Beautiful Lies (19 page)

Their relationship had been based on beautiful lies they had believed about each other.

He turned. “It captures him completely, doesn't it?”

“I think so. Yes.”

“I don't know a lot of kids. But to me, Matthew seems unsophisticated—at least, as unsophisticated as any kid in the world can be today. He's interested in what's happening around him, and he doesn't pretend he's not. He doesn't try to hide what he's feeling.”

“I worry sometimes that he isn't growing up fast enough. Then I look at his classmates. We fight about his hair or the state of his jeans. Last year his best friend ended up in a detox center. It puts things in perspective.”

“He's a wise kid, though, isn't he? He's perceptive, and he has good common sense. He knows how to take care of himself.”

“If he's someplace where he can….”

“I made a reservation for a hotel near your aunt's apartment. I'll check in tonight after we visit Mei again.”

She wondered how she would feel in Cullen's place. If Matthew had disappeared in Australia, and she had journeyed there to find him, how would she feel being at the edge of the investigation, lying awake in a hotel room while others discussed and decided her son's fate. She knew that if the tables were turned, Cullen would do anything in his power to include her. He had never been small-minded or mean-spirited. For all his faults, he had never set out to hurt her.

“I'd like you to stay.” She watched his forehead pucker. “If I get a call or have to make a decision on the spot, I don't want to wait for you to get here. This is where everything is happening, and you deserve to be involved.”

“You're certain you don't mind?”

“Who would have thought it, Cullen? As it turns out, after all these years, we have no choice but to work together.”

“I was never good at working with anyone, was I?”

“No.”

He didn't claim he had changed, and he didn't apologize. “Will we be leaving soon?”

“Stanford is sending a man to wait by the phone while we're gone. Did you have anything to eat?”

“Sue made me a sandwich. Will you at least try to force something down while I call the hotel?”

She had avoided lunch. Now the thought of dinner made her stomach clench. “I'll get something. We'll leave as soon as Stanford's man arrives.”

In the car on the way to Mei's they hardly spoke. Many times during their marriage she had sat beside him like this, bathing in the warmth of his grin and fending off his teasing overtures. She had been a different woman then, fearless, laughing and, most of all, enchanted by the young man with the musical accent and the irreverent perceptions of her world. They had believed that together they could conquer anything and that the distant past could not affect them.

“The Pearl of Great Price has never brought luck.” She glanced at Cullen, who was sitting remote and unsmiling beside her. “If Matthew has it…”

“If you believe it's unlucky, why do you keep it in your office? Aren't you worried, having it so close?”

“My grandfather died for that pearl. I keep it there to honor him.”

“Don't look now, Lee, but your ambivalence is showing.”

She
was
ambivalent about the pearl, wildly ambivalent, as if her thoughts about it reflected two opposite sides of her personality. One side was bound up in duty, respect for her ancestors and honor, the other side was intuitive, yearn
ing and emotional. That was the side that had fallen in love with Cullen Llewellyn.

“I'm grasping at straws,” she said. “Next I'll be lighting incense and praying to gods with names I can't pronounce.”

“Stories have meaning that logic can't explain away. The Pearl of Great Price has destroyed. How foolish can it be to wonder if it will destroy again?”

She shuddered.

Cullen put his hand on hers, a warm, strong hand with a callused palm. “He doesn't have the pearl, Lee. He couldn't. You said so yourself.”

The driver stopped at the corner where he had left them earlier. Cullen squeezed her hand. “What can I do to help you get inside?”

For a moment she wanted to believe he could help, that for once she didn't have to carry the burdens of her fears alone, and that the warmth of his touch was a promise, not a lie. Then reality intruded.

She jerked her hand from his. “You can remember you're not here to make amends, Cullen. Stay on your side of this search, and don't make the mistake of crossing over to mine.”

Once he would have lashed out at her. They would have fought, and, if the fates had decreed, eventually they would have gone to bed together—although nothing except sexual tension would have been settled. But this time Cullen said nothing. His eyes were steady, and his hand remained on the seat, as if hers were still beneath it. “There are no sides on this search. And I can only make amends if you'll allow it.”

The driver opened her door, and she stepped out. The sidewalk rolled in tumultuous waves to her aunt's building. The ornamental streetlights flashed like the fiery
breath of a dragon. She put one foot in front of the other, forcing herself not to gulp the poisoned air. She clenched her fists and took more steps, until she was inside.

