She told Hongmei that in the photos the twenty-something woman had emailed Hongmei, one was a close-up, with a backdrop of an archway wreathed in vermilion bougainvillea, the top of a fire tower visible on the left. Going by the angle of the photo, she’d located the archway. She had the address if Hongmei wanted to see for herself. Hongmei declined for now. She wasn’t ready to confront the secret talker. Not yet. Nini and her boyfriend had sat at the coffee shop opposite and waited. Around six in the evening, the woman finally showed up. She was driving an old, white Toyota, wearing DKNY sunglasses, Calvin Klein jeans, and Nine West leather sandals. Her toenails were unpolished, and a dozen silver bracelets jangled round her wrist as she walked. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with her at all—she certainly didn’t look parricidal. She had said this last word in English.

“A hundred-dollar word!” Glen exclaimed.

Nini said, “Haven’t you noticed I love using big words?”

Hongmei said calmly, in Chinese, “You use Chinese to talk nonsense, then switch to English for the important words—place names, coffee shops. Careful.” She then asked, “Did you talk to her?”

“Around seven o’clock I rang her bell. She opened the door, barefoot, still chewing. I asked if she recognized me. She stared at me for a while and shook her head with a confused smile. I could tell right away she wasn’t bluffing—she really didn’t know who I was. Which meant she hadn’t seen all those photographs I’d emailed.”

As she spoke, Nini got herself a glass and poured herself a little white wine. “She asked how I knew her. I couldn’t answer, so she said it must be online; a lot of magazines have published articles about her. I didn’t even know her name, but now I couldn’t ask—that would give the game away. I said yes, I’d learned about her story online. She said she was sorry she couldn’t ask me in. I knew she was trying to get rid of me, so I quickly left.”

Hongmei couldn’t work out what kind of spell this had been.

Nini was enthusiastic enough to offer up her boyfriend as a sacrifice. She dismissed guys like him as pretty but useless, definitely not marriage material. She was willing to send her pretty, useless boyfriend to go seduce this girl. Again, she switched to English on the word “seduce.”

Dinner was over by this point. Glen smiled. “Want me to go?”

“Didn’t you understand?” Nini retorted.

“I heard enough. Seduction and parricide.” Glen cleared away the plates, giving them the sinister smile of a private detective.

Hongmei said she wasn’t interested, and she’d changed her email address anyway. Nini said animatedly that the truth was going to come out soon.