The Mushroom Tree Mystery (Su Lin Series Book 6) by Ovidia Yu

Author:Ovidia Yu [Yu, Ovidia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2022-06-20T23:00:00+00:00

Mrs Maki’s Room

It was evening when I left the laboratory building to walk back to the house alone.

I hadn’t been sorry when Mrs Maki turned up at the lab again – alone this time. It had been a long day and I was stiff from sitting still and reading to Professor Kutsuki or listening to him talk. Ah Peng and Tanis had brought us lunch at noon. It was a simple meal, steamed ubi kayu, or tapioca, with some green papaya pickle. Since the men were not in the house there was no point in wasting our precious rice ration. Tapioca, however, grew freely and I’d instructed the boys to plant tapioca shoots for every stalk they harvested. And I’d made the sweet papaya pickle days ago, boiling down the cubes of almost ripe papaya with gula melaka, lime and ginger juice.

These days, it was unlike Mrs Maki to do any housework other than organising. She’d been extremely offended when Hideki Tagawa asked her to move a chair out of Professor Kutsuki’s way on his arrival and now, months later, she still muttered, ‘Why ask me to move a chair? There are servants. That’s what they’re for.’

I’d understood she was protecting her position as one of the elite. It was especially precarious given how the elite she was most interested in impressing looked down on women as good only for serving men. So, I was very surprised when Mrs Maki insisted she was going to stay in the laboratory and wipe dust from the surfaces. I’d had a feeling she just wanted to poke around with no one there. And I was perfectly happy for her to do that. Even though I felt I’d worked hard, we hadn’t produced much that was worth anything.

Professor Kutsuki made a fuss, of course. ‘It’s my laboratory. It’s my private work space. Why should you busybody inside here? Pah!’

‘All right, you stay then. I’m just going to clean. The place is filthy. Clearly some people think they’re too good to clean a room once they call themselves “assistant”!’

That was for me, of course. As was ‘Go and get dinner started. And you’d better give us something better than that lunch we had.’

She’d been supervising the lunch, not me, but I wasn’t going to remonstrate. I left that to Professor Kutsuki who protested at my departure until ‘I’ll read you the story later tonight,’ I’d promised.

I hoped Mrs Maki wouldn’t tell Yoshio Yoshimoto I was reading stories to the old man. He’d probably disapprove of anything distracting Professor Kutsuki from his work. It might make him rethink asking me to help him. I didn’t want that to happen.

Did Mrs Maki mean to grill Professor Kutsuki? I was pretty certain the old scientist could hold his own against her. I would have liked to watch her try, though.

I found the houseboys had dinner preparations well in hand, so I left them to it. There was some dried fish and they’d put together a fish dish with

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