“Did you know about this elevator, Sakakibara?”
“No, I never heard of it.”
“In any case, on top of the elevator being antiquated, there are some questions about whether proper maintenance had been conducted.”
“I see.”
“It really was an accident that happened here. And given that this is a public building, this raises major concerns, naturally. Still, a fatality in an elevator crash is unusual nowadays. All we can say is that she had terrible luck.”
We’ll both be careful.
The words Ms. Mizuno had spoken the last time I’d seen her echoed in my ears again.
Especially for any accidents that would never usually happen.
6
Sixth period had begun and was more than thirty minutes gone when I was released from the “voluntary questioning” by the detectives.
I left the office and dutifully hurried to my classroom, but when I arrived I got a surprise. Not a single student of third-year Class 3 was in the room.
Looking around, I saw their bags and stuff were still there. So they hadn’t finished early and gone home—which meant…
They’d all gone to some other place together? That was all I could think of…
Izumi Akazawa
Her name was written in large letters in the center of the blackboard.
Izumi Akazawa.
She had a slightly grown-up, forceful, glamorous persona. She had a feminine figure, was always surrounded by friends, at the center of a group.
…Pretty much the opposite of Mei, huh?
Despite the thought, I recalled a few things about this student named Akazawa that nagged at me.
The day I’d first come to this school in May, I was pretty sure Izumi Akazawa had been absent. And then in gym class that other day…The time Yukari Sakuragi, who was sitting out gym class with a twisted leg, came over to talk to me…
I have to do this right, or Akazawa’s going to get mad at me…
I thought I could hear the words, spoken to herself, in my ears. What had that been about?
And that phone call I’d gotten from Teshigawara after that, out of the blue.
I’m calling ’cause I thought you might be in trouble.
He’d said that, then continued:
Akazawa’s pretty wound up. She might start having some kind of hysterical episode.
“Oh, Sakakibara.”
I turned around at the sound, and there was Mr. Kubodera. He came into the classroom through the door at the back of the room, as if tailing me.
“Have you finished talking with the police?”
“Yes.”
“I see. Then you can go home now, if you’d like.”
“Oh. Um…where is everyone?”
“They picked a new class representative for the girls in homeroom. Akazawa.”
“Oh?”
So that’s why her name was on the blackboard.
“Um, so then where is everyone?”
But Mr. Kubodera basically ignored my question.
“You can go home for the day,” he repeated. “I’m sure the incident with Mizuno’s sister has been quite a shock for you, too. But you can’t let yourself get too downhearted. Things will be all right. If everyone pulls together, I’m sure we’ll get through this.”
“…Yeah.”
“For that, do you agree?”
Although he was talking to me, Mr. Kubodera’s eyes were turned not on me, but on the empty lectern.
“We need to obey whatever the class decides, without fail. All right?”
7
The next day, Saturday, June 6, I stayed home from school so I could go to the municipal hospital in Yumigaoka. If things were still normal, I might have seen Ms. Mizuno again today, but…
Her memorial service was being held right now at a funeral home somewhere in this town…I was conscious of that fact as I went to my outpatient exam in the respiratory unit. The lead physician, just entering old age, certified me in an unusually compelling voice, saying “In this state, you should be fine.” Afterward, I headed to the inpatient ward alone.
I wanted to see the site of the accident that had taken Ms. Mizuno’s life with my own eyes, if only once.
Just as the detectives had told me, the location of the “back elevator” I was searching for was hard to find, pretty far back in an old part of the inpatient ward, which had a complex floor plan. I managed to make my way there somehow or other, but of course the elevator was off-limits and several strips of yellow police tape had been put up to cover the entrance.
Why had Ms. Mizuno, the novice nurse, gotten on this elevator that day, when even the employees hardly ever used it? Had she actually been in the habit of using it? Or had she just happened to get on it that day? Even now, those details weren’t clear.
I took a different elevator up to the roof, alone.
It had been relatively humid all day, slightly cloudy and windless.
I was walking from one end of the empty roof to the other, feeling that someone would call out “What’s wrong, Horror Boy?” to me any moment, when I came to a sudden stop. I wiped the sweat from my face with a handkerchief. There may have been some tears mixed in there.
“Why…Ms. Mizuno…” I mumbled without realizing it. I was suddenly oppressed by the visceral weight of the emptiness of “death,” to the point I thought my chest might crumple in on itself.
As I slowly brought my breathing under control, I leaned against the fence and looked out across the town of Yomiyama. When Reiko had come to visit me in the hospital, she’d shown me a distant view of the town from the window of my room; that image hung hazily over what I saw now.
The mountain range in the distance. Where was the one called Asamidai? The river that ran through town was called Yomiyama River. Beyond it I could see the field at North Yomi…
…When I’d gone back to school yesterday, the first thing I’d done was catch Yuya Mochizuki and talk to him.
“Where did everyone go for sixth-period homeroom?”
