Book Girl and the Famished Spirit (17 page)

I heard Tohko turn around.

“Ellen Dean? That’s what she told you?”

I twisted my head around and saw a complex expression on Tohko’s face. Something had clearly caught her attention.

“Yes.”

Tohko lowered her eyes and flipped through a book. She seemed to be thinking about something else, though, her eyes never moving over the page.

I pulled a huge flat case out of the closet, and as I tugged at the stiffened zipper, I asked, “What is Ellen Dean anyway? It’s not the housekeeper’s real name, is it?”

The zipper refused to open.

“No, it’s not. Ellen Dean is—”

“Ack!”

The zipper suddenly gave way and the bag fell open grandly to either side, spilling out painting supplies, brushes, and a sketchbook. So it was an art case.

“Oh my gosh! Are you okay?”

Tohko had jumped at my shout, too. I scrambled to gather up the art supplies and then picked up the sketchbook.

“I’m sorry I scared you. It looks like this is Amemiya’s sketchbook. It says ‘Hotaru Amemiya, 1-B’ on the back. Our school doesn’t use letters for the classes, so this must be from middle school.”

Flipping through it, I saw many drawings of flowers. Charcoal
sketches had been colored in with watercolors. It looked like Amemiya was pretty talented: Her pictures were so precise it was like looking at a photograph.

“Oh—”

“What is it?” Tohko came closer and peeked at the sketchbook. Then her eyes widened just as mine had.

It was a drawing of a boy around ten years old with disheveled chestnut-colored hair and eyes like glass beads. His clear eyes were painted brown with a hint of blue over them, a mysterious color that felt isolated.

When I turned another page, there was a picture of the boy slightly older, fourteen or fifteen. I turned the next page. He had grown again and looked seventeen or eighteen now.

“This boy… Could it be Aoi?”

“But this sketchbook belongs to Amemiya, and if she’s the one who drew these pictures, that means she would have known about him in middle school.”

“Hmm… that’s true.”

Tohko closed her eyes and sank into thought.

I turned the next page.

There was a sheet of paper folded in half between the pages. When I opened it, I saw the alphabet. At the top it said “From the K in Kayano,” and beside the letters
K, L, M, N,
and
O
were the numbers one through five.

I remembered Kayano telling me that her name was a hint, and my heart beat faster.

“Tohko, this looks like the guide to Kayano’s number code.”

“Let me see.”

From the K in Kayano… Tohko must have realized what that meant, too. She took a red marker from a drawer and stabbed it at the paper, writing numbers next to the letters.

If K was one, L was two, and M was three, then P was six, Q was seven, and going back to the beginning, A was seventeen and B was eighteen.

At the end, a little apart from everything, the apostrophe was twenty-seven and spaces were twenty-eight.

We filled everything in and then took the paper over to the wall, tracing each number out with a finger and filling in the right value.

“I’m back, Kayano—”

A shudder ran through my body, as if cold water had just been dumped over my head.

These words were written by Kurosaki and Amemiya… And the photos of Kayano taped to the wall and the pictures in the sketchbook… When I pieced it all together, an outlandish thought occurred to me.

What if Aoi Kunieda hadn’t died like everyone thought? What if he were still alive? What if he had changed his name and come back for revenge? What if he had made Amemiya a substitute for her mother since she so closely resembled Kayano?

Tohko was staring at the wall, her face ashen. Her lips moved and a strangled sound made its way out of her.

“You know… I always suspected. I thought I’d read a story like this before… I thought the setup was very similar to the passionate, excrutiating, uncompromising story I knew, but I didn’t have enough to be sure. But… but if he’s Aoi—if he intended to get revenge on the man who married Kayano and everyone around them,
then this story is exactly like
—”

I caught the smell of lamp oil, then gasped and looked at the door.

A thick liquid was seeping in under the firmly shut door.

“Tohko, look!”

“Eek! Wh-what is that? A leak? A flood?!”

“No, it’s lamp oil.”

“What?!”

