Lee stared back at his father, trying to make sense of hiswords. He didn’t understand the way his father was looking at him, his eyes so flat and empty.
“The well,” Lee echoed.
His father nodded. “Like Okiku,” he said.
Lee pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes, shaking his head. No, that wasn’t right. Hina had told Lee the story about Okiku, but she wouldn’t have told his father because he hated ghost stories. The wind picked up, wailing through the open window and knocking over the broom by the door, revealing the stain on the wall. The whole world was screaming at Lee.
“There’s no well on campus,” Lee said.
His father frowned. “Not on campus,” he said. “Here. In the yard.”
Lee looked up sharply at his father. His hands fell slowly to his sides.
“What?” he whispered.
“He was at the bottom of the well,” Lee’s father said, his eyes empty, expression flat. “Isn’t that strange, Lee?”
The ocean roared in Lee’s ears. His father kept talking, but Lee couldn’t hear anything over the crashing waves. He stood up and tried to back away but tripped over his chair, falling to the floor.
The porch door clattered open, the wind tossing sand into the open doorway. Only yesterday, the sword ferns had scratched against the windows, but now all of them were gray and dead, limp on the ground as the wind tore them to pieces.
James can’t be in there, Lee thought, stumbling to his feet and slamming the door shut.But if not in the well, then where?
Another frigid breeze slammed into him, and Lee turned to the door on the other side of the house, which was now hanging open as well. All the doors in the house had flown open, wind spiraling through every room.
Lee shoved past his father and locked the living room door,then raced across the house and closed each door, one by one. Open doors had started everything, and now everything was going to end with an open door. He needed to seal everything up, and then he would be safe. The wind wailed louder as he ran—the sound of his mother’s screams, the dying cry of the man on Sen’s porch, Hina yelling in the kitchen. Lee locked every door, sealing all the sounds outside.
When he returned to the kitchen, his father was standing in stunned silence among dishes Lee hadn’t noticed he’d shattered. Sweat plastered Lee’s hair to his forehead, running cold down his chest.Where is James Baldridge?Lee thought again and again and again.
“Lee,what the hell is going on?” his father asked.
“I shut the door,” Lee said, his teeth chattering, hands trembling uncontrollably. “We’re safe now because I shut the door.”
His father’s frown deepened and he took a step forward, into the tiny square of sunlight cast from the kitchen window.
There, on his father’s shirt, was a stain.
It was the same shape as the stain on James’s shirt. The same shape that was not quite a circle but not quite a tear, the puzzle piece that wouldn’t fit.
Lee grabbed a fistful of his father’s shirt, tugging him closer. Just like James, his father stayed limp because he didn’t think someone like Lee could hurt him, wouldn’t realize he was wrong until it was too late.
Lee felt like he had a fever, the sudden wave of rage nearly sending him to his knees. The truth was on the other side of the stain, he was sure of it.
Where is James Baldridge?
Lee could see it before it happened—he would grab one of the kitchen knives that Hina had so carefully sharpened for him, as if she knew what was coming. He would stab his father straight through the stain and his blood would devour it and finally itwould be gone. Staring at it was like staring at the surface of the sun, boiling his eyes inside his skull. He would stab again and again and again because to see and not know was unbearable. He had to get rid of it.
Lee released his father and turned away, gripping the counter to hold himself still. He could taste it—blood and rage and the truth blurring through him. He didn’t want this, he didn’t want to, he loved his father, but his father was standing between Lee and the truth.
He thought of Sen dying on the other side of the wall.
Cut me down, he thought—begged, even though she would never hear him because she was already dead.
He grabbed a knife from the knife block. It trembled in his hand, light glinting frantically off it because he couldn’t hold it still.
“Lee?” his father said warily. “What are you going to do with that?”
Cut me down, Lee thought.Last chance.He pictured Sen raising her sword to him the way she had to the traitor in her yard because Lee was a traitor to his father, to his own soul.
