Ink and Ashes (13 page)

“I’m sorry this happened,” he said.

Thanks for nothing, I wanted to say, even though I knew the idea of them immediately finding the person who’d done this and taking them out of the school in handcuffs was asking a little much. “Well, thank you.”

“No problem,” he said. “That’s what I’m here for. Let me know if you think of anything that would help us find the kid who did this.”

“I will.” My lip stung—I must have bitten down on it. The muscles in my jaw wouldn’t relax.

“I’ll let Mr. Tama know you’re on your way to the lounge,” Mrs. Davis said over the top of her monitor.

Why was this happening to me? Had I done something to deserve this? No. No one deserved this. Blood pounded in my head and my chest. Whoever was responsible for this truly was sick.

The halls had emptied, the students already absorbed into classrooms. I pushed open the door to the women’s restroom and washed my hands over and over again. I shut off the water and steadied both hands on the sink. Only twenty-five minutes of study hall remained and school would be out.

With thoughts ricocheting in a million directions, there was no point in staying. It was Friday, and after the day I had, I deserved an early weekend. Whatever Mr. Tama had to say, I’m sure it could wait until Monday since it was practically the weekend anyway. If I didn’t get away from school, I was going to combust.

I could go to the front office and check myself out of school, saying I wasn’t feeling well. It wasn’t entirely a lie. Mrs. Davis said she wasn’t feeling well either after that. She would probably ask if I’d talked to Mr. Tama, though.

Forrest would have happily given me a ride home, but I had energy to burn, and our house was less than two miles away. I pushed open the school’s doors and walked into the sun. A light wind carried a mixture of smells: earth, decaying leaves, and wood. A few dark clouds gathered ahead with what I hoped was the promise of rain. I strolled along Franklin Avenue until I reached the first intersection.

As I waited to turn left and cross to Highland Drive, a black SUV crawled up the street. I hadn’t seen it when I left the school. I couldn’t see its license plates from here, so I told myself that it probably wasn’t the same one.
There are black SUVs all over Utah,
I told myself.
You’re overreacting.

When the light turned green, I crossed at a steady pace. Highland Drive was always busy, and I would need to stay on the sidewalk near the road for a while if I wanted to get home as fast as possible. The SUV turned and pulled into the right lane. As it approached me, it slowed down, creeping behind me at a snail’s pace. Other cars behind began to honk and change lanes to pass.

Maybe I was right after all.

My pulse picked up speed. Every muscle lit with a new intensity, and I sprinted forward. To the right of me was a tall concrete wall that continued up a small hill. If I could make it just after the hill crested, I could run into Reams and hope the grocery store was a public enough place that he wouldn’t continue to follow me.

The car accelerated enough to keep up with me, allowing me to see into the front seat. Behind the driver’s wheel was the same hooded man with sunglasses.

I reached in my pocket for my phone. My fingers slipped as I tried to keep up my pace and dial at the same time.

I typed 911 and was about to hit Send when the car sped off, driving so far it disappeared from my line of vision. After pausing a moment to cancel the call and look around to be sure the car was gone, I decided I wasn’t going to wait for it to return. I sprinted the rest of the way, peeking over my shoulder every few seconds.

Running two miles was normally an easy jog, but I was desperate for air when I crossed through our back door. I threw off my shoes and wandered to the couch in the family room, where I collapsed. My heart continued to pound, so I rested until my breathing slowed to a regular pace. I stood and got myself a large glass of water. As I drank, I paced around the island, trying to put all the pieces together. So much had happened. I set the empty glass in the sink and fell back down on the couch.

The events at the school could possibly be connected. But what did the SUV have to do with all of this?

Somehow, during all of my questioning, I must have drifted off. When I opened my eyes, a shadow fell over me.

I gasped and looked up. My dad was standing above me.

“What are you doing home?” he asked.

“We need to talk,” I said.

“Yes, we do,” he said. “Where were you? You missed your meeting with Principal Alvarez, and I’ve been trying to call your phone for the past half hour.”

Crap.

WE WALKED TO
Dad’s office and my mind churned over where to start.

“Well?” Dad asked as we walked. “Where were you?”

“The short answer is I was running home.” I staggered my steps to make sure I trailed a little behind.

“And what’s the long answer?”

I crashed into one of the leather chairs in the office. Dad sat across from me behind his desk, arms folded.

“I think someone might be harassing me at school. I don’t know if all these events are connected, but it started with someone accusing me of cheating—”

“Which is why you were supposed to be at the principal’s office.”

Yes. We had established that already. “Anyway, someone broke into my locker last week and took all the pictures I had hanging up. And then today, someone put a box in my backpack with four eyeballs. Real eyeballs. Mrs. Kenton said they were from a bird, maybe something like a raven or a crow.”

As I described the box and how it was all packaged, Dad’s face grew dark, and he seemed more concerned than I expected him to be. “Do you still have the box?”

“No. I gave it to the officer at the school, and he said he would file a report and submit it into evidence.”

“Did your brothers get boxes too?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t see them after class.”