Someone was on the other side of the door, and we heard the loud splash of liquid hitting the floor.

It was clear what they intended to do, and we paled.

“N-no! Stop!” Tohko shouted, beating against the door, but there was no answer. Instead, we heard a flame burst into life and smelled something burning.

“Ow!” Tohko jerked her hand away from the heat of the doorknob.

“Watch it! Get back, Tohko!”

I grabbed her shoulders and pulled her back just as orange flames crawled under the door like a swarm of earthworms.

She brought the tank full of oil to the basement and splashed its contents over the walls and floor.

When she had seen them arrive from a window on the second floor, her heart had tightened and her body had shaken feverishly.

A girl wearing a sailor suit and a boy in a short-sleeved shirt and pants. They looked like the boy and girl she had seen in old photographs.

They’re here!

Aoi and Kayano—!

They had escaped the darkness, deeper than the abyss of space, and come back from the distant past as ghosts to stalk the world of the living!

Aoi and Kayano came in through a door on the first floor, looking for her. They would find her and tear her soul from her body and try to inhabit the freshly emptied vessel.

Thunder pealed, the wind shook the trees to the point of breaking, and huge drops of rain pelted the window.

What could she do? What was there to do? She had to hide. Had to run away.

Her stomach knotted painfully with merciless force; her bony fingers had been fit stiffly together.

Ah, their footsteps were moving away. Going into the room in the basement. To their secret room.

The sky lit up and thunder rumbled. Pierced by the light, she flew from the room as if by divine guidance and ran without an umbrella through the rain, pouring down on the world like a
muddy river, to the shed outside, where she caught up a tank of oil.

She would end it all. She would burn them up completely this time, these people who had twisted her destiny.

Trudging barefoot through the tepid mud, she panted wildly, clutching the tank in her arms, and headed toward the basement.

Kill them—kill them—she would kill them both.

As she splashed the oil, she heard a voice crying, “Stop, stop!” It would avail them nothing to beg for mercy. They had died once. There was nothing wrong with sending them back to hell.

She dropped a match onto the oil-soaked floor, and at last she could smile in satisfaction.

“Good-bye, Aoi. Good-bye, Kayano.”

“Nooo!”

Tohko tore the blanket off the bed and tried to beat the flames down with it. I beat at them with a pillow, coughing painfully. There were tears in Tohko’s eyes and she coughed, too.

“This is really bad, Tohko.”

“Agh! They’re going to burn this complete collection of MacDonald children’s books! There’s a new translation out in paperback, but I’ve always dreamed of eating the entire twelve-volume set in hardcover! I refuse to watch something so delicious get turned to charcoal right in front of me!”

“Why don’t you worry about yourself burning to a crisp instead?!”

Why was I making jabs at Tohko at a time like this?

The small room filled with smoke, which stung my eyes and
made them water. I was coughing too much, hurting my throat. I couldn’t breathe.

Was I going to die here with Tohko?

Tohko was still fighting to put out the fire. Swinging the blanket down with a desperate look in her eye, she yelled, “Nooo! They can’t burn up! Books aren’t any good when they’re well-done! You can’t cook them that long!”

I was utterly astounded by her devotion to food.

All at once, we heard the sound of several pairs of footsteps rushing down the stairs, accompanied by a jumble of sounds and voices, like an avalanche of pounding water, and the sounds of a jet lifting off and people shouting.

The door opened, and I was dumbfounded to see Maki appear, holding a fire extinguisher and wearing her school uniform.

Why was she here? Was she stalking Tohko or something?

Tohko’s eyes popped out, too.

Maki turned the fire extinguisher to the burning floor. The chemicals spewed out with a loud
bwoooosh!
and deposited a white foam.

Behind Maki were two adult men, working efficiently to put out the fire. One of them looked familiar. It was the guy who’d driven the limousine when Maki came to get us from the police station two days ago.

When they’d put out the fire, Maki told the other man to bring down a first aid kit and towels; then she looked at us. She quirked her sensual lips into a bewitching smile.

