“What do you mean, everything else? You mean that photo you got at the funeral?”
“Not just that. I got an email from Katherine this afternoon.” Seeing Grace’s puzzled look, he reminded her, “Angie’s mom.”
Grace waited, chewing her noodles, watching him comb his fingers through his hair. He had still not eaten much of his food.
“Apparently someone broke into their house the night of the funeral service. They had been out, Katherine and her husband—Angie’s stepdad, Mel. When they got back, they found the place burgled and the dog dead. Poisoned. It tears me up to think about her having that loss on top of Angie.” He wiped his eyes and took a swig of his soda.
“My God. That’s terrible.”
“I called her,” Mo said. “She was pretty broken up. A bunch of things had been taken from the house. Some electronics and some things from Angie’s room. And here’s the odd thing: she said some pictures had been taken. A pile of pictures on Angie’s desk that Katherine and I had been looking through. That’s why she had emailed me. To find out whether I had any recent pictures of Angie. All the recent ones she had were in that lot.”
“So what does that mean? Why were the pictures taken?”
“Katherine thinks it was just random. Accidental. Someone sweeping things into a bag off desktops and tables. But that doesn’t seem like a good explanation. Why would someone want to get into a house enough to poison a damn dog, and then end up taking pictures? There are plenty of valuables in that house. It doesn’t make sense.”
Maybe he is onto something, Grace thought. Mortensen had been asking a lot of questions. Maybe something really was going on.
“What do the police think, do you know?” she said.
“Katherine says the police are looking into it, but so far, it looks to them like a standard burglary. Whatever the hell a standard burglary is. I just think something is rotten here.”
“There’s something else we found out. Marla and I,” Grace said. “Maybe it’s connected to the burglary.”
After she had told him about Minowa Costa and the police visit, he said, “Why did they think you’d know if Angie was writing a story? They didn’t ask me.”
Grace took a deep breath. She had already told Marla and Duncan, she reminded herself. “Because I told them that Angie left me a voicemail before she died,” she said. She didn’t know where this was going to go, whether she would have to end up telling him the whole story. She had half a mind to, now that he had opened up and said so much about his own disappointments.
Mo looked bewildered. “When? About what?”
“Just to say hi. That she wanted to meet up,” Grace said. “I know. Everyone’s asking me why I didn’t say anything.” She tried to make it casual. “Before she died, it didn’t seem important. I didn’t think anything of it. And then after, I don’t know. It didn’t seem to matter. I did tell Mortensen when he was interviewing everyone.”
Mo stared at her, his eyes piercing. “She said absolutely nothing else?”
“I couldn’t make out a lot of the message,” Grace said, concentrating on pouring more soda into his glass. “It kept cutting out. She mentioned the name of a bar in Chicago where we’d chatted once. Maybe she wanted to talk about something we discussed then. No idea what. But definitely nothing about any story.”
Mo shook his head, frowning. “So the police are investigating this Minowa’s death? You think the burglary at Katherine’s house was related? Someone was trying to find out if Angie had information about that death?”
Grace realized she had been holding her breath. She let it out, relieved he’d moved on.
“I don’t know,” she said. “But could be, couldn’t it?”
“That doesn’t explain . . . I told you how Bent reacted to that picture.” He looked sharply at her. “Did you show it to Duncan?”
Grace nodded. “I sent it to him. He emailed me back from the airport. He does remember the mask.” She hoped Mo would not make too much of it.
Mo gripped her arm. “He does? That proves it. I knew something didn’t make sense.” His eyes were fervid as they ran over Grace’s face. “If he says it’s still there, and he’s only been there a few days, it couldn’t have broken months ago. That means Bent was lying about when the damn picture was taken. The question is, why?”
“Mo, wait,” Grace said, as gently as she could. “The fact that Duncan remembers the mask, the fact that he says he remembers, really doesn’t prove anything. He’s shockingly absentminded. If you knew how many times a week he forgets where he parked his car, you wouldn’t put any stock in this.”
