Chapter 41
How could anyone live among such hateful people? The sheer noise and violence of those voices shocked me. I was about to leave the group when I saw this post: Did the Ahn boys show up today in camp? I’m not sure their babysitter knows anything about taking care of kids. #LookingOutForOurNeighbors
The user had a sheepdog as a badge with the name “John Smith.” Who was that, and why would he be asking about Edison and Austin? It was dated two weeks ago.
Another user, Nora Poleman, who had a red rose as her badge, said yes with a thumbs-up emoji.
Others liked her comment. At the beach club, the woman who had run up to Channing had been named Nora.
She’d tried to help me at pickup at the camp.
Was she the same woman who had made this comment?
It was a common name, I reminded myself.
I clicked on her profile and saw that her background photo was of her two daughters sitting by a swimming pool.
A post by someone with an American flag badge said, The Ahns’ babysitter is a thief. Don’t know where they got her. Keep her locked up!
She comes from a family of thieves, someone replied.
My heart dropped. I didn’t want to read the rest, but I had to.
Her dad stole money from his friends. Look it up.
No one proved that, Nora commented.
She tried to kidnap the children. If the storm hadn’t come in, she would have gotten away with it.
Someone posted a laughing emoji. And someone beneath it posted, Good thing they caught her. Act of God. Fluke storm, or was it?
It was in the forecast. Calm down, people.
She’s Kent’s fiancée! Imagine stealing from the man you’re engaged to!
She fooled him.
That person replied, Have a sense of humor. I’m a fan of Kent’s too. He got the mayor to fix the water problem and the playground since Kent started working for him. I think Kent should be our next mayor.
Hold on, we love our mayor, Rick Reynolds.
I feel sorry for the parents of those kids!
Someone said, Maybe Kent has terrible judgment.
Too trusting.
She tricked him.
Looks can be deceiving. Watch out, men!
Chief Buzz Harper should bring her up on charges of attempted kidnapping.
Chief knows what to do with her. Lock her up, throw away the key.
He locked up Freddie Lu for stealing. Eight months. Chief Harper doesn’t play. For stealing a watch that expensive, she’ll be locked up for good.
Innocent until proven guilty—where was that among the good people of East End? And they’d be Channing’s jury. I swallowed and forced myself to continue reading.
East End for Americans, someone posted.
Keep East End safe from migrant criminals.
Was Freddie Lu a migrant? someone asked.
Immigrant, migrant, they’re the same. They used to call them immigrant but now you can’t say that, you have to say MIGRANT. #Censorship.
Why do they keep changing what we’re allowed to say?
Beneath that post someone had shared a dubious newspaper article about a man named Fred Lu who had confessed to killing a woman, a white woman from the look of her photo. Fred Lu had his face turned, so I couldn’t tell his ethnicity or race.
Is it just me or are we overrun by Orientals? someone posted.
They’re everywhere, someone said.
Our taxes are going to all these Oriental and Asian town events. What about a celebration for Swedish people? Or Portuguese? It’s Kent Choy’s fault.
You mean Kent Cho.
Haha I mean Kiki Choy-me-no-English. Who the f cares?
You all know who I mean that’s what matters.
He’s the one behind all the ‘celebrations’ of his people.
Let’s keep East End American. Is that so much to ask?
He’s renovating the park so he can have more party spaces for his people. #KeepOutForeign.
Someone below that replied with #KeepOutForeigners #KeepOutKoreans #KeepOutOrientals.
There were a dozen likes for every one of those terrible comments.
I dropped my phone on the couch as if it were on fire.
Channing didn’t have a chance. Innocence didn’t matter.
They hated her. Hated us. I showed Channing the social media posts later that day, and together we read some that had been added.
“That’s Nora from the beach club,” she said, pointing to the badge of the rose. “She stayed quiet when she could have defended me. Look at those comments about me. I hate this town.”
“She did try,” I said, and pointed to the two I’d seen. “She needs others to help.”
“I guess,” Channing agreed.
“Okay, look at this latest post.” I pointed to one to try to soften the impact of these comments.
Someone had written that Channing’s mom had helped her grandparents sue the town for not fixing a municipal waste line years ago. And she thought Channing was innocent. It makes no sense that she would steal a watch, this person wrote.
