THE CAMBODIAN CURSE AND OTHER STORIES Read online

  “That’s it,” I said. I knew what had been off about the library. All of the books were treated so haphazardly, even ones that looked expensive. But not Murder on the Orient Express. I could understand wanting to protect the famous Agatha Christie novel from theft, but the removable locked glass case didn’t achieve that. The book was already damaged, and its value lay in its history rather than condition. What history was the book hiding?

  “The poison,” I said. “I know how Simon was poisoned.”

  “Ixnay on the oisonpay,” Tamarind whispered.

  “He wasn’t poisoned in his coffee,” I said. “Simon Quinn was poisoned by the Agatha Christie book.”

  vii.

  “A poisoned book?” Dot whispered.

  “I think Simon was poisoned by the pages of the book,” I said. “Just like Mr. Underhill nearly a hundred years ago.”

  “No. Way.” Tamarind said. “A poisoned book couldn’t have stabbed that first guy.”

  “Of course it could,” I said. “Think about the story Rosalyn told us about Underhill. He was going crazy, tossing books off the shelves. Why would he be doing that? If he was alone in the room, he wasn’t fighting with anyone. If he was looking for something, why not a more organized search? If he was in a rage and wanted to destroy the room, there were more satisfying objects to break. But if he was poisoned by a drug that caused him to hallucinate—”

  “He was fighting an invisible foe,” Tamarind said.

  “So it was Rosalyn,” Kenny said. “She’s the one who knew the history of the book. She knew it was poisoned.”

  Rosalyn’s face paled and her eyes looked frantically between us. “I didn’t—I didn’t poison him.”

  “I don’t think you did,” I said. “The ghost killer accidentally struck again.”

  “Accidentally?” Ivy asked.

  “The first killer selected the book for poetic justice,” I said. “Think about the solution to Murder on the Orient Express. In the book, multiple people were working together to kill a bad man using an assumed name, who many people wished dead. And in real life, our Mr. Underhill conned people during the Great Depression and caused their deaths. A real person or group of people, not a ghost, poisoned the pages of the book. They got away with what many people would consider a justified murder.”

  “Simon never did respect other people’s property,” Kenny said softly. “That’s one of the reasons his publisher insisted he hire an assistant. I was as much his keeper as his research assistant.”

  “But why destroy the book in the fire tonight if it was an accident?” Tamarind asked.

  “Because Rosalyn felt responsible,” I said. “I think she knew the truth about how Underhill died, but she kept silent because she wanted to keep the book.”

  “It was supposed to be safe,” Rosalyn whispered into the fire. “That’s why it was locked in glass. I wasn’t thinking about theft. I was thinking of safety. It was great publicity. Ghost hunters loved to see it. Why did Simon have to break it open?”

  viii.

  I woke up as the day lingered between night and sunrise. It looked as if the sun was struggling to decide if it should make the effort to push through the haze. Just like I was.

  I’d been wrong the night before, I now realized. Half wrong.

  Rosalyn had told us why it was necessary to burn the book, yet now that I’d gotten some sleep, I realized a fundamental problem with what I’d accepted at the time was a confession. The hotel’s owner was the only person who couldn’t have burned the book. We were all watching her at the window, which was far from the fireplace. Why had she walked to the window as she spoke, when there was nothing to see outside in the darkness?

  I found Kenny in the kitchen.

  “Kenny, you said you knew about poisons from your research for Simon. What could have still been active after seventy years?”

  “It would have to be one of the heavy metals, like arsenic or antimony.”

  Which didn’t cause hallucinations and couldn’t have compelled Mr. Underhill to kill himself. And that type of poison wasn’t what had killed Simon.

  “Coffee or cranberry scones?” Kenny asked. “The storm is over, but I think it’ll still be a while before they reach us.”

  “I’ll be back.” I left the kitchen and knocked on one of the bedroom doors.

  History was repeating itself. As had happened seventy years before, the library ghost was enacting poetic justice again.

