Your House Will Pay

by Steph Cha

  It wasn’t the most implausible lie. Koreans were cheap. Woori Pharmacy had once been Woori Optometry; it would’ve cost almost nothing to get all new signage, but Woori—“our”—was generic enough that they kept the name, cutting the “Optometry” and hanging a green cross in its place. Grace had seen similar moves wherever Koreans owned businesses, and it wouldn’t have surprised her to learn that half their security cameras were dead props.

  But she had been working when Paul had the cameras installed. She remembered him overseeing the process with care. It was possible that they’d stopped working and hadn’t been fixed, but they certainly weren’t just for show.

  “I’m sorry. I can’t help you.” She shrugged, straining for nonchalance. “I have to get back to work.”

  He kept his eyes on her as she rose uncertainly, hoping he wouldn’t stop her from leaving.

  “I’m trying to nail the guy who tried to murder your mom,” he said. “You’ll ask your dad about the cameras.”

  It wasn’t a question. He knew he was right, which meant he knew he’d disturbed her.

  He got up and shook her hand. “You have my number if you find anything out.”

  Grace nodded. She had his number. “Thank you for the coffee.”

  Paul waited for the drive home to ask about Maxwell’s visit. He kept his hands on the steering wheel and watched the road, as good a reason as any to avoid looking at Grace.

  “What did he want?” he asked.

  She hesitated. Paul did not like to be challenged. He didn’t answer questions just because they were asked. If he snapped at Grace for suggesting he mixed up a couple of prices, he might bite her head off for asking why he’d lied to the police.

  “Dad, did you tell Detective Maxwell the cameras were just for show?”

  He said nothing, but she saw the tension in his jaw.

  They drove in silence, and Grace knew Paul would be happy to never speak of the subject again. He focused on the road and sped enough that Grace noticed, as if all would be well once they touched down at home.

  “Why would you tell him that? It’s such an easy lie to figure out.”

  “What did you say to him?”

  “I didn’t say anything. I had a feeling you lied to him, and I didn’t want to get you in trouble.”

  He nodded. “Good. Let me handle the police.”

  “But what the hell, Dad? Are you withholding evidence? When Mom is the victim?”

  “You want answers.”

  She almost laughed. “Of course I do. Someone shot my mom. There’s a man in jail for it. I want to know if he’s the guy, and if he is the guy, I want him to stay in jail.”

  “Do you think that’s what she wants?”

  Grace didn’t know what her mother wanted. For most of her life, she’d assumed she and Yvonne wanted the same things. Her mother was happy when Grace was happy. She shared in her daughter’s successes and worried about her shortcomings. She wanted Grace to like her job and maybe get a nice boyfriend. She wanted their family to be together and well.

  “Isn’t it?” she asked.

  “Your mom doesn’t care if this man goes to jail. She just wants things to go back to the way they were before.”

  “That’s impossible,” said Grace. “You know that.”

  “It is if we stay in the news. If there’s a long trial. If we have to testify. You don’t know what it was like.”

  “I have some idea,” she said, her face going red just thinking about her own viral infamy.

  “You’re too young to remember, but it destroyed your mom. We lost the store. We had to move. And then she almost never left the house. If it weren’t for you and Miriam, she might have killed herself.”

  He said it matter-of-factly, and Grace believed him. It seemed fitting, in a way, that Yvonne had lived for them, against her own will.

  “I’m not letting her go through that again.”

  “But we need the police to help us.” She thought of Shawn Matthews, so sure of his cousin’s innocence. “What if it wasn’t the guy they arrested? What if the shooter’s still out there? He tried to kill her once. Why wouldn’t he come back?”

  She felt the panic climb up her throat as she spoke. Paul wouldn’t even look at her.

  “Dad? Do you not care?”

  He veered to the side of the road and parked the car, his whole body emanating fury. She’d ignited his temper at last.

  “I can protect my own family,” he said. “No one is hurting your mother ever again.”

