Twenty-Four
TWENTY-FOUR
OLIVER
The last thing that Oliver thinks he’d be doing two weeks after his brother’s death/possible murder is spending his Sunday morning going to Chinatown to tidy up a teahouse, specifically, the very same one that his twin brother was found dead in. But here we are , he thinks, as he parks up and finds Riki and Sana outside Vera’s teahouse. The sight of them is strangely nice, as though they’ve been friends for a while instead of strangers thrown together by tragic circumstances. He waves at them and they wave back, and when he walks out, Sana hands him a takeaway cup.
“Figured we could all use some coffee,” she says.
“Ooh, better not let Vera see this,” Oliver says, and Riki and Sana grin, which makes Oliver feel sort of... happy. It’s an unfamiliar feeling, but he likes it. He fishes out a key from his pocket and unlocks the door. He came by yesterday on his own to fit a new lock.
The inside of Vera Wang’s World-Famous Teahouse is just as gloomy as Oliver remembers from the last time he was here. All that smashed glass, the overturned chairs. The three of them pause at the doorway, and Oliver senses their uneasiness at the sight of all that destruction. Then Oliver says, “Come on. I brought supplies.”
And he has. For the first time ever, Oliver is thankful for his position as a super. He only needed to buy stuff like trash bags and cleaning liquid, but everything else reusable he borrowed from the supplies closet. Cleaning gloves, brooms, and mops. Together, the three of them unload the things from Oliver’s trunk and get to work, lifting the furniture out of the shop before sweeping away the broken glass and herbs from the floor. Then Oliver starts mopping while Sana cleans the bay windows. Unfortunately, the gruesome outline of Marshall’s body doesn’t come off, which creeps him out.
“You’ll need to use some isopropyl alcohol on that,” Sana says. “And maybe toothpaste and baking soda.”
Oliver nods, shuddering as he turns away from the outline of his dead twin’s body. If only every bad thing in life could be removed just by mopping it away.
Riki returns after disposing of the trash bags, wipes his brow, and inspects the furniture they have removed from the shop.
“These are pretty good pieces, actually,” Riki muses, tilting one of the chairs this way and that.
“Oh?” Oliver doesn’t much care about furniture, but the way Riki is studying the chair is interesting. There’s a deftness to Riki’s movements, like he’s utterly comfortable working with furniture. “Are you into carpentry?”
“A little bit. Back in Jakarta my dad is a handyman.” There’s a note of sadness in Riki’s voice, but then he continues. “I think I could take out this part right here”—he points at the back of the chair, which is half falling apart with age—“and replace it with something more modern, add a cushion to it, give it a new coat of paint... it’ll look great, actually.”
Oliver can’t really picture it, but he nods along encouragingly. “Sounds good.”
Sana steps back from the bay window and looks around the shop. “Huh, whaddaya know? Now that the windows don’t have an inch-thick layer of grime, the shop actually looks bigger.” She hesitates. “Not to sound ridiculous, but before I cleaned the windows, the dirt seemed almost shadowy, like someone was watching.”
“Maybe the pastry lady next door?” Riki says.
“Maybe.”
The three of them look around. Oliver is surprised to find that Sana is right. The shop really does look bigger and brighter. He frowns at the lights in the shop. Even after changing the bulbs, the shop could do with better lighting. “I’ll get her more lights. A couple of those cheap IKEA light stands would do the shop a world of good.” Just saying it out loud makes Oliver feel better. He’s doing something, producing instead of staying inert and helpless.
Riki brings in three chairs and they sit down for a break, sipping their coffees in companionable silence.
“Do you know how Vera’s doing at Julia’s?” Riki says.
“I can’t imagine having Vera staying at my place,” Sana says. They all laugh.
“Surprisingly, Julia told me she kind of loves having Vera there,” Oliver says.
Sana and Riki gape at him. “Seriously?” Riki says.
“Yep, seriously.” Oliver takes another slurp of his coffee, savoring its smoky flavor. “She said Emma’s really opened up, thanks to Vera. And apparently Vera cooks a feast for pretty much every meal. I’ve been invited once or twice and those meals are to die for.”
“Oh man, that does sound good,” Sana says.
“I miss my mom’s cooking so much,” Riki says. “Back home, she used to cook all these huge meals for us too. Every Sunday, she’d make at least seven or eight dishes for us, and each one was amazing.”
Oliver smiles and nods. “What’s Indonesian food like?”
“Spicy,” Riki says with a laugh. “Everything smothered in different sambals—that’s chili paste. My favorite is terong balado, which is eggplant fried with the most gorgeous red chili and tomatoes.”
“Ooh, I love eggplant,” Sana says. “My dad is the cook in our family, and he makes this spinach and eggplant curry that is sooo comforting. It’s creamy and rich and to die for.”
