Sarah Canary (21 page)

Blair fetched whiskey and poured each man a small glass. Chin drank his immediately and felt a warmth surrounding his heart.

Blair cooked the eggs himself while the other men sat. Chin took an inconspicuous chair slightly behind B.J., with Purdy to his right. Purdy leaned across him. ‘I recollect being afraid that the Bay View might prove too rough for Miss Adelaide Dixon,’ he told B.J. ‘Will you believe me? Remember, Blair? Remember me saying that the Bay View was not the place for ladies?’

‘
I
will believe you,’ B.J. promised, ‘I don’t know what Chin will believe.’

‘I let her stay because another woman had taken rooms as well,’ Blair said. ‘Otherwise I wouldn’t have. Not unescorted, the way she was.’

‘Her and her companion,’ said Purdy.

‘No companion,’ said Blair. ‘I never had an unescorted woman stay here before. I never will again.’

‘She left with a companion.’

‘No companion.’

‘I saw a companion.’

‘I believe you,’ said B.J.

Purdy’s voice was increasingly excited. ‘By God,’ he said. ‘I
thought
her companion was a little wild-eyed. Now I recollect that she growled at me like a dog. She swung out of the trees like an African ape. She ran to the river like a deer. So Miss Adelaide Dixon escaped through the window with the Alaskan Wild Woman, did she? But why would she do that?’

It was all too plausible to Chin. Why did anyone run off with Sarah Canary? It was a question beyond why. Blair set a plate of eggs in front of B.J. He reached past to give Purdy the second plate. Both men put their hands in their mouths and pulled out their gum. B.J. set his out on the plate rim. He looked at it. He shaped it into a little mountain peak. He smashed it down with his thumb. Chin turned to Purdy to see if this was simply what one did with gum, but Purdy was already eating his eggs and his gum lay relatively untouched on the table, like a bird dropping. Chin felt slightly embarrassed for having swallowed his.

‘What a
lot
of eggs,’ said B.J.

‘Did you see two women?’ Blair asked him.

‘No,’ said B.J. ‘But the woman I saw looked a lot like the woman I didn’t see. I thought I was seeing the woman I didn’t see, at first. So did Chin. Didn’t you, Chin?’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Blair.

‘It was confusing,’ B.J. agreed. ‘That’s all I’m saying. I was confused.’ Blair returned to the stove and scraped another plateful of eggs out of the pan. He held the plate out to Chin along with a metal spoon. Bits of uncooked white dotted the eggs. Chin’s mouth filled with water and he ate quickly without chewing. Purdy cut the bread into thick slices and passed it.

B.J. rubbed his bread in circles over his plate to clean it. Chin imitated him. He drew rings in his cooked eggs and then erased the rings.

B.J. put his bread into his mouth. ‘Is the Alaskan Wild Woman’s manager’s name Harold?’ he asked. ‘I don’t want to see him or anything. I just want to know. He’s a short man with a big mustache.’

‘Yes,’ said Blair. ‘That’s him.’

Chin’s thoughts straightened into lines. Sarah Canary would take the
Biddy
to Port Gamble. And from there, who could guess? Perhaps with Miss Adelaide Dixon, wherever her business might take her. Perhaps with any other man or woman who happened along. They had missed her again.

‘Dark hair.’ B.J. was being very thorough. ‘With light eyes.’

‘Right upstairs,’ said Blair. ‘Unless he climbed out the window with the ladies.’

‘Which he wouldn’t have,’ Purdy added. ‘She wouldn’t have taken a man. She doesn’t like them.’

‘Are you a friend of Harold’s?’ asked Blair. ‘Or a creditor? Would you like to go up and see him?’

‘No,’ said B.J. ‘We just wanted to see the Alaskan Wild Woman. Nothing more.’

Chin cleared his throat inadvertently. B.J. misunderstood. ‘Oh,’ B.J. said awkwardly. ‘I guess I
do
want to go up and see Harold.’

Chin coughed in alarm.

B.J. stared at him. ‘But not now?’

‘Why not?’ said Blair. ‘It’s just up the stairs. First door on your right.’

‘Why not?’ said B.J. in some confusion. He looked at Chin. ‘You come with me, Chin,’ said B.J., and Chin, who knew that Sarah Canary was gone but that some white demon was hidden upstairs instead, shouting ‘Ho-o-w do’ and ‘Who-o-o-ee’ at irregular intervals, was still afraid to risk anything so un-Chinamanlike as refusing. Besides, B.J., left to himself, was likely to go to the first door on the right.

