“Actually, there has been a change,” Mas said, enjoying the coolness from the fan.
“Oh, really?” Toshi’s voice sounded tentative. Was there a tinge of disappointment?
As Mas explained what had transpired the previous night, Toshi reached for his cigarettes. He barely exhaled the smoke. It was as if he was saving it all up inside himself before releasing it.
“She is at the home now,” Mas said.
Toshi finally let out a stream of smoke, which dissipated quickly with the force of the fan. Mas let the smoke bathe his face, remembering the joys of smoking, the smooth cigarette in his fingers, and the comforting burn in his throat and lungs. He’d given it up for his grandson and didn’t regret it. But it was nice to be around it from time to time.
“What she said to me: ‘boy killer.’” Toshi rubbed a spot on his table. “It wasn’t about Sora.”
Mas waited.
“It was about something else. She wanted to hurt me, especially in front of Thea. And yes, she knew about us. She saw us one time coming out of Hideki’s apartment. In some ways, Hiroshima is a small town.” The educator’s voice was growing fainter and fainter. Mas pulled at his good ear to catch all of his words. “It’s about why I was sent to Senbazuru in the first place. It involves my younger brother.”
The revolutions of the fan seemed to take over the room.
“It was accident. It wasn’t intentional. We lived on the fifth floor of an apartment building in Hiroshima. There were three of us, and I was the oldest at eight years of age. My mother told me that I was to set an example. Of course, I didn’t. She told me to never stand and play around near the edge of the balcony, but I was always jumping off, pretending that I was a Power Ranger. I was supposed to watch my younger brothers, but instead I was jumping. Ryo-kun was just doing what I was doing.”
Whirl, whirl, whirl. Mas didn’t know where to look, so he stared at the spot on the table, too.
“He was only four years old. I’ll never forget. . . .” Toshi was as still as a statue. “My mother never completely recovered. And I don’t think I did, either. Caused so much havoc in the family that my parents had no choice but to send me away.
“When I saw Sora’s body—and I didn’t know it was him—I hadn’t seen him in so long, aside from the photos that Hideki used to show me. Anyway, when I saw his body on the jetty, I just started thinking of Ryo-kun. I felt that part of me had left the island. The only person left was Ikeda the teacher, the director of Senbazuru. It was as if I had separated myself from my past. I had left myself somehow.
“That’s why Hideki is so important to me. We grew up here together, and he’s like my brother. I want him to eventually move back to the island. I’ve been telling him that I can find him work fixing people’s homes in the village. That would have given me time to work with Sora-chan. But Rei. It was Rei who opposed it. She said Ino was no place for a child. It probably didn’t help that Sora-chan had a bad experience here back in May. Not sure exactly what happened because I was in Tokyo visiting friends. But Rei blames that whole thing on me. Just because I had found a holiday job for Hideki here.
“I don’t think Rei was giving enough credit to Sora-chan. I’ve seen the children of Senbazuru survive the death of their parents, abuse, neglect. There are scars, for sure, but they have the strength to continue on. But for adults, it’s not so easy. Maybe that’s why I like to work with children. They still have a future.”
Mas listened carefully as Toshi spoke. He pulled out the phone from his back pocket. “Is this Hideki’s?”
“Where did you find this?” Toshi turned over the phone to examine its back cover. “Hideki misplaced this a few days ago. He thought it was lost forever. He just got it this year and it was expensive.” He also pushed a few buttons, but nothing.
“The beach. By the oysters.”
“But that’s impossible. He wasn’t anywhere close to the island this past week.”
Mas said nothing, but his silence communicated his doubts.
“The night that Sora went missing, Hideki was at a party in Hiroshima. His friends saw him there and even posted photos on Instagram.”
“Small boats, here and there,” Mas said, implying that Hideki could have taken a private vessel. “Who owns that jetty, anyhow?”
“The owner of an oyster factory. During the summer, he stays in Hiroshima. But it would be impossible for Hideki to come over to Ino on his own in a boat. That doesn’t make any sense.” Toshi took the phone and plugged it into a cord that was attached to an electrical outlet. “When this charges, we’ll find out what was going on.”
