Murder on the Silk Road

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Murder on the Silk Road

A Charlotte Graham Mystery

Stefanie Matteson

MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

In memory of

Char Lappan

1946–1986

AUTHOR’S NOTE

For translations of the Chinese classic the
I Ching
or
Book of Changes
, the author is indebted to the Richard Wilhelm translation, rendered into English by Cary F. Baynes, copyright © 1950 by the Bollingen Foundation, New York, N.Y. New material copyright © 1967 by the Bollingen Foundation. Copyright © renewed 1977 by Princeton University Press. Excerpts reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey. In some cases, the author has altered the Wilhelm/Baynes text slightly.

For the words of the song “John Chinaman, My Jo,” the author is indebted to the book
Songs of the American West
, compiled and edited by Richard E. Lingenfelter, Richard A. Dwyer & David Cohen; University of California Press; Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968.

The poem “I’m nobody! Who are you?” by Emily Dickinson is from her
Collected Poems
, originally published in
Poems, Second Series
, 1891.

1

Grasping the coins in her perfectly manicured fingers, Kitty Saunders threw them down on the surface of her long pine kitchen table. They were antique bronze Chinese coins with a square hole in the center, and with Chinese characters inscribed on both sides.

After spinning like tops on the hard surface for a few seconds, the coins finally came to rest, and Kitty leaned over to study them, her brow furrowed in concentration. “Yang, yang, yin,” she said. Picking up her pencil, she drew a broken line on a notepad. “Eight,” she said. “Young yin.”

Charlotte was mystified. Kitty was telling her fortune using the
I Ching
, the ancient Chinese book of oracles. The
I Ching
had replaced the tarot cards as Kitty’s latest fortune-telling enthusiasm. Before tarot cards, it had been the crystal ball, and before the crystal ball, it had been astrology. At one point, it had even been palmistry, but that was more than forty years ago now, when they were both starting out in summer stock on Cape Cod. Palmistry wasn’t in fashion anymore. A social historian could have charted the fortune-telling fads of the late twentieth century from the history of Kitty’s enthusiasms.

Kitty was about to throw the coins again. She was shaking them with all the intensity of a craps player on a roll in Las Vegas.

Charlotte remembered the first time Kitty had told her fortune. She had said that the three horizontal lines on the side of her hand underneath her pinkie meant that she would have three husbands. With only one husband on hand at the time, three had seemed like an unlikely number, but in fact the total had turned out to be four. So far, that is. Though she had no intention of marching down the aisle again, the powers that determined the circumstances of her life had always conspired to take her by surprise, and there was no telling what might happen in the years she had left. Actually, Charlotte had always considered the tally of her marriages to be anomalous. She had never intended to be the kind of woman who accumulates a string of surnames. She had always wanted the security that comes with mating for life, but everything about her life had turned out to be dramatic instead.

“Yin, yin, yin,” said Kitty as the coins spun slowly to a stop for a second time. “Six. Old yin.” Again, she made a notation on the notepad. This time it was a broken line with an
x
through the middle, which she drew above the first broken line. “The
x
shows that it’s a changing line,” she explained.

Her explanation meant nothing to Charlotte. “Don’t I have to ask a question?” she asked as she peered over the tops of her reading glasses at the notepad on the other side of the table.

“Not with the
I Ching
. Although you can if you want to. But the
I Ching
will give you the answer to whatever’s on your mind at the moment, whether or not that’s the subject of your question.”

“In other words, it intuits the question.”

“Exactly,” said Kitty as she shook the coins again.

“I guess the question on my mind is, ‘What I am going to be doing next?’” After more than forty years in front of the cameras and on the stage (it was now 1984, and she had made her first movie in 1939), Charlotte might have been expected to have more job security than she had had when she was just starting out. But it didn’t work that way: the actor’s job lasted only as long as it took to shoot the movie or for the run of the show. After that, it was invariably a matter of twiddling your thumbs and waiting for a call from your agent. At least she didn’t have to comb the columns of
Variety
anymore: her face was as familiar to three generations of moviegoers as a member of their own family. But the anxiety of those early years had never left her. In spite of her fame, there was still a fearful place in her heart that believed there would never be another job. She even had nightmares about it, the way other people had nightmares about failing final exams.

