“Tell me! Tell me everything!” Jack said.
The young man looked to Shen, who stepped toward Jack and gently ran her fingers along one side of the drawing.
“This is your mother?” Shen asked.
“Yes.”
“Who you believe to be dead?” Shen asked.
“No!” Jack cried, trying to cut her off before she said the last word. He didn’t want it to drown out the echo still ringing in his heart. But he was too late. Now that dreaded word rooted and grew in his head.
“I don’t know,” Jack said. The silver frame was cold in his hand. Bottom-of-the-ocean cold. “She drove off a cliff—on purpose. There was a note.”
“But was . . . ,” Hitchcock began. He knelt on one knee and looked Jack in the eye. “But was there a body? And who identified it?”
“There was no body,” Jack said. He spoke more quickly now. “They never found her. The car was an old convertible. They figure she washed out to sea.” Then his shoulders slumped. “But look, there was a crowd of witnesses. They saw my mother drive the car off the cliff. That’s what they told the police.”
“Witnesses can be made-to-order,” Hitchcock said. “We’ll agree they saw someone drive off the cliff, but was it your mother? It did happen in Los Angeles, after all. Home of Hollywood, land of make-believe. Why, give me a stuntman and the proper equipment, and I can give you ten ways to stage the scenario you just described, all with witnesses, and all a complete deception.”
Jack wasn’t sure. The word in his heart and the word in his head were doing battle. His experience was that adults leave. One by one. They don’t come back.
Shen was skeptical too. She turned to the man who had pointed to the drawing, and conversed again in Chinese. It got quite heated at one point, until Shen finished, in English, “Well, if you can’t be sure, you should be more careful about what you say. It’s his mother.”
“When did he see her?” Jack asked. “Where?”
“He thinks he saw her in several of the warehouses and rooms the traffickers use. Never in one place long enough for him to gather sufficient evidence to alert the authorities,” Shen answered.
Dead. That word that Shen had spoken still bounced around his head, trying to overwhelm the thought in his heart. But other things were now bouncing around his head as well. Missing bodies. Made-to-order witnesses. And a ransom note that was really a bill.
A bill for a service rendered.
Jack felt an insistent clamor of hope well up inside him. Hitchcock had said they needed to find an overlooked clue. But they hadn’t overlooked it at all. They had only misread it.
“Moving her around,” Jack asked. “Was there a small, well-dressed man, or a tall, beefy woman with horn-rim glasses?”
Shen translated. When the man finished answering, she turned to Jack.
“Both,” she said. “How did you know?”
Jack’s heart drummed a racket in his chest. The pieces fit. Things made sense. “Because all the time we thought we were solving my aunt’s kidnapping, we were really solving my mother’s suicide.”
Shen gave him a blank look.
Jack turned to Hitchcock. “You see, don’t you?”
“A little, perhaps,” Hitchcock replied.
“Look,” Jack said. He took out the handwritten note that was still in his pocket. His hands trembled until Hitchcock reached out to steady them.
“Calmly,” Hitchcock said.
Jack took a breath. “Before we ran after Shen, you asked what this bill was for. Look again.”
We’ll agree to $200,000.
Bring it to the noon service at Mission Dolores on Monday.
And let’s not play games, or I’ll be forced to end this job immediately.
She’ll be dead and you’ll be blamed.
Yours,
S.
“See the last line?” Jack said. “ ‘She’ll be dead and you’ll be blamed.’ But if it is a bill, then it was for Aunt Edith to read, not us. If that last line was a threat to Aunt Edith, it would read ‘You’ll be dead.’ Not ‘She’ll be dead.’ ”
“If it is a bill,” said Hitchcock, “a theory which, I believe, you have based on a paper clip, then you think the ‘she’ in that line is this woman seen at these warehouses.”
“My mom,” Jack said. “Look, we know Aunt Edith is a kidnapper, and it seems she’s starting up business again. She kidnapped my mom, and then was kidnapped herself.”
“Then who has your aunt?” asked Hitchcock.