Mas had no idea how long that would take and took a gulp of the barley tea.
Toshi returned to the table and began drinking the tea, too.
“Where exactly is your family from, anyhow?” Toshi apparently had figured out that Mas’s roots were not in the city.
“Kure. Small town over there.”
“Aha. By the ocean. Very pretty.”
“Haven’t gone over there in fifty years.”
“Even on this trip?”
Mas shook his head. “What for? Nobody left.”
Toshi nodded. “Sou ne.” This is true.
After drinking so much tea and water, Mas needed to use the bathroom, which was just across the kitchen. It was a typical Japanese one with only enough space for a fancy high-tech toilet with multiple buttons.
When Mas reentered the kitchen, Toshi was at the sink, washing some dirty dishes.
“By the way, I heard from Thea that you lost Mukai-san’s ashes,” he said.
Mas frowned as he sat back down. His hunch was right: the girl was an oshaberi.
“I bet Mukai-san wasn’t too happy. She always wants everything her way; she’s always getting on my case about my children, but I keep telling her that they are not the ones causing problems.”
“She said something like that to me,” Mas said.
“But you see, that’s not why she’s dislikes me. She doesn’t like me because I know the truth about her family.”
Mas lifted the glass to his lips even though there was hardly any more tea left.
“There was a family scandal involving her brothers starting a construction company. There were bribes to a Hiroshima politician and even a couple of arrests.”
“You mean her brothers went to jail?”
Toshi nodded. “It was pretty awful for Mukai-san. She’s tough, though. She never let anyone know she was suffering. She excelled in school and became a professor. That’s commendable, for sure. But no person from a respectable family would marry her. That’s how it works in Japan.”
“Haruo neva saysu nuttin’,” Mas murmured to himself in English.
“Pardon? I didn’t hear you.”
“Oh, I didn’t know,” he said in Japanese.
“We have many secrets here.” Toshi smiled, revealing his crooked front teeth, a bit discolored from tobacco smoking. “You are peeling back only the top layer.”
Something rang—ching-ching; Hideki’s phone was now charged. Toshi unplugged it from the cord and pressed a couple of buttons. He poked at it for a few minutes and sighed. “I thought I knew his password but I guess I don’t. I may have to wait until I see him. He’s supposed to come by today, anyhow.”
Mas immediately regretted bringing the phone to Toshi. He was closer to Hideki than even a blood brother. He would defend Hideki from most anything, Mas figured. But would he even cover up the murder of Sora?
Mas got up from the table. “Don’t forget about Sora,” he said before he left. “He deserves a friend, too.”
As Mas entered the lobby of the nursing home, he heard Tatsuo comment, “That was something else yesterday.” He was behind the front desk, organizing some papers.
Mas stopped and nodded.
“That boy keeps coming around. Kenta-kun. Wants to see you.”
Mas frowned. “His father wouldn’t approve.”
“I think it’s about the cat.”
Of course. For some reason, the boy was fixated on Haruo. On his way back to his room, Mas bought a bottle of Coke from the vending machine. He needed a rush of sugar. This wasn’t the time for taking naps. It was time to think.
Behind the closed sliding door, he mulled over what Toshi had said. That children were so resilient. He didn’t know Sora at all, but from all accounts, the boy didn’t come over to the island to die. It seemed like he came to live.
Taking his Coke bottle with him, he went outside and sat underneath the camphor tree. Sweat dripped from his forehead and the soda soon became lukewarm. He saw another giant worm traveling on the hot pavement. He doubted it was the same one he saw the first day he was here.
Just when he was about to return back inside, he heard the spinning of metal. Sure enough, it was Kenta on his bicycle. He got off underneath the camphor tree and used his kickstand to park the bike.
“I made this for the cat,” he said and held out a collar fashioned of carefully knotted blue yarn. Hanging from it was a leather tag with the name Haruo in hiragana.
