The front door of the mansion was around the bend, at the bottom of the sloping driveway. There was a bell beside the door. Needless to say, she didn’t push it. Instead, she moved clockwise around the building, hiding behind trees and shrubs, hugging the concrete wall and giving the roundabout where guests parked a wide berth. A two-car garage sat to the left of the entranceway. Its door was rolled down and locked. A little farther on sat a stylish little building that looked like a cottage. That must be the guesthouse, she thought. Beyond that was a tennis court. She had never seen a home with a tennis court before. Who did Mr. Menshiki play tennis with? The court, however, appeared to have been long ignored. It had no net, its all-weather surface was strewn with leaves, and the white lines were so faded they were almost invisible.
All the windows facing the mountainside were small and tightly shuttered, so nothing inside could be seen. As before, the house was absolutely quiet. No barking dogs. From time to time she could hear birds chirping high in the trees, but that was all. At the back of the house was another garage. Also with space for two cars. It seemed to have been added after the house was built. Menshiki sure could store an awful lot of cars!
The slope behind the house had been turned into a large Japanese-style garden. She could see a descending flight of steps, and below that a path weaving through a number of large rocks. The azalea bushes were pruned to perfection, the pine branches overhead an array of bright greens. What looked like an arbor lay just beyond. A reclining chair where one could stretch out and read sat under the arbor. Beside it was a coffee table. Lanterns and lights were scattered here and there.
Mariye worked her way around the house to the back. The house’s broad deck looked from there out over the valley. She had walked out onto that deck on her first visit. It was from there that Menshiki kept watch on her home. The second she set foot on it she knew that was true. She felt it in her bones.
Mariye squinted as she looked over at her home. It was right across from her. So close it seemed a person could reach out and touch it (if that person had pretty long arms, that is). From this vantage point, the house looked utterly defenseless. At the time it was built, there had been no homes on this side of the valley. Only recently (though more than ten years ago) had building restrictions been eased and houses erected on this slope. That was why, when her home was designed, no attempt had been made to shield it from those across the way. That made it a sitting duck for prying eyes. A high-powered telescope or even a pair of good binoculars would give one a clear view of what was going on inside. The window to her bedroom was a perfect example. To be sure, she was a cautious girl. She always closed the curtain before taking off her clothes. But that didn’t mean there were no unguarded moments. What had Menshiki seen?
Mariye descended the outside steps to the next floor where the study was, but the windows were shuttered there too. She couldn’t peek in at all. So she kept walking down to the lowest level. Most of that floor was occupied by a large utility area. She could see a washing machine, a place for an ironing board, a room that seemed to be set aside for a live-in maid, and, on the far end, a sizable gym containing five or six exercise machines. Unlike the tennis court, these appeared to be well used. They all looked clean and well oiled. A heavy punching bag hung from the ceiling. Compared with the upper floors, this floor was less tightly guarded. Many of the windows lacked curtains, so she could peer inside. Nevertheless, both the windows and the sliding glass doors were securely locked from within. Here too the security company had pasted their stickers to scare off intruders. An alarm would sound in their offices if anyone tried to force their way in.
The mansion was huge. She found it impossible to believe that a single person could inhabit such a big space. It must be a lonely life. The concrete walls were thick, and every precaution had been taken to block anyone from gaining entry. True, there was no guard dog (maybe he didn’t like dogs either), but apart from that every antiburglar device under the sun had been employed.
What should be her next step? Nothing came to mind. There was no way to get inside, and no way to breach the wall to get out. Menshiki was home, she knew that. He had pushed the button that opened the gate and taken delivery of the parcel. And he lived there by himself. Once a week, a cleaning service came, but apart from that the house was off-limits to outsiders. That was his basic principle—he had told them that on their visit.
