I nodded excitedly. In his absence, I had managed to piece together from the archives of Moose Jaw’s two daily papers a pretty detailed account of the circumstances around Qianfu’s death. To my surprise, it hadn’t been all that hard; in its day, it had been the hot story, the talk of the town. There had been a lot of ink devoted to it. “I’ve got a much clearer picture of the events leading up to Qianfu’s murder than I had before,” I told him. “For starters, The Grandfather was totally right about the Violet McNabb thing being a huge deal.”
Brian stood the shovel up against the wall. “Violet who?”
“Violet McNabb, the white woman Qianfu was involved with, the waitress. Just listen to this. It’s an article dated August 16, 1908.”
Brian hung up the suit bag in the closet and sat down on the other twin bed, facing me.
I cleared my throat. “ ‘The inscrutable, almond-eyed celestial is alleged to have seduced this fair innocent, plying her with the ancient love medicine of opium, with the express purpose first of ruining her, then of selling her into white slavery.’ That is before, ‘virtuous vigilantes saved this flower of Moose Jaw from a fate worse than death.’ ”
“Wow,” breathed Brian. “That’s extreme!”
“And there are photos.” I turned the Zypad toward Brian. He leaned forward to peer at the blurred photograph of an unsmiling young woman in her early twenties. She was wearing a prim white shirtwaist with a turnover collar and little buttons down the front, and had big, pale eyes, a long nose, and a wad of sepia-colored hair piled high upon her head.
Brian winced. “If Violet McNabb was the flower of Moose Jaw, I’d hate to see its skunk cabbage.”
“Here’s a photo of Qianfu.” I scrolled down to the image of a young, smooth-faced Chinese man with high cheekbones, squinty eyes, and a slightly bulbous nose. His thick eyebrows, which rose to a peak in the middle, resembled a kid’s drawing of a bird in flight. He looked like early portraits of The Grandfather – not surprising, given that they were twins. “What’s really Bizarro World is how much of a stink their relationship caused. The Saskatchewan Legislature actually passed a law making it illegal for ‘Orientals’ to employ white women, period. All because of this one case. All because one white woman working in one restaurant in one hick town was seen holding hands with another employee, who just happened to be Chinese.”
Brian shook his head. “I don’t know, Randi. Interracial hand-holding, the first step on the road to perdition.”
“Evidently.”
“So Violet lost her job at Wong’s Restaurant and Uncle Qianfu lost his life. That seems fair and balanced.”
“Talk about a double standard. A-Ma told me that The Grandfather always suspected the disappearance of Qianfu’s bones had more to do with his involvement with Violet McNabb than with public outrage over the Death House; that it might have been an act of further revenge on the part of people who thought being murdered was not punishment enough for a Chinese man who had the nerve to romance a white woman. That’s starting to sound right to me.”
“So who looks good to you?”
“Well, at first I was thinking about the chief of police. You know, Alfred Humes. But Humes’s thing was corruption, right? I think he didn’t look very hard for Qianfu’s killers, probably because he knew who they were and he went along with the murder. Then, later, I think he probably looked the other way when Qianfu’s bones disappeared.”
“For a price?”
“For a price.”
“So, ruling out Humes for the moment, who else?”
“The McNabb clan,” I replied. “Violet’s family. They were so not happy about the whole Qianfu thing. Violet was absolutely and utterly ruined for life, a terrible shame had been visited upon their family, blah, blah, blah. And that was just Ma and Pa.”
“She had sibs?”
I nodded. “Twin brothers, wouldn’t you know? Dwight and Dwayne, and no, I’m not kidding. And they weren’t exactly the forgive-and-forget type. More the tar-and-feather type. According to the Times-Herald, there were a number of times Humes had to lock them up overnight to keep them from doing things like … oh … torching the whole of Chinatown.”
“I thought Humes was on their side.”
“Humes was on the side of whoever could pay him the most,” I pointed out. “I dug around a little and found some accounts by local historians writing in the 1940s. According to them, the Chinese merchants paid Humes enough in protection money that he had a vested interest in Chinatown being a going concern. Every once in a while he would stage a very public raid on an opium den or a gambling house, but that was mostly show, to assure the white citizens of Moose Jaw that he was their go-to guy for law and order.”