“Do you have any idea who would have done this?” he asked. The more he fired questions at me, the more it felt like my stomach was filling with sludge.

“Maybe Chase Phillips. I don’t know,” I said, my head in my hands. “I figure it has to be someone at school though, because I had my bag with me the whole morning. I never left the school. They must have slipped it in walking down the hall or something, and it would have been after fifth-period calculus, because I know it wasn’t there when I closed my bag, and before sixth period, which was history.”

Dad leaned forward, resting his weight on his elbows.

“Claire,” he said. “I need you to think hard. Is there anyone at school who would know a lot about Japanese culture?”

“No one besides Fed.” Up until this point, I had only been angry, but I began to wonder if there was something I had missed. “Why?”

“Nothing.” Dad closed his eyes and massaged his forehead.

“You can’t do that,” I said. “You know I’m going to go crazy and try to figure out what everything means.”

He glanced up and sighed. “Yes, I know.” His shoulders dropped. “The Japanese are very superstitious people. They never give anyone anything in a group of four because the number four,
shi
, is a homophone for the word death.”

“You’re worried because there were four of them?” That could have been a coincidence. I still didn’t understand why he was so concerned.

Dad shook his head. “Your name was written in red, which they don’t do because red is the color used for names on graves. My guess is that the eyeballs were from a crow, not a raven or other bird. Japanese people believe if you catch a crow’s eye, something bad is going to happen—although I would guess the saying refers to crows that are alive.”

“So this is really bad.” I shrank in the chair. “What do you want me to do?”

“I don’t want to jump to conclusions yet, but I need you to be careful and make sure you call for help,” he said. “If anything like this happens again, you need to let me know immediately.”

I nodded. Because the eyeball incident had happened at school, I’d assumed another student had done it. But if there really were Japanese ties behind the present, I had to think it was possible that everything was connected somehow. The cheating, the stolen pictures, the eyeballs, and the black SUV. It felt like rocks had collected in the pit of my stomach. Any frustration or fear I had about the isolated events now added on top of each other, forming one big pile.

He rotated his chair, and I noticed he had changed the lock to the drawer I had broken into. The wafer lock had been replaced with what looked like a disk tumbler lock, which was a lot harder to pick, but he had completely underestimated my skills.

It occurred to me, and had on many occasions in the past few weeks, that I knew very little about the man in front of me—the man whom I had called “Dad” for over a decade. When he married Mom, I don’t think I was old enough to understand what was going on or care where he had come from because I knew he was meant to be part of our family. But now I wasn’t sure what he did or where he went for work. I didn’t know how long he had known my father or how he had really ended up with Mom.

Something heavy took root in my stomach. Dad didn’t seem to be letting on how serious he thought the situation was. And I hadn’t even told him about the car yet. If there were a chance he had been involved in my father’s death, could he also have been involved somehow with what was going on now? I didn’t want to believe that, but too many things had been kept from us.

I took a deep breath and straightened my shoulders. “Why didn’t you and Mom ever tell us that you knew my father so well?” I stretched my toes to the burgundy carpet.

Dad’s eyebrows scrunched up, and he leaned forward. “Why do you ask?” His voice had an edge, and I knew I had to tread carefully, but I also needed answers.

“I saw the picture of you at my father’s funeral holding a bone with your chopsticks. Grandpa said
family
members put the bones in the urn.”

He nodded but didn’t say a word. After a few moments, he straightened some papers on his desk and pushed them aside. “You remember how my father, your grandpa, was a Buddhist reverend?”

I nodded.

Dad steadied his arms on the desk. “Well, when your father came over from Japan, he literally had only the clothes on his back. I remember walking home one night after watching one of the high school football games. Henry, your father, was huddled in the alley next to the temple where Grandpa served. At that time your father was still Hideki Kawakami. I invited him into the temple and introduced him to my father, who gave him some food and a place to sleep. Grandpa always tried to help as many people as he could, but there was something different about your father. Perhaps it was that your father looked to be about the same age as I was at the time. Grandpa took him in and got him a job at the local diner.”

How could they not tell us this before? There was only one reason I could think of and even then, I still didn’t understand how all the secrets were related. “Did he . . . know my father was in the yakuza?”

Dad raised his eyebrows, blinking. “How did you find out?” His voice was low and serious, with a flat tone that unnerved me.

Why did it matter if we knew about our father?

I dropped my head and stared at a loose thread on my shorts. “I found a letter written to you by my father, and in a part that we translated, it sounded like he might have known he was going to die, but he couldn’t have known he was going to die of a heart attack. Unless that wasn’t how he really died.”

To get a good read on his expression, I glanced up. Dad’s eyes opened a little wider but only for a second. “Go on.”

“I knew there were things you guys weren’t telling us, so I thought maybe he hadn’t really died that way, and I ordered a copy of his autopsy report. That’s when I found out about all the tattoos. And then I found some pictures in the attic. One second. I’ll be right back.”

I ran to my room and gathered the pictures we’d been poring over from the middle drawer of my desk.

