Shelter(32)

“Do you have some news for us?” Gillian asks.

Lentz leans against the wall, glancing at the stacks of sandwiches that she’s arranging on a platter. “We finished collecting evidence at Mr. and Mrs. Cho’s house, so they’re free to go back now.”

Jin continues reading his instruction manual. He doesn’t even bother to look up.

“Whenever you’re ready, I mean. You’re free to go back whenever you’re ready. Also, we found your car in Newport.”

Gillian frowns. “Newport, Rhode Island?”

“No, Vermont. Up near Canada.” Lentz pauses, looking aimlessly around the kitchen until he lands on Kyung. “How’s your mother doing? The hospital released her, I hear.”

The shower in the guest bathroom was running a few minutes ago. Now it’s stopped. Beyond this, Kyung has no idea what she’s doing up there, much less how. It’s been three days since Mae returned from the hospital, and she hasn’t left her room since. Every attempt to check on her has been met with silence and a locked door. Aside from the occasional flush of the toilet and the sound of her footsteps overhead, no one would even know that she’s living among them again. She’s the ghost in the house whose presence they all feel, but never see—not even Jin, who she exiled from the guest room within minutes of her arrival.

“My mother’s resting. Is there anything else we should know?”

“About the house? Not really. You’ve got good insurance, I hope?”

The question was clearly directed at Jin, who makes no effort to respond. He just sits there with his chin tucked to his chest, staring at the manual, which appears to be upside down. Kyung isn’t used to seeing him this way, so desperate to be ignored. At work, his father is always the center of attention, a position he says he earned over time. Back in the ’70s, when Jin first started teaching, his research on renewable energy was easy to ignore, almost even laughable. Now he generates more grant money than anyone else on the faculty, and his patent revenues, a small fraction of which goes to the university, keeps the campus well fed. His success makes him popular in a way that his personality doesn’t, and he abuses his colleagues freely, always talking more than he listens.

“Sorry,” Lentz says. “I wasn’t trying to pry. I just thought you might want to hire a cleaning crew before you go back.”

There was no need to share this information in person. All of it could have been done on the phone. Kyung wonders if there’s something else he came to say, but can’t in front of a woman or a child.

“So that’s it?” he asks. “Nothing else?”

“Well, there’s a detective assigned to your case now. His name’s John Smalley. He was the one who asked me to stop by today.”

“Why didn’t he come here himself?”

“His wife’s been in and out of surgery this week. Blood clots or something. But don’t worry. John’s good—he’s been around a long time. He already got a positive match on that guy I was telling you about. Fingerprints, hair…” He glances at Ethan. “You know, that kind of thing. He also sent a statewide bulletin out, so now we’re just waiting for Perry to turn up somewhere.”

Over a week has passed and this is all the progress he has to report. It hardly seems like enough. Kyung hasn’t thought twice about the police—he’s been too preoccupied with his parents to think of anyone else—but now it occurs to him that they aren’t doing everything they should.

“Are you telling me you’re just waiting around for this guy to make a mistake?”

“No, I didn’t mean it like that.”

“But that’s what you said: Now we’re waiting for him—”

“I didn’t say we’re not looking. We’re actively looking.”

“But how do you know he’s not in Canada? What good is a statewide bulletin if he’s not in the States?”

“Hey,” Gillian says, pulling on his sleeve. “Calm down. He’s just telling us what they’ve done so far.”

She pulls again, harder this time, but Kyung doesn’t care. He can’t imagine a world in which Nat Perry is allowed to enjoy his freedom after taking so much of theirs. He wants this man in a prison or a grave. He expects the police to put him there.

“So what does ‘actively looking’ mean? Where are you actually looking? And how many of you are there?”

Lentz tosses his baseball cap back and forth from one hand to the other, looking nervous or confused—possibly both. He’s just the messenger; Kyung understands that. But he has a message of his own that he wants Lentz to carry back.

“That day in the waiting room, when half the department turned up … I thought all of you were invested in this, but you’re not really doing anything, are you?”

“Cut it out,” Gillian says. “Now you’re just being unfair.”

“How is that unfair? You were standing right there—you heard him.”

“There’s a process, Kyung. I should know. I grew up with this. They’re doing exactly what they’re supposed to be doing.”

His father is watching Gillian, studying her as she speaks. Her behavior is probably distasteful to him—a wife sharing an opinion that differs from her husband’s, contradicting him in front of others. Mae would never dare, having learned long ago that dissent was the fastest route to grief. Neither of his parents really knows Gillian—how stubborn she is, how she doesn’t hesitate to speak her mind. Over time, he’s come to accept and sometimes even love this about her, but suddenly she’s making him nervous. After a week of living together under the same roof, she’s abandoned his careful list of dos and don’ts. With no advance warning, no discussion at all, she’s letting his father see who she is, who they are as a couple. Kyung doesn’t know how to interpret the expression on Jin’s face, a queer mix of curiosity and embarrassment, maybe even anger.