When she had made the journey upstairs, Cullen joined her at the door of her aunt's apartment. They entered together, as if the scene downstairs had never occurred.

Mei opened the door herself. “Liana-ah. You are so pale.”

Liana drew a deep cleansing breath. Here in the overheated cocoon of her aunt's life, the fear began to recede. “We can't stay long, Auntie. We have to be near the telephone.”

“You will stay as long as you must.” Mei took her arm, and they walked together to the tiny parlor. Liana wasn't sure which woman was supporting the other.

“Mei, where would you like me to sit?” Cullen asked, when Mei had laboriously settled herself in an armchair.

Liana saw that her aunt had spread photographs on the table beside her. As a girl, Liana had often pored over albums of Mei's family—pictures of her husband, Wo Fong, her sons and grandchildren, including Frank, who was Liana's age and now her ally at Pacific International. She had hoped that these pictures would make her feel that she belonged somewhere.

But these photographs were not familiar.

“You will sit beside me, Cullen,” Mei said in her halting voice. She pointed to the sofa angling to the right. “And Liana, you must sit here.” She pointed to the chair at her left.

They settled themselves. Liana didn't look at Cullen. She was already growing ashamed of her outburst in the car.

“This story takes time, but we have no time,” Mei said. She closed her eyes, and for a moment she was silent. Then she began. “I have been to Jimiramira, Cullen, to the place where you were born. And long ago, when he was
young, I knew your grandfather, Bryce.” She lifted a photograph and gave it to Cullen. “You see? As a girl, I was called by my full Chinese name, Mei-Zhen. This means beautiful pearl, a name my mother chose carefully for me so that I would never forget my father's death. But your grandfather Bryce knew me only as May.”

Liana felt Cullen's eyes on her. She clasped her hands, as if the appearance of self-control would trigger the real thing. But even as her aunt's words began to weave the spell of other times and lives, a part of her thought of Matthew. Where was her son? And how could memories of people he had never known and places he had never been bring him back to her?

She closed her eyes and saw Matthew's face. She held on to that vision like a talisman.

 

On a 747 over the Pacific, Matthew Llewellyn glanced shyly at the flight attendant with the pale blond hair and the gash of red lipstick outlining a professional smile. He had noticed her the moment he boarded the airplane. She wasn't exactly pretty, but she looked like someone who knew how to handle herself in any situation, something guaranteed to impress him at this particular juncture in his life. He could imagine her offering magazines to presidents or hijackers with that same cool smile, that same questioning lift of one eyebrow.

He wondered if her skin under the drab uniform was the same golden tan as her face. Then he looked away quickly, afraid that she might read that question in his eyes. If she did, it didn't stop her from pausing at his row to take his order. Her voice was matter-of-fact, but polite. “And what about you? Would you like something to drink?”

He pretended to examine his tray. “A Coke, thanks.” His voice was reassuringly deep and mature.

“You look lonely up here all by yourself.”

This time he met her eyes and lied with artistry. “My mother's in the back. She's taking a nap.”

That seemed to make sense to her. The flight was only half full, and the experienced passengers had staked out rows all over the plane. “You ought to try for a good sleep, too. It's a long flight. You'll wish you had a nap by the time we get to Sydney.”

“Good idea. Maybe I will after the movie.”

She moved on to the next row, and he relaxed. He had intended to strike up an animated conversation with his seatmates so that the attendants, who might be questioned later, wouldn't think of him if they were asked about a young man traveling by himself. Now, since his row was empty, he supposed the lie about his mother would work just as well.

As well as his newly shorn hair, the cowboy shirt and boots he had bought in the Dallas airport, and the passport and driver's license he had borrowed from Simon Van Valkenburg, the one friend his mother would never know to question.

Now, until he was safely through Australian customs, he just had to remember to answer to the name of Simon.

The attendant returned with his drink and a package of smoked almonds. “Do you need something to read?”

“Oh, no, thanks. I have a book in my carry-on.”

“Have you been to Australia before?”

“Twice,” he said, although it was a lie. He had been born in Australia, but he'd only been back in his imagination.

“Have you, then? Where?”

