Miyuki maintained her composure until she got down the hill from her lawyer’s office. She wanted to weep, but instead she bought an onigiri rice ball and a can of hot tea from a convenience store and found a bench not far away. In her mourning clothes, people stared at her.
As she ate, she answered messages from her section chief at the bank. Because he didn’t really pay attention to the accounts, she worried he’d botch things. It would take more time to undo his damage than to stay on top of it. When she finished damage control, she read Taiga’s messages on the phone her lawyer hacked for her.
Taiga was still in touch with the other hosts at his former host club. She thought he’d broken off all contact with them. She searched for any comment about her or the girls, but the messages were mostly banter about the customers, middle-aged women with too much money.
Despite what she’d told the detectives, she met Taiga not through an agency but at his host club. At a bachelorette party for a college friend, she and her girlfriends ended up guzzling champagne at his club. When the cutest host of all—Taiga—appeared by her side, she felt like a college girl again. After he confided he planned to get out of the mizu shobai nightlife and go back to school, she invited him to become the girls’ babysitter.
Yes, she was drunk, and yes, she was lonely. Patrick was overseas, her mother was no help, and she was exhausted. She wasn’t sure why she trusted Taiga, but she did. He started the next day and became part of the family. Her mother liked him, and she didn’t like much outside of shochu and cigarettes.
One evening when she came back from dinner with clients, she joined him on the couch to watch a film. She was half asleep, so she didn’t notice at first when Taiga put his arm around her, and touched her thigh. She didn’t stop him. He knew his way around down there and she let him.
The moment he began kissing her neck, though, Kiri came in. “Momma? There are wild things under my bed.”
Miyuki clicked into mother mode and sat up. “Kiri-chan, that’s just a book. There are no wild things.”
“Taiga read us the book.” Kiri pointed at Taiga, who had moved to the other end of the sofa.
“Let’s go back to bed.” She took Kiri’s hand, put her in bed, snuggled into a pillow beside her, and fell fast asleep.
In the morning, Taiga acted like nothing had happened. And so did she.
She was surprised at herself, didn’t think she had that in her. But she realized she was just exhausted by the years of motherhood, work, and resenting Patrick for being gone. Still, she couldn’t imagine that Taiga was involved with Kiri and Jenna’s abduction and her mother’s death. He wasn’t like that.
Her lawyer had also found the address of the office manager from Nine Dragons, Arisa. The one time Miyuki met her, she was the epitome of a Tokyo woman, stylish, confident, and ready for something interesting every moment. Patrick said that when he and Kyle started their own investment firm, they’d hire her away. She would know something about Nine Dragons and about Patrick.
Miyuki dug out her mask as she walked to Akasaka-Mitsuke Station. She took the Marunouchi Line to Yotsuya and changed to the Chuo Line going west. She got a seat and reached in her purse for the bag holding the prayer beads, which Tamura’s secretary had gathered for her. She’d get them restrung before her mother’s funeral.
Her childhood had been a dull procession of her parents’ arguments, sports and schoolwork, and nice, plain friends who liked gossip and karaoke. There was only one bus an hour to the shopping mall in the next city. The day she came to Tokyo for university was the day she started living.
She wanted to create a big city life for her daughters. She filled Kiri and Jenna’s every moment with piano lessons, soccer, and after-school schools. The girls took to studying, and it was often Miyuki who dragged them out to Tokyo’s parade of kid-oriented pleasures—the Ghibli Museum, the Ninja Restaurant, Kiddy Land, Legoland, Disneyland. There were special kids’ days at museums and bunraku theater workshops, pottery, ikebana and calligraphy lessons. Kiri and Jenna became the sisters she never had.
At Kokubunji Station, Miyuki roused herself, promising herself they’d do all that again when the girls were back.
Out the south exit, she followed a winding street of dry-cleaning and flower shops, and an old liquor store with a dusty vending machine that once sold beer. Most of the shopfronts were buried behind sun-faded drapes and rusted pull-down shutters. Along the way, old homes had been torn down and new unit homes installed, as if one or the other was on the wrong street.
Miyuki stopped to check her navigation app. The back lane that branched off the street was crowded by rows of shrubs and shoulder-high walls. The cross lanes had school commute routes painted on the pavement.
At a small parking lot in front of a faded yellow apartment building, a black car, low and lean with tinted windows, angled across the parking spaces. Bicycles and trash cans had been knocked over. On the other side of the car, three men were shouting at someone. Miyuki checked her cellphone app. It was Arisa’s apartment.
