3
“…I wonder how Ms. Mikami’s doing.”
From his seat beside me at the worktable, Yuya Mochizuki voiced his concern rhetorically.
“I wonder if she’s really feeling that bad. She looked pretty out of it the other day…”
Fifth period was art class with Ms. Mikami, but there was no sign of her in the art room on the first floor of Building Zero yet.
A different art teacher came in at the start of the period and told us, “Ms. Mikami is out today,” before instructing us in a businesslike tone that we would be having an art class study hall. We were told, “Each of you draw your own hand in pencil,” a completely uninteresting subject, and as soon as the teacher left the room, there were apathetic sighs here and there in the room. It was a natural reaction, really.
I opened my sketchbook, and then—why not, after all?—rested my left hand on the table and stared at its every detail. But honestly, my motivation was as close to zero as you could get. If I’d known, I would have brought a book. Though I didn’t feel much like reading King or Koontz or Lovecraft.
When I looked over at Mochizuki, the Munch aficionado, I saw that he’d never had any intention of drawing a hand. But it was not a blank page in his sketchbook; he was working on a half-finished drawing in pen. A person—I could see at a glance that it was a woman modeled on Ms. Mikami.
What’s with this guy? I almost wound up saying it out loud.
Did he seriously have a crush on her? This kid? On his teacher, who was at least ten years older than him? I guess that was up to him.
Still, I was already in an ambiguous mood when I heard his mumbled wondering about Ms. Mikami, so…
“…No way.”
Suddenly Mochizuki looked over at me.
“Hey, Sakakibara…”
“Wh-what?”
“Ms. Mikami doesn’t have some kind of life-threatening disease, does she?”
“What? Uh…” I was completely flabbergasted. All I could offer was a tepid response. “I’m sure she’s fine.”
“You’re probably right.” Mochizuki’s voice was incredibly relieved. “No, you’re right. It wouldn’t be anything weird like that. Yeah.”
“Are you that worried?”
“I mean…Sakuragi and her mom both died recently, and now there’s Mizuno’s sister. So I figured…”
“Are you saying they’re related?”
I cut straight to the point.
“There was the thing with Sakuragi and the thing in Mizuno’s family, but let’s just say as a for-instance that something happened to Ms. Mikami. Are you telling me there’s some kind of relationship? That there’s a connection there?”
“Uh, well…”
Mochizuki started to answer, then shut his mouth. He turned his eyes away, as if to escape my question, and gave a helpless sigh. Argh, even this kid’s got something he can’t tell me shut up inside him.
I thought about putting the screws to him a little more; but, thinking better of it, I changed the subject. “How’s the art club? How many members do you have now?”
“Just five…” Mochizuki’s eyes darted back to me. “You joining?”
“…No way.”
“You really should.”
“If you’re recruiting, forget about me. Why not Misaki?”
I said it to put some pressure on him. Mochizuki reacted exactly as I’d expected, spluttering. He went dead quiet and didn’t answer, turning his eyes away from me again. This time he didn’t even breathe.
“She’s pretty good at drawing,” I went on, unconcerned. “I saw some of the stuff she’s got in her sketchbook.”
Yes—that had been in the secondary library. That day when I had passed by with Mochizuki and Teshigawara after art class…
The drawings of beautiful girls with globes at their joints, like dolls.
I’m going to give this girl huge wings, last of all. Mei had told me that then. Had she drawn the wings yet?
I gave up on Mochizuki, whose eyes were still turned away and who had not yet attempted to offer so much as a word in response. I shut my own sketchbook. Not even thirty minutes had gone by since the start of fifth period, but I had decided to abandon this independent study.
“Where are you going?” Mochizuki asked when I stood up from my seat.
“The library. The secondary one,” I answered, deliberately curt. “I need to look something up.”
4
When I told Mochizuki I had something to look up, it was pretty much the truth. The part that wasn’t included in that “pretty much” was the faint hope that Mei might be there. But that hope was not realized.
There were no students there. The only person in the ancient library was the librarian, Chibiki.
“Here’s a face I’ve seen before.”
He spoke to me from behind the counter-style table that was set up in one corner. Today, again, he was tricked out in all black, his hair, sprinkled with white, as straw-like as ever. He fixed his eyes on me through the lenses of his homely black-rimmed glasses.
“Sakakibara, the transfer student.”
He spoke my name.
“Third-year Class 3, was it? My memory’s not as bad as all that. Why aren’t you in class?”
“It’s art, and um, the teacher is out today, so it’s a study hall.”
I told him what was going on, and the all-in-black librarian didn’t pursue it any further.
“What can I do for you?” he asked. “It’s rare that a student comes here, most days.”
“Um, there’s something I’m looking for.” Again I told him the situation. I walked slowly up to the counter where he sat, then asked him, “Do you have old yearbooks here?”
“Oho, yearbooks, is it? We have a full set of them.”
“Can people look at them?”
“They can.”
“Then, uh…”
“I believe they’re over there.”
At long last he stood up and extended an arm in front of him. He was pointing at the bookcases covering the wall shared with the hallway, to the right of the entrance.
