The girls slipped down the street to a black Ford belonging to Anna’s landlord, which Anna had surreptitiously borrowed for the occasion and planned to return in the morning. Joe waited there, leaning up against the car with his arms folded across his chest. He glared at Anna.
Anna swore, “Biscuits.”
“You think I don’t know you?” He turned to Miss Robins. “You’re risking your life. I can’t let you do it.”
Miss Robins lifted her noble chin. “I don’t care if I die. They can harm my body, but they can’t harm my soul.”
Anna stomped to the auto and got in, rolling her eyes. She fiddled with the dash, got up, and set about winding the crank to turn over the engine. “You’ll have to tie me up to keep me from going.”
“Maybe I—”
Anna heard a smack and spun around in time to see Joe Singer hit the ground. He lay there unmoving. Miss Robins stood over him holding a full bottle of Coca Cola, looking rather stunned. She glanced up at Anna. “I didn’t want to see him killed.”
Anna rushed to Joe and knelt beside him, holding her breath. She lowered her face very close to his handsome one. Peppermint wafted rhythmically onto her lips. She blinked at Miss Robins. “You brained him.”
Miss Robins bowed her head. “I’m sorry.”
“No, you did well.”
Yuk-Lin came forward and picked up Joe’s right leg.
Each of the four ladies took a limb, Yuk-Lin and Ting Ting hobbling fiercely on their bound feet, Anna and Miss Robins straining against their corsets. They carried Joe’s limp body back to his apartment. Mrs. Puce asked no questions but simply added her strength to the task. The five women lifted Joe Singer onto his bed. Anna took off his boots, and would have taken off his pants and shirt, as any good nurse would, had Miss Robins not been watching. Instead, she collected Joe’s handcuffs from his belt and cuffed his arms above his head, fastened to the brass bed. She left the keys in his pants pocket, where he could not reach them, and pulled the quilt over his body, tucking it up to his chin.
Joe groaned again and moved a little. Anna straightened up. “He has a concussion. We’ve got to go before he wakes up, because he’ll be very, very angry.”
Ominous clouds darkened the sky, and the misty air clung in tiny droplets to Anna’s hair. The roads were rutted from the recent storms. It was thirty miles to San Pedro, a three-hour drive on good roads. Anna didn’t have good roads. She prayed a silent prayer to Saint Raphael, patron saint of safe journeys, reminding him they had to reach the port before sunrise, when the dockworkers would begin their day and the fishing boat would leave the harbor.
Yuk-Lin leaned over the side of the car and pointed her face into the wind, letting the night air toss her veil. Ting Ting sat with her arms wrapped tight around her. Anna addressed Miss Robins. “I assume you know where we’re going, since you made the arrangements.”
“A man’s supposed to meet us at the docks. But our contact will be looking out for girls disguised as Chinese boys accompanied by two men. He’s not going to find us, and I don’t know what he looks like.”
“We’ll have to find his boat, then,” Anna said.
“That’s a problem. His boat will be anchored off Deadman’s Island. It’s named the Juana Maria. We’ll have to walk out on the breakwater to the island, and it’s going to be dark. It’s far, Anna. A couple hundred yards. And if the tide is high, we could get wet. When we find the boat, somebody’s going have to swim out to it.”
“I can swim.”
“As can I. We’ll flip for it.”
Anna hated to admit it, but Miss Robins was brave. No wonder Joe had trusted her.
Anna hit a pothole, and the car shook. “Joe told you about Elizabeth Bonsor?”
Miss Robins’s voice became a whisper. “Yes. He did.”
“Did he ask you about Elizabeth’s friend, Chan Mon? I think you met him once. He was a friend of Leo Lim’s. You chatted one time about hiking to Sturtevant Falls. He had a hunting cabin off the San Gabriel Trail.”
Miss Robins said, “I don’t know any Chan Mon.”
“Have any white men threatened you because of your contact with the Chinamen?”
“We’ve been repeatedly threatened at the mission. And I know this sounds strange, Matron Blanc, but we’ve even been threatened by cops.”
“The Chinatown squad?”
“Yes. Veiled threats, but threats all the same. ‘Leave Chinatown or don’t be surprised if something terrible happens to you.’ It’s not the words, so much as the tone of the warning. You understand.”
