Locked rooms - Laurie R. King [152]
When he had explained all this, he asked his question: Knowing that the man in charge of the garden, Tom Long's father, was devoted to the precepts of feng shui, and knowing that Mr Long would have wished to help conceal and protect this important article, could a comparative study of the garden before and after 1906 suggest to Dr Ming where precisely the item might have been buried?
Dr Ming asked, “Is this an item of importance, or one of value?”
“It could be either, although I suspect to Charles Russell, its importance would not have lain strictly in its monetary value. He was a wealthy man.”
Dr Ming tucked his hands into their invisible sleeves and meditated on the open journal before him, that with the date of March 1906. He meditated for so long, and sitting so still, that Hammett began to think the old fellow had drifted into a nap, and Russell found herself wondering if, despite his earlier fluency, he actually understood English as well as he had seemed to.
Finally he took his hands apart and looked into Holmes' eyes. “It may be possible,” he pronounced. He turned to Long to suggest that another pot of tea be assembled, began to unpack a collection of papers and writing implements, and asked the room in general, “I shall need the precise time of birth of the owner of the garden.”
Fortunately, Holmes had come across just such a document in his search through the family papers, or all might well have been lost before it began. The aged scholar merely accepted the information as if such knowledge was a given, and pulled the first of the garden journals towards him.
After an hour of studying the sketches and journals, he began to transfer certain pieces of information to the sheets of paper he had brought, using as reference a drawing that looked like a highly complex cross between a compass and maze. He murmured from time to time in his own language. Long sat on the edge of his chair, unwilling to relax in the great man's presence. Little else happened.
After two hours, Holmes directed Hammett to an upstairs bed for a rest while he and Russell strolled down to the Italian café, bringing back an assortment of food. Dr Ming plucked curiously at a plate of noodles with a pair of chop-sticks he pulled from his case, but seemed unimpressed with what the Italians had done with the product. Another hour after that, and Dr Ming was on his third pot of tea (“Quite a three-pot problem,” Russell had murmured to Holmes), frowning slightly with the intensity of his excitement, and giving tiny nods of the head from time to time.
Finally, four and a half hours after he had begun, he raised his head to Holmes and said, “Yes.”
“You know where it is?”
But he would answer the question in his own way. “When my friend here explained your problem, it was of interest to me, this matter of anticipating how another man might read the energies. Of course, it simplified matters considerably when I found that the woman whose garden this was left the country shortly after the item was buried. Therefore I could assume that the considerable changes made between her drawing of 1906 and her subsequent one of 1912 would reflect entirely the work of Mr Long Kwo. You see where he has extended the pond a few feet here, and planted a red-flowering bush there?
“You no doubt wonder at this superstition,” he said, carefully not looking at Hammett, who had been sprawling back in his chair for several minutes, as if to put as much distance as possible between himself and this nonsense. “It seems to the Western mind absurd to believe that the manipulation of material objects can change the nature of human emotions, expectations, and perceptions. Yet a room with walls the colour of a peach will make a person feel