The Woman in the Camphor Trunk

by Jennifer Kincheloe

  Anna awoke to the braying of the mules and sat up, her long hair tumbling down her back. Joe slept beside her, looking peaceful and delicious, like an angel in his underwear, with two days’ growth of beard. His head rested on his arm, as Anna had the only pillow. He lay facing her now, his lips parted, smelling of sleep. She sat up and peered through the window slats. Outside, the sky was pink. Leo Lim lay splayed on the frosty ground, having been dragged a few feet by coyotes in the night. Three mangy dogs stood around the body, vying for it.

  She shook Joe gently. “Wake up, sleepy head.” He opened his eyes and gave her a crooked, languid smile.

  “Dogs are eating Leo Lim.”

  He rolled over on his back and stared at the ceiling. “That’s unfortunate.”

  “I don’t know what we’re supposed to do about it.”

  Joe sat up and looked through the window slats. “We should have brought him inside.”

  “I don’t share bedrooms with corpses, except for you, and only when I’m trying to solve a friend’s murder and discharge a family debt.” Anna swung her legs out of bed, bare feet on cold planks. She retied the cashmere blanket around her waist. It still felt as soft as clouds on her bare legs, despite all it had been through and how dirty it was.

  Joe reached over and fingered the cashmere. Anna stood, and the blanket slipped from his grasp.

  He sighed. “I guess I’ll go save Leo Lim.”

  “It’s too late.”

  Joe went outside in his underwear and coat and threw rocks at the coyotes until they scattered. A few moments later, Anna trudged out toward the outhouse wearing her poncho, once more the giant bird. The stray mule still hung about the cabin, chomping on wild grasses.

  Joe loitered about, waiting for Anna to use the outhouse, in case the coyotes returned.

  The privy was a horrid affair, full of fresh poop and flies—more evidence that Leo Lim had been there for several days. After using it, she burst out the door gagging.

  They returned to the cabin. Joe grabbed a bucket and left. Anna added logs to the fire and looked for coffee. There was only tea.

  Joe swung through the door with water and a big, cleaned trout on a string. Anna lifted her chin. “There isn’t coffee, and I can’t make tea.”

  “It’s easy. I’ll show you.” He came to stand beside her, cheeks pink from the cold. “You put it in the pot and you add the boiling water. Then you strain it.” He picked up a teapot and stared down the spout. “This one has a strainer built in.”

  Anna took the teapot from his hand. “How much?”

  “A teaspoon per cup.” He smiled at her for no reason.

  Joe set about boiling rice and fried up the fish in lard. It made the cabin smell good. Anna watched in case she ever needed to do it.

  Joe ate with her at the splintery table and even bowed his head when she said her prayer. The trout was flaky and flavorful. Though Anna had no appetite, she ate two servings to maintain her strength.

  The tea was hot, and the tin cup burned her lips. Anna blew on the green, sugarless brew. “I think Leo Lim might be an innocent man, even if Elizabeth’s body was found in his apartment. We know Chan Mon is a murderer.”

  “Chan Mon could have been avenging Elizabeth.”

  “Leo Lim too. He could have been lying in wait. He knew Chan Mon had this cabin. They used to be friends.”

  “Then where is his weapon?”

  “I don’t know. This is the trouble with love triangles,” Anna said. “Either way, I resent that we have to clean up after them.”

  “Chan Mon will be a pretty mess if that cat came back.”

  Anna abandoned her dirty dish and searched the cabin for woodsman’s gloves. After finding them, she emptied a large burlap sack of rice, pouring the grain onto the floor and lamenting the waste. She said, “For remains.”

  Joe nodded. He took the gloves and the quilt and went outside. Anna used the opportunity to style her hair. Ten minutes later, he came back for the tack, his face grim. Anna followed him outside. He saddled the stray mule and wrestled a long, stiff bundle over the saddle—Leo Lim wrapped in the dirty quilt. It wobbled like a teeter-totter.

  Anna shook her head. “That won’t work.”

  “Grab one end.”

  With reluctance, Anna did. Joe grimaced and pushed hard on his legs until it took all her weight to hold Leo Lim down. The body cracked and slowly bent from the middle at a forty-five degree angle. Anna screwed up her face. “That’s disgusting.”

