A Hole in Memory

That evening, when Baek Jeong-hak came to his senses, he remembered nothing. He was simply displeased that his hands and feet had been bound. As Kim Ju-yeon untied him and explained the situation, his disbelief was plain to see.

"Gaon. No matter how worried you are about Gayoung, installing cameras in the house without a single word to me is going too far. Even among family, that kind of thing is a crime. Do you understand? There aren't any other cameras, are there? I'm going to tell Ms. Kim Ju-yeon to search the mansion from top to bottom."

In no time he had slipped back into the role of the kind, considerate uncle, calling Gaon over to soothe her. Gaon kept her mouth shut and simply studied him.

His eyes were still bloodshot, his hair greasy, and the flesh had fallen from his face until he looked haggard—yet he was far better than the man who had convulsed in the dining room. Above all, the stench that had stabbed at her nostrils had largely faded.

"Gayoung…"

Gaon opened her mouth, then closed it again. She wanted to ask what he had meant by saying he would leave her alone because of Gayoung. For some reason the words would not come.

Baek Jeong-hak looked as though it were nothing of importance.

"What about Gayoung?"

Gaon shook her head. They were standing in Baek Jeong-hak's room. The yellow talismans that blanketed the ceiling were unchanged. The shock of first seeing them had lessened, but the unease remained the same. Animal-fur carpets, stuffed birds mounted here and there, antique furniture, and a yellow cast to the light—the entire room was steeped in the traces of shamanism. In the middle of it all Baek Jeong-hak smiled faintly. The strangeness of it made Gaon shiver without meaning to.

"It's nothing."

She murmured the words quietly.

Baek Jeong-hak is the culprit.

Cha Taekyung's voice replayed itself in her mind. Unable to keep staring into those kindly smiling, cloudy eyes, Gaon looked away.

Afterward Baek Jeong-hak apologized in turn to Han Jun-seok, Cha Gil-ho, and Cha Taekyung, and even pressed a separate sum of compensation into Jun-seok's hands. When he claimed he had simply been drunk and out of his mind, Cha Gil-ho urged him to continue treatment; Jeong-hak agreed readily. A counseling slot for the uncle was set for every third day, carefully avoiding Gaon's five-o'clock session. The incident in the dining room seemed, for the moment, to have been settled.

For several days the cameras caught nothing.

"Nothing unusual."

"So it seems."

Sitting in a corner of the garden, reviewing the surveillance feeds together on Cha Taekyung's laptop, Gaon always felt a faint sense of unreality. After seeing to Gayoung, watching the cameras from the garden starting around two in the afternoon had become Baek Gaon's new routine. They were going over the previous night's recordings now.

The realization that Cha Taekyung himself was one of the suspects had come to her far too late—only after they had already become accomplices in installing the cameras. The home cam she had placed on the second floor had long since been replaced by one of Taekyung's potted-plant cameras. Kim Ju-yeon, tasked with inspecting the mansion, had found nothing odd about the plant.

Or maybe she noticed and is simply letting it be.

Gaon pictured Kim Ju-yeon's unreadable face.

"You don't think they've figured out the cameras are there, do you?"

She murmured the question while staring at the empty second-floor corridor on the screen.

"If they had, Baek Jeong-hak would have thrown another fit by now."

Cha Taekyung had already decided Baek Jeong-hak was the culprit. Gaon could not understand how he could be so certain. Her own feelings were split evenly—half wondering why her uncle would ever do such a thing, half suspecting he was hiding something. Honestly, for some time now she had felt herself being dragged along by events that refused to follow any prediction. This afternoon was no different. She had never imagined she would spend hours of her day with Cha Taekyung.

"Since Miss Baek Gaon comes and goes from the second floor as often as she eats, the culprit couldn't get near even if he wanted to."

A faint note of reproach colored Taekyung's tone.

"I can't just leave the child alone…"

Gaon's voice trailed off. The reason she could not argue more strongly was that, just as he said, she was in and out of the second floor constantly. Having the cameras in place had only made her more anxious.