  Ivy opened the door. Her auburn curls were askew, and dark shadows made her face appear sunken. I doubted she’d slept.

  “It wasn’t an accident, was it?” I said.

  She smiled sadly and shook her head. “No. It wasn’t an accident. It was justice. It was the least I could do. You see, it was my fault he went free.”

  “He lived here in Denver before moving after the trial,” I said. “You were here then, too.”

  She nodded. “I wanted to be a NASCAR driver back then. But I screwed up. I was young. I’d stolen a car to go for a joyride. That night, I saw Simon. He was in the park where he strangled his girlfriend. That park had a great big lot where I thought I could practice my Rockford Spin with the car. I thought it would be empty since the park officially closes at midnight, but when I drove in my headlights shone on the park bench…He never saw my face, only the blinding lights of the stolen car. Simon lied about his alibi. He used his charm to get his friends to back up his story—for all I knew they were probably too drunk to realize they were even lying—and I was too scared to say anything. Confessing to stealing the car would have ruined my life. I didn’t get caught that night. But it didn’t matter in the end. My nerves were shot after that.”

  “So when you saw him at the airport today—”

  “He’s impossible to miss. I turned down other fares so I could ‘accidentally’ bump into Simon and tell him I had an unoccupied taxi and knew of a hotel.”

  “But you left after you dropped us off.”

  Ivy shook her head and laughed ruefully. “I chickened out. But when the storm got so bad I nearly ran off the precarious road, I knew it was fate for me to come back. But you have to understand, I was going to kill myself. Not Simon. That’s why I had the poison. I’ve carried it with me for the past year, ever since Simon’s last book came out to critical acclaim. And I didn’t use it on Simon tonight. Not exactly.”

  “Then how—?”

  “I know Rosalyn,” Ivy said. “I’ve been driving tourists to her inn for years, so we got to know each other well. Nobody else makes the drive to Tanglewood Inn during storms as bad as this one. I called Rosalyn from the airport to let her know I was bringing some people to the hotel and it would be better if my passengers didn’t think I’d made the dangerous drive to bring them to a far-away hotel because I was friends with the owner.”

  “Which is why we didn’t think you two knew each other.”

  Ivy nodded. “I didn’t want her to get in trouble if I was caught. I knew where she kept her keys, so I knew how to unlock the book. I didn’t tell her what I was going to do, though. I know she tried to cover for me last night when she realized what I must have done, since she’s always known I believed Simon Quinn was guilty. I never confided in her what I’d seen a decade ago, but she knew I felt passionately about his guilt, since it consumed me. But I wouldn’t have let Rosalyn take the fall for me. That was never a question.”

  “Even if you originally got the poison for yourself,” I said, “you still killed him.”

  “I poisoned the edges of the pages of the book,” Ivy said, “but I didn’t put the book in Simon’s hands. I knocked on the door to his room after we all went to bed last night. I told him I had evidence of his guilt, and that it was inside the Agatha Christie book, hidden in between some of the pages that were stuck together. If he dared face the library’s avenging ghost, he could get the evidence that proved
his guilt and destroy it. If he was innocent, Jaya, why would he go looking for evidence that didn’t exist?”

  “He wouldn’t,” I said.

  As I thought of Simon creeping into the library, bolting the door behind him, and searching for evidence, I knew Ivy was right. Simon’s actions were those of a guilty man. Once he felt the poison taking hold, he wouldn’t have immediately gone for help because he needed to first find the evidence so people wouldn’t learn of his guilt. That explained why he hadn’t left the library for help.

  “I’m ready to turn myself in,” Ivy said. “My conscience is clear. I’ll accept my fate. It was Simon Quinn’s own guilt that killed him.”

  The Curse of Cloud Castle

  This Sanjay Rai short story originally appeared in Asian Pulp, edited by Tommy Hancock and Morgan McKay and published by Pro Se Productions in 2015.

