Beautiful Lies (26 page)

“Was it worth it, Mei?”

Liana watched her aunt's face. Mei smiled sadly. “I found your father with little trouble, Liana, just as I had so many times before in my dreams. Thomas was tall and strong, as I had imagined, but he looked nothing like me, not Chinese at all. We met in secret. He told me he did not want our grandparents to know I had come, because they would try to send me back.”

Even the sad smile disappeared. “I was so glad to see
him. He was the other half of my soul, and I clung to that, because I had lost everything else that mattered. I held out the pearl for Thomas to see, and I told him about our father and Archer, and all I had done to bring it to him. He reached for it and rolled it in his palm, fingers caressing it. And then he told me to go back to my boardinghouse. He would come for me the next day to start our new life together.”

Mei shook her head sadly. She didn't go on.

“He didn't come, did he?” Liana whispered.

“The next morning the police came to put me in jail. They said that Thomas had accused me of stealing his watch, and one of the policemen pretended to find it in my clothes. They kept me there for two days. Then one of them came to my cell and told me that Thomas would not press charges, but if I bothered him again, he would have me sent back to Australia. He could have, of course. Our grandfather was a powerful man, and Thomas was to inherit everything.”

Liana looked at Cullen and saw he was gazing at her.

Mei finished. “When I returned to the boardinghouse, a letter was waiting. Thomas said that I was never to tell a soul who I was or anything about the pearl. And if I was silent, he would not have me sent away. This was his favor to me. Because I was his twin sister.”

The love of my life came not,

As love unto others is cast;

For mine was a secret wound—

But the wound grew a pearl, at last.

—Edith Matilda Thomas
The Deep-Sea Pearl, Stanza I

Sydney, Australia—Present Day

M
atthew wasn't sure when his wallet had disappeared. He had paid the taxi driver, paid the reception clerk for the first night at his hotel in King's Cross, paid cash for the worst spaghetti dinner he'd ever eaten. Then he had stumbled back to his room and slept for nineteen hours straight.

And when he had finally opened his eyes again, he had discovered that his wallet was missing.

Fading sunlight filtered through the greasy shade covering the only window in his room. Matthew jerked the cord, and the shade wrapped around itself with a loud explosion. Three stories below, he could see two men in front of an open-air vegetable stall gesturing and shouting soundlessly at each other as the owner began to shift the displays inside.

“Shit.” Matthew closed his eyes. Simon had chosen this hotel for him. They had pored over sites on the Internet, and Simon had found the hotel on a travel board for col
lege students. Cheap, easy to find and not the least bit particular. He hadn't planned to stay in Sydney any longer than it took to book a flight to Jimiramira. He had intended to stay two nights. One to recover from jet lag, another to finalize his travel plans.

Now the second night was about to begin, only he had no money to pay for it.

“Shit,” he said again, but he didn't feel a bit better—which he'd thought was the whole point of cursing.

He was in the Southern Hemisphere, as far from San Francisco as he could get without heading back. He had someone else's passport, an empty stomach, a hotel room he couldn't pay for, and no clue where he had lost his wallet.

He sank to the only chair in the room and tried to piece together the minutes between slurping his final strand of spaghetti and falling asleep fully clothed.

He had paid for his meal in cash, Australian cash. He had exchanged all his money at the airport, even though he knew he might get a better rate somewhere else. But the airport had been crowded and the clerks forced to work without socializing. Since the same wouldn't necessarily be true elsewhere, he had resigned himself to losing a few cents on the dollar.

He had expected to be confused, but except for adjusting to dollars in coins, he had caught on quickly. With relative ease he had counted out the money for the taxi, counted out more for the desk clerk and later for the cashier at the café. He had tucked what was left of the eight hundred dollars in his wallet. He remembered, because he hadn't been sure where to put all that heavy change. He had slipped the wallet inside the back pocket of his jeans and the change in the front.

Now his wallet was gone.

His alarm grew as he went over the next minutes out loud.

“I put the wallet in my pocket. I said good-night to the guy at the cash register. He asked if I was an American….”

He remembered feeling chagrined. For years he had practiced his father's accent, drawing out vowels, dropping “r's” in the middle of some words and adding them to the end of others. As Cullen's son he had felt secure in his ability to pretend he was Australian, but apparently he wasn't as adept as he'd thought.