“OK, then. Bye-bye Chief Humes. Hello, Dwight and Dwayne. Two identical rednecks cruising for revenge and a good time. Retribution. The restoration of the family’s lost honor. All good reasons to murder a Chinese dude and steal his bones.”
“Not so fast,” I warned him. “I thought I remembered A-Ma saying that Violet had married later, so I searched her name in the newspaper archives and found this.” I pulled up an engagement announcement in the society page of the Reviewer and read, “ ‘Joseph and Edna McNabb and George and Marianne Rawlins of Moose Jaw are pleased to announce the engagement of their children Violet and Willard.’ ” I looked up. “The announcement is dated June 1908, a couple of months before Qianfu was murdered.”
Brian whistled. “Good catch, Randi! A jilted lover. Boy, that Willard had to be some bitter. Thwarted love combined with a healthy dose of wounded male pride, especially since he probably thought the guy she replaced him with was subhuman. That’s got to hurt.”
“Exactly,” I agreed. “But there’s more. I also found this.” I pulled up a second announcement, dated to June 1914. “ ‘Joseph and Edna McNabb are pleased to announce the marriage of their daughter Violet to Mr. Willard Rawlins.’ ”
“So she actually ended up marrying the guy?”
I nodded. “Six years after the murder, one year before the Death House scandal. OK, but then I got this hunch … 1914 was when World War I broke out, and Willard was the right age to go to war, so I went to the government’s Veterans Affairs website and did a search for him on the Virtual Memorial database.”
“And?”
“Willard died at Vimy Ridge in 1917.”
“What about Dwight and Dwayne?”
“They beat him by a year. Battle of the Somme.”
I could tell that Brian saw where I was going with this. I wondered fleetingly why I had always thought of him as dumb; he was actually pretty smart. “So I guess the real question is: when did they leave for Europe?”
“According to the Virtual Memorial, the McNabb twins were with Moose Jaw’s 27th Light Horse, which was called up in early 1915. Willard was with the 65th and that didn’t mobilize until early 1916.”
“By ‘early,’ what do you mean?”
“Oh, I don’t know. January. February.”
“And when did the Death House fire take place? What month?”
“November. November 1915.”
“So Dwight and Dwayne were killing people over in Europe in 1915 when Uncle Qianfu’s bones went missing. And Willard wasn’t.” He looked at me. “That can only mean that Willard is our man.”
“It sure looks that way.” For the first time, I felt we might, just might be getting somewhere. And it was my research skills, my media savvy, that had brought us to this point. I felt pretty pleased with myself, I have to tell you.
That’s when Brian dropped his bomb. “I’ve got my own news,” he said brightly. “I’ve been doing a little sleuthing on my own.”
His own sleuthing? “What do you mean?”
“Just what I said,” he replied. “A local I was chatting up told me something very interesting. I think it may have some bearing on our case. Just a hunch.”
“Well?” I asked, suddenly wary. “What? Who?”
“Oh, you’ll recognize h
im when you see him.” Brian crossed to the door and opened it. “Hey, Elijah,” he called. “Wanna come in here?”
“Oh, no!” I moaned. “No, Brian. Not the homeless guy?”
Brian looked daggers at me, shook his head once, and pressed his index finger to his lips before slashing that same finger across his throat. In other words, “Shut up or I’ll kill you.”
So yes, in answer to my question, it was the homeless guy – who, it was now clear, had been camped in the hall outside the room since Brian’s return to the hotel. I apple-dolled my face to indicate my displeasure before falling back onto the bed in mute, grumpy submission. As I lay there, staring angrily at the ceiling, I noticed a suspicious yellow stain that looked a lot like Italy. What was it? Had the toilet in the room above had some sort of flushing malfunction? Was it recent?
In the meantime, Brian had turned back to the door and was saying in this really smooth way – you know, the way you talk to little kids when they won’t eat their disgusting squash or try to convince your dog to trade your grandmother’s hearing aid for a Milk-Bone – “Come on in, Elijah. No, no problem. Seriously. She’s cool.” Back his head pivots, in my direction. “Be cool,” he mouths to me, scowling fiercely to underscore his point.
