Chapter Two
two
AUGUST 2024
DAY 1 IN THE HOUSE
RENATA Yin-Lowell flinched as Lucille stood abruptly, her chair skidding backward. Rennie watched in slow motion as it tipped over. The back of the chair slammed into the ground and everyone jumped. “This house belongs to us.”
Elaine retorted, “That’s not what the will says.”
“It’s ours,” Lucille insisted. She righted her chair. “Our dad’s family lived here for generations. Our mother lived here for the past fifty years. You’re not taking it away from us.”
“Like you wouldn’t immediately put it on the market to make up for that pathetic inheritance your mother gave you?” Elaine’s voice was caustic. Next to her, the girl stared at Rennie with the same contemptuous look.
While Rennie racked her mind for anything to say to back Lucille up, she registered something in the corner. A figure materialized. But it was quite hazy when she tried to look at it straight on.
She clutched the edge of her seat and blinked, hard. Nothing. It was nothing! Just dust in the sun.
“It belongs to us!” Lucille’s raised voice hauled Rennie’s attention back to the table. “None of this should have been allowed to happen.”
“What, your mother isn’t allowed to decide what to do with her own house?” The girl finally spoke, tipping her chin up. Her short hair framed insolent narrowed eyes.
Lucille’s cheeks suffused with color. Elaine said in a low voice, “Nora. Let me handle this.” She spread out her palms. “I don’t know why I was added to the will—”
“Don’t you?” Rennie’s sister spoke quietly, in that cool, lethal tone. She turned to the lawyer, Reid Lyman, who peered at them through his glasses with a slightly bewildered expression. He looked familiar, though Rennie couldn’t place him. “Was the will changed recently?”
Reid shifted. “It was, actually.”
“When?”
“A few… well, two weeks ago. Late July.”
Lucille then turned to Elaine. “Well. The will gets conveniently changed shortly before our mother’s death so that you get the estate. Isn’t that interesting?”
“What are you implying?”
Lucille tilted her head.
Elaine stood too, her petite frame belied by her flashing eyes. “Believe me. I knew nothing about this will before today. I’m here because I was asked to come. By your mother.”
Lucille’s gaze shifted to Rennie. She couldn’t play hardball like Lucille, but she could plead their case. She cleared her throat. “Come on. This isn’t—fair to us.”
It sounded feeble even as she said it. Her older sister pursed her lips slightly, in a way that indicated her disappointment.
“Fair,” Elaine said slowly. “The daughters of Hollywood elite want to talk about what’s fair.”
The shimmering in the corner was back. It wasn’t dust. Rennie’s heart tapped out a wild beat. A prickling sensation came over her. She rocked onto the edge of her seat. Her niece, Madeline, glanced at her, and Rennie tried desperately to stay calm.
“Our mā came to this country as an immigrant,” Lucille said. “She, more than anyone, worked for this—”
“And you expected to step right into it,” Elaine said. “Maybe this was her way of telling you that you didn’t deserve this. The great Vivian Yin has passed on, and all you say in her memory is that the money she left you is nothing. All you care about is who inherits her home.” She pursed her lips in disgust. “Look at the state of this place. Did you even care for her in her last years? Or did you just abandon her in this house and leave her to die?”
Rennie curled into herself, feeling sick.
“Don’t you dare speak about our family like that,” Lucille spat. “You don’t know us. You never did.”
In that split second a figure appeared behind Elaine. Rennie was immediately flooded with a childlike burst of relief as she looked upon her mother. She’s back; she’s here to explain things—
And then she remembered that they were all here because Mā was very dead.
Her mother grabbed the back of Elaine’s chair and looked straight at Rennie. She was wearing the same blue blouse as she had been the last time Rennie saw her. Her inky eyes bulged. Mā opened her mouth wide, as if to say something, and dirt spilled out.
Rennie lurched up, pointing, just as her mother disappeared. Everyone stared at her in alarm. She bolted from the room, heaving the contents of her stomach into her purse.
She settled on the cold granite floor of the empty foyer against the banister of the stairway and stared high up, where the chandelier glittered. The ridged ceiling plaster was cracking. Strange, discolored stains dripped down the wall now, like spindly, elongated fingers. She didn’t want to go back into the library and face the other family. Or hers. Because what Elaine had said was exactly what her mā had told her the last time Rennie visited her.
A visit Rennie wouldn’t ever tell anyone about.
She hadn’t told Lucille what their mother had looked like then. How paper-thin her skin seemed, how pale she was in the waning light. How it seemed a miracle that Mā was sitting up at the kitchen table, as if she was animated only by her furious gaze.
How pathetic Rennie was, coming to ask her for money.
“ 看 ,” her mā had said, looking off to the side. Look. “She’s back.”
Rennie didn’t know what to say then. Who’s back? Her mother refused to even look at her. But she simply nodded. If she wasn’t desperate, she would never have come in the first place. She had returned in hopes that her mother would do what she had always done: bail Rennie out. After a nasty, expensive divorce with a manipulative and powerful art collector, and a career dead end with ruinous amounts of credit card debt, she thought that her situation was dire enough that Mā might be sympathetic.
