The wineglasses. Oh shoot. I raced into the kitchen, grabbed the two wineglasses, dumped the wine down the sink, stuck them into the nearest cabinet, emptied the vegetarian curry soup into the sink, threw the butternut squash gnocchi into the trash, tossed the steak I made for Jim after it and shoved it deep into the garbage can in case my mother decided to throw something away. I washed my hands, ran for the door, and opened it.
My mother raised her hands. She was holding her bag in one and a box of donuts in the other. She was about an exact copy of me except thirty years older. We were both short and tiny and when we spoke, we waved our hands around too much. A woman about my age stood next to her. She had dark hair, big eyes, and a cute heart-shaped face. Iluh Indrayani. Like me, she was born in the U.S., but both of her parents had come from Indonesia, from the island of Bali. Her mother knew my mother and we met a few times, but never really talked.
Something bad had happened. The only time my mother brought visitors to my house who weren’t family was when some sort of magical emergency had taken place.
“You left me on the doorstep for half an hour,” my mother huffed.
“I was asleep.” I held the door open. “Come in.”
They walked inside, my mother in the lead. Iluh gave me an apologetic look. “So sorry to bother you on a Saturday.”
“That’s okay,” I told her.
We sat in the kitchen.
“Would you like something to drink?” I asked.
My mother waved her hands. “You talk. I’ll make coffee.”
Above us something thudded. I froze.
My mother stared at the ceiling. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?” I asked, my eyes wide. I would kill Jim. He could sit completely motionless for hours when on stakeouts. I’d seen him do it. He had to be dropping things on purpose.
Thud!
“That!” My mother turned predatory like a raptor. “What was that?”
Lie, think of something quick, lie, lie . . . “I’ve got a cat.”
“What kind of a cat?” My mother’s eyes narrowed.
“A big one.”
“I want to see,” Mom said. “Bring him down.”
“He’s a stray and a little wild. He’s probably hiding. I probably won’t even be able to find him now.”
“How long have you had him?”
“A few days.” The more I lied, the deeper I sank. My mother had a brain like a supercomputer. She missed nothing.
Mom pointed a teaspoon at me. “Is he neutered?”
Oh my gods. “Not yet.”
“You need to neuter him. Otherwise he’ll spray all over the house. The stench is awful. And when he isn’t out catting around, little female cats in heat will show up and wail under the windows.”
Kill me, please. “He is a nice cat. He’s not like that.”
“It’s instinct, Dali. Before you know it, you’ll be running a feline whorehouse.”
“Mother!”
My mom waved the spoon and went back to making coffee.
I turned to Iluh. She gave me a sympathetic glance that said, “Been there, endured that, got the good daughter T-shirt for it.”
“What can I do for you?” I asked.
Iluh folded her hands on her lap. “My grandmother is missing.”
“Eyang Ida?”
Iluh nodded.
I remembered Ida Indrayani. She was nice lady in her late sixties with a friendly warm smile. She still worked as a hairdresser. The family didn’t really need the money but Eyang Ida, Grandmother Ida, as she was usually called, liked to be social.
“How long has she been missing?”
“Since last night,” Iluh said. “She was supposed to come to my birthday party in the evening but didn’t show up. Sutan, he’s my husband, and I stopped by her house on the way back from the restaurant. The lights were off. We knocked on the door, but she didn’t answer. We thought maybe she’d fallen asleep again. Her hearing isn’t the best now, and once she falls asleep, it’s hard to wake her up. My parents keep wanting her to move in with them, but she won’t do it. We went back to her house first thing in the morning, but she wasn’t there. She hadn’t opened her shop either, and that’s when we knew something was really wrong. My mother has a spare key so she unlocked the door. My grandmother was gone and there was blood on the back porch.”
Not good. “How much blood?”
Iluh swallowed. “Just a smudge.”
“Show her,” my mom said.
Iluh reached into her canvas bag. “We found this next to the blood.”
She pulled a Ziploc bag out of her purse. Inside it were three coarse black hairs. About nine inches long, they looked like something you would pull out of a horse’s mane.
“We tried going to the police, but they said we had to wait forty-eight hours before she can be declared missing.”
I opened the bag and took a sniff. Ugh. An acrid, bitter, dry kind of stench, mixed with a sickening trace of rotting blood. I shook the hairs out on the table and carefully touched one. Magic nipped my finger. The hair turned white and broke apart, as if burned from the inside out. Bad magic. Familiar bad magic.
Iluh gasped.
“I told you,” my mother said with pride in her voice. “My daughter is the White Tiger. She can banish evil.”
“Not all evil,” I said, and pushed a sticky-note pad toward Iluh. “Could you write your grandmother’s address down for me? I’ll go visit the house.”