Eat, Prey, Love

by Laura Durham

  Mack thumped Fern on the shoulder, causing the hairstylist’s knees to buckle. “I, for one, think it’s a brilliant idea. Buster and I have been so busy training the hotel staff that we haven’t seen anything but the floral design room.”

  “Are you sure we won’t get in trouble with Carol Ann for going off schedule?” Buster asked as Mack scooted his way to the back seat.

  Fern massaged his shoulder as he sat next to Kate. “Carol Ann’s assistants gave her a Xanax to calm her down. That Georgia peach will be out for hours. Besides, we’ll be back in time for the dinner at Sky Bar.”

  “And tonight’s dinner has very little floral decor,” Mack reminded Buster. “So as long as we’re back by midafternoon, we’ll be fine.”

  The van lurched forward and we drove up the curved driveway, pausing at the massive walls made out of giant bronze rosettes that framed the resort entrance before making a right onto the two-lane road. Tall knotty trees stretched their branches overhead and were interspersed with palm trees along the street. The flag of Indonesia, a band of red on top of a band of white, was tied to trees on both sides, and the fabric flapped in the breeze. A stream of people riding motor scooters passed us going in the opposite direction, some riding single file and some in pairs.

  “Look at all the bikers,” Buster said.

  Mack peered out the window. “Who knew that Bali had a biker culture?”

  I didn’t point out that these small motorbikes were a far cry from their massive black-and-chrome Harleys and seemed to be more practical than stylish with thin wheels and little embossed leather. Not to mention the fact that if Buster and Mack tried to ride a Balinese scooter, I felt sure they would crush it.

  “Where are we headed?” I asked the driver, a Balinese man named Wayan, meaning firstborn, with neatly parted black hair and a ready smile.

  “Temple and waterfall,” he said, catching my eye in the rearview mirror. “Up north.”

  I pointed to a stone structure with a thatched roof along the side of the road that was flanked by two ornamental statues. “Is that a temple?”

  He shrugged. “House temple.”

  Kate leaned forward. “What’s a house temple?”

  “Families have private temples on their property,” Wayan explained. “Very common.”

  “That’s interesting.” I pointed to an ornate orange building set back from the road, fronted by a stone statue of a dancing god. The god’s face looked like an exaggerated mask with bulging eyes, large pointed teeth, and a curled beard. I couldn’t imagine having something like that in front of my apartment building in Georgetown. Then again, I had Leatrice to ward off evil spirits and unwanted solicitors.

  “You’ve got to admit the belt is fabulous,” Fern said. The statue did have a wide stone belt that extended past its feet, covered with flowers and ornate scrolling patterns and centered with what appeared to be a monster-face belt buckle.

  “That’s one way to describe it,” Richard said.

  We drove down an open stretch of road with swaths of rice fields on both sides, the golden-green plants bending and swaying under their weight. Wayan pointed out the women in cone-shaped straw hats gathering the stalks of rice in bundles and pounding them in wooden troughs. “Old-fashioned way.”

  “I thought rice was grown on the sides of hills,” Richard said as he flipped through his Bali guidebook. “Isn’t Bali famous for the terraced rice paddies?”

  Wayan nodded. “More north.”

  Richard’s phone trilled. He fished it out of his leather bag, glanced at the screen, and sighed. “Yes, Leatrice?” He listened for a moment, then held the phone out to me. “She wants to talk to you.”

  I put the phone to me ear, my stomach clenching in anticipation of bad news. Had a pipe burst? It was winter in DC, after all, and our building was old. “What’s up, Leatrice?”

  “I wanted to run this by you first, in case Richard got his nose bent out of shape,” Leatrice said, Hermes yipping happily in the background.

  I twisted around so Richard couldn’t see my face. “What are you up to?”

  “Nothing,” Leatrice said. “But what do you think Richard would say about a pet psychic?”

  I glanced back at Richard, who had his arms crossed and his eyes narrowed. “Nothing I could repeat in mixed company.”

  “Oh.” Her voice sounded deflated.

  “Are you planning on hiring one or becoming one?” I asked.

