THE IMPERIAL DINNER FOR TWO
“POT STICKERS!” Ann exclaimed. “Good for you, Willie. I love pot stickers.”
“So do I. Go ahead, I’ve had my share.”
There had been a dozen small, fragrant steamed dumplings in the big bamboo steamer. He had eaten five, and felt that he had eaten nothing. Had he really had lunch at some other restaurant with Ann and Merc before driving to the real estate agency? If so, what had that lunch been? It had vanished into the darkness that lies behind Egypt and Sumer, if it had ever existed—though he could not imagine either Ann or Merc consenting to skip lunch or any other meal. Breakfast had been buckwheat cakes. Or cold cereal, Grape Nuts or Grape Nuts Flakes.
No, the pancakes had been back in Arlington Heights, whole centuries before; and the cereals had been served by his mother, quick breakfasts before school. Breakfast? “An equal time hath shoveled it/’Neath the wrack of Greece and Rome./Neither wait we any more/That worn sail which Argo bore.”
Ann chewed a steamed dumpling darkly laden with the Golden Dragon’s own homemade soy sauce. “What’d you say, Willie?”
“Nothing. Just mumbling to myself.”
“About your adventures? From what you said on the phone, you’ve had Adventures.”
“I suppose I have. I hadn’t thought of it like that.” He poured jasmine tea for her.
“Then let me tell you, Indiana Shields, you haven’t seen a
thing.
You haven’t done
anything.
It’s me, Calamity Annie, the Queen of the Frontier, who—” She forked in half a dumpling.
He asked, “Do you want to tell me about it?”
Chewing ecstatically, Ann shook her head. “I’m going to be too busy eating, Willie. Besides, it’s best to save the really juicy stuff for the end. You’ve ordered for both of us, haven’t you?”
Shields nodded.
“Duck? This place is supposed to have great duck.”
He nodded again. “And a lot of other things.”
“Then have them trot it out quick, and give me all the gory details. You and this salesman went to that museum because the woman in my house said they’ve got stuff about the castle? And he scooted? That’s what you said on the phone.”
Shields sipped his tea. “I said he disappeared. Maybe on his own—that’s what the police think. Maybe—” He sought the right words. “Maybe because someone else—or something else—got hold of him. That’s what I think. Instead of the police, I should have said the sheriff’s deputy. Castleview doesn’t have a regular police force, according to him. There’s a constable who rounds up stray livestock and supervises the school crossing guards.”
“One pot sticker left, Willie. Sure you don’t want it?”
“Go ahead.”
In a trice it was on her plate. “I wonder what they really put in these things. It’s supposed to be spiced pork, but it’s much too good for that. Leftover duck, maybe. Why did you want to find out about the castle here anyway, Willie?”
“Because I saw it.”
Ann laughed, nearly choked on a large bite of dumpling, and washed it down with tea. “Come on! As Mercedes says, get real. You saw the castle?”
Shields nodded. “I didn’t say anything because I knew you wouldn’t believe me.”
“I believe you thought you saw it, anyway. People do, I suppose, and everybody’s been telling me we saw a ghost. That man on the horse, remember? You damned near hit him.”
“I don’t think that was a ghost.”
“Neither do I, but I’ll tell you about all that stuff by-and-by. Horses and cowboys—one cowboy, anyhow. When did you see the castle?”
“While we were up in the attic of the Howard house. I saw it through one of the attic windows.”
“They were pretty dirty.”
“Yes,” Shields admitted. “They were.”
“And it was raining hard.”
“The eaves kept the rain off the glass, mostly. I happened to glance out, and there it was—a big, solid-looking building with towers, not more than a quarter mile away. Sort of gray or grayish-pink. Is there a name for that color?”
“Dusty rose. Willie, it was an illusion.”
He nodded slowly. “Or an hallucination. I looked at it—I stared right at it, Ann. And suddenly it was gone. You wanted to know what I had been looking at, and I said it was nothing.” He paused, afraid she was going to be angry. “That didn’t seem to be the time to go into it.”
“That’s right, you asked her about it while we were looking at her kitchen.”
Shields opened his mouth and closed it again. There was no means by which Ann could be made to understand what he wanted to say, ever.
He was saved by the arrival of their waiter, who took away the big bamboo steamer and the small plates from which they had eaten their dumplings.
When the waiter was gone, Ann said, “It bothered you quite a bit, I can see that. Was this museum still open?”
Shields shook his head. “Bob Roberts had keys. Bob’s on the board of directors, it turns out, and he told me about it when I
asked him about the castle. That’s when I decided to go—I wasn’t even thinking about it when I left you and Merc at the motel. Where did you park her, anyway?”
“Just left her there,” Ann said. “She didn’t want to come. She’s probably gone out to get something to eat.”
As if on cue, the waiter returned with a tray of covered dishes. He put clean and much larger plates in front of them before ceremoniously setting out the biggest. “Peking Orange Duck. Very fine.”
Ann said, “I certainly hope so,” and the tip of her tongue made a brief patrol of her lips.
“Also have shredded beef oyster sauce, fried bean curd and plenty rice. Szechwan double-cooked pork, got very hot spices. All very fine. Imperial dinner three—plenty food! Other one come soon?”
“I don’t know,” Shields told him. “You weren’t born here, were you, waiter? Born in this country?”
Ann said sharply, “Willie!”
“No, sir. Born Hong Kong. Have many cousin here, bring me, own Golden Dragon.”
