Chapter 39
Ames closed the door and leaned against the wall.
“I don’t have the power over him like Channing does.
” She sounded almost wistful. Did she wish Kent was obsessed with her the way he was with my cousin?
I stayed silent. “You’re right about the piece that came out the other day,” she continued.
“Kent told my editor how the piece should run, and then he had the nerve to call me about convincing Channing to give him another chance.”
I walked over to her, raising my voice. “Another chance? She was never interested.”
“But she stole his watch.”
“For the millionth time, he grabbed her and then wouldn’t let her out of his room. He did that with all those people in his house. When did she even have time to steal his watch?” I said.
She let out a breath and studied her hands. There was a gold ring with a small sapphire on her finger. “I can’t believe Kent would do that though.”
“What’s up with you and Kent?” I looked straight into her eyes. A moment passed in which I saw embarrassment and then she averted her gaze
“Kent means well,” she said, and flashed her ring at me.
“Ames, please help us.” I waited. My hands tingled but I didn’t dare move.
She frowned at the floor. No reply. I was ready to leave then. My feet felt so heavy.
“Give me a minute,” she suddenly burst out. Then she rushed to a chair and opened her laptop, stared at it, and then closed it shut again. I joined her.
“Kent was the only guy who didn’t have a crush on Alice.
I respected him for that.” She scowled at me then as if I had an expression on my face she didn’t like.
“What?” she continued. “Kent worked at Mrs. Ku’s bakery and then for Channing’s dad as an intern.
Unlike everyone who went into tech, Kent really, and I mean really, wanted to go into public service here in town. ”
“So what are you saying?” I didn’t want to jump to conclusions, but did Ames have genuine feelings for this man?
She rolled her eyes. “No, I never liked him like that, but I thought for a minute that we could make sense, that maybe with time I could develop something for him and him for me, that we could make a relationship work.”
Slowly I was beginning to feel sorry for her and distressed that she cared for someone like Kent. “You deserve real love, Ames,” I said. I was beginning to sound like Channing when she talked to me about relationships.
Ames kept talking as if she hadn’t heard me. “We dated for two months last winter. I felt bad for him because his parents are in Korea now so he’s here alone.”
I sat in the other chair and waited for more. She said, “Okay, I never slept with him, but he almost got me to. Part of why I didn’t was because one of his ex-girlfriends told me to be careful because he likes to record everything, in his bedroom.”
“So?” I asked when she paused. When I didn’t understand something, a tactic I’d learned as a child was to encourage the person to keep talking, which gave me time and more information to figure out the context from the rest of the conversation.
She gave me a look I’d seen from people before when they suspected I was clueless.
“Look, I’m not uptight, I like sex, and if it’s recorded that doesn’t bother me as long as it’s for me and whomever I’m with,” she protested.
I realized she thought I was judging her, which wasn’t the case at all. It was hard talking to Ames. She misread everything on my face.
“I don’t understand what you mean by recording. Recording like a camera?” I asked.
She nodded. “His ex said she’d caught him looking at footage without her.
So it’s a long shot, but if he was so intent on getting Channing to his room like she said today, then he might have wanted to record something.
I mean when he made his move on me, we were in his bedroom, and he was all weird about kissing me in a certain spot by this old piece of furniture.
I broke up with him right after. I don’t like being manipulated. ”
“There’s got to be a recording of Kent attacking Channing in his room then,” I practically yelled.
Ames nodded again. “I don’t know how you can get it, but that would prove what he did to her.”
I wanted to jump into the air. Then I recognized a problem: How would we gain access to Kent’s room to find out? This punctured whatever high hopes had started to rise.
Ames was typing away on her laptop. She paused to say, “You know you’re right.
I’m going to find those police transcripts and see what people said that day the money vanished.
I do want to know what happened. But I’ll have to write about Channing’s father stealing the money if that’s the truth.
” She looked at me as if daring me to challenge her.
“If that’s what you find, then that’s what you write,” I said. “But, really, find the truth, Ames.”
She nodded and went back to her laptop. I had to ask an additional question. “What would we do with that footage if we got it? Kent would just make it disappear if we turned it in to the police. Buzz is his pal. Can we trust Jack Wire?”
Ames’s brow furrowed. “You’re right, it could get buried.
Kent is very good friends with Buzz and the judge.
I don’t know about the lawyer. He’s just not that experienced, like I said before.
Anyway, the judge might not allow whatever video footage you find.
You know Kent sent him away on that little junket at the golf club so Channing would be in jail longer. ”
“I heard it was for charity.”
“It was, but how did the cost of travel and entrance fee, etcetera, all get paid at the last minute by Kent Cho so the judge could go?” She made a show of comically scratching her head.
Her hair was cut about the same length as Channing’s.
She was talking again. “I hate to do this to Kent, it would be really bad for how Koreans are treated in this town. But if I were Channing and he made up this whole thing about me attacking him and stealing his watch and put me in jail?” She sniffed. “He deserves to lose everything.”
“Write your feature. Another paper will take it. Someday you’ll win a Pulitzer, Ames,” I said as I stood up and headed for the door. It was a long shot, I knew, but those words came out of my mouth like a prediction. I believed it.
When I returned to Paul’s apartment and saw Channing behind the laptop with the curtains closed, I thought she was watching Chunhyang again.
My spirits lifted at the thought because that would mean she still believed in the outcome of the story.
She had not meant the words she’d said earlier.
I wanted her to have faith in the story of love despite improbable outcomes in real life.
Instead, Channing turned the laptop toward me and held her fingers up to her lips as soon as I walked in.
She opened a blank document and tapped the keys, In case this place is bugged, just type here on my screen.
