She suddenly realized she was alone. Her parents had gone out for the day. She was alone, where anything could happen to her, and she had left the front door unlocked.
The letter floated under the coffee table as she rushed to the front door to find it thankfully, still closed. She locked it and checked through the peep hole, before proceeding to run through the house and check all of the doors and windows. While running to the stairs, she took her phone out and speed dialed her mother. Cypress came rushing past to join her in her only safe haven.
She shut the door, locked it, and raised the cell to her ear to hear that it was still dialing. Cypress jumped up on the bed as she thrust the curtains shut. The receiver murmured in her ear as she wrapped herself in her covers.
When her mother answered, she couldn’t stop herself from talking in hysterics with tears escaping, begging them to come home and saying everything she could about the letter.
“He’s real! He’s real! He’s coming to get me, I’m so scared mom! Please help me!” she sobbed into the speaker.
Her mother’s voice did everything it could to calm her. It assured her they were on their way home immediately, but she needed to get off the line so they could call the police. Her mother said they should both make the call, and that when Reiko was finished, she should call her back and stay on the line. Reiko forced herself to comply with this, not wanting to be separated from the comfort of her mother’s voice in case something did happen.
Reiko called emergency services and explained everything again, while trying to keep her voice level. They said a unit would be by the house shortly.
After the call ended, Cypress crawled close to her and curled up in front of her chest. Instead of redialing her mother, she set the phone down by her pillow, and hugged him, feeling his purring close to her frame.
After several indefinite, eternal minutes later, the doorbell rang throughout the house. Reiko didn’t get up, but held Cypress tighter.
A minute later, her phone rang. It was her mother telling her they were outside and the police were at the door.
Her parents were the first ones to knock at her room. They held her as she was escorted down the stairs, which felt like a distant object she could not quite connect with.
She was seated with her mother on the couch. One of the officers spoke with her father while two others searched through the house and checked the entrances. They questioned her and her mother. Then the letter and envelope were gathered and examined. They were regular peace officers and could not make much of it, other than that it had been, subjectively, a threat to Reiko.
After securing the home, one officer said they would submit the letter to evidence. Reiko’s father requested that one of them stay behind to keep watch over the house, but was denied, and the officer explained that no one had seen who sent the letter, and there was no present threat of damage to the home, or its owners. They assured them that it was likely a harmless prank or that someone was indeed in love with their daughter, and left.
Reiko decided not to take the meds anymore, they dulled her senses. It was only a day before the effects wore off, and all of the paranoid horror came back with a fury.
Reiko could never be alone, especially when she went out. Unlike before, when solitude had been the best way to clear her head and recuperate, now she absolutely had to be around people. Only now, people were watching her everywhere. Every time she turned, she thought she saw someone looking at her, and every time, it was a different person. Some days, she skipped school, with permission from her parents, and others, she had to be coaxed out of bed.
Her friends only saw her at school, and asked why she insisted on being so close to them while avoiding them afterward. She only expressed that she was going through a tough time, and they did whatever they could to support her. They texted her individually on occasion to ask what had happened. She would talk with them and ask about what everyone else was doing, and tried to avoid the subject.
Keeping her secret finally became too agonizing, and she managed to tell them everything that had happened to her. They reacted with perplexed worry, but said they would do anything they could to help her. A few times, they insisted upon visiting her at home, which she obliged, but felt distant and uncomfortable during their few visits, knowing it would only be temporary, and would not solve her problems.
Her school work became cumbersome, but she still managed to pull through without too much harm to her grades. It was the only way she could escape. She no longer had the urge to do her passion, which sat on her book shelves and under her bed, collecting dust.
The second letter came in early February. It was in her shoe locker at school. The third was on Valentine’s Day, in her desk.
He knew exactly where she was, at every moment of the day.
She received chocolates from all her friends, who wished her well and told her that they were doing their best. She knew they were, but they were never going to find him. She didn’t tell them about the letters. She didn’t know where this was going, or what was going to happen next.
The fourth came in early March.
They were all written in the same fine print, all smelling the same. The only thing that changed was the use of her name.
