Chapter Nineteen
NINETEEN
Finn stares at the tiles on the rack in front of him, ordering them first by suit and then by number, his fingers twitching with barely contained anxiety. Paula put him at the card table by the fireplace, in a seat where he has a good view of the second table across the room.
An hour ago, right after he got home from work, his landlady gave him a crash course on mah-jongg, teaching him to identify dots, bams, and craks and their respective jokers.
Now he slides his flower tiles to the left end of his rack like she taught him and glances at the long trifold card in front of him, filled with this year’s hands.
The numbers and letters seem to swim before his eyes, blurring under the weight of his impatience.
“Someone with your background in informational science will pick it up right away,” Paula told him, her voice low and conspiratorial.
“It’s about patterns. Seeing patterns and pivoting when you have to.
Just like what we’ll be doing this evening.
We’ll be listening to the chatter and looking for an anomaly. ”
“What anomaly are we looking for exactly?”
“I can’t say,” Paula said. “But we’ll recognize it when we hear it.”
Then the doorbell rang and the first guests entered, a tidal wave of perfume and chatter washing over him.
He sits at a table with Paula, Kenya Williams, and an older woman named Bonnie with short silver hair and glasses, their practiced movements making him feel like an intruder in some arcane ritual. Across from him, Bonnie frowns at the tiles in front of her. “I’ve got nothing.”
“You always say that,” Paula says. “Then you mah-jongg.”
Finn glances at the other table across the room, his gaze lingering on the women there, noticing they are all much younger.
They chatter like birds about summer camps, vacations, and the pool without stopping for breath.
He recognizes two of them from the library, where they bring their small children, and wonders if they recognize him as well.
“Here you go.” Kenya passes him three tiles, face down. “And thanks for washing Rosie. She loves rolling in stinky things.”
“Of course.” He takes the three least desirable tiles from his own rack and passes them on, his mind racing.
He’s unsure how playing mah-jongg with these women is going to help him get any answers about Autumn, although he appreciates the chance to spend some time with Kenya.
The one question he’d love to ask her would be impossible to pose—what was the text conversation with Miguel Costa about?
Maybe there is some way he can bring it up innocently.
Finn dismisses the thought. There’s no subtle way to say he was snooping.
After they pass their tiles and begin play, Finn tries his hardest to just enjoy the game, though his heart isn’t in it.
Threes, sixes, and nines dominate his rack, and he recalls his landlady’s advice to focus on one neighborhood of the mah-jongg card.
His fingers drum silently against the edge of the table.
“How’s the garden this year, Paula?” Kenya asks. “It’s been hot, don’t you think?”
“It’s June in DC. It’s always hot,” Bonnie says dryly and tosses a tile. “Five bam.”
“There’s hot and there’s hot,” Kenya says. “My water bill is killing me. But if I don’t water, my hydrangeas droop.”
“That’s why you should go native,” Paula says.
“I want to. Did I tell you what happened?” Kenya asks. “I bought a whole bunch of native plants from American Plant a few weeks ago. But I only had time to plant some of them so I left the others in the driveway for later.”
“Oh, I do that all the time.” Paula pulls a tile. “Mah-jongg!”
Kenya claps as Paula lays all her tiles on the rack.
“Already?” Bonnie groans. “I can never do quints. You need to get a lot of jokers.”
Finn pushes down the feeling of impatience, his leg bouncing beneath the table. This feels like a giant waste of time, and he is annoyed with himself for having let his landlady rope him into this charade of suburban espionage.
They all empty their racks into the center of the table and begin mixing them up.
Finn does the same, his mind elsewhere, ruminating about Autumn, asking himself why he still lives in Eastbrook.
He should be out living his life. A girl named Ellis who works as a barista at Tatte told him to stop by tonight.
She has black, curly hair and a tattoo of a ladybug on her wrist. He’s sure she likes him.
He could be there now, flirting, living, but instead he is stuck playing this stupid game, pretending to be a spy.
