Book Girl and the Famished Spirit (13 page)

“So I was walking with Nanase when these scary old guys started talking to us… I was sure they were propositioning us, so I smacked one of them in the face with my bag and we ran away. Then they got even scarier and started chasing us, so we tried to jump over a wall. But then Nanase’s foot slipped and she fell…”

Tohko was sitting in a metal fold-up chair in a room at the station, her hands clasped in front of her knees and her body scrunched up. Her face was flushed as she told me and the detective about how she had been taken into custody.

“I may be a book girl, but even I couldn’t have imagined that people who looked like crooked loan collectors were detectives.”

“So sorry we looked crooked to you, but you forced us to get even tougher when you whacked us with your bag.”

An older detective popped his head in. I could see how his hard-bitten face had made Tohko want to run away as soon as he spoke to her. He had a meaty face and build, and if he had a fake sword, you could have mistaken him for the villain in a pro wrestling match.

“If I see a couple of girls in school uniforms walking through a disreputable neighborhood like that, I have to speak to them as
part of my duties, you realize? But then I get a bag swung at my head!”

“… I’m
sorry
.”

She slumped so much that her braids brushed the ground.

Why in the world had Tohko been walking through a sleazy place like that?

And what had happened to Kotobuki?

Tohko slumped down even further when I mentioned her.

“They took Nanase to the hospital. She broke something, and they said it’s going to take a month for a full recovery…”

Whoa. I was speechless. The detective scolded Tohko.

“I told you to call your guardians. What are you trying to pull, calling your buddy instead? Get your family over here, pronto.”

“That’s probably a good idea, Tohko,” I agreed gently.

But Tohko shook her head fiercely.

“N-no! I can’t ask Mrs. Sakurai to come and pick me up from the police station.”

Was that Ryuto’s mother? I could see how someone would have trouble asking that of the people she boarded with.

“Do you want me to ask my mom to come?”

“We can’t do that, either. It would destroy her image of me as a steadfast, reliable mentor. I already can’t ever call your house again.”

She had picked an odd time to start worrying about appearances, though I did recall my mother complimenting Tohko before on what a polite young woman she was.

“Then what are you going to do? They’re not going to let you go home in my custody.”

“Don’t you have any adults you can call on at times like this? Any old archaeologists who are still young at heart?”

“No, I don’t. And even if I did, he would be excavating ruins in the Amazon and would only come back to Japan once every four years, max.”

“Any older ladies, then? You must have at least one saintly aunt who teaches piano.”

Tohko looked up at me desperately.

“I don’t. Oh—but if you need a reliable, though sinister upperclassman with all kinds of connections who has pull with the police, who paints with one hand and conducts an orchestra with the other, I think I know someone like that.”

Tohko looked as if she was about to cry.

So it took us an hour.

Maki talked to the police and Tohko was released without incident.

“Konoha was the one who called you, Maki. Got that? It wasn’t me, okay? This was Konoha’s decision without my consent. If you’re going to demand something in return, ask Konoha, not me.”

Tohko emphasized this again and again to Maki in the car on the way home.

“Got it. Then maybe I’ll have Konoha strip for me,” Maki offered casually. She’d come in a limousine with a chauffeur.

“I don’t think so.”

For crying out loud, wasn’t Tohko the one who had called me, blubbering to please come get her because she’d gotten arrested? Why did
I
have to get naked?

But Maki had been the one leading her on in the first place, and if Maki hadn’t forged those notes or sent her black lilies, Tohko would never have gone so overboard.

Maki was looking at the red flush of humiliation on Tohko’s face with an exultant grin.

Why was everyone around me so selfish?

“So? What were you doing with Kotobuki? Why were you wandering around some shady neighborhood where the police would pick you up?”

“W-well…”

Tohko seemed to find it difficult to speak, and her voice cracked.

Maki smugly offered, “Why not come to my workroom? I’d like to hear the truth about this ghost that’s been troubling Tohko, too.”

“Ohhh, you have Jane Austen!”

The moment we set foot in the familiar workroom, Tohko walked toward the bookshelves ranged along the walls and let out a deliberate cry of admiration.

“Dickens, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Mary Shelley, Virginia Woolf, Mansfield, Somerset Maugham—it’s a smorgasbord of English literature! Spectacular… I recommend this one.”

She took down Jane Austen’s
Pride and Prejudice.

“Austen was an English writer born in 1775. Her style is light and cheerful. It’s like sitting in a Victorian garden under a pure blue sky eating ham or salmon sandwiches and petit fours adorned with nuts or fruit while you gossip with your friends. And she’s the ancestor of all romantic comedies. Elizabeth and Darcy’s love is so
thrilling.
A simple rundown of the plot would be—”

Just as Tohko was about to launch into her diatribe, I cut her off coldly.

“Don’t try to distract us, Tohko. We didn’t come here for a lecture on English literature.”

“Hmph.”

Tohko frowned and looked at me sulkily.

It seemed that she still held a grudge against me for blowing off the ghost investigation and that she didn’t want to tell me quite so easily what she’d gone to such trouble to find out.

But after Maki coaxed her—“He’s right, Detective. Lay out the results of your investigation for us, and please, don’t rush it”—Tohko got into the mood soon enough. Returning the Austen volume to the shelf, she puffed out her scant chest and said,
“Heh-heh… If you’re going to twist my arm, I suppose I have no choice. Konoha, while you were skipping out on the club to go have fun with those girls, I continued my investigation into the recent ghost incidents on the sly and zeroed in on the truth.”

