Chapter 2 – Dragon Alley
The trip from Toronto to the coast took three days. At first Colleen distracted herself by examining the hardware of the train, from the straightforward mechanics of the steam locomotive to the complex, cutting-edge pneumatic brake system. She watched the scenery, and chatted with her fellow passengers, but by the second day all of that began to pall.
She brooded over her shattered family. Her mother was a distant memory, just a face in a photograph and faint images of warmth and love and a golden smile, so long ago that she wasn't sure if she was remembering or imagining.
Her father's death, eighteen months earlier, was fresh and devastating in her mind. The two of them had been inseparable, working side by side in the workshop whenever she wasn't in school. She still woke up some mornings not remembering that he was gone, and was crushed anew when memory came flooding in.
She reviewed what she knew of Uncle Rod. He had visited on half a dozen occasions, always on his way to some exotic new location. He was rootless, Dad had said. Born to wander the Earth, seeking his fortune, seeking adventure, never content.
She remembered a broad-shouldered man, his stomach a bit bigger on every visit, his face a thicket of bristling whiskers. He smelled of tobacco smoke and peppermint and something else, a scent she'd never been able to identify. The first time Colleen encountered whiskey she'd been shocked to recognize the smell. She'd meant to tease Uncle Rod about it, but she never saw him again.
Six visits in twenty years. Oh, probably he'd visited when she was an infant, but six visits was all she could remember. They hadn't been especially close. This feeling she had, that she needed to drop everything and dash across the country, had less to do with their relationship than with the fact that he was all the family she had left.
Was this trip ill-advised? She told herself she was going to settle his affairs, take care of anything that needed doing. She told herself she was being responsible, but in truth it had been an impulsive decision.
She was plagued by questions, and it would take three days at least to get any answers. Meanwhile there were probably telegrams and letters stacking up at home with the answers to all of her questions. She sighed and read the one telegram she'd received for the umpteenth time.
The telegram was signed "Jane Favisham." Colleen had never heard of her. Was she a friend of Uncle Rod? A girlfriend? Whoever she was, she knew about Colleen.
On the morning of the third day some of her questions were answered. She switched trains in Calgary, and found a Vancouver newspaper, four days old, discarded in the dining car. She glanced at a lurid headline, dismissed it, and started to turn the page. Then a name caught her eye and she turned back, a chill spreading through her body as she read.
Madman Subdued in Victoria
On Monday afternoon a near-tragedy was averted at a small public school in Victoria. A man with an axe entered Queen Elizabeth Primary School in the mid-afternoon. He apparently tried to enter the first classroom he came to, but a quick-thinking teacher, Mr. Hainsley, pushed the door shut from the inside and held it, exhorting his students to flee by the window.
The attacker was attempting to batter the door open with his axe when he was apprehended by a group of teachers and a janitor. No students or staff were harmed in the attack.
The attacker was taken into police custody. He has been identified as Roderick Garman of Victoria. The motive for the attack is not known.
Colleen stared at the newspaper, baffled. Uncle Rod had taken an axe and attacked a school? She didn't know him well, but he'd always been gentle, amusing, and patient. It made no sense.
She checked the date on the paper. May 1, 1921. The day before the telegram. Uncle Rod should have been in police custody. How had he died?
She was exhausted and disgruntled when she finally walked down the gangplank of the Vancouver-Victoria ferry and stepped onto Vancouver Island. She had never been so far from home, but she was in no mood to enjoy the sights. She hoisted her suitcase and trudged down the dock.
"Miss Colleen Garman?"
Colleen looked up to see a woman of about forty standing before her. She had brown hair drawn up in a bun, and wore a modest blue dress and an uncertain smile.
"Yes?"
"Oh, it is you!" the woman gushed. "I knew it! Your uncle has- I'm sorry, had a picture of you in his house. I'm Jane Favisham. I was your uncle's friend."
"How do you do?" Colleen said automatically, and Jane shifted a parasol to her left hand so she could shake Colleen's hand. "How did you know I was coming?"
Jane smiled. "There's only one ferry each day from Vancouver, and I live quite near here. When I didn't get any replies to my telegrams I decided I'd come by each day starting today, for a few days at least. And here you are, on my very first day. You must have really hurried."
