I woke up on Tuesday morning, warm in bed, the alarm beeping incessantly at 7:00. Right. I wanted to wake up early and go for a run before harvest time. Today, we had pumpkins that needed to be brought in, and some of them were so large, we’d hired one of the local workers to come and help out. He’d be here at 9:30, so I had enough time to run and eat some breakfast.
I stared at the ceiling for a little while, willing myself to emerge from the warm cocoon of blankets to the chill of the morning. Mom turned on the space heater in the main room when she worked between there and the kitchen, and the kotatsu could be turned on at a moment’s notice, but that didn’t stop my room from being ice cold each morning. It wasn’t even winter yet! Winter would be brutal.
I threw off the covers quickly and jumped into my warm terrycloth robe, one of my favorite belongings. Opening the shades on my window, weak morning light filtered in and highlighted the complete disaster I called my room. Okay, I’d had it. I had to clean it right now or else I’d hate myself. Plus, my clean running gear was in there somewhere and it would take a bulldozer to find it.
First thing, I opened my closet and prepared it to accept my clothes. I threw open the doors and cleared out the old stuff from high school — papers, folders, and notebooks. I could recycle or burn those later if I needed to. I opened a cardboard box, pulled out my clothes still on hangers, and hung them in the closet. When I was a teen, I had this closet converted from all shelves to one for clothes as well. It used to be a place to put a futon, but I wanted something modern and easy. I emptied two large boxes of clothes onto the rod in the closet and then looked them over. I wondered if I should keep these? I could sell most of them to a second-hand clothing shop and make a few yen. It wasn’t like I was going to find a new job any time soon, and I’d shrunk a whole size in the last four weeks.
With those boxes emptied, I opened my door and threw them into the main area.
“Mei-chan, you’re up?” Mom called from the kitchen.
“Yes! I’m finally cleaning my room.” I turned back to the disaster and sighed.
“Coffee?” Mom called again.
“Sure!”
I picked through my pile of clean laundry and started to fold clothes, actually putting said folded clothes into my empty dresser.
“Wow,” Mom said, handing me a cup of steaming hot coffee with milk and sugar. “I’m beginning to see the tatami.”
“I’d had enough.” I sipped the coffee, set it on my dresser, and kept folding.
“I’m heading outside soon. Let me know if you need anything.”
I nodded before she left, speed folding and sorting. Way at the bottom of the pile, I found my workout clothes and set them aside. I went through two more boxes, finding things like knickknacks and photos and placing them on my dresser and windowsill. There was a stack of bills, all paid now, I could add to the burnables. I gathered up my dirty clothes and threw them in the hamper, but at the foot of the bed, I found a pink and orange furoshiki bundle. Oh no! The package Chiyo gave me when I arrived in Chikata!
I set the bundle on my bed and opened it hesitantly. If I remembered correctly, she gifted me a whole bunch of newspaper clippings and her homemade sweets, and they were probably pretty gross by now. Why hadn’t I eaten them when they were fresh? The sweets, wrapped in wax paper, were growing mold, so I placed them in my pile of burnable trash, then I withdrew the newspaper clippings she gave me. I almost threw them in the pile as well, but stopped, familiar names and faces swimming out of the random text.
Sitting down on the bed, I began to read through them. The top article detailed Midori Sankaku’s plans for the town, their partnership, and projections heading into 2018. In the accompanying photo, Shin Tajima and Fujita Takahara shook hands and walked around the town. I wondered where Takahara was now and if he was angry with me for turning him down.
The next article was from the business section showing Chiyo outside of her new bathhouse. The article stated that she hoped to open before the end of October and that the whole community looked forward to the new ownership.
I flipped through a few more articles about my old high school athletic teams doing well today and the shake up in town as new places of business opened. I paused on an article about Yasahiro and Sawayaka. He garnered an entire half page on his time spent in Paris, the breakup with Amanda, the restaurant he worked at in Tokyo, and now his success at Sawayaka. I set that one aside. I wanted to put it on my dresser so I could see him every day.
I read through more of them becoming bored by the second. Chiyo had always been the town gossip, and her newspaper collection was legendary, though Goro started her on clipping them and recycling anything older than five years. Otherwise her home would have been a fire hazard. It was just like her to find out I was returning to town and try to catch me up on everything Chikata related.
The second to last article made me stop and pay attention. Another news story about my old high school, the one where Tama currently taught, boasted about the after school clubs’ successes. In a photo of Tama with teenage kids in the woods, he pointed at plants and the kids examined them. The caption read, “Tama Kano, chemistry teacher and head of the survival skills club, uses his love and knowledge of botany to instruct students on edible wild plants.” Another inset photo showed him posing in his home garden.
