when I see a lance such as this. The weapons loose in our hands, unused.”
The sobering tale caused me to ask about Flip, “Are there children?”
“No, not here.”
“A wife? Was the woman who brought me in his wife?”
“No. He had women, but no wife.”
That tallied with what I’d heard about Flip, that he was a womanizer.
“Are you in shock?”
I was startled by the question. “Shock? No, I don’t think so.”
He watched me carefully.
I thought for a moment. “I’ve been mentally cataloguing the room. Trying to imagine the event. Trying to understand what happened.”
He nodded. “What have you touched?”
I flushed, the sack suddenly heavy in my pocket. “Touched?”
He pointed at the pen that I still gripped in my hand.
I felt my cheeks heat up. “I, well . . . I wanted to see what he’d been painting. I just lifted the edge of that board a little with the pen. Took a peek. That’s all. I didn’t move it.”
“And?”
“Balinese modernist style, not his usual as far as I know.”
“Nothing else?”
I shifted the subject. “Why did you just say ‘Welcome back’? I haven’t been here since I was a child.”
His black eyes flashed as he held up his left pinky. I saw the long nail that Indonesian men favor and for a brief instant wondered what the gesture could possibly mean. Then I saw the thin, narrow scar running from the base of that finger to his wrist. I remembered the nausea I’d felt watching it being stitched. I looked again at his heart-shaped face, the delicate, feminine mouth and wide-set eyes.
“Oh, my god. It’s not possible. Tyo?”
He smiled. “Big brother. When you left Ubud all those years ago, when you were eight, I told you that your big brother would always watch over you. This is why we both stand here. I have been awaiting your return. It took you a very long time.”
We heard a commotion out in the garden, men’s adamant voices and a woman’s high, shrill words, yelling something in Balinese that I didn’t understand.
Wayan Tyo said, “She wants to come in. I must go to stop her. Come with me.”
When a man holds his hand out to you, there’s nothing to remind you of him as a child. The palm is larger, the texture of the skin rougher. But the touch is the same. When Wayan Tyo grasped my hand, he used exactly the same pressure he had used when I was eight years old and he was twelve. When his fingers wrapped around mine, electricity ran through me, not a shock or a jolt, rather like a circuit being completed. Was this why I returned? Not my work, my passion for art, my curiosity, my research of these paintings, but a man?
“I need to—” I began to pull the sack out of my pocket to give to him.
“Come,” he said, pulling me along, each step stripping my resolve to return the amulet. “We must hurry. She must not see him.”
“But I want to—” He didn’t listen, his attention on the sounds outside.
As he led me out of the living room, through the hall and out the antique carved front door, memories of that time twenty-odd years ago coursed through me, visceral and unformed. Tyo and his siblings. My brother and me. Tag, hide and go seek, kids strung together in a tug of war. My hand in his. A tear escaped my eye, muddying my vision so that I tripped over the bottom step. He steadied me without turning his eyes from the scene before us. He didn’t acknowledge my distress in any other way.
She was thrashing and screaming violently while two young policemen held her arms and tried to calm her. Her words came out in short, venomous bursts of anger. I had no idea what she was saying, but guessed that she was cursing them. Her hair had fallen out of its fastener. It hung over her shoulders and across her eyes and fell down to her narrow waist. Dropping the sack into my pocket, I ran my free hand through my short hair.
She was very beautiful, as most Balinese women seem to be. Both her face and her thin, fragile body belied the strength she displayed as she struggled with the two policemen. She wore traditional Balinese dress, sarong, sash, and the long-sleeved blouse called a kebaya. One of her rubber flip-flops had fallen off in the struggle. Her bag now lay on the ground at her feet. Suddenly she leaned back and looked toward us, her mouth opened for another burst of obscenity, but at the sight of me, or maybe of Wayan Tyo, no words came. She stared at me as if in a nightmare and sagged, so that now they didn’t need to restrain her, but to support her.
“Ulih, Ulih. You must not go in there.” Wayan Tyo let go of me and approached her. “He is gone.”
The policemen released her and she fell to her knees. “Tidak, tidak, tidak,” was all she could say. No, no, no. She began to sob quietly, her head bent to the ground, all that beautiful glossy hair spilling around her and twining in the groundcover that wove through the stones of the path. Without her to support, the policemen no longer knew where to put their hands. Wayan Tyo knelt at her side.
Flip’s death was a loss that shifted her life. Who were they to each other? If I had to guess, I would say he was her beloved.
Ulih’s heartrending sobs joined those of the mourners inside the house, and I realized that though his death angered me and I would search for his killer, it was not personal. I’d stood over his body and tried to recreate the crime. I’d escaped from the reality of a dead body into the intellectual exercise, the whys and wherefores. I looked down at my hand; it was shaking. Maybe I was in shock.
Ulih unfolded herself from the ground and from Wayan Tyo’s gentle words. She picked up her bag and asked, “Who is she?”
“She found him. She has just arrived and came to talk with him about business. She never met him.”
She turned back to go down the gaily bordered path, welcoming and at odds with the surfeit of distraught emotion. She shifted the bag from her arm onto her head, steadying it as she walked. The lush grounds and the exotic woman created a scene right out of a glossy guidebook. To the right, in the northeast corner of the property, the household shrine was laden with offerings, sacred water, woven containers resting on textiles, flowers.
It was all very pretty. I’d arrived in paradise. Or had I?
Sirens were sounding. People were gathering at the gate.
“Tyo, I need to—” I fingered the sack.
“Not now, Jenna. I’m busy here. This officer will take you back to the station for questioning.” He distractedly directed the arriving officers toward Flip’s living room.
“Aren’t you going to question me? And why do I need to be questioned? I arrived, the servant took me to the living room, and we found the body.”
“Yes.” He turned to a young man who was carrying two heavy bags. “Leave the one out here. There’s