Colleen nodded. "Thank you for meeting me. I wasn't expecting it."
"Well, anything I can do. Rod was terribly fond of you, you know."
Colleen closed her eyes for a moment. She wasn't aware that she'd made much of an impression on her uncle. He had a picture of her? Oh, Uncle Rod, I never had a chance to properly get to know you.
"Do you have a place to stay?" Jane interjected.
"No. I guess I didn't plan this trip very well."
Jane patted her shoulder and smiled. "That's all right. It must have been a terrible shock. I know it was for me. I'm afraid you'll have to check into a hotel. Your uncle's house, well, it's been damaged. And I stay in a boarding house.
"The Empress is the best hotel in town. It's really something, but expensive, I fear. I recommend the Queen Anne. It's not too pricy, but it's respectable. The best part is, it's not far. My, that suitcase looks heavy. Can I help you carry anything?"
The Queen Anne Hotel was a two-story building a block from the docks. By the time Colleen was checked in the sun was setting and her head was spinning. Jane smiled sympathetically and said, "You look done in, dear. Why don't you rest, and I'll come see you tomorrow morning."
Colleen slept late and rose still feeling tired. She was finishing breakfast when Jane arrived, the parasol dangling from her hand. The sky was overcast. She would need the parasol more for rain than sun today.
They made small talk as they strolled through the streets of Victoria. Colleen was not an experienced traveller. She hadn't realized her country had so much variety before this trip. Toronto, she now realized, was a bastion of industry and commerce. She'd been surprised that the smaller prairie cities were so different, built of wood and sandstone instead of brick. Now she was in Victoria, the most elegant city she'd seen so far. The heart of the city was filled with elaborate Edwardian architecture and somehow felt distinctly British.
The buildings became less ornate as they walked. Soon they were on the outskirts of town, surrounded by clapboard buildings. Jane put her hand on Colleen's arm. "We're getting close to Rod's house. I'm afraid it's been burglarized."
"Really?"
"Yes, it happened right after the, that is, right after your uncle was arrested. I went by the house to pick up a few things for him and the door had been pried open. There it is up ahead."
Uncle Rod's house was a small, stand-alone structure with peeling paint and a sagging front porch. It was surrounded by similar buildings. Fresh, unpainted wood showed on the door frame where it had been repaired. Jane unlocked the door, then handed Colleen a small brass key.
"I guess this is yours, now. I haven't cleaned anything up. After Rod- after everything happened, I was just too upset. I called the police and got someone to fix the door, and that's all I did."
"Thank you for doing that," Colleen said. "Thank you for everything. For caring about Uncle Rod. For looking out for me."
Jane smiled, her lip trembling, and Colleen turned away, stepping into the house before both of them broke down in tears. Uncle Rod's house was wired for electric ligh
ts. She found a light switch on the wall and pressed the button.
The house was a shambles. Colleen stared around the front room, her hand over her mouth, aghast. Padded chairs had been slashed open. Tables were overturned. A hutch stood open, the floor around it covered in smashed dishes.
Colleen moved through the house, shocked at the destruction. Every shelf, every drawer, every cupboard had been emptied onto the floor. Uncle Rod's mattress had been slashed open, the stuffing strewn around the bedroom. She could barely take a step without treading on his shattered possessions.
She realized she'd been looking forward to this, to seeing where Uncle Rod had lived. She'd wanted to get a sense of who he was, what sort of life he'd led out here on the coast. To get a sense of connection to him, if possible.
Instead she was surrounded by rubbish and ruin. This was no longer her uncle's home. Colleen hurried from the house, and stood outside taking deep breaths, trying to compose herself. The street was mostly empty, for which she was grateful. A man was loitering on the far side of the street, but he looked away as Colleen looked at him, giving her privacy to blink away her tears.
Jane came out of the house and stood beside her, mute and sympathetic, patting her shoulder. After a minute Colleen locked the house.
They walked back to the hotel, silent at first, each woman lost in her own thoughts. Finally Colleen blurted, "I don't understand. What happened? Why was he at that school, with an axe?"