Since she couldn’t gain access to the house, she had to find a place to hide outside. If she kept poking around she might locate a likely spot. After a long search, she finally came across what seemed to be a small storage shed at the far corner of the garden. The door was unlocked. Inside were a bunch of garden tools and stacked bags of fertilizer. She slipped in and sat down on the bags. The shed was far from inviting. But at least the security cameras wouldn’t find her here. And it was unlikely anyone would show up. Sooner or later, things would change. All she could do was wait.
Although she was stuck in one place, she felt full of energy. After her shower that morning, she had noticed swellings on her chest in the mirror. It was an exciting development. Of course, she might be deluding herself. It could just be wishful thinking. She had inspected her chest from a number of angles, and touched it with her hands. There did seem to be two soft protuberances that had not been there before. Her nipples were still tiny (a far cry from her aunt’s, which resembled olive pits), but there was a hint they might be about to sprout.
Mariye passed her time in the storage shed thinking about her budding breasts. She pictured how they might look when they grew. What would it feel like to live your life with really big ones? She imagined strapping on the kind of underwire bra her aunt used. That day was still miles away, however. After all, her periods had only begun that spring.
She was a little thirsty, but she could bear that. She consulted her chunky G-Shock watch. It was five minutes past three. Her painting class was on Fridays, but she’d been planning to skip that anyway. She hadn’t brought her bag of painting supplies with her. Yet her aunt was sure to worry if she didn’t get home by dinnertime. She could come up with a good excuse later.
* * *
—
She seemed to have fallen asleep. It was hard to believe that she could have slept in this place, and under these circumstances. Yet she had managed to drop off without realizing it. It hadn’t been for very long. Ten or fifteen minutes. Maybe less. But a deep sleep, nonetheless. She was disoriented when she awoke, her mind at loose ends. For a moment she didn’t know where she was or what she was doing. It seemed she had been dreaming. A vague dream, something to do with full breasts and milk chocolate. Her mouth was filled with saliva. Then it hit her. I snuck into Menshiki’s, she remembered, and now I’m hiding in his storage shed.
A noise had roused her. A repetitive, mechanical noise. To be more precise, a garage door clattering open. The door of the garage near the entrance. Menshiki was probably in his car and about to head off somewhere. Mariye hurried from the shed and ran around to the front, making as little sound as possible. When the door was fully open the clattering stopped. She heard a car start up, and then the front of Menshiki’s silver Jaguar slowly emerged. Menshiki was sitting in the driver’s seat. The driver’s window was down, and his pure white hair glowed in the afternoon sun. She watched from behind the shrubbery.
Had Menshiki looked to his right, he could have glimpsed her there in the shadows. The shrubs were too small to provide full cover. But his eyes were trained straight ahead. Hands on the wheel, he seemed lost in thought. The Jaguar moved up the driveway, passed around the curve, and disappeared. The remote control–activated metal door began to clatter down again. The second before it closed, Mariye raced from her hiding place and slipped under the door. Like Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Another reflex action. Without really thinking, she had decided to gain access to the house through the garage. The automatic door hesitated when it sens
ed her slide underneath, then resumed its descent until it was tightly shut.
Another car was in the garage. A stylish blue convertible with a beige hood, the sports car her aunt had admired on their previous visit. Mariye couldn’t care less about cars, so she’d barely glanced at it then. It had a very long nose, and, here too, the Jaguar crest. Even someone who knew as little about cars as Mariye could tell it was worth a lot of money. A collector’s piece, in all likelihood.
A person could pass into the house through a door in the garage. She tried the knob with some trepidation, but it turned easily. She sighed with relief. Few people would lock a door like that during the day, but Menshiki was such a cautious man she couldn’t be sure. Perhaps something had been on his mind to make him forget. She’d been lucky.
She walked through the door and into the house. Should she take her shoes off or keep them on? In the end, she decided to carry them with her. Leaving them on the doorstep didn’t seem like a good option. The house was hushed when she entered. As if everything in it was holding its breath. Menshiki was gone, and she was positive no one else was there. I’m alone in this huge house, she thought. For the next little while, I am free to go wherever, and do whatever, I want.
