"And I was wondering whether you had time to look at the Sentosa Landmark Villas yet."

"Beg your pardon?"

"If you take a look at this chart and follow the current patterns, doesn't it look as though a body found here"-a short but very red fingernail jabbed at the map-"would most likely have come from somewhere around here . . . especially if it was put into the water at high tide?"

SSS Salim had a feeling that Aunty Lee was reminding him of something he should have known. "My grandfather used to take me fishing around there," he said. "I should have thought of that. It's actually very true-very good. If anything comes of it, I will make sure to give you the credit . . ."

"Don't be silly, boy," Aunty Lee said fondly. "You just go and find out what you can."

"I still don't understand . . ." SSS Salim could not think of a way to finish his question without sounding rude. "I mean Commissioner Raja . . . he has never . . . I only met him once before this, when he attended our graduation . . . I don't think he even remembered me. How come-"

"He and I had met before," Aunty Lee said lightly. "Long ago, when there were fewer people in Singapore, everybody knew everybody else. Now, when people in our age group are starting to die out, those of us left are in the same situation. And we know who we can trust. So when the commissioner and I met again by chance at a friend's home, we both agreed that you are a nice, responsible young man. Of course he remembers you!"

"But why?" SSS Salim had to ask. Why did an upper-middle-cla.s.s Tai-Tai worry about such sordid things? "Why are you so interested?"

"Because the two girls who died both came to eat in my restaurant. For me that makes it personal. If they ate my cooking, they are my guests and they are my family. Why don't you eat your nasi lemak? You don't like it, is it?"

Salim ate his nasi lemak.

Aunty Lee's next stop was Carla Saito's small room in the Frangipani Inn on Pasir Panjang Road. It was not a place Aunty Lee was familiar with and she took it all in with interest.

The Frangipani Inn could have been a stack of s...o...b..x apartments except for the check-in counter that stood in the overdecorated foyer. There were plastic flowers everywhere. Though two girls, recent arrivals from the People's Republic of China by their accents, were wiping down the front window side by side as they talked. Nina noted there were smudges on the walls and dust on the corner of the counter where Aunty Lee put down her bag.

"Hourly rate or daily rate?" the concierge asked in a Filipino accent without looking up from his paper.

Aunty Lee waited. When the man finally looked at them, she said, "We are looking for Miss Carla Saito."

"Is she . . . is this person here with a man? Are you looking for your husband? We cannot give out such information. It is all confidential. Hotel policy."

"I am looking for Carla Saito," Aunty Lee said sweetly. "Of course, the room may be booked under the name Marianne Peters."

"This is an interesting area."

The front desk finally agreed to call Carla Saito. Between her refusing to come down to the lobby and Aunty Lee refusing to leave it, the beleaguered concierge eventually gave them her room number.

"It's not bad," Carla was saying. "There's a twenty-four-hour prata place, a Chinese food place, a 7-Eleven, and a laundry all in the next block. Which is useful, given there's no cafe and no room service in the hotel. And that Ying-Yang place looks like some kind of motorcycle rental. Nice guy runs it. He feeds the stray cats. If we ended up staying, I thought I might get a bike for transport.

"Marianne chose this place because she knew it from her university days. She told me about the twenty-four-hour cheese prata." Suddenly she fell silent. "I don't know why I'm talking like this. What do you want?"

Aunty Lee knew how the young woman felt. What had happened was not yet real to her. But somewhere inside, she must have known for some time. And she was no doubt feeling that nothing mattered anymore and would never matter again. In the days following her husband's death, Aunty Lee would have killed herself if there hadn't been visitors constantly around her needing to be fed and looked after.

"Tell me," Aunty Lee said. She motioned to Nina to put the tingkat of hot soup on the small coffee table. Nina could not help wrinkling her nose at the griminess of the room and the thought of cheese prata. Nina liked cheese and she liked pratas-fried flatbreads usually served with mutton or vegetable curry-but she could not stomach the idea of a cheese prata combination made at the twenty-four-hour-stall around the corner on Clementi Road. She had never tried it, but to Nina things as different as Western cheese and Indian prata should not be combined.