  “Aren’t you a stitch?” Leatrice giggled. “Hiring one, of course. Although pet psychic might not be a bad job for me, come to think of it. I’ve always had a bit of the second sight.”

  Just what I needed—Leatrice to add communing with the dead and having psychic visions to her array of nuttiness.

  I lowered my voice. “This is a bad idea. Why did it even occur to you?”

  “I think Hermes is a very intuitive dog. He seems to have instincts about people when we go to the park. I thought if I brought in a proper psychic, Hermes could tell me things about some of the people I’m keeping an eye on.”

  “Who are you keeping an eye on?” I asked, trying to make my voice stern. “Are you illegally surveilling people again?”

  “It isn’t illegal to observe people,” Leatrice said. “Especially when you’re ninety percent sure they’re Russian moles.”

  I put a hand over my eyes. “Oh, good lord.”

  “Hermes agrees with me. “The dog yipped again in the background. “And I’m sure he could tell me more with the proper channeling.”

  “Absolutely not,” I whispered, scooting further down the seat away from Richard so he couldn’t overhear me scold my neighbor. “Richard will have a fit if he finds out.”

  “Fine.” Leatrice sighed loudly. “But don’t blame me when it turns out the Russians have a sleeper cell embedded in Georgetown.”

  “I promise,” I said. “Now I have to go.”

  I clicked off and handed the phone back to Richard.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “She called to tell me she let herself into my apartment to let all the faucets drip.” I purposely looked out the window to avoid his penetrating gaze. “It’s going to be below freezing in DC this week.”

  He made a noise in the back of his throat that told me he only partially believed me.

  “Lucky us to be here instead of there,” Fern said. “It’s always warm near the equator.”

  I lay my head back on the headrest and closed my eyes. The exhaustion of the trip, coupled with the stress of the past few hours and Leatrice’s latest crazy idea, seemed to be catching up with me. Not to mention the lulling motion of the van. When I woke, we were pulling over on the side of a road overgrown with thick foliage.

  “We’re stopping at a coffee plantation,” Richard said as he scooted toward the door to the van and slid it open.

  “Perfect,” I said, following him. “I could use something to wake me up.”

  A large stone sign reading “Cantik Agriculture Luwak Coffee” sat near the edge of the road with a pair of open-air wooden huts nearby. Wayan waved us to a path with a bamboo door leading into the jungle.

  I followed Richard, pausing to wait for the rest of the gang when I reached the entrance. Buster and Mack were right behind me, but Fern stood by the van as Kate tied a black-and-teal paisley sarong around his waist. This was not a surprise as Fern prided himself in dressing to the theme of any occasion. I’d been shocked he hadn’t worn a full Balinese headdress on the plane.

  “What are you doing?” I called back to them.

  “Getting in the Bali spirit,” Fern said, taking tiny steps toward me in the snugly wrapped sarong that nearly reached his feet.

  “I hope you can walk faster than that,” I said. “It looks like there’s a long path into the jungle.”

  Fern picked up the pace, jogging without moving anything above his knees.

  Richard turned around and his eyes rolled heavenward. “You look like a geisha girl being chased.”

 
Fern stuck out his tongue as he caught up with us. “You’re just jealous that you don’t have an authentic batik sarong.”

  “Where did you get it?” I asked. “We’ve barely been here twenty-four hours, and this is the first time we’ve left the hotel.”

  “I took a walk on the beach this morning. Once you get away from the hotel zone, there are quite a few people selling things. Sarongs, massages, jewelry.”

  Not surprising since our resort was in a tourist area with quite a few luxurious hotels.

  “Are you all coming?” Mack asked from a few feet inside the jungle. “Coffee awaits.”

  We walked down the pebbled path into the dense jungle, a bamboo railing guiding us through the twists and turns. As we emerged from the path, a pair of metal cages, each topped with a tin roof, sat off to one side. Several black-haired animals reminiscent of foxes lay curled up inside.

  “What are those?” Kate asked Wayan who waited for us by the cages.

  “Civet cats,” Wayan said. “They make the luwak coffee.”

