back to her cooking.
I looked at her. Was the other reason to discover the killer of the dead man? No, I thought. “Fate, is that what you mean?”
She sidestepped my question. “How does it make you feel being here?”
I thought for a moment. “I feel comfortable. I feel at home.”
“How are you?”
“Very well, it’s wonderful to be here.”
“No, I mean how are you?”
“You mean the murder, finding the body?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’m . . .” I faltered. “I think I’m fine.”
Ani looked at me steadily, and I took a breath and said, “I don’t know. I don’t know how I am. I feel confused. You know I came here to talk with Flip, to look at art and to talk with him. And now there’s no Flip. So I guess I need to regroup and try to figure out a way to meet someone to help with my research.” To my surprise, tears welled up in my eyes. Embarrassed, I turned away.
She waited.
“Then, also, violent death. It’s not the first time.” I saw her start at this bit of news. “Last year, I . . . But that was someone I knew, and my response was very different. I felt very sad. This time I felt physically ill.”
“That seems normal.”
“Yes. I began analyzing the room, the scene of the crime, to keep myself from getting sick. I wanted to know who killed him, more than, more than . . .”
She nodded and took my hand in hers, which only brought more tears. “Tyo has told me that when he has seen someone die badly, cruelly, he finds himself floating above them, a distance away, even if he is right there with the body. I think this is natural.”
“Really? I know I didn’t want to be there, but at the same time I did. I didn’t make any attempt to leave. I rationalized that I shouldn’t move my feet, that they might think my footprints were the killer’s footprints. I tried to think of other things. I closed my eyes. I listened to the monkeys.”
“You tried to find safety in your mind.”
“Yes, but in retrospect my response was more disturbing than if I’d become hysterical or run screaming from the room. Do you understand?”
I took her silence as a judgment.
“What I felt. Well, actually that’s it. It was not so much about emotions. It was about intellect, knowing. I want to know who killed him. I want to know what happened. As I stood there with the body, I felt as if I’d been there in that room when it happened. I could see the killer’s anger, not just the way the spear was thrust through the dead man, but in the way things were pulled off the wall. The cushions on the floor.”
“Tyo said you stayed. This is why you stayed. To try to solve the mystery.”
“Someone needed to stay with him.” I looked at my hand in hers and felt the comfort in it. “You’re smiling.”
“Yes, you think that you did not feel anything, yet you felt compassion for him. You felt that someone had to stay with him.”
“You say compassion, and I did feel compassion. Then I would waver and worry about myself. I thought, I’ve just flown thousands of miles to speak to Flip and here he is, lying at my feet. I wondered, what am I doing here in Bali? And then it would come back to the biggest question.” She looked at me questioningly, which made me think she hadn’t heard all I’d said. “What I can do about his death.”
“That is for Tyo to figure out.” She spoke forcefully as she patted my hand. “This is not your job.”
I shrugged off her words, knowing I couldn’t argue with her about this. “I’m jet-lagged, too. When you’re jet-lagged you feel so out of it. I couldn’t anticipate this, a murder, an interrogation, my plans shot to hell.”
“Was the interrogation difficult?”
“You know, I hardly remember it. They just asked me a series of questions. I suppose it was pretty obvious that I had just arrived at the house. I mean, after all, the girl met me at the door. I don’t think they believe I did it.”
“No.”
I took that to mean that Tyo had told her I hadn’t killed him, but I went on. “I don’t know that a woman could have driven that spear through him. Someone needed a great deal of strength to kill him instantly, so that he didn’t cry out.” I pictured myself getting the spear halfway through him, unable to complete the thrust.
I said, “Maybe that was what Tyo thought when he saw the body. It didn’t even occur to me that a woman would be able to do it. So why would the police suspect me? I suppose that they probably just had to question me.”
“Probably,” said Ani. I looked around the kitchen and felt a bit like those policemen when Ulih had fallen to the ground in front of Flip’s house. Useless and not knowing where to put my hands. “They also wanted to make certain you had not disturbed the crime scene.”
I looked down, hoping she couldn’t spot a lie, my deflection, as easily as my father. “As I said, I didn’t move my feet.”
She looked at me closely. “You need to chop these beans. Small and thin, like this, and we will add coconut and sprouts. This is a side dish to the meat that we will grill. We will eat together tonight, though we usually each eat when we feel like eating. In the morning we cook a large amount of food, and whenever someone wants something, they come and get it. This is more common in Bali than the Western way of sitting down to a meal. Do you remember this?”
I shook my head and picked up a knife.
“Now tell me about your family. How are they?” She began to lead me away from death, back to normal.
“My mother and father are both fine. Still working. My father plans to retire from teaching; my mother continues with her job, though she could retire if she wanted. She’s a bit of a workaholic.” I didn’t say that she wouldn’t want to be around the house with my father day in and day out. His temper, the boredom that would surely paralyze and further anger him, his need.
“Do you see them often?”
“Pretty much every week. We live close enough to each other that either I drive over to the East Bay, where they live, or they come over to Marin for a hike or a visit to their favorite restaurant. They’re both healthy now, though my mother has had some back problems.”
“Yes, we are aging. And your brothers? Are they well, too?”
“Byron lives back east, in New York. We hardly see him—lucky if it’s once a year. He’s married, and his wife is pregnant with their second child. Sean lives very near my parents and sees a lot of them. I see quite a bit of him, too, even though he’s the youngest, and we’re nine years apart in age. We are very close.”
“I do not know Sean. He had not been born when you were here.”
“He’s
