“Hmmm…” I wasn’t getting any extra useful information from this conversation, and I was sure the principal had plenty of other things she should be doing. “Well, then I don’t want to keep you from your duties. I’m sure you’re a very busy woman. Might I look at the club photos for that year?” I gestured to the envelope on her desk. “I wanted to get a better idea of what Fukuda-san could’ve been doing around the time she disappeared.”
“Sure.” She handed the envelope to me. “Would you mind looking at them here? These are our only copies on site. I think they’ve been digitized, but I’m fuzzy on the details of where those are stored.”
“Of course.”
She stood up and left the room while I emptied the envelope onto the clear desk space in front of me and flipped through the old memories. This school was well-known for the variety of after-school clubs on offer. They had everything from traditional kendo to international fencing, arts and crafts, cooking, photography, hiking and survival clubs. Everything.
Including a manga club.
I sifted through the photos until I found the group photo of the manga club, all eight of the students smiling for the camera. And at the center of the photo, Ria Fukuda stood with her red sketchbook clutched to her chest.
A modicum of calm trickled through my chest while looking into her eyes. In the past week, through every thread of evidence and every story, she’d slipped further and further away from me. She almost didn’t feel real. And without a body, how could I ever prove she was alive to begin with?
With memories like these, cast in shades of light and dark on a shiny piece of paper, she became real again.
I ran my finger over the list of people in the photo until I came upon, “Watanabe Kohei (Not Pictured).”
Really?
I looked at the photo again, hoping he would appear there. No such luck.
Maybe he was in other photos, in other clubs. I flipped through the other club photos until I found one other mention of him, also not pictured, in the kendo club. What gives? Was he afraid of the camera or something?
I shouldn’t have found it suspicious that he wasn’t pictured, but I did. Think, Mei. Perhaps he was sick the day photos were taken? That was unlikely. Unless you were on the brink of death, you went to school. That’s just the way it was here.
Suddenly, I needed to see a photo of Kohei Watanabe from back then so badly my feet itched to start the search. What had he looked like? Had I seen him around when I was a kid and not even realized he was the same person as the jerk of a cop I knew now?
I shuffled through the photos again and came up empty. Well then, what about the individual school photo for the year? They were usually taken on a different day than the club photos.
I glanced out the door, but Aizawa wasn’t in the main office. Could I ask someone else in the office for it?
I laid out the photos Aizawa had set aside for me and took pictures of each with my phone so I could show them to Akai and Goro.
“Excuse me,” I said, approaching the young man working at the front desk, “I need to find a yearbook for a particular year. I’d ask Aizawa-san, but she seems to have stepped out.”
He hummed, scratching his cheek, “I’m not sure where they’re kept. Is it possible you can come back later?”
“I can’t. Sorry. Do you think you’ll be closed tomorrow with the typhoon on the way?”
“Probably. The forecast is for damaging winds and rain. Aizawa-san is off discussing this right now with the staff.”
I nodded and sighed, unsure of what to do next, when the young man perked up.
“We provide copies of the yearbook every year to the prefectural library. You could go there and look at their copy.” He pointed in a vague direction out of the school. “The one up on the hill.”
“Really? I didn’t know that. How long have you been sending them yearbooks?”
“Since the 1960s. They have all the years in the stacks, but you can’t check them out.”
What a fabulous idea! I dashed out of the high school, checking the location of the prefectural library on my phone before tearing away up the hill to the library parking lot. Exiting the car, I tried to keep my hair in place as the wind whipped around me. Clouds raced by in the sky, indicating the weather was fast, and the typhoon was approaching. By morning, we would see the first bands of rain.
Inside the library, I asked for assistance right away. I didn’t know this library at all. When I was in school, I always went to the one in Chikata, and I never came here after school like many of the local students did.
The woman working the front desk directed me to a reference section along the backside of the library. She ran her finger over the spines of my high school’s yearbooks. I saw my own year fly past her fingertip and then land on Ria’s year.
