Thirteen Orphans

by Jane Lindskold

  His tone held respect tempered with something Brenda couldn’t quite identify. Resentment? Envy?

  “That window,” Dad went on, “is one-way glass. There’s a control somewhere that makes it almost clear—from this side only.”

  “I guess he doesn’t trust his employees,” Brenda said. “I’m not sure I’d blame him. They could eat about five hundred dollars’ worth in about two minutes.”

  “Actually, Albert claims the window is for market research, not spying. It enables him to see what attracts shoppers, what turns them off. Employees are coached to step on a button when prize clients come in. Then Albert can use the window to see who is there, and ‘accidentally’ come out to greet them.”

  “He sounds manipulative.”

  “That’s about right,” Dad agreed. Again, Brenda caught that odd note in his voice. Dad went on, “I’ve reached Auntie Pearl. We’re in luck. She was in the area today, and thinks she can be here in about twenty minutes or a half hour.”

  “Dad, why did you call Auntie Pearl?” Brenda asked, her gaze shifting to watch the ghostly forms of the staff going about their business. “Why didn’t you call the police?”

  “Too soon to call the police,” Dad said. “We don’t even know if Albert’s really missing. He knew I was coming by, but something could have called him away.”

  Brenda looked at the messed-up office, and thought her father was being disingenuous. Albert Yu clearly valued order accented with a certain amount of beauty. The office walls held the file cabinets one would expect, but they were crafted from dark, polished wood, the fittings in mellow bronze. The wall space above the cabinets was adorned with elegantly simple ink-brush landscape paintings after the Chinese style.

  There was an expensive computer workstation, but it was tucked away in a back corner. Cabinet doors were neatly folded to either side. When they were folded shut, the modern era would be gone, hidden behind polished mahogany inlaid with a pattern of cranes worked in mother-of-pearl. Waist-high cabinets that didn’t precisely match, but were similar to the computer workstation in their ornate beauty, balanced the file cabinets.

  “What are we going to do if someone in the shop buzzes?” she said.

  “They won’t,” Dad said. This time his voice held absolute confidence. “Albert would have told them he was not to be disturbed, not even if the First Lady herself arrived to shop for White House party favors.”

  “Because we were coming?” Brenda asked, impressed despite herself.

  “Because he was doing this,” Dad said, sweeping his arm to indicate the mah-jong tiles scattered on the table. “Albert would not have wanted to be interrupted.”

  Brenda turned her gaze from ghosts in the shopwindow. “Don’t tell me he was playing mah-jong by himself! You need at least three players.”

  “I won’t,” Dad said, forcing a grin. “I’ll let Auntie Pearl explain. Come on. Let’s go meet her.”

  Brenda glared at her father, but she knew she’d get nothing more from him. His gaze had fallen to the scattered tiles on the cloth-covered table. His grin had vanished, and his expression was very, very worried indeed.

  Pearl Bright instructed her driver to drop her off at the main entrance of the largest building in the shopping mall that was quite proud to host Your Chocolatier.

  By habit more than vanity, she inspected her reflection in the mirrored surface of the smoked-glass door as Hastings moved to hold it open for her. The reflection gave her back an older woman—no doubt of that—but an older woman who still carried herself upright and moved briskly. The elegance of her attire turned heads in this age when casual dress had gone so far that thongs were worn on both feet and backsides, doing, in her opinion, no credit to either.

  “Hastings, I will phone when I wish to be picked up.”

  “Yes, madam,” he replied with formality, standing straight as he held open the door.

  He didn’t tell her he had a book and a lunch in the trunk of the car, but she knew, just as she knew he would find himself a nice spot under some shady tree and spend a leisurely interlude waiting for her call. There were worse jobs, far worse, than chauffeuring a rich former movie star.

  As was often the case with older people, Pearl’s vision had actually improved as she had grown older, so that the spectacles she once had worn had become no longer necessary. As she advanced into the mall, she inspected the people who lingered in the tiled atrium, looking for the two she was to meet.