Jane pressed her lips together and shook her head. "I wish I knew. It was very unlike him. He was the gentlest man you'd ever want to meet. You know that."
Colleen nodded, although she didn't really know Uncle Rod well enough to be sure.
"I saw him the day before, and he was agitated. He kept going on about some book he'd read. He had a collection, artifacts and antiquities from around the world."
Colleen smiled, remembering. Some of his get-rich-quick schemes had involved treasure maps, or hunts for lost cities, lost treasures, lost temples.
"I don't know what book he meant," Jane continued. "I can't remember what he said, exactly. But he kept going on about how it couldn't be true, it had to be lies, there was nothing that could be done. He was acting so strange, I told him he was scaring me. I left, I said, come and see me when you've calmed down." She looked down at her feet. "That was the last time I saw him, before he, he went mad."
"It's not your fault," Colleen said. "I don’t know what happened to him, but it sounds like something you couldn't have stopped by talking to him about it."
Jane nodded.
"I know he was arrested," Colleen said carefully. "I don't know how he died, though."
Jane turned to face her, her face haunted. "He killed himself," she whispered. "I don't want to go into the details. But he killed himself in his cell."
They continued in silence, and stopped in front of the Queen Anne Hotel. "I have to go to work," Jane said. "They've been very understanding, but I'd better put in some hours soon, or their patience will run out."
"I'll be all right," Colleen told her. "I'm not sure what I'm doing next. Did Uncle Rod have a lawyer?"
"I don't know."
"Maybe I'll try to find that out. Thank you so much, Jane. I don't know what I would have done if you hadn't met me at the ferry."
The two women hugged, then Jane said, "I'll come by this evening after work. Maybe about seven. I live at Mrs. Rosebottom's boarding house on Tanner Street if you need to reach me." And she hurried away, a slim, lonely figure in blue soon lost in the crowd.
Colleen turned and walked into the hotel. She felt suddenly alone and far from home, all at sea in a world she didn't understand. She longed for the sight of a familiar face, a friendly voice. What she wouldn't give to have Roland come up behind her and call her name!
"Miss Garman?"
Colleen turned. The front desk clerk smiled. "We have a message for you, ma'am."
"For me? Are you sure?" No one knew where Colleen was except Jane.
The clerk handed her a folded slip of paper. "A couple of gentlemen dropped it off, not half an hour ago," he said. "They went to the bar." He gestured toward the hotel lounge.
The note was brief, written in a strong, flowing hand:
Mr. Smith and Mr. Carter would like to speak with you at your earliest convenience. We will wait for some time in your hotel bar. We have taken accommodations in the Empress Hotel and can be reached in rooms 304 and 306.
She thanked the clerk and walked down the corridor, puzzled. She stepped into the doorway of the lounge and scanned the room.
Two men sat at a corner table, glasses before them. She saw a stout man in a tweed jacket and bowler hat facing her. He had a round, amiable face and a brown mustache, and he saw her, raised an eyebrow, and spoke to his companion.
The other man had his back to Colleen, but she felt her pulse start to race even before his head began to turn. She stared, frozen, disbelieving, at his thin face, his intense eyes, his long dark coat. As he rose from his chair she turned and ran.
A voice in her head told her she should stop, confront him here with plenty of witnesses around, but an unreasoning terror had her by the throat and all she could think of was escape. She burst out the front door of the hotel, running hard, and didn't look back until she was a block away.
The man in the dark coat was loping down the street, half a block behind her.
Colleen fled, legs burning and breath sawing in her lungs. She grabbed the tailgate of a moving truck, lifted her feet, and hung there for a block, gaining precious speed. When the truck slowed for traffic she dropped off and dashed down a side street. She wove through crowds of pedestrians and darted around another corner.
She stopped, panting, her back against a wall. Finally she peered around the corner, looking back the way she'd come.
There was no sign of him.
Something caught her eye, though. A man was staring at her, a stranger in a dark red coat. She looked at him, and he quickly looked away, but he was sidling through the crowd toward her, and she was sure he was watching her from the corners of his eyes.