He had prepared himself. Now he tried out his story. “South Australia. But I was only five the last time we were there. I don't remember anything.”

“You'll certainly remember this trip, won't you?” She started down the aisle.

“No doubt about that,” he said, although she was already out of earshot.

How would he ever forget it? Applying for a visa weeks ago under an assumed identity. Scheming and cheating. Lying and stealing. Ditching the Denver airport and traveling by cab to the bus station, by bus to the Dallas airport, by plane to Chicago. Cutting off his hair, stuffing his clothes into a cheap backpack and disposing of his suitcase. Avoiding cops, charming ticket agents, sweating buckets every time somebody compared him to the outdated photograph on Simon's passport and commented about how much a young man could change in five years.

No, he wouldn't forget this trip. Not in this lifetime. He downed the Coke in four swallows, then he leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes.

The attendant was right. It was a long flight to Sydney. And Sydney was only one more step toward Jimiramira.

Two points in the adventure of the diver,

One—when, a beggar, he prepares to plunge,

One—when, a prince, he rises with his pearl…

—Robert Browning,
Paracelsus, Part I

Northern Territory, Australia—1921

T
he trip to Jimiramira was arduous. Mei made the long voyage to Darwin first, on a pearling vessel belonging to John Garth. After her father's death, John had tried to offer assistance to her mother in small ways. He had never been one of the men who came late at night to the tiny bungalow to share Willow's bed so she could buy food for her twin daughter and son. He came in daylight, bearing practical gifts, or small misshapen pearls Willow could sell when life was bleakest. Sometimes he brought laundry, so his gifts wouldn't seem like charity.

John was the one who had diligently searched for relatives of Tom's who might help his children toward a better life. And months later, it was John who had written the letter to Tom's parents in San Francisco, enclosing photographs of Mei and her twin brother, Thomas, who had been lovingly named after his father.

Finally, it was John who had read the Robesons' re
sponse out loud in the sitting room of the bungalow, folded it neatly and soberly counseled a sobbing Willow.

“You must think about what will be best for the children, Willow. They have no life here. At least Tom's parents are willing to give little Thomas a home.” John lifted the bewildered two-year-old to his lap, but he didn't smile as Thomas searched his pockets for the peppermint that was always waiting.

“Thomas is my son! I cannot send him across the sea alone. And Mei is the air he breathes. They cannot be separated.”

“But the letter is very clear. They will take only Thomas.”

“Because
he
does not look Chinese.” Willow reached for her daughter, who began to cry, as well.

“It's unfortunate appearance has determined so much.” John fidgeted in discomfort. “But they have promised to give the boy every luxury, and to give you money to help support and school her if you send Thomas to them. You and Mei can continue to live in this house, and, when she's older, perhaps she can go to California and find her brother. How could anyone stop her?”

“They are halves of a whole, my children. Can half a heart continue to beat?”

“Is the alternative to raise both children here?” He paused. “To sell your body more often? To men of lower quality and no discretion?”

She drew a startled breath.

He bowed his head. “I'm sorry. But yes, I know what you've been forced to do. Soon everyone will, if you continue. Is this the life you want for your children?”

“I cannot give up my son!”

But she had. In the end, when Thomas was four and the
house nearly empty of food, Thomas, in the care of a woman who was paid to make the journey with him, was sent to live in San Francisco.

Now, after sixteen years without her brother, after her mother's lengthy illness and death, Mei was making a journey, too. Not as far as her brother's, but more dangerous than the oceans separating Australia from North America.

She was going to Jimiramira, to take back the pearl for which she had been named.

The decision to go had not come suddenly or easily. She didn't even remember the first time she had heard the story of the magnificent pearl her father had lifted from the ocean floor or of his death at the hands of a faithless friend named Archer Llewellyn. She had absorbed the story along with tales of her ancestors in China and the rural village in the district of Kwangtung where Willow had been born in a wooden house with mud floors. She had learned about her father, his great kindness, his tender smile, his wish to marry her mother. And she had learned, from the catch in Willow's voice, of her mother's shame that he had not.

But the story of the pearl had stood out from the others. It was a legend, invested with power that went beyond simple history. It was a story of injustice crying out for retribution. Her mother told Mei of dreams where she held the Pearl of Great Price in the palm of her hand and gazed at it, and as she did Mei's father was reflected in its radiant glow. Tom Robeson was smiling, his gaze as warm as it had been when he was living.