  “Okay, Appa, okay,” she said. She stopped herself from asking how.

  “It’s the police who put a target on her in the first place,” he said.

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “Do you know how many people were killed in South Central back then? It was like a battlefield. Every day, somebody shot. I knew people who were killed.”

  “I know, Dad. I’ve heard all this before.”

  “The LAPD chose our story. They called a big press conference. Made speeches about justice. They promised to get your mother charged with first-degree murder. Do you think they did that every time a black teenager was killed?”

  “But she was—”

  “I know what she was. It was a tragedy. But that’s not why they picked this case.”

  “Why then?”

  “Because it was less than two weeks after the Rodney King beating, and they were getting hammered on the news. Every day, they played that video of four police officers beating an unarmed black man. Every day for two weeks. Then your mom shot that girl.”

  Grace saw the logic in what he was saying. She’d seen the King video. The cops were out of control, and she had no doubt that they’d pull a trick like that. They had to be dying to change the subject. “They got to act like they cared about black people.”

  “They wanted to be heroes, so they made your mom their villain.”

  Paul was talking fast, and Grace saw how gratified he was that she was following, that she was agreeing with him.

  She shook her head, remembering the Figueroa Liquor Mart footage. “They didn’t make Mom shoot an innocent girl.”

  Paul pretended not to hear her. “When our store burned down, they did nothing. And it wasn’t just our store—they let all of our neighbors down. So many Koreans lost everything. Some of them, I know they blamed us. But it was the police who made us the villains, and then they abandoned us. They let us take the fall. All the rioting in South Central and Koreatown, and they were nowhere.”

  “But that was almost thirty years ago. They’re trying to help us now.”

  Paul shook his head, and Grace saw that nothing she could say would push him off this hill he’d guarded all these years. “They’re not on our side. They won’t protect us.”

  She was the only one in the house with a laptop. Yvonne rarely used a computer, and when Paul needed to send an email or print a document, he used the old desktop. The one they kept in a corner of the living room.

  Grace hadn’t used this computer since high school, when it was sort of new, before she got her own laptop for college. It was a miracle that it still worked, though she supposed her parents didn’t push its abilities.

  She waited until they went to bed, then waited a couple hours more, until she could hear Paul’s long, quiet snores whispering down the hall.

  She got out of bed and crept out into the living room. It felt wrong to sneak around in her parents’ house, though she did know exactly how to get to that computer without making a sound. She’d never really betrayed her parents’ trust growing up, not to meet a boy or steal booze, but she had made a habit of using the computer after they fell asleep, mostly to read manga and watch YouTube videos with headphones on. Once, she’d watched porn just to see what it was like. She closed out and deleted the browser history within minutes, so scared and ashamed that she couldn’t even begin to enjoy it.

  What she was doing now was much worse—she didn’t know what Paul would do if he foun
d out. She booted the computer, horrified by its noisy, whirring respiration. If her parents woke up, she’d have to lie to them, tell them her laptop had died and hope they weren’t savvy enough to call her on it.

  The hard drive was mostly uncluttered. Her parents didn’t keep much on there. Mostly practical things, like tax documents, and the occasional photo downloaded from an email.

  She found the videos in a folder labeled SECURITY, left unprotected, in plain sight. She might have laughed at Paul on another day, but right now his naivete only made her feel guilty. They were arranged by date, ending with August 23, the day of the shooting. She scanned the clips, starting from just before closing time.

  The shooting had happened deep enough in the parking lot that it didn’t register with the camera. Or, now that Grace thought about it, any of the other cameras the Hanin Market tenants might have had up. She wondered if the shooter had known how to avoid them.

  She saw Javi leaving for the day, then Yvonne stepping out to buy groceries. She watched herself meeting her mother and closing up, the door shutting behind her at 7:37 P.M. The store went dark after that—a pharmacist had to lock up, by law, and only she and Uncle Joseph had keys. But there was another clip, more than fifteen minutes later. After the shooting.

