“Is there any hope?” Louise asked Lois, though she could conclude the negative by the look on Lois's face, which had lost its usual smile since the day she had got the lethal cut.
“Don't worry, Mom. I'm fine so far,” Lois solaced her mother.
Everyone in the room was silent. What could they say to her except some trite appeasing words? However, Lois could feel their solicitude through the heart. She sat on the sofa sipping orange juice from a porcelain mug. Then she suddenly felt a need and standing up, went to the bathroom.
The phone rang. “I'll get it!” Alida yelped. It seemed that one of the duties of the children at home was to answer the phone calls like a switchboard operator, even though most calls didn't pertain to them.
“This is the Lins' residence. How can I help you?” Alida talked in her sweetest voice into the plastic mouthpiece, holding some souvenirs Lois brought her from
“Hi, Alida. This is Sam. Is Lois back home?” Sam recognized Alida's voice at the first word she uttered. He was familiar with it already since she was the first phone answerer at home.
“Will you hold on for a minute or two? I'll go get her.”
Lois came out of the bathroom and took the receiver from Alida's hand. “Hello, Sam. I just came back late last night.” She sat down on the sofa beside the phone on the end table.
“How are you feeling? Did you get the thing, the Snow-flake flower?”
“Snow-Lotus flower,” Lois corrected him. “No, I didn't.”
“So, what will you do?” He sounded really concerned.
“Don't worry, Sam. The worst thing, methinks, is to cut off my forearm if I feel I can't control the remaining poison anymore, but for now it's under control.” She didn't really feel so confident that she could control it for the rest of her life. She was only twenty-five.
“Okay, take care of yourself. I've gotta go now. Bye.” He hung up.
It was Sunday morning. Everyone was at home. “We have some good news and some bad news for you,” said Sally, having just retrieved the burst bubble of gum into her mouth.
“Okay. Let's hear the bad news first. Then the good news can cheer me up,” said Lois jestingly.
“That's a good strategy,” agreed Sally, leaning on the TV set. “The bad news comes from my side. Laura--you know, the girl working in the computer company who showed me the secret club location--has been missing for several days now. I think, just after the day we went to search the clubhouse.”
“How did she disappear?” asked Lois.
“After she left from work, she never got home.”
“Did her parents report it to the police?”
“Yes, they did. I contacted her parents when she didn't show up for work for two days. I had thought she'd been sick, but it doesn't look like a kidnapping for money. Her family is not a rich one. No ransom notice’s come, just like in Frank case.”
“I think it's because David had taken her to the secret club once. I doubt she's still alive,” Lois gave her gloomy surmise. Recently she often looked at things on the dark side, just like pessimistic people would say that the bottle was already half empty while the optimistic people would say that the bottle was still half full.
“It's too bad they take out lives just like people kill poultry in the slaughterhouse,” sighed Tricia. She raised her can of diet Sprite, took a guzzle, and perched on the loveseat which was at a right angle with the sofa.
“Enough for bad news, now for some good news,” Lois required.
“When I was stationed one night near the house in
“That's no news,” Lois said flatly.
“But Tricia and I speculated that he could be the so-called Mr. Joseph Hsu, who's said to be very tall,” said Sally, who came to flop down on the sofa beside Lois.
“Could be. But we don't have any proof,” cautioned Lois, looking askew at Sally.
“I've got an idea. We all saw him in
“You are a genius, Sally!” Tricia grinned at her, showing two rows of her white pearly teeth.
“Don't forget more good news from my side,” their father, who had Alida squeezed between him and Tricia on the loveseat, reminded them.
“What is it? Won a big lottery?” Lois looked at her father expectantly, attempting at a wry smile.
“No such luck,” her father replied, smiling back. “Mr. Chen can walk now.”
“It means that his xue is no longer jammed?” Lois opened her eyes wide in surprise. “So soon?”
“You can say so,” Mr. Lin grinned. “He'll get complete recovery in a month or two.”
“I'm exulted for him.” Lois looked actually beaming with delight for the first time in a month.
***
Lois began work on Monday. She had so much work on hand. She could not rest at home as long as the remaining poison was well under control. Sally was still working during the daytime in that computer company. Tricia went for the appointment with the owner of the secret clubhouse, taking a picture of the tall man with her, hoping that the owner would supply the answer whether positive or negative. Lois was in the office, meditating on the cases.
It was around noon and Lois felt famished. Just as she was about to depart for home for lunch, the phone on her desk rang.
“Lioness Team. Lois speaking. How can I help you?” she said routinely.
“Hello, Lois. This is Martha Fox. You remember me?” As Lois was searching her memory for such a name, the soft feminine voice came again, “We met in XiAn, in the same traveling group. Does this jolt your memory a little?” Then a fit of chuckles followed.
“Oh, hi, Ms. Fox. How are you?” Lois recalled the woman in her forties, half-Chinese and half-American, who wanted to exchange phone numbers with her, saying that she liked her a lot, anticipating friendship.
“Martha, call me Martha. I am just fine. What a memory you have, young lady!” Her crisp giggles rippled through the line to tinkle on Lois's eardrums.