“This is called washing the tiles,” Paula tells him. Finn glances at his watch under the table. He wonders how much longer he has to stay here before he can make an exit. He decides he’ll play a little longer and then split. Maybe he has time to get to Tatte and see Ellis after all.
The table is silent as they stack the tiles and go through the preliminary passing once again, but as soon as the first tile is discarded, Kenya continues with her plant story. “Anyway, I left the others in the driveway for a few days, in a shady spot, of course, and someone stole them. West wind.”
“No, they didn’t!” Paula says. “Five bam.”
“Why are you so surprised?” Bonnie asks. “That’s the world we live in. People are always posting about their packages being stolen from their stoops. Where are all the jokers? Finn, are you hogging all the jokers?” she asks in a teasing tone.
“Not me,” he says, although he has three jokers sitting on the left end of his rack, not that they are doing him any good.
“I have a trusting nature, I always have,” Kenya says. “I’ve always seen the best in people ever since I was a little girl.”
Finn glances sideways at Kenya. Her left hand is at her neck, the huge diamond on her ring finger glinting off her brown skin as she taps the pearls around her neck with long taupe nails.
Polished and sophisticated are words he would use to describe this woman.
Trusting is not one of the ones that comes to mind.
“Red dragon,” Kenya says. “I’ll take that.”
“Speaking of American Plant,” Bonnie says. “You’ll never believe who I saw in the houseplant section. Looking at the different types of orchids. I’ll tell you who, that woman that lived in that house. The Allard rental. Tori Price.”
Finn freezes at the mention of Autumn’s former boss. He rubs the tile he is about to discard between his fingers the way he used to play with fidget spinners as a kid when he could barely sit through class.
“Wait, is she the one whose au pair was murdered last year?” Kenya asks. The casual way she says it makes Finn’s jaw clench. It’s hard to listen to them talk about Autumn like this when she was the most important person in his life—after his mother, that is.
“Nanny, not au pair,” Paula corrects her.
“You know the one,” Bonnie says. “She lived in that awful house with her little boy. The nanny was really sweet. I used to see her with that boy all the time at the park.”
Autumn. Sweet. Murdered. The words hammer at Finn’s temples. The room suddenly feels too warm. He takes a swig of sparkling water and shoots Paula a look, but she’s focused on her tiles. Or at least she’s pretending to be.
“So sad.” Bonnie clucks her tongue and tosses a tile. “I think that boy spent more time with the nanny than with his mother.”
“I had heard she moved to California after that poor girl was killed,” Kenya says.
Finn had heard the same thing somewhere, but he hit nothing but dead ends when trying to find the woman.
“I mean, I don’t blame her one bit,” Kenya says. “I couldn’t spend another night there.”
“Turns out she’s still in the DC area,” Bonnie says.
A rush of adrenaline floods his system, making his fingertips tingle.
He’s searched for almost a year for Tori Price.
He has always believed that she knows more about what happened that night than the police report let on, but she seemed to have disappeared when she moved.
It was strange how she simply vanished. When he came back from Autumn’s funeral in North Carolina, the house was empty, a FOR RENT sign out front.
He even went so far as to contact the mental-health services group she worked for in downtown Bethesda to see if he could schedule an appointment with her, but they said she had left the practice.
And here she is, living close enough that she’s shopping at the plant store only a few minutes’ walk from where he works at the library. The thought gives him chills.
“Hello! Earth to Finn. Your move, hon.” He looks up to see Bonnie staring across the table at him, eyes wide behind her glasses, peering at him like he is an insect under a microscope.
“Oh, sorry.” He tosses out a tile, his hand trembling slightly. “Soap. Or is it white dragon?”
“Either,” Paula says. “So did you say hi to her? At the plant store?”
“Funny, I started to,” Bonnie says as she pulls a tile. “We were practically neighbors. But she wasn’t very friendly even then, and she hasn’t gotten any friendlier. Five crak.” She tosses the tile into the center of the table. “She walked right by me. But I recognized her little boy. Milo.”