I looked around. Where? I clicked on the keyboard.
Channing turned the laptop back to herself and typed furiously, and then turned the screen to me.
I keep thinking about that day. Kent must have heard us.
He thought I was going to accuse him of assaulting me, so that’s why he got ahead of it and told the police I’d taken his watch and assaulted him.
There’s some sort of surveillance in that house on Sandpiper Lane.
I didn’t find it, but I know it’s there.
How could he have done that? You looked everywhere.
It’s so easy now: small camera, listening device.
Something that the detector I have couldn’t catch.
She was determined to figure out how and had her ways.
On her laptop screen, she had images of maps and street views.
Some, like Sandpiper Lane, were familiar.
And then she was off, studying drone footage of places I’d never seen.
Kent had mentioned emails he’d sent to Channing a couple of times to me and seemed defensive about them. Is there anything we could use in the emails Kent sent you? I typed.
Channing’s fingers paused over her keyboard. Then she started typing again. They were just weird photos of himself, without a shirt and stuff like that. Gross.
I guess sending you nudes isn’t a crime.
She shook her head. He knows how to avoid getting caught. How does he do that?
What about outside? No one can listen there, can they? I pointed to the door. She nodded and followed me to the landing.
“Recordings are what Ames talked about. You’re right. Kent uses them.” I told her how Ames had described Kent’s insistence that they kiss in a certain spot in his room and how his ex-girlfriend had warned her of the recordings he’d made. “How can we get into his house to find them?” I said.
“I knew it,” Channing said, and seemed to be intensely thinking about something.
“He came over to the house that first day to replace smoke detectors. He said the batteries were bad. I didn’t think anything of it.
I wonder—” Channing went back inside and started typing again on her computer.
Then she came back out, holding the laptop in front of her.
“He installed new smoke detectors on the first and second floors of the Ahns’ house,” she said, and showed me her screen.
“These smoke detectors have cameras and audio, look—”
“Anything they recorded would be sent to an account the Ahns had, right? Like their phones?” I asked. “Maybe they were listening in and told him. They knew about the boys missing camp, remember?”
“Yeah, but she found out late. I mean she could have checked the footage later, but I don’t know. Kent probably set it up for them and monitored it the whole time. Remember I told you that day of the storm not to mention where Minjae and I were meeting you?”
I nodded.
She continued, “Did you say it out loud? That we were going to Jutting Rock? Dahee, did you say it to the boys?”
I nodded again, miserably this time. “I’m sorry, I did. Edison wouldn’t come.”
“Kent sent the police to the beach.”
If I’d only listened to her. “I’m sorry,” I repeated.
“He’s the one who’s at fault. Not you or me. He shouldn’t be listening to our conversations. What’s wrong with him?”
“We can do something with this info, can’t we? Prove he’s—wait, we have to warn the Ahns. Is he still listening to them?” I asked.
“Go ahead, they won’t talk to me. I’ve called to ask about the kids, and they just hang up,” she said.
I didn’t know she’d done that. Channing gave me Edison and Austin’s mother’s number, and I phoned her right away.
The call went to voicemail. I texted a message that explained who I was and then how she might check her smoke detectors because they might be surveillance ones that Kent installed.
Was she aware? Channing watched and listened with a skeptical look on her face.
A text came back immediately telling me not to contact her again. I showed Channing the message, and she pushed her hair off her forehead. “We tried.”
“Okay, that’s a dead end. Let’s focus on Ames telling us Kent has a camera in his bedroom.”
“Good idea. But I don’t trust Ames. If it’s her idea, it’s a trap.”
“I know you feel that way about her, but she didn’t have to tell me. It was after I told her what you said about your dad. The details of that day, I explained them to her.”
A flash of fury streaked through her face.
I said, “Channing, listen. Writing this article about what happened years ago to the Korean community and the beach club means a lot to her, I can tell. It’s the same way you are about your computers.
She cares about it, even if what she said about your dad is wrong.
Let her find out for herself what happened to that money.
We know your dad didn’t steal it. No one has ever really looked into it.
And no matter how you feel about her, she was trying to help you with Kent. We know he’s the key to freeing you.”
“She would negotiate with him to turn us in so he’ll fund the newspaper.” She glowered.
“It didn’t seem that way to me, Channing. I talked to her for a while. What can she really do? How could he trap us if you break into his spy camera in his own bedroom?”
“He’s always a step ahead. I’m telling you we can’t trust Ames,” she insisted.
“This is all we have to go on right now. Let’s try,” I pleaded.
“Kent is smart. He would have deleted that footage of what he did to me.”
“He’s cocky as hell. Why would he? But if he did, then maybe there’s something else on there we can use. We have to get him to drop these charges.”
Whether it was the coolness of the evening air that was now descending or my impatience with people like the Ahns who didn’t know when help was being offered to them, I was suddenly exhausted when Paul called up to us from the bottom of the stairs at that moment.
“The grands are cooking, come eat,” he said.
I was going to turn him down, but Channing surprised me by agreeing right away.
“Paul,” she called to him, “let me ask you a question about cloud storage. You worked in security, didn’t you?
Minjae told me you did.” She brought her laptop with her, running down the stairs in her bare feet.
When I caught up to them, I heard her say, “It’s like the smoke detectors Kent installed.
The footage will be stored somewhere remote.
Not a hard drive in his actual house. If his house ever caught on fire or if he was robbed, then he’d lose it, so he probably has it stored in some other kind of way.
A cloud service most likely,” she said. “I just have to break into that.”
Paul didn’t have time to answer because a voice interrupted from across the yard. It was Mrs. Yun waving us over. “Come, join us, I made geotjeori.”