Total pages in book: 173
Estimated words: 163802 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 819(@200wpm)___ 655(@250wpm)___ 546(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 163802 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 819(@200wpm)___ 655(@250wpm)___ 546(@300wpm)
I was shaking my head before she finished. “My mother was a hard woman. Strict, judgmental, humorless. But she also minded her own business. She didn’t work, so when she wasn’t hanging out with the Ajumma Gossip Network, she was home—gardening, reading, doing jigsaw puzzles, and keeping herself to herself. She—”
“I’m sorry, excuse me.” Balogun paused in her notetaking. “Ajuman gossip network? Is that what you said? What is that exactly?”
I tossed my head. “Oh, sorry. Of course you don’t know what that is. Ajumma means like middle-aged woman, or married woman, or both in Korean,” I confessed. “Part of the reason my parents chose Lantana is because there’s a thriving Korean American community here. Whenever Mrs. Park, Mrs. Choi, and Mrs. Jeong came over for tea, the four would sit... here,” I whispered, “and gossip about everyone in town. That’s why I called them that.”
Balogun wrote something down. “Had your mother been in contact with her friends recently?”
I shook my head. “Omma stopped seeing all of her friends and pretty much shut the world out when she started losing her hair,” I said bluntly. I wasn’t making that up. Mrs. Park told me as much when I ran into her and her grandson in town that morning. “My mother was a proud woman. She didn’t want anyone seeing her like that.”
“Understandable, but are you sure that was the only reason?” she asked. “There could’ve been a falling out. Maybe the real reason she stopped seeing her friends is because—”
“—because she committed a crime against them so terrible, they waited almost a year after she stopped inviting them over to sneak into her house and stab her in the face?” I sliced off. “And apparently getting this revenge was suddenly so urgent, they had to do it while the manor was full of cops and my mother was already on her deathbed? Because waiting for nature to take its course is such a poor option compared to life in prison.”
My gaze hardened. “Detective, I invited all of my mother’s friends to the party, but you and your officers didn’t invite them to stay this morning—meaning, none of them went upstairs around the time my mother was killed, and therefore, aren’t suspects. So why don’t we both stop wasting each other’s time and you just ask me what you want to ask me.”
Kaplan leaned back in the armchair, blown back by that response.
But Balogun didn’t. A smile stretched her lips. “I’m sorry if you think I’m wasting your time, Mrs. Kim, but you certainly aren’t wasting mine. You can tell a lot—almost everything—about a person by the way their own child describes them. And you describe her as hard, judgmental, gossipy, strict”—my own words shot like bullets from her lips—“humorless, exclusionary, distrusting—”
“I didn’t say she was exclus—”
“You said she moved here because there were people that looked like her here,” Balogun spoke over me. “And it was only those people she befriended and invited into her home, correct?”
“I— Yes, but that doesn’t mean she was distrusting—”
“Doesn’t it?” Balogun cocked her head. “These are the same friends she tossed aside when she needed them the most because she didn’t trust them not to judge her for something as insignificant as a hairless head?” She gestured to her own. “You’re her daughter, but you don’t have a single kind word to say about her.”
“I didn’t—”
“No, that wasn’t a question,” Balogun said, flapping a hand at me. “There wasn’t much love lost between you and your mother, Mrs. Kim, and your words told me so. But there was something else your words told me—that you’re either innocent, or a sociopath.”
“What?” I cried, shooting up. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“When I brought up your mother’s friends and suggested they may have a motive, you immediately shut me down,” she said. “In my experience, a guilty person never misses a chance to throw suspicion on someone else. Anyone else. They don’t care who as long as we’re not looking at them.
“But you didn’t take that chance. Either because you don’t have a guilty conscience, or because you have no conscience at all, and you really don’t care if we suspect you. You don’t care about anything. You just wanted your mother dead.”
I stilled, thinking through my reply carefully. Balogun was smart—one conversation and I couldn’t deny that. She was also tricky, laying traps for me that I couldn’t see coming. I wasn’t guilty of my mother’s murder, but I was guilty of something.
And the last thing I needed was for her to follow that trail and discover what happened to the real Soo Min Kim.
“Well, then, you know the answer to that question too,” I finally said. “You can’t say I’m an emotionless sociopath today, but a raging psychopath last night. Whoever killed my mother was in a rage, and I felt a lot of things toward Omma, but rage wasn’t one of them. The opposite, actually.