The Apothecary Page 0,52

She stopped, and her narrow shoulders danced and trembled. She pressed her hands into her eyes, as if to block out what she had seen, smearing the oil down her cheeks.

I didn’t know what to say that could help. I put my hand on her shoulder and I could feel how overcome she was. I didn’t know if she’d be able to move.

“Janie,” Benjamin said, after what seemed like a long time. “We can’t stay here. They might come.”

I reached in the pocket of my trousers—Benjamin’s trousers—and found another of the folded handkerchiefs his father must have neatly ironed. I gently pried one of Jin Lo’s hands from her face and wiped the oil off the delicate skin inside her wrist.

“We have to go,” I said. “It’s dangerous for us to stay here.”

I took the other wrist and wiped away the oil, and then I cleaned the tears and oil from her face. She let me do it, as if she were a small child. Her eyes were still spilling tears.

“I’m so sorry about your family,” I said. “And your city.”

She blinked vacantly.

“We need your help,” I said. “The apothecary said he’d be in the Morrison shelter, and we found it, but he isn’t there.”

I thought I could see her eyes slowly returning to the present, from the distant past. I could feel that I was coming into focus.

“Come and look,” I said, and I helped her stand up. She was unsteady on her feet, as if all strength had been drained from her. “Can you get up the ladder?”

“I try,” she said.

I stood behind her, making sure her feet were on the rungs, and Benjamin and Pip helped pull her up when she reached the top. Upstairs, we all stood in front of the Morrison shelter, and Jin Lo crouched to peer through the wire mesh.

“We open,” she said, and together we lifted one of the long side walls of the shelter off its hooks. Jin Lo peered inside again. There was a flat board making a floor in the bottom of the shelter, and I imagined a tiny Benjamin and his father sleeping on it.

“See this,” she said, and she pointed to a cone-shaped pile of white dust on the shelter’s floor. “Japanese call ‘Morijio’. Like Shinto offering. But English say ‘Lot’s wife’—you know this meaning?”

“Is Lot the one who had all the bad luck?” Benjamin asked.

“No, that’s Job,” I said.

“Lot’s wife turned to a pile o’ salt,” Pip said.

I looked at him, surprised. “How do you know that?”

Pip shrugged. “I ’ad to go to church lessons once, for stealing, like. The stories were all right, though.”

“This salt your father,” Jin Lo said.

“What?” Benjamin said.

“You find one glass beaker now,” she said. “Clean.”

CHAPTER 22

The Pillar of Salt

Jin Lo climbed into the Morrison shelter and gathered all of the salt onto a piece of paper, carefully brushing up every loose grain with her finger, even after I was sure she had them all. I still didn’t believe that the salt was the apothecary, but I could see how she wouldn’t want to leave a whole leg behind. She bent the paper and poured it into the clean beaker. Then she brought the beaker out of the shelter. She still had the marks of tears on her face, but she was steady again.

“Where he work?” she asked.

Benjamin looked around the paper-strewn office and raised his hands to offer it up. “Here,” he said.

“No,” she said. “Real work. Laboratory.”

Benjamin shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“Must be in house.”

“It’s not upstairs. That’s where we live.”

I looked around the room, which had no doors except the one to the shop. “What about the locked door in the cellar?” I asked.

We all climbed back down the ladder into the dark, and Pip got out his wire to start working on the heavy iron door’s lock.

“No time,” Jin Lo said. “Hold please.”

She handed me the beaker, moved Pip aside, and kicked open the door with what I guess you’d call a kung fu kick. The door swung on its hinges, and she walked calmly through and turned on a light. Benjamin and Pip watched, impressed.

We all followed her into what was, as she had promised, a laboratory. Where the cellar looked dusty and unused, the lab was spotless and orderly, with rows of shining bottles and jars. It had an oven against one wall, a sink, and a row of gas burners. There were beakers and vials and crucibles, and mortars and pestles in different