Joe knocked once on her desk with a false levity. “That’s it. That’s all I’ve got. So, see you later . . . Assistant Matron Blanc.” He smiled and Anna held her breath.
“Oh.” Joe produced her beloved, stolen silver net purse from behind his back. He set it on her desk. “I confiscated it from a pawnshop.”
“Thanks.”
“Open it,” he said.
Anna did. It was full of Juicy Fruit. When Anna glanced up he was walking away.
CHAPTER 28
Anna stood at attention in Matron Clemens’s office, wishing she had washed her uniform. To compensate, she wore her ugliest dress, which, regrettably, looked quite nice, albeit slightly too big. She could summon no cheer at her superintendent’s return, though Anna loved the plain, stern woman. Recent events had left Anna devoid of all joy. She had nightmares. None of the officers seemed at all impressed with her accomplishments. They credited Joe with solving the murder, refused to believe that Anna had dispatched Tom Foo Yuen, and gave her either hot looks or the cold shoulder. Joe credited Anna, but he was never around.
The piles had grown on Matron Clemens’s desk during her absence, mostly due to Anna’s negligence. Anna bobbed a somber curtsy. “Welcome back.”
The lady nodded in stoic acknowledgement. She glanced at the heaps of files on her ink blotter.
Anna said, “The children have been very naughty, and I’ve mostly been out—”
“You never found Jane Godfrey.”
“Jane who?”
“The fifteen-year-old thief? The treat girl?”
“Yes. She moved to Alaska. She’s the Eskimos’ problem now.” Jane might have for all Anna knew.
Matron Clemens stood, scraped up the files, and plopped them in Anna’s thin arms. “You’re dismissed. Get to work.”
“Thank you, ma’am.” Anna walked quickly toward the door. She would catch up on her duties, even if it meant working night and day. She would keep Matron Clemmons proud.
“Oh, Assistant Matron Blanc.”
Anna turned. “Yes?”
The older woman’s eyes were fixed on a document before her, and she marked it with a pen, never looking up. “To walk a mile is a trial, to walk a yard is hard, but inch by inch, it’s a cinch.”
“Yes ma’am.”
Anna’s upper lip, which she tried to keep so stiff, quivered. She took a velvet cape from the station’s coat rack and slunk toward the door. She wrapped up in it and hugged herself, whispering under her breath, “To walk a mile is a trial, to walk a yard is hard, but inch by inch, it’s a cinch. Inch by inch by inch . . .”
She opened the station door and it creaked closed behind her. She didn’t want to be in the station when Joe might appear, and she had work to do. The municipal band played on Friday afternoons in a bandstand at Hollenbeck Park. If not monitored by the authorities, some people would dance too close. A matron was duty-bound to prevent it. Anna used to be in favor of love and hated to tap sweethearts on the shoulder, flashing her matron’s badge, forcing them to separate. So instead, she usually fed the geese. But not today. Today she wanted to warn them all.
She took the trolley to Boyle Heights and walked to Hollenbeck Park, the very place where she and Joe had first kissed last summer. She had responded by kneeing him in the groin. In retrospect, it had been the exact right thing to do.
The park spread out for acres, covered in lawns, lovely ponds, tall jutting pampas grass, the twisted roots of a giant fig tree. There were hedges, bushes, and trellises—places for trysts. The music had started and people were waltzing. She peered into the crowd. Couples whirled in circles. No one danced too closely, but Anna glared at couples anyway. Then she hated herself for being heartless, and for having too much heart, and for everything she’d ever done or said. She left the lovers to their own precarious fates and wandered down to the geese.
Anna sat on a bench facing the pond and whispered to herself, “Inch by inch, it’s a cinch. Inch by inch by inch . . .” The geese came waddling up in large numbers, quacking, but she had no bread. Anna tried to shoo them, but they quacked forward, nibbling the fancy ribbons on her skirt. Anna stood and bustled away, stepping on at least one webbed foot. They followed her. She broke into a run, heading for the pampas grass, away from the water, the music, and the people, chanting in rhythm with her footfalls, “Inch by inch—”
“Anna!”