  Pearl had known Gaheris Morris all his life, and sometimes she had to remind herself that he was no longer the eager young boy she so fondly remembered. His family had moved to the Midwest when he had been something like six. It wasn’t until after Gaheris’s grandfather’s death and the attendant ugliness that she and Gaheris had resumed more than casual contact.

  Then Gaheris had been reeling from everything he had discovered about himself and his heritage, all that had been thrust upon him through his father’s denial. He had turned to her as a source of stability.

  “Auntie Pearl” had been happy to oblige, even if the attention she paid to Gaheris had made young Albert less than pleased. She wondered how Albert would feel when he knew that his sparring partner had been the one to discover his absence.

  She wondered if Albert was in a position to feel anything at all.

  Glancing to the right, she spotted Gaheris standing next to one of the smooth stone columns that punctuated the open reaches of the foyer. Lean and slim, his curling reddish-brown hair untouched with grey, his skin ruddy with sun, he looked like what he was, an American male of indeterminate ethnic heritage. The young woman standing beside him had similar features, but her coloring was taken from a different palette: browns and ivories, rather than her father’s redder hues. The white pantsuit she wore set those colors off nicely.

  At nineteen, Brenda Morris was already as tall as her father, her legs seeming impossibly long in proportion to her torso. Her dark brown, almost black, hair was thick and straight, long enough to fall past her breasts. She wore it unstyled, except that the part was slightly off-center, a nice, if possibly unintentional, touch that kept her appearance from rigid symmetry. Her eyes were the same dark brown as her hair, slightly slanted under perfect brows.

  Brenda was not pretty, nor would she ever be so, but she was something far better—she was exotic and interesting. Pearl wondered if Brenda realized how lucky she was, and decided she probably did not. Brenda was still young enough that “difference” meant separation from the parental generation, but not from the peer group.

  Gaheris raised his right hand in a lazy wave. If Pearl hadn’t known him so well, his manner would have been the perfect form of a nephew greeting an elder relative. She knew him, though, and saw the tension in how he gently nudged Brenda forward.

  Brenda moved lightly, only the tightness of her shoulders showing how much she disliked being steered. The smile she turned on Pearl was equal parts shy and warm. Pearl knew why. Pearl was a celebrity who was somehow family. The role gave her a certain mystique—a mystique Pearl had refused to relinquish, staying in hotels when visiting the Morris family, and never being seen disheveled or informal.

  After greetings had been exchanged, Gaheris said, “I locked both Albert’s office, and the stairwell. I don’t think anyone will bother them before we can get back. Do you want to stop for something to eat or drink?”

  Pearl smiled. “I was finishing lunch when you phoned, but if you and Brenda need to eat, I would be happy to sit with you.”

  Gaheris shook his head. “We got sandwiches from one of the outrageously expensive places here. I charged it to Albert’s account. I figured we’re here on his business.”

  Pearl shook her head in mock reproof, but such behavior really was typical of Gaheris. He was financially well-off, but he never stopped looking for an angle, especially if it would get him something for nothing. Maybe having three children to support was the root of his scheming. However, she suspected it was part of his integral nature.
His father and grandfather had been the same way.

  Brenda was looking at her father with affectionate dismay. She clearly knew this aspect of her father’s personality, but thought he carried it too far. Pearl wondered what the girl would be like when she came into the full force of her inherited nature. She hoped they would have a long time before they found out.

  “Very well,” Pearl said. “Since we have all eaten, then we should go up to Albert’s office. Is his staff aware anything is amiss?”

  “They know nothing,” Gaheris said. “I sent Brenda into the shop, and as far as she could tell everything was normal. They sold her something the size of a Hershey’s kiss for ten dollars.”

  “It was delicious,” Brenda said. “Absolutely wonderful.”

  The young woman’s smile faded, and she gave Pearl the full force of her gaze. “I don’t know what’s worse, knowing something is wrong or not knowing why Dad won’t call the police. He said you’d explain.”

  Pearl nodded. “Your father did the right thing. However, these are not matters we should discuss here. Shall we go to Albert’s office? I would like to see for myself what Gaheris described.”

