“Mei-san, It’s good to see you again,” Aizawa-san said, opening her office door and gesturing for me to enter. I’d been sitting in the main office waiting area for only a few minutes, enjoying the sound of classes being held down the hall and the staff answering phones or typing up notes. It wasn’t as if I missed school, but like most people, I craved the nostalgia of times gone past.
“Thank you for seeing me at such short notice,” I replied, bowing and following her into her office.
“It’s no problem, I assure you.”
I sat in the same chair I’d sat in last fall when I visited to find out more about Tama’s teaching schedule. It was here that I’d caught him in a lie about where he was when his father was killed. He hadn’t been teaching because he’d gone home sick. Would I be that lucky today?
“Did Hokichi-san brief you about why we need these photos?” I asked, eyeing the manila envelope on the desk.
She shook her head. “Only that you were in the middle of an investigation. What’s all this about?”
She was a serious woman but very curious — good traits for a school teacher and administrator.
“We’re looking into the disappearance of Ria Fukuda.”
“No,” she said, gasping and leaning back in her chair. I almost smiled at her reaction.
“Yes. Her father passed away recently, and my friend inherited the house. While I was helping her clean it out, we thought we might try to solve the case.” I shrugged my shoulders. “It seemed like a good idea at the time, but I admit the whole situation’s been nothing but confusing and stressful.”
“I’m sure. The police never got very far with the investigation. I wasn’t here then, but I was good friends with the former principal. Having a responsible and caring young woman like her go missing on his watch almost got him fired. There was nothing he could’ve done though. It hadn’t happened at school, and there were no prior warning signs. Just here one day and gone the next.”
“Did the police come and question anyone in particular?”
She lifted her eyes to the ceiling. “Hmm, not that I remember. I looked at the principal’s logs from that time, but he didn’t mention anyone specifically. The police questioned anyone who had been in the same classes with her. That’s about it.”
“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.