“Who?”
“Detective Snow. I have a bad feeling about him, but I try not to let him frighten me.”
“And Detective Singer knows?”
“Yes. I tell him everything. But we can’t be run off. Missionaries die all over the world—Africa, New Guinea, China. Mr. Puce was beheaded. But the Chinamen are precious in God’s sight. Someone has to show them this. Their very souls depend upon it.”
Anna pondered whether Detective Snow was capable of killing a girl. He’d certainly stood by passively while prostitutes were being killed by the New High Street Suicide Faker. Anna believed he was capable. But she didn’t think he’d killed Elizabeth—not alone anyway. The dummy in the bed suggested some kind of scheming. Snow wasn’t smart enough for that.
The car motored along. Yuk-Lin tried to distract Ting Ting with fairy tales about a herd boy and a weaving maiden and the lady of the moon. Miss Robins attempted to translate. The stories and Miss Robins’s silly translation errors should have delighted Anna, but her mind was on more serious things. She smiled to be polite.
After five hours, they saw the lights of San Pedro and smelled the sea air. Anna stared out over the horizon, which was blanketed in a coastal fog, illuminated by the blinking of a lighthouse. She could see the outline of a small islet. A breakwater of large, jagged rocks connected the island to a peninsula. The breakwater was at least two football fields in length and curved like a giant snake. They would have to walk along the peninsula until they reached the breakwater and then sneak across in the dark. The hike would be excruciating, since her legs still ached from her foray into the mountains, and her blisters still bled. Anna thought about Yuk-Lin and Ting Ting’s tiny, bound feet and winced.
To avoid drawing attention, Anna parked the car before they reached the waterfront. When the engine sputtered and quit, she pulled out her red and black talisman, the one for gambling luck. She kissed it and handed it to Yuk-Lin. Yuk-Lin examined it and smiled at Anna. “Good.”
Anna lit the talisman with an ornate silver lighter, and the paper flared. The women watched the bright flame burn down toward Yuk-Lin’s pale fingers. At the last minute, she dropped it onto the ground outside the car and shook her hand.
The ladies slunk along the road that led to the harbor. The soil was sandy and covered with ice plant, which crushed beneath their feet. On every block, light shot from the windows of at least one establishment, loud with the raucous sounds of sailors deep in their cups. Saloon girls, too, giggled sharply into the smoky air, which seeped out through open doors and tasted like ash on Anna’s tongue.
Anna stopped. It was imperative that she and her charges not be seen, lest they be conked on the head and shanghaied, taken captive to work on one of the many boats that sailed from Los Angeles to San Francisco, then across the Pacific to China. She had no doubt that their work would not be limited to cooking and scrubbing. Yuk-Lin and Ting Ting would be slaves again, only this time servicing a lower class of men. And Anna and Miss Robins would be servicing right alongside them.
Occasional lampposts sizzled along the road, and telephone poles stood erect like sentries. Each bore a wanted poster displaying the image of the two Chinese girls and describing the two men seen with them. It perfectly described Joe Singer and Wolf. The LAPD had recently been here. Of course they had. The harbor was under the jurisdiction of the city. Anna felt sick to her stomach. She was glad Miss Robins had knocked
Joe out. Although she didn’t like the lady, she admired her pragmatism. If they could get the girls onto the boat safely, Joe and Wolf would also be safe.
Anna led the girls off the main street to a foot trail that crossed a field of weeds—a shortcut down to a beach. It would be a rougher walk, and the girls would have to lean on her and Miss Robins, but there were no carousing sailors. The ladies’ heels churned in the sand. Yuk-Lin and Ting Ting’s faces betrayed their pain, but they did not complain. They spoke not a word, lest their language give them away. Anna wished she could have tea with them some carefree day, and that Mr. Jones could translate so that Anna might hear more of their fairytales and stories of their lives in China and in Chinatown. But would he surrender the girls to the tong? Anna didn’t think so.
The foam of the waves glowed with bioluminescence, and it smelled of seaweed. The ladies followed the shadowed beach to the edge of the docks, where large cargo ships floated, their lights shining on the water. The piers and planks were deserted, except for the occasional drunken sailor, and, to Anna’s dismay, a lone policeman.
