THE CAMBODIAN CURSE AND OTHER STORIES

by Gigi Pandian

  The woman we knew as Ursula Light, whoever she was, had vanished.

  “How does the story end?” Sanjay asked. He’d gotten so wrapped up in my story that he’d been unconsciously picking at his hat. Mangled rose petals surrounded us, filling my apartment with a sweet, calming aroma.

  “When hotel security searched the room of the woman who fit the thief’s description,” I told Sanjay, “they found Milton York bound with comfortable silk ropes. There was no sign of the thief, but faced with evidence of a wire transfer and incriminating e-mails, Reggie Warwick confessed that he’d hired her to steal the diary. He insisted he had nothing to do with the kidnapping and pointed out that he’d tried to get her to stop. He cut a deal to avoid jail time by giving the authorities all the information he had on the fake Ursula Light, but his academic career was over. Milton York, on the other hand, is still teaching. He convinced enough people that my theory about him ransacking his own room wasn’t true, and to this day he swears Reggie managed to steal the diary. The real Ursula Light showed up the next day, after the storm ended.”

  “How long did it take to find fake Ursula?”

  I held up the postcard of Pulicat, one of the Dutch East India Company’s trading ports in India. “She sent me this postcard a few months after disappearing from the hotel. I have no idea if she’s really in India or if she had someone send it for her.”

  “They never caught her?”

  I shook my head. “But I found out some of the information the authorities have collected on her over the years. They’re onto her, but she’s never been caught. She really is in her seventies. That’s her cover that makes her a great thief. Along with her quick thinking. The information they’ve pieced together on her suggests she only took up a life of crime in her sixties, and she turned out to be quite good. There are several thefts that have been attributed to her.”

  “I can see why this latest conference you’re off to won’t live up to that one.”

  “One never knows. The keynote speaker is Milton York.”

  The Shadow of the River

  This Jaya Jones short story was Gigi’s first publication, originally appearing in Fish Tales: The Guppy Anthology, edited by Ramona DeFelice Long and published by Wildside Press in 2011. It is the only work of fiction featuring Jaya Jones that has a different narrator.

  I arrived ten minutes early outside the office of Dr. Omar Khan, professor of history at the university. That’s when everything started to go wrong.

  It surprised me when my knock was greeted with silence. In spite of my early arrival, I had been confident Omar would be there.

  I knocked again.

  “Omar? It’s Tarek. I’m here for our appointment.”

  A faint groan sounded from behind the door.

  “Omar?”

  I hadn’t imagined that sound.

  Omar was getting on in years. I knew he took medication for his heart. He’d made a big discovery earlier this week. An ancient map depicting three sacred rivers in India. It was a huge find. Could the excitement have been too much for him?

  I tried the door handle. Locked.

  I called out again. I pressed my ear to the door. Nothing. But I was sure of what I’d heard.

  I ran down the hallway. Skidding to a stop, I pounded on the door of the corner office. This door wasn’t locked. It gave way under the force of my fist, swinging open to reveal Dr. Lydia Reynolds, Chair of the History Department, looking up from her desk at my disheveled self.

  “Tarek, what on earth—”

  “Do you have keys to the department offices?” I asked. “I think Omar is having a heart attack.”

  Lydia sprang up from her chair. “No,” she said. “With those manuscripts of his, only the campus police have keys.”

  “But—”

  “I know.” Lydia rushed past me, moving more quickly than I imagined possible. “There’s no time.” She disappeared into the office next to hers.

  Lydia emerged from the office moments later with a young professor, Bradley Atkins, who was new to the department. Lydia’s gray hair bounced against her shoulders as she trotted down the hall with her accomplice jogging after her—all six-and-a-half feet and 250 pounds of him. Watching his sturdy frame, I got an idea of what Lydia had in mind. I sprinted after them.

  “You sure?” Bradley said to her, stopping in front of Omar’s office.

  “You’re certain what you heard?” Lydia asked, turning to me.

  “Positive.” I hoped.

  “I take full responsibility,” Lydia said.

  Bradley gave me a helpless look, which under other circumstances would have been amusing coming from a man who looked like he should have been a linebacker rather than a history professor. He breathed deeply, and then took a few steps back from the door. He ran toward it, lifting his foot just in time to make contact with the edge of the door. A loud thwack echoed down the hallway. The door didn’t budge.

  At the noise, several heads poked out of doorways down the hallway. One of the visible heads was that of my friend Jaya Jones.

  Bradley hurried several paces further back, allowing for a bigger running start. This time the door splintered. He faltered, almost falling onto his hefty back, which would surely have broken several bones of whomever he landed on. Based on my location, they would probably have been mine.

  Luckily for me, a stocky man who’d emerged from one of the offices steadied Bradley. With one more heave, the two of them together broke down the door and spilled inside the office. The stocky man— Professor Grant, I believe was his name—landed on the floor at Omar’s feet.

  Jaya and Lydia stood at my side in the hallway. The three of us followed inside to help Omar. What we saw made us stop just inside the doorway.

