by Ovidia Yu
It wasn’t your decision. Aunty Lee felt anger mixed with guilt stirring inside her. Beth had decided what was best for her sister much as Aunty Lee tried to decide for Nina and Salim. Because she was sure that her way was better for them.
Julietta had known … or suspected.
‘That was when Julietta started becoming difficult. Mocking us and dropping hints about what she could tell the police if we didn’t make her happy. Julietta knew Jonny was getting desperate. Patty hadn’t left as much money as we expected. I had a feeling that Jonny had expected even more than I did. Patty had been making donations to the SPCA and the Pelangi Pride Centre and I don’t know what else without us knowing. And Jonny didn’t know the Singapore market, so it was taking him longer to get started.’
For all his talk of being an experienced investor and entrepreneur, Jonny didn’t know the most basic rule about entering a new territory … he had charged in without studying the terrain. Perhaps his gung-ho attitude and youthful brashness had served him well up to this point … it had got him a wife and her money and the right to stay and make profits off Singaporeans, but once he had collected all the low-hanging fruit he had no strategy to get him further. He knew nothing about planting and growing trees for the future. He may even have cut down the tree that might have supported him well for years, desperate for the fruit on its highest branches. Surely even Jonny Ho wouldn’t have been so short sighted? To her surprise, Aunty Lee felt sorry for the man. And why not? He was dead after all, unlike this madwoman in her living room.
‘That was when I had to start locking her up,’ Beth continued. Now she had breached her silence, words were gushing out of her like water out of an inflatable pool. ‘I couldn’t have her running around and saying things to people. She was even sucking up to Fabian, you know.’
‘So you killed Julietta. Jonny knew?’
‘Jonny got rid of the body for me … after all, he couldn’t have the police nosing around. Aside from that he didn’t care. He was so busy sucking up to his China connections, trying to prove to them he was useful to them.’
‘But why did you kill Jonny Ho?’
‘Can you imagine him, that luxury-loving free spirit, in prison? It was for his own good.’
So Beth had killed Jonny for the same reason she killed her sister. For his own good. If we get out of this alive, Aunty Lee promised the portrait of M. L. on the wall behind Nina and Beth, I will never again do anything for anybody’s good!
There was a sound outside. Was it the gate?
‘That must be my taxi,’ Beth said. ‘About time too.’ She raised the knife against Nina’s neck. ‘Relax. It will hurt more if you struggle. People kill goats and cows like that all the time. And I’ve got to do your boss next.’
But at that moment Mr and Mrs Guang stepped in through the French windows from the garden. Aunty Lee stared in disbelief, wild hope surging.
‘Excuse me, Aunty Lee,’ said Mr Guang with his usual formal politeness, ‘are you ready to join us on our evening walk?’
‘Get out!’ Beth shouted. ‘She’s not going anywhere!’
Beth might just have been able to kill one stunned maid and one tired aunty with one knife, but what use was a single knife against four people? Even madness must face up to reality sometimes.
Aunty Lee only hoped Beth would not slash Nina in frustration … ‘No!’ she screamed as Beth, seeming to read her thoughts, raised the knife.
What followed seemed unreal to Aunty Lee. Little Mrs Guang stepped swiftly and silently across to Beth. Blocking the thrust of the knife with her outer forearm, she rolled her arm over Beth’s so that Beth’s elbow was locked in her armpit. At the same time, her other elbow hit Beth’s chin hard.
‘My arm!’ Beth whimpered as Aunty Lee’s seven inch Misono 440 Molybdenum Santoku knife landed on the floor. Mrs Guang grabbed a firm handful of hair on the top of Beth’s head and held her in a half clinch.
‘Are you all right?’ Mr Guang asked Aunty Lee.
‘What was that?’ Aunty Lee wondered if she was dead and dreaming of a martial arts movie.
‘Chisau or push hands. It is t’ai chi. My wife does not often get a chance to practice as she does not believe in competition.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Menu Planning
The Guangs had been in Aunty Lee’s Delights when a woman came into the café looking for Aunty Lee. She was a friend, she said. Avon had given her Aunty Lee’s address and directions to her house.
‘We thought, if she is a friend of yours, surely she would know your home address,’ Mr Guang said. ‘And if she was not a friend of yours, she should not get your home address without you knowing. So my wife and I decided to take our evening walk. We saw her at the side of your house watching for you. So we waited. If you saw her and said, “Wonderful! My friend is here!” then we would have gone home.’
