“Father proposed to mother the day he met her. It was the colpo di fulmine, as the Italians say.” Love that came like a strike of lightning. Isobel would not admit it to Lotario, but that was exactly how she’d felt when she met Riot—only she’d been hit by a weighted walking stick.
“Mother and father couldn’t even communicate. They didn’t speak one another’s language,” she pointed out. “And they still argue in their native tongues.”
“Even better, they can’t understand each other. Besides, who needs to talk when you’re in love?” Lotario asked.
“I tried that, it didn’t work.”
“That gondolier in Venice doesn’t count.”
“I’m dead, Ari,” she reminded.
“You’re awfully warm for a corpse.”
She sighed. “I don’t want to hurt him.”
“Silence hurts worse. I should know.” His tone was wounded.
Isobel glared at the back of her twin’s head. “I shot a man at point-blank range who kept coming. I was hog-tied, repeatedly kicked, and kept in a cold basement for a day. They threatened to kill Riot if I told him, and then threw me from a moving wagon.”
“Oh, is that all?” His voice caught, and he settled his back more firmly against her. She could feel a tremor passing through his body. “Seems like something he should know.”
“He should,” she agreed. “But I fear he might do something foolish.”
“As if you won’t?”
“Riot isn’t as prim and cultured as he appears.”
“Of course not, he’s attracted to you.”
Isobel slapped her twin’s chest.
23
The Hunt Begins
Sharp nails dug into her skin. Isobel was trapped under a heavy weight. The scent of her ex-husband filled her memory, and she jerked awake, unleashing her rage. Something thumped to the floor. Claws sank deeper, and a warning growl stilled her fear.
Isobel blinked at the cat on her chest. Watson retracted his claws, and fell into a gentle kneading. His growl turned into a purr. She scowled at the beast, and he flicked his ears in return.
“Damn you, Watson,” she muttered, scrubbing her face. A wet nose and whiskers tickled her chin in apology. “It’s too early.” Or too late. Sunlight was fighting its way through the porthole.
She looked at the floor. Lotario glared up at her from where he had landed. He picked up his blanket with all the dignity he possessed, and fell into the opposite berth. He was back asleep in seconds.
Isobel tried to sit up, but the cat on her chest proved too much for her abused stomach. Everything hurt. With the purring heater, she was tempted to follow her twin’s example. But it hurt to lie down as much as it did to move. She carefully extracted Watson’s claws, and nudged him to the side. He flicked his tail in her face, and melted off the berth to continue his nap on Lotario.
She pushed herself upright, and leaned against the cushion. While she caught her breath, she reached up and opened the hinged window above her berth. Sunlight stabbed its way through the misty canopy. It’d be a sunny afternoon in San Francisco.
Her thoughts traveled to questions with no answers.
“Ari?”
He didn’t move.
She picked up a newspaper and chucked it across the saloon. It hit him in the face, and he yanked the blanket over his head. She called his name again.
“What?”
“What does din gau mean?” Lotario was far better with languages than she was. While Isobel spent their childhood impatiently plotting her next escape from the family home, her twin had shadowed Hop, their family butler, and learned passable Cantonese.
“It’s too early,” he said.
“It’s important.”
He nudged down the blanket, and squinted at her. “Will you take me with you today?”
“No.”
“Will you take Atticus?”
“I don’t know yet,” she said honestly. “I need more information—hence my question.”
“Will you tell me where you’re going?”
“I’m going to hell.”
“I’m sure to meet you there,” he drawled, and then sobered. “I’m serious, Bel.”
She relented. “Yes, I’ll tell you as soon as I figure out where I’m going.”
“If you’re not back by dark, I’m telling Atticus.”
“Never mind,” she growled. Both Watson and her twin were traitors. Anger spurred her into action. She stood and lifted the berth cushion up, rummaging through the underneath storage as she pondered her clothing options. Mr. Henry Morgan was known to her abductors, but then they also knew she was a woman. However, they didn’t know what she looked like in women’s clothing. She’d have better chances as Miss Bonnie today.
