The Flower Master (Rei Shimura #3) (34 page)

The alcohol on her breath was so strong that it made me step back. "Why?"

"I'm the hostess. I need to look beautiful," she said, sounding as desperate as her brother had earlier.

"Don't you have your own clothing? What about your mother's famous kimono?" I asked.

"I wore that a few years ago." She sneered, revealing dark lipstick on a front tooth. "I cannot repeat an outfit."

"Well, you'd be repeating my outfit if I gave you my kimono. And what do you propose I wear? I'm too big for your black patent leather suit or even those jeans," I said, examining them. They looked like the equivalent of an American size two, while I wore a six.

"There's a kura on the other side of the house where you can find one of my mother's old things to wear. You like vintage clothing! Take the key." Natsumi fished in a chest of drawers, then slammed it shut. "I can't find it. Well, that probably means that the kura is open. Maybe my brother's there." She wiggled her eyebrows at me. "You'd like that, wouldn't you—some time with him?"

"You're drunk, and I'm not going to the kura," I said, thinking of the black truck parked outside it. "Please be reasonable. Everyone has already seen what you're wearing and thinks you look lovely. Just sit down quietly and you'll be fine."

"This is a semiformal party," Natsumi said in a slow, superior voice. "You don't understand Japanese etiquette. Clothing is very important. That's why I need you to give me the kimono."

I'd had
You don't understand Japanese etiquette
said to me so many times that it no longer hurt me. I looked straight back at her and said, "Very well, Natsumi-san. If you want to wear one of your mother's kimono, you're going to have to pick one out yourself."

"Girls, people can hear you arguing!" Aunt Norie came upon us like a small tornado. "I'll go with Rei to find the kimono. I know where the kura is."

"Oh, that would be so kind." Natsumi delivered an exaggerated smile to my relative. "Be sure to find an underskirt and under-robe and an obi. I trust your judgment to choose things that match!"

"But you've got something else to do," I said in a low voice to my aunt. "The food."

"I'll ask Tsutomu to set things out. He's become very good around the house."

"I'm going to go upstairs to get undressed and wait," Natsumi said.

"Of course," Aunt Norie replied.

I didn't like the deferential note in Norie's voice. When we got outside, I told her, "We're being set up. Something—I mean someone—is waiting for us in the storehouse."

"That's very silly, Rei-chan." Aunt Norie snapped on the flashlight and began walking down the dirt road toward where the black truck was parked.

"The storehouse is the root of all the trouble. Just as Sakura went into the school archives to take Kayama ware, she must have gone to the kura to take Reiko's kimono. While she was there, she came across something that led her to be killed."

"What is this story about Sakura wearing Mrs. Kayama's clothing?" Norie stopped and looked at me strangely.

"Well, I'm not absolutely positive it was her," I amended. "But a middle-aged Japanese woman stole Takeo's mother's yellow kimono and called herself Kayama when she went to Mr. Ishida's shop. She fenced some 1930s ceramics that were produced by the Kayama School."

Aunt Norie began breathing rapidly. "Oh, dear. I think I've seen a woman dressed like that, but she was shrouded by early morning mist, so I couldn't see her face. I thought she was Reiko-san, come back from the dead to haunt me."

"Why?"

"She's come to my garden a few times, always around the anniversary of her death in early spring. I am sure that the woman who appears there is the one sending the haiku," Norie's words came out in a flood that had been held in too long.

"But how can it be Sakura if we've received haiku since her death?"

"It's a ghost who has come to haunt me for my sin," Norie said.

Just how bad was her sin? I cleared my throat and said, "You and the headmaster. Did you . . . "

"Yes, I did. I hurt him terribly!" Norie's voice shook.

"Don't feel bad, Obasan. He manipulated you, and he does the same to other women in the school. These days they'd call it sexual harassment!"

"No!" She stared at me as if horrified. "There was nothing romantic with the headmaster. What I mean is that I hurt him by causing his wife's accident."

"Takeo told me that she fell down a flight of steps in the garden. How could that be your fault?"