  Kate tilted her head. “What’s luwak coffee?”

  Richard scanned a page of his Bali guide. “Poop coffee.”

  “I beg your pardon?” I said.

  “The palm civets eat the coffee beans but can’t digest the stone of the coffee berry, so they poop them out and that’s what’s used to make luwak coffee,” Richard read from his book. “It’s supposed to be the best coffee in the world.”

  Kate put a hand on the cage. “Poor civets.”

  Fern made a face. “They’re not the ones drinking the poo, darling.”

  “Still,” Mack said, “do you think we could break them out?”

  I patted them both on the back. “You know how much I love to do illegal things, but why don’t we try not to get arrested on our second day here?”

  Wayan led us away from the cages and toward a wooden hut with open sides overlooking more dense green jungle. A series of long polished-teakwood tables with benches on each side filled the huts, each table topped with a large yellow laminated place mat with descriptions of the various coffees for sale.

  “Being arrested for liberating cats would be better than being arrested for murder,” Kate said, swinging one leg over a bench.

  I sat across from her. “For the last time, we aren’t going to be arrested for our colleague’s murder.”

  “Murder?” Wayan cocked his head to one side. “Why are you talking about murder?”

  “One of the women with us on this trip was poisoned last night at our hotel,” Kate explained.

  Wayan shook his head. “This is a bad thing. Bali didn’t have crime before visitors.”

  “None?” Fern asked, taking tiny sideways steps to sit down on the bench.

  “Balinese have a philosophy,” Wayan said. “What happens to you, happens to me.”

  “I like that,” Buster said, pushing his black motorcycle goggles up further on his bald head.

  “We are a small island, so we are all neighbors,” Wayan continued. “If our neighbor suffers, we suffer. We only have crime from people who visit.”

  “So there’s no way our colleague could have been killed by someone from Bali?” Richard asked.

  Wayan’s dark eyes widened, and he shook his head vigorously.

  “We didn’t suspect the staff anyway,” I reassured him as a wooden tray lined with twelve glass cups was placed in front of us. The glasses were each filled with a different drink and ranged in color from milky brown to deep mocha to garnet red. The server took the glasses off the tray and arranged them on the yellow place mat so they matched up with the coffee descriptions. He explained each variety, leaving us to taste them at our leisure. Luwak coffee, or poop coffee, wasn’t included in the sampling, much to our relief. Even if it were the best coffee in the world, the thought of the caged civets would have spoiled the experience.

  “Then who do we suspect?” Richard asked me once Wayan had walked away to chat with the staff. “We know it wasn’t one of us.”

  “Motive and opportunity.” I raised the cup of coconut coffee to my lips and took a small sip, savoring the rich flavor. “Once we figure out those two things, we’ll know who did it.”

  Mack nudged Kate. “I guess we know who’s dating the cop, don’t we?”

  I noticed Richard purse his lips. He wasn’t crazy about me dating Reese, although to be fair, he’d never warmed to any of the men I’d dated. Kate insisted that he would be less jealous if I included him in the relationship, but I barely had enough time to date Reese, much less Richard and Reese together.

  “Whoever killed her must have really hated her.” Fern lifted a glass of dark-brown coffee, his pinky finger outstretched. “Antifreeze is an awful way to do away with someone.”

  Mack shuddered. “I’m glad I was nowhere near when it happened.”

  Fern took a sip then replaced the glass and lifted the one next to it. “To be honest, I didn’t know she was poisoned. She just dropped dead like she’d had a heart attack.”

  I paused with the cup of vanilla coffee halfway to my lips, the sweet scent giving me pause. I wasn’t an expert on poisons, but I felt pretty sure it would take a lot of antifreeze to make someone drop dead like that. Fern was right. Whoever killed Veronica must have held more than a grudge against her. They must have despised her. I wondered what the wedding planner had done to warrant such hatred.

  Chapter 9

  “That was the perfect day,” Fern said as he shimmied out of the van, shopping bags filled with packs of fragrant coffee swinging from his shoulders.

