Page 113 of The Manor of Dreams

Renata Yin Lowell looked at her mother in front of the door, her shoulders shaking with sobs, then back, finally, at her sister. The ceiling pulled apart with a terrible groan.

“Get out!”

She ran.

epilogue

LATE AUGUST, 2024

TWO WEEKS AFTER THE COLLAPSE OF YIN MANOR

LUCILLEput on the hot water kettle and sank into the couch. She closed her eyes and waited for the painkillers to kick in.

“I’ve just drawn up the settlement agreement. I’m going to route that over to you and Elaine for your signatures, and then it’ll be finalized.”

Her phone was perched on her lap and Reid Lyman’s voice crackled through the speakerphone. “Okay,” she said. “Sounds good.”

There was a pause. “I take it you and Elaine sorted things out, then?”

“In a sense.”

“What happened between the two of you? If you don’t mind me asking?”

Lucille opened her eyes. She squinted at the drawn blinds in her living room. Normally she loved how the light tapered in the afternoons and warmed the white furniture with precision. But she was still concussed.

She stared at her bandaged hands.What had happened?For a moment, she contemplated telling Reid everything. What she’d discovered about her family. What her parents had both done, the truth of that summer. About the house that ended up being a trap. How the garden—or the wrath of the dead—had almost taken her daughter. How Lucille had prepared to die, to stay with the ghost of her sister, only to wake up in a hospital room.

Elaine had been the one to save her, Madeline told her in the hospital. After Elaine left the house, she had gone back in to pull Lucille out. Elaine told the doctors that the foyer chandelier had fallen on them, an excuse Lucille first found ridiculous, but eventually realized was the only possible explanation. They had been covered in cuts. Glass had sliced so deep into Lucille’s palms that it almost caused permanent nerve damage. Now there were staples in her head.

Why had Elaine chosen to save her? She’d tried to find Elaine when she woke up in the hospital, but the Dengs were long gone. Rennie, on the other hand, was nowhere to be found. It was just her and Madeline.

Madeline was the person who’d seen Rennie last. “She jumped out the window,” she’d recounted from her hospital bed, shifting up on her pillows. She’d ended up the worse out of the both of them and was covered in bandages. All in all, her leg had received a combined fifty-four stitches.

“From the second story? That’s a twenty-foot drop.”

“She was fine. She landed in the bushes. I saw her get up and run toward the back.”

“Toward the back? Why? Why would she runtowardthe garden?”

“I don’t know…” Madeline blinked, clearly exhausted. “I called her name, but she didn’t answer.”

Where could Rennie have gone? It wasn’t unheard of for her to go off the grid and disappear for months while she reinvented herself. She always could extract herself from whatever circumstances she wanted to be free of. Lucille had tracked her elusive sister down so many times she’d lost count. They’d all lost their phones in the house, so Lucille watched her email like a hawk from her laptop, but nothing came. Instead, an email appeared in real time from Reid, saying that Elaine’s lawyer had sent him a revised family settlement agreement. Elaine had given them the house. Or whatever remained of it.

“We talked it out,” Lucille finally said over the phone to Reid. “We came to a resolution.” The hot water kettle hissed. She shuffled over to the kitchen and poured two cups clumsily, with both bandaged hands.

“Right. That’s good to hear.” Reid sounded relieved. “And did you ever figure out what was going on with your mother that summer?”

Lucille stared at the rising steam. She thought of all the files and papers buried under the rubble of the house. There was one that she’d been thinking of recently, the library pages that Ma had torn out of a book and taken notes on. What was it on, the railroads? There was the picture of that man who looked like her dad. If she thought hard enough, maybe she could conjure his name. But it hurt to think.

And there was Ma’s screenplay, too. The one and only copy of it. All irretrievable.

“No,” she said faintly. “Still looking into it.” She cleared her throat. “I’ll get that signature in by end of day, though. Thanks for handling everything.”

“Of course, Lucille.” His voice softened. “And one more question. Aside from the will.”

“Shoot.”

“I, ah… Do you think you’ll be around LA anytime soon? In the near future?”

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