Aunty Lee's Delights

by Ovidia Yu

  5

  Carla Saito’s Story

  Carla Saito chose to meet Aunty Lee back at the café.

  “Marianne didn’t go diving with friends,” she told Aunty Lee. “She just told her parents she was going to be with friends they knew so they wouldn’t worry about her. She took extra time off work because she was going to spend time with me. We had a lot to talk about.”

  Marianne Peters and Carla Saito had met the year before when Marianne visited Washington for an IT conference. They had instantly clicked, despite being from such different backgrounds. Carla had shown Marianne around Washington. Even though it was not her hometown, she knew her way around better than Marianne, who was on her first visit to the States.

  “And I know what you’re going to say, but it wasn’t just a holiday thing. We spent all our time together there; she skipped all her final sessions so that we could take a quick trip to the mountains. And after she went back to Singapore—I mean came back here—we talked every day on Skype—”

  “You became very good friends very fast,” Aunty Lee observed sweetly.

  Carla Saito looked at her for a moment, but there was nothing but curiosity in Aunty Lee’s expression.

  “Yes, we did,” Carla said quietly. “And we planned this for a long time. Me coming out here to join her, I mean. I had to sell my apartment and hand in my notice—”

  “What do you do? For work, I mean.”

  “Well, to put it simply, I work with computers. I’m in IT security.”

  “But you can’t go on staying at the Frangipani Inn. That kind of place is not good for a single girl staying alone. Why don’t you come and stay at my house? I have a lot of room in my house. Nina, you can make the bed in the side room for her, right? You can have your own toilet, and then if you want to go and talk to Marianne’s family tomorrow, you can walk over. They are just nearby, just further up the road and up the hill. If it’s not too hot, you can easily walk. I can show you where to go or I can go with you. I know her parents very well.”

  “I don’t know—”

  “Don’t worry.” Aunty Lee sensed her alarm. “If you are happy in your room there, then that is fine.”

  “Well, it’s not so bad. But the main thing is, Marianne booked the room for us. She put down the deposit and I just had to check in when I got here. She was going to meet me there so that we could talk. Plus it’s cheap because it’s a backpackers’ haunt and nobody her family knows would ever go near there, so it was safe.”

  “You must be glad Marianne is all right,” Aunty Lee said to Carla. “I mean now that you know she is not the body that they found.”

  “Of course I am. I just don’t understand why, if she’s all right—and why, if she could call someone else—she didn’t call me.”

  Aunty Lee nodded, understanding. Even a tragedy was easier to understand than abandonment. “As long as there is life, there is hope,” she said. “Tell me why you came here to look for Laura Kwee. How did you know that Marianne would get in touch with her about not coming?”

  “I didn’t. But Marianne told me Laura got her brother interested in this place and he got her and his wife to go too. And then there was some fuss at the first dinner, right? Laura was trying to match Marianne up with some guy? But Laura called her afterward and they talked and she explained things to her, and then she said Laura was getting someone to help us.”

  “Help you? What do you mean?”

  Carla Saito shrugged. “I don’t know. It was going to be some big surprise for me. All I know is she was pretty excited about it. She said we could have some time together to work things out in peace without really leaving Singapore. Anyway, I should be going. It’s really late. Thank you very much. For the food and for listening.”

  “Would you like me to come with you to Marianne Peters’s house and ask her mother where she is?”

  “No! I mean there’s no point. I know what she’ll say. She thinks that Marianne is off on a travel vacation with friends. Marianne was only telling them that because she wanted us to have some time together. I don’t want to tell them she was lying. If she comes back and finds out I told them she lied, she’s going to be so mad.”

  “Then why not just meet her somewhere else? Why come to Singapore?”

  “Because if we managed to figure out what we want to do, then we could have gone to tell her family together. I mean, if I managed to persuade her to see things my way,” Carla Saito said quietly. “I wanted everything to be clear and open and honest from the beginning. This way, even if her family wasn’t happy about it, at least they would know how we felt and what we wanted and they could take their time to come around to the idea—but they would never have to think that we lied to them. Of course, it didn’t quite work out that way. Marianne said I didn’t understand what traditional Asian parents were like.”

  “You have to tell her parents,” Aunty Lee said. “They have a right to know Marianne is not away with her friends.”

  “No. I mean . . . just wait. Please. If she just took some time off to think about things and I’ve gone and talked to her parents—”

  “If you don’t want to talk to her parents, at least tell her brother. Mycroft is a nice boy. He won’t say anything—”

  Carla Saito shook her head. “No. I know all about Mycroft Peters. He’s the worst of them all.”

  6

  Family Dinner

  Though she was far from convinced, Aunty Lee agreed not to say anything to Marianne’s family—at least for the moment. In contrast to Carla Saito’s relief to find out that Marianne was not the body found on Sentosa, the news left Aunty Lee feeling even more worried. There was a problem with the phone call no one else seemed to have noticed. If Laura Kwee had already been murdered, how could Marianne have left a message with her? And if the message had not come from Laura, why had Marianne been mentioned at all unless . . .