She walked quickly and cautiously around the car. Sitting on a cinderblock wall, a woman in a big sweatshirt cowered between three men in black suits. They wore long overcoats and sported bright-colored ties.
Miyuki shouted, “Hey, what are you doing?”
One of the three guys turned toward her and thrust his chin out over his dark purple tie. “Get out of here.”
From her purse, Miyuki pulled out her rape alarm and yanked the strap. Over 130 decibels of ear-piercing siren shattered the silence of the back street and echoed down the cramped lane. She held the alarm up as she backed away.
Windows slid open in homes. Someone shouted from a second-floor balcony, and a man stepped out from his front door looking in all directions.
The three men stared and the one with the purple tie started for her.
Miyuki dug in her bag for her pepper spray, right next to the bag holding the prayer beads. She held it straight at him.
He stopped and turned back toward the tallest guy, the leader, who was glaring at Miyuki, as if the siren didn’t reach his ears. He waved the other two guys into the car.
They slammed the doors and backed over the fallen bicycles, crunching them as they spun into the lane, the engine roaring louder than the rape alarm.
The neighbors who had gathered in the lane leaped aside as the car sped away.
Miyuki wasn’t sure how to stop the siren, since she had never used the thing before. A middle-aged man took it from her and slid the pin back in, mercifully stopping the noise. The neighbors gathered around her and barraged her with questions.
Miyuki pointed at the woman in the oversized sweatshirt. She walked over and helped her up. “Arisa? I’m Miyuki, Patrick’s wife.”
Arisa pulled her sweatshirt tight around herself and stretched her back.
A policeman rode up on a bicycle. He dismounted and talked to the man who’d stopped the siren. Four more policemen arrived from different directions. The neighbor pointed in the direction the car sped off. Two of the policemen rode off in pursuit, but the car had a head start.
Miyuki stood beside Arisa as they answered the policemen’s questions. Arisa told them the car pulled up right when she got home. She had no idea what they wanted. She told the police she’d never seen them before.
It was cold, and the neighbors gradually drifted back to their homes. The police wearied of Arisa’s unwavering answers and promised to ride by for the next day or two.
Miyuki took Arisa by the arm and helped her up the outside stairs to her apartment on the second floor. The genkan was only wide enough for one person at a time. Miyuki followed her inside, turning sideways to scoot by the cardboard shoe box and convenience store umbrellas.
The kitchen was neatly arranged with a small refrigerator, folding table, and a single chair. Beyond the kitchen an eight-mat tatami room was full of clothes drying on laundry racks. The glass door to a unit bath opened to the right. Not one thing in the place had character. Arisa must have had a salary at Nine Dragons that could afford a bigger, better place than this.
Arisa washed her hands at the kitchen sink, wiped them on a towel, and turned to Miyuki. Her mask was torn and she threw it out.
“I’m looking for Patrick and my daughters.” Miyuki stood in her socks on the cold kitchen floor.
Arisa pulled her hood back. Her eyes were red, but not crying. “How did you find me?”
“You saw him, didn’t you?” Miyuki took a step toward her and Arisa flinched. Miyuki lowered her voice. “My girls are missing.”
Arisa looked down. “I saw him today.”
“Did you see the girls?”
Arisa shook her head. “He wanted to know about Nine Dragons, but I quit.”
“You what?”
Arisa shrugged.
“Where did you meet him?”
“At a coffee shop near the station.”
“And the girls were with him?”
“He said they were. And they were leaving Japan soon.”
Why wouldn’t Patrick at least call? She closed her eyes. “Who were those guys just now?”
Arisa put her hand on the chair, her eyes down. “I don’t know who they are.”
She realized it was worse than she thought. Maybe Patrick was taking care of the girls. But why wouldn’t he tell her anything?
“He was back to get the girls, he said. That’s all I know.”
“Why did you quit?”
Arisa stared at the kitchen floor. Cockroach traps were spaced along the edges. “I don’t know how they found me.”
“Are those guys connected to Nine Dragons?”
Arisa sat down in the single chair at her half-folded table and stared at the floor.
Miyuki took a step toward her. “They’ll be back. You shouldn’t stay here.”
Arisa raised her head. “You’re dressed for a funeral.”
“My mother…she…I’m arranging her funeral.” The cold seeped from the floor through her socks into her feet.
Arisa looked into Miyuki’s eyes. “Patrick needs to get out of Japan. So do you.”
Miyuki knew she was right. If Leung had been killed in his office at Nine Dragons, he wouldn’t be the last one. Patrick would be next. Or they’d find her to get to him. She didn’t want to think about the girls.