Home garden. Botany. Survival skills. Edible and non-edible wild plants. Poisonous plants.
I jerked my hand out and reached for my computer, powering it on and heading straight for my browser. I googled, “Japanese poisonous plants” and clicked on the top link entitled “Three Major Poisonous Plants in Japan.” Aconitum, or Wolfsbane, was the top number one plant on the list. I’d seen these purple flowers all around the area, and I’d always known they should never be picked, but I didn’t know they were this poisonous. Wikipedia said, “If ingested, the initial signs of poisoning are gastrointestinal including nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. This is followed by a sensation of burning, tingling, and numbness in the mouth and face, and burning in the abdomen.”
Senahara said Kano had stomach problems for a few months until one day he suddenly got better. Is it possible that…? No. I examined the photo of Tama again, smiling in his garden and with the kids he teaches. But I knew he was capable of menace. He practically threatened me in my studio. He had seemed cold and aloof, not warm and paternal like he did in these photos.
Had he used his knowledge of poisonous plants to try to kill his own father? And when that didn’t work, he smothered him?
A wave of chills traveled up my spine and made all the hair on my head stand up. I felt sick imagining this. How did Tama do it? Slip it in Kano’s food? He would have had to be at the house every day and put it in food his father ate regularly. That seemed impractical. Maybe he made a liquid of it? Put it in his saké? But then Tama may have accidentally poisoned Akiko as well, and Akiko had never complained of being sick.
I closed my computer and imagined every possibility. I walked through their house in my head and tried to remember everything I last saw when I was there — the kotatsu, the pile of tins next to the TV, the stack of blankets. Nothing jumped out at me. It had to be something!
I picked up the phone and dialed Akiko. It was almost 8:00, and she must have been getting ready for work or on her way out.
“Morning, Mei-chan. How are you?”
“I’m good,” I said, playing cool. “I was just cleaning my room before heading out for a run.”
She laughed. “Won’t that take a solid week?”
“Ha, ha. Funny. Yes, it was super messy but I couldn’t find my running clothes. Hey, I was wondering about something…”
“What’s that?”
“Remember when your dad was sick over the summer?”
“Yeah,” she said, sighing. “He was sick every day for a few months. Lost a lot of weight.”
“What was wrong with him?”
She hesitated, and it sounded like she was opening a car door. “They thought it was a parasite or something. So we put him on a restricted diet and gave him antibiotics and he felt better after that.”
“And that was it?”
“Yep. Sad that he had to be sick so long before he died of something totally unrelated. Tama-chan says the police think he killed himself. I don’t know…” Her voice fell off. “Anyway, it’s over now, and I can’t bring him back.”
Over now? That was a weird choice of words.
“Akiko-chan, maybe he was poisoned all those months he was sick?”
Silence for a few heartbeats. “Poisoned? Mei-chan, what’s gotten into you?” Her voice sounded angry, so I began to backpedal.
“Nothing, nothing. I was just thinking—”
“Please. Poisoned? That’s ridiculous. Look, I’m on my way to my first patient of the day, so I have to go. Just…” She sighed again, sounding as worn out and tired as she did a few days ago. “Just let this go. I know you want to help, but continually dredging this back up again is too much. I need to move on.”
“Okay. I’m sorry. Really. I just wanted to help.”
“Don’t.”
“Okay.”
“I’ve gotta go. I’ll see you tomorrow night at the Kutsuro Matsu opening. Let’s put this all behind us.”
“Okay. Sure. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
We hung up and I looked between the phone and the clippings of Tama. I couldn’t help feeling that this was the missing piece of the puzzle. It set off every warning bell in my head. Didn’t Goro tell me to go with my gut?
I dialed him, thinking that if anyone was going to take me seriously, he would.
“Poisoned? Are you kidding me?” Goro’s voice raised almost an entire octave. “Whatever gave you that idea?”
Refusing to work properly, my voice cracked and my lips bumbled. “He was sick for a long time with stomach problems. What if Tama had tried to poison him and it didn’t work? So he moved on to smothering Kano-san when he didn’t get results.”
“You realize you’re describing a cold-blooded killer, right? Do you really think Tama is capable of that?”
I didn’t know! I held two very distinct images in my head of Tama and neither of them seemed real anymore.
“No.” In my heart, I hoped Tama wasn’t capable of that. If he was, I was in deep trouble.
