The Geomancer's Compass (17 page)

This was what was going through my head when suddenly Brian pulled off his headphones and turned to me. “Enough!” he announced. “I can't sit here a minute longer with my mind in idle. I've got to do something.”

I blinked. “What do you mean, ‘do something'?”

“ ‘Something,' ” he repeated. “Like you. You're doing something.”

I shook my head. “Nope. Not really.”

He sprang to his feet and began pacing back and forth.

“Whoa, dude, slow down,” I pleaded. “You're being way too intense.”

He stopped. “I'm restless. Don't you ever get restless? I gotta get out of here … get some fresh air!” He turned and headed for the door.

“Where are you going?” I cried.

“Out.”

“Out where?” I began to panic. The last thing I wanted was to be alone.

“I don't know,” he said. “Shopping. I'm going shopping.”

“For what?”

“Things we need,” he replied. “A shovel. A bag of some sort. A body bag.”

“Where are you going to find a body bag?” I demanded. “At the Bay? At Canadian Tire?”

“I don't know. Someone has to sell them.”

“Yeah, but I bet they ask a whole lot of questions first.”

“A suit bag, then.”

“Won't a suit bag be too short?”

“Dead people shrink. And it's just bones.”

I scrambled to my feet and took hold of his arm. “Don't leave me, Brian.”

“What? Are you scared?”

“Of course I'm scared. Aren't you?”

“More … I don't know … perturbed. C'mon, Randi, give me some space. Nothing's going to get you while I'm gone.” Taking me by both shoulders, he pushed me back down on the bed. “Just … research something, OK? I need to get my head around this thing. I won't be long, I promise.” He released my shoulders, snatched the Helio's keys from the dresser, and left, banging the door behind him.

I started up, intending to follow him, then thought better of it. Sitting around doing nothing would drive me crazy. I could see his point. I glanced at the window. It was still daylight after all, and what I knew about ghosts – not much – suggested that they weren't free-range. They had haunts, and clearly the Azure Dragon Tea and Herb Sanatorium was Qianfu's. Which meant I was probably safe at the Prairie Rose. Probably.

I steeled myself and turned back to my Zypad, scanning the long list of downloads. What did The Grandfather think I'd find? Or did he regard technology as somehow magic, and data as a kind of treasure trove? Of course, data
is
a treasure trove if
what you're looking for was ever collected in the first place. The burial of Qianfu's bones had clearly occurred off the record. So why did The Grandfather believe there might be a record of it? Or was he just hoping against hope? I shook my head. This was a wild goose chase I wasn't up to. I decided to download all the archives of the
Moose Jaw Reviewer
and the
Times-Herald
from the time of the Death House fire to when Qianfu's body went missing. Maybe I'd find something resembling a clue in those newspaper accounts. It was worth a shot.

No sooner had I initiated the
Reviewer
download than I heard an eerie howl unwinding from the direction of the bathroom. It sounded hollow, like the wail of something not alive, plaintive and menacing at the same time. A second later I was on my feet, ready to let loose a bloodcurdling scream, when I remembered the desk clerk's warning: that the wind sometimes made the plumbing howl. How had he put it?
Like a ghost in a bottle
. I clapped my hand over my mouth and stood there waiting for my heart to stop pounding. Don't be such a sissy, I told myself. It's just the wind. I crossed to the bathroom, peered inside, then shut the door firmly before returning to the bed and my download. “It's just the wind, it's just the wind,” I repeated out loud, as I watched the download indicator bar slowly fill up.

I
t was eight-thirty when Brian returned, a shovel in one hand and a suit bag in the other. He looked more his old self, relaxed and goofy rather than all conflicted. “Look at this,” he said proudly, holding the bag out for my inspection. “Pierre Cardin. Only the best for old Uncle … Qianfu. Because we know how finicky he is.” He stepped back and scrutinized me. “Hey! You don't look utterly miserable. Don't tell me you've found something?”

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 27
^th
Light Horse, which was called up in early 1915. Willard was with the 65
^th
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 him when you see him.” Brian crossed to the door and opened it. “Hey, Elijah,” he called. “Wanna come in here?”