“Sorry, Martha, I have something on my mind and can't focus these days.”
“You need relaxation. How about having lunch together? I'm in a Chinese buffet restaurant, just a block away from your office.”
As Lois felt her hunger sharpening, she said, “Okay, see you in five minutes.”
They sat in a booth. Ms. Fox wore a pair of beige raw silk slacks and a simple white shirt with a matching beige jacket. Her feet were encased a pair of cream-colored leather pumps. Her hair was twisted into a chignon at the nape of her neck and finished off with an elegant old Chinese-style jade hairpin. Her ensemble was accented by a pair of genuine diamond studs in her ear lobes and a slender necklace with a diamond pendant dangling from her neck, a sharp contrast with Lois's attire. Lois had on khaki pants, a checkered blouse and a nylon jacket, her daily working clothes. She only dressed up as special occasions required.
They went to the buffet table, choosing whatever food they each liked, then back to the booth. Ms. Fox told Lois that she was a salesperson and worked flexible hours, was divorced, and her ex-hu*****and claimed their son who was ten.
“That's fine with me. I am free like a bird now, can fly wherever I want to, no longer having the need to find a babysitter.” She laughed a lot, but it sounded a little forced like actresses on the stage. When she was not laughing, she wore a Mona Lisa smile, a smile that seemed to hide some secrets behind it. Was there any secret behind the smile of Mona Lisa—as if she was mysteriously pregnant with a child of royal blood and would someday become the mother of a young king?
“What's on your mind? Perhaps, I can relieve you of your mental burden,” she cooed intimately.
“Never mind. I am fine.” Lois stuffed a chopsticksful of food into her mouth.
“Sorry. I'm just concerned. Don't mean to pry into what’s none of my business,” Ms. Fox chuckled again, standing up and walking to the buffet table to get more food.
“That's okay. No offense taken,” smiled Lois, temporarily kicking all her troubles into the most remote part in the back of her mind.
After they finished lunch, Ms. Fox insisted that the lunch was on her, because she invited Lois.
“I still have half an hour to kill before my next appointment.” Ms. Fox looked at her platinum watch with a ring of tiny diamonds round the face. “May I sit in your office for a while?”
“No problem,” said Lois.
They walked to Lois's office. After Lois opened her office door, Ms. Fox strode to the sofa and collapsed on it as if she was exhausted with the eating and walking. And she really made herself at home in an office other than her own. The sofa groaned out its protestation under her weight.
“Would you like some coffee, Martha?” asked Lois.
“No, thanks. I had enough of everything.” She didn't lie there.
Lois remembered that Martha had had two bowls of sour and hot soup together with other food. She really didn't care about her figure and only paid attention to her stomach so that no complaints came from that quarter. Martha Fox was a nice lady. She sought Lois's company as frequently as possible and Lois began to look upon her as a friend despite the age difference.
***
“You are right, Sally,” Tricia cried hilariously. “No. We are right.”
“What are you right about?” inquired Lois in the evening when her two sisters came back, waiting for dinner in the living room. They occupied the sofa and loveseat as usual.
“The owner of the clubhouse recognized Mr. Joseph Hsu in the picture. He's the same tall person we know so well. It seems we are not finished with him yet,” Tricia reported, taking a swill from the cold can of diet Sprite, her favorite daily drink.
“Now we can safely and definitely draw the conclusion that the three cases are all connected, and connected with the Black Panther,” Sally said eagerly, patting her empty stomach in hopes that dinner would be ready soon.
“But we still don't know what their secrets are, who their big boss is and why they want to kill,” Lois reminded her two sisters. She didn't want their hopes soaring too high like kites on thin strings. Many things could happen between now and the goal to solve the cases.
“Since the three cases are connected, if we can crack one, we crack all of them.” Sally was always full of confidence and optimism, not concerned with difficulties and hitches. She grew up under the wings of her parents first, now that of her sisters. Lois always assigned her with the least dangerous tasks since she was the youngest of the sisters.
“When can we have dinner, Auntie Louise? I feel my empty stomach shrinking and my limbs on strike,” Alida called out to the kitchen when she finished her homework in the family room. She feigned feebleness of her limbs by crawling upstairs.
“Can anyone help to lay the table?” Louise called back from the kitchen. “Don't sit there like Buddhas. I am not the Guanyin with a thousand hands.”(Guanyin is one of the Buddhas.)
“I--doooon't--haaaave--aaa--nyyy-- strennnngth--leeeeeft.” Alida pretended to be weak.
“Lazybones.” Sally patted her on the head. All the girls went into the kitchen to get dishes, chopsticks, everything needed for dinner. All the five females sat at the table, ready to dig into the dishes. The front door opened, Robert came in. “Lucky me, just in time for dinner.” He sat down, all smiles.
“Better to be in time for everything than too early,” Louise quoted. But the others stared at her; her remark seemed above their heads.