  Sanjay Rai had escaped from a coffin sinking to the bottom of the Ganges River with a full minute of air left to spare. He had remained calm and composed while appearing on live television wearing nothing but a lungi. He’d even kept a level head to avoid being burned alive when a fellow stage magician had miscalculated an illusion.

  Most people would find those situations horrifying. Or, at the very least, stress-inducing. Though Sanjay would never admit it publicly, his heart rate did rise during all of those experiences. However, it was nothing compared to the abject dread he felt as he stood on the dock in front of the small motorboat.

  Sanjay didn’t hate boats. It was his stomach that did. He felt queasy even contemplating a boat ride.

  There was something else making him queasy this morning. Looking across the water, the fog-shrouded island in the distance gave him a sense of foreboding. Sanjay wasn’t superstitious. Quite the contrary. As a stage magician, he knew how to see beyond the obvious explanations that most people saw. On more than one occasion, he’d solved crimes that appeared impossible.

  But he also knew the power of suggestion. The fact that a curse had been attributed to Cloud Castle played on people’s subconscious minds, even when they didn’t believe in curses. And Sanjay Rai did not believe curses.

  “It’s only a twenty-minute ride,” Vik assured him.

  “I’m only doing this because it’s you.” The wind at the edge of the ocean flipped up Sanjay’s collar and carried his words out to sea.

  “I don’t understand,” Vikram said with a shake of his head, “how someone who can settle comfortably into a coffin without getting claustrophobic can possibly be so afraid of a little boat ride. We’ll be able to see the mainland the whole time.”

  Vikram, who’d gone by the nickname Vik as soon as he realized he had free will, was one of Sanjay’s oldest friends. Vik was two years older, but they’d grown up in the same neighborhood in Palo Alto and bonded as two American born kids of parents from India. ABCD. American Born Confused Desi.

  Early in life, Sanjay had done what his parents expected. Right up until he dropped out of law school to become a professional stage magician, much to his parents’ disappointment. After several years struggling, he’d become a huge success, selling out a long run of shows at a Napa Valley theater and having a short-lived TV show on Indian MTV, which featured the Ganges escape.

  After a short phase as a Goth slacker in high school, Vik followed in his computer programmer parents’ footsteps, making millions in the latest Silicon Valley dot-com boom. Thanks to his “Om” app, which sent calming and inspiring messages to a cell phone whenever the program detected the user needed to relax, he’d made his first million before he turned twenty-five.

  This weekend, Vik was celebrating his thirtieth birthday. With the same gusto that made him successful with his tech start-up, he planned to celebrate his big day by throwing a party on a small island off the coast of Northern California. Nothing too extravagant, by Silicon Valley standards. He was limiting it to forty of his closest friends.

  Cloud Castle stood on a private island visible from the mainland only on the clearest of days. Even then, the rocky island was a tiny speck on the horizon, small enough to make one wonder if it was a trick of the light. Aside from a guard outpost next to the dock, the fifty-room mansion was the only building on the island. It was ostensibly the vacation property of a tech billionaire, but the man had lost a fortune in the last stock market crash. To avoid losing his toy castle, he was now forced to rent out the property when he wasn’t using it. Luckily for him, the industry was booming again, and there were plenty of young men like Vik who were happy to throw their money around. The castle was rented for getaways ranging from two days to twenty—however long the renter could stand to be away from their cell phone and the Internet. The ethos of the island was to enjoy luxury while taking a break from modern technology.

  While Sanjay dragged his feet, a small motorboat waited to shuttle eight guests to the island: Vik, his fiancée Geneva, his little sister Priya, her Welsh husband Broderick, and four friends, including Sanjay. The rest of the guests would be arriving the following day, on Saturday, to stay the night at the castle after the catered party with almost as many hired staff as guests. Sanjay fit into both categories: friend and hired help. He was to be part of the entertainment for the weekend, performing his Hindi Houdini stage show during the party. That’s why he’d been invited to come to the island a day early along with Vik’s family and closest friends. Sanjay and Vik had once been close, but with the demands of their vastly different careers, they rarely spoke these days.

