The Law of Lines Read online

  In Ki-jeong’s view of things, life was a weed. If you didn’t tend to it, it would grow out of control and spread and shove its branches into everything. If you did tend to it, it would be restrained and trimmed and plucked, and, if you did really well, it could even have a shape to it. How could her sister not know that? Especially having been so miserable her whole life. It suddenly occurred to Ki-jeong that the phrase her whole life now referred to the past perfect tense where her sister was concerned, and she went blank for a moment.

  Her sister had come into Ki-jeong’s home, holding Ki-jeong’s father’s hand, at the age of five, and from that point on, she’d become a burden to Ki-jeong’s mother. Ki-jeong’s mother was pitiable and terrifying. Her sister was pathetic and shrewd. Her father was irresponsible and cowardly. Ki-jeong consciously tried to treat her sister fairly. She mistakenly believed that she acted as an objective and neutral mediator between her mother and sister. In truth, she was entirely indifferent. You’re not like her, her mother always said. And because she was not like her, Ki-jeong regarded her sister with pity and sympathized with her with all of her heart.

  When her sister returned home after that year of no contact, she’d seemed changed. She was warm to their mother, and when they sat down to dinner, she’d talked nonstop. Ki-jeong and her mother were unable to get a word in. Her mother ended up losing patience and leaving the table. Her sister seemed entirely unconcerned and continued to prattle on, much to Ki-jeong’s wonder.

  Her sister had always been just as uncomfortable around Ki-jeong as she was around her mother, but upon her return, she acted differently. She pestered Ki-jeong to take her out to popular restaurants, asked Ki-jeong to loan her a bag, wore Ki-jeong’s clothes without permission, waited in front of the school when Ki-jeong was scheduled to get off of work, claiming that she’d just happened to be in the neighborhood, and then hit her up for spending money. In a word, she acted like a true little sister.

  When vacation ended, her sister returned to school, where she kept herself busy. Or at least according to the occasional updates she gave them over the phone. She belonged to several clubs on campus and never missed a single class. She studied for exams late into the night at the library and went on blind dates. One minute she was joining a mountaineering group and going on a week-long hiking trip, and the next she was joining an a cappella group and horrifying everyone by crooning vocal warm-ups right in the middle of a phone call. During a school break, she announced that she was taking a trip and dropped out of contact for over a month. On another break, she joined an advertising club and came home with a crate-load of a brand of bottled water that had a low market share. She said she was preparing for a copywriting contest and swigged the water constantly before coming up with the ad copy: “We don’t bury pigs. We don’t bury chickens. We only bury purified water.” Ki-jeong couldn’t help but grimace when she read it. Her sister added the unasked-for explanation: “It means the water is safe from hoof-and-mouth disease and bird flu. Remember? When all those diseased farm animals were buried and it polluted the groundwater?” When Ki-jeong retorted that that ad alone would make customers sick, her sister changed it to “We don’t sell water, we sell class,” which made no sense for the brand, which was named after a small hick town out in rural Gangwon Province. Sometimes Ki-jeong thought her sister should act more like a student and loaf around and take it easy, but instead her sister acted like she was making up for lost time, keeping herself busy and distracted with things that, in Ki-jeong’s eyes, were not really worth her time.

  Now it fell to Ki-jeong to contact people who might have known her sister. So as not to be the only one at her funeral. So as not to abandon her little sister. The very first place she called was her sister’s department at the university. They told her that her sister had never re-enrolled. Thinking there must be some mistake, she tried calling the office of the registrar and the student affairs office. They told her the same thing. She wouldn’t put it past her sister. Her sister had not been all that interested in her declared major.

  After a couple of days, Ki-jeong went in person to her sister’s university in Wonju. Her sister could still have attended student club meetings while on a leave of absence. Ki-jeong went first to the mountaineering club’s room. There were several photos taped to a metal filing cabinet. Her sister’s face was in none of them. Next she went to the advertising club. None of the students there knew her sister’s name, but they did confirm that they’d created an ad for bottled water. Ki-jeong remembered the ad copy her sister had written. We don’t sell water, we sell class. One of the students told her it was the slogan for a famous foreign water company. They added that it had won a great deal of prize money in an ad contest.