"I was at the bottom of the steps, cutting daffodils for a forthcoming exhibition. My scissors were too dull to do a good job, I realized. Because I was pregnant with Chika, I did not have the energy to go up the steps. Also, the weather had been rainy, so the stones were very slick, and that made me nervous. I called to Mrs. Kayama, who was on higher ground, asking if she could ask one of the other students to bring an extra pair of scissors." Norie spoke slowly, as if each word hurt. "She called out that she would walk down herself and give me her own scissors. I called back an apology, because I hadn't expected the iemoto's wife to do such an annoying errand. But she called down that she truly wanted to join me in cutting daffodils. But when she came, she fell head over heels down the steps. She landed, falling on the scissors she had been carrying for me. They pierced her throat."

A freak accident—repeated as Sakura's murder. Feeling a chill, I said, "That's why, when you saw Sakura dead at the Kayama School, you were so devastated. You were remembering Mrs. Kayama's death."

Aunt Norie nodded. "Yes, and the others knew it, too. Twice I've found women dead with scissors in their necks. It's a bad record." She paused. "You don't think—you don't think there's a body lying in the kura? And I'm meant to discover it, just like the other times?"

"We should wait for the police." At my aunt's surprised look, I said, "I called Lieutenant Hata. He 's going to send the local police out to look around."

"Ara!" my aunt exclaimed. "So when you were upstairs, you were not just calling a restaurant. You were calling the police!"

"Yes. Takeo was showing me where I could telephone privately."

"Are you sure you can trust him?"

I thought about Norie's question and the various guises in which Takeo had appeared to me. I'd first seen him as an arrogant rich boy, then a possibly dangerous environmentalist, and finally an emotionally needy young man who missed his mother.

"I guess so." I knew that sounded less than confident.

"Then you should ask Takeo-san to go into the kura. He is the man of the house."

Norie wanted to see how brave or honorable Takeo would be in the context of danger at his home. But this was the wrong test. Takeo would no sooner go hunting for a kimono for his spoiled sister than I would.

"Nobody's going in there until the police come," I repeated. "Come on, let's go back into the house. I'd feel better if the Shimura men were offering us support, wouldn't you?"

Aunt Norie did not argue.

"I'm bored to death," Tom said when I came upon him pondering a calligraphy scroll in the house's grand hall. "Can we leave? The Kayamas have vanished, and I'm running out of things to do. I've already made six rounds of the cherry blossoms."

Norie and I exchanged glances, and I imagined she was thinking there were worse things to die from than boredom. After hearing about Mrs. Kayama's death, my cousin's exaggerated complaint was almost offensive.

"Tsutomu, your services may be needed. You should stay a little longer," Norie murmured, smiling pleasantly at more party guests arriving.

"If somebody gets too drunk, as most of them are"—he waved his hand dramatically toward the crowd drinking on empty stomachs in the living room—"I will be asked to help them? Just because I'm the only physician here?"

"Nobody will ask you to do that," his mother snapped. "You don't have to do that at St. Luke's, do you? The tough jobs are given to nurses. To women."

Was this a bit of feminist consciousness surfacing? I looked at my aunt in surprise, and the tense moment was mitigated by the arrival of the sashimi. Because Takeo didn't seem to be evident, I directed the deliveryman into the kitchen, and Norie and I swiftly moved the takeout food from its plastic trays onto the Kayamas' antique wooden trays. Norie asked Tom to carry out the food and stand guard over it.

"Guard against what, the guests eating?" Tom grumbled.

"No, against poisoners! " his mother shot back.

Tom raised his eyebrows but did as he was told.

Where was Takeo? I wondered about that when I got caught up in a dispute between Uncle Hiroshi and the deliveryman who wanted to be paid. In the end, Uncle Hiroshi handed over his credit card and said that he would guarantee the payment if the Kayamas hadn't made good on the bill by the next morning.

"That was very generous of you," I said to my uncle.

"I still have some money," he said stiffly. I had almost forgotten about his unemployment, and now that unhappy specter reared its head again.

As the elegant crowd stampeded toward the sashimi, I overheard a woman commenting that there were no flowers garnishing the food. Aunt Norie and I had operated in a rush and overlooked this important detail.

As far as I was concerned, there were other priorities. I headed upstairs in search of Takeo, thinking that perhaps he had retreated to his room like an adolescent trying to avoid his parents' friends. But that would be out of character for someone who had been calm enough to order enough food for two hundred.