Menshiki had given them a basic guided tour on their first visit. She remembered it well enough. The general layout was fixed in her head. She entered the big living room that took up almost the entire first floor. From there, one could go out to the broad deck through a sliding glass door. She hesitated, though. Menshiki might have activated the security system before leaving. If he had, an alarm would go off when she tried to slide it open. A light would flash in the agency’s office. They would phone the house to check. A password would be necessary to end the alert. Mariye stood before the sliding door, black loafers in hand, pondering the situation.
Finally, she reached the conclusion that Menshiki hadn’t set the alarm. The fact that he had left the inner door in the garage unlocked suggested that he wasn’t heading off on a long trip. Odds were he had gone shopping, or was running some sort of errand. Mariye made up her mind. She unlocked the door, slid it open, and waited to see what would happen. No alarm went off, and the security agency did not phone. She heaved a sigh of relief (had security guards found her there she couldn’t have joked her way out of it) and stepped out onto the deck. Putting down her shoes, she went over to the binoculars and removed their plastic cover. They were too heavy to hold, so she tried balancing them on the railing, but that didn’t work very well. Looking around, she noticed what looked like a stand leaning against the wall. It resembled a camera tripod and was the same olive color as the binoculars. The binoculars could be screwed onto the stand. She stuck them together, pulled up the low metal stool left nearby, sat down, and looked through them. Now using the binoculars was easy. Moreover, they were positioned so that she couldn’t be observed from the other side of the valley. This had to be how Menshiki spent much of his time.
She was shocked at how clearly the inside of her house could be seen. Everything was a notch brighter—one of the binoculars’ special features, she assumed. Some of the curtains in the rooms facing the valley hadn’t been drawn. The view within was so distinct she felt she could reach out and touch what she was looking at. A vase of flowers, for example, or even a magazine on the table. Her aunt should be home at this hour. But she couldn’t locate her anywhere.
It was weird to look inside her own house from such a distance, and in such naked detail. It felt as if she had become one of the dead (how was unclear) and now was viewing her home from their vantage point. She had belonged there for so long, yet it was hers no more. She knew it so intimately but could never go back. It was a strange, dissociated sensation.
She trained the binoculars on her own room. It faced in her direction, but the curtain was drawn. Shut tight, without a crack. Her familiar curtain, with its orange pattern. The orange bleached by the sun. She couldn’t see behind it. But her shadow was probably visible at night, when the light was on. How visible, though, could only be known after dark. Mariye panned across the house, looking for her aunt. She ought to be there. But she was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps she was preparing dinner in the kitchen in the back. Or resting in her room. Wherever she was, she wasn’t visible from this angle.
Mariye felt a powerful urge to go back to that house. Right away. She longed to sit in her familiar chair at the dining room table and sip hot tea in her very own cup. To watch her aunt preparing dinner in the kitchen. How wonderful that would be, she thought. Until that point, she had never imagined missing her home this way. Not for a second. To her, the house had always been an ugly, barren monstrosity. She had hated living there. In fact, she was impatient for the day when she was old enough to move into her own place, one that suited her. Yet now, looking at its interior from the other side of the valley through the clear lens, she wanted to return at any cost. It was where she belonged. Where she would be protected.
Just then she heard a faint droning sound. Prying her eyes from the binoculars, she saw something black circling above her. A large bee with a long body, probably a hornet. The kind of hostile, aggressive hornet with a sharp stinger that had killed her mother. Mariye ran back into the house, forcefully slid the door shut, and locked it. The hornet buzzed around the door for a while, as if to pen her in. It struck the glass several times, then finally gave up and flew away. Mariye gave a great sigh of relief. Her heart was pounding, her breathing ragged. Nothing scared her more than hornets. Her father had lectured her time and again how dangerous they were. Mariye had looked at many photographs so that she knew exactly how they looked. In the process, she had conceived the terrifying idea that she, like her mother, would be stung to death. She might well have the same allergic reaction. One couldn’t escape death, but it should come later—she wanted to know what it felt like to have full breasts and a woman’s nipples at least once before she died. It would really suck if hornets killed her before she had that chance.