Purdy followed them all the way to the foot of the stairs. The light was very dim and the smell of beer made Chin want to cough, which he couldn’t do, not without waking someone. His eyes watered instead and he could hardly see to pick his way among the legs and arms and heads of the men on the stairs. Toward the landing he reached a spot where there was no gap left for his foot. His boot hovered over the face of a man, then over his palm, then over his white beard.

‘Are we going up the stairs now?’ B.J. whispered behind him.

‘Yes,’ said Chin.

‘I thought it had gotten steep,’ B.J. said. Chin straightened his knee, stretched his leg to the stair above, set his toe down in the middle of a plate of bread. It took both his hands on the rail to pull himself forward. The plate cracked as his weight shifted onto it. He took a final, long step and stood at the top of the stairs, looking back to see if Purdy was still watching. It was too dark to see past the landing where the staircase turned. He heard a second crack as B.J. stepped on the plate behind him.

Chin passed up the first door on the right. He paused at the second, put his ear against it. He was mentally matching it to the hotel exterior, to the draped and intact window outside. Sarah Canary’s room would be right next to Harold’s, of course. Locked, he imagined, although he did not try the knob. Harold would have locked her in at night and kept the key with him as he slept, underestimating her cunning. She’d escaped him through the window.

‘Whee-yoo-oo!’ the white demon called out suddenly from behind a door across the hall. The doorknob rattled as it turned. The third room on the right was open and Chin, in a panic, grabbed B.J.’s sleeve, pulling him inside. He could not shut the door behind them. It was split and appeared to have been forced.

‘Chin?’ said B.J. Chin hushed him. They stood for a moment, still as stones, and listened. No more sounds came from across the hall. A noise behind them turned out to be the wind, coming through the window frame unchecked, rustling papers that earlier had blown off the desk and into corners where they beat against the walls in the wind like trapped moths.

Chin shivered, from nervousness or from cold. The room was extremely cold, colder than the porch had been. The open window channeled the wind right toward them over the bed, which was unmade and unoccupied, but B.J. stared down at it in a way that made Chin go and look, too. On top of the rumpled blanket, someone had set out the articles of a white woman’s dress in the shape of the woman. Perhaps it was a joke, because the undergarments were laid on the top. Most of them were unknown to Chin, although he recognized the function of the stockings and the shoes, which had not been quite properly placed, so that one leg appeared longer than the other. One shoe had fallen over onto its side, so Chin could see the whole length, how very big the shoe was. One shoe pointed merrily up to the ceiling.

It was very easy to imagine the woman inside the clothes. The wind disturbed the hem of the skirt so that it beckoned with a disembodied, unearthly sexuality. Chin was aroused even as he recoiled. Noises through the doorway, a gasp and a groan and a series of secretive footsteps, quickly took his attention instead. He could not tell where the footsteps were headed. He could not take a chance on being found in some white woman’s room. Not with the bed unmade and her clothes so intimately displayed. Chin hurried past the bed and climbed out the empty window to the roof.

B.J. followed him through the window. ‘Chin?’ he said.

Chin hushed him again. He crossed the roof to the one room he knew was empty, the one with a window and the drapes drawn. He pushed at the glass, levered it open enough to reach through with a finger and flick loose the catch. There was something wrong with this, but he couldn’t, for a moment, think what. He was already scrambling inside when he remembered. This particular window shouldn’t have been locked.

~ * ~

11

The Story of Carmilla

But never met this Fellow

Attended, or alone

Without a tighter breathing

And Zero at the Bone—

Emily Dickinson, 1865

Harold was sitting on the floor, leaning against the bed frame. His face was drained of color and his eyes were those of a madman. He was looking right at Chin. ‘Demon from hell,’ he said. His voice croaked like a cricket’s. ‘Chinese devil.’ He spat. In one hand he held something; now his fingers uncurled so that it fell to the floor. ‘Pick it up,’ he told Chin. ‘Read it to me.’