“Ah—” Mas said. “Haven’t seen the cat since last night. You made this?”
Kenta nodded.
Mas studied his handiwork, neat and precise. As a fisherman, Kenta’s father certainly would be adept at tying knots in working with nets. “You hang onto this for the next time you see Haruo.”
Putting the collar in his pocket, the boy sat next to Mas on the bench. The cicada started their chirping and the two of them listened for a while.
“Don’t you have any brothers or sisters?” Mas finally asked.
Kenta shook his head.
“You lonely?”
“Only sometimes. I actually like being by myself during the summer break.”
“Why do you hang out with those yogore boys?”
The boy shrugged his shoulders. “Not too many boys my age around.”
As if on cue, the cicada stopped singing, an intermission from their concert in nature. Drops of rain hit the leaves of the camphor tree and dripped onto the pavement, evaporating almost immediately.
Mas suspected that Kenta wasn’t here for just the cat. “What happened to Sora? Do you know?”
The boy’s eyes grew larger while his mouth seemed to shrink until it was a tiny “O.”
“We didn’t want anything bad to happen to him.” Kenta put his hands in his pocket. “Even Daisuke. We didn’t want him to die.”
“Who’s Daisuke? The fat one?”
“Um, yes.”
The boy described their first encounter with Sora during Golden Week, Japan’s national weeklong holiday in May. He had come with his father to do repairs on people’s homes. “We tried to play with him, but he was strange. Weird. In the end, he was screaming about something. His father was trying to calm him down. I don’t know what it was all about.”
“He was strange, so you bullied him. Told him to die.” Shi-ne.
“That wasn’t me. I never said that.”
“Your friends did. And you didn’t stop them.”
Kenta’s hands tightened into little fists. “We were just playing a game with him that day. After getting off the ferry, we ran into the village to get our bikes. We weren’t thinking about Sora until we saw him walking alone toward the east side of the island. Then Daisuke made up a game. We were spies. We were supposed to follow Sora and figure out what he was doing here.
“He saw that we were following him and then he started to run and hide. For not being from the island, he was pretty good. I was the one who spotted him. He had gone into one of those oyster factories that were closed for the summer. The one closest to here.”
Mas almost couldn’t breathe. Sora had come to an island with a mission.
“Take me to it.”
“Why?” Kenta looked afraid, as if wisps of the dead boy’s soul might remain in the places he visited had on the last day of his life.
“Let’s go.”
They went back on the same paved road that Mas had traveled back and forth to Senbazuru. The second oyster factory was a little farther off the path, closer to the water. It stood on stilts on the shore. One side was completely open, revealing a large container full of light-colored scallop shells. The only way to enter was through metal steps connected to the elevated platform.
“Here.” Kenta pointed to the platform. “Sora was in there.”
“Go on. Show me.” Mas gestured that the boy should go up the stairs. He hesitated again. Perhaps he was afraid of heights. Finally Kenta climbed up, with Mas right behind him.
On the platform, beside the container, which was about six feet tall, were an electric fan and low green plastic crates. Mas noticed walls of corrugated metal siding on the east and south side along the shoreline.
“What was he doing in here?” Mas said out loud, more for his own benefit. He repeated the same question to Kenta.
The boy hemmed and hawed. He nervously looked left and right to make sure they were alone. “I saw him searching for something in back of this container. And then he pulled out a green bag. While he was checking the bag’s contents, I waved for the others to come over. We all hid underneath the platform, so when Sora climbed down the stairs with the bag, we were waiting for him.
“Daisuke was the one who took it. The bag. Then we all rode away on our bicycles. Sora didn’t yell or chase after us, which was no fun. So Daisuke went back and told him that we’d be hiding the bag somewhere on the island and he’d have to find it.”
“What was in the bag?” Mas figured that the boys must have looked.
Kenta said he wasn’t sure. “But I think it was money.”
“What happened to it?”