  At 7:55, Paul walked into the store. Grace tried to remember when he showed up at Hanin, whether he’d taken her purse and left her alone before driving them to the hospital. She couldn’t picture it, but he must have—he was in there, looking directly at the camera. He balled his fists and approached, getting closer and closer, until he stood on a stepstool and filled the screen. Grace paused and studied his face. Alone in the empty pharmacy, he let his emotions show in a way Grace wasn’t sure she’d ever seen before. He looked pale and haunted and murderous, and she understood with awful clarity why he’d been stonewalling the police.

  The idiot thought he was going to solve this.

  He was planning to study the feed and find the man who shot his wife. Whatever he found—even if it was nothing—he couldn’t turn the recordings over now. Not without ceding his ground and letting the detective know that he’d withheld evidence.

  There was a full week of clips, plus a handful of older ones Paul must have saved from automatic deletion. She started with these, sifting through, trying to identify what it was that made them stand out to Paul. She saw herself behind the counter, sometimes Uncle Joseph; Javi and their other tech, Tae-Hee, who worked when Javi was off. They all tagged in and out, as they did day to day—but Yvonne was in every clip, working the register.

  Grace watched the customers approaching the counter, picking up their medications, shopping for supplements and lottery tickets. It looked like business as usual, and it took a few clips before Grace saw what caught Paul’s attention. She paused on a black man, not inside Woori but walking by in the corridor outside, eyeing the store. She rewound and watched again. His interest seemed passing, she decided, like he was reading the words on the window just to have something to read. But that’s what she was looking for—people who stood out, who could be casing the store; people who might be stopping to get a good, long look at Yvonne.

  There was one in every clip—not just black people, who were rare in Hanin, but passersby who slowed down to peer through the window. Grace watched the flow of people passing the pharmacy. It was steady and familiar; she recognized a lot of the faces. Mrs. Oh, who worked the jjajangmyeon place in the food court. Rogelio, the young cashier who always flirted a little when she bought her groceries, asking after her parents, the burgeoning drug trade. She scanned them, wondering if they had anything to tell her.

  She sat up and rewound a clip from August 1. A black man walked slowly along the window, peering in with intense focus, as if trying to memorize the layout or to puzzle something out. His line of sight reached Yvonne, who was busy at the register, and lingered.

  She paused the video and tried to zoom in. When that failed, she stretched the window as far as it would go. The image was pixelated but not unintelligible. She could see his smooth, rounded face; the awkward way he held his shoulders. He wasn’t a man at all, certainly not Ray Holloway, who was middle-aged. This was just a teenage boy, plump in the cheeks, with his hands in his pockets, wearing clothes that were too big for him by half.

  She stared and stared, a bad feeling in her chest, growing tighter and denser like a coiling length of chain. There was something here that wouldn’t let her look away. She followed the lines of his face, the soft mouth, the straight nose; paused on his eyes, squinted under boyishly bushy brows. She knew it with a certainty that rang like an alarm: she had seen this face before.

  Twenty

  Tuesday, September 3, 2019

  Shawn sent Jazz home and spent the night waiting up with Nisha. At midnight, she ordered Dasha to go to bed, and Shawn convinced Aunt Sheila to take a sleeping pill, to save them another reason to worry. They slept in snatches, sitting in the living room, waiting for a phone call, listening for the doorbell, the garage. But Darryl didn’t call, and he didn’t come home.

  When morning came, they had nothing to show for their vigil but a wretched, anguished exhaustion. Nisha had to go to work—it was that or sacrifice her job to this crisis, admit defeat in its face and put in for a long leave of absence.

  Shawn had coffee waiting for her when she came out of her room, showered and dressed for work. She took it gratefully, and he hoped it would be enough to perk her up for the drive to LAX. The bags under her eyes were almost as black as her lashes.

