Chapter Seven
Next day, Sam called Tricia at her office. “Hi, Tricia. They can't find a car with your plate number on the deserted car list. What else can I do for you?”
“Thank you, Sam. Nothing at present.” Tricia smiled as if Sam could have seen her smiling through the line.
“Can I talk to Lois?” Sam requested.
“Sure. Please hold on.” Tricia put the phone on the hold and told Lois that Sam wanted to speak to her.
As Sam and Lois carried on their phone conversation, Tricia put on her thinking cap. Now there were two possibilities. First, if something serious happened to Frank, his car might have gone to a chop shop. Second, if nothing happened to Frank, he was still using his car, and he disappeared for some unknown reason--maybe of his own free will.
Around
“Call me Tricia, please. What is it?” she asked eagerly. She pressed the receiver nervously against her left ear lest some important words would escape if there were a gap in between. She entwined a loose strand of her blond hair between the forefinger and the middle finger of her right hand, as if her fingers were a curling iron and she could have made her hair wavy.
“Since Frank didn’t return, I've hired another guy. I wanted to give Frank's locker to the new guy and found a slip of paper in his locker with a phone number on it.”
“What else was in his locker?” Tricia's interest was provoked. She pressed the receiver even harder to her ear.
“Nothing. Only his work clothes. I found this paper in a pocket.”
“Anything in other pockets or in the folds of the clothes?” She relaxed a little, hopeful. Actually, she felt Mr. Brown's voice booming in her ear and had to let the receiver detach a bit.
“I searched thoroughly. Nothing more, but I'll keep the clothes in my office. If you want to check, just drop in.”
“Thank you very much, Mr. Brown. You are always a big help.” Tricia jotted down the phone number beginning with the area code “718”, which should belong to the
***
We stopped seeing each other six months ago,” the girl, about twenty, told Tricia when she visited her at her home. She was still wearing her red-and-white striped sleeping gown, with black hair streaming down her shoulders, no makeup yet.
“How long were you together?” Tricia looked at her to see her reactions to all her questions.
“Three months.” The girl just played with a tress of her hair that fell over her bosom and didn't make any eye contact with Tricia. Her head was bent a little low.
“Why did you separate?” Tricia could not get a good view of her face since her head was at a thirty-degree angle with her spine.
“He has an alcoholic problem. I don't like it,” she said timidly, eyelids drooping.
“How did you get to know each other?”
“He worked in a garage. Once my car broke down near there and was towed to his garage. He gave me a ride home and when the car was ready, he came to pick me up.” She looked up once at Tricia during her comparatively long narration, her large brown eyes expressionless.
“Did you know any of his friends?”
“No, not even where he lived.”
Tricia thanked the girl and left. But she thought the girl and Frank might still be seeing each other. So on the coming Friday, Tricia stationed herself in her car close to where the girl lived to see if Frank would come or if the girl would go out to meet him somewhere else.
Sally was away in
***
Lois pulled her Mitsubishi into the driveway of the late Charles’s deserted house, which had a “For Sale” sign set up on the front lawn. She and Alida got out of the car and walked around the house to the backyard.
“Listen, Alida. Now, I'll play the part of the stranger and you your father. Show me where each of them stood that night.”
So Alida took the position with her back to the big tall tree with dense foliage towering above the two-story house and told Lois to step to the spot facing her about three meters away. From the position Charles took, Lois concluded that the needle must have come from up in the tree. There could have been someone hiding in the foliage doing the evil job that had killed Charles. Had this someone cooperated with the stranger, or just acted separately, using the stranger to cover his action? She must find the stranger first.
***
It was Sunday. The girls stayed at home. After breakfast, they sat at the dining room table and discussed the Charles case. Louise was teaching Alida kungfu in the basement. Lois took out the list her father made and spread it on the table. There were eight names on it, four of them without the exact addresses listed, only the town they lived in. Lois had heard of five of the names but only knew two by their faces. Her father had told her all he had learned about each of them, but she wished to know more. She stood up from her chair and went to the doorway leading to the basement. She called her mother, requesting her to come up for a minute. Louise told Alida to practice by herself for a while and she would be back soon. Then she climbed up the staircase. Lois was in the hallway. They walked together into the dining room and took their seats.
“Tell me what you know about these masters, Mom, beginning with the four with addresses listed.” She pushed the slip of paper toward her mother.
“The first one,” Louise started, pointing to the list on the table, “is the most renowned, because he always wants to fight the other masters to see who is better.” Lois looked at the name on the top of the list: Richard Chang. She had seen him twice or thrice at some karate gatherings. He should be the first one I visit, Lois thought to herself.
