The Pearl Diver (10 page)

“How are things going in the kitchen?” I asked as an opener.

“I’m surviving,” she said. “I’m just keeping my fingers crossed that Justin will screw up so much that Marshall will give me my job back.”

“It was bad luck,” I sympathized. “That reporter was trying to do too many things, report on crime and decor and service. Overload, I guess.”

“A good hostess is supposed to have attitude. I am who I am. It worked well at Mandala. If you only knew the kind of tips I used to get from the lobbyists…” Her voice drifted off sadly.

“Toad in the whole-wheat hole!” came a cry from the front counter. I excused myself to retrieve my breakfast dish. When I got back to the table, Andrea motioned for me to start.

“But your food isn’t ready yet,” I said.

“I’m not eating today.” Andrea cleared her throat. “Actually, there’s something I want to ask you.”

“Do you want me to put in a word with Marshall?” I was instantly uneasy. The truth was, I did think Andrea was cold in her dealings with people.

“No, no, it’s nothing to do with the restaurant. It’s about you and me.”

I paused, feeling relief. “I know we got off to a rough start. But I’m willing to try again, if you are.”

“Never mind that. What I’m trying to say is that I don’t tell many people this, but we—you and I—have something in common. My mother was from Japan.”

“No way!” I said, and looked at Andrea, really looked at her, past the beauty that had made me so apprehensive when I’d first met her. “Of course. I should have noticed you have classic Asian eyelids. I guess I was a little distracted by your hair color.”

“My hair is natural, but the color isn’t.” Andrea ran her fingers through her wheat-colored curls. “Anyway, nobody would call me an Asian-American like you. My father is black, which is a whole ’nother thing.”

“To you, maybe, but there are plenty of people our age who are part Japanese, part American. There was even a documentary made about black Japanese kids ten years ago. It was great!”

“Really?” Andrea tilted her head, as if she was examining me more closely. “I haven’t met anyone else like me. Here in America, any drop of black blood defines you. I never bothered telling Jiro I was half-Japanese because I knew it wouldn’t count the way it counts for you.”

“I have a Japanese name. That’s the first tip-off for people from Japan.” I changed the subject. “So how does your mother like it here?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I need a little help from you.”

“You mean, to speak in Japanese?” I was confused.

“No. I want you to find her.” Andrea leaned forward, as if she’d sensed my immediate desire to flee. “She’s been gone since I was two years old. I don’t even know if she’s dead or alive.”

“Andrea, I’m so sorry, but I—I don’t know how I could help.”

“You knew something bad was happening to your cousin,” Andrea said, keeping her tough, sad gaze on me. “Any normal person would have thought she’d just gone out for a phone call, and maybe then ran off to do something. They’d wait around or blow the whole thing off and go home. But you knew, and then you made the cops listen to you. Maybe we could start with that guy, that Detective Burns, who found your cousin.”

“Actually, another cop was tracking down a stolen Mercedes, and that’s why Kendall was found. It was a matter of luck, I’m afraid.” It still gave me the chills, in fact. Kendall wouldn’t be around if it hadn’t been for a car-theft tracking device.

“Did they catch the guys yet?”

“No, they didn’t. This isn’t Japan.”

“What do you mean?” Andrea raised her eyebrows.

“In Japan, there are far fewer criminals. It’s easier to stop people and hold them for questioning, too.”

“I understand the Japanese police kicked you out of the country.”

I sputtered latte. “How did you hear that?”

“Well, I was a little curious about you when you started the decoration project. I wanted to see if you were really this high-powered decorator or not, so I did an Internet search. I came up with lots of links, most of which were in Japanese, so I couldn’t read them. But from what I’d gotten in the English-language papers they print out there, I learned plenty.”

“You told Marshall, I bet.”

Andrea shook her head. “No. Growing up in the homes I did, I learned early on not to rat on anyone. But knowledge is power, you know? And what I read about you online, and then what I saw last night, made me think you could be a professional investigator.”