“Okay. I'll give you an example.” Louise raised one hand like a policewoman, not to stop traffic, but to stop the questioning brainwaves from the others. “Today I went to a small plaza. All the parking spaces were occupied except those for the handicapped. As I drove forward, a car pulled out from a space, a few cars behind me. When the car drove away and I was about to back down, another car came into the parking lot and pulled into that empty space. If I had gone to the plaza a moment later, I would have been just in time to take that empty space.” She swept her eyes across all the faces, but none were looking at her. Their eyes were centered on the dishes. Good, she shrugged. At least they are interested in my cooking.
***
Mr. Chen could exercise chi by himself now, no longer needing the aid from Mr. Lin, but sometimes Mr. Lin came to visit. They became best friends now. After Lois returned from
Mr. Chen led his guests into the dining room and all sat down around the rosewood table. Mrs. Chen brought in a tray with three cups of tea on it. She placed the cups before her hu*****and and Mr. Lin and Lois; then retired to the kitchen.
“I know something about fortune telling,” Mr. Chen said to Lois, who had on a banana-yellow silk blouse, pants and a jacket of the same color, only a shade darker, and a pair of sandals. “If you tell me your birthday, including the year and the exact time you were born, I can do it right now for you.” Lois was not superstitious, but curious. No harm would come out of fortune telling itself, whether you believed it or not. So she gave Mr. Chen the information. Mr. Chen also knew Geomancy (feng shui) and could tell what was good or bad by which direction the door or windows of the house faced, the arrangements of the furniture in the house or the location of the graves of one's ancestors.
(Readers can skip this paragraph about Chinese fortune telling theory if they don’t like it or have too much difficulty in understanding it. The skipping doesn’t affect the whole story. The author puts it here for those who are interested in Chinese culture.) In Chinese fortune telling, besides palm-reading and face-reading, the fortune teller should acquire eight Chinese characters, two of them representing the year, two standing for the month, two for the date and the last two for the hour the person was born in. The eight characters are the essentials in Chinese fortune telling. In ancient
Of course, Mr. Chen did it gratis. He got a slip of paper and a ballpoint pen. And pushing his teacup a little away from him, he began to write something on the paper. “You have a good grouping of the eight characters.” Mr. Chen showed Lois the sheet on which he wrote down her eight characters in four pairs in a certain pattern. “You see, two pairs are the same characters and the other two pairs are the same, too. This grouping is called 'Butterflies Flying In Pairs', a very good one. And the five elements are almost balanced, which means your life path is mostly smooth, but sometimes there are pits and a little ruggedness. You have still another thirty-five years of good fortune. This year is the worst in your life. You'll have a misfortune involved in cutting and bleeding.”
“I already had it,” said Lois dubiously.
“No, not this one. You'll have another one later,” Mr. Chen prophesied. “Beware of someone who will bring you something bad, either on purpose or involuntarily.”
“Can you tell me who it is?”
“No. I can't. Only a god can foretell everything in every detail. But I can say it's a female.”
“Okay, I'll be alert. Thank you very much, Mr. Chen.” But once she left Mr. Chen's house, she cast the warning to the back of her mind, the most forgetful corner possible.
***
Once or twice Ms. Fox invited Lois to a golf club that anyone could join as long as the membership fees were paid. Lois learned quickly. Kungfu people know how to control their strength and they can easily use just enough strength to send any object to where it's intended to go. They can make any object go along a very straight line, too. As they got more intimate, Ms. Fox would call Lois some Sundays, saying, “Can you meet me in the same place at the same time?” But Lois didn't accept her invitation every time she called. She went there occasionally when she felt she had nothing better to do or wanted to relax. All the cases seemed as if they were stuck in slow traffic. There were not enough clues to go on with them.
Tricia went to
“Where's the girl?” said a speaker in one of the recordings.
“Safe and sound in some place, I dunno.” That was another voice.
“Willing to cooperate? The girl.” Still another voice said between the humming of a popular song.
“Have to if the b-i-t-c-h wants alive. What's a dogshit question? You bastard,” the second voice said with a little chuckle.
“Why kill David? Why not let him disappear?” It was in another recording.
“The dammed strategy of the big boss. Dogshit,” a different voice said, sounding serious.
“S’ppose he wants to transfer the fucking attention. Provoke some Buddha-dammed fight elsewhere, like between Chang and Li, the two old bastards.” It was the first voice. He was being smart in guessing, but really stupid for his own good. No boss wanted his secret intention known or guessed publicly.
“David was a useful guy. ” said another voice.
“No more f-word use. He's a suspect already. So the boss used him for another dammed purpose,” the second voice said again. He sounded like he was chewing something.
“It seems unsuccessful. Dogshit,” the first voice said once more.
“Just sow a baleful seed. Maybe, it'll bud and sprout to our advantage someday.”
There were so many four-lettered S-words and F-words in between some useful information. It seemed that they could not get out what they wanted to say without throwing in those four-lettered words. When Lois had first become a teenager and begun to know such adult things, she would flush involuntarily when she first heard these filthy words. However, with growing experience and time, she had become numb to these curse words so frequently invading her auditive organ and looked upon them as prayers to Satan just like Amen to God or Amituofu to Buddha.
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