Gusty Lovers and Cadavers: A Fun Cozy Mystery (A Raina Sun Mystery Book 2)

by Anne R. Tan

  The door opened and an overpowering rose scent filled the room. Raina’s eyes watered as her seasonal allergies went haywire from the perfume. By the time the resort owner came into view, Raina was wiping her nose on the sleeve of her shirt.

  Cecelia Wagner was in her late forties with manly features, a hawk nose and square chin, that gave an overall impression of vigorous health. Her waist-length mousy brown hair was streaked with gray. She had once told Raina she got tired of dying it since her money was more attractive to men.

  She waved to get their attention as if her perfume hadn’t already stopped all activity in the room. “Sorry for interrupting. Lucille, could you please pack up the guest’s things in Suite Eighteen. She was supposed to check out two days ago. Since she hadn’t told me otherwise, I’m assuming she didn’t want her things.”

  “How long are we going to keep the things this time?” Lucille glanced at Raina. “Some of our guests spend their entire stay shopping. And because of the weight limitations on baggage, they leave a lot of it behind.” Her nostrils flare as if she were smelling something rotten. “With all that money to burn, you would think they could tip the help better,” she muttered under her breath.

  Raina ignored the extra comment. “Have they ever asked for us to ship it to them? I know the guests are wealthy in their own countries, but this seems like a waste.”

  “Tell me about it. They take home the good stuff, but the things from Bullseye just aren’t good enough. Housekeeping get first dibs on them after the thirty-day holding period.” Lucille eyed her slyly. “Well, I get first dibs. You being a temp and all.”

  “Of course,” Raina said placidly. She doubted there would be anything she would want from a pregnant woman. “Who’s the guest in Suite Eight—”

  A cellphone rang. Money, come away / Get in my pocket, here to stay…

  Cecelia grabbed the cellphone clipped to her elastic waistband. “Hello, this is Cecelia Wagner.” As she listened, her eyes grew wider. “Officer, am I in trouble? Do I need a lawyer?”

  Raina paused in the act of tucking in the corner of the sheet. Either Cecelia was being sued or she was needed at the police station. Did the police also run a reverse lookup on the number in the diaper bag and connect it to the resort? What she wouldn’t give to have said yes to breakfast with Matthew to pick his brain on the Sui Yuk Liang disappearance case.

  “I can't go to the station right now. It's the middle of the day. I have a business to run,” Cecelia said into the phone. She listened. “Alright, I’ll be there in half an hour.” She disconnected the call and stared at the phone for several heartbeats.

  Raina cleared her throat hoping she looked concerned rather than curious. “Cecelia, is everything okay?”

  The resort owner ignored her.

  Raina glanced at Lucille, who shrugged at her. “Cecelia, are—”

  Cecelia shoved her phone back into the clip at her waistband. “Yes…fine.” She left the room without further ado.

  “What you think that is about?” Raina asked.

  Lucille immediately opened the patio door and an inviting breeze swept into the room, cleaning the air. “Who knows? Someone should tell her that less is more. You shouldn't smell someone before you see them.”

  Raina sneezed. So said the pot calling the kettle black. The cigarette smoke rolling off Lucille could cure a ham. “Who is the guest in Suite Eighteen?”

  Lucille pulled out her guest list. “Some lady called Sui Yuk Liang. Ah, the one that was busy making cow eyes at Eric, Cecelia’s ex-husband, and Scotty, the pool boy.” She gave Raina a sly look. “Who is also Cecelia’s new boy toy.”

  Bingo! Raina cleared her throat to give herself time to calm down. “Cecelia’s ex-husband works here?”

  “Oh yeah. He’s the head landscaper. If you haven’t noticed Cecelia likes to keep her men on a short leash.”

  “I don’t understand. She’s not exactly”—Raina grimaced—“a sexpot.”

  “Money, kiddo. That’s the way the world works. And Cecelia has far more of it than either man.”

  Raina wiped the small tabletop next to the television cabinet. Play it cool, said a small voice inside her head. “So this guest poached on both of Cecelia’s men while she was pregnant? I’m assuming she’s not pregnant anymore.”

