Murder on the Silk Road (2 page)

But that wasn’t to say there couldn’t be too much peace and quiet. She didn’t know how Kitty and Stan could stand living here year-round. A few blessedly serene weeks was enough for her, and she had been here two already.

After two more throws, Kitty had finally finished. On the notepad was a stack of six lines: two broken lines, two straight lines, a broken line, and a straight line. Two of the broken lines had
x
’s through the middle.

Kitty was now leafing through the gray-jacketed volume of the
I Ching
. Sitting next to her teacup on the table were a couple of books of interpretation.

“The verdict?” asked Charlotte.

“Just a minute,” said Kitty, raising a pink-lacquered fingernail. “I’m reading.” She read for a few minutes, a smile creeping across her lovely face. She had lost none of her good looks with age. Finally, she set the book down. “You’re going on a trip,” she said.

“Kitty, really!” protested Charlotte. “Couldn’t you have been more original? How about, ‘You’re going to meet a tall stranger with dark hair who can’t be trusted’?”

Kitty pursed her lips. She didn’t appreciate it when Charlotte made light of her prognostications. “That’s what it says!” She slid the notepad across the table to Charlotte; “This is Hexagram Fifty-six: The Wanderer.”

“I’m going back to New York on Monday,” said Charlotte glibly.

“Not to New York. To a foreign country, an unusual foreign country. Not Europe, but somewhere more exotic. According to the
I Ching
, you’re a nomad, someone who’s always on the move. In your professional life you’re always searching for new challenges; in your spiritual life you’re always searching for answers; and in your sexual life …” Kitty looked up.

Charlotte considered. “A sexual nomad,” she said, and then shook her head with amusement. “True enough, I suppose.”

“The image is of a grass fire on a mountainside in pursuit of fresh fuel,” Kitty continued as she read. “The position you are now in is of a fire that’s lingered too long in one spot. Unless it finds fresh fuel, it will burn out. That’s where the trip comes in: you have to keep moving to keep your creative fires burning.”

Charlotte leaned back in the Windsor chair, and sipped her tea thoughtfully.

“I’d say it’s pretty close to the mark,” observed Kitty.

“Right on the mark is more like it,” said Charlotte. Her opinion of the
I Ching
had suddenly gone from good-natured skepticism to serious respect. As a metaphor for her life in general and her current situation in particular, a fire on the mountain couldn’t have come any closer to the truth. “What else?” she asked, her interest piqued. “Does it say where I’m going to go?”

The corners of Kitty’s mouth turned up in a smile of triumph. “Actually, this reading is very interesting. Sometimes the readings can be pretty cryptic, but this one’s as clear as glass.” She pointed to one of the books that lay open on the table. “This book advises you to be adaptable; it says the country will be one in which the manners and customs will be very exotic.”

“Does it say when I’m going to leave?” asked Charlotte. She hoped it would be soon. The idea of a trip was beginning to sound like the perfect antidote to her professional ennui. Although she had traveled widely, it was almost always work-related, and she’d never had the time to see the sights. She remembered a shoot in Capri on which she’d never gotten around to seeing the Blue Grotto.

“No,” said Kitty, who had turned back to the
I Ching
. “But it does say that you should take along plenty of money. Also that you’ll be traveling with a ‘faithful and trustworthy friend’”—she emphasized the direct quotation—“who will be of much value to you on the trip.”

“What else?” Charlotte prompted eagerly. By now, she was mentally spinning the globe in search of all the faraway places she had always wanted to see: the upper Amazon, the steppes of Central Asia, the source of the Nile, the roof of the world, the Taj Mahal, the rain forests of Papua New Guinea, the palm-fringed islands of the Pacific, the Pyramids of Egypt—the list went on and on.

“I’m not sure exactly,” replied Kitty. “It says that you’re going to find a home in foreign parts, but it always speaks metaphorically. I would interpret it as saying that as a result of your travels, you are going to establish a more permanent connection with this foreign country.”

“More permanent connection?”

Kitty shrugged. “I can’t be any more specific. It talks about a ‘circle of friends’ and a ‘sphere of activity.’” She consulted one of the books of interpretation again. “This book talks about being honored by strangers, but only if you act appropriately; it says that you have to observe protocol.”

“Phew!” said Charlotte, who was trying to take it all in.

