Chapter Five
five
AUGUST 2024
DAY 2 IN THE HOUSE
LUCILLE pulled into the parking lot of the law firm in Pasadena. It was half-hidden off the side of the road and hard to find even with her navigation. Her phone lit up with a notification, and she snatched it out of her bag. Any email could be the toxicology report. But this one wasn’t. It was just a work email. She’d been getting a steady stream of them—briefs to look over, contract language, indemnity clauses, forwarded communications meant to snare her in the CC trap. Her usual urge was to open them and fire off responses, to show how hard of a worker she was even during her time off. But this was too important.
She walked into the office and felt the cool hum of the air-conditioning. She adjusted her blouse. “I’m here to see Reid Lyman.”
The receptionist peered toward the offices in the back. “He’ll be with you in a second.”
Lucille cradled the printed copy of the will in her handbag and picked at a loose string on her pleated pants. She needed to get these tailored again.
“Lucille?”
There was his familiar warm tone. Lucille smiled wanly. “Hi, Reid.”
“It’s good to see you. Come in.”
Lucille followed him to his office. It was a corner room with light wooden walls, bare except for a clock and a Pepperdine Law diploma. She sat in the chair across from his desk, which was strewn with papers. There was an old coffeemaker, the carafe ringed with a gradient of stains. He pushed aside his keyboard and leaned forward. She was a little caught off guard by the intensity of his gaze. She thought of the first time their eyes met thirty-four years ago, those few electrifying weeks after her party. Her cheeks warmed. She slid the copy of her mother’s will between them. “Thanks for taking time out of your day for this.”
Reid raised a hand. His sleeves were pushed up. “We’re past those formalities. I’m sorry about your mother. I want to be here for you.”
She paused.
“I mean it, Lucy.”
Lucille had come to despise her old nickname because her husband had always sounded exasperated when he used it. But Reid said it softly. With care. She looked up. She wanted to shout across the desk: How could she do this to us? Instead, she stayed businesslike. “How did she change the will?”
He exhaled through his nose. “I got a call on my cell during the weekend, which was strange. I asked if it could wait until Monday, but Vivian said it was urgent. That was when she said that she wanted to make a change referring to the inheritance of her estate. To write a codicil. She wanted the estate to go to Elaine Deng.”
“ She said?”
Reid nodded. “Your mother wrote and signed the codicil.” He paused and held up a piece of paper with creases in it. “Here is the original document. It was her handwriting and signature, wasn’t it?”
Lucille stared at the familiar words that had been photocopied into her copy of the will.
I devise and bequeath my estate and all its matters to Elaine Deng.
I revoke the prior devise and bequest of my estate and all its matters to my daughters, Yin Chen, Lucille Wang, and Yin Zi-Meng, Renata Yin-Lowell.
It all would have been theirs. Hers, and her sister’s. It should have been.
There was her mother’s unmistakable, betraying signature. And the date: July 20.
Lucille ground her teeth. Keep going. “And in this call. Did my mother mention any other financial assets? Or funds?”
Reid gave her a strange stare. “There’s no other money that she mentioned.”
No other money. It didn’t make sense. Between her late mother and stepfather, they’d accumulated wealth, generations of it, she thought. Enough to send them all to years of private school and college. Enough that Mā had paid half the down payment for her and Daniel’s house. Enough that Mā used to send checks for Madeline’s day school tuition. But now it was all gone? “Okay. And what time was this again?”
“Hm.” He pulled out his phone. Squinted at it. “Around 5:32 p.m. She’d written up the amendment after and mailed it to me. I received it by Monday. The 22nd.”
“And did you ask her why? Why she changed this detail?”
“I did.” His eyebrows knit in focus. “And she said this one thing I couldn’t make sense of. She said, ‘ My daughters can’t have this house. It will ruin them .’?”
The clock ticked.
“Ruin us,” Lucille whispered. Ruin? Her mouth was dry. She swallowed. “What does that mean?”
“I asked her. She didn’t say.”
“That doesn’t sound like her at all. Mā wouldn’t say that.”
“She did.” Reid’s voice was soft. “I heard her, Lucy.”
There had to be more to this. “When she changed the will. Did she seem like she was under the influence of something? Under duress?”
“If you’re referring to her mental acuity, she seemed sound of mind. At least to me. But she didn’t have witnesses so… I don’t know.”
“Does that even make the will valid?”
“Technically, yes. It’s handwritten. Still, contestable.”
She gripped the sides of her chair. “It sure is. Because none of this seems like her . She doesn’t change her will for decades, and then she does this, and a week later she’s found dead?”
He gave her a long look. “What did she die of, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Doctor said heart attack. I’m getting an official autopsy report.”
He nodded. “That’s what I would have done. It may have been… planned.”