“That’s a different sort of memory,” Mo said. “This isn’t about remembering where he put something. This is about recognition. And this is not some random decoration. Devil dancing is his thing. He would notice one of those masks.”
“He said he saw a collection of Sri Lankan masks somewhere else recently. At the house of a Cinasat exec. He could have seen this mask there, and not in the Cinasat lobby. I don’t think this is a real issue, Mo,” Grace said. She understood his sadness about the passage of time, the need to feel that life had been properly lived. And on top of that, he was contending with losing Angie. Grief could be so difficult. She knew what it was like to lose someone. Even a breakup could make a person think and act in ways that were completely out of character. A death would be even harder.
“Look,” she said, “even if Duncan is really remembering that mask being there, it’s much more likely that Angie visited Cinasat recently to see someone else—maybe the woman she’s with in the picture—and didn’t meet Bent. Maybe Bent’s upset about that now that she’s gone, and he can’t even admit to himself that she wouldn’t have come by to say hello.”
Mo shook his head slowly. “No, that just isn’t it. I told you, his reaction was odd. Not upset like that, just . . .” He rapped his fingers on the counter and took another swig of his soda. It could have been whiskey, the way he did it, Grace thought. As if he’d conditioned himself to relieve stress with water or soda after he gave up drinking.
He set the glass down decisively. “I know how we can find out. We could go to Cinasat and see if this damn mask is there. That way we don’t have to rely on Duncan’s lousy memory. And we can ask if this woman works there.”
“Just like that, show up at Cinasat,” Grace said, closing the containers with the remains of the food.
“Yes. We could go now.”
Grace glanced at her watch. “It’s after nine thirty. Who’s going to be there at this time on a Friday?”
“They probably have a security desk, right?” He stood up, brushing stray noodles off the front of his shirt. They had left small greasy streaks on the pale fabric.
“But I doubt there’s anyone there now, Mo. And even if there were, we can’t just waltz in and ask—I don’t even know who—about this woman.”
“We can find someone. And no one’s going to prevent us from looking at a mask in the damn lobby, even if Cinasat’s all that. A cat may look at a king, right? A man may look at a mask.” He chuckled to himself in a way that alarmed Grace.
“This is insane,” she said. Then, realizing that insane could be a literal description of Mo’s behavior at the moment, she said, “Silly, I mean. All this about when a picture was taken. Why does it even matter?”
“It’s not just about the damn picture,” Mo said. “There was Bent’s reaction, and the break-in, and now this Minowa person. And what about this other person Mortensen contacted you about? What if that really is a murder? Not to mention Angie dying in the peak of health, out of the blue.”
Grace wondered, with a sinking feeling, whether she should have mentioned Mortensen’s call or Minowa. Mo had already convinced himself that something was wrong. With Angie’s death and the financial stress he was under, he could be close to . . . what? Some kind of breakdown? All she had done was feed his irrationality.
“Maybe Minowa’s death is connected to the break-in, but w
e don’t really know. The rest . . . These could be separate events, Mo. Death happens, sometimes when you don’t expect it at all.” That was how miscarriages were too. Things happened. “It doesn’t mean there’s anything suspicious.” She paused, wanting to not be too rough on him. “Angie’s death has been so difficult for everyone. Especially you. I think maybe you’re working everything up into something it’s not.”
“Grace, I’m telling you, there is something.” His breath caught, and he took too big a gulp of soda.
“I’ll tell you what,” Grace said. She busied herself with transferring the glasses and plates to the dishwasher. “We’ll go to Cinasat tomorrow morning. Duncan said some people work there on Saturdays. I really doubt we’ll get to ask anyone about the woman in the picture, but you’ll see the mask is probably not there, and that’ll put your mind at ease. And when Duncan gets back to me, I’m sure we’ll find out more.”
23
DUNCAN
In Transit
“Good school, KIS,” Mrs. Atukorale said, wagging her head. “Now, of course, we have so many international schools. KIS was one of the first, but.”
“That’s what Grace said,” Duncan said. “Academically, it was pretty good. Grace got in because of her exam scores.”