“Wait, we’re not finished yet,” said Kitty. Taking up her pencil, she drew another hexagram on the notepad. “The
I Ching
is the Book of Changes. The two broken lines with the
x
’s through them change into straight lines, which gives us another hexagram. The second hexagram sheds further light on the first.”

Charlotte hadn’t followed her, but it didn’t matter. She sat back, and awaited the rest of her fortune.

“Here it is: ‘Coming to Meet,’” Kitty announced, after consulting the index. Turning to the text, she studied it for a minute, and then said, “It’s one of those cryptic ones, but I’ll do the best I can.”

“Shoot,” said Charlotte.

“Your encounter with this circle of friends is predestined by fate and promises to be of some historical importance. But in order for the encounter to succeed, you will have to meet one another halfway. Both parties will have to be fully equal both to one another and to the situation.”

Charlotte waited for her to go on, but she didn’t. “That’s all?”

“Sorry,” said Kitty with a shrug. “That’s the best I can do.”

2

Charlotte left Kitty’s right after lunch. Because the Saunders lived on an island, coming and going from their house depended on the tides. The island was joined to the mainland by a sand bar that was exposed when the tide was out. If you didn’t cross over to the mainland during the two hours before or after low tide, you had to either wait eight hours until the bar was exposed again, or take a boat. After crossing the bar, Charlotte picked up her car and drove back to her cottage. In her lifetime on the move—sexual nomad, indeed!—Kitty and Stan had been her rock of stability. Other friends and acquaintances had come and gone, but Kitty and Stan and a handful of others had been the constants in her life. They had met on Cape Cod when they were starting out: Charlotte and Kitty as actresses, Stan as a painter. Kitty and Stan had gone onto other things—Kitty to being a wife and mother, Stan to a career in public relations—but they had remained friends. And although it astonished Charlotte when she thought about how little they had in common—Kitty and Stan belonged to a certain suburban type, as easily categorized as any common bird species (plumage: slacks of lime green or brick red; habitat: elegant country clubs on the outskirts of major Eastern cities; behavior: friendly, courteous, and as unconscious of the world-at-large as a horse wearing blinders)—it was a great relief to have friends to whom she was not Charlotte Graham, the movie star. Their presence in the summer community of Bridge Harbor was one reason she had bought her cottage there. She was a nomad, true; but even a nomad finds it hard to move into a strange community without knowing anyone. And they appreciated her company as well. Although they claimed not to mind their isolation—they had moved here so that Stan could pursue his dream of being a marine painter—Charlotte suspected that they sometimes got lonely in their secluded little offshore world.

Actually, it was Kitty and Stan who were responsible for her buying the cottage. Knowing that Charlotte had been thinking about getting a summer place for some time, they’d called her as soon as it had come on the market. They’d suspected that she wouldn’t be able to resist it, and they had been right. From the moment she’d seen the cottage clinging like a limpet to the rocky mountainside, she had fallen in love with it. It had been built in the late nineteenth century by an artist, one of the area’s first “rusticators,” as they were called—the painters, writers, and intellectuals who first cultivated the area as a summer resort. Every evening, after dining at the hotel at the base of the mountain, the cottage’s previous owner had made his way on foot back up the rocky mountain path by lantern light. And although there was now a road for cars, Charlotte often did the same. It gave her great pleasure to hike up the mountain after a pleasant meal at the big old hotel. She ate at the hotel most nights. Not only because she wasn’t much of a cook, but also because her tiny kitchen wasn’t equipped for cooking. It was the lack of an adequate kitchen that had soured many prospective buyers on the place. But not Charlotte: she had fallen in love with the kitchen window. The view from the sink was like looking into an elegant terrarium. A few feet away from the window was a wall of pink granite studded with mosses and lichens in shades of green and gray and gold. Tiny jewel-like ferns and flowers grew in its crevices. A fascinating still life that changed with each season, it was in direct contrast to the view from her veranda, whose peekaboo vistas looked out over the spires of pines and firs to the sails and masts of the boats in the harbor, and beyond the harbor, to the rocky green hills of the Saunders’ island.