She heard footsteps behind her. The geese were gone, so she stopped abruptly. A man collided with her backside. “Sorry.”
Anna swung about. Joe Singer looked agitated and serious. He ran his hands through his hair, which still needed cutting. Her stomach sank, and she hugged herself. “You’re angry because I’m not doing my job. But I am. I saw lovers nearby, and I’m going to stop them.”
He laid his hands on her shoulders, looked her sternly in the eyes, and commanded her. “Magic Genie.”
Anna’s lips trembled. He was going to do it. He was going to use his genie wish. He would command her to go away and leave him alone so that he could go off and marry the Piano Girl. He would tell her not to interfere, maybe even to move to China or somewhere far away so he never had to see her again. He’d come all the way to Hollenbeck Park to tell her.
All the strength left her. She felt insubstantial, like the barest wisp of smoke from an extinguished fire. Her words came out like a sob, “No. Don’t ask me. I can’t.”
She started to sway. Joe pulled her behind a trellis. “You give me whatever I ask. You can’t say no. You’re a genie of your word.”
“No, I’m not. Don’t make me!” Anna looked at her feet and made little hiccupping sounds. Red splotches spread across her face and chest, and her eyes ached from holding back the tears.
Joe hiccupped, too, one big, stifled gulp. Surprised, Anna glanced up. His cheeks were turning crimson, and his eyes looked like blown glass. His voice, normally so smooth, sounded low and choked, “You’re right. I can’t make you do anything. What kind of man would I be if I even tried? But if I can’t, then I’m getting out of town.”
Anna shook her head “No! You can’t leave me.”
“Anna, listen. I never know what you’re gonna do. You say you love me, but you won’t be my wife. All the other girls in LA—they’re on their best behavior around a man, acting modest, playing it coy. But not you. You’re on your worst behavior, all of the time.”
“I’m sorry!”
“I walk around aching ’cause I want you so bad. I think about you constantly. Don’t you see? I can’t love anybody else with you around. I could never marry anybody else because I’d always be thinking you might change your mind. And I’m never gonna get over you if I don’t go away. So if you don’t want to hook up with me, I’m leaving.”
“You were going to command me to marry you? I thought you were going to send me to China or something and marry that Piano Girl.”
“She and I are quits. I can’t marry her, Anna. I love you. That’s why I have to go.”
“No! I’ll change my mind. I promise.”
“When.”
“Soon. Very soon.”
“Anna, that’s not good enough.”
“There. I just changed it. My mind’s changed. But it has to be a very, very long—”
Joe kissed her.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
While this book is entirely fictional, it was inspired by historical events. The storyline of the two stolen girls, the reward money offered by their tong “owner” for their return, and the Los Angeles Police Department’s efforts to find the girls in order to return them to the tong president to collect the reward and avert a tong war, was taken from a single 1908 newspaper article in the Los Angeles Herald. (“Tong president” is the term used by whites in Los Angeles. The Chinese called their tong leaders “Dragon Head” or “Dai Gor,” which means “big brother.”)
A second historical event also inspired the novel. In 1909, a nineteen-year-old missionary woman, Elizabeth Sigel, was murdered in New York City
’s Chinatown and found in a trunk in the apartment of her Chinese lover, Leon Ling. Her lover fled. The police never solved the crime. She really was entangled with two Chinese lovers. She really was the daughter of a famous Civil War general, Franz Sigel. There was a national backlash against the Chinese. Although white New York residents didn’t storm Chinatown in 1909, the Chinatown Massacre that Joe Singer refers to in the novel did occur in Los Angeles in 1871, as he described it.
There are other things in the book that I lifted right out of history and fictionalized—the tunnels under Chinatown, the bells rigged to announce cops, the death threats written in red ink on laundry tickets, the number and locations of opium dens and lotteries, what fan-tan parlors were like and how they were raided. Donaldina Cameron, a Presbyterian missionary in San Francisco, really did steal Chinese slave girls away from the tongs. The Cracker Jacks riddles actually came by way of Cracker Jacks boxes from the turn of the twentieth-century.
