Murder In Chinatown by Victoria Thompson Page B

sell.
    “Yes, he works there,” Biddy said.
    “He’s not a farmer, though,” Una added importantly. “He unloads wagons and things like that.”
    “How did you meet him?” Sarah asked, thinking that a job like that would be a good way to spot young girls.
    “We go to the market all the time,” Una said.
    “With our mothers,” Biddy added.
    Like hundreds of other girls, Sarah thought.
    “One day we went off by ourselves, looking at things,” Una continued. “He called out to us, asked was we lost.”
    “He’s handsome,” Biddy said, “and real friendly, so we stopped to talk to him.”
    “He only wanted to talk to Angel, though,” Una said with just the slightest trace of bitterness. “Because she’s so pretty.”
    “What did they talk about?” Sarah asked.
    “Nothing much,” Biddy said, wrinkling her face as she tried to remember.
    “Silly things,” Una added. “Like did our mothers know where we were.”
    “He didn’t know we’re Chinese,” Biddy said. “Not at first.”
    “Angel told him,” Una said. “He wanted to know why we looked so different.”
    “How long ago did you first meet him?” Sarah asked.
    They didn’t remember exactly. “Back in the fall, I think,” Una recalled. “When there was still vegetables at the market.”
    “How often did you see him?”
    “ We didn’t see him much at all,” Biddy said, and this time she also sounded bitter. “He was only interested in Angel.”
    This was sounding worse and worse. “How did she manage to see him?”
    “At first she just went to the market, but she couldn’t always get away from her mother, and then the weather turned cold,” Biddy explained. “So she started saying she was going upstairs with us after school, and she’d climb down the fire escape and sneak off.”
    “No one ever suspected?” Sarah asked in surprise.
    “Why should they?”
    Why, indeed. Angel was an obedient girl who’d never given her parents a reason to distrust her.
    “Do you know where they met?” Sarah asked. “Was it at the market?”
    “No, that was too far. She wouldn’t have time to get there and back,” Una said. “They’d meet someplace nearby, but she never told us where.”
    “Are you sure you don’t know? Did she say anything about it at all?”
    “I don’t remember anything,” Biddy said.
    “Try hard. It’s very important,” Sarah urged.
    “I think…” Una mused.
    “What?”
    “I think it was behind a store,” she said.
    “Why do you think that?”
    “She said one time that she wasn’t afraid somebody would see her, because she’d just go in and out the front of the store, like she was shopping.”
    “I don’t remember that,” Biddy protested.
    “Did she say anything about what kind of a store it was?”
    Una tried to remember. “I can’t think of anything. Just that she’d go into the back of the store and meet Quinn.”
    “Do you think he worked at the store?”
    Una shrugged. “She never said.”
    “We already told you, he worked at the market,” Biddy reminded her.
    “Do you remember what part of the market he was working in?” Sarah asked.
    Biddy described the location to her. Sarah knew the market well. It wasn’t too far from her home on Bank Street.
    “Can you think of anything else she told you about Quinn? Anything about his family? Anything at all?”
    “He wanted to marry her,” Biddy said crossly.
    “Especially when she told him her parents wanted her to marry Mr. Wong,” added Una.
    “How did you feel about that?” Sarah asked them.
    They exchanged another glance, probably wondering if it was safe to tell Sarah their true feelings on the subject.
    “I didn’t blame her for running away,” Biddy admitted.
    “Mr. Wong is old,” Una added, as if that settled everything.
    “Don’t tell Angel we told you what happened,” Biddy said. “Please, don’t. She’ll be mad at us.”
    “I won’t,” Sarah promised.
    “Are you going to tell our mothers?” Una asked.