It was better to stay in the house a while, for safety’s sake. That savage insect would still be flying about. Moreover, it appeared to be targeting her. She decided to search inside the mansion and forget about going outside for the time being.
Her first step was to tour the sprawling living room. She could see no particular change since her first visit. There was the big Steinway grand piano. A small stack of musical scores was piled on top of it. A Bach invention, a Mozart sonata, one of Chopin’s études, that sort of thing. Nothing that required advanced technical skill. Still, being able to play them at all was impressive. Mariye could tell that much. She had taken piano lessons when she was younger. (She hadn’t gone very far—art was what had grabbed her.)
A number of books were scattered on the coffee table’s marble top. Judging from the bookmarks stuck in them, all were in the process of being read. One was on philosophy, one was historical, and two were novels (one of which was in English). She recognized none of the titles and had heard of none of the authors’ names. She flipped through several, but they weren’t her thing. The master of the house loved difficult books and classical music. Between those pursuits, he looked into her home across the valley through high-powered binoculars.
Was he just a perv? Or was there a logical reason or purpose for his behavior? Did he have the hots for her aunt? Or for her? Or for both of them? (Was such a thing possible?)
Next she went to take a look at the lower levels. First she made her way to Menshiki’s study. His portrait hung on the wall. She stood in the middle of the room and studied it for a moment. Of course, she had seen it before (that had been the purpose of their first visit). This time, though, the longer she looked at it, the more it felt as if Menshiki were there with her. So she turned away from the painting. Trying her best to ignore it, she went over to inspect his desk. There was a state-of-the-art Apple desktop computer, but she didn’t switch it on. She knew without trying that it was secured.
There would be no way she could gain access. Not much else was on the desk. There was a deskpad calendar with almost nothing written on it. Just a few incomprehensible symbols and numbers here and there. He would have input his daily schedule into the computer, and then shared it with his other devices. All would be locked. Mr. Menshiki was a cautious man. He would leave no traces.
The other things on the desk were the sort of work-related materials you would expect to find in anyone’s study. The pencils were all of the same length, and sharpened to a fine point. Paper clips were arranged according to size. The white memo pad waited patiently for someone to write on it. The digital clock faithfully clicked off the time. The desk was in such perfect order it was frightening. Unless he’s a well-made android, Mariye thought to herself, something sure is funny about Mr. Menshiki.
As she expected, every desk drawer was locked. That was only natural. No way he would neglect securing them. The study held little else that she wanted to see. She had no special interest in the shelves of books, or the CD collection, or the new, obviously expensive stereo system. Those did no more than reflect his range of tastes. They didn’t help her understand who he was as a person. They had no connection to the secret he was (most likely) concealing.
Mariye left the study and walked down the dim hallway, checking the rooms as she went. All were unlocked. None had been included in the house tour. She and her aunt had only been shown the living room, the study, the dining room, and the kitchen (she had also used the guest bathroom on the first floor). Mariye opened the doors to these unknown rooms one by one. The first was Menshiki’s bedroom. As the so-called master bedroom (she assumed), it was very big. It had a walk-in closet and a private bathroom. Its large bed was neatly turned out, with a quilted duvet. Since there was no live-in maid, she assumed Menshiki had made the bed. If so, its neatness didn’t surprise her. A pair of plain dark brown pajamas lay next to the pillow, also neatly folded. A number of prints hung on the wall. A set by a single artist, from the looks of it. A half-read book rested on the bedside table. He certainly was an avid reader. The window faced the valley, but it wasn’t very large and its blinds had been drawn.
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