the table.
“You know a good deal about mah-jong,” Auntie Pearl said. “What do you make of this cloth on which the tiles are set?”
“I can’t see much detail,” Brenda admitted after a moment, “not with the tiles all over it. There are animals on it, block-printed, along with lots of what look like Chinese characters.”
Auntie Pearl started moving the tiles to one side, evidently so Brenda could see what was printed on the fabric.
“Hey!” Brenda said. “You shouldn’t do that. The police wouldn’t want a crime scene disturbed.”
Pearl Bright continued moving the tiles. “This is not a crime scene, at least not one the police would recognize as such. Now. Tell me how this cloth fits in with the game of mah-jong.”
Brenda glanced at her father, but his face was expressionless. She decided she’d better go along if she wanted to understand anything. She hadn’t missed Dad saying that apparently having her learn something was the whole reason for this trip. Could this be what she was supposed to learn?
“The cloth doesn’t fit in with any version of mah-jong I know,” Brenda said, bending to inspect the cloth since Auntie Pearl clearly expected her to do so. “Mah-jong’s more like a card game than a board game. You make the board out of the tiles. I mean, everybody grabs tiles from the shuffled batch, then builds the tiles into the Great Wall. Only then do you deal them out.”
“Why go to all that trouble?” Pearl asked. “Why not just deal from the shuffled batch?”
“To keep anyone from cheating,” Brenda replied, feeling weirdly like she was reciting catechism lessons. “We didn’t gamble at home, but mah-jong is like poker. Lots of people bet on it. When dealing from the wall, it’s just about impossible to stack the deck.”
“Why?”
“Because no one knows where the wall will be broken,” Brenda said. “One person rolls the dice to indicate which wall will be broken. Most of the time, another person rolls the dice to indicate where the wall will be broken. So, for someone to stack the deck, they’d need weighted dice, and to get both rolls.”
“Very good,” Pearl said. “Now, tell me why if mah-jong is a game that does not need a board, Albert Yu was setting up his ‘Great Wall,’ as you call it, on this cloth.”
Brenda looked where Pearl’s red fingernail was pointing and understood instantly. Although the tiles had been scattered, much of the base of the wall remained in place. There was sufficient to see that the tiles had been set within one pattern printed on the cloth. Another pattern was printed within the wall.
“He was, wasn’t he?” Brenda mused aloud. She was pleased when no one pushed her to answer quickly. Her father and Auntie Pearl seemed quite willing to let her figure out the details for herself.
The Chinese characters printed on the cloth mostly meant nothing to Brenda, although she recognized a few, mostly from Chinese takeout menus and playing mah-jong. Instead of trying to figure them out, Brenda studied the figures printed in what she was thinking of as the “outer ring.” They were so stylized it took her a moment to recognize what they were, but when she did, she was so pleased she muttered aloud.
“They’re animals. The ones at the top are a pig and a rat, then there’s a bull or something …” She traced her way around, as if reading the face of a clock. “Big cat … tiger from the stripes. A bunny, a dragon, a snake, a horse, a sheep or goat, a monkey. Is that a chicken? Then a dog and back to the pig.”
She frowned, chewing the inside of her lip in thought. “That sounds familiar … Why am I thinking of food?”
Brenda straightened and looked at her dad and Auntie Pearl, punching her fist into the air in triumph.
“I’ve got it! They’re the animals from the Chinese zodiac. I’ve seen them on menus. That’s not a chicken. It’s a rooster. The bull is usually called an ox. This one sort