As Isobel began shedding her long johns, she heard a hiss. It wasn’t the cat.
“Good God, Bel!”
She glanced at her twin. His gaze was fixed on her black and yellow stomach. “I told you they kicked me.” She tugged on her chemise, and reached for her sports bodice.
“But your wrists—did you clean those cuts?”
“Yes,” she sighed.
Never one to trust her first aid protocol, Lotario tossed off his blanket and bolted over to the medical supplies as if he feared she would run. She would have if she’d been dressed.
“It’s fine, Ari.”
He ignored her.
Resigned, she sat down and started emptying the pockets of her male guise from the day before. She laid the items out on the table, and gritted her teeth as Lotario began cleaning her injuries with diluted carbolic acid. There were a number of wounds that she didn’t know she had.
“Are you going to tell me more about what happened?” he asked.
Isobel debated his question for a full minute, before he began roughly scrubbing the dirt out of a large scrape on her back. “Ari!”
“If only I had a story to distract myself with, I wouldn’t be so impatient,” he lamented dramatically.
A growl worthy of Watson escaped her throat. But in the end, she told him all.
“You stole a hundred dollars from a corpse!” He nearly dropped the bottle of diluted acid on the floor.
Isobel snatched the bottle from his hand. “It’s not stealing; it’s a retainer fee for finding his murderer.”
“You are going to hell,” he huffed. “Sooner rather than later if you don’t drop this business.”
“Those men were after a girl,” she reminded. “Whoever that girl is, she needs my help and I intend to find her before they do.”
Lotario sighed. He knew better than to try and argue with her when someone was in danger. “Din gau means mad dog, or maybe rabid dog.”
“Rabid Dog?” She puzzled over the meaning. The night before, Riot had asked her where she’d heard that name. It was an uncharacteristic slip on his part. He had been charmingly flustered, and then all at once his gentle eyes had turned to stone. She had whittled away his defenses, stripped him of his armor and blindsided him with those words. He had a right to be angry. But why would the tongs give him such a nickname?
“I don’t know,” Lotario answered. She didn’t remember asking the question out loud. “Hop used to call us Siu Wai Daan—little rotten eggs—all the time.”
“And here I’ve been thinking it was a term of endearment.”
Lotario rolled his eyes. “It was. When he was really upset, he called you Wu Lei Ching—a fox spirit.”
“I’m flattered.”
“It’s not flattering in his tongue.”
She shrugged. “A matter of perspective.”
“I’ve heard choi chi—dog whelp—before, but a rabid dog is…”
“To be feared. Not an insult,” she finished.
He nodded as he dabbed at the rope burns on her wrists.
“They’re afraid of him, Ari. The room went dead still as soon as I said his name.”
“We were questioning everyone in Ocean Beach,” Lotario pointed out. “
He may have questioned your captors. It probably spooked them.”
“Maybe so.”
“Did you know he picked up a stray girl?”
“Who?” she asked.
It was Isobel’s turn to listen. And she did, as Lotario told her about Sarah Byrne and her uncle in the receiving hospital. But in the end she dismissed the information.
“It’s a small world, but it’s not that small, Ari. This isn’t the girl they were looking for. Riot’s stray was waiting at the ferry building when I met Sinclair in the hospital. And why would the tongs be searching for a white girl from Tennessee?”
“How do you know the men were part of a tong?”
Her gaze fell on the bit of embroidery that lay on the table. The very one she’d found on the dunes two nights before. Dried, and sitting in the light, she could see the color clearly: turquoise. It was part of a floral pattern with an intricate maze-like design. Isobel knew that design. She had seen the style before—during her dangerous adolescent wanderings down unsavory alleyways.
She pointed to the embroidery. “Because of that.”
Clicking, clacking, bells and deep voices slammed into Isobel as she stepped off the elevator. Newspapers never slept. She threaded her way through an obstacle course of desks, and made her way to the Sob Sister’s enclave.
