by Julie Beard
By the time I returned home from my trip downtown, Mike had fixed a healthy and tasty vegetarian meal that even Lola claimed to have enjoyed. Lola had found some of my old pajamas and pointed Lin in the direction of the bathtub. I was impressed. As I recalled, when I was little, Lola would sometimes have me wear the same outfit for a week—in and out of bed. When I moved in with the Bassetts, I didn’t quite believe Sydney when she told me you’re supposed to change clothes every day.
By the time I found them, Lola was taking a nap in her makeshift apartment downstairs, Lin was in her guest room, door shut, and Mike had just finished cleaning up the kitchen.
I was glad to see him, and not just because I needed a translator. Whenever I walked a tightrope without a net, I liked to have Mike there to catch me if I fell. Together we went to Lin’s room, knocked, then entered.
Lin sat on the bed in a pool of amber-tinted light from the bedside lamp. She’d locked her arms around her drawn-up knees, looking like a strong little scarecrow in the oversize long-sleeved and-legged cotton pajamas. With her black hair falling in jags around her bony shoulders and dashes of pink on her cheeks, a sliver of a mouth beneath solemn, almond-shaped eyes, she seemed like a young heroine in an anime cartoon, capable beyond her years, yet bighearted and innocent.
But I knew all too well that she was really a wounded little waif who had only a few years to decide once and for all whether the world was a good or bad place and whether that heart of hers would ever again be safe.
“Ni hao, Lin,” I said, standing in the doorway.
She looked up warily at me, as if she knew we were going to have a difficult conversation. Yet she seemed more at ease than I’d ever seen her. It didn’t hurt that Mike had probably fed her the best meal she’d had since leaving China. Green soy beans stir-fried with mong beans, tofu, yu-choy and black bean garlic sauce can be persuasive to a stomach that has probably been surviving on the Drummonds’ likely fare of starchy pirogi, mutilated broccoli and white bread.
“We want to talk to you, Lin,” I said, stepping inside and settling at the end of her bed. Mike sat on a chair against the wall, about two feet away. “Are you doing okay?”
She nodded.
“Lin, I think you understand English, but what I’m going to say is very important, so I’ve asked Mike to translate into your native language.” I paused, allowing Mike to translate after every sentence. “I know you’ve been through some difficult times, but the bad times won’t be over until we find out what has happened to you and where you belong. Do you understand?”
She blinked and, after what seemed an eternity, she nodded.
I let out a pent-up sigh and shared a hopeful look with Mike. “Good.” I went on to explain what we knew about the Drummonds, which was very little, and the plans for her temporary and long-term foster care. “Lin, we can send you home relatively quickly if you will tell us more about where you’re from. I believe you were with a group of girls who were kidnapped by a man named Corleone Capone. Is that right?”
She nodded and tears filled her eyes.
“Where are you from? Where did you live before you were taken?”
Her little body went stiff and her eyes seemed distant. “Peking,” she said through tight lips.
“Peking doesn’t exist anymore,” I said gently. “Do you mean Beijing?”
She shook her head. Mike and I shared another look. “Ask her to describe her home,” I suggested.
Mike translated her reply, which described a vast palace, jade statues, gold-tiled ceilings and giant pillars.
“Wow,” I said, “that’s quite a place to grow up in. Her parents must be rich.”
“No,” Mike said, “they must be royal. She described the Gugong in Beijing.”
“Translation, please.”
“The Imperial Palace, where Chinese emperors live for five hundred years, starting in the Ming dynasty and ending with the last emperor, Puyi, who lived there until 1924.”
“So how could Lin have been raised there? Isn’t it now a tourist attraction?”
“Yes. Where once there live three thousand eunuchs and hundreds of concubines, there is now over eight thousand empty rooms for tourists to see. No, she is confused.”
“Or she’s trying to confuse us,” I mused. She looked at me sharply and I remembered she could understand most of what we’d said.
