What would she tell George? How could she explain how she knew? What could she possibly say to him?
George Hitchman was home when she arrived — frantic with worry, he told her.
“Why frantic?” she said, surprised. “I’m not late. I always go to the cove on Saturday.”
“What have you done to your hair?” he asked, staring at her wildly. “What’s that green thing you’re wearing? You’ve never had a bikini. You don’t like bikinis! Where’s your blue suit? What have you done to your hair?... My God! Oh, my God! I told him you had long brown hair on top of your head. And a blue suit. I showed him where you always sit.”
The Shanghai Gold Bars
by Ta Huang Chi
This is the 575th “first story” to be published by Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine... a bold debut in the world of fictional detection; even before the author knew his first story would be published, he planned to make his detective, Feng Da-wei, a series character...
The author, Ta Huang Chi, was born in 1927. He has been a ship’s officer and a guided-missile engineer. At present he is writing and illustrating a book on Chinese chess. He has no hobbies, but admits he “dabbles in Chinese poetry, computer programming, and a bit of clay sculpting when the mood is upon me”...
Feng Da-wei was born in July of 1900. The exact date is unknown, but his baptismal certificate and the records of the Evangelical Gospel Order in St. Louis, Missouri indicate July 20th. This date is surely accurate within a day either way, since the Feng baby was only two or three days old at the time he came into the keeping of Reverend and Mrs. Myles Stainford.
In May of that year the Stainfords received a letter at their mission in Lingtan ordering them to report at Shanghai in August to act as resident instructors to newly arrived groups of missionaries — missionaries whose knowledge of China and the Chinese consisted of little more than colorful fictions current in the American midwest. The letter had taken a month to reach them.
In early June the Reverend and Mrs. Parkinson arrived in Lingtan to replace the Stainfords. They arrived with several cases of Bibles and some ugly, but unconfirmed, rumors.
In July, satisfied that his replacement was now familiar with the mission and local conditions, Reverend Stainford and his wife started their long journey to the coast. It would take them twelve days, traveling by mule cart, to reach the first of several rivers that would eventually carry them to Shanghai.
On the evening of the tenth day they reached what once had been a small farming village, but was now gray ashes on dark brown earth. Black, wide-winged birds circled above, while others strutted, grotesquely fed, across the corpses in the street. Here, the ugly rumors had become an uglier reality. They searched for survivors and found two — a young woman, unconscious, one out-flung arm charred to the bone, with a newborn baby clutched in the other. The baby slept fitfully on the mother’s bloodstained blouse.
They made night camp near a small stream several li beyond the village where they took turns sleeping and watching over the woman. Myles Stainford was beside her when, during the fifth hour of starlight, she opened her eyes, called softly for her husband, and died. Two days later three weary people reached the river.
After selling the cart and both mules, they took a mud-floored room at an inn and set about arranging for supplies and a sampan to take them downriver at first light.
Later, on that powder-dry Chinese night, the Reverend and Mrs. Stainford hurried across the walled courtyard of the district magistrate’s yamen, bid a polite tsai chen to the frightened watchmen at the gate, and walked back down the dusty street leading to the inn. The elderly magistrate had confirmed the wild tales they had heard along the waterfront.
After the first minutes of prescribed polite questions of health and family had been mutually asked and replied to, one terrible phrase had dominated the conversation — I Ho Chuan — The Society of Righteous Fists. The English-language press had dubbed them “Boxers” and had not taken them too seriously in the beginning. Now the whole world would hear of them.
The Boxers had risen in their thousands, cut all lines of communication between the capital and the sea to the east, and even as they spoke, were besieging the foreign legations in Peking. Missionaries, the hated Je-so teachers, were being hunted down and killed. Missions burned. Chinese converts butchered.
“You must think of your wife. Flee to a treaty port, honored friend,” the magistrate had said. “You are not safe even in my own poor house. Your mission at Lingtan is now ashes and the Je-so, Parkinson, is dead with all his family and servants. Liao pu te! Fearful, fearful!”
It is written that God moves in mysterious ways. Reverend Stain-ford never questioned these ways and never, like some, cried out, “Why me, Lord?” It wasn’t lack of faith that stayed his words but fear of the booming reply, “Why not, Stainford?” This explains, in part, why a certain Chinese baby did not end up in a specific church orphanage when the Stainfords finally arrived in Shanghai that August.
Martha Stainford loved babies. Myles Stainford liked children but disliked babies, and this particular baby reminded him of a boiled Chinese owl. Whenever he mentioned the church orphanage as the proper place for the baby — after all, the church would certainly be sending them back to the interior when their present work was complete — a look would come in her eyes. A look of such pained longing that he reluctantly agreed to keep the baby until they were assigned to a new mission. He also agreed that David would be a fine name for the baby. From the mother’s dying words he knew that the family name was Feng. David, in Chinese, became Da-wei, and it was as Feng Da-wei that he was baptized on the following Sunday.
In the months that followed, Myles Stainford went about his work content in the knowledge that his role of temporary father would soon end.
It ended later at night that Christmas Eve when they were told to leave for Kwangsi province before the Chinese New Year began on February 19th. Sometime around midnight Martha had quietly got out of bed. Half an hour went by. He found her sitting crosslegged among the small presents around their candle-lit Christmas tree. She was staring at a floppy-eared, gingham-vested bunny propped at the base of the tree as she rocked the sleeping David in her arms. Her face was that of a mother holding her child for the last time, waiting for that nameless, uninvited thing that never knocks and, without speaking, takes away all light forever. Moving quietly, Myles sat down beside his wife and gingerly took the child into his own arms.
On February 14th in 1901, the Stainford family arrived in Kwangsi. The unpacking of a floppy-eared, gingham-vested rabbit was duly noted by an intelligent pair of small dark eyes peering from a teakwood cradle...
A rain squall born of the great Tai Hu Lake left its watery womb at noon, swept east in a broad gray pattern across farmlands, blotted from sight the towering pagodas, and wove itself into the latticework of canals that made Soochow the Venice of China. The advance winds of the storm played onto a checkerboard of courtyarded homes, sending a foam of flower petals after the specks of birds fleeing to quieter horizons.
At one of these comfortable, walled homes the wind flicked off a heavy roofing tile and planed it clattering along the eaves of the study.
Two men sat in the paneled room below the storm. Each man knew only the sound of his pen nib scraping across paper.