Chapter Forty
forty
AUGUST 2024
DAY 7 IN THE HOUSE
RENNIE watched Lucille pace.
“What could have happened between them, even? It’s only been a week.” Lucille flung her hands in the air. “And for it to be her , of all people. She could be in on it with Elaine, for all we know!”
At this, Rennie finally rose from the bed. “She’s not. And Elaine’s not either.”
Her sister faced her. “What do you mean?”
Rennie had held her tongue when Lucille and Elaine were fighting. But she had to come clean. She had to finally talk about that night.
Rennie took a deep breath. “Elaine wasn’t the last person to see Mā alive. It was me.”
She waited for Lucille to react. She braced herself for the force of it.
Instead, Lucille simply whispered, “What do you mean? You came with her?”
“No.” Rennie had to force the word out. “Three days before Mā was found on July 25, I spoke to her here, for half an hour? Maybe less. And then I left.” The memory was so vivid, and she had been over it so many times, it was strange to finally say it aloud.
“Why did you—”
“I don’t know how you didn’t see my car on the camera,” Rennie barreled on. “Maybe it was dark, so it didn’t show up. Maybe you weren’t looking on that day. But I was here.”
“That’s not even remotely close to my question. Why on earth did you not tell me this entire week?”
“I—” Rennie started and then swallowed. “I don’t know. I’d been meaning to. But I didn’t know where the case was at, and you mentioned settling, so I thought—I thought if anybody could scare Elaine into settling, it would be you. And no one would ever have to know. I’m sorry.”
“Oh God,” Lucille said. She faced the wall and clutched her head. “Oh my God. I can’t even look at you right now.” She whirled around. “What did you two talk about? What did she say?”
It all had to come out now. Rennie admitted, finally, “I came to ask her for money. But then I backed out. And I left. She didn’t say much to me.”
You were the most like me. You became the cruelest.
“But we have nothing now,” Rennie said. “We’re out of moves, aren’t we? So let’s just go. Okay? Let’s listen to Elaine and take the inheritance and leave this all behind us. Let’s go. Please. I don’t want to be here anymore.”
Lucille stared. “All you know how to do is leave, don’t you?”
Rennie flinched.
Lucille started toward her. “ I’ve been grinding my fucking teeth out of my head to try to get us this house back. And all the while, you kept vital information about Mā to yourself.” Rennie tried to back away but Lucille cut in front of her. “You thought you could use Mā and me to get money, and now you want to back out. Now you’re just going to abandon us and disappear like you always do. Right? Right? ”
Rennie’s eyes smarted. “I don’t— abandon people.” Even as she said this her words sounded empty. In that instant she remembered Mā looking at her in the dim light. Her voice, rasping: You only came here when you wanted something from me.
“You’d ask for my help and then not return my calls.” Lucille’s voice trembled. “Sometimes I wouldn’t even know what city you were in.”
“That’s just—”
“You cut us out of your life,” Lucille spat. “You didn’t even invite me to your wedding !”
“I eloped!” Rennie was crying now, and it made her feel so stupid and childlike and out of control, but she couldn’t stop. “And it was a godawful sham of a marriage anyway, which is how things usually go for me.” She swiped at her nose with the back of her hand. “All I ever wanted was to do one thing that you and Mā would be proud of me for. And I never could. That’s all I can think about when I’m with you. That I’m just a fuckup. A mentally unstable addict, and—it’s better that I stayed out of your lives, don’t you see?”
“That’s not true,” Lucille muttered through gritted teeth.
“That’s what you think of me. And I know it.” Rennie dragged in a shaky breath. “I’ve heard you talking about it with Daniel, and I can see it when you look at me. I just—” She tried to offer a teary smile. “Oh, never mind. None of this matters anymore. We need to leave this house, Lucille. It’s doing things to me. To your daughter, too.”
Lucille frowned. “What do you mean it’s doing things to Madeline?”
“I don’t know what Madeline is seeing,” Rennie said. “But I see her again. Ada. ”
Lucille backed away. Her stark expression told Rennie everything.
Rennie said, “You’ve been seeing her too, haven’t you?”
Lucille shut her eyes tightly.
Rennie walked toward her. “When was the first time?”
Tears slid from her sister’s closed eyes. “Winter break. Senior year.”
Rennie had been a freshman at Lawrence then. She remembered sitting together in the waiting room of the counselor’s office before they each went in alone; she remembered standing in the hallway outside Lucille’s room. How Lucille had told her that she was seeing things, that she was going to become an addict, that she was going to end up just like Dad. God , how Rennie held on to that accusation for years, decades, dragging herself in and out of rehab, hurting herself, hating herself for being high, thinking she was damaged and rotten to the core. She remembered the Thanksgiving, years later, when she overheard Lucille telling her then-husband, Daniel, offhandedly, that Rennie seemed a borderline alcoholic and unstable.
She wanted to scream now: How could you have left me alone all this time?
But just then the floor tipped underneath them. Lucille staggered. Rennie threw her arms out against the bed to steady herself. The lights in the room flickered.
The floor jolted again, and Rennie looked at Lucille with terror.
A final tremor shuddered through the room and then everything was still.
Madeline burst in. “Did you feel that?”
Rennie looked at Lucille and pleaded, “ We need to go .”
“Okay.” Her sister was back to pacing, but she wouldn’t meet Rennie’s eyes. “It’s late. I need to gather some last files. We can leave first thing in the morning.”