The door to the room he'd showed me earlier was closed, so I knocked, not wanting to alert Natsumi in her nearby bedroom that I had come back to the house without a kimono for her. If Natsumi knew that I was upstairs, she was liable to off my kimono and stick me with her too-small jeans.

Hearing no answer, I cracked the door to Takeo's room a few inches. It was empty. I closed up the room and surveyed six other doors. One of them was slightly open, so I peeked in.

I'd found Natsumi. She was lying sprawled across a canopied bed in a matching purple lace bra and panties that I would have envied if the situation had not been so dire. This small bit of jealousy helped to quell the fear that was rising inside me. Natsumi couldn't be dead. I hurried forward and was greatly relieved to see the rise and fall of her tiny breasts under the lace. I shook her warm, smooth shoulder, and it flinched under my gentle grip. Looking at the jeans crumpled on the floor, I could figure out what had happened. She'd undressed to get ready to put on a kimono, and then she'd blacked out.

I shouldn't have felt glad that Natsumi was out of commission, but now at least she wouldn't be hassling Norie and me to go into the kura for her. Thank goodness for small blessings. I left the room, closing the door rightly to ensure Natsumi's privacy. I'd heard a door open and then close in the hallway.

I didn't think that it was a door to one of the bedrooms, but more likely the toilet. The tiny square window of patterned glass at the top corner of the powder room door indicated that someone was inside. Perhaps the unconscious Natsumi was going to be the first of many victims of too much drinking and too little food. The party columnist would have plenty to report on. I slipped into Takeo's vacant bedroom to wait, leaving the door cracked so I could catch sight of whoever came out.

Takeo's room was colder than the rest of the house; I wondered if he ever built a fire on cool nights like this one. There were no traces of logs on the grate, just a pile of environmental magazines. I was not a tidy person by nature, but not even I hoarded old publications to this extent. I turned my back on the clutter and toward the alcove where one of Takeo's mother's calligraphy scrolls hung above an arrangement of thorny branches.

I looked at the scroll he'd chosen to hang on the wall above the flowers. One of the nice things about Reiko Kayama's calligraphy was that her hiragana lettering and kanji were sketched clearly enough for me to decipher. Usually the lettering I saw in calligraphy artwork was unfathomable.

It also helped that once I'd read a few words, I recognized the haiku as one I'd told Takeo about:
The breezes of spring push the beautiful girl, arousing anger.

I'd first thought those words were a threat to me; now I understood that they were a recounting of the situation in which Reiko Kayama had fallen. Norie had told me that she thought Reiko slipped, but when she'd described the scene to me, she had only mentioned seeing Reiko falling. Norie hadn't said it aloud, but I thought it now: Reiko Kayama could have been pushed.

Who would have pushed the iemoto's wife? Logic told me the pusher had to be the headmaster or Sakura or another person within the Kayama School. But I could think of a young boy who might have playfully bumped against his mother. She had been unable to regain her balance and tumbled down the long flight of steps. The boy would come to bear such guilt for the succession of events that he would spend years copying more of his mother's haiku and sending it to Aunt Norie, thinking she had seen him. How he managed to masquerade as his mother in a kimono I didn't understand. Had he faked his own car accident because he needed to make sure Mr. Ishida wouldn't connect him to the Kayama ware?

My vision blurred, and I realized that it was because there were tears in my eyes. How had I allowed myself to begin to become fond of Takeo? Norie had been right that he was the wrong person for me.

"What are you doing in here?" Lila Braithwaite's voice cut through my thoughts. I spun around and saw her standing in the doorway. In her white sequined cocktail suit, she resembled an ice queen.

"I'm waiting. And I'm sorry about what happened earlier today."

"So am I!" Lila's words tumbled out in a long, angry rush. "When I met you at first, I really thought you just wanted to sell me a few antiques. And I would have bought them, you know. Is that why you ruined my life—because you were annoyed that I didn't want your stupid plates?"

"Don't you think you're the one who designed your life's plan? It was your choice to be with the iemoto. If it wasn't that, well, you should tell the police. There are laws against sexual harassment."