  Joe looked pale, slightly green even. “We need to go, or we’ll never get back by dark. Can you make it all the way to the trailhead? I guess it’s twenty miles, mostly downhill.”

  “Of course.”

  “That a girl, Sherlock.”

  Joe led the funeral mule, and Anna rode Mule Robins, wending down the mountainside. She was leaden with fatigue. They stopped in the clearing where the mountain lion had killed their assailant. Joe shot his gun into the air once to spook the cougar, but the cat was nowhere to be seen. “I wouldn’t look if I were you, Anna. You’ll never forget it.”

  “I have to. In case you miss something.” Anna squinted her eyes as if that would somehow take away the horror. Chan Mon was mere hair and some bone. Her mouth puckered in disgust. “There isn’t much left. There’s no way we can identify him.”

  “That and the fact that nobody’s ever heard of Chan Mon.”

  “There’s got to be something distinguishing about him. Not his clothes. Most of Chinatown has this same ensemble.”

  Joe’s face contorted in a look of disgust as he bent to collect the remains with gloved hands, and put them in the rice sack.

  Anna wandered about the area.

  Joe picked up a severed foot. “What are you doing?”

  “There might be a clue.”

  “I’m pretty sure the cat did it.”

  “Hah. I meant a clue to the other crimes.” Anna searched the area and tiptoed across the spongy green earth near a burbling stream. She found a stiff piece of leather with blood on it, with the remnants of ties and three sheaths. One sheath still had a cleaver in it—sharp and rectangular like the one that had killed Joe’s hat and Leo Lim.

  Sitting in the water was a canvas pack. It contained packets of cooked sticky rice, dried fish, dried strawberries, and a canteen. Anna scooped it up, keeping it as evidence.

  When Joe had gathered up all the pieces and loaded them on the mule with Leo Lim, he and Anna headed for home.

  It was almost dark when Anna and Joe arrived at the pack station with two ripening corpses. The ominous clouds had let loose their water and sheets of rain were falling, making Anna’s hat wilt and her double pompadour stick to her skull. A black horse with a star stood drearily among the mules in the pack station corral. She hadn’t seen it on the way in and wondered if it had belonged to Chan Mon.

  Anna waited with the bodies, pelting rocks at the occasional scavenger bird, while Joe tied Mule Robins to a tree and went to use a call box. The box hung from a tree trunk near the trailhead. She watched him open it and turn the crank on the telephone.

  Joe wandered back to Anna and sat on a granite rock. They waited in companionable silence—Joe smoking a cigarette, Anna throwing rocks at any vulture that descended upon the mule. She hit a vulture square on the beak and smiled darkly. “Did you call Wolf?”

  “No, the national forest is the sheriff’s jurisdiction. But I did ask them to bring you some clothes.”

  Anna frowned. The Sheriff’s Department wasn’t known for cooperating with the LAPD. Likely, Anna and Joe would be excluded from the investigation. Everyone would assume that the mauled man was Chan Mon and that he had killed Leo Lim, and so it appeared. But they wouldn’t take the trouble to find out for sure—not for a Chinese man. Anna would be more thorough.

  She wished she could identify Chan Mon’s body with more than a cabin and a poetry book. “I think we need to review the case right away and try to figure out what all of this means. I have whiskey at
home. Maybe we can trace the knives.”

  His lovely lips flattened into a grim line. “Sherlock, I think it needs to be somewhere public.”

  “You’re afraid to be alone with me.”

  “Terrified.”

  “You spent the night with me last night.”

  “I was tired.”

  Anna thanked God that they had been attacked with a hatchet, that their assailant had been eaten by a mountain lion, and that Joe had insulted her, saying holding her hand was a mistake. Otherwise, tired or not, she would have succumbed to Joe’s deliciousness, rolling into his arms, and other things, and it would be difficult to pretend he wasn’t a temptation.

  “Truly, you have nothing to fear from me. Especially when you smell the way you do.”

  Joe frowned, pinched his vest with two fingers, and sniffed down his collar.

  Actually, Anna loved how he smelled. If it could be bottled, Anna would spend all her money on Joe Singer perfume. “We had a passing infatuation, that’s all. I would never interfere with you and your charming fiancée. You know how I feel about love triangles. I wish you the best, really I do.”

  “I was just saying . . .”

  “Besides, you’re the most unattractive man I know, now that I know you. Personality is more important than physical appearance, and you don’t have either. And, you’re poor. Then add to that your dismal hygiene.”

