Coconuts and Crooks

by Christy Murphy

  Mom said to tell everyone we’d be solving the case soon and not to worry.

  “Will we solve it soon?” I asked.

  “It always works out somehow,” she said.

  I decided to have some faith that things would work out not just with the case, but with DC Cooper and me as well. Although I had to admit that one of the ways it might work out is that DC and I wouldn’t be together. But then I’d have time to focus on going back to school. But what would I go for? Did I want to be a nurse like my cousins?

  As great as it would be to make Mom proud, I knew that being a nurse wasn’t my dream. Although, I still didn’t know what my dream was. I decided that I needed to worry more about my own future than my future with DC. Not that I didn’t want to be in love, it was just that I wanted to have something for myself first. It wasn’t just that my ex-husband had let me down. It was that I’d let myself down, and I wouldn’t do that again.

  The rest of our time in Cebu was fun. We enjoyed the resort. Abigail and her husband visited with us. We took lots of pictures. In Cebu, they have more regular automobile cabs, and we took one to the dock. I stepped up to the ticket counter ahead of Mom and bought three business-class tickets for the ride home.

  “You didn’t even check to see if they had the cheaper tickets,” Mom said to me.

  “Is the Wi-Fi working on the boat?” Wenling asked the woman behind the counter.

  “You have to see when you get into the cabin,” the woman said.

  “It’ll be fun, Mom,” I said.

  “You’re spending too much of your money,” Mom said.

  “Mom, it was under twenty dollars more altogether,” I said as I led the way to the boat.

  The cabin for business class was at the very top of the boat and was closed in with large windows. We entered the cabin, and I was delighted by the cool air-conditioning and the roomy reclining seats. “Isn’t this so much nicer!” I said to Mom.

  “Beats having feet in your face,” Wenling said, which made Mom laugh.

  “It looks like we might be the only business class passengers,” Mom said, and I could only hope that would be true.

  But of course, just a few minutes before we were about to set sail another group of people came into the cabin.

  I glanced over and saw a young man staring at me and Mom. He’d come with what looked like his grandfather, who was being helped to his seat by a young woman. The fourth person in their party was a woman about Mom’s age who took her seat and deliberately stared out the window, ignoring us.

  Mom turned to see what I was looking at, and a look of surprise and then glee filled her face.

  “Kim Lim!” she said, looking right at the old man with wispy thin white hair and age spots freckling his face. “I’ve been trying to get in touch with you, but you’ve been out of town.”

  It was the owner of the land and his family! And he was stuck in this small cabin with us for the next six hours. I bet Mom was very happy I insisted on business class now.

  “Don’t you come near us, and don’t even think about talking to my father,” the older woman that had been ignoring us spat out.

  “I’ll get security,” the young man said, and dashed out of the cabin.

  Security! Maybe Mom wouldn’t be so glad that I insisted on traveling business class.

  The young man returned with one of the members of the crew. “There they are!” he said, pointing at Wenling, Mom, and me. At this point I didn’t care about the case, I just wanted us to get back to the island safely and not have to give up my seat in the air-conditioning.

  “This young man says you followed his family onto the boat to threaten his father,” the crewmember said.

  “Aye!” Mom said. “How could we follow them here? We were here first.”

  The crewmember said something to the young man in Visayan, and the older women jumped into the conversation, yelling.

  They must’ve said something inflammatory, because Mom started yelling as well. The ruckus escalated until an older uniformed man entered the cabin and everyone quieted. As the crewmember and the young man moved out of the way, I realized the uniformed man was Captain—the head of police.

  What was he doing on the boat?

  “What is going on?” the Captain asked the crew member.

  Kim Lim’s daughter began to speak from her seat, but the Captain held up his hand for her to be quiet.

  The daughter did not like being silenced, but she held her tongue. The Captain motioned for the crewmember to continue. The young man spoke to Captain in Visayan. I could tell from Mom’s smile and the other party’s scowl that he had sided with us.

  The Captain nodded. “Why is that you think you are in need of security?”

  “Captain, my grandson is concerned with my safety. He may be overzealous,” Kim Lim said.

  Captain nodded.

  “She killed the judge. Now she’s after us,” the grandson said.

  “She did not kill the judge,” Captain said.

  I sensed the family didn’t believe Captain, but no one dared question him.

  “You could at the very least remove them for our cabin,” the daughter said.

  I couldn’t believe she had the nerve to call this their cabin. “Do you have tickets to be here?” Captain said, turning to us.

  I pulled the ticket stubs from my pocket and handed them to Mom, who handed them to Captain.

  Captain looked at our tickets, nodded, and handed them back to me.

  “Do you have tickets to be here?” he asked Kim Lim.

  The silent woman next to Kim Lim opened her purse and took them out. Captain went over and checked the tickets. “Looks like everyone is in the right place. Enjoy your trip,” Captain said, and left the cabin.

  The crewmember asked if we needed any snacks. I ordered a Coke Light and some chips. The two parties ignored each other throughout the rest of the trip. That was fine with me, but I could tell Mom wanted to talk to Kim Lim.