Questions poked at her mind like a cattle prod. Who was Mr. Lincoln Howe? Why was his body in her cell? Where had those men taken Howe’s corpse? And where was the girl they were looking for? Who was she?
The myriad of questions mixed with the jumble of emotions that were clouding her mind.
“A crack in the lens; a tear in my sail,” she said under her breath. The crack was Atticus Riot. And she felt as if she had just dragged him into a rattler nest. Only he didn’t know it yet.
Common sense told her to leave well enough alone, but Isobel had never listened to sense; she rebelled against its every principle.
Clara Sharpe sat at a desk in the Sob Sister’s office. The older woman stared at a blank piece of paper in her typewriter. A thin line of smoke rose from a cigarette between her lips; it seemed forgotten, the ash growing by the second.
Isobel walked across the room to her preferred desk by the window. She took out the red token and the bit of embroidery, and laid them down in front of her. The token distracted her eye—its vibrant red mocked. She swept the cloth away, and moved the token to dead center where it sat like a bloodstain.
The Palm Saloon. It sounded expensive. Of course palm could mean something else entirely where the Barbary Coast was concerned.
A single question swam to the forefront of her mind: where to start? This investigation required care. She was known to at least one party involved. And she had no wish to mark Riot for death (or herself for that matter). Asking after Lincoln Howe would do just that.
Her eye kept being lured back to that bit of embroidery. A symbol of a girl being hunted. The question remained: where to start?
She glanced at Cara Sharpe, whose cigarette had dropped ash on the desk. Cara was a veteran reporter—direct, self-assured, and quick with a laugh. Isobel liked the older woman. She was everything opposite of hesitation, and her current stillness was profound.
“Start with a detail?” she asked the reporter. Advice that Cara had given her only a week before.
Cara plucked the cigarette from her lips, and smashed it into an ashtray. She turned in her chair and looked straight at Isobel. “It’s the details I don’t like.” The woman’s eyes were as sharp as her name, and Isobel felt like a fish in a bowl. “You look the worse for wear, Bonnie.”
“Rough night,” she said. “Do you know who generally handles affairs in Chinatown?”
“Mack McCormick.”
Isobel groaned. It would be him. She did not feel like dealing with a misogynistic, womanizing sportsman. No matter, she thought as she reached into her handbag for a mirror. She had dealt with Kingston for months. Only, Cara was right, Miss Bonnie was looking positively frumpy today. More harried college girl than seductress. She clicked the mirror shut, and sighed.
“Don’t sell your soul to the man,” Cara said. “What do you need to know about Chinatown? Is it about the murders this morning?”
“Murders?”
“There was another tong shootout. Mack is writing up the article now.”
Isobel leaned back, pushing her chair onto two legs, and looked into the corral. The big man was bent over his typewriter, glaring at the keys. She dropped back down. “I had a question about an old story.”
Cara waited.
Isobel realized that the veteran reporter had been with the Call for years. She had the editor’s ear. Cara was also sharper than Mack by spades.
Tread carefully, warned an internal voice. Isobel wondered if she had her own ghost haunting her. Maybe that was where her sense had gone—she’d killed it long ago.
“Do you know anything about Zephaniah Ravenwood’s murder three years back?”
Cara didn’t hesitate. “I remember it.”
“Did Mack handle that story?”
“Anything with grisly details attracts him like a fly to dung.”
Isobel had been in Europe when Ravenwood was murdered, and it only earned a three line mention on a back page. But she had recently dug through the Call archives for the story. Hip Yee hatchet men had hacked Ravenwood to pieces in his own home. The assassination had somehow triggered a tong war (so the article claimed), and the Hip Yee leader was gunned down by Suey Sings.
August Duncan had claimed that Ravenwood’s head was placed on a platter, but the article made no mention of it. And while the coroner might simply have been trying to distract her (a ploy that worked), the article lacked the kind of detail that Isobel had expected; instead, it had deteriorated into a long, drawn-out exposition on the Chinese threat to San Francisco, and the poor victimized white man.