“That was a little close. Now how do you intend to show your appreciation?”

Night had not yet fallen. We were in the workroom in the music hall and finally felt like ourselves again.

Takamizawa, who had helped to rescue us, brought us tea in thin, white porcelain cups. He was tall without a hair out of place, and he wore a well-tailored suit. Apparently he worked for Maki’s grandfather. He had also been the one to bring a first aid kit from the first floor and treat Tohko’s burnt hands.

He gave a crisp bow and left the room, leaving only Tohko, Maki, and myself.

Tohko was hugging the sketchbook she’d brought from Amemiya’s house to her chest, sitting in a metal folding chair, looking down at the ground with a tight-lipped expression on her face. Her right hand was bandaged.

Tohko had been like this the entire time in the car, her face tense as she took the student handbook out of her bag and looked through it, then furrowing her brow even more, all in total silence.

In contrast, Maki was in a buoyant mood.

“The tea he makes is top-notch. You need to try it. What’s wrong? You’re so sullen. Well, I suppose you must be in shock. You
were
almost roasted like a Christmas goose.”

Without lifting her head, Tohko murmured, “Hey, Maki… How come you were at Hotaru’s house?”

Holding her cup of tea in one hand, Maki leaned back against a windowsill and smiled faintly.

“I told you in the car. Since you two were running all over the place about this thing with Hotaru Amemiya, it made me wonder. I decided to do some investigating of my own. When I got to Amemiya’s house, I saw a window was broken and the room was in total chaos and there was smoke billowing up from the basement, which caught me by surprise. I’m just glad I got there in time.”

“… Is that really all?”

Tohko set the sketchbook on the table and rose to her feet.

“A girl in Hotaru’s class said that Hotaru had stolen your boyfriend. I had no idea you and she were in a love triangle.”

“Seriously. This is the first I’ve heard of it myself.” Maki shrugged it off with a strange expression. “I wonder how these crazy rumors get started.”

“You said that in middle school you and Hotaru were in the art club together, but you didn’t know each other very well. But you actually knew about Hotaru and Kayano and
who Kurosaki really is
, didn’t you?”

Tohko’s and Maki’s eyes locked.

Tohko’s clear, intelligent black eyes and Maki’s brown eyes, usually sparkling with superiority, stabbed at each other.

I gulped and watched their confrontation.

“I don’t know what you mean, Tohko,” Maki replied, her lips carved into a smile. The haughty, formidable look on her face was exactly the same as the one she’d used on me the day before. It was no easy task to get the truth out of this girl. Did Tohko have any chance against her?

After staring at Maki for a few moments, Tohko started walking.

Her shoes clicking on the floor and her braids swinging, she stopped in front of a bookshelf. She pulled a book out with long, slender fingers and read the title in a strong voice.

“
Wuthering Heights
—Emily Brontë’s problematic work of the nineteenth century, right in the middle of the Victorian era.
Wuthering
refers to the violence of a storm blowing across hills that can offer nothing to oppose the passing rain and wind, as well as to the sound they make as they rage over the land.”

I was confused. What was the connection between Maki and that book?

With the book still in hand, Tohko began to talk, her words like a river overrunning its dam.

“The story begins in 1801 with a misanthropic gentleman named Lockwood who has grown weary of life in the city and is visiting a stout manor on a windblown hill. Lockwood listens to his cook Nelly tell the story of a man and woman from Wuthering Heights and the oppressive history of love and hatred between the people around him.

“In the summer of 1771, at the beginning of the harvest, the master of the house, named Earnshaw, has just come back from business in Liverpool, where he picked up a small boy. Dirty and dressed in rags, the boy is given the name of Earnshaw’s oldest son who has passed away—Heathcliff—and he begins living at the mansion at Wuthering Heights.