But, instead, Beth had hit Nina on the head. So the Guangs came into the garden and watched the drama through the French windows. They had not been able to hear what was being said, Mr Guang explained, but the knife at Nina’s neck did not look like a friendly gesture.
The Guangs could watch people in the café all they wanted, Aunty Lee decided. And all the free tea and free laksa they could drink and eat.
By the time the police arrived, Beth was her genteel schoolteacher self again. She had been calling on an old friend, she told them, when two mad people burst into the house and attacked her with a knife. She stood there in her beige cotton shirt and brown skirt that ended at where her calves were thickest and said: ‘Rosie, tell them it’s just a misunderstanding!’
Even Aunty Lee might have been convinced. But her legs were still shaky from the terrors of the last hour. ‘She tried to kill us,’ she said firmly, ‘and she killed her maid and her sister’s husband, who she was in love with … ’
Aunty Lee could hear herself being incoherent. Luckily the first two police officers to arrive knew her and knew that it was her house. They took Beth in for questioning. Nina was sent to hospital and made to stay overnight for observation though she insisted that she was all right. True to her promise to herself not to interfere (and against all her instincts), Aunty Lee did not phone Salim to tell him that Nina had been hurt and was in hospital. Anyway, she knew he would see the reports.
Aunty Lee closed the café for a small home party when Nina was allowed home. This meant that, in addition to those she had invited over, any customers who turned up were invited to join them as guests … but had to eat whatever Aunty Lee decided to cook. Helen Chan was not there. Fabian had finally surfaced from the drug-induced coma, and she was at the hospital.
‘We’ll have a bigger party when Fabian gets out of hospital,’ Aunty Lee told her.
Aunty Lee served up bowls of hot bak kut teh soup. The excitement had left Nina’s stomach too ready to lurch and retch, but she could drink the hot, spicy pork rib soup even if she didn’t manage to eat much. The fragrant ginger in the nutritious soup was soothing and calming from the inside out. It never does any good to force your body to eat what it is not ready to digest.
Aunty Lee had invited Salim and his mother. They could not eat the pork in the soup, but Aunty Lee had also made nonya chap chye or vegetable stew. All Singaporeans know to have at least one vegetarian dish at every party, since there will be Muslims who don’t eat pork, Buddhists who don’t eat beef, and possibly Christian fundamentalists who don’t eat shellfish. Salim introduced his mother to Nina, but as they sat down, Commissioner Raja drew Aunty Lee firmly away to another table.
‘I want to talk to you.’
‘I wasn’t interfering. Not this time.’
‘No. All you did was go home.’ Commissioner Raja sat down beside her with a small grunt. The once slim muscular athlete had put on some weight since his days on Singapore’s Olympic yachting team. But the years had also brought a dignity and he wore them well.
‘Early or late, love tends to be blind. But another love that can be even more
blind and irrational love is parental love.’
They looked from Salim’s mother to Selina, whose pregnancy was just starting to show. She was ordering Mark around for the good of ‘the baby’.
‘Did Beth confess?’
‘Not a confession so much as a justification of why she had to do what she did, given the unfairness of everyone … you and her parents included … making her sister the favourite.’
‘Still, Patty left her the house in her will … ’
‘Only according to the will that Beth and Jonny passed off as Patty’s. There are photographs of another will on the camera Nina found. This one is witnessed by Patty and Julietta. It looks like Patty drafted it after she became aware of Jonny’s involvement with the housebreakers. It’s very close to the earlier one that she left with her lawyer, leaving everything to Fabian with some money to go to Julietta’s children’s university fees, to be paid directly to the university. And she wrote down the amounts of money that she invested in Jonny and Beth’s projects and says that they are to pay the amounts back to Fabian, without interest, until 2020 and, if not fully paid back by then, at five per cent interest from then on.’
Aunty Lee sat back. Clearly Fabian had had no idea of this will or he would not have been so angry with his dead mother. Someone had deliberately made Fabian think that Patty had died angry with him when, in fact, she had made sure that everything of value that she had would go to him. ‘I don’t know how anybody could have been taken in by that stupid fake will!’
‘People often change their wills after they get married.’ Mycroft stopped at their table bearing a tray of condiments, guided by Cherril with baskets of kropok. ‘I did.’ He looked at his wife and smiled. ‘But don’t worry, I don’t have that much to leave anyway.’
Aunty Lee thought Mycroft and Cherril very likely had very different ideas about what ‘that much’ might mean. Even her two stepchildren, born and brought up in the same environment, had drastically different ideas about money and what they were entitled to.
‘Didn’t your husband leave everything to you?’ Cherril teased as she arranged the little dishes on their table. ‘Mark always gives the impression that he was cheated out of a fortune when his father married you and left you everything.’