“I’m cool,” I mouthed back. Might as well be. How long could this – whatever this was – take? Get the guy in and out, with a fiver for the favor, and then I could start searching Land Registry for any properties that once belonged to Willard Rawlins.
Elijah’s smell preceded him, a rank combination of wood smoke and old sweat, made all the more pungent by the wet-dog smell that Lois contributed to the mix.
Wait a minute – Lois?
I sat up. How had Brian managed to get Lois past the desk clerk? Assuming, of course, that Oscar saw anything wrong with letting homeless people and their mangy pets wander all over his hotel. It wasn’t the Ritz, after all.
Elijah appeared in the doorway, looking hesitant, embarrassed, and a little bewildered. He was taller than I would have guessed, almost as tall as Brian. Well, duh; when we had first seen him, he’d been sitting all hunched over but, even standing, he looked stooped, like the upper part of his spine had collapsed in on itself. He must have been a big man once, judging from the broadness of his shoulders and the size of his feet and hands. Now his clothes – an old navy blue windbreaker pulled over a dirty gray sweatshirt, baggy khaki pants with frayed hems held up with a belt improvised out of rope – hung from him as if from a skeleton.
“What are you waiting for? Come on in. Sit down.” Brian gestured toward the armchair by the window.
“Lois?” Elijah asked uncertainly. He looked over his shoulder. “I don’t go nowhere without her.”
“Lois too.” Brian was expansive. “The more the merrier. We like dogs. Don’t we, Randi?”
I nodded, cringing a little. Clean dogs, I thought, not walking three-ring flea circuses. Just the thought of Lois made me feel itchy. But at least it made me forget about the stain in the ceiling.
“It’s just that … sometimes people don’t let her … they don’t allow her,” Elijah explained. “That’s why I don’t go to the shelter. She’s not welcome there. They say I can stay but not Lois, she’ll have to go to the Humane Society. I know what happens to dogs at the Humane Society, dogs nobody wants because they’re old and broke down and not this type or that type but a Heinz 57. How could I do that to her when she’s been with me all these years?”
“No worries, Elijah,” Brian assured him. “Lois is welcome here.”
“Well, OK, then.” Elijah eyed the armchair with its faded upholstery and its shiny seat, then shuffled toward it like a big old gaunt bear, trailed by the woebegone Lois. Never, I thought, had I seen a more abject-looking animal. Everything about her drooped, and she had these sad, sad eyes. Tragic, really. Because when you think about it, it’s got to be super-depressing being a homeless person’s dog.
Elijah glanced out the window at the roof of the adjoining building. “Nice view,” he observed. He sat down gingerly, like he didn’t trust the chair not to break. (I made a mental note not to ever sit in that chair.) Lois slumped to the floor and flattened herself on the rug at his feet like a furry mud puddle. Elijah rubbed his hands together as if for warmth. “Don’t suppose you got one of those minibars, do you?”
“Nope,” replied Brian. “Sorry.”
“Just asking.”
Brian sat on the edge of the bed nearest him. “Elijah,” he said, “I want you to tell Randi what you told me out on the street.”
“OK. Yeah, sure.” Elijah removed his toque. His hair was long, coarse, and the color of iron. He sniffed the toque, then proceeded to knead it as he cast furtive glances around the room, looking nervous and distracted.
We sat there, Brian and I, looking intently at him. After a moment Brian said, “Elijah?”
“Huh?”
“You were going to tell Randi what you told me out on the street. About the golf course.”
“Oh yeah, sure,” said Elijah. “Ahh … remind me.” Definitely not the sharpest tool in the shed.
“You were working for a construction crew …”
“That’s right,” said Elijah. “Abbott and Sons. Good job.” He turned to me. “I wasn’t always like this, you know? Not so … down and out.”
It was all I could do not to recoil from him. He smelled like old cheese. I gulped and smiled a fake smile, and nodded.
“And there was this golf course development company that wanted to build an eighteen-hole course on the outskirts of town,” Brian continued to prompt him. “Weeping Birches Golf Club.”
“That’s right. Weeping Birches. Big Sky Golf Course Development,” said Elijah. “Where Highway 363 heads south going toward Abound and Old Wives Lake.”
I turned to Brian. “What’s up with this?”
“Patience, Grasshopper. Go on, Elijah.”