"It would be best if you allowed yourself a little more composure."

Taekyung spoke without taking his eyes from the laptop screen. Gaon looked down at the large hands that moved so deftly across the keyboard, manipulating the cameras. Now that they were on the same side, Cha Taekyung revealed himself to be meticulous and careful. He broke the timeline into increments of minutes, recording in a notepad the exact movements of Kim Ju-yeon, Lee Yong-hoon, Baek Jeong-hak, Cha Gil-ho, and Han Jun-seok. An external hard drive whirred beside the laptop—he was double-backing up the video data. At moments like this he looked less like a doctor and more like an engineer who worked with machines. Above all, while he worked he seemed almost normal.

At some point she must have been staring too openly; Taekyung's gaze left the screen and settled on her. Gaon turned her head at the same instant and rose abruptly from her seat.

The longer she spent with Cha Taekyung, the more extremely careful Baek Gaon became.

Ever since she had touched his penis behind the garden, she had been strangely aware of the man. Her chest tightened without warning. She had realized that this feeling was what she had once read about in an old book—sexual tension. It was a peculiar tautness, as though one wrong thought would send her tumbling. Mixed into it was a curious fascination. The bud whose shape she could not yet predict frightened her.

But a bud was only a bud.

"I'll go in first. Let me know if anything strange turns up."

When Gaon spoke stiffly, Cha Taekyung nodded. In that plain manner there was not the slightest trace of the crude teasing he sometimes directed at her.

Definitely the sort of person who would be exhausting to get entangled with.

She turned the thought over as she walked away. Curiosity and novelty. Perhaps a trivial accident had opened a crack through which the man had slipped in. Whether to widen that crack or leave it alone rested entirely with Gaon.

Lost in thought as she left the garden, she heard footsteps. When she looked back, an unexpected figure stood there.

Hello, Miss.

It was the gardener, Lee Yong-hoon, greeting her in sign language.

It was the first time Yong-hoon had ever initiated conversation, so Gaon could not help being startled. On the rare occasions they crossed paths in the garden they usually only nodded past each other, or ignored one another entirely. Their routes through the grounds barely overlapped, so meetings themselves were uncommon.

When she stared at him, he looked embarrassed and rubbed the back of his neck with a gloved hand. He wore the same blue work clothes he always did.

Yong-hoon signed something further. Gaon did not know sign language. As she simply watched his hands, he seemed to decide communication this way would be difficult and drew a notebook from his pocket. He had clearly come prepared to speak with her.

The moment she read the words, Gaon's gaze sharpened. What was he trying to say? Undeterred by the wariness that had sprung up in her, Yong-hoon merely blinked his simple eyes and continued writing.

Gaon stared at the notebook, reading the lines several times. "My sister"—such an intimate way to put it. She had known their relationship was not ordinary, yet facing Lee Yong-hoon as he apologized on Kim Ju-yeon's behalf left her with a strangely complicated feeling.

"It's all right."

She answered slowly and nodded. Suddenly Gaon became deeply aware of how little she knew these people. They had spent more time together in this mansion than anyone else, and yet she knew so little. Had she simply poured every scrap of her attention into Gayoung all these years?

"But… when exactly did you and Ms. Kim Ju-yeon come to the mansion? I can't seem to remember the precise time."

She decided to ask what she had been wondering. Even though he could not hear, Lee Yong-hoon watched the shape of her lips carefully and pieced together the meaning; for a moment he looked thoughtful.

The yellow diary Gaon had been searching for had never turned up. Unless she unpacked every last crate stacked in the storeroom, finding it would remain difficult.

Yong-hoon scribbled quickly in the notebook.

In her haste Gaon took the pen from him and wrote beneath his words.

But Gaon had no memory of it.

As if a hole had been punched straight through her recollection, only pitch-black darkness ruled those years. She could do nothing but stare blankly into that void.