‘I want to be with you, Reiko.’ ‘Reiko! My love is only for Reiko!’ ‘I made something for my Reiko, I can’t wait for my Reiko to see it.’ ‘My love, it will never end for my Reiko.’
The sentences spiraled and merged together, some talking to her, most talking of her, like she was no longer a person.
For every one, the police were called, and every time, the questions rained down with no answers.
The phone calls continued as well. Reiko was being called two or three times a week, some from random numbers she had never seen, some were repeats. The police told her never to answer an unfamiliar number, but that was pretty much all they did. How did he have her number?
Her parents had to set up a system, so that whenever they needed to leave the house, one stayed with her, while the other left. Sometimes she would go with them, but was extremely cautious and clung close to them, feeling like a child. Her mother began talking about quitting her job so she could stay home most of the time. It tore Reiko apart inside that this was what her family was being reduced to, and she pleaded with her mother not to do it.
Graduation came, and then spring break.
She didn’t leave the house during the break. Her friends kept in contact, and wished she could join them, but she just couldn’t. They promised her they would save their spring trip for next year, and she pleaded futilely for them to not let her situation ruin their time.
The only times she did leave the house were if she was with her mom to go shopping.
One evening, after getting back, Reiko was helping her unload groceries. They were on their way to the kitchen, when both their eyes laid on the broken pane of their back door, sitting wide open.
“Call the police,” Reiko’s mother ordered, but Reiko was immediately worried about something else.
“Cypress!”
“No, Reiko! We have to get out of the house!”
Reiko didn’t listen, and ran upstairs as fast as she could. When she made it, she found him curled under her bed, next to her chemistry boxes.
He mewed at her and she thought she might pass out from the relief.
She pulled him out and held him close. Cypress kept mewing. It was apparent something had scared him.
Reiko’s mother called the police and then Reiko’s father, who dropped work and came straight home.
The police performed a haphazard search with her father and found nothing missing. A few had been to their house several times before, and had become skeptical. The lead officer spoke with Reiko’s father, and after clearing things up, mentioned offhand that if the family was creating false reports, they could be fined by the city. Reiko’s father was outraged, and began questioning them on what they had done so far to look into this. They left whil
e he was still in a heat.
Minutes later, her father sat on the couch to comfort her while her mother went to make tea for everyone. Reiko’s phone had been lying on the coffee table when it rang. Her father got to it before she could, and answered.
In an instant, he was on his feet and had walked around the coffee table and stopped.
“Oh, you think this is funny? You think it’s funny!? I’m gonna’ kill you!!! You son of a bitch!!! Stop terrorizing my daughter!!! The police will never find your body, because there’ll be nothing left!!! If it’s the last thing I do!!!”
This was the angriest she had ever seen her father. There were tears streaming down his cheeks.
After he hung up, he walked over to her and knelt.
He apologized and then said, he was going to keep her phone for her own sake. Reiko understood unequivocally, and did not argue the matter.
Later that evening, her mother put her to bed, like she had done so many times when Reiko was a little girl, speaking kindly to her that everything would be fine, while stroking her hair. Cypress curled up next to her head, and when her mother shut the door, Reiko turned to face him.
“Hey...” her still voice whispered, tears rolling across the bridge of her nose.
She stroked his ears in the dark, and listened to his relaxed purrs. If she looked hard enough, she thought she could still see the green of his eyes.
“I wish you could talk...I wish you could tell me what you saw...”
The next day, she reached for her hair brush and found it was missing.
Sometime, still during spring break, her mother got it in her head that Reiko should not spend her entire break cooped up inside. She sat down with Reiko in her room, and upon her mentioning this, Reiko tried her best to stay calm, but disagreed. Her mother took her in her arms, smoothed her hair and told her that staying inside like this was giving this person all of the control. Reiko didn’t want to go anywhere, and kept silent while clinging to her. Her mother said she would not be alone, that her friends had missed her, and wanted to see her. She needed to face her fears of going out. If this person was indeed following her, then she was only making it easy for him by staying in one place.
With extreme hesitance, using her mom’s cell, Reiko called Sumi, and asked if she was doing anything or already out. She received an ecstatic reply and Sumi said she would love to come get her and go out.