  Vik’s fiancée stepped off the boat to join Vik and Sanjay on the dock. Geneva worked long hours as a human rights lawyer, and Sanjay had never seen her without harsh clothes perfectly tailored to her thin six-foot frame, and an even harsher expression. It was partly her name that played into Sanjay’s impression. Thirty years before, her mom was presenting a paper at an academic conference in Geneva, Switzerland, while eight months pregnant. She unexpectedly went into labor, and since she and her husband hadn’t yet selected a name, Geneva it was. Sanjay knew her name wasn’t her fault, but it was telling that the more casual nickname Genny never stuck. As she put her hand on his arm and gave him a warm smile, he wondered if he’d misjudged her. For Vik’s sake, Sanjay hoped he’d been wrong about his initial impression of her.

  “I don’t know how much good it’ll do right before you get on the boat,” she said, “but I have an extra seasickness patch.”

  “I’m already wearing two,” Sanjay said. “But thanks.” With a deep breath big enough to rival that of a Yogi, Sanjay stepped onto the motorboat.

  The boat lurched as it pulled away from the dock. Sanjay closed his eyes and focused on breathing.

  “Don’t you dare throw up so close to us, Sanjay Rai,” Priya shouted across the boat from where she stood at the bow, her long black hair swirling around her face. Five years younger than her brother Vik, Priya had tagged along with the two boys when they were kids. She had a crush on Sanjay up until she left for college. She was a sweet kid until then, too, he remembered. Once she got to college, she learned there was a whole world out there beyond the rules imposed by her conservative parents. Unfortunately, one of the first lessons she learned was that her good looks could get her almost anything she wanted.

  “If you’re going to barf,” she continued, “at least lean over the side of the boat.”

  “Thanks for your concern.”

  “Haven’t you learned to ignore Priya yet?” Vik said, leading Sanjay to the tiny enclosed area of the boat with padded benches. “Engaging only encourages her.”

  “Why did you invite her, then?”

  Vik blinked at him. “She’s my sister. How could I not?” He looped his hand into Geneva’s and pulled her down to sit on his lap. They were a good-looking couple. Vik was confident enough that he didn’t even mind that Geneva was a few inches taller than him.

  “It was their parents,” Geneva said, lowering her voice and squeezing Vik�
�s hand. “Priya complained to them that she and Broderick were only invited to the party on Saturday night, not tonight’s pre-party island fun.”

  “You want to meet the rest of the gang?” Vik asked, nodding toward the five people at the front of the boat with the hired driver.

  “I think he’d rather wait until we’re on solid ground,” Geneva answered for Sanjay.

  For someone so brilliant, Vik could be terribly unobservant. Sanjay smiled weakly, then gripped the edge of his seat. For one startling moment, he could have sworn he was seeing double and feared doubling up on seasickness patches might not have been a good idea. Then he remembered two of Vik’s friends were twins.

  Emilio and Elena were famous in the tech community for being the brother-sister team who invented a promising social media platform, then sold it for a price that boggled Sanjay’s mind. Sanjay hadn’t met the twins before, but had heard good things about them through Vik. As he watched them, the wind blew Elena’s hat into the ocean. Her long black hair that had been tucked up inside now flowed freely around her. She didn’t seem to mind. Her attention was focused on Cloud Castle, slowly coming into view through the fog.

  Sanjay hoped the twins would be better company than Priya and her husband Broderick, whom he’d spent more time with than strictly necessary for a well-lived life. For the most part, Sanjay could ignore the vacuous woman Priya had become, but Broderick’s gregarious personality ignored all subtle cues that someone didn’t wish to speak to him. The tall Welshman was at least ten years Priya’s senior. He’d won her over with his suave British accent and his overflowing bank account.

  “Bore da,” Broderick shouted into the wind. “What a beautiful morning for a boat ride.”