Jack thought. “Whoever wrote the other notes,” he answered. “We never received a ransom demand from The Suave Man. His note was handwritten. A bill. But we received other ransom notes. We’ve been chasing the wrong kidnapper. But look, here’s the important thing. The bill reads ‘She’ll be dead.’ ‘She.’ Like the woman they saw captive. ‘She’ll’ meaning ‘she will.’ Will! Future. She could still be alive. And she could be my mother.”
Hitchcock paced a small circle. “But, Jack, you may be seeing only what you want. He’s not certain it’s your mother.”
“Does it matter?” Shen said.
Jack rounded on her. “What do you mean? Of course it does. It matters a lot, see.”
“What I mean is, this woman, she is an innocent. A victim of Edith Crowley who may be sent into slavery any moment. She needs our help. It is our duty to find her.”
“Oh,” Jack said. “Right. I mean, you’re right. It is our duty.”
“But how?” Hitchcock said. “Her trail is weeks cold.”
“One trail is still warm,” said Shen’s father. “Jack knows.”
Jack did know, but part of him was reluctant to say. “My aunt,” he said. He’d always had reason to dislike her, but now he loathed her. She was the one person he never wished to see again, and the one person he had to find. “If we find my Aunt Edith, we find the woman. If my aunt got the bill, then she was the one to request the service. And believe me, she’d know every step of the plan so she would get her money’s worth. To save my mother’s life—”
“We may need to rescue the woman who killed her,” Hitchcock finished.
The room was silent. All were lost in their own thoughts. Jack wondered what the next step should be.
“In the cinema,” Hitchcock finally said, “motivation of the character must be resolved, revealed, and clarified for the audience to understand the plot. So we must ask, if Jack’s aunt did have his mother kidnapped, why? If the note is indeed a bill, then the expense was high. What did she or will she get in return?”
“Nothing,” said Jack. “My mom was an actress. She wasn’t a star yet, so we weren’t rich. My aunt got nothing.” Jack shrugged. “All she got from my mother was a full orphan. All she got was me.”
“Your aunt has sold orphans in the past,” Shen said.
“Then why isn’t Jack also in the hands of the man who took his mother?” asked Hitchcock. “And pardon me for being indelicate, but would the return on an orphan and his mother really be worth more than two hundred thousand dollars?”
“No,” said Shen, “I suppose not.”
“Was there a will?” Hitchcock asked.
Jack remembered that day when Aunt Edith came to the funeral home and stole him away. “She had some legal papers when she picked me up. But even if there was a will, my mother had nothing. Just me.”
“Perhaps the papers say differently,” Hitchcock said. “Where are they?”
“Her room is the only place I can think of,” Jack said. “And we’ve already looked pretty well in there.”
“But we didn’t know what we were looking for,” Hitchcock said. “I think our next step is to search again. We must find those papers.”
“Or search for the man who is holding the blond woman,” Shen said.
“Well, whatever we do, we need to do it fast,” Jack said, “or my mother may die a second time.”
SHEN’S FATHER DROVE HITCHCOCK, Shen, and Jack back to the Fairmont Hotel.
&nb
sp; “After all, we are allies now,” Shen said. “We all want the same thing. To bring your aunt to justice and to save the woman, whoever she is.”
My mother, Jack thought. What he couldn’t figure out was why Aunt Edith would kidnap her. Surely not just to get Jack as a servant to fetch her chocolates and clean her messes. Jack knew he’d made the right choice, revealing her identity. At least he hoped. If they found his aunt, she would be put away, whether the captive woman was his mother or not. If he was one step closer to becoming a ward of the state, or one step farther away, Jack wasn’t sure.
Before they’d left, they’d decided that the men from the factory—her “tong,” Shen laughed—would continue to search for The Suave Man, while Jack, Hitchcock, and Shen pursued Aunt Edith.
“Sharon will be our eyes in this matter,” her father said.
“That’s good,” Jack said. “Maybe she can find something we couldn’t. We think my aunt is somewhere in the hotel. But that would be a lot of rooms to search.”
“Plus the back of the house,” said Shen.
“The what?”
