Free Aunty Lee's Deadly Specials by Ovidia Yu

bed. There’s food
     everywhere. I couldn’t wake them up. I know they are dead.”
    For a moment Sharon didn’t move. Then, as Aunty Lee thought later, she seemed to shift
     into gear, or rather into her mother’s role.
    “We should save the food in the room,” Sharon said in a voice that echoed Mabel’s
     bossy tone. “So it can be tested. GraceFaith, call the police. We shouldn’t touch
     anything until the police get here. They should examine everything. And we should
     make sure nobody leaves.”
    “This is not some kind of TV mystery,” Edmond snapped at her. “Don’t drag the police
     here for nothing. I’m going to check on them first.”
    “Dad, where were you? Do you know what happened?”
    Henry Sung came through the passage looking dazed. Doreen was with him.
    “I thought they were praying,” Henry Sung said. “I went to get Mabel, to tell her
     Doreen needed to talk to her. They were so quiet in there. Mabel is never quiet unless
     she is praying. I was sure they were praying.”
    “There are buah keluak shells all over the floor,” Doreen said. “As though somebody was throwing them.”
    “For goodness’ sake!” Sharon Sung snapped. “GraceFaith, go and call the police and
     tell them two people are dead. Tell them it’s Mabel Sung and her son. That should
     make them come more quickly. And say they were probably poisoned by buah keluak .”
    “No!” Aunty Lee said. “It could not have been the buah keluak !”

7
    Inspector Salim
    Inspector Salim Mawar, officer-in-charge of the Bukit Tinggi Neighborhood Police Post,
     was in his office when the calls came in. This was not surprising. Salim, whose recent
     awards and promotion to inspector should have catapulted him from this apparently
     dead-end posting onto the main administrative track, was almost always in his office.
    “Sir, I think you better take line two. It’s the commissioner’s assistant, calling
     on site with DB.”
    “Thanks, Neha.”
    “And there was another call but the woman couldn’t wait and gave me a message to pass
     to you—” Staff Sergeant Neha Panchal hesitated. This was a new posting for her and
     she was still getting used to the casual way residents called or dropped in on the
     station.
    “The message?” Salim picked up his phone and pressed 2.
    “She said to tell you it couldn’t have been the buah keluak . I asked her what she meant but she said she couldn’t talk now. She sounded a bit
     funny, frankly, but I thought I better tell you just in case—”
    Salim got his connection and gestured to her to exit and close the door. Panchal was
     not sure whether her boss had heard her message. Or whether he had heard her and thought
     her a fool for bothering to convey it. But Panchal had already been told off last
     week for telling a Filipina maid she could not see Inspector Salim without filling
     in a request form and having a woman officer present. She was not going to give him
     another excuse to embarrass her. And just in case, Panchal was keeping a strict record
     of all regulations she had observed Inspector Salim flouting. When he got into trouble
     for treating this jurisdiction as his own personal domain, Panchal was not going down
     with him, unlike the other officers in the station, who worshiped their boss. If she
     handled things right she might even come out of it with a promotion, like her predecessor
     Timothy Pang, now in a dream posting in International Affairs. Panchal knew Pang must
     have discovered something on Salim (or someone even higher up) to have leveraged such
     a promotion.
    Staff Sergeant Panchal had researched Inspector Salim thoroughly even before starting
     her current posting. Inspector Salim Mawar was a lucky man. Thanks to subsidized education,
     he had graduated from the National University of Singapore with a basic degree in
     Social Studies and then thanks to a Singapore Police Force Scholarship, acquired his
     master’s in Management in Science. With