***
“Cousin Lois, look at this. What does H2O mean?” Alida asked when she saw Lois and Sally coming into the family room. A notebook of some kind was lying on Alida's lap, opened to a certain page.
“What do you mean by H2O?” Lois didn't understand Alida’s question.
“Auntie Louise's teaching me poetry. She gave me a notebook of her own selected poems. There's one in it with the title of that weird sign H2O. It must have been written by a weirdo,” said Alida, showing the page with the poem on it to Lois.
Lois read it, which ran as follows:
When the scorching sun's high at
I run from here to there,
From east to west, north to south,
Through the fields, over the ditches,
Up the slope, over the top,
Down the hill, to the valley,
Into the woods, through the glade,
Not in search of ores, nor of gems,
Neither of buried treasures,
Which everyone seeks,
But of the element--H2O;
Not to quench my thirst,
Nor to wash my hands or face,
But to water a withering rose,
Lonely and deserted in a nook.
After Lois scanned to the last line, she explained to Alida, “H2O is the chemical symbol of water. It means that every molecule of water is composed of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom.”
“So, the poet's talking about water.” Alida seemed to come to sudden comprehension.
“You got it.” Lois smiled encouragingly. Sitting on the sofa, she leaned back and tapped her right foot on the thick-carpeted floor, a habitual reaction to the sort of music she loved, which drifted out softly from the cassette on the end table in the corner.
“Auntie Louise said it's free verse. What's free verse?” asked Alida, fixing her naive eyes on Lois's face.
“A free verse has no meter, no rhyme,” Lois manifested, meanwhile enjoying the music--the Blue Danube Waltz that never dies through time and tide--drifting out from the portable radio.
“Auntie Louise already explained to me about the rhyme. It's the same vowels, or the same vowels and consonants, used at the end of the lines. There can be many rhyme patterns in a stanza. But what's the meter? Do you use some kind of a meter to measure the length of the lines?”
“You could say so. Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Longfellow and many other poets often use meter in classical poems. They used almost the same numbers of syllables in paired lines with the same rhymes throughout a poem. When it's recited, it sounds even and balanced with rhythm. It will sound even more beautiful when you put alliteration and middle rhyme in it like in the poem Spring by Nash. It's the first poem in Golden Treasury, an anthology of classical poetry. Actually, we measure a line by the foot. A four-foot line, a five-foot line…” Lois sat up, leaning over the coffee table in front of her, and made some marks on a piece of scrap paper along with her explanation.
“Wait a minute, Cousin Lois. I've never seen a line that long. I think the width of the biggest book wouldn’t be four feet long, let alone the lines.”
“A foot here is not a length measurement. In poetry, a foot can have two syllables or three syllables. A syllable can have stress on it or non-stress on it, alternately. I'll give you an example. When I was learning poetry, I did a translation from a Chinese classical poem into an English metric one. Read the version.” She wrote it down on a slip of scrap paper.
At a wall corner some plum trees grow,
Alone against cold white blossoms blow.
Aloof one knows they aren't the snow,
As faint through air soft fragrances flow.
“This poem has only one stanza, four lines. Each line has four feet. Each foot has two main syllables. So every line has eight main syllables. Mostly the first syllable in every foot in this poem is non-stressed while the second main syllable is stressed. This combination is called iambic. Sometimes, especially in poem translation, if an extra non-stressed syllable appears in a foot, it's okay.”
“Thank you, Cousin Lois, for your precious time and effort. I really appreciate it,” said Alida, followed by giggles, seemingly proud of herself for being capable of such formal usage. She bounced up and down a little on the balls of her feet.
“You are really a phoenix in our family.” Lois patted her on the head benignly. In old
“When I was in high school, I often got extra homework, literally home-work, assigned by Mom at home.” Sally recollected her hard times as a teenage. “She always wanted me to try my hand at poem-writing. If I said I didn't like poetry, she would pluck my ears--”
“Excuse me, Cousin Sally. Why not call the police?” Alida asked innocently.
“I didn't like to bother the police with such trivial family problems. Besides, when the police came, I would seem to have rabbit's ears.”
“So what'd you do then?” Alida tilted her head and stared askew at Sally, anxious to know the result as though she was listening to a fascinating fairytale.
“You know our Mom. I had to do the homely homework. Here, I will write it down for you.” She wrote her poem on a piece of paper while popping her gum bubbles all the time and then handed it to Alida, who read it aloud: (Monologue of Ozone Layer).
How painful I feel,
As the Ultra-Violet rays hit me,
But I don't care about the pain,
If you are safe, Oh, Man.
Don't make holes in me, Oh, Man,
With your stupid fluoride!
It hurts me more than the rays,
Since it comes from friends.
Do you realize, Oh, Man,
Wise creature you call yourself,
If I am made extinct,
How can you survive?
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