by Vivien Chien
But she hadn’t. She was standing about three feet away from the edge of the pool, where a lump of black clothing floated ominously in the water.
I froze, staring at the form, trying to register what I was seeing.
The woman turned around to look at me, her eyes filled with terror. “Call 911!”
Peter came running out from behind me, grabbed my shoulders, and moved me out of the way. Without hesitation, he jumped into the pool and swam toward the black mass.
The woman turned to me again. “Young lady!”
I snapped out of my trance and ran to my purse, digging frantically for my phone. It had taken me a few moments to realize the thing I was looking at was a dead body.
CHAPTER
4
The body in the pool turned out to be Alice Kam. Peter had attempted to administer CPR, but it was useless. She was already dead.
The Westlake police arrived minutes later to secure the scene. They gave Donna permission to have her maid, Rosemary Chan, take the children to their friend’s house for the rest of the night. They weren’t involved and didn’t need to be exposed to the parts that came next.
The coroner was second to arrive. I watched as he and his team marched through the house onto the back patio.
Kimmy and I were huddled in the kitchen as everyone else went about their business. The police had begun their interrogations of the remaining guests and, of course, Donna.
On first sight, it looked like maybe Alice had fallen into the pool and drowned. But while we waited, Kimmy and I overheard the coroner say to one of the officers that he’d noticed bruising on Alice’s wrists and neck. His conclusion was that she had been held under water against her will. He needed to take the body to the lab for more testing, but he felt confident about his assessment.
“Well, now she’s gone and killed the damn maid,” Kimmy spat after hearing the coroner’s explanation.
“Kimmy! Shhhh! Don’t say that. Someone might hear you!” I peeked over her shoulder to see if anyone on the patio had heard her. They seemed to be preoccupied in their own conversation. “Also, she wasn’t a maid, she was a nanny.”
“Ha! Semantics. She washed the dishes, Lana.”
“Someone was just murdered, can we not bicker about the trivial details of her job description?” I hissed.
She shrugged. “Fine. You started it, but whatever. Hey, do you think the cops will be pissed if I head out to smoke? I’m gettin’ kinda antsy sitting around here.”
“I thought you quit?”
“Well, I just started back up.”
I shook my head. I knew that Kimmy was trying to distract me with her nonchalant demeanor, but that sort of thing never worked on me. “Can’t you just wait?”
“You never let me do anything,” she returned. “I can’t talk about what happened, I can’t say anything negative, I can’t smoke. Blah blah blah, Lana.”
A police officer entered the room, catching the tail end of our conversation. “Is everything all right in here, ladies?”
“Yeah,” Kimmy said before I could respond. “Just want to know if I can go for a smoke. This whole situation has got my nerves in a tizzy.”
“Actually, the two of you can go on home. We’re taking Ms. Feng in to the station for additional questioning.”
“Officer, is she being accused of something?” I asked, the palms of my hands beginning to sweat.
“I can’t discuss that with you at this time,” he replied.
“Because I can tell you that I’ve known Donna for my entire life, and she is not capable of doing something like this.”
“I appreciate your opinion, but this is standard procedure, ma’am.”
Ma’am! Who is he calling ma’am?
I was just about to say something when Kimmy pinched my arm. “Let’s go, Lana.”
We grabbed our things, and I glanced at Donna before heading out the front door. She looked unkempt and small sitting on her couch. She hadn’t even looked this torn up when her own husband died. She noticed me as I walked by. “Lana, would you do me a favor?”
The officer sitting with her gazed between the two of us.
“I’m afraid that one of the girls might have left their curling iron on in the upstairs bathroom. Could you go double-check it for me?” Donna looked up at the officer. “Would that be okay?”
The officer nodded. “I suppose that’s fine. Make it quick, please.”
I told Kimmy I’d meet her outside and ran up the winding staircase to the second-floor bathroom, remembering the first time I’d seen the massive, luxury bath. I’d sneaked into Donna’s house hoping to find information on her husband’s death. At that time I thought that she might be a killer, though she’d been proven innocent. But now she might actually be one.
I shook the thought out of my head and stepped into the lavish bath, turning on the light. There wasn’t a curling iron anywhere in sight. But there was a three inch terra-cotta soldier lying in the sink. I picked it up and inspected it. What the heck was this thing and what was it doing in here?
I didn’t understand why Donna had sent me up here, but I imagined it had to be some kind of code. Her kids were too old to play with this sort of toy, and there were no other children in the house. My own summation was that it didn’t belong.
I quickly checked under the counter and found a curling iron that hadn’t been used in a while. Just in case the cops decided to check on it themselves, I unraveled the cord and placed it on the counter, making it seem as if it had been there all along.
The cop yelled up the stairs. “Hey, is everything okay up there?”
“Yes, on my way, sorry.” I slipped the terra-cotta soldier into my purse and hurried back downstairs. Donna eyeballed me as if she knew I’d found what she’d really sent me for. “Darling, was it on?”
“Yes, but don’t worry, I took care of it.”
