Beautiful Ghosts (48 page)

Corbett, too, seemed to be struggling not to watch the planes.

“You said your aunt gave you a house, on an island.”

“A little cottage. Its walls are almost entirely covered in flowering vines. You can look out over the ocean and see whales sometimes.”

“She was the one who taught you to paint?”

Corbett grew very quiet. “That’s a long way from here. This is America. This is what I do in America. Not what I am now,” he said, and Shan realized he really wasn’t speaking of his aunt, but of Bumpari village. “Liya and I spoke, before I left the village. She said something very wise. She said she thought being an investigator was the opposite of being an artist.”

“Maybe she was saying that some mysteries require an artist, not an investigator. That an artist has different ways to get to the truth.”

“Up there in the mountains with you I learned that the facts are only part of the truth, not the most important part.” Corbett looked into his cup. “I never really thanked her. Liya. You’ll have to do it for me.”

“Maybe you’ll see her again.”

“Me? Not a chance. If you didn’t notice this morning I am heading for the junkpile. After this I’ll be assigned to helping old ladies find their teeth.” He suddenly turned his head down, into his cup. “It’s her. Croft’s manager.”

Shan studied the slight, stylish Asian woman a moment then rose before Corbett could stop him. He waited by the counter that held napkins and sugars until she was seated at a table, then quickly stepped to her side and dropped into the chair across from her.

“My name is Shan,” he said in a low voice as he fumbled with the top button of his shirt. “You work for that antique place upstairs.” He pulled out the gau that never left his neck and held it for her to see.

“Do you have any notion what that is?” the woman asked. Her eyes showed impatience, but also amusement.

“It’s very old. It’s very valuable. I know where more are.”

She stared at the prayer box with interest and extended a finger toward it, but stopped short of touching it.

“We aren’t buying any,” she declared impatiently. “You should go. This is not the way we do business. I could call the security guard.”

“Take me to your showroom. Let me see what you’re buying. I can find many such things. Tibetan. Chinese.”

She took a bite of her salad, chewed, and aimed the fork at him. “We are a private house. No showroom. We procure what is requested. No requests for fourteenth-century prayer boxes,” she said, nodding toward his gau. “That was three or four years ago.” She jabbed the fork toward the door. Shan sighed, rose, and stepped out of the café.

Corbett joined Shan ten minutes later by his car, studying the top-floor windows as Shan explained what she had said, then spoke to Bailey on a cell phone, explaining the urgent task they had with the building security tapes.

They drove again, in a slow, steady rain, Corbett in a brooding silence, until he parked in a huge parking lot, containing more automobiles than Shan had ever seen in one place, and guided Shan toward a cavernous, sprawling building so large Shan could not see the other end through the greyness.

He paused in silent wonder as they walked through the double set of elegant glass doors. Trees and flowers grew beside a pool with a waterfall. The floors were marble. An ironwork stairway gracefully curved around the waterfall, toward a ceiling of arched glass.

“There’s a place we can get coffee, a quiet place to talk.”

Shan still stood, studying the strange building and the dozens of people who were wandering in and out of the open doorways off the huge main hall. There were shops, he realized, dozens of shops, two floors of shops. When he looked toward Corbett the American was already ten feet in front of him. Shan followed slowly, puzzling over everything in his path. Adolescents walked by, engaged in casual conversation, seemingly relaxed despite the brass rings and balls that for some reason pierced their faces. He looked away, his face flushing, as he saw several women standing in a window clothed only in underwear. He saw more, nearly identical women in another window adorned in sweaters and realized they were remarkably lifelike mannequins. One of the sweaters was marked at a few cents less than three hundred dollars, more than most Tibetans made in a year.

“Why did you bring me here?” Shan asked, as Corbett led him into a coffee shop and ordered drinks for both of them. “This place of merchants.”

“I thought you’d want to see America,” Corbett said with an odd, awkward grin, gesturing to a table, then sobered. “And this is where Abigail worked, before getting the governess job. People here knew her, told me stories about her, made her real for me.”