Back downstairs, I handed him the pictures of my father with Osamu Sekiguchi and sat back down in the leather chair.

He lowered his brow. “You found the letter and funeral pictures in my office, and then these pictures were in the attic?”

“Actually, I found the letter in one of those boxes in the garage with my father’s old stuff.” Well, I had. Just in a journal that I’d found years ago.

His chair creaked as he shifted and massaged the back of his neck. “And you didn’t think it might be important to give the letter to us before Avery
ate
it?”

My parents had been lying to us, so it seemed reasonable to me that we wouldn’t have given it to them, but the tense muscles in Dad’s face suggested otherwise. “I guess I didn’t know what to think when I found out you were hiding this from us, and I didn’t know if there might be more we didn’t know.”

Dad leaned back in his chair and took a deep breath. “Sometimes your persistence is a little scary. I don’t know if I should be impressed or angry.”

The tight grip he had on the arms of his chair and his narrowed eyes didn’t give a vibe that he leaned toward “impressed.”

He held up the pictures and studied them one by one. “Yes,” he said. “Your grandfather knew where your father had come from.”

“And you were okay with that?”

His face relaxed into a smile. “At first I resented the way Grandpa cared for him and felt like he had brought Henry into our home because I had somehow failed him as a son. Hideki Kawakami became Henry Sato to hide from the yakuza, but changing his name also reflected the life changes he had made.”

“I was able to get information by following paper trails,” I said. “Wouldn’t the yakuza be able to do the same thing to find him even though he had changed his name?”

“Oh, there were paper trails,” Dad said. “Your father wanted nothing to do with that lifestyle when he left. But his rank in the clan was high enough that they would come looking for him if he escaped, so your father had help from someone who had access to a lot of money. They left paper trails that led mostly to Korea but some led to Brazil, Hong Kong, and Los Angeles. Airline tickets, real estate purchases, financial investments, fake documentation.”

“Fake documentation?” I sat straighter. “Do you mean he wasn’t really a citizen?”

“He was a legitimate citizen. His friend helped your father get a job so he could get a green card, and he started working at your grandfather’s diner, and met your mom. And once he married your mom, it was easier to become a US citizen.”

“That still seems fast, though. I swear Ashley Cheung once said it took her dad almost twenty years to become a citizen.”

“The fact that his friend had a lot of money also made the process a quick one. Everything was legal, but his friend was very fluent in business politics and knew how to work the system.”

I scooted to the front of my chair and leaned my elbows on his desk. “Are you sure my father changed when he came here? Not just his name, but as a person?”

“Positive. Over time, I grew to love your father like a brother, and when I left to attend college, we wrote to each other often. We were close.”

I loved hearing about what their relationship had become. Once Parker left for college, I’d probably email him, but I couldn’t see myself taking the time to send anything handwritten. “Do you still have his letters?”

Dad nodded. “I do. I have the one when your father met your mother at the diner, one from when they were married, letters announcing the arrival of kids and other big events. They’d waited so long for children, more than ten years, and then all of a sudden it was like the stork dropped a big bundle. I was so proud of all he had done with his life. As you know, I entered the military immediately after college, but he would send me pictures of you guys all the time.”

Behind him was a set of pins hanging on the wall. He had collected them from various places he had been assigned. Mom had laid them out on a piece of felt and then had them framed. She gave it to him as an anniversary present a few years ago.

“So how did
you
end up with Mom?” I asked, the most relaxed I’d been all day. I nearly forgot about all the strange recent events that caused me so much anxiety.

He leaned back until the leather chair groaned. “Claire, the day your father died was one of the saddest days of my life. When I saw your mother on the day of the funeral, standing with the three of you next to her, I felt . . .
compelled
to take care of all of you. It seemed like the honorable thing to do—something your father would have wanted. Through all of the letters and pictures your father had sent, I felt like I knew you—as if I had grown to love you and your brothers before I had even met you.” His mouth curved into a smile, and his dark eyes sparkled.

I could have curled up in that story. Maybe there were bad people out there who wanted to do bad things to me—and maybe the rest of our family and friends—but he wasn’t one of them.

For a moment he stopped, perhaps unsure if he should continue. But finally he shifted his weight forward. “So I took a leap of faith and moved to be near your family, not knowing what would happen, and spent time with your mother. She had her hands full with you and the boys, and my support came at a time when she really needed it.”

I stared at him, speechless. This seemed like a pretty important part of my history which should have been made known to me—us—much earlier than now. “When were you guys planning on telling us all of this?” I bit at a fingernail.

“It never seemed necessary, but I think you’re old enough to understand now. Your father did a lot of things we had always hoped to protect you from. Mom thought if you knew how well I had known your father, you would ask too many questions, and you guys were so young. At the time we got married, we wanted to keep it fairly quiet, so we eloped. For your mom to get married so soon after your father’s death seemed like a potential scandal for the people in Hawaii who knew both of our families. We didn’t want anyone to think I had taken advantage of a widow, and many traditional Japanese people felt she had not been grieving long enough to consider remarrying.”