Though unwashed and probably suffering from insomnia, Nina thought, but without the black-rimmed eyes she'd had the last time she and Aunty Lee had seen her, Carla Saito looked much younger and almost pretty.

"No, I don't want to talk to you," she suddenly declared. She stood up and marched toward them. "I don't want to have anything to do with you!"

Nina had not realized till now how tall Carla was. Instinctively she took a step backward, pulling on Aunty Lee's arm to make her move too, but Aunty Lee simply swung both her arm and Nina behind her, staying put.

"You're enjoying this, aren't you?" Carla Saito's voice was low and harsh from tears and dehydration. "You're just an old busybody and you've got nothing better to do, so you're meddling here. Get out of my room or I'm going to smash your stupid soup into your face!"

10.

Carla Saito and Marianne Peters "All right," said Aunty Lee. She blinked at Carla Saito, somehow not seeming to notice Nina's frantic tugging at her arm. "You can throw the soup at me if it makes you feel better. But doing that probably won't do you as much good as eating it."

Carla made an unconvincing sweeping gesture that encompa.s.sed Aunty Lee and the tingkat of hot soup that Nina had put on the table. Nina winced but Aunty Lee watched unperturbed. Carla's face suddenly began to twist in silent agony. She crumpled where she stood. As Nina thought later, it was as though all the bones in her body had just melted.

Instantly Aunty Lee was squatting with her arms around the choking, shaking girl. "I know," she said. "I know, I know." When finally Carla started to cry in earnest, her moaning and m.u.f.fled screams came as a relief after the tension that had blocked them. Nina found that she herself was shaking as well and sat down quietly on the only chair in the room. Neither Aunty Lee nor Carla, who continued holding on to her, seemed to notice.

"Both Laura and Marianne used to come to eat my food," Aunty Lee said. "I feel responsible for the people I feed. Once my food has gone into them and become part of them and their lives, I become part of their lives. In a way I love them. And I watched Marianne grow up, you know. And having lost someone who was very, very much the center of my life, I do know something of what you are going through.

"Besides," she continued, "you are hungry. You say it's not my business, but all hungry people are my business."

Now that she was somewhat calmer, Carla drank the soup. It was good soup, with very thinly sliced carrots, cherry tomatoes, baby corn, and mini bitter gourds in a clear dried shiitake and miso broth, with fragments of kway teow by then so impregnated with liquid flavor they could be swallowed without chewing.

Aunty Lee was right, Carla Saito thought. Solving the most immediate of her hungers gave her strength to attack the others.

"Thank you," she said to the grave old woman who had watched her eat. "I needed that. What are we going to do now?"

"Tell me about Marianne," Aunty Lee said. "Tell me what you are keeping secret and what you think her parents still don't know."

Carla had already given her statement to the police, who had not arrested or accused her of anything. But they had advised her not to leave Singapore just yet. They had not said how long their "not just yet" might last. She seemed strangely unperturbed by this injunction. In her position, Nina was certain she would have been climbing up the walls. But then she had never been in Carla Saito's position. Aunty Lee seemed to understand. She waited.

"Anyway, I have nowhere else to go," Carla said in the same emotionless monotone in which she had answered all Aunty Lee's questions. That served to explain both why she had no objection to remaining in Singapore and, perhaps, why she was willing to talk to Aunty Lee after her initial show of resistance.

"Marianne told me that the real reason she went to Washington was to commit suicide." She looked hard at Aunty Lee, searching for a reaction. Aunty Lee opened her eyes and looked satisfactorily startled.

"Why would she do such a thing?"

"Because she didn't want to upset her family, her parents. But she felt she just couldn't go on living here the way they expected her to. She could not live with what she had become in their eyes. She thought that if she died over there, they would put it down to depression or even think it was an accident or something . . . Anyway, they wouldn't blame themselves for it. I thought I had stopped her from considering such thoughts. I thought I saved her when we met. I thought it was like magic, that that's what brought us together."

Carla Saito paused, then added, "That's the real reason she was in Washington. She didn't want to kill herself in Singapore because of her family. In spite of everything, she cared very much for her family."

"You didn't tell the police that?"

"It wasn't relevant."

"Surely it would be just as bad for her family wherever she killed herself," Aunty Lee pointed out gently.