“They’re on that shelf, second from the inside, I think. Somewhere around there. You probably won’t need a step stool, with your height.”
“Okay, thank you.”
“What year are you looking for?”
“Well…” I faltered just a little. “From twenty-six years ago…the one from 1972.”
“Seventy-two?”
The librarian’s brows knit sharply and he looked straight into my face.
“Why would you want to see that?”
“Well, actually…”
I did everything I could to regain my equilibrium and struggled to give a harmless answer.
“My mom graduated from this middle school that year. And my mom, she, uh, she died young and I don’t have many photos of her, so I, um…”
“Your mother?”
The look in the librarian’s eyes seemed to soften very slightly.
“I see. All right. But seventy-two, of all things.” The last part he murmured to himself. “You should find it pretty quickly. But it’s not available for lending. When you’re done looking at it, put it back where you found it. Understand?”
“I will.”
It took maybe two or three minutes before I located the yearbook I wanted and pulled it down from the shelf. I set it down on the large reading desk and pulled up a chair. Then, as I got my somewhat ragged breathing under control, I turned back the cover embossed with “North Yomiyama Middle School” in silver foil.
First of all, I looked for the page with third-year Class 3. I soon found the two-page spread, laid out with the left page showing a group photo in color and the right page showing black-and-white photos of the students split into several groups.
There were more students than now. More than forty students in the class.
The background of the group photo was somewhere outside the school. The bank of the Yomiyama River or somewhere like that. Every
one was wearing their winter uniforms. They were smiling, but I could tell that there was some kind of tension in it.
My mom—where was she?
It didn’t seem as if I was going to be able to find her so easily just by looking at the faces. I had to consult the names written under the picture…
…There she was. That one.
“Mom…”
The word slipped out of me unintentionally.
Second row, fifth from the right.
She wore a navy blue blazer exactly like the current uniform. Her hair was put up with a white barrette or something…and she was smiling, too. With some sort of tension in her face.
This was the first time I’d seen a picture of my mom from middle school. It struck me how young she was—how childish, in fact. Adjusting for age, I could see that she really did resemble her younger sister, Reiko.
“Did you find her?” the librarian asked me.
Without turning around, I simply replied, “Yes,” and returned my eyes to the list of names under the group photo. I wanted to check if the name “Misaki” was there. But…
There was no reason it would be.
Misaki had died in the spring of that year, long before they started preparing the yearbook. So there was no reason the name would be there.
“What class was your mother in?”
The librarian asked me another question. His voice was much closer than the last time. I turned around, surprised, and found that he had left the counter and come over to stand right next to me.
“Um, well, I heard that when she was a third-year, she was in Class 3.”
The librarian’s eyebrows dove sharply again. “Hm?” Then he rested a hand on the edge of the table and peered at the yearbook. “Which one is your mother?”
“This one.”
I pointed her out in the group photo. “Let’s see.” The librarian pushed his glasses up and brought his face closer to the book. “Ah, Ritsuko, is it?”
“Huh? You knew her?”
“Oh…well, you know.”
The librarian evaded my question and moved away from the desk. He realized that I was following his movement with my eyes and ruffled his straw-like hair. “Ritsuko’s son. I didn’t know…”
“My mom died fifteen years ago, right after I was born.”
“I see. Which means…Ah. Yes, I see.”
I fought back the urge to ask what it was that he saw, and dropped my eyes back to the yearbook on the table.
Second row, fifth from the right.
I looked at my mom’s face, smiling there with an air of tension, then looked at the group of classmates pictured with her, and then…
…Huh?
I realized something and blinked. I had half stood from my chair, so I sat back down, then looked more closely at the yearbook. Which is when—
“So here you are, Sakakibara.”
The door banged open and a student came in just as the bell ending fifth period began to ring. It was Tomohiko Kazami.
“Mr. Kubodera is looking for you. He wants you to go to the teachers’ office right away.”
5
“You’re Koichi Sakakibara, correct?”
There were two men I’d never seen before, one of whom—the middle-aged man with the round face—spoke to me. His voice was more placating than it needed to be, intended to soothe the tension of its listener, but he questioned me without hesitation.
“You know about what happened to Ms. Mizuno, who used to work at the municipal hospital?”
“…Yes.”
“Were you close with her?”
“She was nice to me when I was hospitalized in April, so…”
“You talked on the phone?”
“Yes, a few times.”
“Yesterday afternoon—around one o’clock, you spoke with her on her cell phone?”
“…I did.”
I’d been summoned by Mr. Kubodera, and waiting for me when I reached the teachers’ office in Building A had been plainclothes cops from the criminal affairs bureau of the Yomiyama police force—detectives, in other words. Two of them, just like the formula goes. In contrast to the jolly-looking middle-aged man with the round face, the younger one had a narrow face with a jutting chin and large glasses with navy blue frames, which seriously made him look like a dragonfly. Their names were Oba and Takenouchi.
“We want to ask you some questions. Your teacher told us that was fine. Do you mind?”
