Now she just strummed, idly, watching the people who waited for the Turning Bridge to swing back into place so that they could cross over onto Ama-no-Hashidate. But playing the guitar was like singing for her. When Kara thought she was only humming tuneless notes, a song would come out of her mouth as though the radio in her head had been playing all along and she had just turned up the volume. Likewise, her hands surprised her by discovering that they were not simply strumming, playing the opening notes of The Frames’ “When Your Mind’s Made Up.”
Quietly, under her breath, she sang along.
When she first spotted the thin girl in the blue skirt and long gray coat, with her white socks and black shoes and the white bow clipped in her hair, just above her right ear, she did not even look at her face. In those clothes the girl, all alone, seemed to have wandered away from some kind of church tour group. Only when the girl kept walking, away from the Turning Bridge and up the path toward the stone wall, did Kara look curiously at her face.
Her eyebrows went up, and then she smiled.
“Sakura?”
With a shrug, Sakura paused and presented herself like some actress on the red carpet who’d just been asked what fashion designer had made her outfit. Sakura actually spun around once.
“Total transformation,” she said in Japanese. But she continued in English. “My mother thinks clothes can change a girl. She thinks we are what we wear. Good girl clothes means good girl Sakura.”
Kara strummed quietly, studying her friend. “How’s that going?” she asked in English.
Sakura sat down beside her, reached inside her long coat and withdrew a packet of cigarettes. She tapped one out and flicked open a lighter Kara hadn’t even seen her produce, putting flame to the cigarette’s tip.
“I’m still Sakura,” she said. “If the school uniform did not change me, why should this? First my mother wanted me to be more like Akane, and now she wants me to be more like her. I told her it was hard enough trying to be like me without trying to learn to be someone else. She didn’t understand. Thought I was trying to make a joke.”
Kara put her fingers over the guitar strings, stilling the music. She gave Sakura a sad smile and switched back to Japanese.
“I’m going to guess she didn’t think it was funny.”
Sakura pointed the cigarette at her. “You’re not as dumb as you look.”
Kara laughed. “You’re not as paranoid as people say you are.”
Eyes mock-wide, Sakura looked around. “People? What people?”
They grinned at each other and then fell into an easy companionship. Kara played and Sakura smoked. It occurred to Kara that they must look very odd together, the proper Japanese girl in her pristine clothes and the blond gaijin girl in blue jeans and a Boston College sweatshirt. People would look at them and wonder. Kara liked that.
They had spoken on the phone and via instant message regularly throughout the days since Mr. Matsui’s murder, but they had not seen each other even once in that time. Furious with her and terrified for her, Kara’s father had not let her leave the house for the first three days unless he was with her, and by the time she had been free to go anywhere on her own—during the day, of course—Miho and Hachiro had both been taken home by their parents.
Sakura had never gone home, but the principal had restricted her to the dormitory and Miss Aritomo had stayed with her whenever she wasn’t at the police station answering questions. That arrangement had lasted for two days, and then her parents had finally arrived. They had been out of the country, out of contact, but had become miraculously findable when, instead of merely being in danger, their daughter had been arrested for assault.
So many times, Kara had wanted to say, “At least they came.” But the words never made it as far as her lips, mainly because she knew they would be hollow and bordering on deceit. Though who she was trying to deceive, herself or Sakura, she was not quite sure. Sakura’s parents had come to be with her, that much was true. But neither their daughter nor anyone else involved—even Kara’s father—thought for a moment that they had come for any reason other than to save face. They defended their daughter because if she was indeed guilty of a crime, that would be an embarrassment to them.
It had apparently never occurred to them that their neglect of their surviving girl did more to dishonor them than anything Sakura might have done, or would ever do.
“Are you officially innocent, then?” Kara asked.
“As innocent as I’ll ever be,” Sakura said. “Thanks to you and Miho and Hachiro, they don’t have any reason not to believe my version.”
Kara cringed inside. She had hated to lie, but no one would have believed the truth, and so they’d all had to manufacture a version of that long, terrible night to account for its events without any hint of the supernatural. Given her troubled history and school record, neither the police nor the school board had any difficulty believing that Sakura had snuck out a first-floor window that night.
Sakura had wanted to visit her sister’s shrine, as she had nearly every night, to say a prayer for her. There, she discovered that the memorial put together by so many students had been destroyed, nearly every scrap of paper and every photo torn up. Furious and anguished, she had searched the site for a picture of herself and her sister that she had left at the shrine. She did not realize that Ume had followed her, out the window and down to the bay, until she heard the other girl laughing.