During the years following the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, many Chinese Americans relocated to Los Angeles, which became a new headquarters for some tongs. Violence was on the rise, tourism was down, and the tongs were vying for power. Hatchet men or highbinders did assassinate people. Some residents left Chinatown because of the violence. There was a large police presence in LA’s Chinatown at the end of the first decade of the 1900s. According to the Los Angeles Herald, half the men of Central Station were assigned there. It was the center of vice in LA, and the most dangerous beat in the city.
Most of the historical documents I found relating to LA’s Chinatown in the early 1900s are written from a white perspective and therefore reflect a Caucasian rather than Asian perspective. This is regrettable. The Chinese language newspaper published in Los Angeles during the period was edited by a Christian Chinese American man, and to my knowledge hasn’t been translated into English.
The character of Anna Blanc bears some resemblance to Fanny Bixby, one of California’s richest young women, who became a “special constable” in Long Beach in 1908. She carried handcuffs and a gun. However, this resemblance is purely coincidental. I learned about Fanny Bixby after I wrote The Secret Life of Anna Blanc. My novel was actually inspired by Alice Stebbins Wells, who in 1910 became the first woman police officer in Los Angeles. She was nothing like Anna Blanc.
Lastly, the unattributed poem in this novel is also inspired by history. It is a combination of words and ideas taken from a dozen English translations of Chinese poems that would have been read in Anna’s day, taken apart, shaken up, mixed together with my own words, to produce a single, short poem.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As with my first novel, The Secret Life of Anna Blanc, this book feels very much like a team effort. I’d like to thank my husband for his unfailing support, and my children for understanding my need to write. They all made sacrifices. Many thanks to Zoe King, Josephine Hayes, and Neil Blair at the Blair Partnership. I couldn’t ask for better agents. I’d like to thank everyone at Seventh Street Books (SSB) for being so good at what they do—Dan Mayer, Sheila Stewart, Jill Maxick, Cheryl Quimba, Nicole Sommer-Lecht, and my fellow SSB authors for their support and advice.
I’d like to thank Paul Foley for teaching me how to tell a story. My gratitude goes out to Matthew Boroson for his comradery and advice while we both wrote books set in California Chinatowns around the turn of the twentieth century, his set in San Francisco, mine in LA. Thanks to Stephen Kuo and Jimmy Lui for advising me on Chinatown culture and language. I feel enormously grateful for my beta readers Stephanie Manuzak, Susan Spann, Thea Pilarczyk, Cassi Clark Ward-Hunt, Eric Stebbins, Joe Weber, Heather Bell, Jamie Gordon, David Weaver, Jonathan Owen, Susan Ludes, and of course, Elizabeth Bonsor.
Thanks to the many others who gave feedback on sections of this book—the Denver Writer’s Workshop, Linda Joffe Hull, Melisa Ford, Mark Stevens, Christine Goff, Suzanne Proulx, Suzanne Blanchard, Christine Jorgensen, Jeanette Baust, Laurie Sanderson-Walcott, and Mike McClanahan.
Thanks to my mother, sisters, cousins, and in-laws (especially you, George) for cheering me on.
Most of all, I want to thank my readers for taking a chance on a relatively new author. If you liked this book, please spread the word. Tell a friend. Post on Facebook. Write a review. It’s the number-one way readers find new authors.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jennifer Kincheloe is the author of The Secret Life of Anna Blanc, winner of the Colorado Gold Award for mystery and the Mystery and Mayhem Award for historical mystery. The novel was also a finalist for the Macavity Sue Feder Historical Mystery award, Left Coast Crime “Lefty” Award, and Colorado Authors’ League Award for genre fiction. Formerly, Dr. Kincheloe was the principal of a health consulting firm and a member of the research faculty for the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. She currently does research on the jails in Denver, Colorado.
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