  Joe winced. “Okay, okay, I understand.”

  Anna went back to her apartment to think and bathe alone. The bathroom welcomed her, unoccupied. She shed the ugly hand-me-down gown the sheriff had brought for her, and stepped into the tepid tub. Her feet throbbed, her skin itched, but the bath water soothed her saddle-sore bottom and the raw places on her toes and heels where blister upon blister had formed and then popped.

  Her two main suspects were dead, which only made her task more difficult. She couldn’t question them about themselves or each other. Maybe she should just assume one of them was guilty and give up. The possibility remained that it was a white villain who fatally punished Elizabeth for loving a Chinese man. But Anna had nobody left to ask.

  CHAPTER 20

  The next morning, Anna awoke with a red, runny nose and a rash on her shins from poison oak. She could hardly lift her legs to crawl over to the kitchen corner and her stack of kipper tins. The stack was lamentably short. Her police bloomers—the ones that had cost her so dearly—moldered somewhere in the woods. Despite losing three days of paid work for her trek in the mountains, her murder investigation was nowhere. Anna smeared Vick’s Croup and Pneumonia Salve on her chest and donned a green velvet gown with Irish lace trim from Vionnet of the House of Doucet. She smelled regrettably of menthol. She chose an especially large hat with lots of feathers and flowers to cast shadows over her pale, splotchy face. Anna limped to the trolley stop, sneezing, and rode the tram to work.

  A wanted poster hung inside the door at Central Station. It featured the faces of Yuk-Lin and Ting Ting and descriptions of the two men seen with them on the train, offering a $1,000 reward for their capture. What the poster didn’t say, and what all of Central Station knew, was that the two wanted men were rumored to be LAPD cops. Worry lines creased Anna’s delicate brow. She tried to smooth them, and failed.

  Wolf approached, noted the poster, and, looking this way and that, quickly took it down. He grinned at Anna. “You look lovely Assistant Matron Blanc, but where is your uniform?”

  Anna sneezed.

  “Bless you, honeybun. About that uniform . . .”

  Anna kept sneezing.

  “Gesundheit!”

  Anna sneezed again and planned to keep sneezing until Wolf finally went away. He did. Joe appeared at her side with a handkerchief. He extended it to her. “You should be in bed.”

  “I’ve got things to do.”

  “Me, too.” He whispered, “Tonight’s the night. Miss Robins says the fisherman won’t wait another day.”

  Anna’s mouth flattened. “You and Wolf still plan on taking the girls to San Pedro? I don’t think you should.”

  “Anna, I don’t see a way around it.”

  “Send Wolf alone. One man is less suspicious than two.”

  Joe shook his head. “He might need my help. I’m heading to the mission now to finalize the plans.”

  “Then I’m coming with you.”

  The mission was the last place Anna wanted to be. Surely Miss Robins was his fiancée. And no fiancée worth her salt would let Joe Singer take Yuk-Lin and Ting Ting to San Pedro. There was going to be a fight. As off-putting as it was, Anna needed to be there to back up Miss Robins.

  Mrs. Puce reclined on the settee in the parlor at the mission. She had a bit of spittle in the corner of her mouth, and her sunflower eyes were shining bright, as if she had a fever.

  Miss Robins glided soberly from teacup to teacup with a pot of steaming Oolong. Anna noticed for the first time that she had a tiny scar on her temple—a breach in her perfection.

  “Wolf and I will take the girls. I’m not willing to risk sending anyone else.” Joe dumped two heaps of sugar into his teacup and stirred.

  Anna didn’t touch her tea. “Both tongs are looking for the men that took their girls. So is the LAPD. They’ll have eyes at the port, and they know what you look like. If the Bing Kong or the Hop Sing catch you, they’ll chop off your head.”

  Joe wrinkled his brow. “Maybe not. I am the police chief’s son.”

  Mrs. Puce chimed in with her lilting voice. “No, they’ll chop off your head.”

  Anna stood. “Then, it’s settled. You can’t go. Am I not right, Miss Robins? I’ll take the girls. Instead of dressing like boys, they can wear my clothes. I have hats and veils—”

  Joe shook his head. “Unescorted in the middle of the night? Absolutely not. I can’t let you.”

  Anna said, “True, you can’t. Because you don’t get to let me or not let me. I thought we were clear on that.”