  Lucille grabbed the handle of the maid’s cart. “Ready to go?”

  Raina held the door opened. “Yes.”

  “Now here’s an unexplained miracle,” Lucille continued as they headed toward the next bungalow. “Sui Yuk went into labor and had a stillbirth at the hospital. She came back a month later with a baby boy.”

  5

  DRAMA QUEEN

  After making her strange comment, Lucille clammed up. She would talk, but it wasn’t about anything of real interest. Raina tried asking questions about Sui Yuk Liang in a roundabout way, but no dice.

  Raina didn’t know what to make of Lucille’s statement about BL. How could there be a mistake about the stillbirth? This wasn’t one of those situations where there could be a gray area. Wouldn’t there be witnesses, like a doctor and nurses?

  If there was a stillbirth, then BL couldn’t be Sui Yuk’s baby. So were BL’s parents out there searching for him? Poor little guy.

  The next three hours flew by in a blur. Raina wanted to rush into Suite Eighteen to make a sweep of the room. Surprisingly, Lucille was meticulous when it came to her job, checking each suite off her list in numeric order. It took all of Raina’s willpower to hold her impatience in check.

  When Lucille took a smoking break, Raina texted Matthew, asking if he was available for dinner. Now that she had more information about Sui Yuk Liang, she wanted to see what turned up when he ran the missing mom’s name through the police databases. A few seconds later, her cell phone dinged. She clicked on his reply.

  No can do. Got a hit and run.

  Raina suppressed her flash of disappointment. She didn’t need his help. It wasn’t like finding a missing person was rocket science. How hard could it be to post up a couple of flyers and call around at the local hospitals?

  Lucille came back, and they moved to Suite Eighteen. Hallelujah!

  The sun didn’t make an appearance the entire day. The low outdoor lights lit the meandering pathways on the property. If Raina squinted hard enough, she could pretend the women she passed were everyday tourists. Except the silhouette of their bulging stomachs told a different story.

  The women sat on the park benches or on their lounge chairs in the small patio next to the front door of their bungalows. It was nippy outside, but it was probably better than being cooped up inside their rooms day after day. And Lucille was right. While the women had a stillness about them as if they were listening to something internal, their eyes watched everything with distrust. It fairly made Raina’s skin crawl because they belonged to a world in which she had no idea how to navigate. But boy, she’d love to have one of them give her the skinny on Sui Yuk Liang.

  They stopped to grab some boxes from a nearby utility closet. Suite Eighteen was mind numbingly similar to all the other rooms she’d cleaned. The large main room included the living room, dining nook, and kitchenette. The front room alone was bigger than Raina’s apartment.

  Lucille made a beeline for the laptop on the sofa. “This would make a great Christmas present for my son. Right now he has to type his papers at the library or the computer labs at the high school.”

  Raina opened and closed the kitchen cabinets. Other than several packages of saltine crackers and a box of cereal, there wasn’t much else in the kitchen. Even the trashcan was empty. “I thought you said we have to hold the discarded things for thirty days. Christmas is only six days from now. Besides, the laptop is from China. Is the keyboard even the same as the one we use here?”

  There was a setting to re-program the keyboard layout so the laptop could be used in the United States. However, Lucille didn’t need to know this. She didn’t want her coworker to take the laptop home before s
he got a chance to search through the files.

  This almost felt like lost relatives coming to claim a part of an estate before the dead person was even properly buried. It left a bad taste in her mouth.

  Lucille opened the laptop, and her smile disappeared. “There’s alphabets, but there’s other things on the keys too.”

  Raina walked over to the sofa and peeked over Lucille’s shoulder. “Those are the keystrokes for typing Chinese characters if the user doesn’t want to use the Pinyin system of writing.”

  Lucille closed the laptop, and tossed it back on the sofa. “I should have lined up at Best Buy on Black Friday,” she muttered under her breath.

  “But then you would have missed Thanksgiving with your family.”

  Lucille shrugged. “Some things are more important than food.”