‘That’s different,’ Aunty Lee said. M. L. had indeed left her a life interest in all his properties. But he had also made clear (as had Aunty Lee in her own will, as Mycroft would know) that it would all be divided between his children when she died. Indeed, Mark had already borrowed heavily on his anticipations to fund his various business ventures. If Aunty Lee had not been topping up the family investments from her profits, there would have been a lot less left than Mark so confidently expected, and the one who would suffer unfairly would be Mathilda …
Commissioner Raja fished a strip of Panadol out of his pocket and swallowed two tablets with his Homemade Cloudy Lime Juice. Despite the happy (at least in Aunty Lee’s eyes) ending, Commissioner Raja looked as though he was having a headache. And he was. This was going to be a public relations nightmare. Already half the social media activists were shouting that it was the consequence of allowing too many Mainland Chinese to set up businesses in Singapore too quickly, while the other half were ranting about how badly Singapore dogs treated entrepreneurial true Chinese businessmen.
But all that could be taken care of later. For now, there was food on the table and friends to share it with.
‘Has Salim forgiven you … the police … for suspending him?’
‘Nothing to forgive. He understands the procedure. Rules are rules. If you don’t want to follow them, you either get them changed or you get out.’
‘Yes,’ Aunty Lee said. She made her decision then. It hurt, but it was right.
‘I was saying I’m ready to come back to work.’
When Aunty Lee went over to her table, Nina was trying to clear her own plates but Cherril and Salim were making her stay seated while Puan Aisyah laughed.
‘I am terminating your contract,’ Aunty Lee said. ‘When you feel well enough to travel, I will arrange for you to go back to the Philippines.’
Nina’s mouth opened and shut several times before she said, in a strangled voice, ‘it is not my fault, Madam. I did not want to go to work there; you sent me to work there.’
‘Like Madam Beth said, I’m the boss and you should do what I tell you instead of talking back.’
‘But, Madam, I … ’ Nina was on her feet, sounding stricken. Salim, also on his feet, looked poised to act. But it was not physical action that was needed here. His mother watched Aunty Lee with calm, clever eyes that knew there was more to come. ‘I am sorry I made you angry! Please don’t send me away! You need me!’
‘Nina, if you are not in Singapore when Salim applies for permission to marry you, you will have a better chance. They may still say no. But if you start your own business and come back to Singapore as an entrepreneur … ’ like Jonny Ho, Aunty Lee almost said, but stopped, ‘you can apply for PR and then apply to get married.’
A voice inside Aunty Lee’s head said, Thought you weren’t interfering anymore? It was so clear that Aunty Lee looked up at the photo of her late husband. It was his voice. ‘I’m Not interfering, I’m strategizing,’ she said firmly.
Nina and Salim had sat back down and were talking together in what was clearly meant to be a private discussion. Aunty Lee looked at the other woman at the table. She was suddenly aware that Salim’s mother had every reason to be angry with her. For once she had nothing to say.
Fortunately, Puan Aisyah did.
‘Your potato curry puffs are very good,’ she said. ‘Did you make the filling specially?’
‘Oh yes. I thought of making them because we had a lot of leftover potatoes. But then, with so many things going on, I forgot. So in the end I threw them out and cooked a new batch. Wasted, I know.’
Puan Aisyah nodded. ‘Sometimes you cannot help it.’ She smiled.
Sometimes you just have to start over from scratch.
Acknowledgements
I want to thank so many people, especially my super agent Priya Doraswamy, Lucy Dauman who first welcomed Aunty Lee to the UK and the wonderful team at Killer Reads: Kathryn Cheshire, Sarah Hodgson, Janette Currie and Micaela Alcaino
About the author
Ovidia Yu is a Singapore-based novelist and award-winning short story writer and playwright with over thirty plays staged by theatres in Singapore as well as Malaysia, Australia, Hong Kong, Edinburgh and San Francisco. Ovidia has received several awards and attended the University of Iowa’s International Writing Programme. Her latest novel, Meddling and Murder, features best-loved amateur sleuth and restaurant proprietor Aunty Lee, who appeared in her previous Aunty Lee’s Delights series. Ovidia has also written a new historical series, The Crown Colony Murders, which will be published by Constable and Robinson in summer 2017.
@OvidiaVanda
OvidiaYuDoggedAuthor
Previous books in the Aunty Lee series
Aunty Lee’s Delights
Aunty Lee’s Deadly Specials
Aunty Lee’s Chilled Revenge
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