  Omar was indeed lying helpless on the floor of his office. Only it wasn’t his heart. A large patch of blood covered his thinning hair. His large green eyes stared up at the ceiling, unmoving. There was no life left in Omar Khan.

  A thick wooden figure lay on the floor next to his body.

  It was a statue of a smiling Buddha.

  A shrill voice screamed. A deep one did, too. Somebody shouted about calling 911. It might have been me, but I honestly can’t quite recall. Those first few moments of seeing the blood on the floor beneath my advisor’s head were almost more than I could stand.

  Jaya squeezed my hand.

  “I thought he’d had a heart attack,” I said numbly. “I heard him cry out. That’s why we needed to get in.”

  “Wait,” Jaya said. “He doesn’t look like he could have—”

  “What’s all this?”

  I nearly jumped out of my skin at the sound of the deep voice next to my ear. Jaya’s small body jumped a little as well. She relaxed when she saw the man in the tweed jacket.

  “I didn’t see you there, Isaac,” I said.

  “Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you,” the university’s museum director said. “What’s happened? Is that Omar who Lydia and Bradley are standing over?”

  I nodded but didn’t know what to say.

  “I wonder...” Jaya murmured. Her hand let go of mine as her voice trailed off. Her lips continued to move almost imperceptibly. I’d seen her face like that before. It was at the university library, late one night the previous year. I’d walked up to her table and said hello to her, but she hadn’t responded. She wasn’t being rude; she hadn’t heard me. She was so wrapped up in the volume of bound journals in front of her that the rest of the world had been invisible.

  “Jaya?” I said. As I expected, she didn’t hear me.

  Lydia knelt next to Omar’s body. She reached out her hand to touch him. Bradley stopped her.

  “I’m telling you,” Bradley said into his cell phone, “I don’t think he needs an ambulance. Just the police.”

  Jaya wasn’t paying attention to any of
them. Her olive complexion had paled, but she remained where she was, her eyes scanning the room before stopping on one particular spot. Her focus was directed at the plant on Omar’s desk.

  I took a look at the plant myself. At first I thought the object next to the plant was only a shadow, but a dried leaf rested on the desk underneath the other leaves of the plant. She took a step toward it, but stopped.

  Why was Jaya so interested in a dead leaf?

  “I understand,” Bradley said, his face grave. He took his phone away from his ear. “There isn’t anything we can do for Omar,” he said to us. “We need to go wait in the hall. Nobody leave.”

  That’s the moment it truly sank in that Omar wasn’t only dead. He had been murdered.

  Jaya pulled me into the hallway. She didn’t stop there. She’s stronger than she looks for her petite five-foot frame. I’ve seen her flip a six-foot man over her shoulder when he didn’t believe she could take care of herself. I nearly tripped as she pulled my elbow until we were around the corner.

  “What’s going on, Tarek?” she asked.

  She poked her head around the wall before I had a chance to answer.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “Nobody followed us. They’re all still right outside Omar’s office.”

  “What do you mean what’s—?”

  “The leaf,” Jaya said. “Didn’t you see it?”

  I had previously thought that Jaya was the smartest graduate student in our history department. Now I wondered if perhaps her genius had crossed over into insanity.

  “Didn’t you see what was in that room?” Jaya said. “I saw you looking at it, too. We have to tell the police, you know.”

  I stared blankly at her.

  “Next to the plant on his desk,” she said.

  “A dried leaf?”

  “Exactly,” Jaya said.

  “Why does it matter that Omar forgot to water his plant?”

  Jaya threw up her hands. I thought nobody actually did that in exasperation, but Jaya never ceased to amaze me with her varied gestures. She’d been raised in both India and the United States, the respective countries of each of her parents, and had consciously or unconsciously picked up a jumble of body language as well as the spoken languages.

  “A scrap of palm leaf was on the edge of his desk,” she said. “It looked like a leaf because it was a leaf. Just not the kind that came from Omar’s plant.”

  I groaned to myself, finally beginning to understand.

  “His great discovery,” Jaya said. “It was a torn edge of that map.”

  “How did you know? I thought he hadn’t shown it to anybody yet.”

  “You’ve been studying Western history too long, Tarek. You were thinking about Western maps and their inked parchment when Omar told you about the map. But in India, they often used dried palm leaves for paper. We need to find the police and tell them Omar was killed over the map.”

  Jaya poked her head around the corner of the hall, and then motioned for me to follow her back to the rest of the solemn group of professors and graduate students. She began to pace around, full of nervous energy. Nobody seemed to know what to do. It was a welcome change when the police were ready to talk to us about Jaya’s theory. Two unsmiling detectives led the two of us down the hall and sat us down in Lydia’s large corner office. They closed the door behind them.

  “There’s a fragment of an historic map on his desk,” Jaya began. “That’s why he was killed. Someone has stolen the rest of that map.”

  “You saw it happen?” the older of the two detectives asked. He raised a skeptical gray eyebrow.

  “No,” she admitted, “but when a mild-mannered professor of Middle Eastern and South Asian history discovers a priceless map earlier this week and is bludgeoned to death today—”

  “Wait a sec—priceless map?”