Takenouchi had been the one to say that, cutting to the chase a few moments ago as soon as we’d met. It wasn’t bad enough to come off as brusque, but his tone smacked of the idea that he was only talking to “a half-man middle schooler.”
“We’re having the extended homeroom next,” Mr. Kubodera had added. “But that’s fine if you need to come late so you can talk to them.”
Almost immediately, the bell rang to start sixth period, and Mr. Kubodera handed the matter off to another male teacher and hurried out of the room.
There were sofas set in one corner of the room, where I sat facing the detectives. The teacher who’d been asked to handle things introduced himself as “Yashiro, a guidance counselor,” then sat down beside me. I suppose there was no way the school was going to leave a student on his own in a situation like this.
“You’re aware that Sanae Mizuno passed away yesterday,” Oba continued in his more-soothing-than-necessary voice.
“…Yes.”
“And the manner of her death?”
“No, I didn’t get any details. Just that there was an accident at the hospital.”
“I see.”
“You didn’t read the paper this morning?” Takenouchi cut in to ask. I shook my head silently. In fact, I realized, my grandparents didn’t have a newspaper delivered to their house. And no one turned the TV on at night, either…
“There was a problem with the elevator,” Takenouchi informed me.
I had pretty much guessed that. There had been a few whispers along those lines sprinkled through the voices filling the classroom. But the instant I heard it said officially, from the mouth of a detective, I felt a dull shock that numbed my entire body.
“An elevator in the inpatient ward fell. She was the only one in it. She hit the floor with the full force of the fall, and then the shock of the impact also caused an iron beam to come free in the ceiling and fall on her,” the young detective explained with a slight air of triumph. “And, unfortunately for her, it smashed into her head.”
There was no answer to that.
“The cause of death was a cerebral contusion. When they recovered her from the scene of the accident, she was completely unconscious. They did everything they could at the hospital, but in the end they weren’t able to save her.”
“U-um…” I began timidly. “Was there, um, anything suspicious about the accident?”
Maybe that’s why there are detectives investigating it, I thought.
“Oh, no, it was just an accident,” the middle-aged detective replied. “An extremely sad, unfortunate accident. But when an elevator falls at a hospital, certain issues arise such as determining the cause and investigating any administrative responsibility. That’s what we’re working on.”
“…Ah.”
“Ms. Mizuno’s cell phone fell to the floor of the elevator in question. Its call history showed your name and number, Sakakibara. Moreover, we saw that the call was placed around one o’clock, exactly when the accident occurred. So we believe that you may be the last person she spoke with.”
Ah. Once they said it aloud, it was completely obvious.
The one person in the world most likely to know what had gone on right before and after the accident yesterday. They’d realized that person was the middle schooler she’d been on the phone with, Koichi Sakakibara. And it was true, I had indeed heard it happen yesterday.
But wasn’t it a little late for them to come see me? That thought occurred to me, too. I could pretty much imagine the chaos at the scene after the a
ccident yesterday, but still…
At their urging, I recounted what I had experienced.
How I had received a call from Ms. Mizuno yesterday at lunchtime. How we had talked normally at first, then how things had changed suddenly when she left the roof and went into the elevator. How I’d heard some kind of horrible sound almost immediately, then a sound like the phone had been tossed away, and then an instant later the sound of her pained moaning before the call was cut off. Each of them seemed to match up with an aspect of the accident.
“Did you tell anyone about it?”
“Right after it happened, I had no idea what was going on. I tried calling her back, but I couldn’t get through.”
Struggling to calm myself, I described my actions of the day before.
“But I still thought something bad might have happened, so I went to find Mizuno.”
“Who?”
“Takeru Mizuno. Ms. Mizuno’s little brother. He’s in my class. I told him about what I heard on the phone, but I guess he couldn’t figure out what I was saying, so he didn’t take me very seriously…”
What are you talking about? You’re not making sense.
That had been Mizuno/Little Brother’s reaction. Angry, but also incredibly confused.
You need to quit feeding my sister crazy stories. You’re causing a lot of problems for me.
The only thing I could think to do after that was contact the hospital.
The nurses’ station in the inpatient ward had answered and I’d asked for Ms. Mizuno. But that hadn’t reached her, either, like I pretty much thought, and soon things had gotten incredibly frantic on the other end of the phone…Then, no matter how many times I’d tried to call, all I’d gotten was a busy signal, and there was nothing left for me to do.
“She was on the roof, correct?” Oba confirmed. “Then she got on the elevator, and immediately…I see.”
The middle-aged detective nodded, taking notes.
“What do you think caused the accident?” I asked him.
“That’s still under investigation,” the young detective answered. “What we do know is that the elevator fell because a wire snapped. There are safety measures in place, so typically something like this shouldn’t happen. That hospital building is decades old, though, and apparently they’ve made a lot of unnecessary improvements in that time. The elevator in question was in the back of the building and they even called it ‘the back elevator.’ Patients never use it, of course, and even employees normally didn’t bother with it.”
Another, Volume 1 Page 17