I wondered what she meant about the homes she’d lived in, but I didn’t have the time to ask about it. “I appreciate the compliment, but I really can’t help you. You should contact the police or a PI.”

“I already did that. Ten years ago, when I started making money, the first thing I paid for was a PI. He got a copy of the old police report, my father’s statement, that kind of thing. Nothing of substance.”

Her father’s statement. I reflected on how odd it sounded, for a daughter to be cataloging a father’s statement rather than talking to him. “What’s the basic story of what happened?”

“Remember how I told you my father met my mother in Japan? Well, he was in the military. He was still in the Marines—he’d enlisted for a four-year term—when I was born in Virginia. He was based at the Pentagon at that point, but he was away on temporary additional duty when my mother vanished. The record states that she had left me with a next-door neighbor one morning and said she was going to a doctor’s appointment and would be back by lunchtime. Well, she didn’t come back that day or the next. The neighbor called the Pentagon and they sent word for my father to return. A day later a couple of tourists found her clothes and shoes at the edge of the Potomac River.”

“A suicide?”

“Nobody ever found a body. And what kind of woman would actually take off her clothes if she was intending to commit suicide? I mean, if you knew your body was going to be discovered eventually, wouldn’t you rather be clothed?”

“I guess I would.” Especially now, when I was starting to hate the way my body looked.

“Furthermore, I found out from the report that while she lived in Japan, she’d been a professional pearl diver. Women like her worked underwater, without oxygen tanks. Someone who was that skilled underwater couldn’t drown unless she was weighted down with something, and she had supposedly taken off all her clothes.”

“As far as I know, pearl divers only work on the Shima peninsula. Is that where your father met your mother?”

Andrea shook her head. “I never heard of Ise anything. My dad was working at a base called Sasebo, and he said they met nearby.”

“Really,” I said, thinking that I didn’t buy the pearl-diving story at all. In the nineteenth century, Japanese marine biologists had learned to culture pearls that were perfectly round and beautiful, far superior to the irregular natural pearls that women had dived for in centuries past. Given the time frame, Andrea’s mother couldn’t have been a pearl diver unless she was a tourism worker, and she was in the wrong geographic area to do that. Sasebo was on the Japanese island of Ky
sh
. The pearl divers I’d heard about, the ones who put on a show for tourists, worked in Mie Prefecture, on the Shima peninsula, as I’d brought up already.

Andrea continued, “The Arlington, Virginia, police kept the case open for a few years but ultimately closed it. My mother’s missing, presumed dead. That’s not enough information for me.”

“Those must have been tough years for you and your dad to wait through,” I said.

“We weren’t together.” Andrea looked down. “He put me in foster care within a month of her disappearance. He couldn’t take care of me because the military required him to travel, he said.”

I was stunned by the mention of foster care. It reminded me of what Burns had said about social services for Kendall’s children. “Why didn’t you live with your American relatives?”

“He said he didn’t think I’d be treated well there, because they didn’t like my mom.” Andrea sighed. “So I went into care, and like I said, the police kept looking for a few years. Then she was declared dead and my dad almost immediately remarried.”

“Well, why didn’t you join him then?” I asked.

“You keep putting it as if I was the one who could make the decisions.” Andrea’s tone was angry. “The fact was, he didn’t want me. He hasn’t been outwardly nasty, but his wife, Lorraine, has been, ever since the beginning. She still tries to keep him from
seeing me. Believe me, I don’t want to be close to him. All I want is to know what happened to my mother.”

“I’m so sorry, Andrea.” I didn’t know what else I could say.

“There was something you said at the restaurant last night. What kind of mother would leave her babies?”

“‘What kind of mother would leave her babies,’” I repeated. Last night, I’d said it out of desperation, the only thing I could think of to make people start to think it mattered that Kendall was missing.

“I think she was killed,” Andrea said. “She wouldn’t have run away without me. Even if she was so unhappy with Dad, she would not have left me there.”

