Dragon Bones

by Lisa See

  She shook her head.

  “We don’t know how bad it’s going to get, but I’ll lay out a possibility for you.” He still had his face to the window, but she could see how his features had hardened. He’d punish her now for her accusations. “The mother of all storms whipped through China in 1975. The rains came in three successive waves, each lasting at least twelve hours, each with the intensity of a fireman’s hose. Birds fell from the sky, killed by raindrops that had the force of arrows. Two days later, two of this country’s largest dams downstream from here collapsed. Sixty dams below them fell like dominoes. Overnight. The revered river dragon had escaped with such demonic force that tidal waves wiped out entire towns.” His voice was bitter and accusatory. “Somewhere between eighty-six thousand and two hundred thirty thousand people died. But you know how your government manipulates statistics. Were there five or five thousand deaths at Tiananmen? Li Peng might know, but instead of saying, he diverted attention to the dam, right? So, let’s be conservative and say that it was only eighty-six thousand who died overnight. Two million people were trapped for weeks by the high waters. Another eleven million were stricken by disease and famine. I’m talking now about typhoid, hepatitis, malaria, and starvation. That’s the thing about China. The variety of scourges and the numbers of victims are always daunting.”

  His fingers toyed with the string from the blinds. “For the Three Gorges Dam, your government is moving over a million people upstream so that millions of people downstream will benefit for decades, maybe even centuries, to come. Can’t a Communist like you see the good in the sacrifices of the few for the good of the many?”

  He turned to face her once again. “You want to know why I’m here. It’s all of it.” His arms opened to embrace his worldview. “It’s the money. It’s saving people’s lives and livelihoods. It’s making sure this dam is built right. It’s getting my hands”—and here he gripped them into tight fists—“dirty, but not in the filthy way that you’ve suggested. It’s knowing that this pile of concrete and steel will be a monument to human achievement that will make a direct impact on people’s lives. Can you say the same for anything you do?”

  WHEN STUART’S DRIVER DELIVERED HULAN BACK TO THE VISITORS’ center, the helicopter still had not returned from Wuhan. The winds had picked up, and the rain was falling so heavily that she couldn’t see the river from the building. The stranded tourists hadn’t budged, and wives complained in a variety of languages that their husbands should do something. The receptionist in the kelly green outfit was no match for those husbands, who banged on the counter, complained loudly, and generally acted like the spoiled foreigners that they were. Hulan found a spot against one of the walls as far from the tourists as she could get, sat on the floor, tucked her knees up under her chin, folded her arms across her knees, buried her head, and waited.

  Finally, the chopper returned from Wuhan. The pilot said he didn’t recommend flying in this weather, but Hulan climbed in beside him nevertheless and was back at the Panda Guesthouse by one. The desk clerk gave her two thick envelopes that had been dropped off by one of Hom’s men, then she went straight to her room. The rain was worse than yesterday, and the ungodly racket it made as it pounded the building exaggerated the empty silence in the room. She sat on the bed and tried to call David, wanting to find out if he’d made it to Hong Kong safely, but the phone wouldn’t dial out. She padded back out to the lobby and was informed that all phone lines were down because of the storm. “But we still have electricity, Inspector,” the day clerk said brightly. She walked back to her room, feeling low.

  She shook out her shoulders, then went through the room, pulling together all of the notes and files she’d gathered. David had been right yesterday when he’d said they were on a train. They’d jumped from interview to interview, heading out far from the scenes of both Brian’s and Lily’s deaths. Hulan especially had gone far afield, trying to make connections to the All-Patriotic Society and the dam where none apparently existed. Now it was time to put those dead ends aside, hole up, and try to couple what she’d actually learned with what the paper trail had recorded.

