The Geomancer's Compass (20 page)

“Really. It's amazing to see you out of uniform for once. Who'd have known you were a girl?”

“Stop!” I insisted. “I look
ridiculous
.” I scowled at my reflection in the long mirror. Wouldn't you know it? Weeping Birches Golf Club had a strict dress code, so ixnay on everything Brian and I had packed (make that everything I owned) and away we went to the club's pro shop to purchase “proper golf attire.” My wardrobe runs to black, navy, gray, and olive drab, so the prospect of so much pastel made me go catatonic. In the end, it was Brian who picked out our clothes – or, as he insisted on calling them, our outfits. To make matters worse, they were identical: plaid Bermuda shorts into which a canary-yellow Lacoste shirt was tightly tucked, knee-high white socks, white-and-gold soft-spike golf shoes, light-gray
gloves with leather palms and mesh uppers, and a straw visor.

“I think we look sporty,” Brian said, smiling at his reflection.

“I think we look like Tweedledum and Tweedledee!”

“Nah,” he said cheerfully. “More like killer bees.” He consulted his watch. “Tee time in ten. Let's grab some clubs and a couple of PTDs.” By PTDs he meant Segways – those two-wheeled, self-balancing Personal Transportation Devices that were so retro they were cool again.

I shook my head in disbelief. He was looking forward to this! What was
wrong
with him? Here I was, suffused with dread and so rattled that my teeth ached … and Brian was looking forward to a jolly round of golf! I looked at my hands in their silly gloves. At least I didn't have to worry whose icky-sticky hands had last sweated on the Segway's handles.

Ten minutes later, I caught up with Brian at the tee for the first of nine holes. While I had been struggling to fasten the strap of my helmet, he had taken off at warp speed … or what passed for warp speed on a Segway, a raging twelve miles an hour. “What were you trying to do?” I demanded. “Beat some NASCAR record? Vehicular homicide?”

“What can I say? I have a need for speed.” He surveyed the hole with approval. Guarded by ponds to either side, it was wide and open, with a gentle slope downhill and to the left. “Now, this is what I call a pretty sight.”

“I agree with Mark Twain,” I muttered. “ ‘Golf is a good
walk spoiled.' ” As far as I'm concerned, there are two kinds of people in the world: people who like games and people who hate games. I am a person who hates games. What's the point if it isn't real? Mind you, events of the last several days had pretty much wrecked my concept of what was real and what wasn't.

“Don't poop on my parade. Ladies first.”

“Do you know what you are? You're obnoxiously cheerful.”

“Thank you, ma'am.”

“That's not a compliment.” Still grumbling, I placed a ball on the tee. I remembered that there was a right way to set up a swing, a skill I had yet to perfect when my father's accident put the kibosh on golf lessons. What I didn't remember was how that right way was. This was painfully obvious when I fanned the ball three times before actually making contact. Even that was pathetic. The ball hopped into the air, dropped like a stone, and dribbled into the rough.

“Randi, Randi,” Brian cooed. “You've got to let me work on your alignment –”

“No! I don't care about my stupid alignment. Just hit your ball and let's get out of here!” By this time a foursome of golfers was crowding us – like when you're stuck between monster trucks on a highway and they kind of waffle across the white line into your lane and you think, omigod I'm gonna die. They were big, bulky, businessman types, pink with sun, and boisterous.

“Why are you so jumpy?” Brian asked.

“Why aren't you?”

“Because there's nothing to be jumpy about.”

“Yes there is. Oh, man! Just hit the ball and let's get out of here.”

Brian placed a ball on the tee, took his stance, made a couple of practice swings, then swung for real, hitting the ball right in its sweet spot. It sailed through the air and onto the fairway. He turned to me, gloating. “Now, your –”

“Nope,” I snapped. “No way. I don't want this to take any longer than it has to.” I plucked my ball from the rough, got on my Segway, and chugged resolutely in the direction of the fairway.

“Eat my dust,” cried Brian, zipping ahead of me.

We quickly negotiated the next two holes, the foursome hot on our heels due to my continued fanning. I'm not what you would call a connoisseur of golf holes. Brian, it turned out, was. He insisted on describing their various features – their swales and berms and sand traps and bunkers – despite my frequent, irritated assertions that I didn't
care
. Brian was an unstoppable juggernaut when it came to this sort of thing.

Then we arrived at the fourth hole.

“A
nd that right there, if I'm not mistaken, is what we've been looking for.” Brian pointed to the left of the hole, between its fairway and the next one. I consulted the course map. The strange eruption of earth he was pointing at corresponded to the spot marked “Ancient Native Grave Site.” It didn't look like a berm so much as a big mound of mud that had been leveled off and planted with tall bushes. Could this actually be the point of origin of our family's misery over the generations – this pile of dirt, this messy scramble of bushes? If it was, I don't know what I had expected. Something more impressive, I guess – something more sinister.

“Saskatoon-berry bushes,” Brian was saying. “You have to prune them ruthlessly. They make for a good hedge. We're going to need shears.”

“Shears?”

“Hedge clippers.” He shook his head. “Oh, man. Talk about adding insult to injury! Whoever this poor dude was, he wasn't only buried in a place with lousy
feng shui
, the
feng shui
still sucks even after they built a golf course around him.”