“Thank you, Lana, I’ll talk to you soon about payment. My apologies for the end of the evening.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “We can discuss that later.”
The cop ushered me out. I found Kimmy pacing in the driveway, puffing on her cigarette. “What the hell was all that about?”
“Nothing, just keep walking.”
* * *
Kimmy and I said a quick goodbye and drove off in separate directions, and I kept my finding to myself. Megan wouldn’t be home yet—it was only eleven thirty. She’d still be working. I decided to head up to the Zodiac instead of going straight home.
On the way to the bar, I tried calling Adam to let him know what happened, but his phone went straight to voice mail. Adam is a newer addition to my life. He started out as the lead detective in Thomas Feng’s murder case, but without intending to, we had taken a strong liking to each other as we kept crossing paths. And now, a handful of months later, he was my boyfriend. What crazy turns life can take when you least expect it. It was safe to say for the both of us that at the time of meeting, the last thing we were seeking was a romantic relationship.
I left a message telling him where I would be. Most likely he was working and it would be a while before he got back to me.
The parking lot of the bar was packed, and I immediately regretted not stopping home first to change my clothes. A qi-pao isn’t what you’d normally wear to a place like the Zodiac. It was a very casual bar—jeans and T-shirts were the status quo—and I was going to stick out like a sore thumb. After the night I’d had, though, I didn’t really care.
As I walked into the astrologically themed bar, a few eyes glanced my way, but thankfully nobody gawked. I shimmied my way onto a stool at the end of the bar and caught Megan’s attention.
“Hey!” She smiled. “I didn’t expect to see you in here tonight. How’d the party go?”
“Ugh, you’re not going to believe this.”
“One minute.” She scurried away before I could say anything else and returned with a mixed drink in hand. “Okay, you need this first. Now tell your story.”<
br />
I looked suspiciously at the neon-yellow drink she’d brought me.
“It’s a Sour Sagittarius, just drink it.”
I went through the entire night, the story pouring out of me in a wave of anxiety, from Donna’s strange behavior to my conversation with Alice, and everything that happened afterward.
When I was finished, she ran a hand through her hair. “Wow … just wow. The woman has finally snapped.”
“You think so?”
“Lana, her husband died and she barely batted an eyelash. It’s all coming out now. You can’t just hold that type of thing in forever.”
“True…” I chewed on my cocktail straw. “But it’s so out of character for her. I mean, violence in general.”
“Look, I know you respect this woman, and she does come across as a class act, but the mighty fall, too, ya know?”
“Oh!” I dug my hand into my purse and pulled out the tiny terra-cotta soldier. “I found this in her bathroom sink. She sent me up to her bathroom, but since the police were listening in, she told me there was a curling iron left on and I needed to check it and turn it off.”
Megan eyed the solider and took it from my hand. “What the heck is it?”
“No clue.” I shrugged. “There wasn’t an iron on in the bathroom—there wasn’t even one on the counter—and there was nothing there except this. So I’m assuming she wanted me to take it for whatever reason.”
Megan held it closer to her face and turned it over. “What’s this line in the middle of it?”
“Huh? What line?” I squinted, trying to see what she was looking at.
“This,” she said, handing it back to me.
I ran my finger over the break in the figure. “Hmm…” I gripped both ends and pulled. To my surprise it came apart. “Oh my God, Megan … it’s a thumb drive.”
CHAPTER
5
The minute I figured out it was a thumb drive, I wanted to rush out of the bar, run home, and rifle through it on my computer. I didn’t think Donna would particularly approve of that, but my curiosity always seems to win these inner battles I have with myself.
Megan, however, made me wait until she got off work so we could snoop together. Reluctantly, I stayed with her until the bar closed, impatiently tapping my fingernails on the bar as I waited for last call.
When we finally got home, Megan turned on the laptop while I took Kikko out for tinkle time and a few good sniffs around her favorite bushes.
Once I was back inside, I found Megan planted at the kitchen table with two beers and a box of wings she’d brought home from the bar. “Okay, let’s do this.” She slid one of the beer bottles toward me.
I retrieved the thumb drive from my purse and handed it over. She inserted it into the appropriate slot, and a message popped up asking if we wanted to open it.
When we opened the files, I pulled out the chair next to Megan and sat down in stupefied shock.
“Holy…” Megan looked at me. “Are you seeing this?”
I nodded in return.
I already knew that Donna Feng wasn’t who she said she was. Not entirely, anyway. I had stumbled upon all of Donna’s secrets while investigating her husband’s murder. There’d been a time when I thought she was the guilty party, and what I found hadn’t helped her case in my eyes. While sneaking through some of her husband’s personal effects, I had found a hidden envelope with information about Donna’s past. Apparently, something had caused Thomas Feng to look into his wife, and he’d hired a private investigator to find out what she was hiding from him. We never did find out why exactly he’d hired the investigator to begin with. Maybe the paranoia of his own double life had gotten to him and he’d begun to see things that weren’t there.
