Dragon Bones (Red Princess 3)

“How could he afford that?”

Wu didn’t answer the question. Instead he repeated, “From the fist of the past to my fist to the fist of the future.” Then, “My son is dead, and he was murdered by foreigners.” It was a brash but sadly empty accusation.

Hulan gestured to the piece of paper on the wall even though the old man couldn’t see it. “You’re a disciple of the All-Patriotic Society.”

“We aspire to be reverent,” Wu admitted.

“You know this cult has been implicated in domestic terrorism,” she stated.

“These are false accusations.”

David admired the man’s bravery in acknowledging publicly that he was a follower of an illegal group. Or was it stupidity?

“Do you have explosives here?” Hulan demanded.

Wu looked shocked, then shook his head.

“I think your son was a troublemaker.” Her voice was cruel in its accusation. Father and widow wordlessly accepted the denunciation as Hulan walked to the wooden crates and lifted the cloth to examine the contents. “Did your son have a special hiding place?”

“No,” Wu answered without hesitation.

Hulan gazed about for other potential hiding places, then suddenly addressed Huadong’s widow. “Ni! You! What do you know about your husband’s activities?”

The poor woman visibly trembled in fear. Sensing this, the infant whimpered. The woman shook her head in vehement denial.

“The two of you must have had a special place to meet. This is just one room….”

David understood Hulan’s implication. There was no privacy here, but that word didn’t exist in the Chinese language, so Hulan finally had to spell it out.

“You have a baby. Where did you and your husband go to be alone?”

But before the woman could respond, her father-in-law said, “I am an old man, but I still remember the ways of a husband and wife. I sat outside.”

“I’m going to say some names,” Hulan said. “I want you to tell me if you ever heard your son speak of them. Brian McCarthy….”

“The foreigner who drowned,” Wu answered.

“Like your son,” Hulan pointed out.

“The river takes the careless. My son was not careless.” It seemed Wu wasn’t going to budge from this position, but David had seen this stubbornness before. No parent wants to accept a child’s faults.

Hulan continued listing the names of the foreigners at the dig, but neither Old Wu nor the widow professed to having ever heard of them.

“Ask if they ever spoke to Brian,” David said. “If Brian went to that spot down by the river often, then they must have seen him on their land.”

Hulan asked the question. Huadong’s widow shifted her weight. Her father-in-law answered, “He crossed our land every day. We did not speak to him.”

“Are you sure?” David asked in Mandarin. Wu’s eyes widened. He hadn’t expected the foreigner to speak the mother tongue, even if it was the northern dialect.

“I don’t speak English,” Wu responded.

“But Brian spoke Chinese,” David revealed.

An awkward silence hung in the room. The widow stood motionless against the wall. David glanced at Hulan. Anything else? his expression asked. These inquiries are going nowhere.

David kept his eyes steady on Hulan as he asked the old man one last question. “Were there any marks on your son’s body when he was pulled from the river?”

“I felt him with my own hands,” Wu answered. “He was as perfect as the day he came into the world.”