He couldn’t remember what he’d done with the body.
He remembered cleaning until the bleach seared his palms, scrubbing himself raw in the shower, then running away with untied shoes. He remembered throwing his clothes into a bag, buying a train ticket and then a plane ticket, waiting for an Uber late at night and wanting to rip his own face off because he thought for sure that everyone would see it in his eyes, MURDERER MURDERER MURDERER.
But he couldn’t remember where he’d put James.
He’d woken up on the plane in a cold sweat, worried that he hadn’t actually gotten rid of the body at all, that he’d left James in the hallway for the janitor to find. The police would catch him for sure. One roommate found dead and the other mysteriously fled the country? He was as good as guilty.
But if he’d done that, someone would have found the body by now. NYU would have shut down until they figured out what had happened. They couldn’t keep this kind of thing a secret from students.
But it seemed that, for now, no one knew a thing.
Still, Lee needed a better plan in case things went south. Japan had an extradition treaty with the US, so Lee wasn’t safehere if they came for him. But where else could he go, and with what money?
The sound of footsteps in the hallway pulled Lee back into his body, out of the dark crevices of his mind. He’d been zoning out while staring at the stain on the kitchen wall. If his father walked in now, he’d see Lee sitting in front of a closed laptop like he’d cast his brain out to another planet. That wouldn’t do. Lee stood up and crossed into the corridor before he could run into his dad, who had already seen him once today and didn’t need to suffer through another encounter.
Most of the rooms in the house had yellowed tatami mats that stuck to Lee’s shoes like the fibers of a Venus fly trap. As he walked down the hallway toward his room, he despised how every step clung to his feet, as if he wasn’t allowed to leave.
He didn’t know why his father had picked this place.
The house sat at the bottom of an incline, almost completely hidden by the veil of sword ferns and wild ginger. From the gate at the top of the hill, the house looked like a little white jewelry box forgotten in the woods. The exterior walls were somehow bright white despite the century of disrepair, caged in by dark cypress frames. A narrow porch lined the right side, and the black tiled roof cast darkness over the yard, leaving the uncut grass in a murky swamp of shadows.
Somehow, despite its state of abandonment, flowers bloomed tall and healthy on all sides of the house. Marigolds and summer lavender lined the southern yard, where the sun glared brightest. In the shadier western yard, the hues of the flowers deepened into auburn and vermillion. In the north yard, near the well, white buttercups emerged from the cracked dirt and the trees grew sparsely enough that you could just make out the sea. And in the front yard, bright pink tulips tangled with the sword ferns. Hina said that all those flowers were supposed to grow atdifferent times of the year, that it didn’t make sense to have every season all at once, but Lee had seen far stranger things than stubborn flowers.
His father had only gotten as far as furnishing the kitchen, so the rest of the house was mostly empty. When they opened all the sliding doors because there was no air-conditioning, the wind blew straight through the hollow rooms from front to back, the whole world passing through the house like it wasn’t there at all.
Lee’s father had assigned him a room at the back of the house with sliding doors that opened to an overgrown clearing and the edge of a forest. Sunlight sparkled through a small window, casting a golden square on the tatami mats.
When Lee had arrived less than an hour ago, he’d only paused long enough to shove his suitcase in the corner and drop his backpack on the floor before making coffee for his father. His father thought the rest of his things were in storage for next semester. His father also thought he’d formally requested a semester off due to stress. His father thought a lot of things that weren’t true.
It helped that next week was the eight-year anniversary of his mother’s disappearance, and she’d officially been declared dead last week. That made a good excuse for the stress, one that made sense to his father. It should have been official after seven years, but because she’d vanished in Cambodia, there was a lot of paperwork that had to be translated and submitted and processed. Even eight years later, his mother was still helping him out.
They’d never found a body, and for a while, Lee thought that meant she might be alive. After all, the leading theory was that she’d been knocked out and crammed into a suitcase, then dragged off to a van in the parking lot.
But ever since Lee had started hearing her voice, he knew she had to be gone. After all, she couldn’t haunt Lee if she was still alive.
Let me out, Lee.
Lee rolled his suitcase over to the closet and slid the door open to shove it inside, but came face-to-face with a cement wall. He pressed his hand to it, let the coolness spread from his palm into his bones. He knocked once against the wall, tried to ascertain its thickness, but the sound came out muted and an ache bloomed in his knuckles, the grit tearing at his skin, like the wall was biting back.
He shoved his suitcase into the darkest corner of the room, then dragged his backpack into the square of sunlight and pulled out his cell phone. Lee was torn between leaving it off forever and getting a burner phone, or just getting a SIM card so he could use his phone as usual and act innocent.
He gnawed his bottom lip, squinting in the sunlight as he contemplated. It was probably better to act innocent. If the police actually had enough evidence to come after him, it wasn’t like he had anywhere else to run.
A SIM card, then.
He opened the side door to his room and stepped onto the porch, sliding the door shut to keep the mosquitos out. He hopped off the porch and into the yard, where his shoes sank into wet soil that clung to him with every step, like it wanted to pull him under.
Let me out, Lee.
The wind carried the words across the yard, scattered them like sparks of pollen, tickling the bare skin of his neck. Despite his better judgment, Lee turned around.
From where he stood, the house looked gray rather than white, dimmed by the looming shadow of the forest to the west. The sword ferns clung to the foundation like a bear trap withits teeth clenched around the house. A thin blade of sunlight tore through the branches, a bright scar across the western wall.
Then the trees shuddered and the sunlight vanished, and Lee realized why he hadn’t been able to look away, why his skin itched and his feet stayed rooted in the mud.
There was no window on this wall.
Lee was certain there had been a window in his room. He remembered the square of sunlight he’d used to find his phone in the dark abyss of his backpack. Yet, somehow, there was nothing here but an unbroken wall of wood.