  “I know it’s easier said than done, but try not to worry yourself all day,” he said. “He wasn’t kidnapped. He thinks he knows what he’s doing, so he’s probably not in danger. He’ll come back home when he figures out what a fool he is. Probably today.”

  “What if he doesn’t?”

  “Then it’ll be tomorrow.” Shawn could hear the hollowness in his own words.

  Nisha didn’t bother to challenge him again. He was clear out of reassurances, and she must’ve known it. “What do we do, Shawn? Would it be crazy to call the police?”

  “We can’t call the police. Not when we don’t know why he took off.”

  She bit her lip. She didn’t want to think about why Darryl was gone. She’d been shutting down the why all night, the few times Shawn tried to bring it up. They’d find Darryl first, ask the other questions later. But whatever he was up to, even if it was nothing, he was a black boy running around away from home. Cops needed to be about a thousand miles away.

  “I’ll look for him,” he said. “I’ll try his friends again.”

  Shawn hardly used Facebook. He hadn’t grown up with it, and he had no particular desire to spend his free time mining his real life for items of interest to present to people he went to school or church with, for their entertainment or their judgment. His life was too public as it was. The one thing he found social media good for was keeping tabs on the kids. Dasha and Darryl were active users, and he liked that he could see who they were friends with, what they were up to, without having to drag it out of them.

  They’d spent hours last night messaging every friend of Darryl’s they knew by name from Nisha’s account, asking if anyone knew anything and leaving both of their phone numbers. No one called back, and most didn’t even bother responding. Probably thought Darryl’s mom was being paranoid, freaking out because he stayed out one night. The last night of a long weekend, too. Shawn hoped he was with friends, groaning with embarrassment over their shoulders.

  “Try Brianna again,” said Nisha. “She might have enough sense to tell us if she knows something.”

  Until not too long ago, Brianna Lacey was Darryl’s girlfriend. She was the first girlfriend Darryl had ever had, and for the six months or so they were together, they were all but inseparable. Shawn had met her several times and was disappointed when the two kids broke up, just a few weeks before Ray came home. Nisha was right. Brianna was a good girl. Soft-hearted and quick to worry. If she only knew h
ow scared they were, she’d do anything in her power to help.

  It was almost seven when Nisha left, and Shawn tried to sort out what had to be done in her absence. He had the day off from moving, one small mercy, but with Aunt Sheila unwell, Ray arrested, and Jazz and Nisha at work, he was the one adult left to keep watch over the besieged family fort. He dropped Dasha off at school and went home to change clothes and pick up Monique before Jazz had to leave for the hospital.

  He took her back to the Holloway house, where he played with her as well as he could while keeping an eye on the door, the phone, the computer. She was wide-awake and punishingly hyper, and he was grateful when Aunt Sheila got out of bed and offered to entertain her while he caught a couple hours of solid sleep.

  He woke up to a call from Nisha.

  “Brianna came through,” she said. “Says she was asleep when we messaged. I just got off the phone with her.”

  “She know where he is?”

  “She says no, and I believe her. She wouldn’t call just to lie to me.”

  “Did she say anything else?”

  “She said she was happy to help, so I asked if you could talk to her. You think you can meet her today after school?”

  “I shouldn’t just call her?”

  “Well, I was thinking maybe you should go over there anyway, see if Darryl’s hanging around.”

  She’d already called the school earlier, and they weren’t surprised to learn he wasn’t in class. Shawn doubted Darryl was just chilling on campus, but Nisha was right—it was worth checking out, and Shawn knew she’d go herself if she weren’t seventy miles away.

  “You could maybe drop into the principal’s office, too. I said we had a family emergency, but it could help to go in person. I don’t want him getting kicked out of school after all this.”

  “I’m on it. I can pick Dasha up, too, as long as I’m gonna be there.”

  “Thank you.” Her voice was heavy with relief. “We don’t deserve you, Shawn.”