Chin had heard of snakes in India that hypnotized their prey so they walk right into the snakes’ open mouths. He took three steps into the room, moving like a little mouse, like a dreaming rabbit, carried forward by his own sense of inevitability. Beside the bed, he squatted slowly, until his eyes were just opposite Harold’s. He picked up the item, which he didn’t look at, but that his fingers recognized as a chopstick. He rolled it to the flat side, felt for the characters like a blind man. He couldn’t take his eyes off Harold’s eyes. ‘It says good health,’ said Chin. ‘Good fortune. Long life.’ What did chopsticks say?

Harold laughed and it was a horrible whistling laugh, like a breath over the top of an empty bottle. ‘Long life. I just bet it does,’ he said. ‘John Chinaman.’

‘Chin,’ B.J. said from the window. Chin didn’t know if B.J. was speaking to him or correcting Harold. Neither responded. They continued to look at each other, Harold attacking with his insane stare, Chin defending, until his strength gave out. His soul began to leak from his eyes and he was forced to close them quickly.

Harold made a sound, breath and demon music. The air from his mouth was very foul. ‘Am I a dead man?’

‘No.’ Chin looked at the chopstick in his hand and saw that it was his own chopstick, his own good fortune, his own long life. ‘Did Sarah Canary give you this?’ he asked.

‘That’s what she did,’ said Harold. He coughed, holding both his hands over his stomach, and the cough was unproductive and apparently painful, but Harold repeated it anyway. He brought one hand up, wiping away the spit at the corners of his mouth. Chin saw that his nails were stained the color of bean sauce and there was a matching stain on his shirt where his hand had been. ‘I found it in my heart. Is it wooden?’

‘Yes.’

‘Of course, it would be. She used to come at me in my dreams, standing over me in the moonlight and gloating and her dress all made of blood. I’d wake up in a sweat and have to drink to steady myself so that I could sleep again. I don’t have a gift for sleep. Too much like death, I suppose. And now, of course, we’ve gone beyond dreams. Now she’s tried to kill me. She doesn’t understand that I can’t be killed. You tell them, Jimmy. You know that I can’t be killed.’

‘B.J.,’ said Chin. ‘Go downstairs and get Mr Blair. Harold needs medicine. A doctor, too, if Blair can find one.’

‘I can’t be killed,’ said Harold with more emphasis, as if Chin were missing the point. ‘But I think she can be.’

B.J. had not moved. ‘B.J.,’ Chin said authoritatively, and B.J. began picking his way through the puddles of water and islands of crockery on the wooden floor. He opened the door and disappeared into the hall.

‘Where is she?’ Harold asked.

‘Gone,’ said Chin.

‘No.’ Sweat coated Harold’s forehead. ‘How long? Gone where?’ Chin was afraid to touch him. He squatted on the heels of his boots and tried to see how badly hurt Harold was. He tried to see this from a distance, but Harold’s hands were in the way.

‘I don’t know. She was gone when I got here.’

‘I want to ask you a question, Chinaman.’ Harold’s hands were shaking. He paused a few moments to breathe. Chin could see nothing that looked like fresh blood, not on Harold’s hands, not on his shirt. The color was coming back to Harold’s face in two small circles that burned in his cheeks. ‘Since you found Sarah Canary in the forest, how many people have died?’

‘None,’ said Chin. He thought of Tom, of course, but what did Tom’s death have to do with Sarah Canary?

‘Think harder.’

‘None,’ Chin repeated. ‘Not one.’ He had troubled himself from time to time, wondering how Sarah Canary had gotten the warden’s keys to the asylum gate, but there was no reason to think anyone had died over them.

‘Except for Bergevain.’ B.J. was standing in the doorway to the room.

‘Who?’ said Chin. ‘I thought you were getting Mr Blair.’

‘Louis Bergevain. The wardens beat him to death in December. I tried to tell you before, Chin. And I can’t get Mr Blair, because there’s another dead man on the stairs.’

‘Step over him,’ said Chin. ‘Those men are just drunk.’

‘I don’t think so.‘ B.J.’s voice was apologetic. ‘Please come, Chin.’

Chin rose and followed B.J. The light was much better in the hall now. There was only one small glassless window, but it was on the east side of the hotel and the sun had risen enough to come through it direct. Naked and dirty patches in the flocked paper on the walls were visible now. Chin stood at the top of the stairs and looked down at the man whose blood-caked, matted white beard contrasted with his nice clothes. Blood ran from the man’s throat onto the step beneath him and off that step, in defiance of gravity, up the sleeve of another man below.