  She worked chronologically from Brian’s disappearance, looking for inconsistencies. Hom’s report stated that on the morning of Saturday, July 20, Dr. Ma arrived at Bashan’s Security Bureau to announce that one of his foreign experts had gone missing and was feared drowned. A house-to-house search was conducted along the river in the hope that Brian had washed ashore alive but injured. No mention was made of Stuart Miller’s hydrofoil. However, Hom noted that he’d phoned the provincial government on Monday morning at 9:00 A.M. to file an official report on the missing foreigner. At that time, Dr. Ma placed calls to the American Embassy, the Cultural Relics Bureau, and Angela McCarthy in Seattle. An inventory of Brian’s belongings—from his backpack and from his room—made up the rest of the file. These effects were kept locked either in Hom’s office or in Brian’s room at the guesthouse until Angela arrived from America on Wednesday, July 24.

  The timing of that puzzled Hulan. If Ma had called Angela at 9:00 China time Monday morning, it would have been 6:00 on Sunday night in Seattle. Hulan didn’t know if China had a consulate in Seattle. If it did, then Angela could have been there first thing Monday morning to apply for a visa, which could have been processed within an hour or so given the emergency situation. Angela would have had one of two choices to get across the Pacific: Seattle–Tokyo–Hong Kong or Seattle–San Francisco–Shanghai. The earliest she could have arrived in China would have been Wednesday evening, because she would have lost a day crossing the international date line. From either Hong Kong or Shanghai, she would have needed to fly to either Wuhan or Chongqing, then taken public transportation—a bus, ferry, or hydrofoil—to Bashan. The absolute earliest that she could have arrived here would have been sometime Thursday evening or Friday morning. Yet Angela had signed the release for her brother’s belongings on Wednesday, which meant that she had already been on her way to Bashan before she knew what had happened to her brother.

  Why hadn’t anyone, Angela especially, mentioned this? In fact, at dinner the other night she’d specifically said that she’d come out after she’d gotten word that her brother was missing, because the two of them had such a close relationship that she knew he’d never go anywhere without telling her first. She’d lied. For the first time, Hulan had found an anomaly in the written record, and she felt a sense of urgency as she opened the material Investigator Lo had sent.

  China kept track of foreigners through entry documents, mandatory hotel registration forms, as well as the ubiquitous watchers who monitored not only Chinese citizens but foreign visitors as well. Hulan began with the entry forms, which provided dates of visas, where they’d been obtained, ports of entry into China, dates of arrival, in-country movements if known, and anticipated departure dates. These forms also furnished standard information on date and place of birth, home address, profession, and the like.

  Angela’s entry form confirmed what Hulan had already deduced. The American had arrived in Hong Kong on July 20, the day her brother’s absence was first noticed by Annabel Quinby. Hulan set this page aside for now and quickly scanned the information on the other foreigners. Doctors Quinby and Strong planned to stay for the summer, while Professor Schmidt was in China on a year’s sabbatical. Stuart Miller traveled in and out of the country regularly. Catherine Miller had been in China for three years, having studied at Beijing University before coming to Bashan. Nothing in these records seemed out of the ordinary.

  Dr. Quon, the mathematician, had arrived in Bashan a week after Brian’s disappearance. Hulan figured that Quon was a Chinese American of a certain type. Now that he’d found his roots—having already visited his home village and seen the usual tourist sights—he was finding adventures farther afield as China’s ecotourism industry expanded. He’d visited several archaeological sites over the last three years. Last summer he’d spent three days in Bashan in July, then had circled back for anot
her week at the end of August. Although he’d planned to leave China on this trip on August 1, he was still here.

  Hulan turned her attention to Brian and Lily. The two of them had been in Hong Kong at the same time on at least a dozen occasions in the last two years. Lily’s most recent entry form, dated July 16, stated that she’d be leaving China on July 21—two days after Brian’s disappearance and three days before Angela’s arrival in Bashan. But, like Michael, she’d stayed. This was not a criminal act. People had the right to change their travel plans and extend trips, but Lily had stayed an additional two weeks in Bashan. Not only was that a long time in a small town in a remote area in the middle of the hottest and rainiest season, it was also longer by a week than any other visit that Lily had made here since the site opened. She had stayed for a reason. Maybe the answer would be in her papers.

