Blood Hina (14 page)

“You see, he doesn’t think it was an accident. He never did. I think he might have even lost his job over Jorg and Ike’s case.”

Mas felt as if freezing cold water was being poured over his head.

“Anyway, about a year ago, I began receiving these strange postcards. Typewritten. All gibberish. I reported them to the local postal inspector, but he couldn’t do anything. They
weren’t threatening. They just didn’t make sense. The same thing over and over again. Without a return address but a Phoenix postmark.

“So I called Mr. Blanco. Not that he could do anything, but I thought he’d be interested. And he was. So I mailed off some of the postcards to him. Shortly thereafter, they stopped coming. But Mr. Blanco told me to inform him if anything unusual came up again.”

“You tellsu him about dollsu?”

The widow nodded her head. “Of course, first thing. Like I said, Mr. Blanco is very committed to finding out the truth about the car accident. Spoon never cared for him, however. She won’t talk to him. So I’d appreciate it if you don’t mention to her that I keep in touch with him.”

Mas bit down on the right side of his lip. Too many secrets between supposed friends.

A train must have just released carloads of commuters, because they poured out from the station, their briefcases swollen with tasks undone.

“Find out who was sendin’ the cards?” Mas finally asked.

“Never did. I almost completely forgot about them, in fact. Then I came across one this week when I was packing. This time I understood the word that was typed.” The widow rummaged through her purse and presented a bent postcard to Mas. In the darkness and without his glasses, Mas couldn’t make out the words, only that they were typewritten.

Sonya stepped in to interpret. “HINA, it says. HINA, almost twenty times over.”

Hina
. Had it been some strange coincidence? Why had someone written a word referring to the Girls’ Day dolls? And a year ago, much less? Mas was troubled and a bit spooked. Dolls sometimes seemed to be inhabited by spirits—like those in the Hina House in San Diego. Had Ike’s
hina
dolls somehow inspired a message? No, that was too ridiculous to consider.

There must be something
tokubetsu
about those dolls. But what?

Driving home, Mas knew that to piece together this puzzle, he’d have to sit down and make peace with Haruo. They said two heads—even considering Haruo’s lackluster one—were better than one.

As soon as he turned onto McNally and into his driveway, he noticed something familiar from Mari’s childhood days. The front door and even the screen door were
akkepanashi
, wide open, inviting any wandering flies or robbers to enter. “Sonafagun,” he said to himself. Recollections of all of Haruo’s annoying traits, as bad as a teenager’s, washed over him again.

Carrying out the six-pack of room-temperature Coke and the can of cashews, Mas slammed the driver’s door. “Haruo!” he called out, walking onto the front porch. The stink of something burning filled his nostrils, and a film of smoke obscured his vision.

“Haruo!” Mas bellowed again, but nothing. He went straight into the kitchen, where the smoke was thickest, and heard water rushing from the faucet. A figure standing in
front of the kitchen sink turned. The Buckwheat Beauty, holding a pan, charred and damaged beyond repair.

To find his best friend’s nemesis in the middle of his faded kitchen was a shock indeed. “Whatchu doin’ here?”

“Uh, saving your ass and your house from going up in flames,” Dee shot back. “Don’t you know better than to leave the house while dinner’s on the stove?”

Mas went to the sink and turned off the faucet. What nerve this woman had to be in another’s man’s house! “Not cookin’ nuttin. You the one makin’ dis mess.”
And I expect you to clean it, too
, he added silently.

“Look, I came here to talk to Haruo. When I got here, the front door was wide open and smoke was blowing out onto the street. Nobody was home.”

“Sonafagun,” Mas muttered. A couple of sliced carrot rounds sat on the white synthetic cutting board, and a crushed cardboard package for curry blocks had been tossed in the trash can. Haruo, no doubt, had started to make dinner. But why would he leave without finishing what he started? Before he could figure out what happened, Mas needed to clear his head of Spoon’s daughter.
“Orai
, so youzu save the day. Good for you. Haruo not here, go talksu to him tomorrow at market.”

“I will. But I want to see him sooner. I think my mother may be having a nervous breakdown.”

Mas bit down on his lip. Spoon was on his black list, but not enough for him to wish her an emotional meltdown.

“She won’t leave the bedroom and won’t let anyone in. Doesn’t want to see any of us girls. She even threw me out of the house.”

Mas raised his eyebrow.
So-ka
, he thought.
Seems like every homeless person ends up in my house
. Good thing he’d stopped by the market for a baker’s dozen of ramen packages.

“She won’t see a therapist. I thought maybe Haruo could talk to her. She still cares about him, you know.”

You wouldn’t know that judging from her recent actions
, Mas thought.

“My mother is hiding something. I think it has to do with those dolls. I know, I thought Haruo had stolen them. But now I don’t know.”

