The Silent Girl

“Where did they go, the mother and daughter?”

“How would I know? I couldn’t catch a flight home until three days later. By then, they were gone. They packed up their clothes, their belongings. I have no idea where they went.”

“Why did they run? Was it because the wife was illegal?”

My jaw tightens, and I glare back at her. “Are you surprised that she would run? If I were illegal, Detective, and you thought my husband had just killed four people, how quickly would you put me in handcuffs and have me deported? The girl may have been born here, but Li Hua wasn’t. She wanted her daughter to grow up in America, so can you blame her for avoiding the police? For staying in the shadows?”

“If she wiped away those footprints, then she destroyed important evidence.”

“Maybe it was to protect her daughter.”

“The girl was a witness. She could have changed the course of that investigation.”

“And would you put a five-year-old girl in a courtroom and have her testify? Do you think a jury would believe a child of illegal immigrants, when the whole city has already called the father a monster?”

My answer takes her aback. She falls silent, thinking about the logic of what I’ve said. Realizing that Li Hua’s actions were in fact reasonable. It was the logic of a mother desperate to protect herself and her child from authorities whom she did not trust.

Frost says, gently: “We’re not the enemy, Mrs. Fang. We’re just trying to learn the truth.”

“I told the truth nineteen years ago,” I point out. “I told the police that Wu Weimin would never hurt anyone, but that wasn’t what they wanted to hear. It was so much easier for them to think he was a crazy Chinaman, and who cares what goes on in a Chinaman’s head?” I hear the bitterness in my own voice, but don’t try to suppress it. It spills forth, sharp and grating. “Searching for the truth is too much work. That’s what the police thought.”

“It’s not what I think,” says Frost quietly.

I stare back at him and see sincerity in his eyes. In the next room the class has ended, and I hear students departing, the door whooshing shut again and again.

“If Mei Mei was in that cellar,” says Detective Rizzoli, “we need to find her. We need to know what she remembers.”

“And you would believe her?”

“It depends on what kind of girl she is. What can you tell us about her?”

I think about this for a moment, looking back through the fog of nineteen years. “I remember she was afraid of nothing. She was never still, always running and jumping. The little tiger, her father called her. When my daughter, Laura, would babysit, she’d come home exhausted. She told me she never wanted to have children, if they were going to be as wild as Mei Mei.”

“An intelligent girl?”

I give her a sad smile. “Do you have children, Detective?”

“I have a two-year-old daughter.”

“And you probably think she’s the cleverest child ever born.”

Now it was Rizzoli’s turn to smile. “I know she is.”

“Because all children seem clever, don’t they? Little Mei Mei was so quick, so curious…” My voice fades and I swallow hard. “When they left, it was like losing my own daughter all over again.”

“Where did they go?”

I shake my head. “There was a cousin in California, I think. Li Hua was only in her twenties, and so beautiful. She could have married again. She could have a different name.”

“You have no idea where she is now?”

I pause just long enough to raise a doubt in her mind. To make her wonder if my answer is truthful. The chess game between us continues, move followed by countermove.

“No,” I finally answer. “I don’t even know if she’s alive.”

There is a knock on the door, and Bella steps into the office. She is flushed from the exertions of teaching class, and her short black hair stands up, stiff with sweat. She dips her head in a bow.

“Sifu, the last class of the day has left. Will you need me?”

“Wait a moment. We are just finishing here.”

It is clear to the two detectives that I have nothing more to offer them, and they turn to leave. As they walk to the door, Rizzoli pauses and regards Bella. It is a long, speculative look, and I can almost see the thoughts whirring in her head. Mei Mei was five years old when she vanished. How old is this young woman? Could it be possible? But Rizzoli says nothing, merely nods goodbye and walks out of the studio.

After the door shuts, I say to Bella: “We are running out of time.”

“Do they know?”

“They’re closer to the truth.” I draw in a deep breath, and it worries me that I cannot cast off the new fatigue that now drags me down. I am fighting two battles at once, one of them against the enemy that smolders in my own bone marrow. I know that one of these enemies is certain to take my life.

The only question is, which one will kill me first?

TWENTY-FIVE

NOW THERE WERE THREE MISSING GIRLS.

Jane sipped lukewarm coffee and ate a chicken salad sandwich as she reviewed her growing stack of folders. On her desk were files on Jane Doe, the Red Phoenix massacre, and the disappearances of Laura Fang and Charlotte Dion. She’d started a new file on yet another missing girl: Mei Mei, the cook’s daughter who had vanished along with her mother nineteen years ago. Mei Mei would be twenty-four years old now, perhaps married and living under a different name. They had no photos of her, no fingerprints, no idea what she looked like. She might not even reside in the country. Or she could be right under their noses, teaching martial arts in a Chinatown studio, Jane thought, and she pictured Iris’s stony-faced assistant, Bella Li, whose background they were already looking into.

Of the three girls, Mei Mei was the only one likely to be alive. The other two were almost certainly dead.

Jane turned her attention back to Laura Fang and Charlotte Dion. To the startling connection between them, despite the gulf that separated their lives. Charlotte was wealthy and white. Laura was the daughter of struggling Chinese immigrants. Charlotte grew up in a Brookline mansion, Laura in a cramped Chinatown apartment. Two such different girls, yet both had lost parents in the restaurant shooting, and now their files shared equal space on Jane’s desk in the homicide unit-not a place where anyone wanted to end up. Paging through their files, she heard the echo of Ingersoll’s last words to her: It’s all about what happened to those girls.

Were these the girls he’d meant?

PATRICK DION’S ESTATE looked no less impressive the second time she saw it.

Jane drove between the twin stone pillars onto the private road that took her past birch trees and lilacs and up the rolling lawn to the massive Colonial. As she pulled up under the porte cochere, Patrick emerged from the house to greet her.

“Thank you for seeing me again,” she said as they shook hands.

“Is there news about Charlotte?” he asked, and it was painful to see the hope in his eyes, to hear the tremor in his voice.

“I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear about the reason for my visit,” she said. “I’m afraid I don’t have anything new to report.”

“But you said on the phone that you wanted to talk about Charlotte.”

“This is in connection to our current investigation. The murder in Chinatown.”

“What does that have to do with my daughter?”

“I’m not sure, Mr. Dion. But there’ve been developments that make me think Charlotte’s disappearance is