"But it would not be something they would have to remember every time they had to look at or pa.s.s by the place where it happened. And she said that if she died so far away, they could believe it was an accident or something if they wanted to."

Aunty Lee reflected that whatever Marianne's reasons for wanting to kill herself, she had not wanted to hurt her family.

In spite of the shock of learning of Marianne Peters's death, Carla Saito now seemed more in control of herself than she'd been on her previous visits to Aunty Lee's Delights. At least knowing that the worst had happened took away the raging uncertainty. Aunty Lee knew from her own experience, however, that the physical reality of death had not yet sunk in. In Carla's case, it would take even longer than it usually did because so much of her relationship with Marianne had been spent apart from each other. Even if Carla's mind knew that Marianne Peters was dead, her heart would continue waiting for the next phone call, the next blip on the computer screen that announced that her friend was online and waiting to hear from her. It was like being suspended in purgatory with occasional glimpses into h.e.l.l.

"Do you need to tell anybody what happened?" Aunty Lee asked. "Won't anybody back home be wondering where you are?"

"There's no one to worry. I quit my job and sold my place. I wanted to tie up all my loose ends, in case I ended up never going back. I suppose I will, though, sooner or later. Meanwhile I haven't done anything about getting a ticket yet."

Aunty Lee filled Carla's cup of tea from the thermos. It was chrysanthemum tea, said to be calming; Carla Saito might be speaking slowly, but the way her eyes moved constantly over the table and around the room even as she spoke suggested there was a lot of tension beneath the surface. Right now it was blanketed by grief and exhaustion, but Aunty Lee was not going to feed it in any way if she could help it.

"You were telling me about meeting Marianne in Washington. You said you didn't want to say anything earlier in case it got her into trouble with her parents?"

Carla looked at Aunty Lee. "She spent a lot of time in your cafe, didn't she? She said she liked it there, that it was like her second home. And she liked you."

"I hope so. I think she did. Otherwise she wouldn't have come." Aunty Lee smiled. "Marianne didn't do what she didn't want to do." She could tell Carla was not ignoring her query so much as working herself around to a starting point.

Carla shook her head slightly but seemed to agree. "You knew her family, right? You knew her when she was growing up?"

"Not really. By the time I married my late husband, she and her brother were already almost teenagers. I think she was eleven or twelve. Her parents were friends of my late husband and his wife. Mark would remember her better. You met my stepson, Mark, at the cafe that night, didn't you?"

Carla Saito remembered and dismissed the subject. "I wish I'd told her to forget her family, let them think she was dead, and just stay with me in Washington."

"Should her family blame themselves?"

"Because she's dead now? Of course not. Marianne didn't kill herself. How can you even think that? Didn't you read about how she was found? Wrapped in plastic bags?"

Aunty Lee fluttered her hands apologetically. "No, no, no. That is not what I meant. Forgive me, I am an old lady and sometimes I don't put things very well. I mean, were they responsible for how Marianne was feeling when you first met her in Washington?"

"No. Or maybe yes. I mean, they were responsible in that they created the environment and everything. Marianne said it wasn't their fault. She said traditional Indian families in Asia are always overprotective, especially of their daughters."

Aunty Lee would have thought that traditional families everywhere in the world were protective of their daughters.

"I know I talked her out of killing herself that time. I told Marianne if she was going to die anyway, why not just run away, disappear, and start over? Just as bad for her family as if she killed herself, true, but not as bad for her. She would have a new start and they would feel better about it in time. I did not tell you that earlier because I wondered or hoped that something had happened to make Marianne freak out and run off just to get away from them. Her family had that effect on her. So I wanted to speak to family members or someone who knew the family-Laura Kwee and you in this case-to help me find out whether anything had happened in the Peters family just before Marianne vanished."

"Laura Kwee?" Aunty Lee asked.

"That's why I was looking for her. She told Mari that someone offered us the use of his holiday chalet on Sentosa. Because he'd booked it for a special two-week stay, but his friend had to cancel. He knew she was a lesbian because Laura had found out and told him. Mari was so mad at Laura, so this was like a peace offering. He said she could go look at the place and then decide. But she pretty much decided right away because she said it couldn't be any worse than this place"-Carla waved her hand to encompa.s.s the room-"plus it was free and much bigger, and being in a chalet on Sentosa meant that we wouldn't be holed up in a room all the time in case someone saw her and told her parents she was in Singapore. But after that, I never heard from her again. And she never canceled the reservation, so I came here to wait for her."