“Here you go. You can look at it here, but you can’t check it out. Please just leave the yearbook on the table when you’re done.”
I hurried to the table and immediately opened the book, excited to see Kohei Watanabe for myself. But I knew something was wrong the moment the yearbook creaked open.
“Wait!” I called to the librarian, and she halted in her tracks. “There are pages missing.”
Cut clean from the inside binding, the page where Kohei Watanabe should’ve been was absent.
“What?” The librarian took the yearbook from me, and her eyes widened as she examined the interior. “How did this happen?” she demanded.
“I don’t know. This is my first time in this library.”
“But why did you ask for this particular yearbook?”
Her eyes drilled into me, and I felt like I was being questioned by the police. My scalp prickled.
“I’ve been looking for old photos of someone I know, a boy, at the time, connected to the disappearance of a young girl from my town over ten years ago. I don’t know why the pages are missing.”
Was it related or a coincidence?
The librarian looked at me for a long time before coming to some sort of judgment in her head about me. “If so, then there would be pictures of him from the year before... if this was his graduating year.” She went straight to the shelf again, but she wouldn’t find anything. Goro had said Kohei was only at our school for a year.
“I’m sure all the other yearbooks are fine,” I said, as she set a stack of them on the table. “I believe he only went to the high school for one year.”
I opened the vandalized yearbook and flipped through, stopping on Ria’s photo and looking at her smiling face. What happened to you, Ria? I searched forward and backward a few pages hoping to find other familiar faces, but no one jumped out at me. Akai and Tama had gone to different high schools, and I’d have to go back even farther to find Goro, Kumi, or myself.
After flipping through several of the yearbooks, the librarian seemed satisfied that none of the others were damaged.
“Huh,” she grunted, her hands on her hips. “I wonder why this was the only one. I’ll have to report this to my boss and see what she says to do about it.”
“I’m sorry to have caused drama in your day,” I said, standing and bowing. “I was hoping to come here, see what I needed to see, and leave without causing any problems.”
She gathered up the yearbooks from the table. “It’s funny that life never works out that way, right?”
She had no idea.
Chapter Twenty-Five
I checked the weather report in the car after the library. Rains from the typhoon would start sometime in the late morning, almost noon, the next day, so if I was going to get anything more done on this case, it had to be today.
I threw Yasahiro’s car into gear and headed back to Chikata. I couldn’t waste any more time wondering who Ria had dated after Itsuki. In my mind, Ria’s father was innocent, shattered to pieces after his daughter went missing. I wasn’t sure why people suspected him in her disappearance. He may have been strict, but according to Akai, he loved Ria more than anything. So maybe
he was gruff on the surface and that led people to believe the worst. Still, I trusted Akai’s assessment of him. He was out of the running.
That left Itsuki and the mysterious interim boyfriend. I wasn’t sure Itsuki was innocent, but he didn’t strike me as the jealous type. They’d broken up a few months before she went missing, and that fact was backed up by Itsuki’s father.
So, who was the interim boyfriend? I suspected Kohei Watanabe, and only for a few vague reasons. He was in the manga club with Ria, and he’d been friends with Tama, Ria, and their crew when he lived here in high school, making him a part of the “scene.” If they had dated, I wasn’t sure what Ria saw in him. He was mean and a bully, but mostly to me, though Kayo didn’t like him either. That kind of attitude could easily become violent. I had a hard time believing someone as sweet as Ria could date someone like him. Maybe she fell for the “bad boy?” Then I could’ve sworn he recognized Ria’s red sketchbook when he knocked me over outside the police station. But he may have wondered if it was mine? There were no outside markings to indicate the sketchbook belonged to Ria.