Dee’s doubts did little to cool Mas’s anger. She was the one who had sent the law after Haruo in the first place. He marched out of the kitchen and returned to the front door. He checked the screen. It wasn’t just open, someone had given it a big tug so it was almost unhinged from the frame. The screen had been broken before, but Mas had made the time to repair it last year. Outside on the concrete porch he saw skid marks from the heels of someone’s shoes.

“Youzu do dis to my house?”

Dee shook her head. “I just went straight in. I didn’t even touch the screen door.”

Mas traced physical clues: a spray of gravel, a trail of open cement where a blanket of dried sycamore leaves had been. He took a big sniff. A familiar, delectable smell, one that made his mouth water. On the side of the cracked driveway, by some pigweed threatening to overtake the neighbor’s lawn, lay a spoon covered in fresh curry. And tangled in the
leaves of a knee-high weed he saw long, greasy black-and-white hairs pulled out from their roots, their ends stained in blood.

Mas knew what the theories at Eaton’s Nursery would be—that Haruo had perhaps faked his disappearance because he had actually stolen the dolls to pay off bookies and loan sharks. But they hadn’t seen the masked men at Sonya de Groot’s house. Or listened to the talk about cocaine at the market.

“Haruo’s in trouble,” Mas murmured to himself, repeating it more loudly for his one witness’s benefit. “Big trouble.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

M
aking other people believe that Haruo was in big trouble was a larger challenge than Mas bargained for. The Buckwheat Beauty wouldn’t leave his house, but he wasn’t going to let her stop what had to be done. First was a call to G.I. Hasuike and Juanita Gushiken, the closest thing to a crime-fighting duo that he knew of. But G.I. and Juanita, both busy with their respective lawyering and private investigating, were unmoved.

“Why would anyone want to kidnap Haruo?” asked G.I. over the phone.

A very good question, Mas thought, a good question that he didn’t have an answer for. Haruo had no money, no house, and no working car. His children, both teachers, weren’t rich. His ex-wife had indeed remarried, but to a television repairman who’d retired his shingle as soon as people started paying companies to take old broken TV sets off their hands.

“And those men who were at Spoon’s neighbor’s house—are you sure they weren’t just kids causing trouble?” asked Juanita on the other line.

No, no, no
, Mas tried to tell them. In spite of the ski masks, he knew the difference between a wild gangly teenager’s build
and a grown man’s. Plus they had threatened Sonya, not only in person but in telephone calls—but he had promised the old lady that he wouldn’t breathe a word about that.

“Well, you can file a report with the sheriff’s department. When they find out about Haruo’s background—I just don’t know, Mas. If that neighbor woman goes to the police about her intruders, it might be a different story.”

Next on Mas’s list was Kiyomi, Haruo’s daughter, who also didn’t seem to understand the gravity of what was being told to her. “Missing?”

“Ka-re
burnin’ right on the stove.”

“Oh.”

Why, just
oh
, thought Mas, his temper rising.

“Did he ever tell you how he left the house while he was filling up the bathtub when we were children? Our hardwood floors got all warped.”

This has nothing to do with an overflowing bathtub
, Mas wanted to yell. He saw a chunk of Haruo’s hair in the driveway. What else was being done to him right this moment?

The daughter was so passive that Mas had to move on to the son. He knew from the get-go that Clement would not be happy to hear from Mas, much less about his estranged father.

“Are you sure he’s not back at it?”

Mas gritted down on his dentures. It had been indeed a mistake to call the son, but he didn’t know what else to do.

“You know what I’m talking about. Did you check the card clubs in Gardena, the Indian casinos in Temecula? Las Vegas, even?”

Mas had no answer.

Apparently the son distinctly remembered pulling his father back from those tables, time after time. “When you search all those places and you still can’t find him, I’ll know something’s wrong. But until then, don’t bother calling back.”

“No luck?” said Dee, bringing Mas a freshly brewed cup of Yuban coffee to the kitchen table. Mas was going to refuse it, but what was the use? The Buckwheat Beauty was not stupid. Even overhearing Mas’s clipped side of the conversations, she knew that no one was taking his concerns seriously. Mas understood the bitterness of children. He himself had been an absent father and had experienced the fallout from that neglect. He was trying to mend fences now, two thousand miles away, and it was like tending a sick orchid—no flowers, but the bare stem of hope was still standing.

Mas took a sip of the coffee, so hot that it burned his tongue. He didn’t mind because the pain jump-started his brain. It was already close to eleven and no Haruo. Wishbone and Stinky hadn’t seen him. Neither had his boss, Taxie. Other than receiving a phone call about the wedding cancellation, Tug hadn’t even spoken to Haruo in a few weeks.