  “Maybe we should start at the beginning,” I cut in. “Two days ago, Omar Khan discovered a very valuable map. It was given to us at the last minute to be part of the university museum’s collection. It’s a map of the Triveni Sangam in India, the meeting point of three sacred rivers: the Ganges, the Yumana, and the ‘invisible’ Saraswati.”

  “Why is it so valuable?”

  “In this map,” I said, “the Saraswati wasn’t invisible.”

  “So it was a fake?” The detective rubbed his hand across the deep creases in his forehead. “The forger got it wrong? Then why is it so valu—”

  “No, there’s a river there. Four thousand years ago, a great earthquake struck India. The river Saraswati was swallowed up by the land, becoming an underground river, said to be bestowed with mystic powers. The site where the two grand rivers converge with this legendary one in Allahabad, northern India, is a sacred place for Hindus. With the sacredness of the site, a map from so long ago that shows a new representation would be worth a lot of money.”

  “And the ripped edge of the map is on his desk,” Jaya said. “Somebody must have torn it from his hands before hitting him with his Buddha statue.”

  “Know anyone who wanted to hurt the professor?” The detective’s face was impassive.

  “But I just told you why—” Jaya said.

  “If they didn’t want to hurt him, they could have stolen this map from his office during the night when he wasn’t here,” the detective said, cutting her off without raising his voice.

  “No way they could have gotten in,” I said. “Only Omar and the campus police have keys to his office. He keeps too many valuables to give the key to anyone else.”

  “Well, somebody else had a key. The dead bolt was locked from the inside. And we’re three flights up. No fire escape next to his office.”

  “Tarek is right,” Jaya said. “Nobody else had one.”

  “His keys were still on him,” the younger detective said, speaking for the first time. “We tried them in the lock, and they’re the right keys. Someone else must have made a copy. We’ll find them.”

  “Thanks for your help. Here’s my card if you think of anything else.”

  Jaya opened her mouth in protest. It was my turn to pull her away. Her mouth gets her into more trouble than anything else. She let me lead her back to the group in the hallway, a scowl on her face.

  Bradley walked over from the opposite direction and stopped next to Isaac and Lydia. He handed Lydia a cup of tepid coffee from the vending machine down the hall. Lydia looked as if she’d aged ten years in the past half hour. Her usually sleek gray hair stood out in all directions, and deep wrinkles bore into her forehead under the expression of horror she wore on her face. She and Omar were two of the old guard in the department, having been at the university for decades together. I had the feeling they had some sort of special bond from their status as a woman and a minority years ago when neither was the norm.

  “Do they know anything?” Lydia asked.

  I shook my head. “Who would want to hurt Omar?”

  “It was clearly an intruder,” Isaac said. “Someone not realizing he was here, wanting to steal one of his valuable historical manuscripts—”

  “It was that damn map,” Jaya said. “That’s what they were after.”

  “You don’t know that,” Isaac said.

  “There was a ripped piece of it on his desk.”

  Lydia looked on the verge of tears. “Why didn’t he just give it to them? It wasn’t worth his life.”

  Isaac gasped. “If you’re right, Jaya, I wish I’d never showed him that map.”

  “There’s no need for you to feel guilty, Isaac,” I said. “Omar told me he was visiting the storage room of the museum when your latest shipment arrived. He took the initiative himself to look at the latest items. It’s not your fault.”

  A peculiar expression came over Jaya’s face.

  Isaac was usually so composed that he would never be seen without a pressed handk
erchief sticking out of his tweed jacket pocket as he stood confidently with perfect posture. Now, he was slumped against the wall, fidgeting incessantly with his jacket, as if he didn’t quite know what to do with his hands. He’d been close to Omar, too, since Omar had been quite involved with the university museum.

  Bradley couldn’t stand still either. His shoulder and leg were probably sore after his door-breaking adventure. In broad sweeps, he stretched his arms across his chest. After a few swings, he bent his right knee towards his chest in a leg stretch.

  “You’re making me nervous,” Isaac said to Bradley. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “Sorry.” Bradley’s face flushed. “I’m not used to breaking down doors. My shoulder is killing me.”

  “What?” Isaac said. “Oh, yes.” But he waited a second too long to say it.

  I heard a sharp intake of breath. It was Jaya.

  “You weren’t there,” she said. She was looking at Isaac, her eyes wide. “In the hallway. You weren’t there to see Bradley break the door down.”

  “Oh, of course.” Isaac tugged at his jacket. “Yes, you’re correct, Jaya. I came upon the scene late. I had to infer who would have—”

  “No, you didn’t,” Jaya said. She spoke calmly, but I could hear a subtle vibration in her voice that wasn’t usually there.

  “Of course I—”

  “You were there as soon as the rest of us got there,” Jaya said. “You spoke to Tarek right away. We rushed into the office at the same time, all of us after Professor Grant. He was ahead of Bradley, so that’s why you thought Professor Grant was the one who broke the door down. The only way you could have not seen that Bradley was one of the men who kicked in the door was if you were inside the room already.”

  “Jaya,” Isaac said, his voice cold. “I know we’re all upset—”