I had a feeling it hadn’t been very “sly” at all, but…

In fact, I had a feeling she had come to my class and caused a stir every day, but… In any case, I simply said, “Oh really?” to keep her talking.

“First I looked up the name Kayano Kujo in the student registers and discovered that she’d been enrolled here as a student seventeen years ago. I delved a little deeper, and it became clear that she had quit school in her second year to get married and soon after had a little girl. The name of the man she married was Amemiya. Do you know what this means, Konoha?”

“… Hotaru Amemiya is Kayano Kujo’s daughter.”

I already knew that, so I said it without any real emotion. In contrast, Tohko’s voice grew even more high-pitched.

“That’s right! Hotaru’s mom died when Hotaru was in elementary school. The ghost is actually Hotaru’s mom. Her mom, Kayano, is possessing her!”

Wait
… Hadn’t Tohko huffed that there was no such thing as ghosts and that this was some kind of conspiracy? Tohko raced on with her story, despite my amazement at the 180-degree flip in her position. Plus, she was suddenly talking about Hotaru as if they were friends.

“I was convinced that Kayano must have some kind of unfinished business, and I spread the wings of my imagination. So I intensified my investigation. Then, via
certain channels
, I received a tip that a housekeeper who had worked at the Kujo family home and who had known Kayano since she was little was running a costume pub. So I went to pay her a visit.”

Certain channels?
She was being pretty cocky about this, considering Maki was standing right there. And there was a second housekeeper? Ms. Wada had worked at Amemiya’s house, but apparently there had been someone similar at Kayano’s house, too.

But all of these questions vanished from my mind when the words
costume pub
passed Tohko’s lips.

“A costume pub?! How could you go somewhere like that?”

I recalled the packet of tissues I’d seen in the club room with the name of a shady-looking business on it… But why would a housekeeper suddenly open up a costume pub? There must have been some serious drama in her life to inspire that!

“Even I was a little scared. The street it’s on isn’t the sort of place a serious young woman should be walking alone, and since the bar isn’t open during the day, I had to go at night.”

Tohko looked at me reproachfully.

I knew she was thinking,
If you had been there, you could have gone for me.
But I didn’t want to make my costume pub debut at such an impressionable age. I wasn’t interested in that kind of thing anyway.

“But Nanase said she would come with me.” Tohko’s face glowed. “Nanase is
such
a
won
derful girl. I was at the library, griping about how awful you are, and she nodded with such
conviction
and told me she understood. Bad-mouthing you really brought us together.”

How was I the awful one again?
Please don’t get carried away bad-mouthing your friend and become kindred spirits with Kotobuki over it.
I seriously considered quitting the book club just then.

Anyway, so Tohko and her new best friend Kotobuki had gone to the costume pub together.

“Why did you go in your uniforms?”

Of course they’d attract the detectives’ attention walking around a place like that in school uniforms.

“Because visiting someone else’s home is a formal occasion, so of course, we wore our uniforms. Everyone does that, Konoha—it even says to in the student handbook.”

I wasn’t so sure about that…

“Besides, if we went in our regular clothes, then we’d look like customers, wouldn’t we?”

“That seems better than being mistaken for someone who works there dressed up as a high school student.”

“Oh no, how did you know? Some weird old guy wearing cat ears started talking to me. ‘Hey, are you new? What’s your name? You wanna come sit at my table?’ Blech.”

Maki spluttered with laughter.

Tohko threw a glare at her; then she turned her face curtly away and resumed her story.

“Anyway, despite experiencing such ordeals, we were able to hear what the former housekeeper had to say about Kayano.”

“That’s great. Did you find out what Kayano’s unfinished business was?”

“Yeah. In childhood, she had promised herself to a boy.”

My heart skipped.

The image of Kayano sitting on a black heat-resistant desk, smiling in the moonlight, floated into my mind.

… I’ll tell you about him.

He was closer to me than anyone. He was a part of my soul and my other half.

Could that boy be…?

“She said his name was Aoi Kunieda and that he had lived in
Kayano’s house ever since they were small. Kayano’s father went abroad for work, and once he brought back a little boy who spoke almost no Japanese. He was an orphan and apparently his father was Japanese, but he had been working in an awful place. Kayano’s father couldn’t stand by while that happened, and so he took custody of the boy and brought him into his family.

“The name Kunieda was taken from the butler who worked for the family at the time, and the housekeeper said that Kayano named him Aoi after he arrived.

“Aoi was one year older, and the two of them grew up together as if they truly were brother and sister. They were glued to each other inside the house and out. The housekeeper also told me that they shared a diary, which they wrote in using a number code. When she asked them what the numbers meant, Kayano giggled and told her, ‘It’s our secret.’ ”

That’s a secret only he and I know.

I heard an echo of Kayano’s sweet voice from the night in the school yard.

So the numbers were secret words that Kayano and her childhood friend had used to talk to each other!

But wait—how had Amemiya known that?

I couldn’t believe as Tohko did that the spirit of Amemiya’s mother was actually possessing her.

Even if Amemiya didn’t have access to those memories when she wasn’t Kayano, they were still the same person, so anything Kayano said should have been data stored inside Amemiya.

In which case, when and where had Amemiya found out about Aoi Kunieda and the number code?

Maybe she’d heard about it while her mother was still alive?

“The event that altered their destinies happened when Kayano
was in her fifth year of elementary school and Aoi was in his sixth. Kayano’s father passed away after a sudden illness. Since her mother had already passed on, there was no longer anyone in her family to take care of her. Kayano was a minor, and she needed a guardian to manage her fortune. So her father’s cousin came to the estate to be her guardian.”

I had heard this story before, and my heart filled with foreboding.