Chapter Eight
eight
AUGUST 2024
DAY 3 IN THE HOUSE
NORA stumbled toward her room. She needed to clean the wound. She scrounged up her mini first aid kit from her bag and took out the disinfectant and gauze. She paused and stood up shakily.
Madeline was somewhere in the house. Bleeding. After almost having been swallowed by the garden. Nora thought of her half-sunken among the writhing vines. A fresh wave of terror flooded her.
If Nora hadn’t been there, what would have happened?
The kitchen was empty. The only sign that Madeline had been there was her muddy shoes by the door. Nora’s cup of tea lay on the table, untouched. She ran toward the main staircase and up the first few steps before she stopped. There were a few drops of blood on the carpet. Nothing else. Her hand rested on the carved railing. What was she going to do, go search out Madeline’s room? She could end up accidentally knocking on Lucille’s door.
She returned to the downstairs hallway and went to the bathroom. In the mirror, her chest heaved. Nora turned on the water. It was lukewarm and had a brownish tinge. She shut the tap and went into the kitchen, splashing the remaining water from the kettle over her cut. Fresh blood welled up. She dried her hands and applied pressure.
Returning to her room, she stripped off her dirt-stained clothes and sat on the bed. She didn’t realize how tightly wound she still was until her neck started to ache.
That had been nothing like what she’d seen the other night. There had been no blooming flowers. This wasn’t a dream. Or maybe it was just some new, fucked-up permutation of it? Would she wake up in the morning and run into Madeline in the kitchen, unscathed? But some part of her did want it to be a terrible dream this time. Because there was no logical explanation for how Madeline ended up half-buried in the ground, nearly devoured by plants.
In fact, nothing that happened today seemed real. Back at dinnertime, when Renata had headed upstairs and Lucille was talking to Madeline on the terrace, Nora had snuck into the library. She’d found a manila folder on the table and rummaged through the contents. She didn’t look carefully. She just took pictures of everything.
Now, as she clenched her throbbing left hand, she flicked through the pictures on her phone again. Pages of the will. The toxicology report. All of this information she already knew. She scrolled to the last picture that she’d taken. A printout of a security camera image, taken of the front yard with the date and time clearly marked.
July 20. 1:28 p.m. Two weeks ago.
In the center of the frame was a car that Nora instantly recognized. And though the photo was slightly blurred, she could still make out the numbers of her mother’s license plate.
LUCILLE went downstairs in the early gray light and washed her face in the kitchen sink. She had coffee over the granite island. She went to the library and locked the door behind her.
The manila folder was still sitting on the desk, on top of the files she’d upended from the drawers. There were the files she’d printed at the local library yesterday. A paper copy of the updated will. The security camera footage up until July 20, five days before Lucille found out about Mā’s death. Why was there no video beyond that date? Even in the last few hours of recording on the afternoon of the twentieth, something was increasingly obstructing the camera lens until nothing could be seen.
Lucille walked outside and peered up at the spot where the security camera would have been. It was too high up for her to reach. All she saw was ivy crawling up the eaves.
At least now she had the evidence that she needed. Because on July 20, there it was—a photo of the same red Honda that now sat next to the curb.
Elaine Deng had been here. A righteous fury surged through her. The dates matched. She was still waiting on the rest of the autopsy results, but she had key details. Now she just needed to continue to build the rest of the case: Assemble the evidence. Construct it into an irrefutable narrative.
The morning passed in silence as she pored over all the files from the drawers. Lucille’s gaze swam over more than thirty years of taxes, receipts of payment, and carbon copies of checks. There were astronomical property taxes and years of cleaning service invoices, up until around ten years ago when Mā fired them. Receipts of payment for Rennie’s acting programs and Lucille’s law school tuition. Years of checks to Rennie, all throughout the nineties. Half a down payment on Lucille’s house, the starter house she shared with Daniel in Burlingame before they moved to Newport Beach. All this and not a single cent of income in the last thirty-four years.
No wonder they were left with virtually nothing. All the value was in this property. Lucille leaned back in the desk chair, and then stood to stretch. Idly, she stared at the ceiling, which bloomed with brown splotches. Water damage, probably from burst pipes.