“So you’ve been in Castleview for … ?”
“Two year, almost.”
Shields nodded encouragement. “And have you ever seen the castle?”
The waiter turned away. “No see.”
“Willie!”
Ann paused in the act of ladling duck onto her plate.
Shields watched the waiter’s retreating back, shrugged, and turned to lift the cover of the Szechwan pork.
“Willie, what sort of service do you think we’re going to get after that?”
He shrugged again. “I wanted to find out if he’d seen it. Whether someone from another culture would see it.”
“And you didn’t find out a thing.”
“Certainly I did. He’s seen something. If he hadn’t, he would have laughed and said so. But he’s seen the castle, or anyway
he’s seen something; and he was fascinated and frightened, just like I was. I’d love to know exactly what it was he saw—whether he saw the same thing that I did, or at least the same sort of thing.”
Ann chewed and swallowed. “Well, it can’t be helped now, I suppose. If we need service, I’ll shoot up a flare or whatever. Was the museum nice?”
“No,” he told her. “No, it wasn’t.” He seemed to feel the chill of its lofty rooms once more, a freezing dampness that had left him feeling that he had been in a cavern beneath the ocean. “It’s an old house, almost as old as the Howard house, that was built by some doctor. Dark wallpaper in all the rooms, or oak paneling; a lot of carved moldings stained black. Lots of dusty glass cases—one got broken, did I tell you that?”
Ann shook her head and sipped tea. “Are we going to have to pay for it?”
“I don’t think so. I think it was broken by whoever took Bob. It was very strange.”
Ann had been tasting. “They probably use mandarin oranges, or maybe tangerines. Not Valencia oranges—they’d be too sweet. Do you know about Valencia oranges, Willie?”
He shook his head and spooned Szechwan pork onto his still-empty plate.
“Well, what we Americans think of as ‘oranges’ are really Valencia oranges, just that single variety out of a hundred or so. It’s just like we think of lager as ‘beer.’ Practically all of the oranges anybody grows here are Valencias—that’s in Florida and California too. The reason California oranges are different, less messy, is the climate; they’re really the same variety. How’s the pork?”
He chewed and swallowed, hungry again, and took a sip of water. “Hot spice, like the man said. Don’t you think we ought to call the motel?”
“I wouldn’t,” Ann decided. “She probably walked into town to get a hamburger when the rain stopped. It’s really not very far. She will have eaten, and your food will get cold.”
“All right.”
“You’re worried about her, Willie. I can see you are. But how many times have you been every bit as worried when nothing’s happened? Tell me about the glass. It wasn’t a window?”
“No, it was a display case. There was an old diary in it, and somebody took it. It belonged to Bob.”
“Then maybe he took it.”
“That’s what the police said, the sheriff’s man. But why would Bob have broken the case? He had keys.”
Ann added an eggroll to the heap of duck and rice on her plate. “Then if somebody got him—Willie, do you really mean they kidnapped him? One of our salesmen?”
He nodded. “Something like that.”
“Then they’d have the keys, too. So why would
they
break the glass, either?”
“God knows. The funny thing was that I’d heard glass break before they broke into the case. That was an upstairs window in back, as it turned out. But I thought it was the case with the diary in it, and I ran to look. Bob ran upstairs—he’d heard it right—and that was the last I saw of him.”
Ann grinned. “Willie, do you know you’ve eaten about five mouthfuls of that pork without drinking? You must be hungry.”
“I am. Maybe being scared does it. After Bob disappeared, I was all alone in that old house—except that I wasn’t actually alone, there was somebody in there with me, maybe more than one. Did I mention the carved wood? There were carved heads over the fireplaces in a lot of the rooms—tough-looking men, and women with smooth oval faces. It felt as though they were trying to talk, trying to warn me about something that was creeping up on me.” Shields shivered, and drained his little cup of tea. The pork was nearly gone; he took some beef and a few wontons.
Ann told him, “The scarier you say this place was, the more interesting it sounds. What were the other carvings?”
“Horses. Swords and daggers and lances, and shields with
blazons. At first I thought it was just because of the name of this town—Castleview. Later I realized it was all Malory. The sword in the stone was carved over the fireplace in the parlor, downstairs.”
“Malory?”
“He was an English author, Sir Thomas Malory. He wrote
Le Morte d’Arthur.
The old doctor must have loved it, or maybe his wife did. Then the calliope in the stable started playing. Did I tell you about the calliope? It’s sort of like an organ.”
“Willie, you’re making all this up. You’re embroidering.”
“No, I’m not.” The shredded beef was delicious.
“You know you are. You were never in any real danger—not at all like me. I’ve been through living holy hell, and believe me there wasn’t a drop of fantasy involved. And the car—”
He looked up sharply. “What happened to it?”
“Well, Willie, I went up to talk to that nice old lady who runs the motel. I wanted to ask about the horse you almost ran into—the big man who rode across the road, remember that? It had seemed sort of uncanny—”
“No fantasy, you said.”
“But Willie, it isn’t. I thought it might be somebody in the neighborhood, somebody who might ride at night in the rain, and if there was, I thought the old lady would probably know all about it. And she did, but she had this recipe for pear jelly—I’ve got it in my purse, and Lisa’s cheesecake too—and so we got to talking, and that delayed me. I met her husband; he’s a nice old guy. Anyway, she told me—”
A soft voice at Shields’s elbow inquired, “What was it you said to Hwan? The poor man’s terrified.”
Shields looked around.