"Marianne said it was a man who offered her the chalet on Sentosa? Are you sure she didn't mention a name?"

"I don't think she said it was a guy, but from the way she talked about it, that's the impression I got. Oh, it was a guy all right. Mari said she thought Laura would have liked her to turn down the offer so she could go to Sentosa with him herself, but she was still angry with Laura, so she was going to accept. She said I shouldn't be so suspicious of people."

"Suspicious? Were you?"

Carla Saito rubbed her already red eyes. Without makeup, the shadows beneath them were dark enough to look like bruises. "Not any more suspicious than I was of anyone else. That's the worst of it, right? I was always warning Marianne to be careful, she never believed me when I told her people were interested in her. And then, when this perverted b.a.s.t.a.r.d came along, I didn't sense a thing. I just let her walk right into it."

"Stop being so self-centered," Aunty Lee said.

Carla looked taken aback. "What?"

"This is not about you. It is about whoever persuaded Marianne to go to Sentosa with him. He is the one we should be thinking about. You can spend the rest of your life wondering whether or not you should have been more suspicious, but is that going to find the man who might have killed her?"

"You really think there's any chance we can find who did this to her?"

Aunty Lee looked at Carla. For once, she saw no cynicism or sarcasm in her features, only a forlorn person hungering for hope. Aunty Lee desperately wanted to feed that hope, but she was always wary of making promises to demons and she was not yet certain this tense young woman was not harboring a demon within her.

"I don't know whether there is a chance," Aunty Lee said honestly. "You are still young and strong. You can go away and move on with your life, but an old lady like me, I know that I cannot go on with my life without trying to find out the truth."

Whether she was a demon or not, the answer worked for Carla Saito.

"I want to find out too."

"Then tell me everything that Marianne Peters said to you about this person. And anything else she mentioned over the last few months. I want you to tell me everything you remember, down to the smallest detail."

In life as in recipes, it was often the smallest pinch of contrasting flavor-the lightest splash of seasoning savored undetected-that made all the difference to a dish.

Carla Saito pressed a few keys on her phone then handed it to Aunty Lee, who waved it away without trying to read the text message.

"Better you read it to me. By the time I find my spectacles, I have forgotten what I wanted to read."

" 'Don't have details yet but may have much better place for us to stay.' I called her back right away, of course, but she said she couldn't talk. She was with people. She said she would call back but she didn't."

"Why didn't you tell the police all this?"

"I knew the police were going to suspect me. They were already asking why I came to Singapore because n.o.body believes I would fly out here just to see Marianne. If I told them about us, I was afraid they would just blame everything on me and stop looking for the real culprit."

Aunty Lee thought about this. "They'll do their job."

"How can you say that?"

"This is Singapore. Most of our murders here come from domestic disputes and nightclub fights. They will suspect you first because you and Marianne were having a relationship. If you are innocent, they will move on to the next suspect. That is how it works here. By the book and step-by-step." And of course they sometimes got help from concerned citizens, but Aunty Lee did not mention this. Even in school there were always extra tutors and exam aids to help students ace important tests.

"Do you think her family will mind if I go to the funeral?" Carla asked.

Aunty Lee did not know. She did not even know whether there was going to be a funeral at all. What was the correct procedure for burying a murder victim?

"I will talk to them. But there's no reason why you should not be there. You can come with me."

"Marianne and I did quarrel, you know. Before I came out. That's why I thought maybe . . ."

"Maybe she changed her mind."

Carla Saito nodded. "It was stupid. I thought she was being too idealistic. Like all the freedom-to-marry, vegan, freegan stuff. I lived in all that. I knew she was just struck by how new it was to her to be involved in a relationship with another woman and feared that it wouldn't last. I wanted us to be comfortable together. But as it turned out, it lasted for her all the rest of her life, didn't it?"

"You triggered the search," Aunty Lee said to Carla Saito. "That made all the difference."

"No, it didn't," Carla said bitterly. "At least to Marianne it makes no difference at all."