  She thought the police would be actively investigating her sister’s case, but when she called to follow up, they said they were busy. That her case was not pressing. They would decide the course of the investigation after they got the autopsy results. Ki-jeong accepted the fact that her sister’s death was just one of many countless deaths to the police. And besides, the sooner they moved forward on it, the sooner her mother would find out. Her mother would have to find out at some point, but now wasn’t the time. When she imagined her mother’s reaction, Ki-jeong feared what might happen.

  At least the police were quick to hand over the call history for the cell phone registered in her sister’s name, which Ki-jeong had requested. She wanted to call everyone her sister had been in contact with and invite them to the funeral. Since her sister would be taking her last journey without being seen off by their mother, Ki-jeong wanted it to at least be a little less lonely.

  While scanning the list, which wasn’t very long, the first number that jumped out at her was her own. All of the calls had been made by her sister. The calls were short, some no more than a second. Her sister had wanted to tell her something, and Ki-jeong hadn’t listened. Another number caught her eye. It was the last call made from her sister’s phone. Her sister had tried the number over and over. Ki-jeong wanted to tell that person what had happened to her sister. The person whom her sister had dialed repeatedly during her final moments but who, like Ki-jeong, had not answered.

  According to the log, those calls were also short—just one, two, three seconds, eleven seconds at the longest. Ki-jeong could think of only one scenario in which you would end a call after one second, and that was hanging up the moment you realize who’s calling.

  She tried the number using a public phone in the school cafeteria. It made her uncomfortable to reveal her own number to someone she didn’t know. She called the number several times, but no one answered.

  Where was this number? Who was using it? Who was the person her sister had tried so anxiously to reach? Was it the person who’d led her sister to J—in the first place, where she had no friends or family? Who was this person who answered their phone only to slam the door on her sister’s earnest heart after just one or two seconds, eleven seconds at the most?

  5

  It didn’t matter if you were dealing with a victim or a perpetrator, the hardest type of person to deal with was someone like Se-oh Yun. Mutes were worse than liars. No human being can lie all the time, it’s not in their nature. The truth is bound to pop out, even right in the middle of telling a lie. Liars made you proud to be able to see through them, but mutes—they only made you boil over with anger.

  Se-oh Yun wasn’t saying a word. When Detective Myeong-guk Kim asked, “We understand that your father, Su-chang Yun, has been depressed lately?” Se-oh stared at him and smirked. She wasn’t answering his question. She was mocking it.

  Detective Kim took a photograph from a drawer and handed it to Se-oh. When it came to showing someone evidence and getting them to believe him, he was a pro.

  “Look at this.”

  It was a photograph of the cross section of a gas hose. Se-oh knew at once what it was.

  “Pretty clean, huh? This here shows it was cut. Sliced clean with scissors or a knife, on purpos
e.”

  The results of the investigation weren’t out yet, but Detective Kim wanted to get a reaction from Se-oh. He wanted to make her start talking. Se-oh stared at the photo. Little changed in her expression. He couldn’t stand the silent treatment, but he wasn’t going to lose his temper over it either. At least dealing with someone like her was more efficient than people who asked too many pointless questions and had to be told the same thing over and over.

  At #157, the gas line, which was anchored to the wall next to the kitchen stove, had broken above the manual valve while the valve was turned off. Normally when the rubber tubing deteriorated, it broke somewhere beneath the valve. Gravity and the passage of time are always hardest to bear at the bottom. This meant that as long as the valve was closed, there would be no gas leak, even if the bottom hose fell off completely. To put it another way, if the bottom hose was broken while the valve was turned on, then there was a good chance the hose was intentionally severed.