Also, she had a dreadful feeling that she'd seen him before. She racked her brain, and it came to her. He'd been loitering across the street from Uncle Rod's house.
More movement caught her eyes. The street was a bustle of pedestrians, people moving in every direction, but she could pick out two, no, three people converging on her. In addition to the man in the red coat she saw a burly older man with a forked beard and a dark-haired woman in a white bonnet. At first glance they seemed to have nothing in common, but all three of them were somehow similar. It was their expressions, she realized. There was something fixed, intense, almost animalistic in their faces.
Colleen turned and ran. She was thoroughly lost, running blindly, fighting a rising panic. She twisted and turned, darting around cars and wagons and people, and she heard feet slapping the pavement behind her as the strangers gave chase.
She dashed through an intersection, flinching as a truck gave her a blast from its horn. And suddenly she was in another world. The street was narrow, clapboard buildings looming close on either side. The sidewalk was far more crowded than it had been, and nearly every person around her was Chinese.
The strangeness of it heightened her sense of terror. Strange, spicy smells filled her nostrils and a babble of incomprehensible voices crashed against her ears. It was Chinatown, and Colleen lurched down the street, only too aware that her height and blonde hair made her a beacon in this crowd.
She glanced back. The man in the red coat was right behind her, a manic grin on his face. Colleen threw herself forward. When the press of bodies in front of her was too much she darted sideways, into an alley. It was narrow and dirty, but free of people, and she ran faster, her long legs giving her an advantage over the man behind her.
A man stepped into the alley ahead of her. He was black, and
huge, a broad-shouldered man with a gleaming bald head, and he grinned as he saw her. She was running straight at him, and his arms came out from his sides, blocking her path, his fingers extending, ready to grab her.
Sobbing with frustration and terror, Colleen lunged at the first door she saw. She tore the door open and ran into a kitchen. For an instant she was face-to-face with a Chinese man dressed all in white, his hair in a braid hanging down his back. Colleen flinched away from him, and he flinched back as well. She gathered her courage and darted past him as the door behind her flew open and the man in the red coat came barreling in.
She fled, came to a wall, darted left without looking, and found herself at a dead end with a row of shelves on one side and a wall on the other. She turned.
The man had her cornered. There was a depraved glint in his eyes, and a long silver knife in his hand.
Colleen looked around frantically. There was nothing she could use as a weapon, nowhere she could go. A metallic clang made her look up. She saw the silver knife drop from the man's fingers. A moment later he folded up and collapsed onto the floor. She saw the Chinese cook behind him, a frying pan raised over his head.
She jumped over the man in the red coat, pushed past the cook, and ran through a low doorway. She was in a tiny restaurant, half a dozen patrons looking up from their plates to stare at her.
A strangled cry came from the kitchen behind her. Every nerve in her body screamed at her to run, but she turned her head, looking back into the kitchen.
The big black man had the cook pressed up against the wall, one huge hand wrapped around the cook's throat. Colleen's feet seemed to move on their own, taking her back into the kitchen. The cook had helped her for no good reason other than because she was in trouble, and outrage was rapidly overcoming her fear.
The frying pan lay in the middle of the floor. The man turned his head as she snatched up the pan, but he didn't have time to react. Colleen used both hands, spinning her entire body, and put everything she had into one mighty swing. The pan slammed into the side of the big man's head, the impact numbed her arms to the elbow, the pan tumbled to the floor, and the man fell sprawling across the floor tiles.
For a moment Colleen and the cook stared into each other's eyes. He was massaging his throat, but he grinned, and she smiled back. "Thank you," she said, then turned and raced through the restaurant, out the front door, and into the street.
Her pursuers were on her almost immediately, the woman in the white bonnet flanked by two more men. Colleen ran, panting for breath, wondering how much longer she could keep going.
Two men came around the corner in front of her. Their smiles and the way they spread out, blocking her path, told her it was two more of her new enemies. She stopped, scanning the street, and dashed down a staircase. She pushed open a filthy black door, banged her head on something, and scurried forward with her head bowed.