“Do you have a story brewing?”
“It’s near to boiling.”
“Aren’t you acquainted with Atticus Riot?” Cara asked.
“I am,” she said. There was no use denying that. “But it never hurts to be armed with more information before angling for an interview.”
Cara smiled, her eyes nearly disappearing. “Good girl.”
If anyone else had addressed her as such, Isobel would have bristled. But Cara exuded motherliness—the kind of mother who would sell her own daughter for a story.
“What do you remember about his murder?” Isobel asked.
“That there was too little information.”
That’s exactly what Isobel thought. She decided to play dumb. “But why?”
Clara cocked her head. “Mack isn’t the most thorough investigator. But if I remember correctly, the editor wasn’t interested in any more articles on Chinatown.”
“Do you find that strange?”
“The tongs are old news,” explained Cara. “There’s not a week that goes by that some lurid story isn’t published. And the Quarantine Station Scandal was old news. There was probably another story that caught the public’s attention at the time.” Cara lit another cigarette, and took a thoughtful drag. “Besides, half the men in San Francisco likely use those slave girls. I don’t think they much care to be enlightened.”
Prostitutes were there for a man’s pleasure. Anything beyond that was far too complicated for most men to ponder. Accountability was a bitter pill to swallow when one could use a woman for twenty-five cents. Using a slave took the same level of commitment as slipping a penny into a Mutoscope, being entertained, and walking away.
“The article said that his partner, Atticus Riot, was injured in the attack—nearly killed. It seems like there must be more to the story.”
“There was.” Cara studied her through a haze of smoke. “Rumor said Atticus Riot was ambushed and dragged over to Chinatown. I heard he was tortured, and dumped at a Chinese undertaker’s to die.”
A lump rose in Isobel’s throat. She quickly looked out the window, and tr
ied to keep her voice from shaking. “Seems newsworthy.” Her voice cracked.
A Chinese undertaker worked differently than an American one. The sick were taken to an undertaker while they were still breathing, to lie on a cot in a back room and listen to the hammering of the undertaker constructing their wooden overcoat. Because it was bad luck to have someone die in your home.
Cara smiled. “One would think. You’d have to ask Mack about the particulars.”
Isobel thanked the woman, and returned to the evidence. But her thoughts kept traveling back to Riot, to the scars on his body, and the one that ran along his temple. She could almost imagine the bullet tracing the bone; a millimeter to the left and he’d be dead.
Isobel shivered, and for the first time in her life she wondered if she should walk away and be grateful that she had escaped with nothing more than a bruised stomach. But her eyes drifted to that bit of embroidery. There was a hunted girl out there.
Snatching up the ribbon, she put on an amiable face and walked into the corral to confront Mack McCormick.
Mack ripped out a sheet of paper, crumpled it up, and tossed it into a growing collection of discarded words. His big, scarred hands fed a virgin sheet between the typewriter’s paper table and platen. His red hair was thinning on top, and his neck seemed to have been swallowed by his massive shoulders years ago.
Isobel stood to the side of his desk. “Do you have a minute?”
“I usually need at least five,” the man said. But the response seemed more automatic than sincere. He glanced over at her. “Were you hit by a wagon, Bonnie?”
“My friends call me Charlie.”
Mack scratched the dimple in his square chin. “Is that what you tell your husbands before you murder them?”
“I never said it was murder—only accidental poisoning. I’m absentminded. I can’t help it that cyanide looks just like salt.”
“Call me Mack.” He showed his teeth. “Now that we’re on intimate terms, why don’t you have dinner with me? Only we can skip the dinner part.”
“You appear busy.” She nudged the wastepaper basket with her shoe.
“I am.” He looked at the blank sheet and blew a heavy breath past his lips.
Record of Blood (Ravenwood Mysteries #3) Page 16
