The Love Trap by Nicole French

1

Present

There was no way around it. The man was dead.

He was dead when I arrived in Korea after an almost fifteen-hour flight.

He was dead after the hour car ride to Suwon from the Incheon airport outside of Seoul.

He was dead when I identified the body at the morgue and began the very long process of sending it back to Lawrence Kim’s second cousin in San Francisco, who, along with the Suwon police, was very curious to know why the private investigator had been found facedown in a fallow melon field.

Sudden heart failure, said the coroner. At the ripe old age of thirty-six.

Dead, dead, dead.

“Shit,” Skylar said when I told her.

From the hotel penthouse’s sixteenth-floor picture window, the Suwon skyline glimmered in the night, then faded to a sudden black where the city’s busy neighborhoods gave way to a massive park, then eons of rice paddies, farms, and nurseries. I pressed my forehead against the glass, eager to feel the chill counteracting the heat that seemed to course through my body all the time now. Being approximately eight weeks pregnant apparently turned me into a furnace. It also made me miss my husband. A lot.

“That’s one word for it,” I muttered. “Fucking hell.”

“You sound like Eric.”

I winced. I did sound like Eric, who was probably going to use the same exact phrase when he discovered where I was. “I just don’t know what to do next.”

“Did you talk to your cousins?” Skylar asked, referring to Suejean and her mother, Ji-yeon, some of the few Korean relatives we had a close relationship with in Chicago.

“I did. Suejean said we have some extended family in the area, but I don’t know them. My mom didn’t keep in touch with anyone after she left, you know? What am I going to do, show up and say, ‘Hey, it’s me, the half-breed daughter of the whore cousin who shamed the entire family! Want to help me find her?’”

“I think that’s unfair, Janey. And honestly, kind of selfish.”

I sighed, letting the condensation from my breath cloud the glass. I drew a heart through the fading smudge, then the letter E before the whole thing disappeared.

Skylar was right, of course. I couldn’t let a little thing like family estrangement stop me from finding my mother. And the truth was, I had no clue what my mother’s relationship had been like with her family—only that her mom died when she was little, and her father a few years after she left. Some cousins had moved to Chicago when I was growing up (Ji-yeon, for instance). But I had never seen my mother call anyone in Korea. Never seen a single birthday or Christmas gift with hangul on the packaging. Not a card, a photo. Nothing. As far as I knew, her relationship with her birth country had been completely severed the moment she met my father—whichever one of them.

“The detective at the station was nice,” I said lamely. “He said if I came back tomorrow, he would help.”

“He spoke English?”

“He did, thank God. A lot of people here seem to speak English pretty well, so maybe I don’t need a translator after all.” I considered Jae-ho, the translator that Eric’s assistant hired while I was en route from New York. Jae-ho was a diminutive graduate student of linguistics at one of the Seoul universities. His glasses were even thicker than mine. After discovering that the detective assigned to Lawrence Kim’s body didn’t require an interpreter, he had just loitered awkwardly behind us for a solid hour until I had asked him politely to take a car back to the hotel. I’d see him the next morning.

To do what, I still wasn’t sure.

“Well, that’s something,” Skylar said. “I’m sure the detective will help.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m sure.”

“How are you feeling? Traveling almost twenty-four hours straight while pregnant? I can’t even imagine it.”

“That’s because you were puking your guts out by this point. No one likes being sick on a plane.”

“No one likes being sick, period.” She didn’t even bother to disguise the loathing in her voice. Skylar had been sick as a dog throughout most of her pregnancy, and I did wonder if she hoped a little too eagerly that I would suffer the same fate. Misery does love company.

“I’m fine,” I replied. “Tired, but I don’t know if that’s because I’m knocked up or because I’ve barely slept since Monday.”

“Not even a little?”

“Sorry, dude. I wish I could commiserate, but the bun seems pretty happy in the oven so far.”

Skylar heaved an irritable sigh. “Some people get all the luck. What about your sonogram? Aren’t you supposed to have a scan at eight weeks?”

“Well, yeah. But I’ll have to do it here,” I replied. “Suejean gave me the names of a few good doctors in Suwon. I have an appointment.”

“Was it awful…seeing the body?”

“You are really determined to make me feel terrible, aren’t you?” I backed away from the picture window and sat on the bed, fatigue sinking into my bones. “It wasn’t…I don’t know. It was just a body.”

Prior to last week, when I’d received the phone call from the Korean police about Kim’s death, the P.I. had only been a name to me. Hired by Brandon, not Eric or me, in order to get around John Carson’s potential suspicions. Kim was terse, to the point, but more importantly, trustworthy after coming highly recommended by Matthew Zola. Since he was also a Korean, he had happily continued the lucrative work to collect information about my mother’s whereabouts, but beyond that, he was a stranger.

He had found Carson almost immediately in Suwon, the larger city on the eastern side of the Hwaseong area. It hadn’t taken long, he said. There were limited four-star accommodations here, not to mention a tall, rich white man with curly hair, piercing hazel eyes, and a hooked nose was fairly conspicuous in this part of the world.

Unfortunately, Kim hadn’t been stealthy enough. The coroner said his death was of natural causes, but even after identifying the markless body, I didn’t buy it for a second.

Found in a melon field. Found in a melon field.

I didn’t know why, but something about that statement sounded very familiar.