“What do you mean?”

“This hole. It's a disaster. The balance is all off.”

“I don't get you.”

“I'm talking about aesthetics. Whoever designed this hole bungled it. The shaping is horrific. It's what you call a dog squeeze, golf course archi-torture.”

“Brian!”

“I mean it. The guy was way too bunker-happy, and look at that monster hogback, right there.” He pointed to a large mound in the green. “It's completely out of scale. And the hazards … way too tight.”

“If you say so. As far as I'm concerned, a golf hole is a golf hole is a golf hole.”

Brian shook his head. “No,” he said, “you're missing my point. Whoever this guy was, he was buried in a hog wallow, right?”

“Right.”

“Bad
feng shui
.”

“Apparently!”

“If it really is Qianfu who is buried here and if the landscaping and architecture of the site had been in harmony with the rules of
feng shui
, we might never have had this
problem in the first place. But they
aren't
in harmony. Just the opposite.”

“I don't follow.”

“The grave is on top of a steep incline. That in itself is bad.
Chi
can't accumulate or settle; it can only run downhill.”

“Chi being positive energy.”

“Right. Then there's the cart path. Up until this hole, it's kind of meandered around. Right?”

“Right.”

“But for the last hundred yards or so, it's ramrod straight. That's what you call a
shar
in
feng shui
, a ‘poison arrow.' Evil travels along straight lines, and this one's pointed directly at the grave.”

So it was. “And?”

“And last but far from least, the proximity of that ‘comfort station' over there.” He waggled a finger in the direction of a vividly turquoise, slightly tipsy-looking porta-potty to the left of the hole. He shook his head. “Toilets and
chi
…not a good combination. I'd be pissed too. You know what I think?”

“What?”

“I think we should climb up there and take a closer look at the grave.”

My heart set off at a gallop. Blood rushed to my head. Then I heard gabbing – it was the foursome of businessmen on their Segways closing in on us.

Brian snapped his fingers. “Shoot. Too late. I guess it will have to wait until tonight.”

I can't wait, I thought.
Not
.

B
rian pulled the Helio off Highway 363 into a ragged copse of Manitoba maple on the far side of the road from the golf course; we were maybe five hundred yards from its entrance. Before stowing our luggage in the car's trunk and checking out of Scarface's old haunt, we had changed out of our “proper golf attire” and back into our civvies at the Prairie Rose – jeans and my CanBoard hoodie for me, cargo pants and photographer's vest for Brian. I figured we'd get one chance and one chance only to dig up Qianfu's bones. Either we would die trying or, miracle of miracles, we'd succeed, in which case the plan was to get out of town, and I mean pronto. There was a drop box for the Salvation Army next to the hotel. On the way to the car I crammed the rolled-up Bermuda shorts and yellow golf shirt into the box, followed by the socks and gloves and visor and, to top it all off, the white-and-gold shoes.

“Hey!” Brian objected. “What are you doing? That's good stuff.”

“Which someone else will appreciate more than I ever will,” I told him. “Because if there's one thing this day has taught me, it's that, whatever else happens,
that
was my last golf game.”

The sun had set moments before – according to my Zypad, at precisely 8:21 p.m. Soon it would be dark enough for us to venture onto the course without being seen, but for now the western horizon glowed vibrant pink. “We're lucky there's no moon tonight,” Brian said. I didn't feel lucky. It's hard to feel lucky when you're freaked out. And sore? Man! Over my protests, he had insisted on playing out the full nine holes; he had begged and pleaded for the whole eighteen, but I had gotten on my Segway and headed back to the clubhouse, so he didn't have much choice except to follow.

“It's a good thing I don't have to dig,” I grumbled. “My shoulders are killing me.”

“Are you kidding? I'm just getting warmed up,” Brian assured me, beaming. How could he be so cheerful? What was wrong with him? “Equipment check. Shovel?”

“Check. In the trunk.”

“Clippers?”

“Also in the trunk.” After our golf game, we'd made a detour to Canadian Tire to buy the clippers. Oh, and junk food for Brian; the many pockets of his cargo pants and his
vest were stuffed with bags of chips and candies and crackers and peanuts. He was like a walking, breathing snack machine.

“I-spex?”

“Check.”

“Suit bag?”

“Check.”

“
Lo p'an
?”

I patted my knapsack. Through the thin leather, I could feel the outline of the cherrywood box containing the compass. “And I'm wearing the Zypad in,” I told him.

“What for?”

“To make sure somebody's really down there,” I replied. “Since the grave site's in the database, we should be able to use WorldBoard's infrastructural anatomy function to see the grave's contents. Once we're in position.”

“Good thinking. No point digging if nobody's down there.”

“I just wish we knew for sure if it was Qianfu,” I said.

“It's our best – heck, it's our
only
option,” Brian replied.

“I know,” I said, “but it doesn't make me feel any better about trespassing on private property and disturbing a grave site and whatever other crimes we're about to commit.”

We sat for a moment, our eyes fixed on the pink horizon. Brian extracted a bag from one of his pockets. “Jujube?” he offered.

I shook my head. I don't like jujubes and, even if I did, I don't think I could have swallowed one at that moment. It felt
as though invisible hands wrapped around my neck were slowing squeezing my windpipe closed. “What kind of security do golf courses have, anyway?”