Channing recognized the name. “That’s our old neighbor, Mrs. Valerie,” she said. I looked at the name. Grace Valerie. And below it, Nora had “liked” it. No one disputed it. I wondered what kind of social standing Grace Valerie had in East End.
“We need more Grace Valeries in this world,” I said. Then I closed the app. It was better to turn our energy to what we could control. Harabeoji would tell us this if he were here.
“What have you found online about how Kent could have spied on us?” I said to Channing now.
She explained that to obtain the footage, she planned to check Kent’s Wi-Fi and intercept the traffic going from the surveillance camera to where it was stored online.
“Let’s hope it’s cloud-based. That’ll be easier,” she said.
We stayed up all night. Though I started to fall asleep around three thirty, Channing snapped me awake by yelling at the computer. “Too slow!”
I told her to explain. She said, “I used this package captor to intercept the user ID. So now the brute force software can time different tries to correspond with the number of times the account would lock up after a certain number of attempts to break the password. Not sure how long it’s going to take, but it’ll keep trying. Maybe days.”
“Days is okay, weeks would worry me,” I replied.
“The good thing is there isn’t a firewall. Kent’s cheap in ways that don’t show off his generosity. He’s got a weak house security device.”
I had to laugh at that one, and then we nodded at each other. “We have to get him.”
“What can we do with this if we get in? We can’t give it to the police. It’s been obtained illegally,” she said.
“Leverage? We can threaten him by showing him the footage or take it to the state authorities?” I said. “Someone has to be out of Kent’s reach.”
Maybe it was lack of sleep the night before, but I couldn’t shake the anxiety I felt from reading those social media posts.
When I crossed the street in town, I felt the hostile gaze of the drivers at the traffic light.
When someone didn’t hold the door for me at the café, I thought they’d meant to shut me out.
When someone cut the line in front of me, I objected and didn’t smile when they apologized.
I wondered what people were really thinking.
I wasn’t as quick to greet people or smile when I passed them on the street.
By Friday, Channing had retrieved the footage from Kent’s bedroom camera.
He’d saved segments, which, Channing suggested, meant he might have deleted his attack.
We searched for the one with the date stamp of his party.
The camera was in the corner, above the cabinet with a clear shot of the bed.
I remembered Ames’s description of Kent positioning her in his room for a kiss.
We held our breath, hoping that the night of the party had been recorded and saved.
I was surprised to see the number of women he’d brought back to his bedroom in recent days.
I saw the police officer who had been in the reception area of the station, mostly because she arrived with her uniform on.
Non-Koreans mostly, but there was the Korean woman in the halter dress from Philadelphia I’d noticed at his party.
“Stop there,” I called out. Suddenly the screen was filled with Kent’s plain bedroom, and the door opened.
Kent walked in first and waved Mrs. Yun in.
Behind her was Channing, who stayed by the door.
Mrs. Yun’s face loomed large as she peered at the cabinet.
She held up her phone and took photos of it.
Meanwhile, Kent walked to the door and closed it, stood guard.
Channing took a few steps farther into the room.
I could tell she wanted to keep her distance from him.
Mrs. Yun turned her head toward Kent. There was no audio.
Then Mrs. Yun walked quickly to the door.
Kent opened it for her and then closed it again before Channing could escape.
His back was to the door and Channing faced him.
She leaned to one side and then the other, her hand out in front of her.
Kent moved with her. It was odd without sound.
He mirrored her as if in a dance. Then he abruptly grabbed her with both hands outstretched, and it stopped looking like a dance.
A gross pantomime. His hands were viselike on her arms, and he pushed her backward, all while holding her upright in his grip, directly toward the bed, and just as the back of her legs made contact with the mattress, he hauled her to him and smashed his face into hers.
Was that when Harabeoji knocked? Because just then both figures were absolutely still as if the video had been stopped, but the time stamp still showed it was running.
Suddenly Channing slid away from Kent’s grip and slapped and punched him as he struggled to grab hold of her.
She had better balance and was able to spin and run to the door.
He bolted after her. She flung the door open. The camera didn’t show the figure there, but there was a shadow, and I knew it was Harabeoji. Channing fled out of view of the camera. Kent stared at the figure for a second before he exited the room.
The video paused with the image of Kent’s leg visible in the doorway as he ran in pursuit.