The Graveyard Apartment (14 page)

Mr. Shoji was in mid-chant when Eiko broke the silence, shrieking, “What do you think you're playing at? There's no time to be wasting on this kind of New Age nonsense!”

“Shush!” Mr. Shoji hissed, without raising his voice. Eiko closed her mouth, and a moment later something astonishing happened. From far away they heard the familiar
ga-tonk
, and then the elevator began to descend from the fourth floor: 4 … 3 … 2 …

Eiko, Tsutomu, and the Tabatas began to whoop and holler, while Misao breathed an audible sigh of relief. In the far distance an ambulance's siren could be heard—faintly at first, then gradually louder.

Mr. Shoji, his face suddenly haggard with exhaustion, picked up the envelope he had left on the floor and walked toward the stairwell. He was the only one who didn't pile in when the elevator came to a stop on the first floor.

The moment the elevator doors opened on the basement level, Misao charged out. The sound of a child crying—no, the sound of two different children crying—was echoing off the walls. Cookie's rapidly wagging tail was visible in the shadow of the storage closet farthest from the elevator.

Kaori must have heard the approaching footsteps because she came hurtling out of the darkness, calling, “Mama! Mama!” Eiko swept Kaori into her arms and held her tightly.

Cookie peeked out from the shadows with eyes that were oddly still and expressionless, but seemed to have a glint of madness, too. The dog shot a glance in Misao's direction, then went back to staring at whatever had been mesmerizing her before the crowd arrived.

“Tamao! Are you okay?” Misao found Tamao sitting up in the shadows next to the storage locker. Her face was shockingly pale, and from time to time a weak, whimpering sob escaped from her mouth. It was the same way she cried whenever Teppei got angry and scolded her, but in this case she was in genuine physical pain. One of her legs was covered with blood from the knee down.

Eiko and Mitsue both let out small screams. Misao was shaking all over as she squatted down and hugged Tamao, then looked more closely at the wound. Tamao's right knee was split open, and blood was spurting out in a steady stream. It looked as if she had fallen down in a puddle of blood.

“The ambulance is here!” Sueo Tabata announced from the other side of the room. “Come on, she's right over there.”

Three emergency medical technicians wearing white uniforms and surgical masks loped across the basement, carrying a stretcher. One of them did a quick examination of Tamao's wound, then turned to Misao and said, “This injury isn't as serious as it looks, so there's no need to worry. Your daughter should be fine.”

“But there's so much blood,” Misao said.

“As I said, there's nothing to worry about,” the EMT reiterated, through his white mask. “How on earth did she get this cut on her knee, though?”

Misao shook her head. “I have no idea,” she said.

The ambulance attendants scooped up Tamao's little body—which, to Misao's dismay, looked like one of those broken dolls you sometimes see discarded in a public trash can—and deposited her gently on the stretcher. Misao suddenly felt weak and woozy, and Eiko had the presence of mind to reach out and prop her up. “I'll go with you to the hospital,” Eiko said.

“Thanks, but there's no need,” Misao replied. “We'll be fine by ourselves.”

Misao was following close behind the stretcher that bore her injured daughter when something made her pause and look over her shoulder. She could see the back of Cookie's head, and she noticed that the dog's attention was focused on a spot on the back wall, near where Tamao had collapsed.

It struck Misao as peculiar that a sociable dog like Cookie would be oblivious to all the noise and activity in the basement, but apparently there was something even more interesting beyond that wall. Maybe a mouse, or a cat? Misao shrugged, then turned and ran to the elevator.

 

8

April 23, 1987

Teppei was absentmindedly watching Misao administer (or rather, attempt to administer) Tamao's after-dinner dose of medicine, but he was thinking about his daughter's injury.

As the ambulance attendant had predicted, the wound wasn't as serious as the volume of blood might have suggested. The chief of medicine at the nearby surgical hospital to which Tamao was transported had carefully stitched up the cut and prescribed the appropriate medications, while declaring confidently that it wouldn't be necessary for the patient to remain at the hospital overnight. Nevertheless, Tamao was clearly in a great deal of pain. She cried nonstop through the entire process, and her parents were greatly relieved when her normal, healthy color returned the following day.