  Raina kept silent and moved into the bedroom. A high-thread-count floral sheet set covered the bed. Apparently Sui Yuk Liang traveled with her own sheets. Clothes still hung on the rack in the closet, makeup on the vanity, and the empty suitcases waiting to be filled in the corner. The crib still had diapers stacked next to it on the floor.

  Warning bells clamored in Raina’s mind. She went back into the living room. “Are you sure the guest checked out? Her makeup is still here.”

  Lucille tapped on her cell phone with a goofy smile on her face. She looked up at Raina’s entrance. “You can call Cecelia to straighten it out.” She stood, patting her hair and smoothing the shirt. “I’m taking a smoking break. Be back in a few minutes.”

  “Wait! I thought Cecelia left for the police station.”

  Lucille hurried toward the door, calling over her shoulder. “Just freshen up the room then. We can always deal with packing up the stuff tomorrow.”

  After Lucille left, Raina powered on the laptop. While she waited for it to boot up, she picked up the nearby trash can and peered inside. The crumbled sheet of paper between a plastic cup and a leaking take-out carton with pungent leftovers caught her attention. She pinched the paper between her thumb and index finger and pulled it out. Droplets of a creamy sauce from the take-out carton splattered on her hand. She grimaced in distaste, but pulled out the paper and unfolded it.

  Last warning. Give me back my baby.

  The handwriting, all sharp curves and slashes, sent a chill down her spine. There was no longer any doubt that Sui Yuk Liang gave the baby to Raina for safekeeping. She snapped a photo of the threatening note with her cell phone and sent it off to Matthew with a text to let him know she was keeping the original.

  This couldn’t be the first time Sui Yuk had received a threatening note. If it were the first, wouldn’t she have taken it more seriously instead of discarding it like a used napkin in the trash? No, this meant she’d received enough of them to consider this as more of a bark than bite. At least until something spooked her at Bullseye.

  Raina grabbed the tissue and blotted off the congealing sauce. Grabbing another tissue, she carefully wrapped it around the note, making sure she didn’t touch any more of the paper than necessary. She slipped it into the pocket of her jeans. If she left the note in the trash, it might not be there by the time the police got around to searching the place.

  She clicked open the email program on the laptop. The messages were all in Chinese. She scanned the subject lines, looking for the personal emails. There seemed to be a fair number between Sui Yuk and Zhou Long Jun. While Raina spoke and understood enough Cantonese to order lunch at a Chinese restaurant, her knowledge of the written characters was on par with a beginning reader where the characters were a hit or miss depending on the context.

  She glanced at the clock on the laptop. Lucille had been gone for fifteen minutes already. No time to puzzle out the Chinese characters. She snapped photo after photo of the messages. Her heart raced at the thought of Lucille returning before she could finish, lending her a rush of adrenaline that gave her tunnel vision. She opened the web browser’s history and snapped a photo of the recent sites Sui Yuk visited and turned off the laptop.

  Muffled laughter drifted in from the closed front door. Raina shut down the laptop and wiped off her fingerprints. She sprawled on the sofa and whipped out her cell phone.

  The door opened, and Lucille strode in, flush and slightly breathless. “Please don’t tell me you’ve been sitting here all this time.”

  Raina looked up, feigning surprise. “What? You said we were on break.” She swung her legs around, leaning forward eagerly. “Guess what? My friend Stacy just got engaged. I can’t believe this. Oh, Eden is going to be so jealous. Stacy is with her ex.” She almost clapped her hands in front of her chest but decided it would be a little too much.

  Lucille snorted in disgust. “You are here to work, not to gossip like a schoolgirl. Oh wait, you are a schoolgirl.”

  Raina flushed but ignored the barb. “I think we shouldn’t touch anything in this room.”

  “Cecelia said—”

  “No one has seen Sui Yuk Liang in the last twenty-four hours. All her stuff is still here. Something could have happened to her. Let's just play it safe and not touch anything.”

  “Are you always such a drama queen?”

  “Go see for yourself. Why would she leave her glasses or her laptop behind?”

  Lucille walked into the bedroom. The back of her shirt was untucked.

