Fortune Cookie (Culinary Mystery)

by Josi S. Kilpack

  It took nearly five minutes to find a parking spot on a narrow street two blocks away, and then it was a five-minute walk to the building. Pete went into a convenience store they passed on their way and asked if they had any boxes while Sadie texted Jack to tell him she’d arrived and was heading to Wendy’s apartment. She promised him an update later and put the phone back into her purse when Pete came out with a stack of empty boxes they could use for packing Wendy’s things and a package of heavy-duty garbage sacks he’d purchased as backup.

  When they reached the outside door of the apartment building, located between two storefronts, Pete put down his boxes in order to unlock the door with the keys Lin Yang had given them. He then held the door for Sadie. They walked down an empty hallway to a foyer that was rectangular, small, and empty. On the wall to the left was a door marked exit and a panel of six mailboxes. On the wall to the right were two doors she assumed led to the street-level shops. Further down the hallway were the doors for apartments 1 and 2.

  There was little character or color in this space, but the elevator straight ahead of them was fabulous. It was one of the gated kinds that made Sadie think of Audrey Hepburn and New York City. A spiral staircase wrapped around the elevator shaft, and Sadie followed it with her eyes until it disappeared somewhere above them. Pete pulled back the diamond-patterned grate of the elevator so they could enter, then closed it and secured it with a latch. Sadie pushed the button for level three. It was an old-fashioned knob-style button and depressed an entire half an inch when she pushed it, which made Sadie smile.

  “This is awesome,” Pete said in a reverent tone as the cables jerked and the pulley began its job of hoisting them up the shaft. “I feel like Cary Grant in Charade—though I’m glad this elevator is a little bigger than that one, but seriously, it even has the same kind of staircase.”

  “Or the one in the Hotel Priscilla for Single Women,” Sadie said. “Though I’m glad it works without us having to tap dance.”

  “Oh yeah,” Pete said, looking up as the elevator continued to the third floor. “Is that the hotel from the movie where Carol Channing does that jazz number?” The second-floor foyer passed before them, looking very much like the first-floor foyer but without the mailboxes. The doors to apartments 3 and 4 stood sentry, side by side.

  “Yes,” Sadie said, impressed that he remembered the scene from Thoroughly Modern Millie. Musicals were one topic on which they didn’t much agree, and though he hadn’t said out loud that he didn’t like musicals, Sadie suspected it was to protect her feelings.

  “I didn’t like that film,” Pete said with a shake of his head. “The story line was unrealistic.”

  Sadie made a huffing sound as the elevator came to a grinding stop when it was flush with the third floor. Pete went about opening the door and then closing it again after they’d both stepped out. They scanned the sparse foyer—there wasn’t anything to it other than hardwood floors in need of refinishing and two doors set into the wall across from them, fifteen feet apart. Sadie stared at the number 5 attached to the center of the door on the left. That was Wendy’s apartment. It’s where she’d lived . . . and where she’d died.

  The thought of such an atrocious thing happening on the other side of that door made Sadie’s stomach clench. Had Wendy died of natural causes? How would burning the body later factor into that possibility? What were they going to see—and smell—once they went inside? Sadie shivered at the thought of it.

  Pete put down the boxes and used the smaller key to unlock the apartment door. He gave Sadie a quick glance before pushing open the door. Sadie braced herself for the smell, but while there was a trace of smoke, and maybe something more than that, it was bleach and paint and . . . vinegar that made the strongest impression.

  “It doesn’t stink?” she asked as she tentatively stepped into the darkened apartment. The shades were closed and the lights off, giving it an eerie grayness in the middle of the day.

  “I wondered if it would,” Pete said, coming in behind her. “Seeing as how she was in a bathtub—a nonporous surface—and Lopez had mentioned that the bathroom appeared to be well-­contained and with good ventilation. CSI must have put out the vinegar—it’s the best thing for decomposition—and they’ve already painted with an odor-blocking primer, I’ll bet.”

  Sadie stared at him, both impressed and disgusted that he knew so much about this, but then again he’d spent his career dealing with this kind of thing. Sadie’s experience with death and murder was relatively recent, and she’d never been involved in the cleanup process. Pete met her eye and smiled sheepishly. “Hopefully that’s not too much information.” He reached out and touched her arm. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” she said, reaching for the light switch. She’d been prepared for chaos and disarray—Wendy’s entire existence exemplified disorder to Sadie—but the light came on and showed her that the apartment was . . . normal. Clean and stylish even. The main space they’d entered served as a kitchen, dining room, and living room. Sadie could call it a great room, but it didn’t seem big enough to call great unless you were trying to be funny, and Sadie wasn’t in the mood for humor.

  On the kitchen counter were two document storage boxes. Were they the returned files the police had gone through? There was also a plastic bag that, once she walked over to it, she realized was the jewelry box the police had mentioned having found in a dresser drawer. It felt strange undoing the staples that held the bag closed, but she was eager to see if the pieces that had once belonged to her mother were still there.

  She pulled out the box, opened it, and sifted through the items until she found a gold ring with a large aquamarine stone in the center. She felt a wave of relief. She slid the ring on her finger and noted that, just as had always been the case, it was a little too big.