  We stood under the covered portico in front of our resort as the bellmen greeted us with wide smiles. I glanced into the open lobby with its towering glass walls overlooking the pool and leading toward the beach. I heard the quiet clinking of china cups from the few guests having afternoon tea at low marble-topped tables, but otherwise the resort felt serene. I breathed in and smelled the faint saltwater of the ocean, feeling a sense of relief that I didn’t spot any of our fellow attendees lounging on the sleek beige furniture enjoying savory tea sandwiches and fruit-filled pastries. I didn’t relish dealing with the fallout from Jeremy’s gossip.

  Kate glanced at her phone. “And it’s only midafternoon. We still have plenty of time before dinner.”

  “That’s our cue to go start working on the floral design,” Buster said, nudging Mack.

  Mack threw his arms around Fern, who stumbled back a few steps. “Thanks for putting together the field trip.”

  Fern righted himself and smoothed his sarong. “Don’t mention it. I always say that shopping can cure just about any woe.”

  “Leave it to you to find a retail opportunity in the middle of the jungle,” Richard said, but I knew from his own coffee-filled shopping bags that he’d enjoyed the outing.

  Buster and Mack headed off in the direction of the hotel’s design studio,while the rest of us walked up the marble steps into the lobby.

  “It wasn’t all shopping,” I said. “The waterfall and temple were beautiful.”

  “Speaking of those,” Kate said, “Bali needs more elevators.”

  I knew what she meant. My legs still ached from climbing the hundreds of stairs down to get a good view of the impressive Tegenungan waterfall as water poured over the high rock cliffs to the pool below. Only Kate had been brave enough to swim in the cold water at the bottom of the fifty-foot waterfall, getting close enough to the rushing water cascading over the falls to have her hair soaked by the spray, but we’d all splashed around in the rocky shallows before trudging up the hundreds of steps to our van. But not before taking a photo of Fern next to the rustic wooden sign that instructed tourists “don’t worry, be sexy” followed by a smaller sign underneath reading “but not naked.”

  “My new motto,” Fern had exclaimed when he spotted the sign.

  We’d groaned when our driver had explained that the famous Gunung Kawi Hindu temple complex, with shrines carved into the stone cliffs, could only be reached by a se
ries of at least a dozen long staircases down into a valley. We’d walked down hundreds of stairs and past massive trees, their knotty branches stretching wide and draped with vines that reached the ground and swayed in the breeze. We’d crossed stone bridges over a rushing stream to get a better look at the ornate pyramid designs set into the stone, the ground above them verdant and topped with palm trees.

  I rubbed my thighs, remembering the wide temple complex we’d finally reached— a stone platform with a series of thatched-roof temple structures, some small and some large, gilded on the inside and guarded by stone gods lightly covered by moss. The two sides of the towering stone entrance to the temple complex were designed like a pair of carved stone staircases moving from low steps on the outside to the twenty-foot peak in the middle, but with a space between them in the center wide enough for us to walk through. “But it was worth it.”

  “Maybe so,” Kate admitted, “but I’m ready to lie on the beach for a while.”

  I pointed to her platform sneakers. “Maybe next time skip the heels.”

  “These aren’t heels,” she said, switching them out for a pair of flip-flops in her beach bag. “They’re designed to sculpt my calves.”

  “Can I borrow them later?” Fern said, hitching his shopping bags higher on his shoulders as he shuffled toward the beach with baby steps.

  We walked through the lobby and out the glass doors to the pool deck, then made our way past Dahlia and Kelly, lying with eyes closed in a cabana, to a row of cream-colored lounge chairs with matching umbrellas. I put on my sunglasses to shield my eyes from the bright sunlight as I stretched out on one of the lounge chairs. Kate did the same next to me while Richard unfurled a beige hotel towel, smoothing it on the chair before he sat down.

  “I suppose it’s time to lose the sarong,” Fern said with a frown as he unwound the fabric from his waist, revealing a banana yellow Speedo, and laid down next to Richard.

  Richard gaped at Fern’s eye-watering bathing suit as he tied the laces of his black board shorts into a prim bow.