  Aunty Lee did not want to follow that thought through till she was forced to. Fortunately having Selina and Mark come to dinner provided ample distraction.

  For once Selina was paying more attention to her own plate than what Mark was or was not eating. And she was eating Aunty Lee’s food with gusto. Mark watched his wife helping herself to sambal squid and black-bean fish without a word about cholesterol and preservatives, and helped himself as well. It was about time Selina had a good meal without worrying about what she was eating. It seemed as though being questioned by the police had improved both her mood and her appetite.

  Aunty Lee had been half afraid that Selina would blame her for talking to the police. But Selina was surprisingly good-natured about the experience. She and Mark had had to go to the Bukit Tinggi Police Post for an interview with SSS Salim and had spent almost four hours there.

  “I told them I had no idea whatsoever that Laura was missing. I expected her to turn up like we arranged, she texted me to say sorry she couldn’t make it—that’s all I knew. But they kept asking all these questions about how well I knew Laura, had she said anything about boyfriends or stalkers—and they took my phone. I think they are going to try to trace where her text came from. All I can say is they better get it back to me soon! What am I going to do without a phone—I’m running a business, you know! What if my clients try to call me?”

  “I blame SingTel,” Mark said. “I told them, sometimes messages don’t get through until hours later.”

  “But actually answering their questions didn’t take so long,” Selina continued. “Yes, give me just a bit more rice, Nina—they wrote down all our answers in first person as though we wrote them down ourselves, and frankly speaking, their English isn’t very good. But I wasn’t going to sign my name on the statement until they got it right.”

  “Sel gave them an English lesson,” Mark commented. “I said they should just have let us write our own statements, they could read them over, and that would be that.” Mark looked tired and more stressed than his wife. But then he had never liked confrontations.

  “I did n
ot,” Selina said. “But they said I was very helpful—that we were very helpful. They didn’t know about that woman coming to look for Laura that night.”

  “Carla Saito didn’t come to look for Laura. She was trying to find Marianne Peters,” Aunty Lee pointed out.

  “That’s not true. When she came in she was asking for Laura Kwee. Anyway, the police aren’t interested in Marianne. Marianne isn’t even missing, she’s away on holiday. That woman came in and asked for Laura Kwee. We all heard her. You heard her, didn’t you, Aunty Lee? Why didn’t you tell the police about her? They were very interested in how to get hold of her, so I told them I thought I heard her say she was staying at the Frangipani. I think they’re going to talk to her too.”

  Something in the way Selina said this made Nina wonder what exactly she had told the police about Carla Saito. Aunty Lee could guess. She changed the subject.

  “I wonder whether this is going to change the way people see Sentosa. It can’t be very good for the resort there.”

  “I remember going to Sentosa during school holidays,” Mark said, surprising his stepmother. “I remember the mangrove swamps. Dad had a friend who was crazy about the mangrove swamps. Uncle Bian said they were like natural water filters. Can you imagine, he did his thesis on wave patterns in artificial mangrove swamps.”

  Aunty Lee was uncharacteristically quiet during the meal. Nina recognized it as her analyzing mode; the one that appeared when she was trying to reverse engineer a dish or when she was trying to decide whether some variation in taste was good or bad.

  “They refused to say if poor Laura was definitely murdered,” Mark said. “I asked if they had any leads or any suspects, but they wouldn’t say.” Talking about murder and suspects came naturally enough, thanks to forensic crime thrillers on cable television.

  Selina usually put a damper on gruesome speculations, but now she said, “But you can see they think it is murder, don’t they? And the worst thing is—I think they took my phone because I may have been the last person Laura talked to!”

  The concentration on Aunty Lee’s face grew deeper, if possible. She stared at the unfinished rice on her plate, but Nina knew she was really trying to untangle events. Nina could guess what was on Aunty Lee’s mind. Though SSS Salim had not told them how long Laura Kwee had been dead, it was clear that her body had been found before Selina received that last text from her. The same thought had occurred to Mark.

  “If it wasn’t a SingTel glitch,” he said, “it might have been the murderer that sent you that message. Laura was already dead yesterday evening, you know. They said she’s probably been dead for at least a week.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Selina said. “They said they couldn’t be certain of the time of death. Anyway, the message was definitely from Laura. She signed off with that silly smiley face she always uses. The phone must have been out of range or something. You know how sometimes messages just don’t go through until hours after you send them?”

  Aunty Lee looked up and saw Nina watching her. “You can clear my plate,” she said. “There are ways to track mobile phones these days, right? Go and ask that nice staff sergeant are they tracking Laura’s phone.”

  “I am sure he is already doing that, ma’am.” Nina deftly cleared Aunty Lee’s half-eaten dinner plate. That there was food left over was an indication of how concerned Aunty Lee was. “Ma’am, don’t worry. The police will know what to do.”

  After Mark and Selina left, Aunty Lee continued brooding.

  “What is the matter, ma’am?”