  But Hulan didn’t have them on the bed. She got up and looked through the room again but didn’t find them. Then she remembered telling David to gather them up during their meeting with Pathologist Fong. Something of vital importance could be in those papers, but Hulan had no way to reach David.

  There was nothing she could do but pick up another of Lo’s files. Inside she found a one-page synopsis for each of what Dr. Ma had called the five vultures. Lo had not found a single blemish in any of their dangans, nor were any found in those of the Chinese students who worked on the site. However, he hadn’t been able to obtain any information on Dr. Ma. This didn’t surprise Hulan. Still, she’d put off meeting with him long enough.

  Hulan saw nothing in the files Lo had sent to suggest that the day workers’ deaths—even that of Wu Huadong—could possibly have been connected to that of Brian McCarthy or that of Lily Sinclair. These were just five male peasants in a country of 900 million peasants. Still, she would have liked to have matched this information with Hom’s Public Security files on those cases. But he hadn’t provided them, though she had asked for them several times. She had to wonder why.

  She had two packages from Hom’s officers. She looked through the interviews with the hotel’s day staff and found that the maid who cleaned Lily’s room reported that the sheets showed the foreigner had not had sexual relations in three days. (The maid had never seen a man in Lily’s room.) On the night of Lily’s death, several of the day employees spotted Lily and Catherine walking through town between 11:00 and 12:00. Su Zhangqing, the smarter and shyer of Hom’s men, had had the presence of mind to make a simple map of the town showing the guesthouse, the main road out of town, and the dock. He’d placed little x’s everywhere someone reported seeing the two women either together or separately. This map corroborated Catherine’s story that the two had split up and gone in different directions.

  Hulan next glanced through the interviews with the night staff. The waitresses recounted what she already knew—that after dinner Lily and Angela had left the dining room with the inspector and her foreign husband. The chambermaids on the night shift followed a schedule that took the foreigners’ routines into account. Beds were turned down, new towels brought in, and thermoses restocked with hot water between 7:00 and 9:00, when the foreigners were sure to be in the dining room. No one had seen anything suspicious in any of the guest rooms.

  The night maid serviced Lily’s room at the usual time of 7:15 P.M. Looking at the cleaning schedule, Hulan saw that the day maid wouldn’t have hit Lily’s room until around 10:00 A.M. Had the killer counted on the discovery of her body not occurring until then? Certainly everyone who worked at Site 518 would have been out of the hotel. But then, would they have left on the bus knowing that Lily wasn’t with them? Hulan and David had made a plan to take Lily to the site with them at 7:30, but as far as Hulan knew only Angela was aware of this change.

  Later today Hulan would find and interview Dr. Ma, Captain Hom, and Angela McCarthy, but first she needed to revisit Lily’s death. She was convinced that if she knew how Lily’s body had gotten back to her room, everything would fall into place.

  Moving Lily’s body had to have been a hugely difficult job, between the dead weight, concerns over seepage, and fear of discovery. Hom’s men had searched the guesthouse for ways that the body could have been brought in. Sure that they’d missed something, Hulan decided to search the grounds herself. She walked to Lily’s room, which was in the third courtyard, turned, and stood with her back against the door. All of the courtyards had guest rooms, but only Lily and Dr. Strong had rooms on this one, which held a traditional Chinese garden, albeit with larger than usual scholar’s rocks set in a dramatic tableau. If the murderers had walked stealthily—which Hulan had to assume given the gravity of the crime—Strong might not have heard anything other than the usual night noises he reported.