  She turned and led the way to the elevator. She was spry for her age, but there was no need to overdo things, and Albert would insist on having his office on an upper floor.

  2

  Brenda covertly studied Auntie Pearl as they made their way through the mall to one of the discreetly placed service corridors.

  Pearl Bright had to be old—she’d been a child actress when Shirley Temple was still popular—but she moved with energy and grace. Moreover, although she didn’t look old, she didn’t look fake young, either. She hadn’t had face lifts or injections. That was for sure. There were lines on her face, and her once-dark hair was silver, but neither made her look old. This made her look weirdly beyond time, as if Time had touched her, and she’d slipped his noose.

  Brenda knew Auntie Pearl was at least half Chinese. That had been in the biography Brenda had read a few years ago. Her birth name had been Chinese: Something Ming. Ming meant “bright,” and was one of the few Chinese ideographs Brenda recognized on sight. Auntie Pearl didn’t look Chinese, though, or at least she didn’t look too Chinese. In her early films, she looked like a cute little girl whose straight dark hair was a nice contrast to Shirley Temple’s golden curls. In her later films Auntie Pearl looked more exotic. Did a person grow into ethnicity?

  Thinking back to the phone call she’d heard him make, Brenda found herself wondering for the first time if her dad—and that meant Brenda herself—was part Chinese. Maybe Auntie Pearl really was his aunt or great-aunt or something.

  Dad didn’t look Chinese. He looked American. His mother had been Scotch-Irish, or at least mostly so. His father had been German, but now that Brenda thought about it, he hadn’t looked all German. But then, what did anything look like? Brenda had seen pictures of Navajos who looked more Chinese than many of the Chinese movie stars and models she’d seen.

  Dad led them unerringly down service corridors to a door that opened into the top section of the weird ebony and silver staircase into Albert Yu’s office. He motioned them in, then carefully locked the door behind him. The stairway was narrow, but he squeezed by them and led the way up. Auntie Pearl followed, and Brenda came last. She felt like she’d been appointed rear guard, until she noticed that when Dad got to the top, Auntie Pearl stopped and waited until he had unlocked the door and motioned for them to come ahead.

  I guess Auntie Pearl is watching out for me, not the other way around.

  Brenda didn’t know whether to feel annoyed or relieved by this, and decided she could settle for a little of each.

  Albert Yu’s office was unchanged from when they had left. Auntie Pearl moved immediately over to the table and studied the scattered mah-jong tiles.

  “It looks as if he had just completed a reading into the status of the Thirteen Orphans,” she said. “Whoever interrupted him deliberately scattered the tiles, so I can’t guess what Albert saw.”

  Brenda waited for her father to laugh or say something like “Be serious,” but instead he nodded.

  “I couldn’t tell anything either,” he said. “I didn’t realize the tiles had been deliberately scattered though. I thought they’d just been displaced when the table was moved. It’s usually parallel with the front window, the one into the shop.”

  “Look at how the tiles rest,” Auntie Pearl said, pointing to the bone and bamboo rectangles with her index finger. The fingernail had been polished bloodred, and was absolutely perfect. Brenda would have killed for nails like that. “If the tiles had simply shifted when the table was pushed, then some tiles would have remained on their marks. Not one does. Moreover, one side of the wall would have collapsed more completely than the other according to where force was applied. This wall has been completely broken. You can tell, however, that the tiles were in wall formation because the majority still remain facedown.”

  “I didn’t notice,” Gaheris Morris admitted.

  “You were shocked by what you found,” Pearl Bright said matter-of-factly. “Moreover, I have an eye for such things.”

  Brenda had listened in silence, but as the sensation built that she had entered a madhouse, she broke in.

  “Why are you talking this way? I mean, it’s odd that this guy was playing mah-jong by himself. Fine. I’ve got that. But why aren’t you calling the police? Why are you standing here studying a messed-up game board?”

  Auntie Pearl looked at Gaheris Morris.

  “How much does Brenda know?”

  “Not much. Letting her know was the reason for this trip. I wasn’t going to do to her what my dad did to me, but I didn’t think I should tell her too soon. Look what knowing too much too soon did to Albert.”