“The back of the house. The Fairmont is much larger than the places the guests see. There are stairways and levels below, where only the staff go. There’s the Engineering Department, the seamstress office. Shipping. Receiving. The carpenters have a shop. Room service kitchens. A darkroom for the hotel photographer. There are whole rooms devoted to dishes and silverware. And much more. Your aunt could be anywhere.”
At the hotel Shen returned to her elevator, thanking the operator who had covered for her.
“I was lucky no one important noticed my absence,” she said, “but I better keep to my post and learn what I can from here. You’d be surprised what people reveal in an elevator.”
Jack and Hitchcock retreated to Aunt Edith’s room. Muffin was reaching through the bars of his cage toward the chocolates Jack had put there, but stopped to watch them with eyes like polished lead shot. His whiskers bristled in a disapproving frown as his head swiveled back and forth to follow their movements.
“Anything important to my aunt would be in here. It’s the one room she wouldn’t even let the maids into. I’ll go through the dresser. Can you can start with the closet?”
Jack rifled through the dresser drawers, searching each article of clothing, pulling out the drawer itself and checking underneath and behind it. Hitchcock examined the closet, then under the bed, beneath the mattress, and in the nightstand drawers. Muffin harangued them with chattering squeaks and squawks whenever they came close to his cage.
“Nothing,” Hitchcock said when he’d finished.
“Same here, but I have one more drawer to do,” said Jack.
“Then I suggest you proceed.”
“Only . . . well . . . look . . .” Jack hesitated. A red heat feathered his ears and cheeks. “It’s her underwear drawer.”
He stared at Hitchcock.
Hitchcock stared back.
Then at his own shoe, which had a spot on it.
He began to buff the tip of his shoe on the back of his pant leg. His gaze again fell on Jack, who was still staring at him.
“I’m only eleven,” Jack said.
Hitchcock stopped buffing and stood firmly on two feet. “Yes. I suppose that must be taken into account.” He grasped the remaining drawer’s handle. “Well, into the abyss,” he said.
“Hmmm . . . Ha . . . ,” he said.
“Well, look,” he mumbled.
Then he shouted “Good Lord!” and eased something from the drawer.
“What, what is it? Did you find the papers?” Hitchcock’s back blocked Jack’s view. But Hitchcock held something large up in front of him. His fingers hooked two embroidered elastic straps, one on each side.
“No,” Hitchcock answered, “but something equally . . . ummm . . . noteworthy.”
“A clue?” asked Jack.
“Not to any mystery you need investigate at your tender age,” Hitchcock said. When Jack tried to maneuver around him, Hitchcock stuffed the article into the bottom of the drawer, saying, “Please, I shouldn’t like to be accused of contributing to the delinquency of a minor.” He pulled out the drawer, checking bottom and sides, and set it on the floor. He investigated its slot in the dresser, thumping all four sides and the rear.
“Nothing at all here. Not anywhere in the room. Could she have put her important papers in the hotel safe?” Hitchcock asked.
“I don’t think so. The hotel staff would have access. Aunt Edith doesn’t trust people.”
“Then whom does she trust?” asked Hitchcock.
Jack closed his eyes and scratched behind both ears. His eyes popped open, and his gaze swept over to the occupant of the cage on the dresser. Hitchcock followed his stare.
“Weasels aren’t typically known for their trustworthiness,” he said.
“It’s a chinchilla,” said Jack.
“Perhaps it is also a guardian,” Hitchcock replied.
Muffin cast Jack a wary look. The cage smelled of cedar, with an undertone of something musky and feral.
“Don’t worry, Muffin. We just want to take a little look at your cage.” He unlatched and opened the door, then took a step back.
Muffin poked his head out the door. He slinked out of the cage and over to the earthquake anniversary chocolates. He began to nibble at one, wiping his face with his paws to get every little bit.
Jack slid the cage away from Muffin, who chutted but didn’t interrupt his enjoyment of the chocolate. Jack removed the water and food from the cage and checked underneath it. He felt through the cedar chips that lined the interior. They crackled and crunched as his hands ran along the perimeter of the cage.
