EDGE (33 page)

Saeko’s heart hammered out of control, and she crouched down with one hand to her chest. The horrific image of Shigeko falling through the air replayed in an endless loop in her mind’s eye; the more she tried to get rid of it, the more viscously it stuck to the folds of her mind. She could see the strange way in which Shigeko’s falling body had seemed to glide momentarily towards her before plunging downwards into the sea. The phenomenon of her descent seemed neither real nor natural.

Then she remembered the night before, what she had seen after her dinner with Hashiba. They had been walking out of the building when Seiji Fujimura had plummeted to the street in front of them. Another suicide—she had witnessed two plunges to the death in as many days. Not only that, but she knew both of the people involved. Saeko struggled to understand the implications of such a coincidence. Even now, she clearly remembered how Seiji’s body had seemed to float downwards, featherlike, his spirit seemingly severed from his body, disobeying the laws of gravity by that much. Nonetheless, his body had crashed into the ground with a thud of reality, and the tree branches had kept on swaying as if testifying to the fall.

Saeko repressed the terrible image; she felt like she might throw up. But she knew she had to do something, she couldn’t just sit here like this. If Hashiba were around she’d bring it to him, but since he wasn’t, Saeko probably needed to go to Kagayama.

She called the room where Kagayama was staying. When he came to the phone, she explained what she’d witnessed in terse phrases.

“Y-You mean …” he stammered, trailing off in mid-sentence.

“What should we do?” Cursing herself for asking such a juvenile question, she clutched the receiver.

“I guess we should check Ms. Torii’s room,” Kagayama proposed.

Saeko hung up and dragged herself out to the corridor and stood waiting in front of the room. She knocked once and waited, not expecting an answer, not after what she had just seen. Shigeko had jumped to her death from the top of the Nishikigaura Cliffs. Right now, her lifeless body would be tossed around in the waves, mangled against the jagged rocks at the base.

Saeko was soon joined by Kagayama, Kato, and Hosokawa. Kagayama stepped forward and banged his fist against the door.

“Ms. Torii? Are you awake?”

It wasn’t that Kagayama didn’t trust Saeko’s words. He was obviously
trying to keep his voice down, but it still echoed through the empty corridor. When he stopped knocking and put his ear against the door, there was nary a sound.

He turned to Kato. “Can you call the hotel manager?”

Kato nodded and started to run down the corridor. Saeko, Kagayama, and Hosokawa stood in heavy silence for the few minutes it took for Kato to come back. They all realized that this could mean the end for the program and looked gloomy.

Accompanied by Kato, the manager walked up to the door and pulled out a master key. He knocked once more to confirm that there was no answer. Then, without further hesitation, he inserted the key in the lock and opened the door.

The room was the same size as Saeko’s, with the bathroom on the opposite side. The manager flipped on the lights and walked into the room. There was a thin lump under the bedclothes, and on the pillow lay Shigeko’s wrinkled face. There were no signs of disorder, the bed sheets were pulled up to the old woman’s shoulders, and her body traced a straight line under the sheets. When Saeko walked to the side of the bed and confirmed that the person was Shigeko, she could not but cover her own mouth. Then, steadying herself against the wall, she struggled to gather her thoughts.

Shigeko’s face looked sunken and pale under the stark, fluorescent lights of the room. The manager looked dejected as he bent forward and spoke into the old woman’s ear. He called out to her a couple of times, but not only was there no reply, she also wasn’t breathing. He put a hand to her neck to check for a pulse, and shook his head.

“I’m afraid she’s passed away.” The manager probably would have preferred to keep the matter quiet, but that wasn’t exactly an option when someone discovered a dead body in a hotel. “I’ll notify the police,” he informed them.

He called the authorities from the room’s phone. As he explained the situation everyone else stood completely still, stunned, while Saeko staggered over to the sofa by the window and collapsed down onto it. It was then that she noticed letter paper, the kind provided by the hotel for free, sitting on the coffee table in front of her. It bore words, and Saeko leant forward and began to read.

It was a suicide note—that much was unmistakable. Saeko indicated the stationery to the others and took another look at Shigeko’s face. There was no sign of pain, only the dignity of a natural death, akin to an ebbing tide. This was in complete contradiction to the fact that there was a suicide note. If the old woman had taken an overdose of pills, there would have been salient signs of a struggle between life and death on her countenance. Instead, Shigeko looked as though she had simply died of old age.

Once the police and ambulance staff arrived Saeko knew that she and the crew would have to stay to answer any questions that may arise. If the police suspected the possibility of foul play at a hotel, they would order an autopsy, and that would drag this mess out for even longer. Saeko wanted to speak with Hashiba before that happened. She left Shigeko’s room and walked back to her own.

She checked the time on her wristwatch. Hashiba would certainly have arrived at the television station by now. She summoned up his number on her cell phone and punched the call button. It went straight through to his voicemail. Strange—he must have turned his phone off for some reason. Even when he was busy, Saeko knew that Hashiba made a point of keeping his phone on. Why would he have turned it off tonight, of all nights? The words in Shigeko’s suicide note came back to her as she stood holding the phone in her hand:

But now, at least, your wish seems ready to be granted
.

Somehow Shigeko must have known something that Hashiba wanted. If only she could hear his voice, she knew she would feel better. But it was no use—the dead tone served only to intensify her growing anxiety.

5
The police investigation was pushed back to the next day, and Saeko spent a tense, mostly sleepless night in her hotel room before waking to meet them at nine the next morning.

