Chapter Ten Lee
Lee’s father was keeping a secret.
It was the first thing Lee had noticed since flushing all his sedatives. The world that used to be a kaleidoscope of light,
half a blurred dream, was now sharp and ugly. And he saw, laid bare, the ways that his father was not who he once thought.
First, he noticed that his father’s shoulders seized up whenever Lee appeared. This in and of itself wasn’t unusual—Lee had
always unnerved his father, as if he was a troll his father had found under a bridge and been cursed to raise against his
will. But when Lee asked if he was all right, his father always said yes , and it was always a lie.
The tell was different for every person, but Lee knew that when his father lied, his eyes went dull and his voice got low
and he suddenly sounded like he was reading from a book rather than pulling the words from the dark well of his mind. And
that was how Lee realized that his father lied more often than not.
There was no reason to lie about liking the coffee Lee had made, or wanting to watch the news, or a thousand other mundane
things he said every day. And yet his father kept lying.
Second, his father had started taking out the trash multiple times a day, casting it out by the side of the road, even when the bag was near empty.
Lee went outside once after dark and opened up the bags, not sure what he expected to find (illegal drugs?
Body parts? Strange sex toys?) but all he found was a few scraps of food.
His father was not taking the trash out for any logical reason.
Perhaps it was some kind of compulsion? Or maybe he could smell something that Lee couldn’t, some intolerable stench that pervaded the house.
But Hina hadn’t complained, so that probably wasn’t it either.
Third, his father was still wearing his broken watch. The time was stuck at 11:44, and Lee had pointed it out to him multiple
times. At first because he thought his father hadn’t noticed. The second time because he thought his father had forgotten.
But when another day passed and his father put the watch on again, checked the time and didn’t react at all, as if the broken,
incorrect time actually made sense to him, Lee knew it was no mistake.
The second hand on the watch twitched up and down, kicking like a dying animal. It made an almost imperceptible ticking sound
that was just slightly faster than the actual passing of one second. Something about that mechanical heartbeat made Lee feel
like a wind-up toy, spinning tighter and tighter and tighter. The sound was so unrelenting that Lee had to wear headphones
just to focus on anything else. He didn’t know how his father didn’t hear it, how it didn’t drive him insane.
Lastly, the look in his father’s eyes had been strangely flat since Lee’s second day in Japan, like someone had taken a paintbrush
and smeared static green across his irises. Eye colors were supposed to move and shift with the sunlight, pupils shrinking
and expanding to let in darkness and keep out light. But Lee’s father’s eyes looked like a photograph, unchanging, unseeing.
One morning, his eyes passed over Lee without a hint of recognition, like he hadn’t noticed him at all.
His father had a study, where he locked the doors and paced back and forth for hours.
Lee sometimes overheard him having online meetings with his colleagues or typing on his laptop.
But Lee had never once entered the office.
The door had been shut when Lee moved in, and his father was always careful to lock it behind him whenever he left—Lee could hear the key thunk in the lock, and he knew better than to ask.
James had always locked doors too. Not just the door to the suite, but the door to his room. Like he’d been afraid of Lee
from the start but unwilling to say it out loud.
Still, Lee was careful not to show his father what he knew. His father was used to seeing him half asleep from sedatives—that
was the version of Lee he could tolerate. So Lee imagined that his brain had a giant coffee filter and only 30 percent of
his thoughts were allowed to come out of his mouth. He could not, for instance, tell his father that he’d found a dead girl
who didn’t think she was dead but might help him understand how death worked if he played his cards right. Something that
upsetting practically guaranteed another heart attack.
Waiting for her to return was unbearable. Lee was a devourer of information, and he was being starved. The anticipation was
tempered only by the fact that Lee knew she would come back.
All he’d had to do was a quick Google search for major events in Chiran’s history. The ghost girl would see the fire, contemplate
it for a few hours, and then she wouldn’t be able to resist speaking to him again. Everyone wanted to know the truth, even
if it hurt.
Especially Lee Turner.
That was why, as soon as his father left the house that afternoon, Lee headed straight for his office.