  “I have long held,” Pearl Bright said, “that it was less the knowledge than his father’s refusal to act that marked Albert. However, that old argument is not worth reviewing now.”

  She shifted her gaze to Brenda, and the young woman fought not to squirm under its unrelenting scrutiny.

  “Brenda, what do you know about mah-jong?”

  Brenda replied promptly. “It’s a game, sort of like gin rummy, only it has trump suits, too. They’re called winds and dragons. There are bonus tiles called flowers and seasons. Those can do a lot to help your score if you have a cruddy hand. Oh, and instead of four suits, like in a regular card deck, mah-jong has only three: dots, bamboo, and characters.”

  “You play?”

  “Sometimes, mostly with Dad and Mom, and one of my brothers. We don’t play as often now that the boys are getting older. Only four can play, at most, and my brothers don’t like being coached, but they don’t like being left out either.”

  “That wouldn’t make for a very good game,” Auntie Pearl agreed. She beckoned with those long red nails. “Come here and look at what Albert left.”

  Brenda moved obediently to the woman’s side, her curiosity overwhelming the almost unconscious trepidation that had kept her at a distance from the table.

  “You know a good deal about mah-jong,” Auntie Pearl said. “What do you make of this cloth on which the tiles are set?”

  “I can’t see much detail,” Brenda admitted after a moment, “not with the tiles all over it. There are animals on it, block-printed, along with lots of what look like Chinese characters.”

  Auntie Pearl started moving the tiles to one side, evidently so Brenda could see what was printed on the fabric.

  “Hey!” Brenda said. “You shouldn’t do that. The police wouldn’t want a crime scene disturbed.”

  Pearl Bright continued moving the tiles. “This is not a crime scene, at least not one the police would recognize as such. Now. Tell me how this cloth fits in with the game of mah-jong.”

  Brenda glanced at her father, but his face was expressionless. She decided she’d better go along if she wanted to understand anything. She hadn’t missed Dad saying that apparently having her
learn something was the whole reason for this trip. Could this be what she was supposed to learn?

  “The cloth doesn’t fit in with any version of mah-jong I know,” Brenda said, bending to inspect the cloth since Auntie Pearl clearly expected her to do so. “Mah-jong’s more like a card game than a board game. You make the board out of the tiles. I mean, everybody grabs tiles from the shuffled batch, then builds the tiles into the Great Wall. Only then do you deal them out.”

  “Why go to all that trouble?” Pearl asked. “Why not just deal from the shuffled batch?”

  “To keep anyone from cheating,” Brenda replied, feeling weirdly like she was reciting catechism lessons. “We didn’t gamble at home, but mah-jong is like poker. Lots of people bet on it. When dealing from the wall, it’s just about impossible to stack the deck.”

  “Why?”

  “Because no one knows where the wall will be broken,” Brenda said. “One person rolls the dice to indicate which wall will be broken. Most of the time, another person rolls the dice to indicate where the wall will be broken. So, for someone to stack the deck, they’d need weighted dice, and to get both rolls.”

  “Very good,” Pearl said. “Now, tell me why if mah-jong is a game that does not need a board, Albert Yu was setting up his ‘Great Wall,’ as you call it, on this cloth.”

  Brenda looked where Pearl’s red fingernail was pointing and understood instantly. Although the tiles had been scattered, much of the base of the wall remained in place. There was sufficient to see that the tiles had been set within one pattern printed on the cloth. Another pattern was printed within the wall.

  “He was, wasn’t he?” Brenda mused aloud. She was pleased when no one pushed her to answer quickly. Her father and Auntie Pearl seemed quite willing to let her figure out the details for herself.

  The Chinese characters printed on the cloth mostly meant nothing to Brenda, although she recognized a few, mostly from Chinese takeout menus and playing mah-jong. Instead of trying to figure them out, Brenda studied the figures printed in what she was thinking of as the “outer ring.” They were so stylized it took her a moment to recognize what they were, but when she did, she was so pleased she muttered aloud.