The Silent Girl

was the only one who showed me any real kindness. I didn’t know him well, but he seemed like a decent man.”
    “What about his son, Mark?”
    There was a long silence. “I didn’t realize what Mark was,” she said softly. “He seemed perfectly harmless when our families first got together. Soon we were all seeing way too much of each other. Dinners at our house, then at Mark’s. We got along so swimmingly. The trouble was, my mom and Arthur were getting along better than I realized at the time.”
    “It seems that your father and Mark were getting along rather well, too.”
    Susan nodded. “Like best friends. It was as if my dad finally found the son he’d always wanted. Even after my parents divorced, Mark would come over to visit Dad. They’d go downstairs to Dad’s workshop and build birdhouses or picture frames. I had no idea what was really going on down there.”
    A lot more than woodworking, thought Jane. “You didn’t think it was strange, the two of them spending so much time together?”
    “I was mostly relieved to be left alone. It was around then, when I was thirteen, that my dad stopped coming to my room at night. At the time I didn’t know why. Now I realize that was when the first girl disappeared. When I was thirteen, and my dad found someone else to amuse him. With Mark’s help.” Susan ceased rocking and sat very still, her gaze fixed on the lake. “If I’d known, if I’d realized what Mark really was, my mother and Arthur would still be alive.”
    Jane frowned. “Why do you say that?”
    “I’m the reason they went to the Red Phoenix restaurant that night. They were there because of something I told them.”
    “You?”
    Susan took a deep breath, as if collecting the strength to continue. “It was the scheduled weekend for my visit with Mom and Arthur. I’d just gotten my license, and I drove myself to their house for the very first time. I took my father’s car. That’s when I found the pendant. It had fallen between the seat and the console, where nobody noticed it for two years. It was gold, in the shape of a dragon, and it had a name engraved on the back. Laura Fang.”
    “Did you recognize the name?”
    “Yes. The story was in the newspapers when she disappeared. I remembered the name because she was my age, and she played the violin. At Bolton, some of the students talked about her because they knew her from the summer orchestra workshop.”
    “Mark attended that workshop.”
    Susan nodded. “He knew her. But I couldn’t understand the connection with my father. How did Laura’s pendant end up in my
father’s
car? Then I started thinking about all the nights that he’d comeinto my bedroom, and what he’d done to me. If he’d abused me, maybe he’d done it to other girls. Maybe that’s what happened to Laura. Why she disappeared.”
    “And then you told your mother?”
    “That weekend, when I visited her, it all came out. I told her and Arthur everything. What my dad had done to me years earlier. What I’d found in his car. At first, Mom couldn’t believe it. Then, in her usual self-centered way, she started worrying about the bad publicity and how her name would get dragged into the newspapers. That she’d be known as the clueless wife who had no idea what was going on in her own house. But Arthur—Arthur took it seriously.
He
believed me. And I’ll always respect him for that.”
    “Why didn’t they go straight to the police?”
    “My mom wanted to be certain of the facts first. She didn’t want to attract any attention until they knew this wasn’t some weird coincidence. Maybe there was another Laura Fang, she said. So they were going to show the pendant to Laura’s family. Confirm that it belonged to the same Laura who’d disappeared two years earlier.” Susan’s head drooped, and her next words were almost inaudible. “That’s the last time I saw them alive. When they left to meet with Laura’s father, at the restaurant.”
    This was the final piece of the puzzle: the reason why Arthur and Dina had gone to Chinatown that night. Not to eat a meal, but to speak with James Fang about his missing daughter. Gunfire ended the conversation, a bloody massacre that was blamed on a hapless immigrant.
    “The police insisted it was a murder-suicide,” said Susan. “They said my mom and Arthur were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. The pendant was never found, so I had no evidence. I had no one else to turn to. I kept wondering