LUCILLE shoved everything in her bag: papers, files, all the things she could look at in more detail later. She tried to fit as much as possible, but she was running out of time. Once they left this house in the morning there was a chance they could never come back.
She blinked hard to stay awake. The sleepless nights were catching up to her. It would be so easy to take a quick nap in the armchair, but she switched on the computer and went to email herself all the security camera footage. She watched it again. There was Elaine’s car on the twentieth of July; she arrived in the early afternoon and left an hour later. Then the camera lens got progressively darker, until it was completely obscured by that evening by the leaves.
Could Elaine have done that ? This was why she hadn’t seen Rennie’s car in the footage, but what could have made it happen?
The files were massive and took forever to send; the Wi-Fi kept going in and out. Lucille paced. She yanked her thumbnail between teeth until she felt a sharp slice of pain and drew blood. Finally, the files appeared in her phone’s email inbox. She scrolled to make sure the videos were all there and then was about to click out when she saw the old email. The preliminary autopsy.
She’d read it already, days ago. Several times. But she clicked on the report again.
This time she fixed on the last line.
Her mother’s time of death was estimated to be between July 20 and July 21.
Lucille scrambled to read the line again. Rennie said she visited Mā on July 22. It didn’t make sense.
Lucille sank into the armchair. Either the medical examiner was wrong, or— Or Rennie had recounted the wrong dates.
Could Rennie have misremembered? She did seem pretty out of it these days. Could she be on something? Lucille caught herself—she didn’t want to accuse Rennie of anything else. She’d already done enough. She couldn’t stop thinking about Rennie’s broken expression when she admitted that she, too, had seen Ada’s ghost. She knew she had exacted cruelty time and time again toward her sister. She wanted it to be different between them.
Lucille wanted so badly to be a soft and understanding person and not human shrapnel. But she had been doing what she thought was necessary. And this was a critical detail. If Rennie had misremembered the dates and went to see Mā earlier in the week, then that meant the case was still viable. It was still possible for Elaine to have been involved in Mā’s death. It would all fit perfectly, terribly, in this timeline.
Lucille felt that familiar kinetic rush of figuring out the key to a case. She spun the dates and the facts around in her head. She resolved to ask Rennie in the morning, after they left, and sat back in the chair with a sense of relief. Her eyelids started to droop like she was a little kid again, in the spot of afternoon sun, with the library and the whole world in front of her. She was asleep long before the light of the green lamp finally gave out.
Lucille found herself lying in the soft grass. Stars stretched out above her. It was a summer night and the air had long cooled. She breathed in deeply, taking in the scent of jasmine and lavender.
“Ji? Jie.”
Lucille turned her head. Ada lay on the grass next to her. Her eyes were closed. Her bangs had grown out and swept over the side of her cheeks. She was wearing the Sky High shirt she loved.
Her sister was exactly how Lucille remembered her that summer, 1990.
“You don’t have any reason to be jealous, you know,” Ada said. “Just because I loved her doesn’t mean I stopped loving you.”
Lucille couldn’t speak. To hear her voice after so long was astonishing. So young, so high-pitched. “It’s a different love, that’s all,” Ada continued.
Lucille opened her mouth, though what came out felt hollow and automatic, like she was acting out a script she hadn’t written. “But it’s wrong.”
Ada’s eyes fluttered open and she looked at Lucille with a clear gaze. “Don’t tell me you still believe that.” She put a hand over her eyes. “She thinks it was wrong now, though. Now she’s angry .”
“Where is she?” Lucille asked.
“You know.”
Lucille sat up and looked around. There was no one else in the garden.
“She was so sweet,” Ada sighed. “When I said that the daisies were my favorite, she brought me the most beautiful daisies I had ever seen.” She looked at Lucille. “That’s why I brought you back here. This is when she was kindest. We’re safe here.”
“Safe,” Lucille asked, “from what?”
“Remember 红楼梦 ?”
“ Dream of the Red Chamber ?” Mā loved reading the Chinese classic to them. She’d always remind them that she had once played Lin Daiyu in the movie. They would curl up on the living room couches and read the tragic story of Jia Baoyu and Lin Daiyu. How they fell in love as their family dynasties soured into ruin.
“There’s a line in there,” Ada said. “ 假作真时真亦假 .”
When what is false is taken for truth, true becomes indiscernible from false .
“Ada,” Lucille whispered. “Why are you telling this to me?”
“Because you’ve all been living a lie,” her sister said. “All this time. About what Mā had done. She did it to protect you.”
A slow dread settled upon her. As if she were finally realizing—no, remembering what had happened that summer. “Mèi Mei…”
“And now that you know the truth, I need to tell you something, too.”
Ada sat up.
Her sister was seventeen. They were seventeen. The year was 1990. But was it? She felt a burgeoning sense of fear. Something horrible had happened. “What’s going on?”
Ada’s eyelids fluttered. “I brought you to this time,” she said, “because this was when the garden was safe. But that’s not true anymore. And the house isn’t safe either. This is what Mā was trying to protect you from.”
“Mèi Mei—”
“I’ve been holding the house,” Ada said, her eyes now wide-open and trained on Lucille. “But I can’t do it anymore. She’s breaking through. She’s been angry for a long time, and I thought Mā being gone might appease her. But now that you’re here, her anger is growing like a fire, and I can’t stop it.”
Ada’s placid expression twisted into terror. “You need to get out, Ji? Jie.” Her voice rose. She clasped Lucille’s shoulders and shook her. “Wake up, Lucille. Now. YOU NEED TO WAKE UP. ”