The door had a cheap padlock on it because these kinds of sliding doors didn’t have built-in locks.
His father had gone to the trouble to add this one himself, had needed to keep Lee or Hina out so badly that he didn’t think his words would be enough.
But Lee had done far worse things than pick locks, so he didn’t feel bad about this , of all things.
He slid the round end of one of Hina’s bobby pins into the lock, and after a few seconds of twisting and prodding, the lock
unlatched. Lee entered and shut the door behind him.
The office sat in the darkest corner of the house, where sword ferns blocked the weak afternoon light, their prickly shadows
shifting across the walls.
His father’s desk sat in the center—the way professors like him always preferred it, so no one could see from the door what
was on the computer screen. The rest of the room was still in boxes. Lee could tell from the coating of dust that they weren’t
of any importance, or else his father would have unpacked them by now.
Lee sat down in his father’s chair, the leather creaking beneath him. He watched the room from the perspective of his father,
laid his arms on the armrests and leaned back, heard the satisfying creak of the chair as it acknowledged his weight and held
steady. The cypress trees beyond the window tapped incessantly against the glass. Maybe that was why his father could no longer
hear his broken watch—he was too busy hearing the forest knocking at the windows.
Lee didn’t even bother with the laptop—he didn’t know his father’s password, and if he guessed wrong too many times and got
locked out, his father would notice. Besides, his father was an old-fashioned man and liked to keep paper documents.
Lee opened the first drawer, took a mental picture of how the papers had been placed, then laid all the objects out on the
desk in the exact order they’d been stacked.
The first thing he found was an article cut from a Japanese newspaper.
His father had highlighted some parts and annotated the narrow margins with English translations.
Lee couldn’t pre tend he was great at reading Japanese either—he’d learned it to speak to people, not to read books—but he did his best and pulled out Google Translate on his phone when his best wasn’t enough.
HUMAN TRAFFICKING RING DISSOLVED IN TOKYO
Lee nearly dropped his phone. He felt like he was twelve again, watching his mother’s face on the news, white block letters
spelling out HUMAN TRAFFICKING ENDANGERS TOURISTS. He glanced to the doorway, just in case his father or Hina had reappeared,
then continued to read.
A human trafficking ring tracked across southern Asia was partially dissolved by police in Tokyo on Thursday. All victims
were hospitalized, and police are investigating ties to branches in other countries.
Lee turned the newspaper over with numb fingers, setting it aside.
He’d wondered if his father was stressed about him , but of course that was a self-centered thought. Perhaps his father had moved to Japan for this reason—to chase after a human
trafficking ring. He so rarely spoke about Lee’s mother anymore that Lee forgot at times that she was not only his mother
but also his father’s wife.
But his mother was not found among the victims. Lee knew this even without translating the rest of the article. It was dated
over two weeks ago, and if his mother had been found, his father would have said something by now.
The next article was in English.
TATTOO LINKED TO HUMAN TRAFFICKING RING
Below it, a picture of a blurred and faded tattoo: the outline of a turtle.
A rounded almond for the shell, two sharp front fins, two round back fins, a pointed oval for a head. Lee couldn’t tell from
the photo what body part the picture showed, just that the skin looked red and inflamed and the turtle on its side looked
like an unseeing eye.
Why would they choose a turtle? Lee thought just before he flipped the page and wished he hadn’t.
Seven women with tattoos tied to a human trafficking ring were found dead in Matsuyama with several organs missing, leading
police to investigate connections with black market organ sales across southern Asia.
And then Lee understood, all at once, that his father was expecting to find his mother in pieces.
She would have been nearly fifty years old now—she looked young for her age when she was taken, but by now, she was likely
too old for a prostitution ring. Someone had probably carved out her organs and sold them, then buried her in a mass grave
with other discarded women.
Lee laid his forearms delicately along the armrests and clutched the polished wood, feeling as if the weight of the chair
was the only thing anchoring him to the earth.
In a strange way, he liked the idea of his mother’s organs living on in other people, even if they’d made crime lords rich.
Maybe one day he would meet the person who held his mother’s heart. It would be like she was still alive, somehow.