“There’s some kind of metal plate here,” he said. “I can’t quite get the edge of it.” He snapped open his pocketknife, then plunged his hands back under the cedar shavings. “Got it!”
He hitched the plate up, and the shavings tumbled to the back of the cage. The plate had concealed a file, with a manila envelope and a few other papers. “Yes!” he said, and handed it all to Hitchcock.
Hitchcock sat down to examine the papers. Jack heard the papers shuffling, and Hitchcock’s throaty “hmmm”s and “oh”s as he carefully looked at each one.
Jack’s own attention wandered over to the cage where he’d found the papers. There was something odd about the cedar chips. Some of them weren’t chips at all. Jack picked up a handful, and found he was doing his own examination of papers. But these weren’t long sheets full of legal words and signed by concerned parties. These papers were little shreds that had been concealed under the cedar chips. Little shreds of blue lined paper, with cursive letters and words in the scratchy penmanship Jack knew belonged to Schultzie. But the shreds were far too small to put back together. He’d never know what they’d said. Jack tightened his fist around the paper scraps, compressing them into a little ball. He wished Aunt Edith were here now, so he could shove them down her lying throat. It took six deep, steady breaths before he could unball his fist.
When he did, Hitchcock spoke. “My dear Jack Fair, did you know that you are what is referred to as filthy rich?”
“What?”
“I’ve only looked at this for a few moments, but I believe there is quite a large trust out there in your name, with rather more than a few assets. Including, I might add, a stake in one very prominent hotel in San Francisco, located on the corner of California and Mason Streets.”
Jack plopped onto the bed next to Hitchcock. “I own this hotel?”
“Part of it. The Fairmont. Its name came from your family name, and the fact that it sits on a high hill, overlooking San Francisco Bay,” Hitchcock said as he thumbed through the papers again. “There is quite a bit of interesting information here.”
Jack took the file. First he looked inside the manila envelope. Written on the outside, in his mother’s handwriting, was “Important Papers.” There were two wills, and a paper titled “Transfer of Legal Guardianship” clipp
ed to a handwritten note from Mom. There were a few other documents. Jack didn’t understand most of it, though it surprised him how thin the packet was. Shouldn’t such world-shaking documents be inches thick? One paper especially caught his eye. He ran his finger over the marriage license, tracing his father’s signature—Jonathan Fair. He’d never seen it before. It seemed to Jack that the way his father made his Js wasn’t too far off from the way Jack himself did.
There were other papers in the file besides his mother’s. There was a yellowing magazine article from a year ago entitled “The Missing Heir of Bonanza Jim Fair.” There were copies of birth certificates, including that of Jack’s father. The oldest certificate was for James Fair Jr., whose birth date was listed as November 18, 1861. Hitchcock gently held up this certificate. It appeared to be quite old.
“James Fair Jr. would have been . . .”—the director ticked off the fingers of his free hand with his thumb—“your great-grandfather.”
Jack took the certificate. In the space listing the child’s mother, someone had written Miss Charlotte Vance. Nothing was written in the space beside “Father’s Name.”
A photo slipped out from the stack of papers. It was wallet-size and yellowing. It showed a man in a Marine Corps dress uniform. A man with dark eyes and black hair.
Jack took the sketchbook from his pocket and turned to the image he had drawn the previous night, and compared. The man in the photo had jug ears, and the chin was a bit less prominent. But the eyes . . . the eyes were exactly the same. And they were Jack’s.
For a long time Jack just stared.
Hitchcock coughed and pulled a paper from the file. “This letter is most illuminating,” he said.
Jack read the letter.
Dear Mrs. Smith,
Thank you for your letter of March 8, 1956, informing us that you are the legal guardian of one Jack Fair and establishing his legal position as heir to the newly discovered Comstock trust. As you can imagine, the discovery of the “lost heir letter” among the cache of papers found at the Fairmont Hotel by the Earthquake Celebration Historical Committee has caused quite a lot of interest. No fewer than thirty people have come forward claiming to be the missing descendant of James Fair Jr., all with birth certificates and other legal records.
A Hitch at the Fairmont Page 14