“No, his name is Leo.” The words come out of Finn’s mouth before he can stop himself.
All three women stop their play and look at him.
“Well, someone has a good memory,” Kenya says. He turns to look at her and is caught off guard by the steely look in her eye. “How did you know that little boy’s name?”
“Sometimes they came to the library.” Finn feels his face grow warm under her gaze. “Where I work.”
“Anyway,” Paula says. “Poor woman, she must have been terrified. Can you imagine? A murder in your own house?”
“So scary,” Kenya says. “And so random.”
“Maybe,” Bonnie says in a teasing tone that gets Finn’s attention. He looks up at her sharply, suddenly certain that he’s not the only one in this room with ulterior motives. Her eyes are twinkling, and she has the faintest smile on her thin lips, which makes his skin crawl.
“What do you mean ‘maybe’?” Kenya asks. “It was a robbery.”
“You didn’t hear it from me,” Bonnie says in a loud whisper that carries easily across the table. “But the nanny was having an affair.”
Finn catches his breath, a surge of white-hot anger rising in him. His hands grip the glass of sparkling water as he brings it to his lips. Autumn was not seeing anyone. He was sure of it. He would have known.
“You can’t have an affair if you’re single,” Kenya says. “That’s called a relationship.”
“What if it’s with a married man?” Bonnie asks, her eyes gleaming with malicious satisfaction.
Finn chokes on the water and grabs a cocktail napkin, the liquid burning his throat. Paula smacks him on the back. “You okay, Finn?”
He nods, even though he feels like he might start coughing again, his mind racing.
“Maybe we should change the topic,” Kenya says. “Anyone have any summer travel plans?”
Paula nods vigorously. “I’m seeing an old friend in July on the Cape—”
“Why do you think she was having an affair?” Finn interrupts, unable to stop himself, his voice strained. He tosses out a six dot that he needs to win. He doesn’t care about the game anymore. He doesn’t want to win. He wants to know what Bonnie is hiding behind her smug smile.
“I’ll tell you why, as soon as I call that six dot,” Bonnie says, picking up the tile Finn just discarded and laying out three six dots on the top of her rack. She beams, clearly pleased to be the center of attention again. “You know Yumi Klein? Over on Baltimore?”
“The one with cancer?” Paula asks.
“Autoimmune disease,” Kenya says, sitting up straighter. “What does Yumi have to do with this?”
Finn perks up too. One of his side hustles is visiting the farmers market for Yumi, who is very particular about her produce.
The street she lives on T-bones Earlston and Allan Road, and from the vantage point of her elevated screened-in porch, she has a view of all the backyards.
He’s always wondered if she saw something of note the night Autumn was killed, but hasn’t found a way to ask her.
“You know how her house is kind of higher up?” Bonnie asks, clearly relishing having everyone’s full attention.
“And she’s always on that back porch? I was visiting her once, this was about a year ago, right before it happened, and we saw a whole group of kids run from Allan Road through the Allards’ backyard, duck through their hedge and through the yard of the cement house onto Earlston.
She said all the neighborhood kids used it as a cut-through to the pool, and then she said, I remember this, she winked and said, ‘Some adults too.’”
The table is silent for a few excruciating moments as everyone waits for Paula to discard. Finn can feel his pulse pound in his ears. The Allards’ backyard. The Prison House. All familiar territory in his pursuit of Autumn’s killer.
“And I said to her, that’s funny, I’ve never seen any man come and go from that house.
The cement one.” Bonnie picks up a tile and drops it immediately.
“North wind. And she said that’s because he only comes at night and goes straight into the basement apartment entrance. That’s where the nanny lived.”
Finn stares straight ahead, trying not to breathe. He doesn’t know what this means, he’s sure Autumn was not seeing anyone, but it has to mean something.
“Huh, look at that,” Paula says with surprise. “Mah-jongg again!”