  They were all silent for a moment. Mrs. Puce said, “Maybe we all should stay and have tea.”

  Miss Robins sounded vehement. “And return the girls to slavery? So that little girl can be raped every night? It’s appalling. Tom Foo Yuen has beaten at least one girl to death because she defied him. And when he tires of abusing them, he’ll put them in a brothel. They’ll be forced to lie with ten men in an evening. I’ve seen it before. One day, they’ll simply turn them out on the streets if the girls don’t die from the pox first.” She rose to her feet and came to stand by Anna’s side. She slipped her arm through Anna’s and lifted her chin like a brave soldier. “Matron Blanc is correct. You can’t go, Joe. You’d only put yourself and the girls in danger. Anna and I will go together. We have to do what we have to do, and we’ll be fine. God is on our side.”

  Anna grimaced.

  Joe stood solidly on two manly feet. “No. I’ll borrow Anna’s clothes, but you’re not going anywhere.”

  Yuk-Lin’s and Ting Ting’s colored silks lay in a pile on the floor of Joe’s bedroom. Reluctantly, Anna had picked her two ugliest, cheapest gowns—which were both expensive and exquisite—and offered them to the girls as disguises. Yuk-Lin’s gown fit loosely. Ting Ting swam in hers. Miss Robins cut the fabric mercilessly, while Anna moaned. Miss Robins could sew. Of course she could. The young missionary went at Ting Ting with a pincushion, tucking in the borrowed frock at the waist, making a new hem that grazed her ankles like barbed wire. “We don’t have time to baste it.”

  Mrs. Puce sat on the bed murmuring to the girls in Chinese. Ting Ting would nod and sometimes murmur back. Yuk-Lin replied with a flood of words. She seemed manic, like she couldn’t hold still. She even laughed one time.

  “They must have been very bored at Joe’s house,” Anna said.

  Miss Robins took a pin out of her mouth. “I brought them a primer. They’ve been practicing their reading and writing.”

  “Maybe they’ll be teachers someday.”

  “Perhaps. Most of the girls are matched with Chinese
Christian men. They become wives and mothers. With their consent of course.”

  Anna swept a lock of hair behind Ting Ting’s ear. The girl flinched. Anna withdrew her hand and sighed. “What have they done to you, little mouse? And where do you belong? Not at the mission, surely.”

  To Anna’s surprise, Mrs. Puce spoke cogently and in English. “She’s from Sze Yup in Canton province. Her father sold the girls when they were eight and twelve. Wong Nim bought the pair in San Francisco for four thousand dollars.”

  Anna thought of her own father all but selling her to her former fiancé, Edgar Wright. “Fathers are monstrous things. A woman doesn’t belong to anyone but herself. Tell her, Mrs. Puce.”

  Mrs. Puce said, “We all belong to God.”

  Anna had the blasphemous thought that if God were a woman, they wouldn’t have these problems.

  Anna gently rubbed lanolin over Ting Ting’s face, dusting her with talc until she sneezed. Yuk-Lin dusted her own face using Joe’s shaving mirror. At night, under the cover of a veil, Anna hoped they’d look white. She topped their silken buns with hats, tipping them low to cover their eyes. “There. If anything, it will be their gait that gives them away.”

  Joe knocked on the door. “Wolf is going to be here soon. You’ve got to be ready or we’ll miss the boat.”

  “Five minutes,” she called through the door.

  Anna whispered, “Dear Lord. Detective Singer still thinks he’s coming. We’re going to have to sneak out.” She assessed the casement window that opened up at sidewalk level.

  Yuk-Lin moved to the window and opened it. Anna and Miss Robins exchanged a surprised look as the girl raised herself up onto a chair and climbed through. Anna said, “I think they speak more English than we thought.”

  Miss Robins smiled. “Joe’s been teaching them.”

  Anna handed Yuk-Lin a basket full of Coca-Cola bottles, Cracker Jacks, and some delicious-looking sandwiches that Miss Robins had made. Yuk-Lin hauled them out and stuck her hand back through the window to help Ting Ting up. Anna and Miss Robins followed, leaving Mrs. Puce seated on the bed. Anna could hear the missionary nattering on, holding a conversation with no one. Anna raised her eyebrows thoughtfully. Mrs. Puce might be smarter than she seemed.