The Silent Girl

the cellar door and swung it open. As Maura moved beside her, Jane shone her flashlight down the wooden steps. From the blackness below rose the smell of damp stone and mold. The beam of Jane’s flashlight pierced shadows, and Maura glimpsed large barrels and giant tins of cooking oil, surely spoiled after two decades in storage.
    “The cook died right here, blocking this door,” said Jane. She turned to Ed. “Let’s look at these top steps.”
    There were no impatient looks this time, no sighs or glances at their watches. The criminalists moved swiftly to reposition the camera and tripod, aiming it down the cellar stairs. They all crowded in as the lights went out, and Ed unleashed a final hiss of luminol. Only then did they see that blood had trickled from the kitchen above and had dripped down onto the top step.
    A step where they could see the treadmark of a small shoe.

S OMEONE WAS IN THE KITCHEN CELLAR THAT NIGHT, MRS. FANG. A child who may know what really happened,” says Detective Rizzoli. “Do you know who that child was?”
    The policewoman studies me, monitoring my reaction as I absorb what she has just told me. Through the closed door I can hear the sharp clacks of fighting sticks and the voices of my students chanting in unison as they practice their combat maneuvers. But here in my office it is silent as I weigh my possible responses. My silence alone is a reaction, and Detective Rizzoli is trying to read its meaning, but I allow no emotions to ripple the surface of my face. Between the two of us, this has become a chess game within a chess game, played with subtle moves that Detective Frost, who also stands watching, is probably not even aware of.
    The woman is my true opponent. I look straight at her as I ask: “How do you know there was someone in the cellar?”
    “There were footprints left behind in the kitchen, and on the cellar steps. A child’s footprints.”
    “But it happened nineteen years ago.”
    “Even after many years, Mrs. Fang, blood leaves behind traces,” explains Frost. His voice is gentler, a friend’s, patiently explaining what he believes I do not understand. “With certain chemicals, we can see where blood has been tracked. And we know that a child came out of the cellar, stepped in Wu Weimin’s blood, and walked out of the kitchen, into the alley.”
    “No one told me this before. Detective Ingersoll never said anything.”
    “Because he didn’t see those footprints,” says Detective Rizzoli. “By the time the police arrived that night, the prints were gone. Wiped away.” She moves in closer, so close that I can see her pupils, two black bull’s-eyes in chocolate-brown irises. “Who would do that, Mrs. Fang? Who would want to hide the fact a child was in the cellar?”
    “Why do you ask me? I wasn’t even in the country. I was in Taiwan visiting my family when it happened.”
    “But you knew Wu Weimin and his wife. Like them, you speak Mandarin. The child in the cellar was their little girl, wasn’t it?” She pulls out a pocket notebook and reads from it. “Mei Mei, five years old.” She looks at me. “Where did they go, the mother and daughter?”
    “How would I know? I couldn’t catch a flight home until three days later. By then, they were gone. They packed up their clothes, their belongings. I have no idea where they went.”
    “Why did they run? Was it because the wife was illegal?”
    My jaw tightens, and I glare back at her. “Are you surprised that she
would
run? If I were illegal, Detective, and you thought my husband had just killed four people, how quickly would you put
me
in handcuffs and have
me
deported? The girl may have been born here, but Li Hua wasn’t. She wanted her daughter to grow up in America, so can you blame her for avoiding the police? For staying in the shadows?”
    “If she wiped away those footprints, then she destroyed important evidence.”
    “Maybe it was to protect her daughter.”
    “The girl was a witness. She could have changed the course of that investigation.”
    “And would you put a five-year-old girl in a courtroom and have her testify? Do you think a jury would believe a child of illegal immigrants, when the whole city has already called the father a monster?”
    My answer takes her aback. She falls silent, thinking about the logic of what I’ve said. Realizing that Li Hua’s actions were in fact reasonable. It was the logic of a mother desperate to protect herself and her child from