  I fell asleep and woke up after we docked. The Lims had gotten up first to disembark. Wenling was going to put up a fight, but Mom told her that we could wait. I figured out that the second woman was an aide of some kind to Kim Lim. He was old and frail. He spoke to her in some other language that wasn’t Visayan. She nodded as she helped him. He exited first with her, and the grandson and daughter followed.

  “What language were they speaking?” I asked.

  “I think it was Hokkien,” Wenling said.

  Mom nodded. “Philippine Hokkien.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “They speak it in the southern parts of China,” Wenling said, putting away her various electronic devices.

  “What did they say?” I asked.

  “I only speak Mandarin and English. Some words sounded Visayan,” Wenling said.

  Mom agreed.

  I noticed something in the seat across the aisle.

  “It looks like they left something,” I said. “Like a hat.”

  “Don’t pick it up,” Wenling said. “They’ll say you stole it.”

  “I can turn it into lost and found,” I suggested.

  Just then the aide came back into the cabin. “Are you looking for the hat?” I asked.

  “Yes,” the woman said in heavily accented English. In that moment, I realized that Kim Lim’s kids didn’t have an accent when they spoke English. Were they American?

  The woman grabbed the hat and turned to us. “Sir is very sad about the death of your sister. He wishes you much luck in your pursuit of the truth of her death. He wants you to know that should you have proof that there is wrongdoing regarding the deal for the purchase of the land, that he will meet with you to make it right. It is the promise he made to your sister, and the promise he makes to you.”

  With that the woman dashed out of the cabin to return to the Lim family.

  Mom, Wenling, and I stared at each other in disbelief.

  7

  Superstition and Secrets

 
The three of us exited the boat, all stunned.

  “What do we do now?” Wenling asked. “We’re running out of suspects.”

  We gathered up our luggage. “We need more suspects for the judge, but there’s still hope the pedicab driver that was in the accident might know something tomorrow. In the meantime, let’s drop off the luggage and then head down to the court records office. We need to find out who else might have a problem with that crook, Judge Hernandez.”

  We exited the passenger area and found Buboy waiting for us, his pedicab sporting the Mystery Machine sign again.

  “You won’t believe who was on the boat with you,” he said.

  “Kim Lim,” Wenling said, handing him her bag and getting into the pedicab.

  “Do you want me to follow him?”

  “No, we’re going back to the hotel, and then we’ll need you to take us to the city records office,” Mom said.

  I was glad that I got my fill of air-conditioning and sleep on the boat, because we were hitting the ground running.

  We arrived at the records office within an hour. We went through security and then waited for our number to be called so we could talk to the clerk behind the counter.

  “We need a file acquisition form,” Mom said.

  “What are you looking for?” the clerk asked. She was a woman roughly Mom and Wenling’s age.

  “We need to find out who else Judge Hernandez ripped off,” Wenling said.

  The clerk smiled, looked both ways as she leaned closer to us and whispered, “I thought it was you guys.”

  “Who?” Wenling asked, whispering back.

  “You’re the ones solving the mystery. You’re the one’s seeking vengeance on the judge in this life or the next,” the clerk said.

  “We just want to find out who killed the judge, and who killed my sister,” Mom said.

  The clerk nodded. “It’s so weird, because I don’t think anybody but you guys would want to kill the judge.”

  “We didn’t kill the judge,” Mom said. “You can ask Captain.”

  The line about asking Captain seemed to make the records clerk take us seriously. “If it wasn’t you, then who was it?” she asked.

  “That’s why we need to see the records,” Mom said.

  “But you won’t find anything,” the clerk said.

  “Judge Fernandez was a crook and everyone knows it,” Mom said.

  “No,” the clerk said. “He stopped being a crook like a long time ago.”

  “What do you mean?” Wenling asked.

  “It’s kind of known, but everyone pretends like it’s a secret. So you didn’t hear it from me,” the clerk said.

  Then she went on to tell Mom about how the judge had gone around settling old scores in business from people he wronged.

  “When was this?” Mom asked.

  “About ten years ago,” the clerk said.

  “That would be about the time that he called to see my sister,” Mom said.

  “Did any of the other people he tried to make up with also end up dead?” Wenling asked.

  “No, only your sister,” the clerk said. “Some people say that he found God,” the clerk said.

  Mom shook her head. “Can you think of anybody that he didn’t settle with?” Mom asked.

  “He settled with everyone that he could find,” she said. “Unless they were like you, and were in another country. But you’re the only one that’s come back that I know of.”

  “Thanks,” Mom said, and we all headed for the exit.

  “This makes us look really guilty,” Wenling said when we got into the pedicab.

  “But Captain said to Kim Lim’s family that we didn’t kill the judge,” Mom said. “He wouldn’t have said that—” Mom stopped mid-thought.

  “What?” I asked.

  “He beat us to solving the mystery,” Wenling said.

  “What?” I asked again.

  “He wouldn’t have said for sure that we didn’t do it if he didn’t know who did,” Mom said.

  “So he beat us,” Wenling said.

  “Or maybe he just followed us as we solved it,” Mom said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Wenling said. “I hate it when you do that. If you know who killed him then just say who killed him.”

  “I’m not sure,” Mom said. “I still need to think about it.”