“Her parents must have been very proud,” Mrs. Atukorale said. Duncan sensed that the conversation could be heading into dangerous territory. Mrs. Atukorale, like every Sri Lankan he had ever met, was interested in family histories. Better to steer the conversation away from Grace’s family, he thought. He didn’t want to risk getting close to the now-forgotten scandal over the bribe that had cost Grace’s father his government job. Even though sometimes Duncan wondered about his own reasoning, he felt that long-ago bribe had something to do with Grace’s miscarriages. Grace had never got over her guilt about the sacrifice she felt her father had made for her, however much Duncan had tried to point out that her father had made the choice himself. Without all that guilt, she wouldn’t be so focused on her work, Duncan thought. And if she were more relaxed, who knew whether she would still have the miscarriages?
“I hear nowadays they take a lot of Sri Lankan students, but back then, mostly they had students from abroad,” he said. “Diplomats’ kids mostly. A big adjustment for her, like getting used to a new culture.”
“Must have been the same for you, no?” Mrs. Atukorale said, fixing him with a curious gaze. “Big adjustment for you also to come to Sri Lanka.”
“True. I didn’t even know anyone from this part of the world when I was growing up.”
“Chicago, no, you said? Such a big city.” The way she said it, with her eyes wide, made him realize she probably didn’t know much about the US, however cosmopolitan she seemed.
“The suburb I grew up in was very provincial,” Duncan said. It was only in his senior year at Waterwood High that he’d noticed how white everyone was. In the school gym, the only Asian student in his class, a second-generation Pakistani American named Ali Mustafa, had stood out, his dark arms and legs gleaming under the fluorescent lights amid a sea of pale skin. Skin color had been the only way anyone could have distinguished Al—as Ali had called himself—from the rest of the students. The drawl of his English, his taste for hard rock, and his love affair with McDonald’s had all been unwaveringly Waterwood. “The only reason I started learning about different cultures was that I had a teacher—Ms. Logan was her name—who used to tell me stories. She was like a second mother to me.”
“Right, right,” Mrs. Atukorale said, sympathetically. She was leaning close enough that Duncan could see the pores in her skin, soft and enlarged with age. A faint perfume drifted from her. “That must have been good for you, with your mother being so ill and all. And this Ms. Logan was from abroad?”
“Oh, she was from Chicago,” Duncan said. “Born and bred. But she’d traveled all over the world. Taught in Saudi Arabia and Japan. Kenya. Brazil. Also India. She must have been in her early forties then. She wasn’t married, she didn’t have children. She used to show me pictures and tell me about all the different places, how people lived, what they did. A few times, she brought me food. Tandoori chicken. Stuffed grape leaves and kibbe. Sushi. All very exciting for me. That’s how I ended up getting interested in anthropology when I went to college.”
“In Ohio, you said?” Mrs. Atukorale said.
“That was also with Ms. Logan’s help,” Duncan said. He still felt moved when he thought about the drive she’d organized to help pay for his first year at college. He had not had a scholarship in the beginning, and his mother’s medical bills had made it difficult for his father to contribute much to his college education. In college, he’d worked in a cafeteria, and in the summers as a janitor, until he finally managed to get a scholarship. “I have a lot to thank her for.” He showed Mrs. Atukorale the thin silver ring on his right hand. “She gave me this when I was going off to college.” He took it off and showed her the inscription. NIL DESPERANDUM.
“Ah, yes. Never despair,” Mrs. Atukorale said. “A good thing to remember.” Seeing his surprise, she said, “I took Latin in school. That was one of my best subjects.”
She handed the ring back to him. “You didn’t meet Grace in Ohio, but? Chicago again, you said?”
“That’s where we both went to graduate school. But where I met her was in Sri Lanka, in the Kandy market.”
“Aney, really?” Mrs. Atukorale said, with a giggle that was positively girlish.
“I was staying in Galle, but I had gone to Kandy to visit the Temple of the Tooth. A sarong seller was trying to overcharge me, and I was telling him I wasn’t a tourist. I’d been in Sri Lanka for two months already by then. I knew how the tourists get charged double, triple.”
