Sisters and Friends
Chapter 9
Things Left Behind
Now that things have settled down, maybe I can hit Mom up for some help.
Quinn opened her eyes, giving up on trying to fall asleep. They had gotten the outlines for their papers done; Quinn was glad to be able to help with some solid rhetorical strategies for Annie. Maybe she wasn't as smart as her sister Daria, but she did okay. She and Annie worked well together; Quinn was more methodical and analytic, while Annie was more independent in her thinking.
Quinn flipped the covers off the futon and padded over to the stone bowl above the printer. She opened the window just a little; it wasn't as cold for this time of the year as it might have been. Reaching behind the bowl, she pushed the button to switch on the little lasers on Annie's light sculpture. She found the bottle of clear liquid and poured a little into the stone bowl, smiling as the ceiling flickered to life. The undulating reflections that played overhead never failed to calm her.
"Annie?"
"Uhhhhmm?"
"Do you have any of the papers from that legal fight? Copies?"
"Mmmff. Drawer. Desk."
"Can I look?"
"Sure. Lemme sleep, dammit."
"Quinn, you say that they actually paid for this legal advice?"
"I guess it was someone they could afford. Can they do anything at this point?"
"Well, it's a bit tricky. This actually didn't go to court, and there was no judgment made. The actions were essentially an agreement between private parties. We could have argued that they were threatened with legal action that was unlikely to result in the claim actually being awarded, and that Annie and Sara were simply bullied into concessions. However, there's a one year statute of limitation for this kind of action, and that's past."
"So that's it?"
"I'm not finished. We could pursue a case based on fraud, which would be more difficult; there's a certain misrepresentation implied in this threat of legal action as it's described. We'd have to file within about a year, since the statute of limitations for fraud is three years."
"Do you think we could win?"
Helen looked at her daughter for a moment. Such idealism. When did I begin to lose mine?
"Quinn, I know you want to help Annie, but this is real life. It's not fair, I agree. But I don't think you understand what an ordeal further legal action would be for Annie and her mother. There's no way we could keep her mother uninvolved. And from what you've told me about Sara, I don't think that she would be one to even want to extract a punitive settlement from them. As cold as it sounds, that means that there wouldn't be enough financial incentive for a firm like mine to pursue a case. The percentage of the award would not be worthwhile."
Helen went on, quietly. "I would be willing to work on this, and I'd have to get approval from the other partners to handle this as a pro bono case. I agree, this is not right. But Quinn, you need to find out if Sara and Annie would be willing to do this."
Quinn was silent for a long time.
"Annie would, but not Sara." She glumly reached for the folder. "So those jerks just get away with this crap."
Helen slowly shook her head. "I didn't say that. Let's see if we can get your sister in on this."
"Dammit… " Daria had known about Annie's situation, from past conversations with Quinn. Anger had put an ominous edge to her voice, clearly audible over the videocall link. "Mom's right. Given the situation, it doesn't sound like a legal remedy is the answer, but it's probably not the only way to make them reconsider their actions."
Daria settled back in her chair, lost in thought for a moment.
"The origin of this whole mess was her paternal grandfather's experience as a prisoner of the Japanese in WWII," Daria went on. "His reaction is understandable, but there was a whole other dimension to all of this. Ethnicity and Loyalty are not necessarily the same thing."
"Quinn," Helen said thoughtfully, "what do you know about Annie's maternal grandfather?"
"Not much. Sara did say that he tried to enlist in the Army several times, against the wishes of his parents. The Army finally accepted him, and he wound up fighting in Europe. I think he was hurt badly and was sent home to Arizona."
"I thought you said that their family was from Southern California," Helen said quietly.
Quinn thought about it for a moment. "That's what Annie said, but then Sara said that her father returned to Arizona. Gila River, I think it was."
After a moment, Daria responded. "Look up Executive order 9066, and then look up the 442nd Regimental Combat Team as well as the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion. The 442nd joined up with the 100th, from Hawaii. The 552ndwas split off later. These were all Japanese American units. Annie's grandfather would have been in the 442nd or the 522nd."
Daria was apparently opening another window on her laptop. "Gila River was an Internment Camp."
Helen smiled grimly. "A Quid Pro Quo; the outrage of Pearl Harbor and the negativity of simply being ethnically Japanese triggered thousands of young men to enlist even as their families were being held in concentration camps."
"What?" Quinn frowned.
"9066. Relocation of Japanese Americans inland, away from the coast, to keep them from facilitating enemy action. The executive order signed by FDR ten weeks after Pearl Harbor," Daria said quietly. After a moment, she went on. "Gila River was just one of the internment camps, along with Manzanar, Tule Lake, Poston, and several more. They closed the camps in 1945, allowing people to return to their homes; most of them had to start over."
"It sounds like you've been researching this, sis," Quinn said quietly.
"I have, at work. There have been calls by extremists for the relocation of Muslims since 9-11, so I've been doing my homework just in case."