So Corbett was looking for what? Shan wondered. Not clues, for he had already covered this ground. It was as if he were paying homage to her, perhaps apologizing to the girl in his own way for not being able to bring her killer to justice.

“I thought it was too great a coincidence. The nanny of the family dies the same night the artifacts are stolen. But Punji didn’t do it. I believe what she said.” Corbett seemed to have grown comfortable using McDowell’s nickname, as if he had grown closer to her since her death. “She and Lodi carried away the artifacts but didn’t know anything about the girl. What if it was just a coincidence? What if I have been wrong?”

“It’s why you went to Tibet, isn’t it?” Shan asked as a waitress delivered two steaming mugs. “Because of the girl, not because of the theft.”

Corbett thought a long time about his answer. “I could have sent the boys to follow the artifacts. But every night I kept seeing the girl’s face, as she floated in the water. Like she was looking right at me. Like she was trying to say something to me but her mouth wouldn’t work anymore.” He sipped from his mug. “It’s why I went. It isn’t why I stayed.”

The cell phone in Corbett’s pocket rang. He grabbed it and listened intently, pushing the phone tightly against his ear, making small sounds of affirmation before he hung up. He looked down into his mug before speaking. “The tapes were there, with a machine available to screen through them at high speed. The guard on duty helped them. I thought it would take most of a day.” He spoke into the mug, in a low, despairing tone.

“You knew who it was already. We both knew,” Shan said. “It could only be one person.”

“Might as well be God. He’s untouchable. I’ll never be allowed near him without direct evidence, and he’s way too smart for that.”

“Lokesh would say that if Dolan did such a thing, if he killed the girl and arranged the thefts, then he will inevitably be touched by the sin.”

“So I’m supposed to wait for him to be reincarnated as a beetle and step on him. I prefer my justice in this lifetime.” Corbett looked up from his mug. “You don’t understand the type. If Dolan doesn’t like the way his garbage is picked up he calls the mayor.”

“I know exactly the type.”

“Right. I forgot. You opposed them and you lost. All those years in the gulag.”

“I prefer to think of it as a stalemate. I’m still alive.”

Corbett studied Shan intensely, as if he had never seen him before, as if Shan had just made a proposal, then a grin cracked his face, followed a moment later by a deep laugh. “Fine. We brought a surprise for Mr. Croft. Let’s find a way to deliver it.” He stood, left several bills on the table, and headed for the car.

Shan began to marvel at the rain itself. Beijing was a dry place, most of Tibet a near desert. He had not experienced so much rain since he was a boy, living near the sea. There were many qualities of American rain, and many types of rain clouds. One moment they were in a driving rain, like a storm, the next in a shower, the next in a drizzle that was little more than a thick fog. Once the water came down so violently, in such a sudden wind, that it struck at the car horizontally. Corbett never seemed to notice the rain, but drove at a steady speed, out of the city, into hills with huge houses bounded by high walls and metal gates. He slowed as they passed a long rambling brick structure built into the side of the hill, enclosed by a five-foot-high brick wall. The main structure was nearly two hundred feet long, and surrounded by other buildings, a long garage with eight doors, a greenhouse, and small structures Shan could not identify.

“It looks like a hospital,” he ventured. “Perhaps a small college.”

“The scene of the crime.” Corbett’s voice was tight. He did not seem inclined to conversation. He drove a hundred and fifty yards past the gate and pulled to the shoulder of the road where the compound’s wall turned into the thick forest, pointing to a large tree growing close to the wall, twenty yards from the corner. “The girl’s friends said she sometimes climbed the tree to get over the wall when was she was in a hurry, lean her bike there and go over. I interviewed Dolan’s two kids, before my boss intervened. They confirmed it, that she would climb the wall without tripping the alarms. It was their little secret.”

“But why would she go back that night?”

“To turn off a kiln. She and the kids made clay pots that day in the studio building, near the back of the compound. The boy said they had forgot to take the pots out of the kiln, that he was sure they would be ruined. But someone had taken them out, turned off the kiln and taken the pots out. She had a class down the road at the local college. She came back here, climbed the tree to turn off the kiln. Then she saw something she wasn’t supposed to see.” He began driving again, the road approaching the open water again.

