to side with Ky?n. I wanted nothing more to do with this investigation. But I knew too much now. The ghosts of the murdered returned, whispering into my ears, There is no one but you.
FOURTEEN
TWO WEEKS PASSED. As the rainy season stretched into autumn, when it ought to have ended long ago, and rumors overflowed that nature had lost its rhythm because a woman was regent, something peculiar began. I’d wake up drenched in sweat, dreaming of the dead again. The mountainous heap of burnt servants, the siblings starved into twigs and left to rot in the storage hut, the corpse sleeping under the bush … All Catholics. And last night, the woman who had visited my dreams most had turned her head to stare right at me, locking her eyes on mine.
Come find me, Lady O had called out in a singsong voice. Come quick.
All day I roamed the bureau with my skin pebbling at the thought that the time had come: I had to face Commander Yi. He needed to know the truth. But even though I knew this was the right thing to do, fear wrapped its icy fingers around me, its grip so strong that tears welled in my eyes. The what-if question would not let me go. What if—though I was certain this was not true—but what if Inspector Han and I were tied by blood? I wondered if I would still throw him into a den of hungry tigers, to be devoured in the name of justice.
My answer only a few months ago would have been no. But I had seen the puckering knife wound across a daughter’s throat, a man flipped upside down and drowned. I was a hundred times less naive now, a hundred times less forgiving.
And of one thing I was certain: Older Brother had always told me, in a very stern voice, that it was better to die young than to live long and cause trouble. He would not have wished me to let him live the life of a killer.
I shook my head, unable to believe myself. Here I was brooding over a possibility that was not even based on a speck of hard evidence but my own imagination. There was only one sure truth: Inspector Han’s alibi was a lie, and whatever had occurred on the night of the twenty-first had left him bloody and stammering in shock about a dead woman.
It was wicked and cowardly of me to keep silent. And should another victim die, all the guilt would be on my shoulders.
Gathering my thoughts on the dirt floor, I tried to spell out a question: Will Commander Yi believe me?
I erased it and tried again, for I sometimes got confused with certain letters. But besides the occasional mistake, brushstrokes no longer mystified me. Every night, too worried to sleep, I had rolled off my mat to study the Hangul chart by candlelight, recalling Aejung’s teachings. The consonants were based on the drawing of one’s mouth when pronouncing a sound. Whenever I wrote a character, I imagined dipping a calligraphy brush into ink and then following my voice as it curved off my tongue and hit my palate, or bounced off the front of my inner teeth, or circled around my throat, or hummed against my touching lips.
As for the vowels, they were easy to differentiate, created by three types of strokes: a horizontal line for the flat earth, a dot for the sun in the heavens, and a vertical line for the upright human.
Earth, sun, human. This was what made life, a simple sum of three. Yet life was not simple at all. It was a complicated web, a tangling thread of lies and deceit. I wondered, though, what the truth would look like if I followed the thread all the way to the heart of Inspector Han. Would the truth lying at the center of his being be as simple, a motivation rooted in the three most common causes for murder: lust, greed, or vengeance?
Tell Commander Yi, I wrote in the dirt.
A shadow stretched over me, as though a storm cloud had swept in, followed by a familiar voice. “How curious, a servant who knows how to write.”
It was Young Master Ch’oi Jinyeop. His presence intensified the isolation of the kitchen backyard. His steps were heavy as he walked around, and I kept my eyes fixed on his shadow, growing larger and larger until at last the silk of his robe appeared in my periphery.