  “That message didn’t come from Laura. Whoever it was wanted to make people think Laura was still alive. What I’m worried about is why did the message mention Marianne—but no need to go into all that. Go and phone that nice staff sergeant or that handsome young assistant of his and tell him that you heard a phone ringing somewhere outside the shop but you could not find it.”

  The excitement of giving a statement to the police was not all that was making Selina happy that night. Mark had finally read the piece in the Island High Life reviewing the recent wine dining at Aunty Lee’s Delights. “They don’t mention the wine at all,” Mark said, peeved, but Selina thought he should have been glad. After all, the writer of the article had not been impressed by Aunty Lee’s supposedly classy food—the anonymous reviewer made fun of the fact that dinner had been served on two-dollar Daiso plates. Selina had complained about those plates repeatedly, but Aunty Lee had done nothing, saying no one noticed such things. Well, that was no longer true.

  “I tried to get her to read it because of the plates. But you know what she’s like. You should bring it up. She has to change those plates now if she doesn’t want to be a laughingstock.”

  “Sel, you didn’t write that comment, did you?” Mark asked.

  “Don’t be stupid, of course I didn’t. But print it out for me, okay? I want to show it to Aunty Lee. And make it large print. She won’t admit how bad her eyesight is and I suspect Nina only reads her what she wants to hear.”

  She had to repeat this twice before Mark answered, and even then he only said, “Maybe.”

  “What’s wrong with you? If you go on like that, people are going to suspect there was something going on between you and Laura Kwee!” It was not clear from her tone whether this was a joke or a threat.

  Mark knew his wife. One of her rules of life was not to make threats she was not prepared to follow up on.

  7

  Putting Information Together

  Over the next few days the grisly details about the body on Sentosa were released to the public via the press and the Internet. Aunty Lee read the papers herself repeatedly, with her magnifying glass, as though afraid Nina would miss something, and she asked Nina to start accounts with all the online news and gossip sites so that Aunty Lee was kept up-to-date with speculations and possible sightings.

  The few facts were unpleasant. Laura Kwee’s body had been found wrapped in a plastic bag. Her body might have been in the seawater for up to a week—or more. It was hard to say exactly. She had died of suffocation and traces of drugs had been found in her system.

  This last information had not come from the newspapers. It was not for nothing that Aunty Lee had been married to a man who had donated enough money to the Singapore General Hospital (where the postmortem was performed) to have a wing of that institution named after him. Aunty Lee had made a few social calls, asked a few curious questions . . . and been told the drug found in Laura Kwee’s system was ketamine.

  Nina had looked up the details for her. “ ‘Ketamine is used as an anesthetic for both humans and animals,’ ” she read off her iPad. “ ‘These days it is used more on animals, and in America and Australia, veterinary clinics get broken into for their supplies. It is banned in Singapore but still surfaces occasionally as “Vitamin K” or “Kit Kat.” It is more commonly found in Hong Kong, the United States, and Australia, where it is the drug of choice at dance parties or raves because it produces a state of dreamy intoxication that lasts for an hour or less.’ ”

  “An hour or less,” Aunty Lee repeated. “That is better than getting drunk, right? Why is it banned here when they still allow people to get drunk and drive cars? Are there side effects? Does it cause cancer?”

  “There are other bad effects, ma’am. It can cause memory problems and it can make some people react aggressively or violently.”

  “Again no different from people going and getting drunk, what!”

  Nina speed-read on. Facts were facts but she didn’t like the conclusion Aunty Lee was drawing so far. It was not safe in Singapore for anyone—even old ladies—who thought drugs were not dangerous. Though in Aunty Lee’s case, she was more likely to have trouble with the authorities than with addiction.

  “ ‘It is dangerous because you can feel drunk even if you have not touched any alcohol. You may lose your sense of time and identity and think you are having out-of-body experiences. People use it as a date-rape drug because it is very fa
st acting. People have said the last thing they remember is having a drink, then everything after that is blurry.’ ”

  “Still doesn’t sound so different from people getting drunk,” Aunty Lee said stubbornly. “You should hear some of the things people say when they have been drinking too much. Not only the men. The women, maybe because they are less used to drinking in public, can be much, much worse!”

  Nina shook her head. She had real work to do—there was always something that needed to be done in the house or in the shop. People who came in and said how beautifully organized everything was did not realize that maintaining things in the right places, functioning and dust-free, was a full-time nonstop job. And that was before factoring in a busybody old lady who was always bringing home strange things and stranger people just because they had caught her interest. Not for the first time Nina thought wistfully of a nursing job where her off time was hers alone. But she knew she would not leave the café if she were given the chance. Even if Singapore was not home to her, Aunty Lee was definitely family.

  Nina slid one of the cutlery drawers off its rails and carried it into the living room. This was where she usually took care of noncooking chores because while she worked she could answer Aunty Lee’s questions and read her anything required.

  “Would you take this Vitamin K or Kit Kat?” Auntie Lee asked suddenly.

  “No, ma’am. Of course not. I’m not crazy. These things are bad for you.”

  “Why do you think Laura Kwee took it, then? She didn’t drink much. She wasn’t even used to wine. You remember how she behaved at the first dinner?”