Sumi took the liberty of calling everyone that could make it and they all traveled to Reiko’s house to pick her up.
What they did was like on any normal day, with nothing particularly special taking place, but Reiko still had trouble avoiding her paranoia and escaping the sensation of feeling out of place, as if she did not belong.
Like any girl her age, Reiko wished her first love, one that was genuine, had come by a real love letter, or personal confession. The kind of love that she saw in TV shows and anime.
This, what was happening, was not how she imagined it.
Personally, Reiko had trouble seeing how she could ever be fit for someone else, how she could be attractive enough to a male to conjure their interest. She spent a lot of time indoors with her studies and school work. She didn’t have a very appealing figure, she wore glasses, and she was not as outgoing as her friends. If she didn’t have them, she would have stayed inside most of the time, reading her research articles, and tinkering with her chemicals and lab equipment. Who could ever be attracted to her?
She counted herself lucky that her friends were the type of people to accept someone like her.
They promised her that next spring would be amazing, and all this would just be a bad memory. For the time being, they wanted to take her to as many places as possible, and spend everything they had in their pockets for her. It made her tense up with sobbing, and they did their best to comfort her.
Reiko tried to pull herself together. This was the only day she would get to spend time with them this spring. She had to make it count.
They took her to as many shops and places to eat as they could. They didn’t stop at any one place for longer than half an hour before moving on to the next. Reiko thought her head might spin until she got sick, with all the places she had not seen in so long being visited at such a quick pace.
They were on their way to a shoe shop when Reiko stopped dead in her tracks.
It came to her in a scent. She knew it too well, and while everyone continued ahead of her, she turned and looked frantically, checking her surroundings for anyone that seemed out of place. She didn’t see them, but suddenly realized she had been walking past a flower boutique that was having a sale, and had a broad display of their goods that she would have found beautiful if she had not felt so neurotic. She had been walking past one of the displays that the scent wafted from most potently.
Next to a table of flower beds was a tree in a pot that was tall enough to loom over her. Large clusters of purple petals, like clusters of grapes, hung from the ends of the branches.
It was the same smell as from the letters.
She knew this tree, and had taken a liking to it when she went through her botany phase. In her occasional drive for research, she always came across it in her compilation of favorites. However, she couldn’t remember the name.
She looked at the display card. ‘Wisteria’. She reached out and took hold of the nearest cluster, and brought it to her nose. It was unmistakable.
She stared at it, and before she knew what she was doing, she had worked her thumb on one of the vines and broke off a small cluster of blooms. She placed it under her nose again.
She wanted to leave it, she wanted to never go near another tree like this again. A voice in her head kept telling her that this tree, this smell, had been the cause for all of her anguish, all of her suffering. She wanted to cast the blossoms down and crush them under her shoes, and it hurt...
She placed the blooms in the pocket under her sweater. She didn’t know why. They would eventually wilt, and the smell would thin until it was gone.
“Rei-chan! Come on!”
Her friends had noticed she wasn’t with them and were calling her back.
She left the tree. She didn’t want to see it again…but inside, she knew this wasn’t true.
When her second year started, she felt she didn’t have the energy for it. The whole year seemed like a long, agonizing road that she was being forced to trek, not to mention her third year...if she survived that long.
She received more letters. She didn’t even bother opening them now. She wanted to burn them, but the first of this next group, she had received shortly after she collected the wisteria blooms. She didn’t say anything about the letter to her parents, and took it to her room. She took the wisterias out of the drawer in her desk, and sat on her bed.
She placed the wisterias under her nose, and then the envelope. It was no doubt, they were the same, only the scent on the letter had been fresh and more potent than the actual flowers. It was obvious, just like she figured before, that he had been using a perfume.
She didn’t really see the point in doing this. She didn’t know why, what good was it going to do?
After putting the wisterias back in the drawer, she lifted her mattress. Cypress jumped off and she placed the letter neatly on the mattress support.
When she turned, she saw he had been standing on the floor, watching her keenly.
“It’s just in case...” she said to him.
Eiichi P.I., Vol. 1 Page 17