The doctor told Teppei and Misao that there was no need to worry about infection, and assured them that as long as they gave Tamao the prescribed meds on schedule, fed her nutritious meals, and made sure the affected leg was kept immobile, she should recover completely in ten days or so. After this healing period Tamao would be ready to go back to kindergarten, and any scarring should be minimal. In fact, as Tamao grew, the scar on her knee might very well disappear entirely.

So there was really nothing to fret about—at least, not where Tamao was concerned. However …

“Ooh, yuck!” Tamao said. Misao had been trying to force the foul-tasting liquid medicine down her daughter's throat, and when Tamao involuntarily swallowed it, tears sprang to her eyes and she stuck out her tongue in disgust.

“Unfortunately, there's no such thing as medicine that tastes like candy,” Misao said with a strained expression. That wasn't true, of course, but Tamao accepted her mother's white lie at face value. “If you don't take this medicine like a good girl, germs could get into your cut and it might get infected. Then it wouldn't get better, and it would start to hurt again, too. We don't want that to happen, do we?”

“What kind of germs?” Tamao asked.

“Germs that would make the cut on your leg feel sore and painful. Then the bacteria—the germs—might spread through the rest of your body, and you could end up running a fever and having a really bad tummyache, among other things.”

“Would I not be able to walk, then?”

“That's certainly a possibility. Wouldn't that be awful? That's why you need to be patient right now, and keep taking your medicine.”

“I just want to play,” Tamao moaned.

“I know, and you can play as much as you want just as soon as you get better. You'll be able to start going to kindergarten every day, too.”

“But the medicine tastes yucky, and I hate the way it feels in my mouth.”

“I know, sweetie. You only have to hang in there a while longer.”

Tamao was sitting on the living room couch, nervously jiggling her uninjured left leg up and down. “Damn it to hell!” she blurted out.

Misao grimaced. “Who taught you that? Where did you hear it?”

“Oh, Tsutomu says it all the time: ‘Damn it to hell.' Kaori says it, too.”

Misao shrugged and looked at Teppei with an expression that was meant to convey,
A little help here, please?
But Teppei's thoughts were elsewhere, and he didn't meet her eyes.

There was something he just couldn't wrap his mind around. Three days earlier, when he got the phone call saying that Tamao had been injured, he had immediately left the office and rushed to the private surgical hospital where she was being treated. As soon as he arrived at the examination room, Misao went to a nearby restroom to try to wash the worst of the blood out of the clothes Tamao had been wearing.

Teppei had thought of a number of questions on his way to the hospital. “Is it safe to assume that my daughter's cut was caused by a foreign object?” he asked the doctor right away. “Maybe there was something sharp in one of the storage lockers, and it somehow came into contact with her leg?”

“Strictly speaking, I can't really endorse that theory, Mr. Kano,” the handsome doctor responded, with a faintly smug smile. He didn't appear to be much older than forty, and the professional gravitas conferred by his white coat was the only thing that kept him from looking like a libidinous lounge lizard.

“What do you mean by that?” Teppei asked.

The doctor turned his face, with its remarkably rosy, lustrous cheeks, toward Teppei. “If we consider the circumstances, there are a few things that might have caused a laceration this deep,” he said briskly. “It would have had to be something very sharp—for example, an old kitchen knife, or a sharp-edged piece of stainless steel. However, even if a static object like that had chanced to graze the skin, it wouldn't have caused this type of gaping wound.”

Reluctantly, Teppei raised a troubling question: “Do you suppose the children might have gotten into a fight, among themselves?” If that turned out to be the explanation, dealing with the Inoue family could become very awkward in the future.

The doctor just smiled again and said, “No, that doesn't appear to be what happened. Your wife was asking the same thing, though.”

“Then what
did
happen?”