Kenta shook his head. He didn’t know. “Daisuke was the one who had it. Sora was going crazy looking through every spot on the island. The park, the school, the garden. We got tired of watching him and rode our bicycles back home. I guess we all kind of forgot about it that night.”
This whole tragedy was a result of a prank? Mas was livid. “Why didn’t you tell anyone?”
“We didn’t want to get into trouble. Daisuke said we all could be sent to jail for what we did.”
Obviously a silly threat to keep the boys’ mouths shut. Daisuke being the ringleader, he probably feared that he had the most to lose. Mas turned to leave. He’d had enough.
“It was this kind of bag.” Kenta held up a green canvas bag from a stack of folded ones. It wasn’t that big, maybe a half a foot. Mas had seen a bag like that somewhere before—the one that Tatsuo had given him with his lunch of rice balls and fried chicken.
Before Mas could respond, they heard the echo of footsteps on the metal stairs. “What are you doing in here? You know this is private property.”
Chapter Nine
The Japanese oni, or demon, looked a lot like the American devil, Mas realized. It had horns and maniacal eyes, and its skin could be red in color. But in Japan, there wasn’t a singular devil, a top dog that bossed the lower ones around. Instead, there were multiple demons who could wreak havoc or, conversely, protect people. Mas and Chizuko, in fact, had kept a demon mask in their hallway to ward off evil spirits. He tried to explain its role to the church going Genessee, but she wasn’t having any of it. The oni mask was wrapped in newspaper and like many of Mas’s possessions after Genessee moved in, stored in the garage. He wasn’t about to destroy the mask or throw it away and risk it falling into the hands of the wrong person. He wasn’t a superstitious man, but there were lines that even he wasn’t willing to cross.
Mas was eye level with Tatsuo, who stood on a lower step of the metal factory stairs. As he looked at Tatsuo’s face—the eyes blinking furiously again—the oni came to mind. Was Tatsuo one of those Japanese demons who was able to conceal his true identity? Or was he a good one who would scare away evil ones?
“This is no place to play.” Tatsuo continued climbing until he reached the platform. He directed his admonishment to Kenta, but Mas knew that he was also
supposed to receive the same message.
“This is no playing,” Mas said. “It’s about Sora.”
Tatsuo winced.
“This your uncle’s company, right? The one that he owns?”
“You shouldn’t have come to Ino. This is not your place.” Tatsuo was going on the offensive. A surprise move for the usually passive and taciturn office worker.
Thinking about the green bag, Mas stepped up his game, too. “Why did you leave money for Sora? What had he done to earn it?”
“I don’t know anything.”
“I betcha don’t,” Mas muttered in English. And then a lie in Japanese: “The boy saw you. And he saw Sora picking up the package.”
Kenta’s mouth fell open.
“I don’t know a thing,” Tatsuo said. “I was just doing it as a favor.”
Mas had never heard anything so ridiculous. Who leaves money around for someone in a secret place as a favor? “For who?”
“I can’t say. I promised not to say.”
“This whole thing has got to stop.”
From the water came the chug of an engine. A ferry had arrived at the landing.
“I think you need to leave, Arai-san. I’d recommend that you go on that ferry right now. We can send over your luggage straight to the airport.”
Another cover-up. Mas was tired. He wasn’t going to play nice anymore. A long, sharp hook on a pole leaned against the corrugated aluminum siding. He had no idea what the tool was used for, but he grabbed it and waved it in front of Tatsuo’s blinking right eye.
“You like your eye, don’t you? Don’t lie. Why did you give a bag of money to Sora?” In his anger, the Japanese tumbled out of him, an awkward cling-clang of words. His heart was beating so fast. Maybe he had the guts to poke out Tatsuo’s eye.
“Have you gone kuru-kuru-pa?” But Tatsuo stood still, his eyes on the sharp hook that was inches from his face.
“Tie his hands with that rope over there,” Mas commanded Kenta. The boy quickly did his elder’s bidding, fashioning an impressive restraint around the nursing-home worker’s wrists.
“You’re going to regret this,” Tatsuo sputtered.
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