He spoke quickly in Chinese and she responded in kind, then broke into tears. She tried so hard to hold the tears back that her sobs came out in spurts. I wanted to pull her into my arms and soothe her, but I didn’t know how. I turned questioningly to Mike.
“She says she was stolen from her sister by very bad men who murdered her,” he said.
“Oh, no. That’s terrible. What of the other girls? What happened to their families?”
Mike pressed on with questions and she sputteringly told him there were eleven other girls who grew up with her in the palace. Lin began crying again and I went into the bathroom, retrieved a couple of tissues and handed them to her. As she dabbed her eyes, I lost all desire to question her further. I didn’t want to cause her any more pain. But I also needed more information to give to the police. I couldn’t very well tell them the girls had been stolen from a royal palace that hadn’t been used in more than a century.
“There’s only one way to find out what I need, Mike, without causing her more pain.”
He looked at me questioningly.
“Let’s go to your shed. I’ll bring my crystal ball.”
He gave me one of his rare smiles and his black eyes gleamed approvingly. “Now you are talking, Baker.”
I smiled at him, then at Lin. “Come on, sweetheart. Let’s see if we can’t get you back to Kansas without a trip to Emerald City.”
Chapter 21
No Place Like Home
Talk about performance anxiety. Here I was in Mike’s portable meditation hall, with paper amulets pinned on planked wallboards to ward off evil spirits, a Chinese Book of Days open on his bamboo writing table, I Ching coins scattered on his futon and charts showing the twelve palaces of purple astrology, and I was supposed to be the one to have a vision?
Mike lit several candles and placed the ball and tripod stand in the middle of the floor on a one-foot-high mah-jongg gaming table. I sat on a meditation pillow on the grass mat in front of it and adjusted the position of the ball.
“Ask Lin to sit across from me.”
Mike began to translate, but she stopped him, saying, “I speak English.”
We gaped in silence. She continued with only the slightest accent. “My sister taught me. She said someday I would need it.”
Mike and I looked at each other and stifled grins.
“Well, then let’s continue. In English,” I add wryly.
I tried to remember what Dr. Hunter had done at IPAC. I needed to start using my psychic powers in a more proactive way. “Lin, I need you to concentrate on your own experiences. As painful as this may be, I want you to try to remember what’s happened since you left China. You don’t have to talk about the events, just think about them, okay?”
She nodded, but her smooth, flat features went still and assumed a faraway look that I recognized well. She’d tightened the spigot on the pipeline to her feelings. It was, understandably, a defense mechanism that children used when they were afraid of getting hurt again or reliving past pain. Sometimes it was just too painful to keep the pipeline open. Lin eyed me warily, perhaps as she contemplated giving one more adult a chance to disprove her theory that none of them could be trusted.
“Okay, sweetie,” I said, smiling reassuringly, “now I want you to shut your eyes and picture where you were before you went to the Drummond’s apartment. Who was there with you? What did you smell? What did you hear and see? Think about how things felt to touch. Understand?”
She pulled her hair back behind one ear, sniffled and nodded.
“Good. Mike, turn the lights off. I only want candlelight.”
Mike did as I asked and settled like a shadow in the corner of the room. I put my hands on the ball. Images popped into my head, but they were familiar and ordinary scenes from my daily life. Even after only a few attempts at reading the crystal, I knew the difference between active imagination and a real vision. I simply had to wait.
It was like waiting for slumber. Your mind whirls, replaying events from the day, and it seems you’ll never fall asleep. Then you realize the scenarios have become bizarre, even impossible, and you think, “I’m starting to dream. Awesome.”
I focused on the reflected candlelight on the smooth orb under my hands. In my mind, I saw Janet Drummond frozen in her own blood, Mel and Marvin Goldman’s argyle socks, Soji doing her live shot, Marco on the beach. Then I saw a Chinese girl, but it wasn’t Lin. And it wasn’t in my mind. Her image appeared in the glass. A vision. Awesome.