The initial tests had shown that there was no possibility of a crime having being committed. “Heart seizure” was the term that came to Saeko’s mind, but she thought “old age” more apt in the absence of any discernible pain. If a full autopsy was carried out they would be able to ascertain whether or not she’d had any other illnesses, especially of the heart, but in any case it was clear that her death was of natural causes. It was the presence of the suicide note that threw confusion over the situation. Sitting with the police now, she realized that their line of questioning was based on the trouble they had reconciling the contradictions implied.

Saeko answered their questions as faithfully as she could. She told them that last night she had gone to close her window to ready herself for bed and seen a white figure out on top of the Nishikigaura Cliffs and that the figure had been that of Shigeko Torii. At that point, one of the detectives interviewing her cut her off mid-sentence.

“You do realize that it would be impossible to make out that kind of detail at that time of night, and from the distance you describe?”

What he said was true, Saeko couldn’t deny it. It had been too dark; she had been too far away for that kind of detail to register. “Still,” she said, “I just knew it was her.”

The two cops cast their gazes out of the window then back to Saeko. “Hrm,” one of them grunted, “so you think it was some kind of premonition?”

That could be it, she supposed. A premonition, a hunch. Shigeko had sent Saeko a message from her deathbed in the room next door. The vision hadn’t been real; rather, the image had been delivered straight into her mind. The cops seemed to have intuited that interpretation.

One of the men was in his thirties, the other in his fifties. With sufficient years on their jobs, they’d probably come across a few instances where a “premonition” was the only explanation. Surprisingly few people dismissed such supernatural phenomena outright as being unscientific; it was more common not to doubt that they were perhaps a possibility.

“What did you do next?” the older one continued.

“I was in shock for a moment. Then I called Kagayama and told him what I saw.”

“Did you feel any uncertainty about what you had seen?”

“I did think that it might have been a hallucination. But after seeing Ms. Torii earlier in the day, I had a bad feeling about her.”

“A bad feeling?”

“I worked with Ms. Torii once before. This time, she looked completely exhausted to the core, like she’d lost the will to live.”

“You saw the suicide note I assume.”

“Yes, I was the one that found it, on the table in front of the sofa.”

“A strange woman. Something about her defies the common understanding of our like.”

The note obviously didn’t sit right with the two, who said as much to each other. Saeko felt the same, but perhaps because she knew something of Shigeko’s nature she found herself less surprised than she might have been.

It was Saeko who asked, “Do you know what Ms. Torii did for a living?”

“I’d seen her a few times on TV.”

“A few people accused her of being a fake. But from what I’ve seen, I believe that her powers were real.”

“And that’s why she could’ve done something like that?”

Leaving a note alluding to suicide and then, immediately afterwards, dying naturally in bed with no signs of an overdose was a feat completely beyond common sense, but Saeko nodded. Shigeko had willed her life to end, and with that clear goal in mind, had made it happen.

“She chose to perish, like some exalted monk of old?” the detective asked without sarcasm. There was no other possible interpretation; all that was left was to accept the facts as they were presented.

The younger one interrupted the exchange. “In the suicide note she refers to herself as powerless, small. She sounded as though she held herself in contempt. Do you know of anything that would have caused her to lose confidence in herself so suddenly?”

“We were visiting the herb garden to film for a show we were putting together on the group who vanished there the day before yesterday.”

“Ah yes, that one.”

“Have you been to the site?”

The two men nodded. “We went there initially but were called to join the rest of the search parties. We scoured the mountains between the park and the Ito Skyline. Couldn’t find any traces at all.”

Saeko looked hard as if boring through the men’s skulls and let her line of sight trail out the window, along Nishikigaura to a single point on the hillsides. For the first time she realized that the herb gardens’ slope was visible from her room. Come to think of it, she had been able to see the hotel from the park yesterday.

Saeko was more sensitive than not. She was proud of her ability to hear things and see phenomena that others wouldn’t or couldn’t notice. It was perhaps because of that sensitivity that she had felt such a heavy physical and emotional strain at the gardens yesterday. Even now, she wasn’t sure how to describe the experience. In purely physical terms, her body’s natural sense of regulation had been disturbed somehow—that was closest to the mark. She thought back to the almost unbearable pressure she had felt on her bladder, the sudden dryness of her throat, the heaviness of her feet. If she were ever abducted by aliens and spirited away to a different planet, she’d feel much the same way.

If she had felt the change so acutely, though, it must have felt worse for a psychic like Shigeko. To use her own word, she’d felt small, and Saeko could grasp the sense of it. If the world, which had provided them with a secure footing until now, had lost its own supports and begun to crumble, a human being could only feel as powerless as an ant.

It couldn’t have helped that Shigeko had a growing sense that Hashiba didn’t need her. Saeko was beginning to understand the process through which the elderly woman had lost her confidence so.

“I think Ms. Torii grew tired of living,” she summarized her thoughts, deciding against trying to explain the shock Shigeko must have felt at the park. After all, they had been there and felt nothing.

Other than Saeko, the detectives spoke with Kagayama, Kato, and
Hosokawa, and after clearing up any possible contradictions between everyone’s stories, left the hotel. With Shigeko dead, it was more than likely that the program would be sent back to the drawing board. Saeko and the others returned to their rooms and began to get ready to check out of the hotel. There was no longer any reason for them to stay in Atami.