Taking a seat in one of the green-painted Adirondack chairs on her veranda, Charlotte looked out at the view. Though it was early June, the leaves still weren’t fully out, and she could see much farther than she’d be able to later on in the season. The heat of the sun had warned the sap of the balsam firs, and the air was fragrant with its resiny scent. Putting her feet up on the railing, she pondered her immediate future. She had come to Bridge Harbor two weeks ago for the annual ritual of opening up the house, a euphemism for repairing the damage done over the winter. This done, she had followed her usual prescription for relaxation, which included hiking, sailing, and lying around and reading, mostly for pleasure. She had also scanned dozens of the books and scripts that flowed in steadily from her agent. It was time to go home, and to come to a decision about which of the scripts to accept: the glamorous grandmother, the wife of the man with Alzheimer’s disease, the domineering mother-in-law? What had happened to the movies? she often asked herself. They weren’t fun anymore. Everything had to make a social statement, and the more banal, the better. She was willing to take the bad with the good. After all, it was work. But there was a limit to how much dreck she could put up with. Reluctantly, she picked up another script from the pile she had carried out with her. A rich dowager who founds a shelter for bag ladies? Ugh. Maybe it
was
time for a trip to Papua New Guinea.

It was precisely at this moment that the phone rang. The caller was her stepdaughter, Marsha Lundstrom. Marsha was the daughter of her fourth husband, from whom she’d only recently been separated. She’d always imagined that the ideal man for her would be one who had achieved something in his own right, someone who wouldn’t be threatened by being Mr. Charlotte Graham. When Jack Lundstrom had come along, she thought she had finally met her match. A businessman who had built his family-owned manufacturing company into an international conglomerate, he was handsome, successful, cultured—and a widower. But it hadn’t worked out. After forty years of marriage to a traditional wife, he had found it difficult living with a woman whose priorities did not include giving dinner parties for his business associates and redecorating the house (or rather, houses). But they remained good friends and frequent companions. What
had
worked out was her relationship with his grown children. They had answered her need for a family, something she had never had. She was especially close to Marsha, who also lived in New York. They shared a love of art, and often went together to museum and gallery exhibits.

The low, fluty voice that met her ear over the telephone was tremulous with excitement. “Charlotte. I’m
so
glad I found you. I thought you might be off on location somewhere.”

“What is it?” asked Charlotte. From Marsha’s tone, it was clear that her news wasn’t anything bad, but what good news would merit such a glowing delivery? Charlotte wondered.

“Are you sitting down?”

Charlotte sat back on the old sofa covered with worn and faded chintz which faced the massive pink granite fireplace that dominated her rustic, cedar-paneled living room: “Yes,” she replied.

“What are you doing for the next six weeks?”

“A few appointments. Nothing in particular, really.” She was almost afraid to ask the next question: “Why do you ask?”

“How would you like to go on a trip?”

Charlotte leaned back and took a deep breath. She looked down at her forearms: the hairs were standing up stiffly. “To where?” she asked.

“China,” Marsha replied. “The People’s Republic of. Specifically, to the northwestern frontier, on the ancient Silk Road. We leave on June sixteenth. We’ll be gone about a month.”

“That’s only two weeks away!”

“Yes,” said Marsha. “Can you be ready?”

She waited for a reply, but Charlotte was still swallowing air.

“Before you answer that question, let me fill you in a little.”

It was one of those serendipitous opportunities that come along once in a lifetime. The Oriental Institute, a New York institution devoted to East Asian culture, was sponsoring a study tour of China for several of its staff members. Marsha, who was an authority on Chinese poetry, was among them. Although the tour would visit several sites, their main destination was to be the oasis of Dunhuang, a center of Buddhist worship on the ancient Silk Road that had only recently been opened up to Western scholars.

“Two other staff members were scheduled to go,” Marsha continued. “One of them was Averill Boardmann. Are you familiar with the name?”

“No,” replied Charlotte.

“He was murdered by a vagrant during a robbery attempt in April. It was a tragic thing. I don’t even want to talk about it. But his death leaves a vacancy that the Institute is anxious to fill. Actually, although the director
says
he wants to make it possible for someone else to take advantage of the trip, what he really wants is to recoup some of the Institute’s expenses. They’re offering the trip at a discount, but it’s still expensive. The Institute has contacted other scholars, but the ones who have the time don’t have the money and vice versa. Now they’re turning to friends and relatives of staff members. I would love for you to come along. What do you say?”