“The thing about you, my daughter”—she spat the last word out—“is that you became soft. You never grew up to be great.” Her breath rattled in her chest. She coughed, and spittle dripped from her lips. “You’re waiting around, aren’t you?” Mā accused. “I know what you’re thinking. Who gets the money, who gets the house? I built this up. I endured more than you can imagine. And now you and your sister are just circling me. Like vultures.”
“No,” Rennie whispered. “No, no, that’s not—”
“And you didn’t— call me .” Her mother’s voice collapsed into a croak. Rennie wanted to fall on her knees right then and there and weep. The sky had darkened in the windows. “All those years. You only ever came when you wanted to take something from me.”
“Mā,” Rennie pleaded.
“You were the one I wanted to hear from the most. You were the most like me, my 亲女儿 .” In the dim light Rennie could see that her mā’s teeth were darkened and rotted. Mā’s eyes narrowed. “You became the cruelest.”
Those words had punctured Rennie, and she’d lost all sense of feeling. She’d turned on her heel and stumbled out of the house to her car. She had driven by instinct down the deserted road, away from the house, in the dusk, not realizing that her headlights were busted until she was almost a mile out.
Now, Rennie leaned against the staircase. She couldn’t stand to be here. She wasn’t capable like Lucille, who could bend things to her iron will. Rennie was simply ready to give in. Twenty thousand was enough for a few more months on her sublet and some crucial payments. She just wanted to leave with the money. But she knew Lucille would never leave without the house. If anyone could negotiate to get it back, it was her.
And if that happened, it would be worth staying.
She collected herself and went back into the dining room, leaving her purse out in the foyer next to the stairs. All eyes latched on to her. “Sorry.” She swallowed the remnants of her stomach acid. “I’m back.”
Her older sister’s eyes narrowed in question. Rennie kept her gaze blank. Lucille looked back toward Reid. “As I was saying. I would like to discuss this with my family in private. Will you excuse us?”
Elaine looked toward the lawyer. He paused. “Of course. I can give you a moment to discuss this in private.”
“Yes,” Lucille said. “Just a moment.”
LUCILLE herded her daughter and sister into what used to be their family’s library and shut the doors behind her. She strode across the room to the office table in front of a wall of inlaid bookshelves, and they followed her. Rennie still looked ill. Lucille frowned. “Are you okay? What was that?”
Rennie nodded, not quite meeting her eyes.
Then Madeline said, “Did Wài Pó really… cut us out? Of her will?” Her daughter stood uncertainly to the side, her arms wrapped around her willowy frame.
Lucille shook her head. “I don’t think that’s what happened.” She nodded toward the door. “Okay. She was involved in our mā’s death. I’m sure of it.”
Madeline tilted her head. Rennie looked up.
Lucille mouthed, Elaine .
She watched the shock fall over both.
“I was watching her the entire time. She told me to let him finish reading the will. It was like she knew she was getting the house. Her face gave it away when I pressed her on it. She looked guilty. Didn’t she?” Lucille had decades of cases under her belt as a personal injury attorney. She’d conducted enough depositions to know how someone’s expression could reveal a key truth. She could sense it; the way Elaine’s eyes had widened the moment Reid read out the terms of the estate. It hadn’t been a look of surprise. It had been one of fear.
“Lucille,” Rennie whispered. “You’re saying she could have—?”
Lucille nodded.
“Are you sure?” Rennie asked. “That’s—that’s too far, isn’t it? There could have been so many other reasons. Maybe Mā… changed her mind! Or had some kind of dementia. Or—”
“You think Mā had such severe dementia she accidentally gave the entire house to Elaine Deng ?”
Rennie chewed on her bottom lip.
Lucille told herself to focus on the facts. “The will was changed two weeks ago. She was found dead a week ago. Elaine hasn’t spoken to us in thirty-four years. She walks back into our lives the morning the will is read. The timing can’t be a coincidence.”
“Elaine said she had no idea,” Rennie said.
“And we believe her?” Lucille paused. “After everything that’s happened?”
“What happened?” her daughter asked. “How do you guys know each other?”
Silence.
“She knew our family,” Rennie said quietly. “Elaine’s parents worked for us.”
Madeline nodded. Her expression changed slowly. “ Oh .”
“There’s also an autopsy report with a toxicology component,” Lucille cut in before Madeline could ask another question. “We won’t get finalized reports for months, but the preliminary results should be in soon.”
She had ordered it as an errant precaution. The doctor said it was a heart attack. But Lucille had a feeling. When Mā hadn’t been answering her repeated calls in late July, she had reached out to the nursing agency. It was then that Lucille found out that Mā had fired her nurse several weeks ago. Lucille had hired a new nurse, only for the nurse to go to their house and call Lucille, shrieking, that their mother was collapsed on the back terrace. Her body was long cold and stiff. Already in the stages of decomposition.
Lucille had ordered the toxicology report because of a gut feeling. She didn’t trust that old nurse. Maybe something—wrong medication, some kind of neglect—had led to her mother’s death. But now Lucille thought about Elaine in the dining room, successfully having swept their inheritance out from under them.