I asked him the question that had been on my mind, but Mochizuki’s answer wasn’t very articulate.
“We were talking and so we just headed over to Building S…”
“Building S? You mean the special classrooms?”
“There’s a conference room that students can use there, too. We went there and, you know, just talked about stuff.”
Talked? About what? I wondered.
“I heard you guys made Izumi Akazawa class representative for the girls.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Was there a vote or something?”
“Akazawa was nominated. She was the tactical officer before, anyway.”
“Tactical officer?” I hadn’t heard that title before. “What’s that?”
“Oh…uh, well, it just means—”
Mochizuki struggled with his answer a long time.
“We have stuff like that. When the class has some kind of problem, the tactical officer’s in charge of thinking up how to deal with it. Kazami does that stuff, too, but…”
This, too, was pretty inarticulate. Trying to tease him a little, I said, “Looks like Ms. Mikami’s out again today,” and I deliberately added a little sigh. Instantly, Mochizuki’s face clouded with worry.
This guy was way too easy to read, or maybe he was too innocent, or I don’t know what. It really made me want to ask “That doesn’t bother you, kid?”
It wasn’t just Ms. Mikami, though. Mei hadn’t shown herself at school the entire day yesterday. And today, there was one other person absent from third-year Class 3: Ikuo Takabayashi. I recalled that Takabayashi had been out back on my first day at school, too, along with Izumi Akazawa. Apparently he had some sort of health problems, so even when he came to school, he always sat out of gym class. Anyway, he seemed dull and hard to talk to, and even though he was my sit-out buddy, I had barely ever spoken to him…
8
I couldn’t work up any enthusiasm to
explore on my way back from the hospital, so I went straight home.
I had just realized that with everything going on, it had been two weeks since I’d talked to my father in India. I ought to call him tonight or maybe tomorrow. Then I could tell him about what had been going on and use that to ask him a little bit about how my mother died fifteen years ago…I was thinking these things over when—
I reached my grandparents’ home in Koike around two in the afternoon. When the front gate to the house came into view a little way ahead, I sighed internally.
A middle school–aged boy wearing a summer uniform was loitering in front of the gate, alone. He had a somewhat unsettled air about him…He kept looking up at the house, then looking down or up at the sky. I didn’t have to take a closer look. It was…
“What are you doing here?” I asked him, and he practically jumped in the air, he was so surprised. He turned to look at me, then turned his eyes away in embarrassment. He started to leave without ever saying anything, but I stopped him with a harsh order. “Hold on. What’s going on? You had some reason for coming here, didn’t you?”
It was Yuya Mochizuki.
He didn’t run away after all, but even as I came up to him, he kept his eyes turned away, fidgeting and squirming, and didn’t offer any response. When I came even closer, I peered into his face and loaded on another question. “What might that reason be, Mochizuki?”
Then, finally, he spoke: “I was just, uh, worried. My house is near here, in this town, so I thought I might, uh…”
“Worried?” I cocked my head slightly, sarcastically. “What made you worry about me?”
“Uh, well…” Knitting his thin, girlish eyebrows and looking perturbed, Mochizuki dropped his voice. “You weren’t at school again today, Sakakibara.”
“I had an appointment at the hospital all morning.”
“Oh…But still, um…”
“You plan to keep standing around out here talking? Come inside for a second.”
I invited him in with a casual tone.
“Wha—? Uh, okay. Just for a second,” Mochizuki agreed, his face a mix of smiling and tears.
It looked as though my grandmother had gone out somewhere. The black Cedric wasn’t in the garage next to the front door. My grandfather was probably with her. I thought Reiko was probably in the side house, but I decided not to announce myself.
I brought Mochizuki around to the backyard, where the porch was. I knew that the glass door to the porch wasn’t locked during the day. It was a level of carelessness unthinkable in Tokyo…But no, I should probably chalk it up to peacefulness.
We sat down next to each other on the edge of the porch, and Mochizuki almost immediately started talking, with a speed that suggested he’d decided to just go for it.
“Sakakibara, ever since you transferred to North Yomi, you must have thought a bunch of stuff here seemed weird.”
“Does that mean you’re going to explain it to me?” I shot back, and Mochizuki’s response died off.
“Er…I…”
“That’s what I thought.”
I glared at him out of the corner of my eyes.
“What horrible secret is everyone getting together to hide from me?”
“That’s…”
Again Mochizuki got stuck, and he was silent for a short while.
“I’m sorry. I guess I can’t say it, after all. It’s just…”
“Just what?”
“Something might happen soon that you’ll think is really unpleasant. It’s actually bad that I’m talking about it like this, but…I couldn’t stay quiet.”
“What does that mean?”
“We talked about it at the meeting two days ago…So—”
“You mean the homeroom in sixth period two days ago? When everyone left to go to the conference room?”
“…Yeah.” Mochizuki nodded apologetically. “We knew you were going to be late since you were talking to the police, so that’s how the idea came up. Akazawa and some of the others said we needed to talk without you around. That we should go somewhere else so there wouldn’t be any problems if you came back in the middle of it.”