“I told him I'd lived in the States for a few years. I walked outside….” Matthew pictured the street in front of the restaurant. It wasn't far from the hotel, but the restaurant was on a seedier street, one that reminded him of the least appealing sections of San Francisco's North Beach, with window displays that both interested and repelled him, and neon signs advertising entertainment he wasn't old enough to see—but wished he could.

By the time he left the restaurant the sky was fully dark, but more than stars had come out. The street teemed with people strolling and staring in shop windows. Music drifted on the air, something loud and rhythmic playing over speakers that screeched on the high notes. He stopped in front of a shop labeled Chemist and peered inside, half expecting smoking vials and foaming beakers. Instead the store was exactly like the pharmacy near his school, only here the condoms were prominently displayed.

And that was when the girl had approached him.

“Got a smoke, mate?”

He had turned quickly to face her, shoving his hands in his pockets. She'd seemed to be at least twenty, and she was a full head shorter than his six foot, with long brown hair and dark eyes. Or at first he'd thought they were dark,
until he realized he was staring into pupils so enlarged they were just barely ringed with vivid green.

“I don't smoke.” He cleared his throat and wished for the first time that he did.

“No? That's crook. I need one.”

“Do they sell them in there?” He inclined his head toward the chemist shop.

“I don't buy smokes. Blokes give ‘em to me.” She moved close enough to make him acutely aware of the short length of her skirt and the unfastened buttons of her blouse.

“Wrong bloke here, I guess.” He didn't know what to do. He noticed the exotic way she smelled. She wore too much eyeliner, with her eyes as heavily rimmed as a racoon's, but she was pretty, just the same.

“Maybe not the wrong bloke.” When she smiled, her front teeth were just crooked enough to interest him. The girls at his school were all on their way to perfect teeth, and their fathers had the orthodontist bills to prove it.

Exhaustion was beginning to claim him, but Matthew wasn't ready to end the conversation. This was the most exciting thing that had happened to him since he got off the plane. “Do you live around here?”

“Here and there. I move around a bit.” She reached out to straighten his shirt collar. Just reached out, as if touching him was an entirely normal thing to do. He hadn't heard that Australian girls were more forward than Americans, and he wondered why this hadn't been trumpeted up and down every travel board in cyberspace.

She slowly dropped her hand. “Where in America do you live?”

“How do you know I live in America?”

“I dunno. The way you talk. And this shirt.” Her eyes traveled down. “And those boots. Are you from Texas?”

“I'm from here. I was visiting the U.S. For a long time,” he added.

She shrugged. “Is that right? I like the shirt. Turn a bit and let me see the back.”

And that was exactly what he had done.

Now Matthew put his head in his hands as the truth settled over him. He had been so tired he hadn't even suspected that the girl had lifted his wallet. While his back had been turned, she had bumped up against him. Accidentally, he guessed at the time. The only thing he had really noticed was the way his body betrayed him. He'd been exhausted, but not
that
exhausted.

When he turned around again, she looked perfectly innocent. They exchanged a few more sentences—with him mumbling and wishing he could adjust his jeans—then she wandered off, and he headed back to the hotel. If she had stolen his key, too, he would have noticed right then that the wallet was missing. But he had shoved the key in his front pocket, along with his passport, change and return ticket.

The girl had stolen his wallet.

He had grown up in San Francisco, and even though his home and school were in parts of the city best known for sweeping views and noteworthy architecture, he had still learned street smarts. Smart guys watched themselves with strangers. They kept their wallets in their front pockets, no matter what else had to go there. After dark, they stayed out of places they didn't know.

Smart guys didn't travel halfway around the world and lose their wallets to the first girl they met.

He had to get it back.

For a second Matthew discarded that as impossible. The girl was probably long gone by now. Why would she stay
around King's Cross and wait to be caught? She must have realized he would figure out what had happened and probably call the police. Of course, she wouldn't know that, for him, calling the police was totally out of the question.

But what if she wasn't gone? And what if she hadn't spent all the money? He had to retrieve what he could. He still had a long way to go, and he couldn't do it without cash. Even if he slept outside, he still had to eat. He had a stash of Mounds bars and half a bag of potato chips he had bought in Dallas. But that wasn't going to get him very far.

Of course, he could always call his mother.

Matthew rose and grabbed his backpack. If he found the girl and his money, he would come back, finish his stay and pay for the room. If he didn't, he would spend the night in a park. Some day he would send the hotel money to make up for leaving.

In the hallway, he walked quietly down the worn carpet, trying not to attract attention. Thankfully, the clerk was not at the desk when Matthew crossed the lobby and let himself out into the King's Cross twilight.