  Likewise, if the top hose was broken while the valve was off—as was the case at #157—then the odds were high that it was not an accident. It was possible to maliciously fake a worn-out gas hose in order to cause something bad to happen. That had been the case with the recent gas explosion in Uijeongbu not long ago. The gas valve had been turned off and a sharp object used to sever the top hose.

  But a similar case alone was not enough to conclude that the explosion in #157 was due to foul play. The cabinet above the sink had been found completely torn from the wall. Accidents had been caused before by kitchen cabinets falling and damaging the gas line. A detailed investigation was needed to determine whether the explosion caused the cabinet to fall, or whether the explosion was caused by the cabinet falling and dislodging the worn-out hose. That would take time. If deteriorated hose, accident; if severed hose, incident.

  Se-oh could not believe that the gas line in the photo was the same one installed in their kitchen. She must have seen it several times a day for over twenty years, and yet the shape and color were unfamiliar. Hearing Detective Kim speak so conclusively, so full of assurance, about a gas line she’d never paid attention to before, she was struck by a pessimistic thought: The police would conclude the case as they saw fit. They would not help her father at all.

  Though she knew people only said it to comfort her, it enraged Se-oh each time someone said the accident was a stroke of bad luck. That was the kind of thing you said in response to getting an answer wrong on a test or slipping and hurting your tailbone because you weren’t paying attention to where you were going.

  If this had happened solely due to bad luck, then whose luck was bad? Her father’s, who was burned from head to toe in the explosion? Se-oh’s, who had missed the explosion and survived, but lost her home and would likely lose her father, too?

  Detective Kim didn’t believe it was the fault of bad luck. Some accidents were fabricated from a disguise of coincidence and luck, and he regarded this as one of those cases. Se-oh didn’t fully understand what he meant by that, but it made her feel worse than hearing it was bad luck.

  Detective Kim stared at Se-oh. He seemed to think she hadn’t understood him well enough, because he came right up to the desk and sat down.

  “There’s a thing called a hose cock. Allow me to explain. They’re not in use anymore. You can’t use them. Gas lines were redesigned to not allow them, because they’re dangerous. See, it’s real easy to slice right through. The hose is rubber, so it used to happen all the time. But there are a lot of old houses where the gas lines haven’t been updated. It’s impossible to go door-to-door tracking them all down. Your house, Ms. Yun, was one of those old houses. Makes it real easy to get a gas leak. Once the leak starts, the gas just keeps coming out. That’s because it doesn’t have one of these. An automatic shut-off valve. The new gas lines all have fuses that shut off right away if it senses there’s a leak. Makes it a lot harder for accidents to happen. You get what I’m saying?”

  Se-oh nodded. She knew what he was literally saying, but she didn’t know what he was driving at. She only nodded because she figured he would keep staring at her until she did.

  “There was a similar case not long ago. It was all over the news—did you see it? Up in Uijeongbu. Same as your case.”

  She remembered. A lot of people had been injured, so there’d been news updates every day. Or maybe there was just nothing else worth reporting on at the time. She’d probably even watched the news with her father. Of course, she couldn’t remember what sort of face her father had made or what he’d said.

  “These gas explosions—there were over a hundred and fifty last year. Only reason the Uijeongbu case made the news was because so many people died from it. We’ve already had three cases in our jurisdiction alone. Fact is, the farther out from the city you go, the more of these explosions you get. If you want to lower the suicide rate, all you have to do is add an automatic shutoff valve to the gas line in every last kitchen in the country.”

  As she looked at Detective Kim, she was reminded suddenly of heading off to work many years earlier. Before leaving the dorm, she and the other team members had all stood in a circle and shouted their motto: “Don’t sell, teach!” The image had nothing to do with where she was now, but it struck her that Detective Kim was no different from the people she’d worked with back then. He had it all down to a science. That is, he knew how to get people pumped up, and how to convince them of anything, so he could get exactly what he wanted from them.

  “Have you seen this before?”

  Detective Kim tapped a photo of a half-burned disposable lighter.