Anna waited. The officer turned his back and began pacing away from them. She motioned for the ladies to move. They stole across the docks to the shelter of the nearest structure. A man’s face loomed from a poster plastered on the wall. She recognized Leo Lim. It was a picture Joe had taken from his apartment on the day the body had been found. Anna stopped to read the poster. “Wanted for murder.” There was no mention of trunks or missionary girls, or even of Chinatown. Lim was dead. Anna took it down lest an innocent Chinese man be arrested by mistake.
Front Street was a short street, bordered by the harbor. Mismatched commercial buildings lined one side. White awnings reflected the moon. The only lights came from four separate saloons and a few windows of the Hotel Spokane.
The port stretched farther than Anna could see. There were train tracks running past docks. Boxcars and flat cars stood ready to be loaded. Out in the ocean, a peninsula ran parallel to the shore, protecting the inner harbor from the open sea. Boats hung off the landmass like charms on a bracelet—steamships, barges, and yachts. Dozens of small sailboats anchored inside the breakwaters.
On the very end of the peninsula a line of giant boulders wound through the ocean like a chain, ending in an island—Deadman’s Island. A lone fishing boat was anchored some twenty feet away from it. Miss Robins pointed. “There. It’s the Juana Maria.”
Yuk-Lin looked despairingly at the breakwater and shook her head. She surprised Anna with heavily accented English. “Nothing doing.”
Despite herself, Anna smiled. It was, no doubt, a phrase Joe Singer had taught her. The significance was less amusing. There was no possibility that they could walk the length of the peninsula and breakwater to the island before dawn. The sun would soon rise and sailors would start their workdays. The girls were running out of time. Anna dragged a hand down her neck, which ached and was chafed from the poncho she’d worn on the mountain.
The lapping ocean made the boats bump gently against the dock. A wooden dinghy thump thumped nearby. Yuk-Lin stood over it, peering left and right, then down into the hull. She beckoned frantically to Anna. The boat was old and slightly water logged. Anna looked at Yuk-Lin intently. It might be their last chance. Come dawn, the boat might leave them, or they might be discovered. She nodded. Yuk-Lin untied the briny rope.
A large trawler floated adjacent to the dinghy. Anna scanned the deck. Half a dozen cork jackets hung from iron hooks on the outer cabin wall. It was a sign from God that she should steal them. Anna gracefully made the leap onto the deck, having taken ballet. She crept to the wall. The cork jackets felt damp and cold, and smelled like mildew, but Anna stole four anyway. She jumped back onto the dock with her bundle, landing softly.
Miss Robins stood in the front, holding onto a ring on the dock, waving frantically to Anna. The cop was strolling back in their direction. Ting Ting sat in the boat huddled against Yuk-Lin’s shoulder. Anna stepped into the rocking vessel, giving each lady a cork jacket and donning her own. She took the oars and Miss Robins pushed off, just as the cop stopped, turned on his heels and paced back in the opposite direction. It was no one that Anna knew.
The dinghy rode low in the sea. A good four inches of water sloshed at the bottom of the boat, as if there were a slow leak. It wetted Anna’s glamorous shoes and the hem of her velvet frock and the tiny feet of Yuk-Lin and Ting Ting. She thought the boat might easily tip, but a sliver of sun had appeared on the horizon. It was too late to search out another.
At first she rowed with attention to silence, slicing the still water quietly until they were at a sufficient distance from the tethered boats. Then Anna paddled the dinghy noisily, with all her might, keeping in rhythm so that the boat didn’t turn. The Juana Maria, their salvation, was still fifty yards away.
Miss Robins tapped a shoulder. “Let me take an oar.”
Anna scooted over on the seat. Miss Robins sat beside her, their hips touching. They began to coordinate their strokes and skimmed through the water making better time than when Anna rowed alone.
Behind them, an authoritative voice bellowed through a megaphone. “Stop in the name of the law.” Anna assumed they were speaking to her and redoubled her efforts. Miss Robins kept pace. Soon she heard the splash of oars and glanced behind her. It was the cop from the docks and another man, too, in a bigger boat. They rowed separate pairs of oars in unison.