“We’re running out of ideas, and the prosecutor is close to moving on since we have no real suspects. You know they only ever go to court if the evidence is rock solid. Tama hasn’t complained about the death of his father, and Akiko is the only other person mentioned in the will. With no one throwing an uproar and no evidence, this will die out and be done with in no time.”
I nodded at the phone, a tear leaking out of my eye, down my nose, and falling onto my robe. The poor man. He never had a chance.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Mei-chan. You’ve done good work here. Don’t forget that.”
“Thanks.”
I hung up the phone and glanced over at my running shoes. I should’ve gotten dressed and headed on out. I should’ve put this behind me. No one cared enough about Kano’s death to do anything about it. Tama was untouchable. Akiko was resigned. And now the police were ready to move on, too. Mom still cared, but who else could I persuade to my side?
I scrolled through my address book until I saw Yasahiro’s full name.
“Morning, Mei-chan. How’d you sleep?” His voice sounded tired but not depressed. Nothing like Akiko’s.
“Did I wake you?”
“No, but I’m still in bed.” I imagined him warm in his apartment, tucked into bed, maybe reading something on his phone when I called. I wondered what he wore to sleep in. “Mei-chan?”
“Sorry. I was just, uh, cleaning my room.” Nope. I was daydreaming about being in bed with him and what that would be like. My brain was all over the place. “And I found these old newspaper clippings about Tama-chan.”
“What were they about?” he asked, yawning again.
“He’s the head of a survival skills club at his school.”
“Oh, I did that for a year. I was a pro at the wild vegetables. I’ve been picking those things since I was a kid.”
“I’m not surprised, considering.”
He laughed. “I still go out and pick them in the summer. I miss that. Winter is not my favorite season.”
“Me neither.” Despite the fact I was going to go out for a run, I lied down in bed and pretended I was next to him. “I wanted to ask you about something. Because I called Akiko-chan and Goro-chan, and they both think I’m nuts.”
“I doubt that, though I think you’re crazy to always be running away from me. Come on. I’m not that scary.”
I couldn’t believe he could make me blush over the phone. “Sorry.”
“Anyway, what’s up?”
I told him my theory about Tama and the poison, and he hummed on the other end.
“Maybe the problem here is that you’re all too close to him to see him for who he is now.” I sat up in bed and stared out the window. Huh? “You’ve known him his whole life, so your vision is colored by what you already know.”
“Hmmm, maybe so.”
“I barely know Tama-san. I’ve seen him around town a lot, heard about him through Chiyo-san or Haruka-san, and then I’ve talked to him a few times at Izakaya Jūshi. If you told me he was arrested because he poisoned his father to death, I’d believe it.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely. You know what I don’t like about him? He looks straight through you. When he talks to me, it’s like he isn’t looking at me, he’s looking at someone right behind me. He’s distant, like he’s here but not. It’s hard to explain. It reminds me of some of the books I read. He’s out of phase with reality, living in an alternate universe.”
I imagined Tama, fading out from the world, slowly, his form becoming indistinct and hazy.
“It’s the look of a psychopath, I swear,” he said, yawning.
“Why didn’t you say anything before?”
“Before? When?”
“Before we went to Izakaya Jūshi.” It was Yasahiro’s idea to go and find Tama there, to hopefully ask him questions and find out more about what he was up to.
“Ah. Well, I wanted to go on a date with you. It didn’t turn out the way I planned. I thought he wouldn’t show up and we’d spend the evening talking and drinking, and I’d take you home and kiss you.”
I laughed at the sincerity of his confession. “You got the ending you wanted.”
“I hope to get the whole package next time. Remember, I said I’d woo you. Speaking of which, any chance you’re available on Thursday night? We could go to the city for the evening. I know a great rooftop place to have drinks and then we can head to my friend’s restaurant. I’d take you on a Friday or Saturday, but Sawayaka is booked solid for Friday and Saturday night through the end of January, and I have to be there.”
“I understand. I’m fine with Thursday night. It’s not like I have to be at work the next day.”
“Exactly. And I’ll see you tomorrow night. I’m catering so I have to be there early with the van and everything.”
“Okay. I’ll see you then. Have a good day, Yasa-kun.”
“You too, Mei-chan.”
I hung up and stared out the window. I hadn’t been seeing my world with fresh eyes. All of my daydreams and thoughts were based on two decades of seeing the same faces, the same buildings, the same relationships.
Yasahiro had seen everyone here for the first time in the last year, and if he thought Tama had the look of a psychopath, then I had no reason to doubt him.
I had every reason to doubt everything else.