Ring (6 page)

"Yoko's up." Shizu wiped her wet hands on a towel. Their daughter usually didn't cry so hard upon waking up. Shizu rushed up to the second floor.

As she was going out, Yoshimi came in. Asakawa handed her the card he'd found. "This had fallen under the piano." He spoke casually and waited for a reaction.

Yoshimi took the card and turned it over. "This is strange. What was this doing there?" She cocked her head, puzzled.

"Could Tomoko have borrowed it from a friend, do you suppose?"

"But I've never heard of this person. I don't think she had a friend by that name." Yoshimi looked at Asakawa with exaggerated worry. "Darn it. This looks important. I swear, that girl…" Her voice choked up. Even the slightest thing would set the wheels of grief in motion for her. Asakawa hesitated to ask, but did.

"Did, ah… did Tomoko and her friends by any chance go to this resort during summer vacation?"

Yoshimi shook her head. She trusted her daughter. Tomoko hadn't been the kind of child to lie about staying over at her friends'. Plus, she had been studying for exams. Asakawa could understand how Yoshimi felt. He decided not to ask about Tomoko any further. No high school student with exams looming in front of her was going to tell her parents that she was renting a cottage with her boyfriend. She would have lied and said she was studying at a friend's house. Her parents would never know.

"I'll find the owner and return it."

Yoshimi bowed her head in silence, and then her husband called from the living room and she hurried out of the kitchen. The bereaved father was seated in front of a newly-installed Buddhist altar, speaking to his daughter's photograph. His voice was shockingly cheerful, and Asakawa became depressed. He was obviously living in denial. Asakawa could only pray that he'd be able to get through.

Asakawa had found out one thing. If this Nonoyama had in fact lent Tomoko the membership card, he or she would have contacted Tomoko's parents to ask for the card back upon learning of her death. But Tomoko's mother knew nothing about the card. Nonoyama couldn't have forgotten about the card. Even if it were part of a family membership deal, dues were expensive enough that Nonoyama wouldn't just allow the card to stay lost. So what did this mean? This was how Asakawa figured it: Nonoyama had lent the card to one of the other three, either Iwata, Tsuji, or Nomi. Somehow it passed into Tomoko's possession, and that's how things had ended. Nonoyama would have contacted the parents of the person he or she had lent it to. The parents would have searched their child's belongings. They wouldn't have found the card. The card was here. If Asakawa contacted the families of the other three victims, he might be able to unearth Nonoyama's address. He should call right away, tonight. If he couldn't dig up a clue this way, then it would be unlikely that the card would provide a means for finding when and where the four had been together. At any rate, he wanted to meet Nonoyama and hear what he or she had to say. If he had to, he could always find some way to track down Nonoyama's address based on the membership number. Asking Pacific Resorts directly probably wouldn't get him anywhere, but he was sure that his newspaper connections could come up with something.

Someone was calling him. A distant voice. "Dear… dear…" His wife's flustered voice mingled with the baby's crying.

"Dear, could you come here for a minute?"

Asakawa came to himself again. Suddenly he wasn't even sure what he'd been thinking about all this time. There was something strange about the way his daughter was crying. That feeling became stronger as he mounted the stairs.

"What's wrong?" he asked his wife, accusingly.

"Something's not right with Yoko. I think something's happened to her. The way she's crying-it's different from how it usually sounds. Do you think she's sick?"

Asakawa placed his hand on Yoko's forehead. She didn't have a fever. But her little hands were trembling. The trembling spread to her whole body, and sometimes her back shook. Her face was beet red, her eyes clenched shut.

"How long has she been like this?"

"It's because she woke up and there was no one here with her."

The baby often cried if her mother wasn't there when she woke up. But she always calmed down when her mother ran to her and held her. When a baby cried it was trying to ask for something, but what…? The baby was trying to tell them something. She wasn't just being bratty. Her two tiny hands were clasped tightly over her face… cowering. That was it. The child was wailing out of fear. Yoko turned her face away, and then opened her fists slightly: she seemed to be trying to point forward. Asakawa looked in that direction. There was a pillar. He raised his eyes. Hanging about thirty centimeters from the ceiling was a fist-sized mask, of a
hannya
-a female demon. Was the child afraid of the mask?