  “Your mother’s?” Pete said, startling her. She’d felt as though she’d been alone for a moment, but as soon as she realized he was behind her, she felt immediate comfort in his presence.

  “Yes—and her mother’s before that,” Sadie said, admiring the ring. She kept it on her finger and went back to the box. Within a few seconds she found the flowered brooch her mother had worn to church on Sundays, a strand of pearls, and one of the two diamond earrings her father had given their mother on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.

  “She lost one of the earrings,” Sadie said after taking every other item out of the box to make sure the missing earring wasn’t hiding in a corner. The rest of the jewelry was gaudy and bright—costume jewelry like Detective Lopez had said. “But considering that I thought I would never see them again, I’m thrilled that she still has these things.”

  Sadie put her mother’s jewelry into the zippered pocket of her purse, then closed the jewelry box, realizing as she did so that it was very similar to the one she’d just bought from Choy’s, though this box was painted red, not black. She ran her hand across the painting on the top: a crane flying over a pond of bulrushes. There was Chinese writing along the top, and Sadie wondered what it said.

  Had Ji given Wendy this box? The idea created a tender spot in her heart to think that although Ji said he and Wendy weren’t close, there was a connection between them. She put her purse on one of the bar stools and had a sudden pang of conscience. All of Wendy’s things now rightly belonged to Ji. The idea of parting with her mother’s jewelry again filled her with regret. But Ji was Wendy’s child and had the legal claim to all of Wendy’s belongings. Sadie reminded herself that they were just things; she’d given herself the same argument when she’d first realized Wendy had taken the jewelry fifteen years earlier.

  “This is a really nice place,” Pete said as he walked toward the large bay window at the front of the long room. He twisted the wand for the wooden blinds of the middle window and the natural light poured in. Pete commented on the view, but Sadie was still processing the apartment.

  The furnishings were angular and compact but fit well in the narrow room, which was o
nly about twelve feet wide. There was a two-person table in the dining area and a large mirror on the wall over a buffet table painted bright red and decorated with coordinating pottery. The kitchen area divided the dining area from the living room, where a small sectional couch and a large shag rug, red with orange swirls, squared off that space. A flat-screen television was on one wall with five square canvas paintings on the wall opposite.

  Sadie could see areas where light gray graphite was used by the investigators to dust for prints on the wall and on the furniture, but it was minimal and the overall look of the apartment was clean, appealing, and . . . normal. How could it be so normal when Wendy was so not normal?

  “Is this her?” Pete asked from where he stood in the middle of the living room, staring at the canvases.

  Sadie joined him and looked at the oil paintings prominently displayed. It had been so long since Sadie had seen her sister that she couldn’t say for sure that it was Wendy depicted in the paintings, but she suspected that it was.

  The center canvas was a portrait of a middle-aged woman giving a speculative look, her fingers pointed beneath her chin and her long, tight blonde curls wild around her face. The other canvases were like a puzzle piece of that first painting: the fingers, an eye, the mouth, a section of curl, each with a different color of emphasis—green, blue, red, and yellow.

  “I wonder if she painted them herself,” Sadie said, finding it rather narcissistic that Wendy had decorated her home with self-portraits. Wendy’s face staring back at her was disturbing, and she couldn’t help but wonder about the idea of ghosts. Sadie was very aware that she hadn’t been welcomed into Wendy’s space when Wendy was alive.

  “She was an artist?” Pete asked, saving Sadie from her thoughts.

  Sadie turned away from the portraits and nodded. “She first left home to go to art school, and my parents sent her tuition for a while. I don’t know if she ever finished.” She looked back at the jewelry box Ji had painted. What did he think about the talent he and his mother shared?

  “She’s very good,” Pete said.

  She was very good, Sadie clarified in her mind. She moved to the windows and opened the other two blinds. She could feel Pete watching her for a few moments, then he turned his attention to a cardboard box on one end of the couch full of magazines and books.

  “It looks like Ji already started packing things up.” Pete picked up a stack of magazines and shuffled through them.

  The kitchen drew Sadie to it, and she noted the dishes in the sink—a coffee mug, a bowl with what looked like petrified cereal bits in it, and a small plate with a smear of solidified jam. Had those been the last dishes Wendy had used? The thought gave her chills.

  The counters were clear, the cupboards organized, and the fridge full of food that was beginning to smell sour after five weeks of neglect.

  “Let’s check the rest of the apartment,” Pete said.

  Sadie shut the fridge and looked between the two doors that led off the main space, one on the left wall and one directly across from it on the right. Both closed doors were on the living room end.

  Sadie stood on the invisible boundary between the living room and kitchen as Pete twisted the knob of the door to the right. Tension seeped into her shoulders and chest. The door could lead to the bathroom—the room where Wendy had died.

  Pete opened the door slowly as though he were thinking the same thing, then paused, flipped on the light, and opened the door all the way. “It’s an office,” he said as he stepped inside.

  “An office?” Sadie was spurred into motion by the surprising answer; she hadn’t expected anything other than a bedroom since there were only two doors leading off the living room area and one had to be the bathroom, right?