“So Big Sky bought up a whole bunch of land down there, including this one pig farm …”
My heart skipped a beat. I glanced quickly at Brian. He widened his eyes and nodded. “Pig farm?” I repeated.
“It was pigs, all right.” Elijah’s nose wrinkled and the corners of his mouth turned down in disgust. “Been twenty years, I still remember the stink. Never smelled anything worse in my life.”
And I bet you’ve smelled some very bad things, I thought. Yourself, for example. “Did the farm belong to the Rawlins family?”
Elijah nodded. “It did. Was Old Man Rawlins who sold it to Big Sky.”
I did the math in my head. Presumably Willard was around The Grandfather’s age; if he hadn’t died on Vimy Ridge, he would still have been long dead by the time his descendant sold the family farm. “Old Man Rawlins” had probably been his son. Or his grandson, or maybe a nephew or great-nephew. I hadn’t yet gone looking for birth announcements in the archives, but Violet and Willard had been married a year before he went off to war; a child might well have been conceived in that year.
“Go on, Elijah,” Brian said. “Tell her what happened next.”
“Well, Big Sky contracted with Abbott and Sons to take down the outbuildings and start leveling the ground.”
“And …?” Brian prompted.
“And that’s when we found the grave.”
There was a moment of stunned silence. Then, “Omigod,” I cried, bouncing on the bed and clapping my hands. “You’re kidding. You’ve got to be kidding. Really? A grave? You found a grave?”
My excitement seemed to take Elijah by surprise. Presumably Brian’s reaction to this information had been less over the top. Elijah stared at me, blinked (who was this crazy girl?), then swallowed nervously and muttered, “Yeah. In the wallow.”
“The wallow?” I repeated. “What’s a wallow?”
“Where the pigs … you know … where they wallow,” replied Elijah. “Roll around in the mud. Pigs like that. Keeps them cool.”
“And that’s where you found the grave? In the wallow?”<
br />
“Between the pigsty and the outhouse.”
“Man.” I turned to Brian. “A pig wallow? Between a pigsty and an outhouse? Talk about bad feng shui.”
“The worst,” Brian agreed. “If you’re thinking what I’m thinking and we’re right, Qianfu had every reason to be royally pissed.”
Elijah looked first at Brian, then at me. “What are you talking about? Fang who?”
“Never mind,” Brian assured him. “Go on.”
“Well,” said Elijah, “I took one look at that grave and the way the bones were and I knew they had to belong to one of my ancestors.”
I gave Brian a quizzical look. “Your ancestors?” I asked. “What do you mean?”
“Assiniboine.”
“Come again?”
“Assiniboine,” Elijah repeated. “We are also called Stoney Sioux.”
“How could you tell they were Assiniboine?” Brian asked.
“In the old days, it was the custom of the Assiniboine to place the bodies of our dead on tree scaffolds with their feet facing west, toward the Darkening Land. When the tree scaffolds got old and broke and birds had picked all the flesh from the bones of our dead, we would bury them in the ground. There was no sign of a coffin in this grave, no shroud or blanket. And it was shallow, like two feet deep. White men do not bury their dead that way. That’s how I knew.”
“But that’s …” I began. I was going to say, “But that’s the way Qianfu would have been buried, just bones dropped into a hole with no ceremony and nothing to say who or what he might have been,” but I thought better of it. Better to play our cards close to our chest. “Go on,” I said.
“The foreman sent us home for the day,” said Elijah. “That’s what you have to do when human remains are found. Check with the police, see if anybody’s missing. If the grave looks like it might be old, you have to check with the government, maybe the Heritage Department.” Elijah shook his head. “But I didn’t trust Abbott and Sons or Big Sky, neither. I thought they might try to cover it up … you know … destroy the evidence, pretend it never happened, maybe slip us some cash so we wouldn’t say nothing. The last thing they wanted was a work stoppage. That job was gonna make everybody a lot of money. And I understood that. I did. But I’m Assiniboine. I couldn’t just stand by, knowing what I knew, and let my ancestors be disrespected. A burial ground is a sacred place; it should be respected and left untouched. How would you feel if somebody messed with your dead? Ever think of that?”
The Geomancer's Compass Page 12