Sweat trickled down Anna’s neck and between her breasts. They rowed harder but had little chance of outdistancing them as Anna’s boat had only one set of oars. Miss Robins grunted beside her. The rocks of Deadman’s Island glowed in the dawn. She saw the Juana Maria still out of reach, a little flag flying from its mast. Ting Ting cowered, covering herself with her cloak as if it could magically protect her from her pursuers. Her eyes were shut tight, and she trembled. Yuk-Lin was leaning over the helm, paddling with her hands. They would surely be returned to slavery. Anna would be canned, losing her only means of support. Her options would be severely limited. She could try to find a place as a companion to some old bat, she could take vows or teach children. Anna decided she’d rather go down with the ship.
The policeman’s boat quickly ran astride the ladies’ dinghy, slamming up against the wood with a thump. He flung his hands in the air in an exaggerated gesture of bewilderment. “Are you ladies crazy?”
The game was up. They were about to be screwed.
The cop straddled the two vessels, rocking Anna’s boat precariously. “You are all under arrest for the theft of a dinghy.”
Anna leapt to her feet and shifted to one side of the vessel, tipping the waterlogged boat. She put her foot on the very edge and leaned her full weight until water seeped over, causing the boat to overturn. Cop and girls tumbled into the sea. Anna trusted that if the girls couldn’t swim, they could at least dog paddle in their cork jackets.
Anna went under and bobbed up, losing yet another hat. The cold slapped her, momentarily paralyzing her with the shock of it. Salt stung her nose. “Split up!” Anna swam for the breakwater, hoping to draw the cop away from Yuk-Lin and Ting Ting. Yuk-Lin dog-paddled for Deadman’s Island, which now lay within reach. Miss Robins swam toward the peninsula, a more ambitious endeavor. The cop, who had no cork jacket, flailed in the water. The fisherman jumped in to rescue him.
Anna turned to look for Ting Ting. She barely spied her in the dark. She was splashing furiously toward the outer harbor and the open sea. Anna turned around and swam after her, keeping her eyes glued to the girl. To Anna’s bewilderment, Ting Ting struggled to remove her cork jacket. It bounced to the surface with a splash. Ting Ting floundered for a moment, then sunk, hands above her head. Anna watched the tips of her fingers disappear beneath the foam. She swam to the spot, but Ting Ting was gone. Anna removed her own cork jacket and dove deep down into the water, feeling for the girl. She dove and dove until she had no breath, but Ting Ting was lost.
Anna sobbed as she swam, sputt
ering, swallowing saltwater. She reached the docks and hid beneath them, coughing convulsively. She didn’t check to see if the coast was clear when she dragged herself out of the ocean like a washed-up sea creature. Part of her wanted to get caught by the cops and thrown to the tongs, but she couldn’t let them win. She limped back to the car thoroughly and utterly exhausted. Passersby gaped at the soggy lady with the clinging skirts and kelp in her hair. Miss Robins, also drenched, was waiting at the Ford.
The winter sun was glaring down when Anna and Miss Robins set off for Joe Singer’s apartment, still wet and chilled to their cores. Yuk-Lin was safe. Miss Robins had seen her climb the ladder of the Juana Maria. Ting Ting was lost, and there was nothing that Anna could do about it but hope that she rested in the bosom of her Chinese gods. Anna’s heart felt as numb as her fingers, but her mind accused her.
Miss Robins shook beside Anna, crying quietly. Anna ignored her. Finally Miss Robins broke the silence. “It’s not your fault. She took off her cork vest on purpose. She wanted to die. And at least Yuk-Lin is free.”
“She’s not really free, is she?” Anna said mournfully. “Now she has to be Presbyterian.”
Miss Robins frowned.
The rain had stopped. The emerald hills sparkled with droplets, and the wild gray sea smashed against the shore, sending spray high into the air. Anna was mad with pain. There was nothing to distract her. She wanted to think about anything except the young girl she had lost that night. And it had been Anna’s fault. Anna had tipped the boat.
Anna dropped Miss Robins off at the mission and drove home, parking her landlord’s auto four blocks down where he wouldn’t see her get out of it. The leather seats were now stained with seawater, but Anna felt certain that if he understood why she’d taken it, he wouldn’t be angry at all.
The Woman in the Camphor Trunk Page 22