  Wenling folded her arms and got into the pedicab. She didn’t speak to Mom for the rest of the ride back to the hotel.

  We arrived at the hotel twenty minutes later. “It doesn’t matter if Captain figured out who killed the judge,” Mom said. She was obviously still upset about Wenling saying that she’d been beaten. “We came here to solve the death of my sister. We only wanted to find out what happened to the judge to clear our names, anyway.”

  “Maybe we’ll find out something tomorrow,” Wenling said.

  “It’s a long way to go, but we’ll leave early in the morning,” Mom said.

  Mom turned to Buboy. “We’ll need a ride to the bus station at four o’clock in the morning.”

  “The Mystery Machine and I will be waiting,” he said. “Do you think you’ll need me for the rest of the night? Maybe find some more suspects? Follow somebody? Take you to dinner?”

  “We’ll eat here at the hotel and get to bed early. You should do the same,” Mom said.

  Buboy nodded, and we all climbed out of the pedicab and entered the hotel.

  Sam, our bellman, opened the door for us. “You have a guest here to see you,” he said.

  An old matronly woman leaned on the wall next to the elevators.

  “Who’s that?” I asked.

  “Auntie Chooney,” Mom said, her jaw tight.

  “Jo! I’ve been trying to get in touch with you for days,” the woman said as she spotted us.

  “We were out of town visiting my niece,” Mom said.

  “We need to talk. All of this nonsense about that land has destroyed our family,” Auntie Chooney said.

  “Then maybe you shouldn’t have conspired with those crooked lawyers and judges to cheat me,” Mom said.

  “You set your sister against me, and now you are stirring up trouble for no reason!” the woman yelled.

  People began to stare.

  “You wasted your trip. I’m not talking to you,” Mom said, heading to the elevator. Wenling and I followed.

  Auntie Chooney didn’t budge. “I have a room here. You can’t have them throw me out.”

  “Well then, go to your room,” Mom said as the elevator door dinged open. We all got onto the elevator.

  Auntie Chooney shoved her way in. “I am going to my room.”

  We stood in silence, tension rising with each floor.

  “You can’t ignore me forever. You turned your sister against me, and her ghost will not stop haunting me.”

  “It’s your conscience that’s haunting you,” Mom said. “There’s no such thing as ghosts.”

  Auntie Chooney said something in Visayan, and Mom responded in English. “I don’t know what you’re saying,” Mom said.

  “Don’t pretend like you can’t speak Visayan. I know you still can,” Auntie Chooney said in English.

  “If you want to talk to me, you have to talk in English so my daughter can hear you and be my witness. You cannot be trusted,” Mom said, her voice low and ferocious. I’d never seen her like this before. The elevator door dinged open, and we all exited into the hallway.

  Auntie Chooney started to speak in Visayan very loudly, and Mom held up her hand. “Don’t disgrace the family by causing a public scene.”

  The older woman glared at Mom and said, “I’ll cause a scene if I want to. But you’re going to have to talk to me. We can either do it in your room, or I’m going to scream outside your door until they take me away.”

  Mom opened the door to our room and waved Auntie Chooney inside.

  “Kid,” Mom said. “You and Wenling go downstairs for dinner while I talk to Auntie Chooney. I’ll meet you in fif
teen minutes.”

  I’d never seen my mother so angry. Wenling and I both nodded and headed downstairs.

  We woke up early in the morning. No one spoke about the night before. Mom had come down to have dinner with us as if nothing had happened. We ate dinner quickly, although Mom only picked at her food.

  Mom woke up determined to find Dolpo, the pedicab driver, and find out what happened. Mom was certain that he would be able to describe the truck that ran them off the road. We went downstairs. Buboy was out front waiting to take us to the bus station. We arrived at the bus terminal just as the sun was coming up. Buboy said he’d be waiting to pick us up that night.

  From what I could see, it looked similar to a small Greyhound station except the buses were parked in a clear field of dirt instead of a paved lot. The buses looked like the air-conditioned city buses in the United States, which was a relief.

  Mom spoke to a young worker who told us our bus was on the other side of the ticketing building. When we got to the other side we were greeted by a different kind of bus—a much smaller, less modern bus called a jeepney.

  We were told to get into the smallest of the jeepneys. Our “bus” looked like a pickup truck that had the flatbed in the back converted to bench seating and a roof put on it. It was brightly painted in blue, yellow, red, and white.

  Four other passengers were already inside keeping the seats closest to the entrance. I let Mom and Wenling enter the bus first as I fought a wave of claustrophobia. Being petite, Mom and Wenling were able to walk bent over to get to the end of the bus with relative ease.

  The moment I stepped into the entrance I blocked the sun. The other passengers stared at me, and I felt like King Kong invading the city. I put my arms up in a King Kong-like gesture and did a mini stomp from side to side to signify how I felt. Everyone laughed. It put me at ease. Then I crouched down and waddled hunched over to where Mom and Wenling were sitting. When I sat down my knees came up to my ears, and my head was only a few inches from the top of the bus.

  “How much longer until we leave?” I asked Mom. It was stifling hot in the bus, and I looked forward to the breeze.