  Sadie entered the room and Pete stepped aside. The door opened into the back of the room, which was about twelve feet wide and fifteen feet long. A desk sat against the wall opposite the door while bookshelves stacked with books, knickknacks, and miscellaneous, semi-organized minutiae flanked the doorway.

  A closet gave away the fact that this room was a second bedroom by design, but obviously not used as such. Wendy having a home office was further evidence of the idea that Wendy’s life might not be so different from Sadie’s. It was an incredibly uncomfortable thought.

  After observing the space, Pete stepped past Sadie into the living room and crossed to the other closed door. He wasn’t as slow opening the second door, and this time Sadie was right behind him. The door opened inward and blocked the back portion of the room.

  It was a bedroom with a large queen-sized bed set near the bay windows and a chest of drawers a few feet past the footboard, set against the shared wall of the living room. Across from the doorway where Pete and Sadie stood was a closet twice the size of the one in the office.

  Pete stepped into the room and Sadie followed so that he could close the bedroom door, revealing another door. Was that the bathroom? Accessed through the bedroom?

  The paint smell was stronger here, thankfully blocking out any other scents that might be in this portion of the apartment. Pete opened the final door, and Sadie tensed even as she stepped forward to look over Pete’s shoulder. She relaxed when she realized that the bathroom had been completely gutted.

  There was no toilet, tub, or sink—just pipes sticking out of freshly painted walls. Big sections of drywall were missing, exposing the wooden framework coated with a green substance, perhaps some kind of chemical. On the far wall, above where the tub would be, Sadie assumed, was a small window, no more than eighteen inches square. It had a handle that when turned opened the window a few inches—Sadie’s parents’ home had had the same type of windows.

  Pete stepped over the threshold onto naked subflooring. “They took everything out.” He pointed up at the bathroom fan in the ceiling, still whirring. “I wonder if that was on the whole time she was here? If the window was open and the fan on, it might explain why no one smelled anything and why the smell didn’t seep into the apartment too much.”

  Sadie nodded to confirm she’d heard the morbid observation and looked at the thick rubber strip nailed to the bottom of the door. It would create a good seal when it was closed. Was that coincidence or design?

  “If the fan vents to the roof,” Pete said, still looking up at the ceiling, “it’d also help explain why no one noticed the smell. This bathroom is on an exterior wall of the building and as far from the other tenant on this floor as it could possibly be.” Pete looked around. “But that doesn’t explain why no one would miss her or check up on her.”

  One of the newspaper articles Sadie had read about Wendy’s death pointed out that no one had reported Wendy missing. Didn’t she have any friends? Anyone she interacted with on a regular basis?

  Maybe it wasn’t just family Wendy had pushed out of her life.

  Sadie turned back to the bedroom and her eye caught the enormous painting hung across from Wendy’s bed and above the chest of drawers. She immediately felt herself blushing, then glanced at Pete to see that he, too, was avoiding looking at the painting. Like the canvases in the living room, it was unadorned with a frame. She took a breath and looked again in order to confirm that the nude portrait was indeed of her sister, though she was a young woman in the picture.

  “Maybe we could take that down,” she said.

  Pete nodded, and between the two of them, they were able to lift it off the wall and lean it against the footboard of the bed. Why on earth would Wendy want to stare at herself naked? Especially a younger version of herself? It served as a reminder that there were things about Wendy that Sadie would never understand.

  “Well, I guess we might as well get to work, huh?” she said to break the awkwardness that had descended. She crossed to the bedroom windows and twisted open the blinds to let in the natural light. Her breath caught in her throat as the view from the window commanded her attention. The living room window had mostly showed the buildings across the street, but this perspective was magnificent. S
he could see over the tops of several buildings, across the city, and out to the ocean. Even though the fog cover was still apparent, the view was relatively clear. She heard Pete come up behind her.

  “Wow,” he whispered, putting a hand on her shoulder. “That is spectacular.”

  Sadie nodded. It really was breathtaking, and for a moment she forgot why she was there and just took in the beauty of the place. Perhaps she even gained a small sense of what it was Wendy loved about this city—and what Pete loved, too. His arms came around Sadie’s waist, and she hugged them to her. They stood in silence for a few seconds before Pete kissed the side of her neck, sending a shimmer of heat down her spine and causing her to close her eyes to better focus on the feel of him so close, the smell of his cologne, the comfort of his affection. In just a few weeks, Pete would be her husband. She could scarcely believe it, and yet she wondered how she could not have known from the moment she met him that they would live out the rest of their lives together?

  The sound of a vibrating cell phone interrupted the moment, and Pete pulled away before reaching into his pocket. He gave the phone a quick look before sliding his thumb across the screen to answer it and putting it to his ear. “Pete Cunningham,” he said into the phone, then paused a moment before giving Sadie a quick smile and turning toward the doorway of the bedroom. “Yes, Detective Lopez. We made it safe and sound.” He pulled open the bedroom door and disappeared into the common area, leaving Sadie alone in Wendy’s bedroom. She turned to the window again. This is the view Wendy saw every day, Sadie thought to herself and felt a tiny glimmer of connection.