Deep in my gut, there were two main reasons I suspected him, and neither of them had to do with Ria’s past. One, I couldn’t find any photos of him from when he attended my old high school, and that was suspicious for no good reason. And two, he was always in the places I was, and I felt like I was being followed. From that one time outside of Ria’s old house to the taiyaki shop to the beer garden, he kept turning up where I hadn’t seen him before, always too close. Something about it rubbed me the wrong way.
Kayo would argue with me that I didn’t like him to begin with, so naturally, I suspected him. She wasn’t wrong. I didn’t like him, but only because he didn’t like me to begin with.
And it all came down to why. Why? Why did he hate me, anyway?
I pulled up to Akai’s house about fifteen minutes later. She’d asked me to come by, and this was the perfect time.
“You won’t believe where I’ve been,” I said, patting her dog, Buttercup, on the head as I entered her immaculate house. Akai made a space for my shoes right next to hers and ushered me inside.
“Just tell me.” She sounded weary and looked like she hadn’t slept in a week. “I’m too tired to guess.”
I sat in her extra desk chair as she poured herself a fresh cup of coffee in the kitchen. “Coffee?” she asked.
“No thanks. I’ve been cutting back. I’ve just been at my old high school, trying to find photos of the clubs Ria was in. I thought, maybe, she dated someone from there, and that could’ve led us to who she was with when she went missing.”
Akai sat opposite me at her desk and slurped her coffee. She was back in her usual housecoat, bright red with flowers and a pair of black socks. She probably hadn’t been outside in days.
“Get this. Each time I went to look for her, Kohei Watanabe was mentioned, but he was absent from all the group photos, the manga club and the kendo club too. So I decided to go to the prefectural library to look at the yearbook for that year, and his page was removed from the book!” I threw my hands up in the air. “Poof! Just gone. Cut out.”
“Kohei Watanabe… This is the new police officer in town, right?”
“Yes,” I stressed, leaning forward. I was excited to tell Akai everything. “He went to high school for one year with Ria-chan, and he was friends with Tama-chan, Ria-chan, and all their crew from Chikata. You may never have met him because he wasn’t here for very long.”
“Huh.” Akai squinted and leaned back in her chair to stare at the ceiling. “Kohei… Kohei… I think I may have met him once.” Then her chair snapped forward. “In fact, I think I may have seen him in the photos I’ve been archiving.”
She twirled around to her computer and set her coffee mug on the coaster next to her mouse pad. Clicking through multiple websites, a page loaded on her screen filled with small photo thumbnails, all sorted by date.
“I pulled these together over the last few days. From my cards, my archives, and then a card from Ria’s house I found yesterday on the floor behind her bed.” Her voice was slow as she scrolled through and stopped at a collection of photos dated to the year Ria went missing. The time stamp read, “April.” Ria had gone missing in May.
“Look at these. Do these people look familiar?”
It was a hanami party, a picnic amongst the newly opened cherry blossoms all along the river of the next town over. Most people I knew traveled there for hanami parties because the town had a festival to mark the occasion every year. In the photo, picnic blankets covered with people and baskets stretched out into the distance, but right in the foreground, I recognized a few faces.
“That’s Tama… and Ria… and I don’t recognize anyone else by name. I’m sure I met a few of them before though. Their faces seem familiar.” I squinted in at the guy sitting next to Ria. His head was turned from the camera, a cigarette in his hand, his shaggy bleached hair obscuring his face.
“I took these pictures,” Akai said, quickly clicking through them. “I was at the next blanket over with my high school friends.”
Akai paused on another photo. This one wasn’t much better though. The guy sitting next to Ria had his hand out, hiding his face from the camera.
“I remember this guy being really camera shy. Back then, everyone was into selfies and posting photos online, and he was having none of that. Said that someday he was sure that anything online would come back and bite him in the butt.”
He was right about that. Just look at all the dirt we had dug up on Amanda, everything she had ever put online and most of the stuff she hadn’t either.
Akai clicked through more photos, humming along.
