Free The Shanghai Moon by S. J. Rozan Page B

Chinese man she’d met on the ship. Why are you smiling?”
    “Chen Kai-rong? Was it he?” To my nod, she said, “Oh, how sweet! She talks about him in her letters. They’re in the museum’s archives. You can call them up on the Web site.”
    “I’ve actually read the first few,” I said. “Jet lag. I couldn’t sleep last night.”
    “When I read them I couldn’t tell if it was obvious to either Elke or Rosalie that Kai-rong was courting her, but it was to me. You’re telling me they married? That’s marvelous! How do you know?”
    “One of the jewelers Joel left photos with recognized Rosalie’s name and knew the story.” I told her what we’d learned in Stanley Friedman’s showroom.
    “The diamond necklace,” Alice said, when I was done. “That’s what happened to it!”
    “What diamond necklace?”
    “As nearly as my clients know, Rosalie and Paul took seven pieces of jewelry to Shanghai. Five are in this find. One was a ruby ring, which Rosalie sold—you’ll see if you read the rest of the letters. She also mentions a diamond necklace. I’ve been wondering where that was. Wondering even if Wong Pan palmed it before the contents of the box were known, though I don’t see how he could have. The Shanghai authorities would never have allowed him to open it alone. But this would answer that question.”
    “That question, yes,” Bill said from across the room. “Not the question of the Shanghai Moon.”
    Alice shifted to look at him. “You think that might have been in the box? But it’s the same problem. How could he have stolen it without anyone knowing it was there?”
    “Maybe it wasn’t,” I said. “Maybe someone just thinks it was.”
    “And that person killed Joel? But why?”
    “They thought he knew something he wasn’t telling?Things were stolen from his office. That’s why Mulgrew’s thinking robbery. But what if that was just opportunistic? What if the real point was to search the place?”
    “I suppose that’s possible. But to find what?”
    “Whatever they thought Joel knew?”
    Alice nodded thoughtfully. Bill sipped coffee thoughtfully. I wished I had a thought or two, but I had only questions. “Alice, didn’t you grow up in Shanghai? Mr. Friedman says this brooch, the Shanghai Moon, is famous. You’ve never heard of it?”
    “I was born there, yes, but I was four when we were sent to the internment camp. When we were released three years later, we took the first ship home we could get.” She stirred her tea. “These aren’t memories I return to very often. As you might imagine, the camp was a bad place. Heat and mud in summer. Clammy cold in winter. Nothing was clean and there was never enough food. Everyone was sick, worse and worse as the war ground on. A lot of people died. The land was so swampy they wrapped bricks in the binding cloths—there were no coffins—so the bodies wouldn’t rise back to the surface. But sometimes it didn’t work. You’d see a hand, a leg . . .
    “I was a child. That was my entire world.
Our
entire world. If outside the camp there was someone called Rosalie Gilder, and she married someone called Chen Kai-rong, and they had a brooch created to celebrate, we wouldn’t have known. Then, once we came to America, everyone tried to put Shanghai far behind.”
    I said, “That sounds terrible. I’m sorry.”
    “It was. But we lived, and came here, and prospered.Many didn’t. Still, you can see why Shanghai may mean something quite different to me from what it meant to Rosalie Gilder.”
    “Yes, of course.”
    From the window, Bill said, “What about your clients? They never told you about the Shanghai Moon?”
    “No,” Alice said, frowning over that. I frowned, too; the question seemed a little insensitive right at the moment. Although I had an insensitive question of my own I’d been looking for a time to ask.
    “Alice, Joel was wondering something. About you. It made me wonder, too. I don’t mean to offend