“There is no proof,” Shan said.

“There is proof against it. The next time I went to the house to look at the scene of the robbery, Mr. Dolan himself sought me out and said he had turned off the kiln.”

Shan considered the words. “You mean his children had told him about speaking with you?”

“He had been away, he hadn’t seen his kids. Somebody leaked my interview report to him. He came to me when I was studying the grounds to say he had turned off the kiln, then he walked away, wouldn’t let me ask any other questions. He said the insurance investigators already had all they needed, that the FBI need not trouble itself further. He had no problem with us, until I raised the issue of Abigail.”

Corbett pulled the car onto a narrow track that led to a gravel parking lot overlooking the bay. The wind was lashing the water, creating whitecaps. Corbett pointed to the narrow iron bridge that towered a hundred feet over a small inlet, then silently got out of the car. Shan followed, raising his collar against the raw wind.

“Abigail is spotted at the house, an unexpected witness to the crime. Afterwards he offers to drive her home. Late for riding a bike on the winding roads. They put the bike in the car. When they reach the bridge they stop for a moment. Here, because there are no houses, no one can see. Admiring moonlight on the water perhaps. Maybe he says he thought he saw a whale. Who knows. They get to the edge, he pushes her over. She’s small, not very heavy. Then he drives five miles to the bridge near her house, throws the bike over, where it is found by divers two weeks later. Thing is, it was low tide. No water under this bridge then, just rocks. She didn’t die from the fall but her back was broken,” Corbett added in a tight voice. “She drowned.”

Shan stared at the dark, swirling water, fighting a sudden horror within. The girl had landed on the rocks, helpless, in the night, broken, unable to move as the tide had slowly risen over her and carried her out into the bay.

They spoke no more, not even when they returned to the house. Corbett left some food on the table and went up the stairs. Standing by the bridge he had sounded so certain of the girl’s murder, but they both knew there was no evidence. It was indeed as if the girl had spoken to him that awful day on the water.

Suddenly hungry, Shan examined the food. A cucumber, a head of lettuce, a loaf of brown bread, a box of instant rice, a banana, a tomato, a jar of mustard, and several cans of vegetables he did not recognize. He sliced the cucumber into long wedges and took it with the banana to the soft chair near the entry, turned out all the lights, and ate. He leaned back in the deep chair, listening to the noises that came from outside, his eyes closed. When he opened them the house was dark, and a blanket had been thrown over him. Hours had passed. It was nearly midnight. He started toward the stairs, then stopped and stepped to the back porch again. The rain on the leaves was like a whisper. In a bucket by the door a cricket suddenly chirped. Strangely, the sound seemed to push the sadness from his heart. For the first time in years he remembered walking with his father through a bamboo grove in a soft rain, his father calling to birds, a cricket laughing. He stood without moving a long time, afraid of stirring away his father.

Finally he returned to the kitchen and began to search, opening drawers and cabinets. At the back of the counter he noticed a white plastic box with a cord, its small cursive label identifying it as a can opener. He paused, trying to imagine how it worked, or why it was necessary. Soon he found a piece of white paper, a heavy black marker, matches, and the stub of a wax candle. He took them outside and sat against the wall, under the overhang of the roof, lit the candle, and wrote in bold, flowing ideograms.

In a bucket a cricket sang,
he wrote,
cutting through my sorrow. I am awestruck. Thank you, father, for teaching me to how to listen.
He folded the paper, wrote his father’s name on it, scribbled, in English,
Seattle,
on the upper corner, then lit it with the candle, dropping it into an empty clay pot. He watched the ashes drift into the mist, his postcard from America.

Much later he found his way to the stairs, and was about to step into his bedroom, when he saw that the door at the end of the hall, beyond Corbett’s room, lay slightly ajar. He approached with a pang of guilt and pushed the door open. There were unfamiliar scents. He turned on the light. An easel lay at the center, with an unfinished watercolor. A sketch of the intended picture lay on a table beside the easel. It was of a windblown stone building on a mountain, with a string of prayer flags flapping over it. Corbett had been painting.