“You only worked for Louise for a short time. Did you come just for this? Just to poison me and get me to return to France?”
“Something like that,” she said, keeping her eyes averted. “It’s what my brother would have wanted.”
She looked out at the lake, and I followed her gaze.
“You have the best view of it from here,” I said after a moment’s silence.
“One of the perks of living in the attic,” she said. “The only one.”
“How long have you lived here, Trieu?” I asked. “In the yellow house.”
“Four months before you arrived,” she said without looking at me.
“So Marcelle was plotting all this for that long?”
“I don’t know,” she said, still speaking at the wall.
“Trieu, you do know.”
“It’s been far more than four months,” she said finally.
“But we only had six months’ notice that we were coming to the colony.”
“You do understand that Michelin is more than you and your heartless husband, right? You are just little spokes that make the tires spin. Marcelle has hated Michelin long before she ever heard you were coming to the colony. She’s hated you since Cao Van Sinh died. Since your family ordered his death.”
“Who is Sinh Cao?” I said, growing more confused.
“Why don’t you ask your husband,” she said, her chin raised again. “He knows. His cousin Anne-Marie de la Chaume was in love with him. And she was Marcelle’s very best friend. Marcelle and Khoi, everything they have done in Indochine, all of it has been for them.”
Anne-Marie de la Chaume and Cao Van Sinh. I had never heard those names before.
“I’ll ask Victor,” I said earnestly. “I will. But what I don’t understand, and need you, not Victor, to answer, is how Marcelle tricked Louise van Dampierre into hiring you?”
“Tricked!” she exclaimed, turning to me with an incredulous look on her face. “Louise van Dampierre was Marcelle’s closest friend in the colony. It was easy to get me into this house.”
“That poison. That ky nham. Is it also in Marcelle’s house?” I asked.
“I doubt it.”
“Put it there,” I said, pointing to her dresser. “Now.”
She opened the bottom drawer and took out a small cotton bag.
“I thought it would be silk,” I said, grabbing it from her hand. I moved it between my fingers and then handed it back to her. “Marcelle’s. Now,” I ordered. “If she’s home, find a way to get her out.”
“She’s not home,” said Trieu.
“Where is she, then?” I said.
“Where she always is.”
“At Khoi’s palace.”
Trieu nodded and put the cotton bag in her pocket.
“Did she break my ring?” I said, the bag jogging my memory and pitching me back to my nightmare on the boat. “Did she smash my emerald ring when I was on the Nguyens’ boat?”
“I don’t know,” said Trieu.
“Well, I do,” I said, making for the door.
“She knows about the men,” Trieu called after me as my hand turned the doorknob. “On the list in Haiphong. She knows you killed them, and so do I.”
“I didn’t kill them,” I said without looking at her.
“But you didn’t save them, either. That’s the same thing.”
I turned toward her slowly.
“You don’t know what happens on those plantations,” she said.
“I do. Like you said, I was there. I spent several days,” I countered.
She shook her head and laughed, clearly laughing at me.
“You saw what you imagine is the worst of it, but death is not the cruelest fate. It’s the daily abuse, physical and psychological, that kills most of the men—and women. You glimpsed the face of death, but you didn’t see the everyday sins.”
I thought of my own family, the piling on of constant abuse that was far more damaging than the more occasional blow to the head, and didn’t reply.
“Before he died, my brother told me everything. In the fields, in the hospitals, in their dormitories, women are touched constantly. Defiled. Their children don’t go to school. They can’t read. They never see their parents. The ones who are Lucie’s age speak like babies. As for the men, they’re nothing but mules for you, for the Michelins. They die like rodents, but with less mercy than a trap. Maybe you didn’t bother to look past what your husband showed you, but you should have. I’ve observed you closely these past months, even if you didn’t bother to look at me. You’re not one of these French idiots. You have intuition. You could have seen what was right in front of you. You just didn’t care to look.”