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“I have lost my only child,” Suchee answered. “I’m an end-of-the-liner now. With no family to take care of me, I will end up in the government old people’s courtyard in the village. So am I prepared? No. Ready? No. But if I’m going to spend the rest of my life alone, then I need to know.”
4
HULAN WOKE BEFORE DAWN THINKING ABOUT MIAOSHAN. Last night she’d been distracted by her friendship with Suchee and hadn’t used the investigative tools she usually employed when conducting an inquiry into a crime or interviewing a witness. Ordinarily she would have thought about motive. She would have tried to categorize the murder. Was it a contract killing? Was it murder motivated by an argument, personal or financial profit, sex, revenge, politics, or religion? Or was this simply a suicide? She would have focused her attentions much more clearly on Miaoshan herself. As Hulan had said last night, to catch a murderer, an investigator needed to understand the victim.
Hulan quietly dressed and went outside. Coming from Beijing, with its cars and trucks and millions of people, Hulan was accustomed to noise. Here there was noise of another sort. She heard birds enthralled in their morning song and the whirring of cicadas. Although it was Sunday, she heard the low reverberations from a piece of farm equipment somewhere in the distance. Beyond these sounds and hiding just below the surface quiet was the hum of the earth itself. As a girl she had thought of it as the roar of plants pushing up through the soil.
She slowly walked to the shed where Miaoshan had been found. If she’d been here on the day of the discovery of Miaoshan’s body, Hulan would have kept everyone away from this area so that she could examine the fine dust that covered the hard-packed earth. But if there had been footprints, they were long gone now, so Hulan pushed opened the door and entered. Immediately her senses were assaulted with the sights and smells of long ago. In this small, enclosed, dark room, the aromas of burlap, dirt, insecticide, kerosene, and seed mingled into a muskiness at once intoxicating and repugnant, heady and earthy. She closed the door behind her. As she waited for her eyes to adjust, she forced herself to put away her girlhood memories and preconceptions.
She tried to visualize Miaoshan hanging from the beam, the ladder below her. She called to her mind the suicides she’d seen before: the young mother in Beijing who’d killed herself by drinking carbolic acid; the old woman from Hulan’s own neighborhood who—for reasons that never became clear—had slipped some rocks into her pockets and walked into Shisha Lake; the man who’d taken his village’s savings, invested it in the stock market, lost it all, then had leaped from his hotel window rather than go home and face the people of his village. Then she remembered her own father, seeing him put the muzzle of a gun to his head and pull the trigger.
Hulan let her body slip down into a sitting position with her back against the wall of the shed, and thought. Typically vanity—even at this most desperate moment—kept women from using guns to kill themselves. They preferred to take pills, swim out to sea, or even slit their wrists—options that would not alter the face and also allowed the possibility of a rescue. Death by hanging was also primarily a male act, involving as it did
a certain level of mechanical expertise: securing a rope to a beam, tying a knot that would have the ability to slip, then hold, positioning an object on which to stand but could easily be knocked out of the way when the time came. Of course, a farm girl would have these abilities, but death by hanging did not result in a beautiful corpse. From everything Suchee had said about her daughter—that she was in the midst of transforming herself into a Western ideal of beauty—a broken neck, swollen tongue, and purple face didn’t fit the pattern for this particular victim.
Something else bothered Hulan. While suicide stemmed from deep melancholy, very often victims used the act as a way of getting the last word, of inflicting permanent guilt on those left behind. As a result, suicides were often planned so that the people who discovered the body were the actual targets of the victim’s rage or despair. The young woman in Beijing, for example, had taken her baby to a neighbor’s house, come home, dressed in her wedding clothes, drunk the carbolic acid, and, despite her agonizing abdominal spasms, positioned herself so that her husband—who turned out to have had a series of affairs—would find her on their marriage bed.
Out here on the farm only one person could find Miaoshan. But so far Suchee had said nothing that would indicate that there had been any hard feelings between herself and Miaoshan. Twenty-five years was a long time, but could Suchee have changed so much that she could hide her emotions and motives so cleverly that Hulan wouldn’t be able to see through them? If Suchee had felt guilt or remorse, would she have asked Hulan to come out here at all? No, Hulan decided, the mother was convinced that something had happened to her daughter, and the longer Hulan spent out here in this shed, the more convinced she became as well.
Without obvious physical evidence Hulan knew that the only way to understand what had happened was to take steps back from the scene of the crime. With each step a clearer picture would emerge. Her first step would be to interview Tsai Bing, since so often murders were committed by husbands or boyfriends. Nothing in what Suchee had said about Tsai Bing suggested any animosity between him and his fiancée, but mothers could be blind when it came to such personal matters.
Hulan stood, pushed open the door, and went back outside. She scanned the fields and spotted Suchee. Hulan walked along a raised berm running between a field of corn and a field of budding sunflowers until she reached her friend, who was working the soil with a hoe.
“I’ve been thinking, Suchee,” Hulan said. “It would be a mistake for me to talk to people as an investigator for the Ministry of Public Security. They would be too scared.”
Suchee frowned. “My daughter’s murderer deserves to be scared.”
“Yes, of course, but if you want him caught, then we can’t frighten him into hiding. Let him think he’s gotten away with it. Let him think I’m merely a relative or friend who’s come to visit. He’ll let down his defenses. When he does, I’ll be there.”
“But who?”
“I don’t know yet, but for me to flush him out, I must understand him. To understand him, I must understand Miaoshan. To understand her, I believe I must blend in.”
“Not like that,” Suchee said, nodding at Hulan’s clothes. “You can wear Miaoshan’s things, at least until that baby you’re carrying gets bigger.”
Back in the house, Suchee opened a low cabinet. On two shelves were neatly folded cotton clothes. “These were Miaoshan’s. She was thin like you.”
Many times in Hulan’s life she’d been required to change personas. On some occasions these had been at the whim of politics, as when she’d been thrust out of her routine as a model child of privilege and sent to the countryside. Other times had been the result of geographical circumstance—from Chinese countryside girl to Connecticut boarding school student. Jobs and money had also affected her attire—as a law student, then as an associate at Phillips, MacKenzie & Stout. In recent years she’d changed her dress to meet the needs of a particular case. Hulan thought of this less as working undercover than simply blending into a landscape so she could hear people’s real voices.
Hulan stripped off her dress, then pulled on a simple short-sleeve white blouse worn soft by years of wear and washings, and pants that came to just above her ankles. Suchee then handed her a pair of homemade shoes. Slipping these on, Hulan thought about the kind of life that a person wearing them would have out here in the countryside. She felt her body losing its attitude of self-possession and assuredness, to be replaced by a woman who had survived only at the caprice of nature. Within minutes, and aided by these few garments and a change in demeanor, Liu Hulan devolved from Red Princess to peasant.
“Can you tell me the way to the Bing farm?”
“They won’t know anything,” Suchee said.
“I’m going to see Tsai Bing,” Hulan clarified, then added, “but if you want me to do this, then you’ll have to let me do it my way. Please don’t question me.”
After a brief discussion, Suchee reluctantly agreed.
“One more thing,” Hulan said as they left the house and headed out across the fields. “Please don’t tell anyone who I am.”
“What if someone remembers you?”
Hulan shook her head. “I was here long ago. You were one of the few local people who came to the Red Soil Farm to teach us. The others who were older are probably dead.”
Suchee acknowledged that this was so.
“And the people who were our age, well, most of them went back to the city. Am I right? Besides, twenty-five years is a long time. Few of us look as we once did.”