Across the library two green velvet armchairs faced each other with a small table between them. When she was younger, books would stack up on that table. “Is that your interpretation?” Dad would ask, settling into the chair across from her and putting his glasses on, crossing his long legs, rolling down his cuffed sleeves. “Do you believe that journalists have an uncontested obligation to the forum of public reason?” Sunlight would expand into the room on afternoons like that; Lucille would feel almost consumed by the intensity of his gaze. Dad had studied the classics and political science at Yale. She would carefully build her arguments before she spoke, trying to preempt every weakness. Sometimes he stoically absorbed her words; sometimes he’d break into a smile. President Lucy , he’d say, and Lucille would feel euphoric. At some point Rennie would barge in and Dad’s attention would vanish. But Lucille clung to those small moments of warmth. The fragments of validation. She savored the moments when Mā smiled approvingly at her grades, when Dad turned to focus on her when a guest at the dinner table praised how well-spoken she was.
To some the affinity for being loved came naturally, like with Rennie. Lucille knew it was true, even now, from the way her own daughter gravitated toward her sister. But Lucille was never easily adored, nor did she need to be. She worked for it. She never trusted anything she didn’t have to prove.
Lucille returned to the desk and doggedly sifted through the papers. Something was stuck at the bottom of one of the drawers. She reached in and pried up brittle, yellowing papers that were stuck together. The edges were jagged, as though they had been ripped out of a book. Lucille slowly eased them apart.
It was a biography about a railroad magnate turned congressman in the late nineteenth century, with passages on Chinese railroad workers. She strained to read notes in traditional Mandarin scribbled in the margins. She saw gold rush— this must have been Mā’s character research for Fortune’s Eye . Traditional Chinese cursive swam in front of her. She couldn’t decipher it. The thought of something else of Mā’s lost to her forever pierced through her. Lucille pushed the pages to the side. A magazine peeked out from under one of the file folders.
It was her parents’ 1986 profile in the American Film magazine. Lucille already knew where to flip to. Across the two-page spread her parents lounged on the living room sofa. Mā wore a deep blue chiffon butterfly wing dress and her kitten heels, staring solemnly at the camera. Her stepfather had a playful smile, an arm draped around Mā. His dark hair was carefully slicked back, his eyes peering out from rounded glasses. Lucille did see a lot of him in Rennie these days: the widow’s peak, the wavy hair, the strong jaw, the hopeful eyes. The title read, in block letters:
THE POWER OF A DRAMATIC DUO
Mā had won her Oscar in 1986. Lucille had been thirteen. Back then she had practically memorized every word of this profile. Now she read it again.
An actor classically trained at Yale and an ingenue who’d grown up in the Chinese opera, this unconventional pair found each other at an awards show eleven years ago. Their marriage is a seamless partnership both on and off screen. Their home is furnished with an effortless mélange of East and West, from brush paintings to neoclassical and Italianate architectural influences.
Vivian Yin and Richard Lowell are both dynamic new talents, drawn to ambitious projects. This year Richard starred in Hamlet and Vivian in Fortune’s Eye. These roles catapulted them both to the Academy Awards, with Richard receiving a nomination for Best Actor, and Vivian receiving, and winning, Best Supporting Actress….
Lucille shut the magazine. She was losing focus. She was supposed to be gathering documents of legal and defensible use, not looking through mementos. What was the point of reminding herself what their lives used to be like? The portrait of their family that had hung across the room was now long gone. Mā had so carefully chosen someone who would paint them in the style of Renoir; it had taken multiple sessions, and the result was magnificent. Now there was no trace of it, save for the outline of the frame, the paneling that hadn’t touched sun for years. But how much of it did Lucille want to remember, anyway? The summers at Lake Tahoe at a spacious rented cabin, the winters up in British Columbia? Her old day school, perched on a hill overlooking the Pacific; the cool blue nights she stayed up listening to Dad’s Van Morrison vinyl float up from the living room, with its familiar skips and scratches? The years of observing her parents’ lavish dinner parties? How could she endure those recollections, knowing how it all ended?
Something nagged at her. She peeled open the magazine again and then picked up the torn book pages she’d discarded. She looked at the portrait of the railroad magnate, and then at the photo of Dad.
They resembled each other. The more Lucille stared at it, the more she could see it.