“Huh.” Sai’s penciled eyebrows jumped up. Money always got her. Then the slyness returned. “You still getting married?” she demanded in Chinese.
“We have to go out again first,” April pointed out. “See if we like each other.”
Sai thought about that, then conceded the point. “Who did it?” she asked at last, switching back to English.
April frowned. She didn’t like this case. “A very sick woman.” Didn’t like it at all.
“You got a probrem?”
“More than one.”
“You rant tell me? Mebbe herrp.” Sai moved a few feet and sat stiffly on the modern sofa—very hard, no soft cushions to sink into—in the tiny front living room, then patted the place beside her.
April sighed and checked her watch. Five minutes, no more. She might be able to squeeze another hour of studying into this ruined night. She sat next to her mother. “Okay, it’s like this: A crazy sister kills two young women who work in stores—”
“How?”
“Strangles them. Then sane sister comes in and reports her problem sister to the police. We investigate. Pretty quickly, we begin to think the crazy sister is too crazy to kill anybody. Then we find one murder victim’s clothes in the crazy sister’s house. We investigate more. We get the sisters in for handwriting samples. We test the bite marks of the crazy sister’s dog. We come up with nothing on the crazy sister. Now we’re wondering if maybe she’s been set up, so we follow both of them to see what they do. Few hours later we catch the crazy sister trying to strangle the sane one. Got it?”
Sai shook her head. “I don’t berieve.”
“What don’t you believe, Ma?”
“Tly not same as succeed.…”
“So, what do you think happened?”
“How I know? You detective … I just mother. Hey,
“No, Mom. What’s the story?”
Sai settled back on the hard sofa to tell it. “Hundred, hundred years, peasants work rand. All lound rand good. One piece rand nothing can do. Clops no glow. No leason. All same rand. Peasants beg gods for leason, make many offerings. Give rand water, night soir. Nothing can do. Then mebbe hundred hundred years dig up bad rand to make city. Then find out what’s what.” Sai slapped April’s arm. “Ten thousand cray soldiers buried on horses. That’s what.”
Yeah. April nodded politely. So what did that have to do with the Honiger-Stanton sisters and the two dead salesgirls?
“You take Sergeant test tomorrow?”
Again April nodded.
“Bad spilits. Now sreep—hey
“Yeah, Ma. If I can get it.”
Skinny Dragon Mother shook her head as if the spiteful daughter she had futilely named Happy Thinking so long ago had finally lost her mind.
April got up slowly. A lot of times her mother made her feel as if she were still three years old. Really small and not very smart. In fact, quite, quite stupid. She knew Skinny Dragon Mother had some important lesson in mind for her, but as usual she didn’t know what it was. Once again she headed upstairs.
“See what I mean?” Sai said to her back.
“Yeah, Ma. Look for the ghosts making mischief.”
82
It was almost midnight. In the dark, Jason sat in his favorite armchair, listening to the nine carefully restored antique clocks prominently displayed on bookcases and tables around his living room. The clocks all ticked in a slightly different rhythm. No matter how many times he adjusted them, he could not get them to keep exactly the same time. It took a full ten minutes of bongs and dongs in nine different tones before they all got through striking the hour. He had no idea which one, if any, had the correct time. If he wanted the correct time, he had to consult his quartz watch.
At this moment, some five, ten, fifteen minutes before midnight, he didn’t give a damn about the correct time. He was waiting for the 108 strikes that would proclaim the end of his thirty-ninth birthday. He felt very alone.
One of the occupational hazards of being a psychiatrist was that very few of the people in his life, even those he’d seen regularly for many years, knew anything about him. Today not one of his patients had any idea it was his birthday. The day had passed with no office party, no congratulations, only a few cards, no cake. He did get a call from his parents bemoaning the fact that he had produced no children and never came to visit. It didn’t occur to them to ask him, or take him, to dinner. They sat on extension phones in different rooms of their Bronx apartment where they had lived for forty-three years, talking at the same time. They promised to send Jason a birthday card as soon as they found one they both liked.
But all of that he’d sorted out long ago. What really bothered him was that even though he had spoken to her twice that day, he desperately missed Emma. And his best friend Charles was furious at him. Further, he seemed to have misread the Honiger-Stanton case right from the beginning and all the way through. That was puzzling. He didn’t often get things wrong. He and April Woo had arranged to have dinner together the next night to talk the case over. He was looking forward to it.
Outside, it began to rain. Lightning snaked across the sky above the Hudson River, illuminating the New Jersey horizon for an instant. Thunder reverberated. Jason brooded about the case, about Camille under observation at Bellevue. Something worried him about the story April had told him when she called from the hospital two hours earlier. He didn’t see how the young woman he had diagnosed as gentle and nurturing just that morning—the woman who had told him she wanted to be like Doctor Dolittle—had made a very serious attempt at strangling her sister at five-thirty in the afternoon.
Camille had appeared frightened, vulnerable, fragile. How did he miss her rage? She must have lied. Well, all patients lied. Everybody he knew lied. Still, getting beyond the lies to the truth was his job.
Jason sat there in the dark, trying to work it out. Camille said she always did whatever Milicia told her to. Jason believed that was true. What if Milicia knew the police were outside and deliberately provoked Camille to violence? What if Milicia had threatened or attacked her in some way and Camille acted to protect herself? The thunder rumbled closer. Rain pelted down, drenching the city for the second time in a week. It was the storm season. Jason had the urge to call Emma, to thank her again for her gift. Find out how she was. Hear her voice again, no matter how much it hurt. The phone rang before he had a chance to decide if that was a good idea. He reached to answer it.
“Did I wake you?” Charles demanded.
“No.” Jason was disappointed. He’d been thinking about Emma, more than half hoped it was her.
“Are you alone?”
“Yeah, I’m alone. What’s up, Charles?”
There was a lengthy silence. “Look, I’m sorry I ripped into you today.” Charles sounded sorry.
“That’s okay. I’d probably have felt the same.”
“We’ve been friends for a long time.”
“Yes, we have. Thanks for calling.”
“That’s not the only reason I called.”
“Oh, what’s up?”
There was a short pause, then Charles spoke. His voice had a catch in it. “The shirt came back from the laundry.”