As Donna tells it, she was originally from California and had moved out to Cleveland to go to college. But in reality, she and her mother had fled from China when Donna was very young.
Her father had been mixed up in some type of bad business—which Donna had not elaborated on—and Donna’s mother made a deal to get the heck out of Dodge before anything tragic happened to her or her daughter. That deal came with a price.
And now, as we sat in front of the computer, reviewing the information we’d found several months before, a chill ran down my spine. Where had this come from? As far as I knew, the only existing copies of these documents had been in Thomas’s possession, and he had hidden them well. I’d held on to his copies for a short time after the conclusion of his murder investigation just in case they would be helpful in some way. But after the murder had been solved, I’d burned everything we’d found in fear of the wrong party getting their hands on them.
The files included the finalized report from the detective agency, Donna’s original birth certificate, the forged certificate saying she was born in the United States, and candid photos of her meeting with various people around Cleveland.
Originally I had kept the investigation that Thomas had conducted a secret, in an attempt to spare Donna’s feelings. The last thing I wanted was for her to think her husband betrayed her right before his death, but as time went on, mild concern set in that somehow it would cause repercussions down the line if she was kept too much in the dark. As gently as possible, once she’d had some time to grieve over the loss of her husband, I’d broken the news to her. At the time, I’d thought she handled it pretty well. But seeing her behavior now, I worried that she had been bottling up all her emotions on the matter.
“What do you think this means?” Megan asked as she scrolled through some candid photos of Donna.
“I’m not sure. Why was it in the bathroom?”
“Did Donna want you to take this because it was hers, or do you think it was left for her—maybe by one of the guests at the party?”
“I have no clue. None of it makes sense. Why was it in the bathroom, and if she knew it was there, why would she just leave it?”
“It’s possible it was the only place she could ditch it at the time. If the cops were with her and found it…”
“This could cause a lot of problems for her. Not only will she be outed for a false identity, but the people she was running from could very possibly find her.” I didn’t know if anyone would be looking for her after all these years, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that some people can hold a grudge over something that happened decades ago.
“Lana … do you think this is why the nanny was killed? What if she was the one who gave this to Donna? Then Donna kills her to keep her quiet. It could be blackmail of some kind.”
I shook my head out of frustration. “I don’t know. I can’t decide what to make of it. At all. My head is just a giant jumble of thoughts.”
“Maybe this is why Donna has been on edge this whole time. Maybe she hired Alice because she was forced to and the nanny was holding this over her head the whole time.”
“But for what purpose?”
“Who knows?” Megan lifted a chicken wing out of the take-out box and took a bite. “Could be a lot of things.”
I thought about the timing of Donna hiring the nanny, and how Donna had insisted the woman move in with her immediately. Was that strange? Did two teenage girls really need that much attention? Or were we making something out of nothing? “I have to talk to Donna as soon as possible,” I blurted. “I need to know why she wanted me to take this and where it came from.”
“I think what we really need to do is find out who this nanny woman really is. We should also consider talking to the other people who work for Donna … or ex-employees maybe?”
I could see the wheels turning at full speed in Megan’s brain by the gleam in her eye. If there was anyone who shared in my curiosity, it was her. “Let me talk to Donna before we start sticking our noses into this … we could have it all wrong.”
Megan shrugged. “Okay, but in this instance, I don’t know if you can trust a word that Donna says.”
* * *
I woke up on Sunday morning feeling as if
I hadn’t slept all that soundly, what with the many questions I had about the thumb drive and the small matter of seeing a dead body the day before. I couldn’t wait to head over to Donna’s and start getting some answers. But before I could do that, I had dim sum plans with my parents, my grandmother, and Anna May. It was a weekly tradition that my parents had started once my sister and I had moved out on our own, since it guaranteed them scheduled family time no matter what was going on in our lives.
When the tradition started, I had no clue that I’d soon be managing our family’s restaurant, thereby ensuring I saw my mother at least five times a week. Since my grandmother had come to stay with us, though, my mother had taken a backseat at the restaurant and spent less and less time there. See what happens when you do a good job? People start leaving you in charge of things.
In truth, it wasn’t as bad as I’d originally thought it might be. I actually found that I enjoyed running the show. In a former life, I’d had much different plans.
I downed some coffee while I dressed myself and applied makeup. A Lana Lee rule is that you never leave the house without makeup on. If you catch me without my eyeliner, it means that I’m terribly ill.
An hour later, I arrived at Li-Wah’s, my family’s dim sum restaurant of choice. The restaurant was located in a shopping plaza much like Asia Village, but this one was on the east side of town.
Normally, I was the last to arrive, but since I was so anxious to get things under way and speak with Donna, I beat my family there by five minutes. I think I even surprised the employee who seated me, as most of the employees were well accustomed to how my family and I operated.
I sat at the round table alone watching the dim sum cart circle the room. Being nosy increases my appetite by at least 10 percent.
Finally my sister walked in, spotted me across the room, appeared to gasp, and came walking over.