“Hmph.”
Which meant that Mr. Kubodera had been on board with their suggestion, too.
“…And?”
“I can’t say any more.”
Mochizuki bowed his head and let out a feeble sigh.
“But even if something bad happens to you after this…we need you to put up with it.”
“How can you even say that?”
“Just tell yourself that it’s for everyone’s benefit. Please.”
“For everyone’s…?” I offered him the phrase that came to mind just then. “So that’s a decision by the class that I have to obey no matter what?”
“…Yeah.”
“Hm-m-m. What to do.”
I stood up from my seat on the edge of the porch and stretched, reaching toward the slightly cloudy sky. This was the time when I could have actually used Ray’s encouragement to “Cheer up!” but this was the one time that she (…probably) was utterly silent in her cage.
“Well, I guess I won’t ask you anything more about it, then.” I turned to look back at Mochizuki. “But can I ask you a favor, too?”
“What kind?”
“I want a copy of the class list.”
Mochizuki looked thrown by that, but he nodded, once, immediately. “You never got one, did you?”
“Nope.”
“Then you shouldn’t really be asking me for…”
“Listen up, kid,” I interrupted him. “I’ll worry about me, and I can tell you I’ve got some pretty touchy emotional issues going on. So…”
Mochizuki was opening his mouth to reply when a gentle electronic sound played inside the bag resting on his lap. “Oh—” he made a noise, then opened his bag. The next moment, he was holding a silver cell phone.
“I didn’t know you had a cell phone.”
“Kind of. It’s a PHS,” he answered, then accepted the call. After a moment, Mochizuki cried “He what?!” sounding very surprised.
I wondered what had happened. I was preparing myself for whatever was coming when I saw the color in Mochizuki’s face drain visibly, the phone still pressed to his ear. Then, at last—
“That was Kazami,” Mochizuki told me, his voice smothered and low—as if he were being crushed flat. “He told me that Takabayashi died. He had a heart attack at his house…”
9
Ikuo Takabayashi.
He’d had a weak heart ever since he was little and had often been out of school. Last year, his condition had gotten much better, but the last two or three days it had taken a sudden downturn until he had an attack that had led to his death.
The sudden death of this classmate, whom I had hardly ever talked to, followed on the death of Ms. Mizuno in the elevator accident at the hospital. Thus, there were two “deaths of June” for third-year Class 3 this year.
Chapter 8
June III
1
I ran into Ms. Mikami, who had been out of school for so many days, that morning on the stairs. It was the start of the week, Monday, June 8.
It was on the landing between the second and third floors on the East Stair in Building C. I was going up and Ms. Mikami was coming down. It was just slightly before 8:30.
“Oh…Good morning.”
Flustered, I gave her an unintentionally awkward greeting. Ms. Mikami came to a stop and looked down at me as if she’d seen something odd, but her eyes shifted immediately away from me and floated unnaturally in space.
“Good morni—um, you’re early. The warning bell hasn’t even rung yet. Uh, I mean…”
She didn’t greet me or respond in any way. I thought it was a little strange, but I couldn’t ask her if anything was wrong here in the stairwell, either. There was a brief, incredibly uncomfortable—or rather, embarrassing—moment, and then…
Finally, we went past each other, Ms. Mikami n
ever saying a word. That same instant, the bell began to ring.
Obvious question number one: Why, at this hour, was the teacher coming down the stairs? The short homeroom period was starting now…And yet she was moving away from the classroom, not toward it. Why?
There were still several kids hanging around in the hall on the third floor. But they were all from the neighboring classes, and no one I recognized from Class 3 was among them.
Was Mei here today? I wondered. Was she going to show herself at school, or…?
Thinking about it without really thinking, I opened the door at the back of the classroom.
I was surprised.
This surprise was the exact opposite of the one I’d had last Thursday, when the detectives from the Yomiyama Police Department had released me from questioning and I’d come back to the classroom.
That day, I’d been surprised that not a single person from my class was in the room in the middle of sixth period. This was the opposite…Meaning that even though only the very first morning bell had rung, nearly everyone was in the classroom already, and they were all sitting at their desks, totally disciplined and silent.
“Oh…”
I made a sound inadvertently and a few students turned around to look at me. But they gave no more reaction than that and turned back around right away.
Mr. Kubodera was standing next to the teacher’s platform. There were two students standing atop the platform: Tomohiko Kazami and the new class representative for the girls, Izumi Akazawa.
Extremely confused by the weird atmosphere in the silent classroom, I slowly moved to sit at my own desk.
“So that is what we’ll be doing. Are there any…No, we’ve said enough, I’m sure,” Kazami said from the platform. I heard something fearful in his voice. Beside him, Akazawa stood slightly at an angle, her arms across her chest. Something about her looked—to use a slightly anachronistic phrase—like a bandit queen.
Another, Volume 1 Page 18