"Hey, look," said Asakawa, pointing with his chin. They looked at the mask simultaneously, then slowly turned their gazes to each other.

"No way… she's frightened of a demon?"

Asakawa got to his feet. He took down the demon mask from where it hung on the beam and laid it face down on top of the dresser. Yoko couldn't see it there. She abruptly stopped crying.

"What's the matter, Yoko? Did that nasty demon scare you?" Shizu seemed relieved now that she understood, and she happily rubbed her cheek against the child's. Asakawa wasn't so easily satisfied; for some reason, he didn't want to be in this room any longer.

"Hey. Let's go home," he urged his wife.

That evening, as soon as he got home from the Oishis', he called the Tsujis, the Nomis, and the Iwatas, in that order. He asked each family whether they hadn't been contacted by one of their child's acquaintances regarding a membership card for a resort club. The last person he spoke to, Iwata's mother, gave him a long, rambling answer: "There was a call, from someone who said he'd gone to the same high school as my son, an older boy, saying he'd lent my son his resort membership card, and could he get it back… But I searched every corner of my son's room and never could find it. I've been worried about it ever since." He quickly asked for Nonoyama's phone number, and immediately called it.

Nonoyama had run into Iwata in Shibuya on the last Sunday in August, and lent him his card, just as Asakawa had suspected. Iwata had told him he was going away with this high school girl he'd been hitting on.
Summer vacation's almost over, y 'know. I want to really live it up once before it's over, or else I won't be able to buckle down and study for the exams.

Nonoyama had laughed when he heard this.
You idiot, prep school students aren 't supposed to have summer vacations.

The last Sunday in August had been the 26th: if they'd gone anywhere for the night, it would have to have been the 27th, 28th, 29th, or 30th. Asakawa didn't know about the college prep school, but for the high school girls at least, fall semester began on the first of September.

Maybe it was because she was tired from being so long in unfamiliar surroundings: Yoko soon fell asleep right next to her mother. When he put his ear to the bedroom door, he could hear both of them breathing regularly, fast asleep. Nine in the evening… this was Asakawa's time to relax. Until his wife and child were asleep, there was no room in this tiny condo for him to settle down to work.

Asakawa got a beer from the fridge and poured it into a glass. It tasted special tonight. He'd made definite progress, finding that membership card. There was a good chance that sometime between the 27th and the 30th of August, Shuichi Iwata and the other three had stayed at facilities belonging to Pacific Resorts. The most likely place was Villa Log Cabin at Pacific Land in South Hakone. South Hakone was the only Pacific Resorts property close enough to be a viable candidate, and he couldn't imagine a group of poor students going all out and staying at a hotel. They would probably have used the membership to rent one of the cottages on the cheap. They were only five thousand yen a night for members, which came to a little over a thousand apiece.

He had the phone number for Villa Log Cabin at hand. He put his notes on the table. The quickest thing would be to simply call the front desk and ask if a party of four had stayed there under the name Nonoyama. But they'd never tell him over the phone. Naturally, anybody who had risen within the firm to the position of rental cottage manager would have been well trained to consider it his duty to protect guests' privacy. Even if he revealed his position as a reporter for a major newspaper and clearly stated his reasons for inquiring, the manager would never tell him over the phone. Asakawa considered contacting the local bureau and getting them to use a lawyer with whom they had connections to ask for a look at the guest register. The only people a manager was legally bound to show the register to were the police and attorneys. Asakawa could try to pose as one or the other, but he'd probably be spotted immediately, and that would mean trouble for the newspaper. It was safer and more effective to go through channels.