“She didn’t take you in the water with her,” I said gently. “Some mothers in difficult situations have done that. Yours cared enough to keep you safe.”

“You know, I look at her face and try to tell. But I just can’t.” From her bag, Andrea withdrew a manila envelope. She pulled out old, faded color photographs, the type of photos that fill the 1970s section of my parents’ photo albums. But Andrea’s little three-by-three snaps weren’t in any kind of album; each was placed in an archival acid-free paper envelope. How precious they were; I could tell by the way she handed the first one to me. It was a wedding photograph, a smiling woman in a red bridal kimono, hair blowing across her face, standing next to a black man with a similarly pleased expression. He wore a green military uniform and had his hands at his sides, the “at-ease” military position. The woman had her hands clasped in front of her, and I noted that they looked big. She, too, was large, not heavy, but closer in height to the man than I expected, and with a broadness to her shoulders that reminded me of Kendall’s since she had taken up strength training. The sea lay behind them.

“Too bad the wind’s got the hair going across her face. I really can’t see it,” I said.

“Look at this one, then.” Andrea handed me a picture of her mother holding a baby. Andrea, at about two, looked a lot like she did now. She was a thin baby, unsmiling. Her hair had been
tugged up into two pigtails and she wore a frilly pink-and-white dress with coordinating ankle socks and white lace-up shoes. Her mother, on the other hand, was quite natural. Her straight black hair hung to her shoulders without the benefit of any special styling, and it didn’t look like she wore any makeup except for a faint gloss on her lips.

“What was your mother’s name?” I asked.

“Sadako.” Andrea pronounced it carefully. “My father called her Sadie. He thought her other name was too—”

“Difficult?” I had a grudge against people who invented new names for foreigners to help them integrate.

“No, he told me he thought her name was too sad. Her last name, I’m afraid I don’t really know how to pronounce it. I think Dad was saying it wrong.” Andrea handed me a copy of a marriage license that had been filed in San Diego in 1972. Here, her mother’s name was listed as Sadako Tsuchiya.

“Tsoo-chee-yah,” I pronounced for Andrea. “I’ve heard that name before. Where does her family live?”

“I don’t know,” Andrea said. “All I know is that way back when, the police did try to contact her family, but they didn’t respond.”

“Well, that’s—ridiculous,” I said. “They could have asked a Japanese police officer to call on the household.”

“Dad said that she was written out of the register, whatever that means.”

“There’s a register kept in every town in Japan, with all the names of the families living there,” I said. “When a woman marries, her name is crossed off and is entered in her husband’s family register. What town did she live in?”

“Sasebo is all that I know,” Andrea said. “Tell me more about family registers. Did they take her name off because she wasn’t going to marry a Japanese guy?”

Andrea was coming uncomfortably close to a truth that I didn’t like to think about. “Perhaps. If children make their parents upset, the parents might remove them from the register.”

Andrea kept her eyes on me. “Because she married someone black?”

“Just marrying an
American
is a massive crime of dishonor, in many eyes. My grandparents wrote out my father because he married an American woman. Eventually, they changed their minds, and reinstated him.” It was because I’d been born, everyone said. Babies made hard hearts soften.

Andrea pressed her lips together. “I doubt that would happen for me.”

“I don’t know.” I decided to change the subject. “Tell me more about your mother’s friends in the U.S., what they thought about her disappearance.”

“The neighbor she left me with—Joanne Bridges—was supposed to be her best American friend. And she really didn’t know anything at all about her. I talked to her in person once. She was nice, but not really helpful.”

“Does your father still live close to D.C.?”

Andrea shook her head. “He left the Pentagon at the end of his enlistment, when I was four. He moved back to Orange, where he and Lorraine both came from. They were high school sweethearts. His thing with my mom was, as Lorraine puts it, the overseas fling.”

I heard the pain in Andrea’s voice, but I didn’t want to get distracted from the facts I was trying to establish. “Orange County, near Los Angeles?”