“Hi, Robert. Come in.” I stepped to the side and waved him in. I knew if Yasahiro had been there, he would have welcomed Robert, so it only made sense for me to do it as well.
“It is Mei, right?” he asked, confirming my name.
“It is. You have a good memory.” I never expected anyone I’d met at that party last week to remember me.
“And your English is good, too. I hadn’t realized…” Robert glanced around the room. “Yasahiro isn’t here?”
“Please sit.” I gestured to the couch, and he took off his shoes in that awkward way most Westerners do, leaving them askew in the doorway. I bent over and positioned them to the side, facing the toes to the door so they’d be easy to put on later.
“Yasahiro is not here, no.” I joined him at the couch, sitting a respectful distance away. “He’s in jail, actually. The police and Amanda’s parents suspect him of killing Amanda.” I spoke slowly, thinking of each word before it left my mouth.
Robert’s jaw dropped. “How can that be? Yasahiro is not that kind of guy.” He rubbed the stubble across his cheek. “He barely spoke to Amanda. He had moved on.”
“You were held by the police. Did you not fight for Yasahiro?”
Robert avoided eye contact with me. “I didn’t know what I was doing. Being questioned by the police in a foreign country is stressful. I wanted to get out. I hear jails in Japan are harsh.”
A bead of sweat blossomed on his upper lip. Well, if we did anything right in Japan, it was making the punishment fit the crime. Or maybe I was just bitter.
“Why did you come here?” I needed to cut to the heart of the matter. No more talking around the point.
“I thought he could help me, but I guess not.” He stood up and bowed, another awkward thing Westerners do but don’t understand. “I’ll figure something else out.”
“Wait,” I called out, jumping off the couch. “Maybe I can help, especially if we can get Yasahiro out of jail.”
How could I persuade this man to assist me? Would guilt work?
I shoved my left hand forward. “See? We were going to be married.” Robert stopped and stared at the ring on my finger. “He wants to move on with his life. If there’s anything you know that might help him, I need to hear it.”
I thought of the emails between him, Giselle, and Amanda, how they let Amanda buy up pieces of Yasahiro’s life. This man was guilty of something. I could feel it.
Robert closed his eyes and swore in English. “Marriage is a complicated and messy thing. I thought Yasahiro understood that. I told him not to propose to Amanda, and he did it anyway.” He softened when I pulled my hand to my chest. “You seem like a nice girl, though, and he said he was in love with you.”
“Please. If you help me, I promise to help you, in any way I can.”
I wasn’t sure what I was promising this man. I didn’t know him, couldn’t trust him, but I sensed he held back important information. We were both on the cliff’s edge, looking out at the sea. It was time to either turn back or jump.
“It’s Giselle,” he said, running his hand through his hair. His eyes were tired and red, and he looked like he hadn’t shaved in days. “I think she may have killed Amanda.”
The bedroom door creaked open and out came Kayo and Kumi. Robert’s eyes widened, and then he laughed, shaking his head.
“Of course. Of course this would happen.” He sighed as he pulled out a chair at the dining room table and sat down. “I didn’t see a police car outside, so I thought I was safe.”
I translated and said, “We came in Kumi’s car. Listen to me. What makes you think Giselle killed Amanda?”
Robert kept silent as Kayo sat down with her notebook open. “My English is pretty good, Mr. Girard. Give us what details you can.”
He sighed, resigned. “It was… It was the car that clued me in.”
Robert detailed how he found Giselle a mess in their rented apartment on Saturday afternoon. She was fresh out of a bath, but drinking, smoking, and crying, and he had only seen her cry a few times in all their twenty years together. She refused to talk to him, kept saying over and over how she was sorry, but they were through. It was too late for him to do anything.
She got dressed and packed in a great hurry, took a handful of cash, and left their apartment without her phone. He looked out the window and saw her flag a taxi. He made note of the taxi number and then searched the apartment.
“I looked everywhere, but I couldn’t figure out what’d made her so upset. So I went to the garage where we parked the car we rented, and that’s when I found it.” He swallowed hard, his whole face shined with sweat. I got up and filled a glass with ice water for him. He gulped it down at once. “Thank you. The passenger door had blood on it. Not a lot but some.”
Kumi gasped when I translated for her. Kayo paused in her note taking.
“When I saw the photos of Amanda dead at the police station, I knew right away. They must’ve fought. You know Amanda. She was a hard woman to love. Knew how to push you and make you angrier than anyone else could. I can only guess Giselle lost her temper and attacked her first in the car. She must’ve dragged her outside and finished… finished her off.”
Robert twisted the glass on the table.
“Giselle has her own problems. I knew she wasn’t right. There were signs, but I ignored them all. Still, Amanda made her angry more than anyone on this earth.” He shook his head. “I’m not excusing Giselle, or Amanda, but they had a big fight coming. I just didn’t think it would be like this.”
Kayo paused again, tapping her pen against her lip.
“What about the murder weapon? She was stabbed to death.”
Robert shrugged his shoulders. “Giselle knows self-defense. In foreign countries, she carries a knife sometimes for protection. She’s paranoid because she was mugged once in South America when she was a teen.”
Kayo nodded, and I remembered the police report. In my mind, I saw Amanda and Giselle fighting after Giselle picked her up from Yasahiro’s apartment. Maybe Giselle knocked her over the head first before pulling over and stabbing her with a knife from her purse. I closed my eyes, but that didn’t stop my brain from playing the whole situation out. My stomach turned over.
“Do you think there are any knives missing from your apartment?” Kayo got back to being a police officer.
“Maybe? It wouldn’t surprise me if she’d taken one the same day we landed. She doesn’t fly with weapons. She just picks them up when she can.” He rubbed his face. “Saying this shit out loud is frightening. Sorry,” he said, apologizing for his profanity. “I used to make fun of her, but I was never afraid of her coming after me. It was a joke, you know? Dangerous Giselle.”
I wanted to reach over and squeeze his hand. He didn’t have to come here and confess. In fact, I believed, in many countries, spouses were exempt from testifying against their husbands and wives. This must have been weighing on him. He came here to tell Yasahiro, someone he trusted.
We got lucky.
“Where do you think Giselle is now?” I asked, looking between Kayo and Kumi. We were close to ending this!
He shrugged his shoulders. “I called the taxi company. They dropped Giselle at a train station. She could be anywhere.”
“We’ll access train station cameras and find her,” Kayo said, pulling her phone out. “But that’ll take days. Can you make a guess? We could go one place while others get the video feeds from Tokyo.”
He hummed while rubbing the stubble on his chin. “She’s only been to Japan one other time.”
“Why was she here?”
“She came here once with Amanda to do one of those meditation retreats with Amanda’s boyfriend. Shoda? Shona?” He perked up, straightening in his chair.
“Shōta Kimura,” I corrected him. “Did she enjoy the retreat? Would she want to go back there?”
Kumi stood up and paced, groaning about her hips.
“Yeah. Yeah, actually she really enjoyed it. Said the meditation was relaxing and the hotel they stayed in was beautiful as was the campsite.”
Kayo and I made eye contact. “Nikko. She’s in Nikko.”
Goro was in Nikko too!
We jumped up, everyone running to the door to get back into shoes and coats. I grabbed my purse and the ring box too.
Robert was slow to realize what was going on. “Where are we going?”
I clutched his arm and pulled him to his shoes. “We’re going to find your wife.”
I only hoped we’d find her before she made another run for it.