  “You find them everywhere, these lighters. Every house has got one or two. It’s the sort of thing you think you haven’t seen even though you have, or you think you have seen even though you haven’t. They’re so common that they’re useless as evidence. They should make ’em different from each other. Why do they have to make them so damn identical, am I right? Makes our job harder. Your father smokes, doesn’t he? Looks like maybe he snipped that hose there and had himself a smoke. We found the lighter in the living room. Along with the cigarette. How’s your father been lately? I hear he’s been grumbling a lot about dying. . . .”

  Se-oh closed her eyes. The world slowly turned into a solid wall. It wasn’t dark and dismal. Being surrounded by a wall meant she was safe. What she now understood was that, all this time, while her father had been lying in the hospital, while he was in agony from having his flesh stripped and his bones seared, while his organs were damaged and tubes inserted into him kept him breathing, the police had been doing absolutely nothing. She felt like running away.

  “Ms. Yun, I’m going to tell you all about the father you don’t know. Listen up. First of all, your father is in debt.”

  Detective Kim shuffled some papers. Se-oh knew about it already. She didn’t know the details of where all the debt had come from, but she had a pretty good idea.

  “Big banks, small banks, usurers—the debtors’ holy trinity! That’s how it goes. When you can’t pay back the big banks, you borrow from the small banks, and when you can’t pay back the small banks, you go to the usurers. Do you know what usurers are? Loan sharks. If there were a step after that, he’d have taken it, but sadly for him there’s no such thing. The only place left to go after borrowing from loan sharks is up there.”

  Detective Kim raised his index finger and gestured upward.

  “Since he couldn’t pay back his loans and kept on lying to everyone and not taking responsibility for his decisions, he probably got mad and argued with his creditors. And then of course he would’ve turned to crime. According to the people he was friends with back when he owned a tool shop, your father Mr. Su-chang Yun used to say all the time, ‘I want to die. The work is killing me. What’s the point of living this way?’ Not long before the explosion, he asked if anyone knew where he could buy a strong pesticide. You know, the rate of success for suicide among the elderly, it’s very, very high. Old folks don’t mess around w
hen it comes to deciding whether or not to kill themselves. As soon as they decide they want to go, they really go.”

  “He wouldn’t do that.”

  Having said that, she felt extremely lonely. But she comforted herself with the thought that she was okay. After all, she wasn’t as lonely as her father, who was lying alone in a hospital room wrapped in bandages. She could bear it. No matter how lonely she felt, she was not as lonely as her father.

  “Of course not! Of course he wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t do that at all.” Detective Kim laughed. “But here’s the thing. This kind of thing is done all the time by people who would never, ever do such a thing. It’s not in our nature as human beings. If humanity consisted solely of people who would do that sort of thing, we’d all be terrified to death. But that’s the thing about people. It goes against our nature to rape, and yet we do. We would never lie or cheat, but we do. And, of course, no one would ever take their own life, and yet they do.”

  Detective Kim looked at Se-oh’s silent face and stopped talking. In order for him to close the case as a suicide, above all else, the motive had to be clear. In Su-chang Yun’s case, it didn’t much matter whether you pointed the finger at his depression or his hardships. If the fire were ruled an accident, then he’d have some money coming to him through insurance, albeit not very much. What mattered more was getting the family to agree.

  Se-oh gazed at Detective Kim. She vowed to never die alone. If you were alone, you had no walls to hide behind. Her father must have been so lonely lying in that hospital.

  “There is someone who arranged to meet with your father that day. Do you know him? Someone who might have come by now and then to collect money. Name is Su-ho Lee. You say you were home all the time? Remember seeing him?”

  She had known that someone had been coming to the house looking for money. But she’d never let on to her father that she knew. Her father had wanted to keep it from Se-oh, and so the debt collector had remained a stranger to her. She’d never seen his face. Nor did she know his voice all that well. Her father had always dealt with him out in the courtyard. Very occasionally, the stranger’s voice would drift faintly into the house.