Mei didn't know when she had realized she must go to the place called Jimiramira, where Archer Llewellyn was said to live now, and take back the pearl. The task would have been her brother's, if he had remained in Australia. But Thomas continued to live in California with the grand
parents who also made minimal semiannual provision for Mei and paid for her education.

She knew little about Thomas's life. Once a bookkeeper who worked for the Robesons had slipped a photograph of ten-year-old Thomas into the envelope containing a bank note destined for Willow. It showed a boy who did not resemble Mei, a dark-haired boy with grave, round eyes and a small, unsmiling mouth. Mei herself had eyes that were shaped like the tapering oval of a mulga blossom and lips that seemed to curve, even when she wasn't smiling. Mei had stared at her brother's photograph for so many hours that eventually she had not needed to look at it again. It was burned into her heart, along with the memory of a younger Thomas wrenched from her childish arms and banished from her life.

Because her brother could not take back the family's honor, stealing the Pearl of Great Price had become Mei's destiny. She would take back what belonged to her family; then she would find Thomas in far-off America. Together they would use the pearl to establish a new life.

After Willow's death, she sold what furniture her mother had collected and gave Willow's clothing to the women who had helped nurse her through the final stages of consumption. For herself she kept only the jade bracelet Tom had presented to Willow and the last of Willow's savings. Then she set off for Darwin, chaperoned by John's wife, a proper English lady who, along with her husband, had always done what she could for Mei.

Mei's first glimpse of Darwin was reassuring. Feathery palms and sprawling banyans shaded houses with verandas that reminded her of home. Even the sultry air and the sunlit glare on sapphire water were the same.

The reasons for going to Darwin had been twofold. Like
Broome, Darwin had a sizable Chinese community, and Mei's desire to begin anew there seemed sensible to the Garths. But, more important, Darwin was the only city of consequence in the Northern Territory. Jimiramira was many miles away, over horrifyingly bleak terrain, but the cattle stations sometimes sent to Darwin for whatever employees they couldn't recruit from among the local Aborigines. Mei hoped to find a job that would take her closer to Archer Llewellyn's homestead, then work her way to Jimiramira using whatever means she could.

She had not, in her most expansive dreams, hoped to go immediately to Jimiramira. As a child she had learned great patience. She had waited until there was money to buy fish to eat with their rice, and waited until her mother returned from long hours over a laundry tub so she could help Mei with her lessons. Later, Mei had waited and watched for books to teach her more than she had learned in school. During the Great War, when the pearling industry nearly ground to a halt and there was little work for anyone, she had waited for the cast-off clothing and household goods of others.

So Mei had been prepared to wait for years before she made her way to Jimiramira. Instead, the opportunity arose almost immediately. She had taken a job at a general store in Darwin's bustling Chinatown in exchange for room and board, and within a week she had been introduced to another young woman, who was on holiday from a cattle station near Katherine. The woman had taken her to see the man who had arranged her employment, a banker named Stuart Sayers.

Sayers was a small man with bandicoot eyes that examined Mei from head to toe as he questioned her. She told him her name was May Chun, anglicizing the spelling and
pronunciation to further distance herself from her life in Broome. Although her name had been officially registered as Robeson, she kept that a secret.

He commented favorably on her English and listened silently to the fictitious story she told him about her childhood in Darwin. Finally, satisfied, he promised he would keep her in mind when positions became available.

“We've had only one request of late,” he said, standing to announce that their brief interview had ended. “And I wouldn't send someone as young as you, not even a Chinese. You'd be back as fast as a blackboy's boomerang.”

“You are most thoughtful, but I am both strong and clever.”

Sayers lowered his voice. “The situation isn't impossible, mind you, but nearly so. Jimiramira's as remote as they get, and the missus there's a bit of a problem. Not a married couple we've sent has stayed longer than it takes to arrange transportation back. With the Wet coming, you might not be able to come home for months. I can't be bothered with the fuss you ladies make when things don't go just the way you want.”

The mention of Jimiramira had sent Mei's heart thudding in her chest. She had known Jimiramira was her fate, but not that the fates would intervene to help her.