Now she had a new gut feeling. No—something more certain than that.
“So,” Rennie said slowly, “if Elaine were involved…”
“Then it would be a murder case,” Lucille said. Madeline’s eyes widened. Lucille tried to keep her voice steady. “We take this to court. She no longer is a beneficiary of the will. There’s a term for it. The slayer statute, I think.”
Rennie shuddered at the phrase. “That’s dramatic.”
Lucille considered her younger sister. It was strange, seeing her age. Even with the emerging wrinkles around her eyes, she still had this lost dreaminess to her, something Lucille had come to resent over the years. Rennie had always been the softer one. Too willing to believe people at their best. Lucille felt both irritation and pity. Her voice hardened. “So, what? We lose the house and let her get away with this?” She paused. “Just wait until the autopsy report comes in. Okay? Trust me. I know something’s wrong here.”
Rennie shrank and crossed her arms. “Okay. Okay. I trust you.”
There was a knock on the door. They turned.
“What do we do now?” Madeline whispered. “What do we say to them?”
“We should leave,” Rennie insisted. “We can figure this out outside the house.”
“We can’t,” Lucille said tightly. “They’ll never let us back in. They’ll change the locks on us. We need to stay here or we’ll be shut out.” She stared her sister down. Rennie had to see that there was no other way.
Her sister didn’t say anything for a long moment. “Fine,” she said faintly. “How do we do that?”
Of course now it would come down to Lucille to scrape things together. She was always the one to be there for Rennie when she crashed and burned, to hire nurses and staff for Mā in her aging years. And now she was the only one who could contest the will. She wasn’t an estate lawyer, but she was a lawyer. She could investigate the circumstances of her mother’s death. She had to step up. Within seconds she pieced together a plan. She steadied herself against the table for a moment and then faced her family.
“We need to buy time. We’re going to go out there and say that we need a few days in the house to sort through our mother’s things. The preliminary autopsy should come in the next few days. And during that time, I’ll figure out what happened between Elaine and Mā before her death. If Elaine did indeed have something to do with it—” Her voice dropped. “We get justice for ourselves. And for Mā.”
NORA watched Vivian’s family file into the dining room. They sat back down in their chairs quietly.
“All right,” the lawyer said, his dark eyes settling on each person around the table in turn. “Should we proceed? Are there any further questions?”
“Reid, we’d like to make a request,” one of the women spoke. The pushy one with the sharp suit jacket. Lucille. “There was no specification as to whom the tangible property in the house belongs to. Which means that by California probate code, it de facto belongs to us. The surviving relatives.”
Legal jargon. Nora exchanged a look with her mother.
“Come on,” the other woman—Renata?—said. She leaned in and searched their gazes with doe-like, brown eyes. “You don’t want my mother’s old clothes, do you?”
She was the one who acted weirdly, pointed at Nora’s mother, and ran out. She seemed a little… scattered. But earnest. Her hands were shaking. Nora actually felt a pang of sympathy for her.
“No,” her mother conceded, though Nora could tell she was irritated. “You can have that.”
“Thank you,” Lucille said. “Can we have a few days to collect her belongings? There are…” She looked around the dining room. “Many things of hers. We’d like time to process.”
A long moment passed. Reid, the lawyer, looked to her mother. Nora did too.
Her mother took a deep breath and nodded. “Just a few days.”
“Okay,” Lucille said. “We’ll stay here, then.”
Mā stiffened at Lucille’s statement. “As will we.”
Lucille set her jaw. Reid glanced around uncertainly. “Well,” he said. “In that case, if everyone has reached an agreement, I will leave it at that. A copy of the will has been forwarded to your emails. If you have any more questions, here is my business card.” He stood and shuffled the files into a manila folder. Nora saw him glance at Lucille one last time before he gathered his things and hurried out.
Nora watched the Yin family leave the room and go upstairs. The daughter looked over her shoulder and met Nora’s eyes for a fraction of a second. She looked just like Lucille. Beautiful and brittle, with full lips and rounded cheekbones. She wore pearl earrings, and Nora thought she saw the glimmer of gold rings on her fingers. She’d said virtually nothing. But her calm gaze had needled into everything. Private school pedigree, some Ivy probably, Nora assumed. Not that it mattered. They would never cross paths again after this.
Nora had a weird feeling. Before Vivian’s family had gathered in the library, they had been so adamant about the house. Now there was no mention of it. She had known them for all of an hour, but they didn’t seem like the type to back out without a fight. Especially not that prickly lawyer, who now marched them up the stairs.
“They’re already taking the second floor,” Mā muttered to Nora. “Of course they are.”
“Why did you let them stay?” Nora asked in Mandarin.
Her mother turned to look at her. Her gray hair was fraying out of its bun. “They’re grieving, Jiā-Jiā.” She used Nora’s Mandarin name. Her voice had softened, and Nora knew she was thinking about her own late mother, who’d passed away when Nora was fourteen. “I am not cruel. This is my last favor to them. And then we will never have to see them again.”
“And what about this house?”
“We’ll sell it.” Mā lowered her voice. “It’ll pay for your medical school. And we can donate the rest. I have a few organizations in mind.”