She was in a low, dark room, the air thick with sweet-smelling smoke. An old Chinese man sat on a stool near the doorway, and he gaped at her as she went past. A dozen or so people lounged on low sofas, most of them Chinese, a few white men dressed as sailors mixed in with them. They were no more than vague shapes in the gloom as Colleen stumbled through the room.
There was no back door, but a window at the back let in a little light. Colleen leaned past a couch to push at the window, which swung open.
She heard loud cries as her pursuers burst into the room behind her. She didn't look back, just stepped onto the couch. A soft shape squirmed beneath her foot, a voice cried out, and she realized she'd planted her foot in someone's stomach. There was no time to be delicate. She kicked off, pulling herself up to the window frame and wriggling through.
She found herself crawling into an alley, mud and fouler substances squishing between her fingers. Someone grabbed her foot and she kicked wildly, then squirmed her way outside as the fingers slid free.
She stood, looking around, and heard movement behind her. A man was coming through the window, his head almost touching her shoes, and she kicked him in the face. He flinched, sliding backward as his hands came up to protect himself, and she kicked him again. He fell back into the opium den.
She thought about staying put, keeping them at bay, but there were too many of them. The rest would be coming around the block and trapping her. She turned away from the window and started to run.
She was too late. A pair of men loomed in the mouth of the alley, and she knew that the others would have the far end of the alley blocked in moments. Then a hand closed on her wrist and a man's voice said, "Now, Miss, if you fight you'll just-"
She twisted in his grasp, turning. A man's face was inches from her own, and she drove her fist into his nose. He fell back with a cry, letting go of her arm, but the strangers were all around her now.
She punched, a man grunted, and then a fist slammed into the side of her head and she fell to her hands and knees. She got a foot under her and threw herself forward, diving against the legs that surrounded her, and people tumbled as she went rolling out of the circle.
Some rubbish was heaped against the far side of the alley, and she sprang to it, coming to her feet with a chunk of timber in her hands. It was pine, four feet long and thicker than a baseball bat, and she raised the makeshift weapon over her shoulder as she turned to face her attackers.
There were five of them, the woman in the white bonnet and four men. One man was bleeding from both nostrils, and all of them looked angry. They spread out, surrounding her, and she edged back until her heels bumped the wall behind her. For a moment she was filled with terror. She was hopelessly outnumbered, and what did she know about fighting?
Then she tightened her grip on the chunk of timber. She knew a thing or two about tools, after all. She had used hammers and pry bars to break free rusted gears. This was a similar problem. Moving joints, much softer than the brass and steel she usually worked with. She just needed to separate some joints, lift some bones from their sockets. And she had the right tool for the job. She bared her lips in a snarl and said, "Come on, then. What are you waiting for? Is five of you not enough?"
They pressed in, and she stepped forward, giving herself more room to move. She deliberately turned to her right, showing the back of her head to the man on her left, and she heard the gravel in the alley crunch under his feet as he moved into range, thinking to blindside her. She swung as she turned, and his arm came up to protect his head. She kept right on swinging, and the timber hit his arm. There was a dry snap as his arm broke, and he screamed. Colleen spun and swung at a hand that was reaching for her. She connected with the hand, and a man flinched back.
"To hell with this," the woman said. "We're not getting her alive. Finish her."
Knives came sliding out from pockets and under coats. Colleen advanced, swinging desperately, and they fell back, circling around, trying to get behind her. She retreated, keeping the wall at her back, and they pressed closer.
Then headlights filled the gloom of the alley. Colleen turned, felt a brief surge of hope, then despair as she recognized the thin-faced man in the dark coat leaning out the window of a dark blue convertible. His companion from the hotel, the round-faced man with the bowler hat and mustache, was driving.
The car came barrelling down the alley and a shot rang out. She saw a muzzle flash, realized the man in the dark coat was shooting. He fired again and a sallow-faced man dropped his knife and stumbled back.
Her attackers scattered. One man was too slow, and the fender of the car hit him, sending him bouncing against the wall of a building. The car screeched to a halt in front of Colleen, and the man with the dark coat snapped, "Come with us, or stay here and die!"
Colleen dropped her timber, leaped onto the running board, and hung onto the top of the door with both hands. The car gave a mighty roar and sped down the alley, leaving her attackers behind.