After a long silence, Quinn spoke. "What I don't get is why, after so long a time, Annie's paternal grandmother decided to make changes in her will?"
"And she did so only after her husband had died," said Helen. "That suggests that it was something she didn't want to discuss with him. And for what it's worth, she apparently wasn't on the same wavelength as her sons, since they obviously didn't like or understand what she did."
"I agree," Daria mused. "Something else was going on behind the scenes, probably even before Annie's grandfather died." She pulled a pad of paper over and began making a few notes. "I need to do a little research at work. We have more resources available there, and I'm pretty sure Ms. Hanlon will be okay with this. I'll check with her first."
A few days later, Quinn answered a videocall from her sister. From the multiple monitors behind her, Quinn could see that Daria was in her cubicle at work.
"Okay, from that photo of Annie's grandfather, it shows that he was in fact in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, and that he was a war hero."
Quinn frowned; she looked again at the photograph of Annie's grandfather in his uniform that she had scanned and emailed to Daria, along with everything she could pry out of Annie.
"How do you know-"
"Look at his service decorations." Daria swiveled to face a monitor to the side, and with the click of a mouse an enhanced detail of PFC Seiyei Tamashiro's uniform appeared in a window on Quinn's screen. "Two Soldier's Medals with Oak Leaf Clusters, a Purple Heart, and the one on the left? That, Quinn, is a Distinguished Service Cross. The only higher award is the Medal of Honor. In fact, 21 such medals given to Asian Americans in the Second World War were upgraded to the Medal of Honor by Presidential action in 2000."
Daria again turned to the other monitor and began a quick check. "This is one that was upgraded posthumously." After a moment of reading, Daria continued. "The original DSC was awarded for heroic action on October 29, 1944, near Biffontaine, Eastern France…during the rescue of the 141st Texas Regiment."
Daria fell silent for a moment. "You said that Annie's uncles felt that their mother was not mentally competent when she made those changes to her will."
"Yeah, but I don't know if we'll ever find out why. She died three years ago."
Daria was looking at one of the other monitors on her desk.
"Based on the approximate time of her death, I found her obituary. It says that she was born Emmeline Varnell, 1922, in Lubbock, Texas." After a moment, Daria frowned slightly. "It appears that she had a brother, Tyler, who was a medic in the 141st. He passed away not too long after her husband, Annie's paternal grandfather."
"You're thinking that she might have learned something-"
"You know, Quinn," Daria interrupted, "computing technology is amazing. Check this out." She pressed a few keys, and a photograph opened in a new window on Quinn's screen.
Quinn's mouth fell open. "How-"
"The senior researcher here showed me how to do this yesterday. We have a high end facial recognition program here, and I just did a search across the US Armed forces image database starting with the service records of PFC Seiyei Tamashiro and T/5 Tyler Varnell. This photo of the two of them together was taken in a field hospital some time in late October, 1944, shortly after PFC Tamashiro's left leg was amputated just below the knee."
Quinn stared at the stained, scratched image. The tall Medic, Varnell, was crouched behind Tamashiro, who was laying in a cot. Both men looked exhausted, but were smiling gamely for the camera. Varnell had a hand on Tamashiro's shoulder, and was shaking his hand with the other.
"So Annie's paternal grandmother must have found out that her brother was one of the men rescued by the 442nd. Why did it take so long?"
Daria stared at the other monitor for a long while, and then she sat back in her chair. Her demeanor had become quieter, more subdued.
"She had met and married Nichols in 1944, so he must have been liberated and returned from the Pacific before her brother came home from Europe. I'm sure she spent far more time dealing with the emotional damage her husband suffered. He was one of the survivors of the Bataan Death March.
"I'm guessing that she was very careful to avoid discussing anything at all that would trigger memories of the war for her husband. It wouldn't be surprising if even hearing a Japanese surname would get a reaction. I'd be willing to bet that they didn't own a Toyota, Honda or Mitsubishi."
"I could see that hearing their son Martin was going to marry Sara was definitely upsetting."
After a long moment, Quinn closed the folder in front of her and sighed.
A/N: Tamashiro is a fictionalized character based upon the real soldiers Pvt. Barney F. Hajiro and Pvt. George T. Sakato of the 442nd who both earned their DSC awards for actions in the rescue operation in October, 1944. Both lived to personally receive the upgrades to the Medal of Honor in 2000.
Tyler Varnell is a character based on the Combat Medics that worked the front lines, doing what they could to stabilize and support the wounded.
The Bataan Death March (1942) was a real and gruesome event in the Philippines, which was later used as propaganda by the US Government to maintain public support and anti-Japanese sentiment for the War effort. Between 60,000-80,000 Filipino and American POWs were forced to relocate by the Imperial Japanese Army; over 10,000 died before the end of the march, with thousands more dying afterwards as a result of the horrific treatment.