“Well, it's an unusual case, but this is what I'm thinking right now,” the doctor began slowly, reflectively rubbing the back of his neck. “It might be what we call a weasel slash: that is, a flesh wound caused by contact with some type of sharp object propelled through the air by a sudden gust of wind. The scientific term for the phenomenon is ‘atmospheric vacuum,' and it occurs fairly often in the mountains when people are out skiing or hiking or whatever.”

“‘Weasel slash'? So you're saying that something can just come along and slice someone's leg open for no reason, out of the blue?”

“No, I didn't say ‘for no reason.' As you know, around this time of year, in early spring, it isn't unusual for a sudden burst of wind—weasel wind, if you will—to crop up in a matter of minutes, almost like a miniature tornado. That gust can pick up a rock or a jagged piece of wood, and if someone's extremities chance to be in the path of the sharp-edged flying object, that person might conceivably get slashed and sustain a wound like this. The fact is, something of the sort happened to my older sister, many years ago. Her leg—or rather her ankle, to be precise—was sliced open in the blink of an eye. It was really something to see.”

“You don't say,” Teppei mumbled. “So I guess we just have to look at this injury as a freak accident, and chalk it up to being in the wrong place at the wrong time?”

The doctor looked thoughtful. “The only hole in the theory I mentioned is that the kind of wind that could cause a weasel slash doesn't usually develop indoors in a closed space. Are you absolutely certain your daughter was inside the entire time?”

“From what I heard, she and her friends were playing down in the basement of our building.”

“Even so, I'm very nearly positive that the injury must have happened outdoors. It's possible your daughter didn't notice it at the time. Then, after the children went inside to play in the basement, the cut began to bleed profusely, and that's when she finally realized she was injured. That makes sense to me.”

“But wouldn't someone notice such a deep cut right away?”

“Not necessarily,” the doctor said. His supercilious smile seemed to say,
Don't worry, you aren't the first ignorant parent I've had to explain this to.
“Children have an extraordinary ability to keep on playing obliviously through pain or fever,” he went on. “You'd be amazed. I once had a patient, a five-year-old boy, who fell off the slide at a playground and broke a bone in his leg. It was a clean fracture, but he picked himself up and continued to run around on the damaged limb for the next few minutes, as if nothing was wrong.”

Teppei wasn't satisfied with the doctor's answers to his questions, by any means, but a moment later Misao came back into the exam room, so he didn't pursue the conversation.

After he and Misao had taken Tamao home in a taxi and put her to bed, Teppei decided to take a look around the basement. Evidently someone else had already been down there—probably one or both of the caretakers, although it could have been Eiko Inoue—because the entire floor had been mopped, and no traces of Tamao's blood remained. Teppei might not have been able to locate the site of the accident (or of its aftermath, if you subscribed to the doctor's delayed-reaction theory) if Misao hadn't spoken of finding their daughter next to an unused storage locker at the rear of the basement. That gave Teppei an idea of where to look, and when he noticed some extra-large puddles of mop water in the immediate area, he was certain he'd found the place. He stood there for a long moment, gazing around.

All the storage compartments were padlocked, and there was no way to open them without a key. Teppei tried running his hand along the outside edges of the closest storage locker. If someone was racing around the basement and accidentally crashed into one of the lockers, that person might conceivably sustain an injury that broke the skin. However, it was still difficult to imagine a scenario in which a small child collided headfirst with a locker and only sustained a cut on one knee.

Teppei went over to his own storage compartment, unlocked it, and carried one of the old chairs to the back of the basement. He clambered up onto the seat and surveyed the area, but the only thing atop the tidy rows of storage lockers was several months' worth of dust. Teppei didn't see anything that could have made a scratch on a human being, much less opened up a flesh wound.

From his elevated vantage point, he did spy Tsutomu Inoue's ancient tricycle. It was lying on its side in one of the corridors between the lockers, and Teppei got down off the chair and went over to examine it. There wasn't a single bit of bent or broken-off metal on the tricycle, and he couldn't find any dried blood, either.
So I guess it wasn't the attack of the killer tricycle,
he thought self-mockingly.
But what else could it have been?