 

By midnight Matthew gave up searching for the girl and started searching for a place to sleep. He had combed the neighborhood near the café one street at a time, peering into shadows, entering shops and restaurants, scouting alleys and the hallways of apartment buildings. By ten he had begun to ask strangers if they'd seen the girl, describing her with the details he so vividly remembered. People were surprisingly friendly, but no one knew a thing. No one but one old woman who manned a musty book shop just a block from where the girl had approached him.

“What is it you'd want with a girl like that?” The woman seemed nearly as old as his beloved aunt Mei. Her accent
wasn't Australian. She spoke as if she were repeating lines from
Braveheart,
his favorite movie. He guessed since she was a stranger herself, maybe she was more willing to help him.

“She has something of mine.” Matthew picked up a novel with a torn paper jacket sporting a cartoonish Canadian Mountie. “I need to find her and get it back.”

“You'll be better off without the likes of her. Didn't your mum teach you right from wrong?”

Matthew looked up. “You know the girl I'm talking about?”

“Aye. I know her, sure as you're born. Tried to help her, I did, but she wanted none of it.”

“Help her?”

The woman looked him over. “How old are you, lad?”

“Eighteen.”

If she knew he was lying, she didn't let on. “That's old enough to know better, isn't it, now?”

“How were you trying to help her?”

“I tried to get her off the street, but she wasn't having any of that. She didn't want to shelve books and mind the counter here. No, she'd rather stand on street corners and pick up men.”

The image was too vivid to mistake. Matthew might be just fourteen, but he understood exactly what the old woman meant. For the first time he realized what a fool he'd been. The girl was a prostitute, and he hadn't even realized it.

“Do you know where she is now?” He stammered out the words, embarrassed by what he had discovered—but more embarrassed that it had taken him so long to figure it out.

“Had a room nearby somewhere, I suppose. But I
haven't seen her for a while. She comes and goes, that one does. I wish she'd go back where she came from. Maybe then she'd find a real life.”

He had left the bookshop without another word, and when the door closed behind him, the old woman flipped the “Open” sign to “Closed” and pulled down the shade.

He had stayed in the immediate neighborhood, but after that, he stopped asking about the girl. She was a prostitute, and no one would willingly admit to knowing her. He tried to imagine where prostitutes went at this time of night, and how they spent their time, but those images sent his entire body into panic.

By midnight, when he gave up the search, he resigned himself to sleeping outside. He had come too far to turn back now. Tomorrow he would have to consider his options, but only after he'd had more sleep.

His stomach rumbled, and he began to look for a place where he could open his backpack and dig out the potato chips. He had already decided that shrubbery would be his best choice for sleeping. If he could find an overgrown hedge along the side of a building, it might provide decent shelter. He just needed to be out of sight to stay safe.

He found exactly what he was looking for about a quarter of a mile from the bookshop. A stone church stood on a street more notable for its relative quiet than anything else. Surrounded by rundown apartments and parking lots, the church was away from the worst hustle of commercial King's Cross. Best of all, it was rimmed with tall evergreen bushes that gently arched into a thick canopy along the front facing the street. A chest-high iron fence with ornamental spikes ringed the lot, but there appeared to be a gate in the back. If the gate was locked, it would be easy enough to get over.

Matthew scanned the street, which at the moment appeared to be deserted. Then he took the long way around, since the shortest route was illuminated by lampposts. The gate was padlocked, but easy enough to climb. He tossed his backpack over first, wincing as it hit the pavement with a loud thump. Then he hauled himself over to retrieve it. Keeping to the darkest part of the lot, he made his way to the front of the building and the sheltering evergreens.

He couldn't have asked for a better place to sleep. The ground was sandy and free of debris. The building blocked what little wind there was, and the branches drooped enough to render him invisible. He opened his pack and took out the potato chips, regretfully denying himself a candy bar, since he didn't know when he would be able to afford a real meal again.

Potato chips had never tasted so good.

 

At first, when Matthew awoke, he didn't know where he was. He was cold, and his pillow scratched his cheek. The voice he heard didn't belong to his mother or Sue Lo, their housekeeper. Those women had gentle voices. The voice that awakened him was younger and more abrasive. And the girl was speaking to a man.

“What do you mean, no worries, Charlie? I gotta have some money to pay off my room. The old cow told me she'd change the lock on the door and sell my stuff if I don't pay her tonight.”