had finally spoken with Terence’s temporary landlord, a friend of Aki Ohno’s who rented rooms, and traced him back to San Francisco. Abigail had begun searching for Glee when she became ill, telling her son about her quest. But they got nowhere until Oliver started his new job and saw a list of management for properties owned by the same company. There, on the roster for a hotel in Oakland, was a woman named Glee. With the unusual name, across the bay from the city where her grandfather had fled when old Fong hounded him away, Oliver and Abigail believed they’d finally found her. Last Friday, when he should have been at the symphony with Seetha, Oliver had been on a plane. Thanks to his text Sunday afternoon, the police had located him and helped persuade Glee to return to Seattle.

While Tracy and I had been battling spider webs the size of Elliott Bay, Detective Spencer had gone to meet the Websters and Oliver at the hotel where he worked.

“I don’t blame you,” Glee said. She and Abigail were sitting together now on the small couch, holding each other’s hands.

“How did you two connect in the first place?” I asked. “Back when Terence was a baby and you took refuge here? And how did Terence get into the Gold Rush?”

“I was widowed young,” Glee said, her tone calm and steady. “Before Terence was born. My grandfather had died years earlier, and my mother told me what she knew about the Gold Rush. How Wu Fong had blamed him for his wife’s death and cheated him out of the building. That was her word—he was never angry or bitter, despite knowing he’d been blamed unfairly. There was nothing he could have done to save the poor woman.”

“Part of the delay in getting up here,” John Webster said, “was sorting through his files. It wasn’t easy—they’re in Chinese—but we think we found them.”

“Back then,” Glee said, “I was desperate to learn anything I could about my family, since I had so few people left. I came to Seattle knowing no one. Or who to ask.”

“She knows everyone,” Glee said, “and most of their secrets. She introduced me to Abigail, who told me what she knew and let me stay here.”

“It should have been yours,” Abigail said. “The Gold Rush should have been yours.”

Glee squeezed her old friend’s hand. “I was never after the building, my friend. And I am not after it now. I only wanted the story. The truth. But not at your expense.”

“I promised you you’d be safe here. I told you Bobby never came into the Gold Rush. But that day, he did, and he found you. And—” Abigail choked back sobs. “We’ve found you, thank God.”

“I’ve never known for sure,” Glee said, “but I think the woman who worked for Wu Fong told Bobby I was here. I bought dumplings from her and let her play with Terence. Loyalty is a good thing, but not when it’s to a bad man.”

The woman who lived upstairs in an adjacent building, with a window overlooking the alley. The old auntie, as Rose the dim sum seller at the Red Lantern called her, who’d seen Roxanne and me at the food walk. Had she seen Oliver, and mistaken him for Terence?

I’d thought of Aki as one of those people, like my neighbor at the lofts, who are simply so present that you forget to truly see them. In my blindness, I had not recognized the woman who’d been watching me while I’d been searching for her.

And while I’d kept telling myself I should call Aki and hadn’t, she’d been keeping her eye on me.

Why the old auntie had done what she did, telling Bobby about Glee’s presence in the hotel he hated all those years ago, I could not say. Telling him about Terence. Had she known that Abigail had helped Glee, and was helping her son too, because Abigail believed Fong had cheated the Chen-Leong family?

“I begged Terence to put me in touch with you,” Abigail told Glee, “but he didn’t trust me enough yet. Then, when it became clear, when I figured out that my own husband had killed your son, I knew we had to find you.”

“That’s what I called him,” Glee said. “We were in a car accident, driving home after dinner with friends. I was pregnant. My husband was killed, but I barely got a scratch. After dinner, I’d tucked my fortune cookie in my purse and it didn’t break, so . . .”

“‘Fortunate is the son,’” she said, reciting from memory, “‘who knows his mother’s love.’”

“I’d still like to know,” Roxanne said after a pause, “who took the letters. And how Terence got in the hotel. I’m fairly sure he was watching me. I led him to the pharmacy, though I didn’t know it. That’s what led to his death. To Bobby following him and killing him.”

“Francis—Fong—kept the letters. I gave them to Glee,” Abigail said, answering Roxanne. “When you started working on the upper hallway, I took them, not realizing you’d already seen them. And I gave Terence a key. So he could see what should have been his. You did nothing wrong. You love this place as Glee and I do, as Terence did. As I hope my son does.”

Oliver nodded. Had he resented his father’s devotion to The Green Hornet and the other comics Bobby collected, the way Bobby had resented his father’s dedication to the Gold Rush? Certainly Bobby had dismissed Oliver’s interest in the hotel. Neither had known the reason for their fathers’ single-minded sternness, and in the way of sons everywhere, had seen it as a rejection of himself. Bobby had turned defiant. But Abigail had understood, and she’d done her best to nurture in her son a healthy independence.