I moved my fingers aside so I wouldn’t block the view, but kept my fingertips on the glass. The girl suddenly seemed so real I thought I could reach through the glass and pull her out. She had short, black hair and was smiling. She looked to be no more than four. I saw others playing, including Lin. So this was the past.
“I see Lin with other Asian girls. One has short black hair and…huge dimples.”
“Pei,” Lin said in a small voice.
I didn’t look up, afraid to lose the vision. Where was Pei? I tried to expand my focus, like a camera lens, and it worked. I saw a flash of color behind Pei. “She’s in a big red room. So big I can’t see the ceiling. She…you and the other girls are filing out into a garden. I see…rocks piled up to look like little mountains, and gnarled pines, a bronze incense burner…and a winding footpath with colored pebbles.”
“The Imperial Garden,” Lin said.
Innocent laughter filled the ancient courtyard and a distant gong reverberated. I was actually hearing things. The girls played and laughed while older girls dressed in colorful red-satin Chinese dresses watched.
Suddenly there was a scream. Several men ran into the garden and started herding the girls into another big room with high, painted ceilings and incredible jade murals. The girls began to cry. “Sister, where is Sister?” several of them whimpered.
Again, as in a dream, the scene changed abruptly. I felt queasy and my skin chilled. I was no longer looking down at the scenes reflected in glass. My eyes glazed over and it was as if I were there, as if I were Lin.
I’m hurtling down a hallway, a dark labyrinth, being jostled by the other panicked girls.
“Hurry, hurry,” shouts a guard from behind. He’s dressed in the old Ming-style warrior’s robe. I run faster, but Pei trips in front of me. I try to catch her, but we both go down. I scrape my knee, but am too scared to cry. A guard runs up behind us and scoops us up like sacks of feathers until our sandals once again hit the stone floor. We run forever, it seems, until we reach the Palace of Heavenly Purity.
I hear the gasps and muted cries of horror from those who enter the tall templelike living quarters. I expect to see what I always see here: a half dozen private bed nooks made of dark cherrywood and partitioned by expensive embroidered yellow-and-turquoise silk curtains and elaborate murals made of precious polished stones and jade. I expect to see our sisters grooming themselves or playing cards as they always do when we go out to play. But what I see instead is almost impossible to absorb.
I see Pei’s sister first. She is an angular eighteen-year-old with wide, pretty lips. For some reason she is asleep on the blue-tile floor next to the bed she and Pei share in the corner. Light streams in through long, narrow windows and in its beam I see blood on her sheets. Pei runs to her, then shrieks like a wounded animal, her body in spasms as if she’s been electrified.
I run to the east side of the temple structure, pull back the curtains and there is my sister, brown-black hair splayed on a bloody pillow, eyes open a slit, her simple white blouse darkened with blood. She is dead. They’re all dead.
“No!” I cry out. “Sister!”
A guard wraps an arm around my waist and pulls me away. She is all I have and I cannot even hug her one last time. Likewise, the other girls who live here with us are drawn away from their slain sisters. We howl in a dissonant chorus.
The scene changes suddenly. A moan stops in my throat and I realize I’ve been crying. My cheeks are damp with tears. From a greater distance I see the palace as we are leaving with the man called Capone. Behind the palace, I see a big shiny building and American letters: F.R.Y. Barring. My eyes blur and I begin to cry.
The sense of loss is indescribable. I can take no more.
I force my eyes open and find Lin still staring at me. Her cheeks, too, are wet. But the distance between us is gone. It didn’t matter that we’d only recently met. She knew that I knew what she’d gone through. I understood the depth of her loss. I respect it. In a way, it has become my own.
“You never saw your sister again?” I said in a torn voice.
She shook her head and a new wave of tears flooded her eyes.
“You don’t know what happened to her? Why she was killed?”
“I don’t know,” she whispered hoarsely.