“If that’s the question on your mind at the moment, that’s the question the Sage will answer,” said Kitty knowingly as she drew a solid line above the two broken lines of the reading.

“The Sage?” Charlotte raised a dark, winged eyebrow in an expression of haughty skepticism that was one of her screen trademarks, along with her clipped Yankee accent, her broad-shouldered jackets, and her long, leggy stride, as forthright as a man’s.

“Now don’t you go raising an eyebrow at me, Charlotte Graham,” chided Kitty. “Remember the tarot cards? The easiest reading I’ve ever done. On the eve of the Academy Awards, I turn up the Wheel of Fortune card. It didn’t exactly strain my powers of prediction to foretell that you would win an Oscar.”

“It didn’t strain your powers or anyone else’s,” added Charlotte. “Everybody and his brother was predicting I would win. I was odds-on favorite with Jimmy the Greek. I deserved to win.”

“So? Sometimes everybody says someone is going to win, but they don’t,” said Kitty. “Which might very well have been the case for someone who had already won three Oscars. They might have thought you were hogging the awards, and they’d have had a point.”

“So who’s the Sage?” asked Charlotte, ignoring the comment. She had long ago learned that she was skating on thin ice when it came to discussing her career with Kitty, who had sacrificed her own career to marriage and motherhood, and was jealous of Charlotte’s success.

“That’s how the
I Ching
is referred to,” said Kitty as she picked up the coins for the fourth time.

“My, my. Aren’t we taking all of this very seriously?”

Kitty smiled as she threw the coins down on the table.

Actually, it wasn’t that Charlotte had too little work. She had too much work. She’d just made four movies back to back, and now had offers for several more. They had kept her busy, they had brought home the bacon, and they had been competently—if not brilliantly—directed. But none of them had given her any satisfaction. They had been froth, light and easy. She wanted something she could sink her intellectual teeth into. In the past, she had always turned to Broadway when she got bored with Hollywood, but Broadway was just as boring as Hollywood these days. Musicals, mostly. Not that she had anything against musicals. She’d even done a couple, though her voice was nothing to rave about, as the critics had duly noted. But the plethora of musicals denied space to serious plays, especially those that put an audience in the uncomfortable position of having to think. Gone were the days when Miller was playing on one corner and O’Neill on the next.

Again, Kitty made a notation: another straight line.

Should she go for more of the same thing she’d been doing? A halfway decent script had recently come her way, with a role for a lively grandmother who is forced to curtail her glamorous lifestyle when she assumes the care of her grandchildren after her daughter dies. Or should she hold out for something more meaty? Maybe the
I Ching
would help her decide. God knows, she wasn’t doing very well at it on her own. She’d read a dozen scripts since she’d been in Maine, but apart from the glamorous grandmother, nothing even remotely interested her, and a lot of it she found downright repugnant.

As Kitty picked up the coins once again, Charlotte gazed out at the rose-bordered cove that lay at the foot of Kitty and Stan’s lawn. Though her roses at home had bloomed before she’d left, it would be another week or two before these came out; spring came late to the coast of Maine. The morning sun sparkled on the sea, and the sea gulls wheeled and dived above the surface of the water with raucous cries. She had fallen in love with this corner of Maine on her first visit to the Saunders, who had moved here after Stan had retired from his job in public relations. So much so that she had ended up buying a cottage of her own—not on the offshore island where Kitty and Stan lived, but perched on a pine-studded mountainside overlooking the harbor. It was her retreat from the craziness of Hollywood and the congestion of New York. In its peaceful solitude she could gather up her fractured self, like a Chinese monk in a misty landscape painting.