Under a Gilded Moon(63)

“Co’Cola.” Tully fixed the druggist with worshipful eyes. “Never yet tried it.”

He smiled back at her. “Got a nice kick to it.” They drained their cups.

“Enough kick,” Kerry said to the twins, “to hurry us on back home.”

They made their way faster now down the street. But something at this end felt wrong. Too quiet, like a landscape of downed trees right after a storm. Kerry slowed her steps. “That’s Mr. Ling’s shop, 55 Haywood. But . . .”

Tully let out a long whistle. “Glass all over the street.”

Jursey ran ahead. In front of the shop, he squinted. “Lord. What’s Below Perl mean?”

Kerry and Tully drew alongside him. The letters, painted in a sickly ochre, had been splashed across the jagged shards of what was left of the plate glass window.

Kerry struggled to make out the letters. “I think it’s Yellow, not Below.” She sucked in her breath.

“So what’s special about a yellow pearl? And why’d they spell it p-e-r-l?”

Haywood Avenue seemed snapped still in time like a photograph, as if all the other streets continued their bustle while this one lay stunned.

Kerry lifted a finger to the ochre paint, still wet and dripping. “I’d say the person who did this couldn’t think a lick better than he could spell.”

“So what’d he go meaning to say?”

From inside the shop, something stirred. A man. His shirtsleeves rolled up, ochre paint blotting one arm. Whose face suddenly turned toward the shattered window.

“I think,” Kerry said, rigid with fury, “he meant Yellow Peril.”

And she stared back at John Cabot.





Chapter 25

Kerry struggled for air. On either side of the shattered glass, neither she nor John Cabot moved.

“So what’s a peril do?” Jursey wanted to know.

Behind Cabot, Kerry could make out shelving hurled on its side, the contents of tins and barrels and crates strewn across the floor. Potatoes and beets, brown sugar and bolts of calico lay trampled together.

She returned her gaze to Cabot’s. “It’s a term, an unkind one, that some people use.”

“But what’s it signify?”

“Peril means danger.” That was all she could stomach to say.

Tully was pointing to a portion of the window still attached to its frame. In large, barely legible letters, another word was scrawled—and misspelled. “Mur-dur-er,” she read slowly. Eyes wide, she turned. “Who is, Kerry? Is the murderer here?”

Glass crunched at the back of the shop.

Kicking at a hillock of flour, Ling Yong appeared. Then watched the cloud of white snow drift down onto his sparkling floor, little slivers of glass like so much ice. “Ruined. All of it.”

Cabot dropped his gaze from Kerry to turn to the shop’s owner. “I wish I knew what to say.” He glanced back toward the shattered window, the painted smear of words. “To make it less reprehensible.”

Through what was left of the window, Ling spotted the twins and Kerry. His eyes were so deep brown they appeared black—and bottomless. Kerry felt as if she were falling into a pit of despair.

Without speaking, Kerry stepped through the open door and held out her hand. Looking around the ransacked shop with wide eyes, the twins followed.

From behind a barrel, the one item still upright, a little girl of about three emerged. Clomping forward in too-large shoes over the rubble, she stopped beside her father and slipped her hand into his.

Tully stared. One of her hands lifted as if she might touch the black hair that silked down the little girl’s back.

“Our shop,” the girl said with a defiance far bigger than her small frame. “They came to our shop.”

The child’s words hung suspended in air that was still fogged with what must be flour and sugar. Kerry could taste it on her tongue.

“My daughter, Zhen,” Ling Yong said, with a hand on the child’s back. He gestured to hand-drawn pictures tacked to the wall. Several bore the letters of her name she’d apparently scrawled: Z-H-E-N.

Jursey cocked his head doubtfully. “It’s got a Z here, but he pronounces it wrong—like it’d be nothing but J.” Which was so like Jursey, to stand in the very center of chaos and find some kind of anchor in the distraction of how a word ought to be spelled.

Zhen looked from one to the other of them, her dark eyes already guarded, searching the strangers for signs of future betrayal.

Kerry scanned the shop. “How will you . . . ?” Survive was what she wanted to ask. How will you feed your daughter? How will you reopen?

All that hung in the air with the fog of flour and sugar.

“Just lately, I’ve delivered messages for the telegraph office—as you have seen. Only very early. And late. When we were closed. But that work only isn’t enough.”

Kerry followed Ling’s gaze to the window. The word Closed seemed to rebound off the points of glass that no longer kept any boundaries between open or not. “They didn’t even take any of it to use.”

She heard her own words for what they were: partly compassionate. But also, God help her, she was thinking of Tully and Jursey, with little on their stomachs all day, and a floor here full of food. Oats and cinnamon and platters of round, white pastries like full moons—all frosted now with glass slivers and shards. All of it inedible.