  To Hulan’s right—south—were the restaurant and the lobby. To her left was the courtyard that housed her and David’s room. The few blood drops that had been found were in that direction, so she went left, stopping to check the east and west gates that were set in the compound’s protective wall. Spiderwebs clung to the corners, and thick rust corroded the hardware. These gates had not been moved or tampered with in any way for many years. She continued north into the courtyard where her room was, then into the fifth courtyard, which had originally been for the concubines. Just as Stuart had said, Lily’s description of the deeper courtyards had been an exaggeration. The painted decoration and the architectural elements were grand, true, but this was to be expected the further into any traditional compound you went.

  Hulan almost had to laugh when she got to the sixth and last courtyard. Here Old Man Wang would have had his private apartments, which would have been decorated in opulent and lavish fashion. These would have been flanked by equally well appointed rooms for his sons and sumptuous rooms for his wives. Today, more than fifty years after Liberation, these rooms farthest from the lobby had been transformed into the working guts of the hotel. In the center area were employee bicycles, tables set up for communal staff meals, and laundry lines strung with the clothes of the workers who lived here. She peeked into windows and in through dark doorways, finding a toolshed, linen storage, a locker room for the staff to change into their uniforms, and living quarters for a few of the higher-level staff and their families. She threaded her way past these last rooms until she found the back wall to the compound. An old guardhouse enclosed the back gate. Hulan pushed on the door and stepped inside.

  A tiny old woman dressed in loose black cotton pants and a white cotton shirt perched on the edge of a cot, destringing China peas. Her face was as wrinkled as a dried plum and her teeth were few. Seeing Hulan, the old woman jumped to her feet. “Huanying, huanying! Welcome, welcome! Have you eaten yet?”

  “I have, Auntie,” Hulan said, using the polite honorific.

  “Tea then, you must have tea.” The old woman shuffled across the room to prepare the brew. Hulan stood quietly while the woman did her tasks, knowing that good manners required them to go through this little ritual.

  Once the tea was steeping, the old woman turned to Hulan and clasped her hands together. “Inspector, you are as beautiful as my grandson says.”

  “Who’s your grandson?”

  “You’ve met him. He works in the lobby at night.”

  The old woman poured some tea into a dirty cup, swirled the liquid, and dumped it on the floor. Then she poured fresh tea into the cup and handed it to Hulan. The cup was still dirty, but Hulan took a politely noisy sip. “Xiexie.”

  The old woman motioned to the cot. “Sit.”

  Hulan did as she was told, and the old woman sat so close that their thighs touched. The top of the woman’s head came to Hulan’s shoulder.

  “I’ve been waiting for you to come see me,” the old woman explained. “I am Wang Meiling.”

  “You are related to the owners of the guesthouse?”

  “Landlord Wang and my father were third cousins.”

  Poor third cousins was what the old woman meant. Poor third cousins who’d been used as servants ever since
Wang had made his fortune, which probably accounted for why this old woman was still alive. During Liberation, the lives of servants, even if they were related to the worst landlords, were spared, unlike those of wives, children, and concubines.

  “Do you live here?”

  “My room and my job are together. No one goes through this gate unless they pass by me. Good for me at my age.”

  “And your grandson?”

  “All the Wang descendants live here. My son is the day manager. His wife runs the laundry. If I live long enough, maybe I’ll see my great-grandson in the great house.”

  “It’s good for family to be together,” Hulan observed.

  “Good today. Not so good during the Cultural Revolution,” the old woman sang out hotly in a quavering voice. “The villagers got mad like it was 1949, not 1969. They thought we were the landowners. They killed my husband in the courtyard.” The woman nodded, remembering. “So much blood in this house, but we stay. Where else would we go, hey?”

  “You’ll have to move when the lake begins to form.”

  “How are they going to make me move when I see so much death in this place? I lose four babies here—two girls, two boys. Only one son lives. The rest, all dead. You hear about the concubines? I was here that day. I was here the day they killed my husband—same way too. Cut off his head. Your name is Liu Hulan. You understand what I’m talking about. Some people they call a martyr, some people are bad elements.”