Han had all the motive to avenge his family by killing a foreign priest, even if it meant angering China. “I never knew this…”
“No one likes talking about it. His past is as unspoken of as his own home—the one his family lived in before his father was executed. The new owner of it does not live there. He says it is haunted by the ghost of the original owner, Scholar Jeong.”
The hair rose on my skin. Jeong. I mentally shook my head. Jeong was also my surname, but surely it was a common one. Another coincidence. I pressed my fingers into my eyes, trying to stop all the what-if questions from resurfacing.
Jeong Jeong-yun. That was my true name before Older Sister had changed my first name to Seol and had ordered me to never use our last name. All this she had done to protect me from our past. But she had never explained why we had to hide. “What past? What happened?” I’d ask, and she would only shake her head and walk away.
I also knew this: my surname Jeong meant loyalty, and the first word in my given name, Jeong-yun, also meant loyalty.
Jeong Jeong-yun! Older Brother’s voice called out to me from a faraway memory in a teasing, loving voice. Jeong Jeong-yun, what a girl full of loyalty.
FIFTEEN
IT WAS RAINING still.
When I was a child, I would have found any excuse to run outside, to laugh and shake in the falling blue rain. But now my heart lay frozen in my chest as I stared at the paper-screened door, watching the sky turn from black to gray.
Jeong, Jeong, Jeong. The name from my past circled around my mind the way flies swarmed a carcass, attracted to the smell of death. Death was all there was in my past—the death of my given name, the death of my mother on the island of banishment.
Just like Inspector Han’s family, my family had also been banished for ten years, which had been shortened to three years.
The coincidences left me nauseous, and there were too many similarities now to ignore.
Yesterday, after leaving Lady Kang, I’d asked Woorim to be my guide to Inspector Han’s old house, and if she had not forgotten our agreement, she would be waiting for me outside Lady Kang’s mansion gate.
My curiosity overwhelmed me in such a way that I felt out of control. I could not walk without colliding into walls. I could not will my hands to work. And so I stumbled out of the bureau with my uniform loose—not tightened with a sash belt—and my hair unplaited, hanging down the sides of my face.
In such a manner, I made my way to the mansion. It was like any other day, yet so different. Nothing seemed real anymore. Nothing made sense.
As Woorim had promised, she was waiting for me outside the gate, rubbing her hands together against the early morning chill. The moment she saw me, her tiny lips popped open and she came running, her braided hair swinging from side to side. “You came at last. Are you frightened?”
I could only stare at her. I’m terrified.
“When I was younger, I would wander through the forest at night with my siblings and share ghost stories,” she said, excitement animating her whisper. “My heart would race and all the hairs on my skin would rise! Then we would run home screaming. And now to go visit a haunted mansion this early in the morning? It is when spirits are most awake.”
“I’m sure it is not haunted.”
“Oh, but it is. All who enter that house start shivering, as though stepping into an icehouse.”
We traveled together through the rain and the sleeping streets, wearing our straw cloaks and wooden clogs. She chatted on, but my thoughts were elsewhere. I remembered the first day I’d met Inspector Han. When I had first entered the police bureau, thrown before his feet, I’d heard his voice high above me ask, “Have we met before?”
I had looked him straight in the face, and on seeing a stranger, I’d ducked my head low again. “I’m sorry, sir. I do not think so.” He had never asked that question again, likely thinking himself mistaken.
But now I wondered … had we met before?
Woorim and I kept close to the patterned stone walls lining the narrow dirt street the mansion was on, and the street rose with the upward slope of the land, the steepness dragging the breath out of us. We arrived at the end