Oliver thinks back to his mom’s garlic eggplant dish. It seems very weirdly specific to be talking about eggplant dishes right now, but somehow, it makes sense. There’s just something about eggplant that’s so comforting.
“So Julia’s eating well, huh?” Sana says.
“Yeah. The only downside is that Julia’s sleeping on the couch because she gave Vera her room.”
Sana laughs. “Of course she did. Poor Julia. I can just see Vera guilting her into giving up the master bedroom to Vera.”
“Oh, like you wouldn’t?” Riki says, nudging her with his elbow.
Sana widens her eyes. “Are you kidding? I am terrified of Vera; of course I would. And don’t even try to tell me you guys are not scared of Vera. You should see the way you two behave around her.”
“No, whaaat?” Oliver says amid laughter. “How do we behave?”
“Like schoolkids who know that they’ve done something really, really bad.”
Oliver’s laughter catches in his throat. Riki looks uneasy. Just for a moment—then they both force out their laughter. Oliver glances at Riki. What’s going on there? Oliver knows exactly what he did, but what does Riki have to feel guilty about? But the last thing Oliver wants to do is to start being suspicious of Riki or Sana, because he genuinely likes them. So he shakes off that uneasy feeling and tries to come up with an easygoing response that won’t ruin the moment.
But whatever Oliver is about to say is interrupted by the tinkling of the bell as the door is pushed open. Abruptly, they all fall silent and stare as Officer Gray walks into the shop. Officer Gray is so far from who Oliver expects to see that for a split second, his brain short-circuits and goes, Wait, am I at the police station again, waiting to identify my brother’s body?
“What the hell is going on here?” Officer Gray demands. She definitely does not look pleased to see the three of them.
Oliver scrambles to his feet. Something about Officer Gray makes him feel like he needs to stay on his feet. It’s probably the uniform. Or the gaze that kind of reminds him of Vera. Or maybe the fact that he can very much see the gun that she carries in her holster. Or maybe all of the above. Being the oldest of the three of them, Oliver feels like he needs to be the one who answers her question. “Uh, hi, Officer.” He tries to come up with something better. “How’re you doing?” Oh god, that came out so wrong, like Joey from Friends ’ sleazy come-on line.
Officer Gray narrows her eyes. “I said, what is going on here?”
“Uh...” Oliver looks around helpless at Sana and Riki, both of whom are wide-eyed with obvious fear. “Well, we were cleaning up Vera’s shop?” he squeaks.
“Why?”
Oliver grasps the first answer that comes to mind. “Uh... because... we’re nice?” He cringes inwardly. That was quite possibly the stupidest answer anyone could have come up with.
Officer Gray nods at Sana, then at Riki. “You two, aren’t you the reporters I saw at Julia Chen’s house the other day?”
Riki’s face pales. “Uh, yes?”
“I’m not a reporter,” Sana says quickly. Then, quietly, she mumbles, “I just have a podcast.”
“Right,” Officer Gray says, “and now here you two are, together with Marshall Chen’s brother, in Vera’s teahouse.”
The mention of “Marshall Chen’s brother” turns something in Oliver’s stomach. How pathetic that even after Marshall’s death, Oliver would still be known as just his brother.
“Anyone care to explain to me why the three of you are together? Is it a book club? A coffee club?”
The thing is, Oliver isn’t even sure why he feels like Officer Gray has just caught them doing something illegal. Surely cleaning up an old woman’s shop that was burglarized counts as an actual good deed? The realization makes him stand a bit straighter. He looks Officer Gray in the eye and says, “You see, Officer, Vera’s shop was broken into a few days ago, and so we thought we’d help her out a bit by tidying it up. There was a huge mess, and—”
“Back up,” Officer Gray says, and Oliver’s mouth snaps shut. “You said her shop was ‘broken into’?”
Oliver nods hesitantly.
“And nobody thought to report this to us?”
Oliver’s mouth drops open. “Uh, well—”
The answer, of course, is no. Nobody thought to report it to the police. And why the hell not? My god, now that Officer Gray is pointing it out, it seems like the most obvious thing in the world, and yet only Julia suggested it, and when it was shot down, no one insisted that going to the cops was the right thing to do. Whyyy? Oliver’s mind wails.
Because Oliver doesn’t want anything more to do with the cops, that’s why. He has enough to hide from them. The less he has to do with them, the better. But what about the others? They’d all been there that day, when Vera had called them over to show them the catastrophic destruction of her store. And out of all of them, only Julia suggested calling the cops.
Maybe it’s because they, too, have something to hide.
The skin on the back of Oliver’s neck prickles, and he looks at Sana and Riki in a new light. A light he really doesn’t want to see them in, because he’s growing to like them, to see them as friends, almost. And now he can’t shake off the feeling that they know something. What could they be hiding?