“Yes, yes, that is the way.”
“Grace heard me speaking in Sinhala, and she came over to ask me how I learned to speak it like that.”
“Ah, so you speak it well, then,” Mrs. Atukorale said, switching to Sinhala.
“Now a little out of practice, but still not too bad,” Duncan said, feeling the Sinhala words struggle a little on his tongue. He switched back to English. “Grace didn’t try to help me buy the sarong. Actually, she helped the seller get a better price from me.”
Mrs. Atukorale laughed. “Good, good, so she helped her countryman,” she said, still in Sinhala.
He would have to keep speaking in Sinhala now, Duncan realized. “She invited me to her aunt’s house,” he said. “She was visiting this aunt, that’s why she was in Kandy. Just by chance, at the same time I was in Kandy. Funny how these coincidences happen.”
“Yes, yes. There is a right time for everything, no?” Mrs. Atukorale said, smiling. She laid her hand on his arm, her skin dry and soft.
24
GRACE
Saturday
“Hello there, young lady!” Gordy Mann waved, his newspaper in his hand. She saw that he had laid their own newspaper neatly on their doorstep. “Did I do an okay job?” he called as he ambled toward his front porch.
“What did you do, Gordy?” She scrutinized the bushes, but there was nothing noticeably amiss. Gordy wasn’t shy about blowing leaves off his neighbors’ lawns or even pruning their bushes if he felt they were being too lax about yard upkeep. Grace had once had words with him about her rose bush, which he had pruned to little more than a stump while she and Duncan had been away in Sri Lanka.
He waved his hand at the lawn. “The mowing. I tried to get all the edges.”
Neat mower lines covered the lawn, and the scent of fresh-cut grass was still in the air. “You did it?” she called. “Thank you! I thought Duncan did it last night.”
“You aren’t cracking that whip hard enough, young lady!” He chuckled as he climbed his porch steps. “He should have started earlier. He had the mower out, but then he had to run an errand. He said he had to get on a plane first thing in the morning. So I just did it while he was out. Don’t worry, he came by to say thanks when he got back.”
“If he had told me, I would have done his errand while I was out,” Grace said.
“He said it had to do with work. Too involved with your jobs, both of you. But then, maybe that’s a good thing. You won’t have a problem paying the bill I send you for the lawn care.” He chuckled again and went inside, waving goodbye.
Grace wondered where Duncan had gone. It couldn’t have been a quick trip to the Rite Aid down the road if Gordy’d had time to finish the lawn while he was out. It had been a busy night, she reminded herself, shrugging. He had probably not thought to mention it.
The clamor of the coffee grinder greeted her when she went back inside. Mo was at the kitchen counter, putting out cups. He had changed into a clean black polo shirt, and comb lines furrowed his hair. He grunted, rubbing his eyes. “Too many bad dreams.”
By the time they’d had breakfast and got to Cinasat, it was after nine. A row of trees bordered the lawn outside the building, which wasn’t one of the ugly concrete giants that housed so many large corporations. This building, although sprawling and six storied, aspired to be something more. Its curved front and ridged walls evoked sand dunes. In a small pebbled area outside the front entrance, a fountain spurted hard jets of water. Flower beds full of magenta tulips ran beside a black granite walkway to the front door.
“You’re sure it’s open on Saturday?” Mo said.
“Well, the cars . . . ,” Grace said, pointing out the dozen or so vehicles in the parking lot.
“Let’s do it, then,” Mo said. He was out and heading toward the building even before Grace had got out of the car.
“I don’t even know what we’re going to do,” Grace called as she hurried after him.
“To put our minds at ease, that’s why we are here,” Mo said. “Try to look like you know what you’re doing.”
A faint smell of bleach met them when they pushed open the heavy glass doors. The white-walled lobby was very large and gave the impression of being squeaky clean. The white marble floor gleamed. A man in a navy uniform sat behind a counter paneled in ash-colored wood, under large silver letters that spelled out CINASAT PHARMACEUTICALS.
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