“If this guy didn’t like getting his photo taken, are we out of luck?” I sighed as I sat back in the desk chair and scratched Buttercup behind the ears when she trotted up to me. “This whole investigation feels like a huge waste of time. I want to know what happened to her, just like everyone else, but I’m not willing to chase leads until the end of time.”
I had too many other things going on between my mom, buying a new house and land, and thinking about the future of the tea shop. Plus, what would happen once Mom lost even more of her sight? Would Yuna and Hirata take care of her? I certainly hoped they would.
My thoughts came to a screeching halt as Akai pulled back from her desk and pointed her finger straight at the screen. “A-ha! I knew I’d find one.”
Zoomed in on her monitor, the face of the boy sitting next to Ria was crystal clear in the background of a portrait Akai had taken of two friends making peace signs at her. The camera hadn’t been directed at him, so he wasn’t able to escape the lens like he usually did.
“Kohei Watanabe,” I breathed out. His hair was different, and at the time, he’d been skinnier than a rake. Akiko said the guy Ria had been dating was “skinny” and had “long, bleached hair.”
I brought my hand to my lips. Had Ria dated Kohei? Was he the “Hiromi” of her manga? If so, did the secret lover, Kuro, even exist? Maybe the manga was what Ria fantasized her life to be like, yet she was stuck with some sadistic animal like Kohei?
Ugh. I had no idea.
But this photo was reassuring. For a while there, I doubted Kohei had lived here all those years ago, but this was definitely him.
Those eyes. They lacked compassion and understanding, and ever since I’d met him in the early spring, I couldn’t shake them.
Akai rubbed her face and hit print. The printer warmed up and spit out the evidence.
“Here,” she said, handing over the photo. “It’s not much, but I’d give it to Goro-san and see what he thinks. It could just be a coincidence they were in the same social circle.”
I stared down at him, the hair on my arms standing on end.
“But, Akai-san, he could be the boyfriend in Ria’s manga.” My eyes filled with tears, confusion tearing at my heart and kicking it to the curb. “What if Kohei is the same guy?”
She shrugged
. “There are a million what-ifs here, Mei-san. We don’t even know if the manga is true to life. It could’ve just been her imagination. But I’m going to guess that there’s a reason Kohei’s back in Chikata, and it has nothing to do with his career in the police force.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
The blue sky wasn’t going to stay that way for long. I watched the clouds zip by overhead, racing for the northwest like some demon was chasing them. And it was.
“We’re expecting the first bands of rainfall to hit Tokyo around 11:00, and then the majority of the storm will drench Tokyo and neighboring Saitama prefecture through the late afternoon,” the meteorologist said, using his hands to encompass Tokyo and our area of the map. It was so rare to see our town listed alongside the bigger cities in our prefecture. I was sure I was in an alternate reality.
I glanced over at Yasahiro, sitting next to me on the couch in our apartment. He sipped his coffee and raised his eyebrows.
“Looks like I’m not going back to work today.” He stood up from the couch and stretched. “I’ll go call Ana and text everyone on staff to stay home. We’ll close up both Sawayaka and Oshabe-cha.”
“Yeah,” I said, distracted by the ongoing news conference on NHK. Several weather experts were talking about rainfall amounts over 200 millimeters and wind speeds over 110 kilometers per hour. It wasn’t the worst typhoon we’d ever seen, but it had been a long time a storm of this size would hit us head-on. Usually, Chikata only got scraped by the outer edges of a typhoon.
This would be different.
I wrapped my blanket around me as I pulled my phone from the charging cable and dialed up Murata.
“Morning, Mei-chan. Looks like we have quite the storm coming.”
I smiled as I thought of her on her own couch about a block away, drinking her morning tea. “It appears that way, yes. I’m going to keep Oshabe-cha closed today, so I wanted to let you know before you left to come by. Do you have enough water and food to last a few days?”
The Daydreamer Detective Returns a Favor Page 16