An overwhelming wave of sympathy propelled me to my feet. I pulled her up and lifted her into my arms, clutching her tight. She was nearly too tall to hold, but I was strong, and strength could be used for more than fighting.
I sat in a chair against the wall and pulled her into my lap, cradling her as best I could a—what, a six-year-old? I didn’t even know. And not knowing intensified my urge to protect and heal her. She had no one.
“Oh, Lin,” I murmured against her bangs as I rocked her in my arms. “I’m so sorry. That shouldn’t have happened.” I kissed her hair and tasted my own tears. Grief shook from inside me in a silent, hammering sob. I held her and cried uncontrollably for all we had both lost. I mourned because she couldn’t. Not yet. She was limp in my arms, unresisting. While I’d never allowed myself to cry for me, I could cry and rage on her behalf. She needed that. She needed someone to stand up for her. It didn’t take the whole world to make a difference—just one person.
I held Lin until my tears dried and I was filled with a sense of peaceful acceptance. By then she was asleep. I looked in the corner and found Mike patiently watching us. I never had to explain anything to him. He understood without words.
I carried Lin to bed and tucked her in, stroking her hair away from her soft cheeks. I gazed down at her with a bundle of emotions that were new, exciting and a little frightening. Surprisingly, one of them was admiration for Lin. I thought that was a feeling triggered by someone who had accomplished great things in life. But, in fact, a child being courageous in the face of cruelty was a great thing.
By the time I left the room and quietly shut the door, I knew what task lay ahead of me. I finally had tangible evidence that even the most apathetic city officials couldn’t ignore. Lin wasn’t raised in Beijing. She had been kidnapped from a suburb of Chicago. The royal palace she called home was apparently nothing more than a replica built in the shadow of one of the newest landmarks and most glaring eyesores to hit the Chicago area in the last fifty years.
In my vision, when I viewed the past through Lin’s eyes, the last thing I saw was the Friedman, Reilly & Young building in Barrington. F.R.Y. Barring was all I could see, but there was no mistaking the gleaming corporate icon. Apparently, Capone was no longer stealing girls from China. God forbid, was he breeding them now in the wooded suburbs of northern Illinois? If he sold girls who were literally homegrown, he couldn’t be put in jail for international slave trade.
But he could be put in jail for murder, and that gave me something solid to give to the police. Before I did, though, I wanted to free the girls myself. I didn’t trust the government to do it without screwing up.
That meant it was time to pay a visit to the only man in Chicago who had the guts to steal nearly a dozen girls from Corleone Capone. Vladimir Gorky. Like a Blue Dragon slithering out of the water, I would r
ise up and face the Russian eagle. The day of reckoning had come.
Chapter 22
The Headless Housekeeper
In the kitchen, Mike and I gathered to talk about our plans over a cup of tea. No sooner had we settled in than Lola came up the stairs and peeked her head into the kitchen.
“Yoo-hoo,” she said in a singsong voice. “What time is it? Shouldn’t you kids be in bed?” She sat in a chair, dark eyes bright with curiosity.
“Yes, Mrs. Baker,” Mike said obediently, but he didn’t get up to leave, and I smothered a smile.
I poured Lola a cup of tea and while she stirred in five teaspoons of sugar, I questioned her further about her visit to Gorky’s mansion. I needed to know where she’d seen the girls. I had envisioned her chained in a dark basement. But while she was there, she informed me that not only did she dine on shrimp alfredo, she passed by a room with a bowed glass wall overlooking the lake, à la Frank Lloyd Wright, filled with adorable little Chinese girls eating chocolate cupcakes.
Apparently Lola had a far closer relationship with good old Vlad than she’d let on. And the girls were, at least temporarily, being well cared for.
Based on Lola’s experience, I concluded that there was only one way to free the girls. I had to meet face-to-face with Gorky and strike a bargain.
To that end, I told Lola exactly what I needed from her. She had to call Vladimir Gorky and arrange for him to meet with me. She turned white when I explained my plan.
