“You’ve only been talking about going back there.”
“Maybe I need to go to North Dakota.”
“Why? What’s in North Dakota? Are you quitting school to join a commune like your sister?”
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” I said and hung up the phone, and then I didn’t go to my classes. Instead I holed up in the library, combing through Korean newspapers, looking for evidence. And I stopped at the job board. Maybe I could make enough money for Lloyd and me to buy our own tickets to North Dakota.
68
LOVE, LOVE, LOVE. ALL I’VE EVER GIVEN YOU WAS LOVE. His pacing is leading him farther and farther away from the shotgun. If he puts the handgun down, we could have a chance.
He whirls and charges me. EVERYTHING WE’VE BEEN THROUGH AND YOU’RE STILL LYING TO ME, YOONA.
69
In the middle of the night, there was a knock on my door, and I opened it to find Lloyd on the other side. “She wouldn’t let me call you,” he said and pushed past me into the room. “I scraped enough money together for gas, but the bridge tolls are going to mail a bill to the house. I didn’t know how that was going to work. I thought they’d stop me.” He paced back and forth, looking at the floor, his hands in his hair.
“Okay, it’s okay.” I closed the door and urged him to sit on the bed. “Lloyd, you’re all right. You’re here.”
“I remembered something.” He sat beside me, his arm around me, and whispered as if someone could hear us. “Tongsu Cho works at a restaurant called Little Pan in Itaewon. We can reach him there.”
I leaned back and spoke in a normal volume. “What happened to your face?”
He had a scratch on his cheek that he traced now with his finger. It hadn’t scabbed over yet. He leaned forward, still talking in a whisper. “She kicked me out.”
“Did she do that to you?”
“This? No, it’s from something else. But I found the number for the restaurant.” He fished in his pocket, standing up to reach deep, and came up with a scrap of paper that he unfolded to show me a number starting with a Korean area code. He handed it to me, sitting back down.
“We can call from Underwood, the finance building. That’s how Serena calls her dad.”
“Let’s go.” He looked at his watch. “It’s five p.m. in Seoul. The restaurant will be open.”
I took out a pair of jeans and turned away from him before I climbed into them.
“You don’t have to be shy with me,” he said.
“What did you say?”
“Oh shit, that came out wrong. I meant, Hey, we’ve got to figure out how to call this number.”
I finished buttoning up my jeans and pulled a sweater over my head with my back still turned to him. “I don’t know how we can get into Dean Olin’s office. There’s a larger office where the secretaries sit and then the counter where they handle students who stop by. Outside of that is a larger door.”
“I’ve opened locked doors before.”
“How do you learn something like that?”
“Two stores down from my dad’s shop is Mr. Kelly’s locksmith shop. Mr. Kelly liked me hanging around, so he showed me a few things. But Mr. Kelly sold my dad the safe in his shop, so I can’t open that one. I mean, I tried, but he made sure I couldn’t open that one. Fuck Mr. Kelly.”
I buttoned my coat and then held up my dorm room key. “Could you open the lock on my door?”
“Probably, maybe, but I never tried. I wouldn’t. Plus you’ve got a dead bolt.”
“Right. Anyway, you don’t need to.”
“Exactly, so there you go.”
“So you can unlock most doors?”
“We’ll see—is Underwood the brownstone one with the green door?”
“Near the main gate.”
“Thought so. Let’s go.” He held the door open for me.
“Do you need any tools or anything?” I said as I turned out the light.
“We’ll stop at my car.”
“Good thing your parents didn’t take that away.”
“My mom couldn’t get rid of me then. She’d rather I drive far away. Probably get in a car accident so she never has to see me again.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“It’s that or having me locked up.”
We walked down the steps, and he closed the door so quietly behind us that I had to look back to see if it had closed after all.
In his car, he reached under his seat and took out a brown paper bag, fished around, and pulled out a couple of bobby pins and a flashlight.
He actually did it. He used two bobby pins to unlock the side door to Underhill and then used the same pins to open each of the doors inside. My heart leaped. But Lloyd was cautious. I walked around while he called. It was the best chance we’d had yet, and I hoped, I hoped so much, that Tongsu Cho would know something about the men who had taken you and Lloyd to that meeting that night, would know where the men had gone. You had to be with them somewhere.
Dean Olin’s office smelled musty, and I found socks under his leather chair. I wondered if Serena knew about those. Lloyd dialed quickly and got the international operator to patch him through to the restaurant, and I heard him ask for Tongsu Cho. Then I heard him describe what he looked like. He held the phone away from him and said to me that the hostess was going back to the kitchen to see if anyone by that name worked there. “Maybe he’s using an alias,” I suggested.
“Why would he do that?”
“Yes, hello?” he said in English. The hostess must have returned to the phone. Then in Korean, “Yes, it’s not a good connection. Could I speak to someone else in the kitchen who might know him? It’s really important. Yes, family matter, urgent.”
He listened some more and then he thanked her and said he’d call tomorrow. “Different staff tonight for a special event. She said to try tomorrow.”
70
I had a dream where a doctor was holding up a graph of your heartbeats. She held it up for me to see, on a large eleven-by-fourteen-inch piece of paper, and she pointed to the parts that showed you were alive and then the straight line where you weren’t. “Right here,” she said. “This is the moment he died.” I cried for you. I cried and cried and cried and couldn’t stop crying for you even after I sat up in bed and realized I was in my dorm room. And Lloyd held me and said, “We have to find him, that’s all, then these nightmares will stop. I have them too.”
71
LOVE, LOVE, LOVE, LOVE. WHY DON’T I DESERVE LOVE? WE HAD A PLAN, YOONA. WE WERE GOING TO FIND JAESUNG. WHY DIDN’T YOU NEED ME ANYMORE?
“You’re right, Lloyd. I didn’t know what I was doing. But I do now. I do.”
There’s anguish on his face.
I continue. “It’s not too late, and Sax is listening to you. You’ve got what you wanted. You have proof, and you can free Jaesung.”
HE’S LYING TO ME.
“He’s trying to help. Come on, if they weren’t, they’d be in here by now. You let Daiyu go, and you’ve shown you’re reasonable. That’s what matters. And you’re a good friend to Jaesung.”
HIS ONLY FRIEND.