  Who came back from a smoking break looking like she had a tumble in a bounce house? This explained the goofy smile earlier. What nerve to call her a schoolgirl when Lucille was the one necking with a coworker while she should have been working. Maybe Lucille was poaching on Cecelia's boy toy. Raina shuddered. Yuck! There wasn't enough bleach in the world to clean the thought of Lucille gyrating with the pool boy.

  Lucille came back into the room with a satisfied smile on her face. If she’d been a cat, her tail would be waving behind her. “We’ll let Cecelia make the call. Let’s get out of here.”

  They headed back to the utility room. This time Raina pushed the maid's cart while Lucille walked next to her with a spring in her step. Her coworker had miraculously left her surly mood in Sui Yuk Liang’s bedroom. What did she do in there?

  Raina was loading one of the commercial washing machines with used towels when her cell phone dinged. The text message was from Matthew.

  Breakfast tomorrow? I’ll make it worth your while.

  Raina rolled her eyes as she replied yes. Matthew always believed that if he talked a big game, she’d believe he was a skirt-chasing player. The persona he adopted around her was nothing more than a cover-up because of how much she frightened him. Of course, she let him continue with his delusion because it amused her. She knew he’d never push her outside her comfort zone. There was nothing wrong with a little flirting between two single friends.

  Her phone dinged again. She opened the text app. The photo of the threatening note she’d sent earlier had failed to send. She hit the re-send button. She also tapped out a quick message to Po Po to let her know she would stop by with takeout for dinner.

  A maintenance worker came into the room and grabbed several boxes off the wire racks on the far wall. He exchanged greetings in Spanish with Lucille. She rolled her eyes, but her wide smile was welcoming.

  “I can finish up here,” Lucille said.

  Raina suppressed her smirk. “Thanks. Hasta mañana.”

  Lucille gave her a steely look. “Get your mind out of the gutter.”

  “Trust me, I don’t want to be anywhere near there.”

  As Raina strolled toward her car, she couldn’t help but think her working relationship with Lucille was off to a roaring success. It was only for two weeks. She could deal with it.

  Raina squinted at the shadows of the parking lot behind the community room. Which row did she park in? In the dim light, all the cars were shades of gray and black. In another hour, the guests would congregate around the community room for dinner, but at this time the dead silence was unnerving. She shivered at the chill. Time to pick up some comfort food a
nd go to her grandma’s condo.

  A dark car with bright headlights swung around the bend and the tires squealed at the too fast turn. Raina froze as it headed straight toward her. Her feet grew roots under the glare of the light and the wind snapped her black curls against her face. For the first time, she finally understood what deer in headlights meant.

  The wind slammed something wet and slimy against her chest. Her hands automatically brushed it off, and the spell was broken. She stumbled to the right, banging an elbow painfully against a parked van. She sucked in a breath, making herself as small as possible as she clutched her elbow in front of her. The dark car slid into the parking spot two feet away from her body, the engine idling.

  Raina’s throat tightened, allowing her to only make an eek sound like a mouse. She took several rattled breaths, but her heart continued to gallop. Carbon monoxide drifted into her nostrils and irritated the back of her throat. Another minute ticked by, and the driver still didn’t come out to apologize. She clenched her jaw as her fright turned into irritation. People like this shouldn’t be driving.

  She stomped over to the driver’s side and rapped on the window. Nothing. She pressed her lips into a thin line and knocked again. The window rolled down, and Cecelia’s profile came into view. “You almost ran me over. Didn’t you see me?”

  Cecelia jerkily turned her head, as if she were a wooden puppet. Her eyes were wide, the pupils dilated. Her hands still clamped on the steering wheel. She opened her mouth, but no sound came out.

  Raina took a step back, gooseflesh peppering her arms. The resort owner was a sickly shade of gray in the dim light. “Are you okay?”

  Cecelia blinked several times, staring through Raina. “I can’t believe she’s dead. How can she be dead?”

  The world stood still as a sense of deja vu swept over Raina. Through numb lips, she whispered, “Who’s dead?”

  Cecelia shook as if awakening from a dream. “One of our guests. Sui Yuk Liang. The police asked me to identify her personal effects.”