“I have no family left in Darwin to trouble you.” Mei saw the way his tiny eyes brightened. “Perhaps my destiny waits at Jimiramira.”

“Oriental folderol. A man makes his own destiny, and a woman lets a man make one for her.” Sayers swept her with another appraising glance. “I could find better work for you nearer to town.”

“I am so sorry. But it seems I must try my luck there. Perhaps I will write the owner of Jimiramira on my own.”

“You can't do that.”

“I write well. Would you like me to show you?”

His eyes narrowed to slits. “I'm the one who told you about the job, missy, and I'll be the one to send you. Just don't say I didn't warn you.”

Two weeks later she took the train to the north bank of the Katherine River, where the tracks ended. From there she traveled southwest to Jimiramira in a wagon drawn by mules, since the automobile, of which she'd seen several astonishing examples in Darwin, couldn't withstand the rigors of outback travel.

The voyage from Broome had been rough, and to her own shame she had been sick for some of it. Now, as the wagon rolled inch by tortured inch across the stifling, dusty never-never, she longed for the tossing waves, the nightly creak of the chains, the stink of dead fish. The wagon she rode in was one of two, and both were crowded with supplies for stations along the way. In addition to the driver—who smelled worse than the pearling lugger's hold—and Rex, the Aboriginal youth who had charge of the second wagon, an aging English couple, bound for a station beyond Jimiramira, was also making the journey.

Nothing as official as a road had been cut through the wilderness. Some of the way was marked by the ruts of other wagon wheels, or the hooves of horses and even camels. Some ruts wound around swamps, over sandhills and into dry riverbeds that shifted with the winds, erasing all signs of previous travelers. They passed towering white ant castles, as complex and labor intensive as some of Europe's finest masterpieces. Dingoes howled in serenade, and at dusk kangaroos boxed on the horizon.

They traveled between waterholes and camped at night beside fires, boiling the billy for strong tea flavored with
pungent gum leaves. The head driver, Bluey, slapped dough in a camp oven and buried it in the ashes for damper, and sometimes, to supplement the supply of salt beef and tinned vegetables, there was a treat of plum jam or fruit packed and padded carefully in crates.

Bluey, despite an aversion to soap, was kind enough. He didn't initiate conversation as they traveled, but at the day's end, when the fire had burned to embers, he would tell Mei of his days humping a swag through Queensland.

“When I was young I took three things with me everywhere I went,” he told her. “Me mother's picture, a book of poems by Robert Burns and the finest little cattle dog in Queensland. Then the dog died, I learned all the poems by heart, and the picture just faded away. But I can still whistle the tune that dog liked best, and I can say the poems whenever I've a mind to. Someday I'll be seeing my mother's face again, when she comes to take me home. So now I don't need a thing but this wagon. And if that disappears, I've still got legs and feet, don't I?”

He was a grizzled old man, whose face was as empty of expression as his life was of possessions. But he had obviously found peace. He had no quest and few wants. He traveled from station to station, taking whatever came his way.

Sometimes after their talks, as Bluey snored in his swag across the campfire from hers, Mei wished her own life were as simple, that the Pearl of Great Price had never been plucked from the ocean and that her father had sailed back to harbor that fateful season to marry her mother and welcome his twin children into the world. Then, like Bluey, she would not have a quest. She would be content to take what life offered and to watch her brother make his way in the world. She would marry a good man and have children who would be content with their lives, too.

But the fates had made other plans.

The days passed, and she grew dizzy with the heat. They suffered two drenching rainstorms that disappeared as quickly as they blew in, but Bluey searched the skies each morning with the care of a man reading his daily newspaper. The English couple began to complain reliably as midday approached. The woman, fair-skinned and gaunt, grew brown under the relentless sun, and thinner. The man, who had been good-humored at first, spoke only if there was something to criticize.

They passed over stations so vast they were forced to camp beside rudimentary bores or billabongs with foul-tasting water. At others they stopped at ramshackle homesteads built of corrugated iron and stringybark, where bush hospitality made up for the lack of luxuries. Mei saw only two white women on her journey, both leather-skinned and old before their time. They were starved for news of Darwin and people met along the way, and content to gossip with Mei when they realized the Englishwoman was too dazed by the heat to keep up with them.

“Broome? You've come all this way?” And when they discovered where she was bound, the inevitable: “You're certain, dear?”