“Earnshaw also had a daughter, Catherine, and his younger son and heir, Hindley. Hindley is jealous of Heathcliff, who has become the chief object of his father’s affection, and he begins to hold darkly warped feelings toward him. But Catherine befriended Heathcliff immediately. The two would go out to the moors surrounding the house nearly every day to play. It was as if one soul were shared between two people; they were utterly inseparable.

“But six years later, Earnshaw died and Hindley took everything
from Heathcliff. He thoroughly scorned him, despised him, abused him, and treated him like a slave.

“A large gulf developed between Catherine and Heathcliff’s stations, one a fine lady and the other a servant.

“During all this, Catherine makes the acquaintance of Edgar, the heir to the Linton family, which lives in Thrushcross Grange at the foot of Wuthering Heights. The son of a good family and indulgently educated, Edgar is transfixed by Catherine’s beauty, and Catherine accepts his advances and decides to marry him. When he finds out about it, Heathcliff experiences such despair that he disappears from Wuthering Heights.”

As I listened to Tohko, the rhythm of her voice like the moaning wind gusting over the moors, I thought of Kayano and Aoi.

The young boy acquired on a trip, the manor on a windswept hill, the strong-minded little girl who lived there—the boy and girl uniting their souls and spending all their time together, but the little girl’s father who had watched over them dies and everything changes.

The boy becomes a servant, and because she is a fine lady, the girl can no longer speak to him casually. Then the little girl grows up to be beautiful and betrays the boy, becoming the wife of a rich young man.

The story Tohko told of Heathcliff and Catherine was exactly like Aoi and Kayano’s story!

“Three years later in the autumn of 1783, Heathcliff has acquired property and tidied himself up and he returns to Wuthering Heights. He pretends to be a placid gentleman on the surface, but he has begun his revenge and first drives Catherine’s brother Hindley into a trap, snatching the estate of Wuthering Heights and all his property from him. Then he seduces Edgar’s younger sister Isabella, Catherine’s sister-in-law, and elopes with her.

“Catherine begins to lose her mind, and after refusing to eat,
she falls ill and dies giving birth to a baby girl. In losing Catherine, who was the other half of his soul, Heathcliff is cast down even further into a pit of raging solitude and despair: He is transformed into a demon bent on revenge.

“After Hindley’s death, Heathcliff takes over the house at Wuthering Heights and treats Hindley’s son Hareton like a servant, never teaching him to read or write. Then he plots to marry the son his wife, Isabella, bears, Linton, to Catherine’s daughter, who is given the same name as her mother.

“Swept up in Heathcliff’s evil schemes and lured to Wuthering Heights, the younger Catherine is imprisoned in the manor and forced to marry Linton. While she’s trapped there, her father, Edgar, breathes his last after an illness and Catherine’s husband, Linton, inherits all of her property. However, Linton is sickly and soon dies, and his father, Heathcliff, gains control of the manors and property of both the Earnshaw and Linton families, and the younger Catherine, now a widow, lives with him in the house at Wuthering Heights.”

The story of people complexly intertwined, entangled, hurting one another, and seizing whatever they can from each other—Tohko related this daunting story with such rawness and heart-wrenching pain that I felt as if it had actually happened. Then the figures of the people I knew overshadowed the story one after another, fitting together like puzzle pieces.

Kurosaki had married Amemiya’s aunt.

After Amemiya’s aunt and father died, he became her guardian and took control of her father’s company. Then he got rid of the house Amemiya had grown up in and moved to Kayano’s old house on the hill to live there with Amemiya. He had prevented anyone from getting close to her, using every conceivable means.

Why had Kurosaki done such things?

What was his goal?

“This story is very similar to the situation in which Hotaru finds herself. At first, I didn’t pick up on it, either. I needed a Heathcliff in order to declare that her story was
Wuthering Heights.
Someone seeking revenge with that same unflagging energy, like an evil spirit of old—someone who radiated with intensity, like the raging winds gusting over Wuthering Heights.

“Hotaru was nothing more than an anorexic girl living with her uncle who was deeply troubled by something. Even after I met with the housekeeper and found out about Aoi, I couldn’t be certain. Aoi had left the story early on, and I thought he was dead.