“You think my mother killed herself?”
“I—” Reid swallowed, not quite meeting her eyes. “I didn’t mean— It’s not appropriate for me to speculate.”
He was the last person Mā had spoken to. It hadn’t been one of her children. For a moment Lucille felt a cold and total sense of anger possess her. “Ruin us,” she echoed. Her voice started to tremble. “She said that giving us the house would—ruin us?”
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t know what was going on.”
“As if we’re not ruined now,” she whispered. Every single emotion she had pushed down over the past two weeks flooded her now, the grief rising in the same tide as the anger, all the horrific possible circumstances of her mother’s death, along with her own helplessness. And the worst thing was that she was spiraling, publicly, in the middle of Reid’s office.
“Lucy,” she heard Reid saying. She was only dimly aware of him coming around the desk, putting his hand on her shoulder. “Are you all right?”
She swiped furiously at her face with her sleeves. Lucille looked up and saw Reid leaning over. His hand now cradled her forearm. She held still for a moment, their faces inches apart, his warm brown eyes searching hers, and felt a brief, deranged urge to reach for him. She felt intolerably vulnerable. Why was he looking at her like this? Was it pity or concern?
She rocked back. Reid moved his hand. Lucille stood stiffly from her chair and swept the will into her bag. “Thank you. That was all I needed to know.”
Lucille was still in the parking lot of the law firm. Her swollen eyelids ached from being rubbed raw. She needed to drive home, but now she just sat numbly in her car.
Mā said that the house would ruin them.
What did she mean? Lucille had always assumed it was obvious that they would sell the house and split the money. They all would have been better off for it. Rennie would have enough money to get back on her feet after her big divorce. Lucille would help recoup some of the money she’d lost in her soul-sucking, fruitless congressional campaign and her divorce. They would deal with their own grief, separately. Life could start again. But now they were stuck. Trapped within the consequences of their mother’s erratic final decisions.
It infuriated her.
Whatever it took, she would get her childhood home back. There was no way Mā had given the house willingly to Elaine, that scheming vulture. Had Mā been under the influence of something? Had her mental state deteriorated? Lucille didn’t quite trust what Reid said. She needed confirmation. She went back to her phone and searched frantically through her emails until she found the number for the agency.
A nasal voice came from the other end of the line. “Hello. Heartspring Home Health Care.”
“I’d like to speak with one of your nurses. Shelly Liao.”
“One moment.” Tinny music played, and then there was a click.
A Chinese-accented voice said, “This is Shelly.”
“Hi,” Lucille said. “You were employed by my mother, Vivian Yin, through Heartspring, right?”
“I was. Until late June.”
“I see. And why were you let go?”
There was a pause. “I don’t know. You should ask her that.”
Lucille steeled her voice. “Well, she’s dead now, so I figured I could come to you.”
“Oh.” The nurse faltered. “I’m sorry. When did she…?”
“End of July.”
“ 天啊 . I’m so sorry.” She clicked her tongue, something that Mā also did when expressing pity. “I think—that your mother didn’t want to be taken care of.”
“I see.”
“I did what I could. Her movement wasn’t very good. She needed help getting around, up stairs and into the shower and all. I tried to keep her company in that big house of hers. But she didn’t like it. She wanted to be alone.”
“Did she seem… okay? Mentally?”
“Most times. But she had her own habits. When I would try to eat with her during meals, she’d make me go away. She always wanted me to prepare an extra plate for her. I’d go eat in the kitchen. And then your mother would sit in the dining room, just her and the two plates in front of her. Just talking.”
“Talking to…?”
“No one,” the nurse said quietly.
Lucille realized she was holding her breath.
“She would use this voice like she was trying to get a child to eat. Of course, I was always the one to clear the plates. It hurt my heart to see the food get thrown out. But she always insisted on that second plate. And I always made it for her.” She paused. “She was very insistent about a lot of things. But that’s how the elderly are. I assumed she had some kind of dementia.”
Lucille’s head spun. Dementia. So that was a possibility. “What were the rules?”
“Not a single object could be moved from its original place. She refused to leave the house when I was there. She had her groceries delivered and she’d watch through the security cameras she’d had installed. There were certain areas of the house I was allowed in. I never went behind the house, for example. She did pay me well. I thought she was satisfied with my work. But clearly she was not.”
“Okay.” Lucille paused. “Did a woman named Elaine Deng ever visit the house?”
“Elaine…? No. No one came.”
“Right. Okay. Were there any other times her mental state seemed… particularly questionable?”
Silence.
“Hello?”
There was some muffled shout from the background, and then Lucille heard her say, in Mandarin, “Aiyah, wait a second.”