But that would take at least three or four days, and he hated to wait that long. He wanted to know
now.
His passion for the case was such that he couldn't bear to wait three days. What in the world was going to come of this? If indeed the four of them had stayed the night at Villa Log Cabin at Pacific Land in South Hakone at the end of August, and if indeed that clue allowed him to unravel the riddle of their deaths-well, what could it have been anyway?
Virus, virus.
He was all too aware that the only reason he was calling it a virus was to keep himself from being overawed by the thought of some mysterious
thing
being behind it all. It made sense-to a degree-to marshal the power of science in facing down supernatural power. He wasn't going to get anywhere fighting a thing he didn't understand with words he didn't understand. He had to translate the thing he didn't understand into words he did.

Asakawa recalled Yoko's cries. Why was she so frightened when she saw the demon mask this afternoon? On the way home on the train, he'd asked his wife, "Hey, have you been teaching Yoko about demons?"

"What?"

"You know, with picture books or something like that. Have you been teaching her to be afraid of demons?"

"No way. Why would I?"

The conversation had ended there. Shizu was unconcerned, but Asakawa worried. That kind of fear only existed on a deep, spiritual level. It was different from fearing something because you had been taught to fear it. Ever since he'd come down out of the trees, man had lived in fear of something or other. Thunder, typhoons, wild beasts, volcanic eruptions, the dark… The first time a child experiences thunder and lightning, he or she feels an instinctive fear-that was understandable. To begin with, thunder was real. It really existed. But what about demons? The dictionary would tell you that demons were imaginary monsters, or the spirits of dead people. If Yoko was going to be afraid of the demon because it looked scary, then she should also have been afraid of models of Godzilla-after all, they were made to look fearsome, too. She'd seen one, once, in a department store show window: a cunningly-made Godzilla replica. Far from being frightened, she had stared at it intently, eyes glowing with curiosity. How did you explain that? The only thing he knew for sure was that Godzilla, no matter how you looked at it, was an imaginary monster.
So what about demons…? And are demons unique to Japan? No, other cultures have the same type of thing. Devils..
. The second beer wasn't tasting as good as the first one.
Is there anything else Yoko's afraid of? That's right, there is. Darkness. She's terribly afraid of the dark. She absolutely never goes into an unlit room alone. "Yo-ko," sun-child.
But darkness, too, really existed, as light's opposite pole. Even now, Yoko was asleep in her mother's embrace, in a dark room.

October 11
-
Thursday

The rain was coming down harder now, and Asakawa turned his wipers on high. The weather at Hakone was liable to change at any moment. The skies had been clear down in Odawara, but the higher he climbed, the moister the air, and as he neared the pass he'd encountered several pockets of wind and rain. If it had been daytime, he would have been able to guess at the weather on the mountains from the appearance of the clouds over Mt Hakone. But it was night, and his attention was fixed on whatever came into the beams of his headlights. It wasn't until he had stopped the car and looked up at the sky that he'd realized the stars had disappeared. When he'd got on the Kodama bullet train at Tokyo Station, the city had still been wrapped in twilight. When he'd rented the car at Atami Station, the moon was still intermittently peeking out from gaps in the clouds. But now the fine water droplets drifting across his headlight beams were growing into a full-fledged downpour, pounding on his windshield.

The digital clock over the speedometer said 7:32. Asakawa quickly calculated how long it had taken him to come this far. He'd taken the 5:16 down from Tokyo, arriving in Atami at 6:07. By the time he'd left the gates and finished the paperwork at the rent-a-car place it had been 6:30. He'd stopped at a market and bought two packs of cup o' noodles and a small bottle of whiskey; it had been seven by the time he'd found his way through the maze of one-way streets and out of town.

A tunnel loomed in front of him, its entrance outlined in brilliant orange light. On the other side, just after he entered the Atami-Kannami Highway, he should start to see signs for South Hakone Pacific Land. The long tunnel would take him through the Tanna Ridge. As he entered it the sound of the wind changed. At the same time, his flesh, the passenger seat, and everything else in the car was bathed in orange light. He could feel his calm slipping away, he could feel his hackles rise. There were no cars coming from the opposite direction. The wipers squeaked as they rubbed against the now-dry windshield. He turned them off. He should reach his destination by eight. He didn't feel quite like flooring it, although the road was empty. Subconsciously, Asakawa was dreading the place he was heading to.