“But if Aoi was still alive—if he changed his name, changed his position, and came back for revenge…”

Tohko paused and let out a breath and then started up again.

“According to what Konoha heard from the woman who works at Kurosaki’s company, Kurosaki’s eyes are weak and so he always wears lightly tinted sunglasses, and his hair is dyed light brown. She said he had black hair before he took over, but he bleached his hair right as he assumed control, and the board members disapproved. But was Kurosaki’s hair black originally? Maybe his real hair color is brown, and he just stopped dying it black. And he might wear sunglasses because he doesn’t want people to see the color of his eyes.”

Tohko wasn’t a detective. She was a book girl who simply read and used her imagination.

So this wasn’t a deduction; it was a fantasy.

But the sound of Tohko’s voice and her ideas gripped my heart and were pulling me along in their wake.

“Aoi was of mixed parentage, and I heard that his hair and eye color was lighter. You know his name means ‘blue’? Apparently Kayano named him that because from a certain angle, she could see a hint of blue in his brown eyes.

“If Kurosaki is in fact Aoi, then he might try to change his
appearance by dyeing his hair and wearing sunglasses so people who knew him wouldn’t recognize him.

“And if my guess is right and Kurosaki is Aoi, that makes him Heathcliff and Hotaru is Catherine Earnshaw’s daughter, Catherine Linton, and the setup of
Wuthering Heights
is complete!”

She fixed her clear black eyes on Maki.

Her voice still echoing in the workroom, Tohko pressed Maki further. “The reason I didn’t recognize the plot was because you, Maki, already knew about it. Konoha told me that when I went to see the housekeeper, you told him that I’d gone to see Ellen Dean. In
Wuthering Heights,
Ellen Dean is the housekeeper who worked for both the Earnshaws and the Lintons, but everyone calls her Nelly.

“She’s also the narrator who observed the entire story and untangled the complex drama of Heathcliff and Catherine’s love-hate relationship and explained it for Lockwood!

“When Konoha told me you called the housekeeper Ellen Dean, I started to understand a lot of things. The burned notes and the notes with splatters of blood on them—you were the one who put them into our mailbox, weren’t you? Maki?”

Tohko opened the hardcover book in her hands and started turning the pages quickly, as if she was speed-reading.

“All the words in those notes appear in
Wuthering Heights.
‘The herd of possessed swine’—that’s something Lockwood yells at Heathcliff during a visit to Wuthering Heights when he’s set upon by the dogs they kept in the house. ‘The herd of possessed swine could have had no worse spirits in them than those animals of yours.’ It’s a reference to a parable in the Bible, and there are many other words and phrases in
Wuthering Heights
that trace back to the Bible.

“ ‘I shall make you swallow the carving-knife’—that’s a line Hindley directs at Nelly when he comes home drunk. ‘A bird of bad omen’
is something Nelly tells Isabella when she confesses that she’s fallen in love with Heathcliff, and Heathcliff tells Nelly he’ll be painting the walls with Hindley’s blood after he’s taken some abuse from Hindley. ‘Its nest in the winter, full of little skeletons’ is something Catherine says after she’s descended into madness and pulls the feathers out of her pillow and starts arranging them on her bed.

“And ‘I’m come home’—those are the words of
Catherine’s ghost
tapping on the wall with her tiny hand, begging to be let inside on stormy nights. After that, Heathcliff opens the windows and bellows into the darkness that swirls with wind and snow, ‘Come in! Come in!’ ”

Tohko snapped the book shut.

Maki had a smile on her face. There was dark amusement in it, as if she had been waiting for the moment when Tohko would denounce her, and as she surrendered, it seemed a devilish joy glinted in her eyes.

“You would have easily been able to pull off the business with the ghost in the book club. You were the one who first revealed that Hotaru was cursed. Remember? And you told me where the housekeeper worked, because you thought that if you had me investigating Kayano, I wouldn’t think about Hotaru, right?