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Ling pressed the call button on her mobile phone, and listened to the call go through on the Bluetooth, fingers tapping on the steering wheel.
‘Pick up,’ she whispered. ‘Damn you – pick up.’
There was a click and the call connected, and Ling sat up straighter in the seat. Then immediately slumped back down when Gage’s voice, suave and insinuating even on a recording, came on to ask her to leave a voice message after the beep.
‘Gage!’ she said. ‘Call me straight back. I need to know where the kids are. It’s important.’
It was also the fifth such message she’d left since her mother had called. Gage never let his phone go unanswered this long. Wings of panic stretched and threatened to unfurl inside her and she took a deep breath, turned onto the highway, and pointed the car into the countryside to her mother’s place.
She was spooked. It was hard to admit, when she was just going on her mother’s phone call – her mother was always telling crazy stories, saying crazy things about gods, spirits, and the old ways. Ling loved her mother dearly, but she didn’t have time for things like that. She lived in the twenty-first century. She had a job, car and rent payments to make every week, food to put on the table, three growing children to feed. There was no time for superstition.
But her mother had yelled at her, and said perhaps the only words that would make Ling listen. Her children were in danger. She punched at the button to disconnect the call, and then the button to redial.
‘Answer, you bastard! Tell me what you’ve done to the children!’
And the same voice came on again, telling her to leave a message. Now Ling slammed a fist against the steering wheel, and stabbed at the phone. There was something wrong. Gage returned his calls. Even when it was her calling. He was exasperated and sometimes hung up on her, but he always called back. He was addicted to his phone, always said it was his life and business. It went everywhere with him, and he guarded it jealously.
He should have answered it by now. And it wasn’t even ringing before it went through to the voicemail. Which meant it was turned off, or out of range.
Ling pressed her foot to the accelerator, and though she was now exceeding the speed limit, she didn’t care. If a traffic patrol stopped her, she’d grab him and make him come with her. Something was wrong! Her children were in danger.
Her mother was standing on the step where she always was when Ling came to visit. She had on something different than her usual clothes of a house dress, a pair of thick jeans instead, and on her feet a pair of tough leather boots, and the sight of them had Ling’s throat constricting. She pulled up in front of the house, the dust cloud behind her snatched away by the wind.
She couldn’t make her legs and arms move properly. Fingers snatched at the door handle, fumbled, couldn’t get it open. She watched helpless from behind the glass as her mother turned, bent, then stood up again, holding a large basket and several blankets. By the time the old woman came to the car, opened the back door, and stowed the things on the back seat, Ling had tears in her eyes.
Chenguang let herself into the front passenger’s seat and buckled the seat belt around her before she spoke. Ling had no words: they were all jammed down in her throat, filling the hollow at the base. She pressed fingers there.
‘Now we drive,’ Chenguang said.
‘Where are they?’ Ling whispered. ‘What’s happened to them?’
Her mother stared out the front windscreen, hands held tight and still in her lap as though she was afraid of them taking off and fluttering helplessly around the car. Chenguang was not a helpless woman.
‘Your husband has taken them down the river to the cursed area,’ she said through stiff lips.
‘He’s not my husband,’ Ling said. ‘Not for a year.’ She blinked and stared at the house, and behind it, the woods, where she hadn’t liked to go since she was a child. She looked away. ‘What river are you talking about?’ She didn’t want to repeat the words cursed area. That was her mother’s superstition. She was a modern woman.
‘Start the car,’ her mother said. ‘We are wasting time.’
‘What river?’ It was almost a scream. ‘How do you know this?’
Chenguang turned calm, clear eyes on her daughter, and Ling looked into them and began to sob, shaking her head.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Please don’t make me.’
The eyes did not soften. ‘This is not time to be scared,’ she said. ‘I’ve let you avoid the truth your whole life because you lacked courage, and I had too much love for you. But your daughter is facing these things now, and we cannot leave her to do it on her own.’
Still shaking her head, eyes blurred with tears, Ling glanced out through the windscreen, saw the woods, and looked quickly away. She fumbled with the key in the ignition, turned it, and the car started. Still, she wouldn’t look towards the trees as she turned the car around and headed back down the driveway.
Her throat was still thick when she spoke, but the words were reasonably clear.
‘Tell me where to go,’ she said, and her hands were pressed white where she gripped the steering wheel.
‘He has taken them to our ancestor’s gold claim.’
Ling turned her face to her mother in shock. ‘The gold claim?’ She didn’t understand.
Her mother’s eyes were still calm, but a hardness crept into them. ‘How did he know to find it?’
Nonplussed, Ling tried to think, but everything in her mind was doing somersaults. She’d told Gage about the old family story, even sneaking into her mother’s room one day early in the marriage to show him the gold nugget that her grandfather had found before he disappeared. She had seen the way Gage had looked at it, avarice in his eyes, and been delighted. The nugget was the size of her thumb.
She did not want to admit to it. ‘I told him,’ she said, and glanced at her mother before looking quickly back at the road. She cleared her throat.
‘He is not a good man,’ Chenguang said.
Ling held onto the steering wheel as though it would keep her upright. ‘He is not that bad,’ she said. ‘He is not evil.’
‘He does not have to be.’ Her mother’s back was ramrod straight in the passenger’s seat. ‘He only has to be weak.’
Ling wanted to squeeze her eyes shut. She didn’t understand – didn’t want to understand. Tears bled from the corners of her eyes.
‘The children,’ she whispered. ‘How do you know?’
Her mother turned to look at her again, face impassive, and Ling wanted to scream. How could her mother look at her like that? She was a good mother – she loved her children more than life itself! She would do anything for them! Every day she loved them, looked after them, worried for them. Took them to soccer games and music classes, Jordan to see her psychologist...
‘Jordan,’ she whispered.
Chenguang still made no reply.
‘It’s Jordan, isn’t it?’ Ling asked, and licked her lips. ‘The things she sees. The troubles she has...’
‘Are not troubles.’ The old woman snorted and turned away from her daughter.
‘I didn’t know!’
‘You didn’t choose to know.’
‘She’s my daughter – she has to live in the real world!’
Now Chenguang looked back at her, eyes black. Ling clung to the steering wheel and stared at the road, feeling her mother’s gaze on her.
‘She does live in the real world,’ Chenguang said. ‘It is you, daughter, who refuses to.’