A moment, and then she was back. “Sorry about that. There was one incident I remember,” the nurse said. “I was waking her from a nap in that book room and she looked directly at me and said—” She paused. “She said, ‘ I can feel her. She’s coming for me .’?”
Lucille’s stomach plummeted. “What? What does that mean?”
“I don’t know. I tried asking her. It was strange. But when I brought it up again, she didn’t remember it at all. Then I started feeling strange. Like I was being watched. I asked her once, ‘Doesn’t it scare you, living alone in this big house?’ I figured that must have offended her in some way, because the next morning she told me I was let go.”
“Huh,” Lucille said.
“I didn’t mean to imply anything,” Shelly said. “I just couldn’t believe that ā Yí was living in this house all alone. If I had daughters, I’d sell the house and have one of them take care of me, la.”
Lucille bristled. The judgment in the nurse’s voice was palpable. You don’t understand , she wanted to shout into the phone. I tried everything I could to bring my mother into my life, and she refused. “Well,” she said through gritted teeth. “Thank you for telling me. I appreciate it.”
“Of course,” the nurse said. “I’m sorry about your mother.” There was a click as she hung up.
At the house, Lucille went straight to the bathroom to compose herself. Thankfully, no one had seen her come in. Everyone must be in their rooms. She turned on the faucet to splash water on her face.
Had she been such an awful daughter? Lucille’s eyes smarted. Hadn’t she spent years begging to be closer to her mother? It was humiliating to continually plead for scraps of her presence, only to be rejected again and again. Mā had chosen that. What Lucille could not accept was that Mā had chosen Elaine.
There were still two possibilities Lucille couldn’t rule out. Mā had made this decision out of pure dementia, or she had been coerced. By Elaine.
She gazed down at the sink bowl. There was something collected at the bottom, around the drain. Dirt or some kind of sediment.
How did that get there? She reached out and turned on the sink again, but the water that came out wasn’t quite clear. She scrubbed at the bowl furiously with her bare hands. The dirt eddied away, but there was still a rusted tinge to the water and now a coppery smell. She glanced up. On either side of her, sconces shone dimly against the dark green wallpaper. As she peered at her sallow reflection, something shifted in the background. In an instant her reflection warped. A dimple appeared on her cheek.
She looked down again. The water had started to run brown.
Immediately she shut the water off. When she looked upon her reflection again, the image she saw was grotesque.
Her eyes bulged out of her sockets. An open gash festered across her forehead. Blood dripped through her swollen, bloated lips.
A scream rose in her chest. She slapped her hands to her face, raking her fingers down her cheeks, as if she could claw the hideous mask off her. She felt nothing on her fingers, but the image remained in the mirror. She flung the bathroom door open and fled to the library, sagging into the armchair.
She focused on slowing her breathing until she dared a peek at her dark phone screen. Her reflection was back to normal, aside from two long red scratches down her right cheek. Lucille pressed the pads of her fingertips to the raised, irritated flesh.
It was just like the time when she was in the house over winter break, more than thirty years ago.
Get it together. She went to the desk and tugged open the drawers, uprooting all the files until they were sprawled across the surface. Her hands shook and papers slid out of the folders, but she didn’t care. She would go through all of them. She turned on the computer and the machine slowly whirred to life, casting an eerie blue glow over the rest of the desk. It was an old Windows. Lucille remembered how she and Daniel had installed it for her mother a few years into their marriage. She clicked on the generic chess pawn icon and it took her straight through. Mā didn’t even have a password.
Only the most perfunctory programs were downloaded. Mā had still used Internet Explorer. Lucille pulled up the browser history. The last thing her mother searched was the name of Reid’s law firm. Lucille logged onto her mother’s email; she was pretty sure she’d set that up for her too. Not that her mother used it. The inbox was empty. She barely even called. If she did, it was always during an errant time when Lucille was getting ready for bed or when she was buried under things at work, and it was never for long. Lucille now perused the computer files. There were the pictures of her and Madeline and Daniel, back when they were a Christmas card family. Madeline had been so young, with a wide, gap-toothed smile and short bangs.
In the Documents folder there were forms, mostly scanned tax returns from recent years. Lucille was about to pore through them when she noticed another folder on the computer; she clicked on it. Video clips. One showed an aerial view of what she recognized as the driveway.
She understood immediately what it was: security camera footage.
She had told Mā to do that, too, living all alone here by herself. Lucille deciphered the file labels; the dates led all the way up until July 20. She hovered the cursor over it.
Her phone rang in with a call from an unknown number.
Lucille paused and then picked up.
“Hello?”
“Hello. Is this Lucille Wang?”
“Speaking. Who is this?”
“This is Scott Felim from the medical examiner’s office. We have preliminary results of your mother’s autopsy. Do you have a moment?”