“And you have the security with you, right?” Skylar used her mothering voice, like she was asking her daughter whether she had remembered her raincoat.

“The gorilla squad? Why, yes, but I might be running out of bananas for them.”

“Jane…”

“I know, I know. Yes, Tony and the others are shadowing me everywhere, I promise. You can tell that to Eric too when you see him, okay? Tell him I know it’s important. And that I won’t go anywhere by myself.” I rubbed my forehead. “I don’t even want to think about what he’s going to say when he finds out I’m gone.”

“Actually, I think he already knows.”

I straightened. “What?”

“Nina was going to meet with him and his lawyer tomorrow before the trial starts, but his mom offered to do it today when she went to visit.”

“His mom? Sky, are you kidding me?”

There was an awkward silence. “No…why?”

“Skylar, Eric barely has a relationship with Heather. You really think the best person to inform him that I had to leave the country two days before his trial was her?”

“She said she had something to give him anyway,” Skylar said weakly. “A book, I think. Nina and I both thought it was the right thing to do.” Behind her, I heard a vague murmuring male voice that sounded like it was saying, “I told you so, Red.” Brandon, no doubt, chiming in on my side.

“Shit,” I said. “Oh my God, I bet he freaked, didn’t he?”

“Eric doesn’t really freak.”

“Says who?”

Skylar thought she knew him, but she didn’t even scratch the surface. Eric was better than almost anyone at masking his true emotions. He would put on a calm, implacable face that hid whatever turmoil he might be experiencing, but I knew the truth. A whole host of passions simmered under that stoic surface, and I had been on the receiving end of them from time to time—usually when I pressed his buttons. If he wasn’t careful, if he was pushed too hard, I was genuinely worried that one day, Eric would burst beyond repair.

“Just…Sky, be careful with him, okay?”

“Careful?” My friend was genuinely surprised. “You want me to be careful with Eric?”

My heart expanded in my chest. “You’re surprised.” Of course she was. Most people knew Eric and me as antagonizers of one another. Was it my fault they didn’t know what we truly were? Even my best friend?

“I—you know what, no. I’m not,” Skylar said.

I sighed, relieved. At least someone knew.

“I love him so much, Sky,” I said softly, fighting not to hide my face, even thought I was the only one who could see it in the window reflection. “I wish I were there. I hate, hate, hate that he has to stand up in that court without me.”

My friend paused, like she was feeling everything with me. “Oh, Janey. He knows you love him.”

“Does he?”

We both knew the truth. It’s not like I had made it easy for him over the years. Or even the past several months. I was many things, but an easy person to love wasn’t one of them.

I was torn in half. On the one hand, my husband, the father of my child, love of my utter fucking life, was about to be put on trial for a crime he didn’t commit, a crime that my megalomaniacal biological father had framed him for as a repercussion for marrying me. I should be there. I was the entire reason for this bullshit, and now I had deserted him.

But on the other hand, my mother had been abducted by said bio-dad not two weeks before. Eric, Skylar, and Brandon had all been convinced that I should absolutely not go in search of her. She was bait, they said. Me leaving was exactly what Carson wanted. To lure me away. Separate the unit Eric and I had become.

Well, now he had gotten his wish. Because the only link I had to my mother was sleeping with the fishes, so to speak, and now she had no one else in the world who could find her. I wasn’t abandoning her in this country now. But apparently that meant abandoning my husband instead.

Rock, meet hard place. And then crush me hopelessly between the two of you.

Skylar’s pause was as pregnant as I was.

“Well, I won’t let him forget it,” she said at last. “We’ll get him out of there in no time. Brandon is even consulting with his lawyer, and they got a new judge too.”

I shook my head. “Really?”

“Just last night. The lawyer motioned for an extension on account of bias—to no one’s surprise and shock, the previous judge and Jude Letour are members of the same Princeton society and have a weekly squash date.”

“Of course they are.” I was only just beginning to realize how deeply the nepotistic ties of the Janus society really ran.

“Anyway, there will be a new hearing tomorrow about the case. Brandon thinks there is a good chance the new judge will throw the whole thing out. If I know Eric, he’ll probably be on a plane the second the judge bangs the gavel.”

I cringed. I was in big trouble for being here. But I had to come, and Eric would be the first to tell me. My mother was missing. A madman had abducted her. And the only person we had sent into the fray had been found dead.

I couldn’t risk another person’s life for my family drama. And I couldn’t just leave my mother alone either.

I fell back onto the bed again. It was the kind of bed Eric would have liked, big enough for his long limbs to splay, and wide enough he could toss me around however he wanted. Right now, though, I wouldn’t have been the slightest bit interested. Fatigue was drawing over me like a thick cloak, and this time, I couldn’t fight it off, even as nerves warred within my stomach.

I turned onto my side to where the contents of Kim’s files were spread across the bed. I had intended to go through them all tonight before meeting with the detective, but now I wasn’t sure I could keep my eyes open long enough to read the first page of notes. I needed to read them, though. I needed to determine everything I could about this case so I could hopefully solve it myself and go home.

“Tomorrow,” I murmured to myself, promising a future I couldn’t quite see.

Skylar continued to chatter about what she thought would happen in Eric’s hearing. But before long, her words blended. I fell asleep with my face plastered against four newsprint clippings from 1987.