Sakura claimed Ume had admitted destroying the shrine and gloated about it. To give the story the ring of truth, Sakura confessed to the police that she had attacked Ume, that she had been the one to throw the first punch, but that she had no doubt that Ume had come there to harm her. They fought on the shore and then in the water. Ume had tried to drown her and had confessed in the ferocious heat of that moment that she had murdered Akane.
And then they had heard screaming from the direction of the school.
Sakura told the police she had left Ume there by the water and gone running back up to the school and then around to the field, where she had found Miho, Hachiro, and Kara frantically screaming for help and using their cell phones to call the police after having discovered the torn, bloody corpse of Mr. Matsui.
Kara had snuck out of her house and gone to meet Hachiro, desperate to say good-bye to him before he left for home the next day. They had feelings for each other, and she had been unable to sleep, thinking that she might never see him again. Discovering Sakura missing from her bed, Miho had gone in search of her and run into Hachiro, and she agreed to try to distract Mr. Matsui so that he could sneak out and say good-bye to Kara.
In the foyer of the dormitory, Hachiro and Miho had been surprised to find the door open and Mr. Matsui gone.
At the same moment, as she walked across the field, Kara had found the bloody remains of Mr. Matsui. She had screamed and then heard a roar. A black bear had charged her from the trees. She had run toward the dorm but not been fast enough, and it got its claws into her.
Hachiro had grabbed an aluminum baseball bat that he and his friends had left near the door the day before and rushed out. He had struck the bear several times, and it had raked his chest with its claws before finally retreating. He told the police he believed he had injured it badly, that it had been staggering.
Then Miho had seen Mr. Matsui’s body and begun to scream, even as Kara called the police.
As far as Kara was concerned, the whole thing sounded like the biggest pile of bullshit she had ever heard. Mainly because that was exactly what it was. But they had certain things working in their favor.
Ume confessed to murdering Akane and gave the names of the other students who had been there that night and taken part. In defending themselves, those girls—the ones still alive— had all agreed on one thing, which was that Ume’s confession was one hundred percent true. She had murdered Akane.
So when Ume told the truth about what she had seen that night—the demonic beast that had tried to drown her before being driven off by Hachiro and the others—what else could people think but that she had witnessed their skirmish with the bear and her mind had twisted it into something worse? The girl had admitted to murder and that she’d been unable to sleep, haunted by nightmares and guilt.
“She snapped, I guess,” was how Kara’s father had expressed it.
The police were still calling Jiro’s death a suicide. Hana had jumped off the school roof, but she had been there the night Ume murdered Akane and it seemed obvious that guilt had consumed her and driven her to take her own life. As for Chouku, when questioned, one of Ume’s soccer girls—who had also been present for Akane’s murder—had recalled Chouku saying she thought they should all go to the police and tell the story. They couldn’t prove it, but with that scrap of information, the police suspected that Ume had murdered Chouku as well to protect herself.
No one ever mentioned that Jiro and Chouku had been drained of blood. Hachiro, Miho, Sakura, and Kara had compared notes over the phone, and none of them could recall anyone putting forth a theory as to
how
Ume was supposed to have killed Chouku. As absurdly unlikely as the official version of that night’s events might be, it was a puzzle in which all of the pieces fit together. The absence of blood in the bodies of two dead teenagers was an extra piece, and the puzzle had no room for it, so the police had discarded it.
The police had told Miss Aritomo, who told Kara’s father, who told Kara, that a black bear had attacked two men on Takigami Mountain and that their dog had killed it. The story had to be either a massive coincidence or an outright lie on behalf of the police, perhaps an attempt to calm fears at the school and in the town.
At first, Kara had been amazed that anyone would accept such a story and chalked it up to the Japanese sense of order, the need to have an explanation for something that was inexplicable. But the more she thought about it, the more she realized that the police in American cities and towns also probably concocted stories on a regular basis to set people’s minds at ease. How many times had she seen something on the news about some suspected serial killer, where it seemed the cops had known for ages that the murders were connected and the guy was out there hunting people, but hadn’t bothered warning anyone? Murders went unsolved all the time, and nobody was panicking about killers living among them.
Of course, when the cops back home invented stories to explain something they could not understand, it didn’t involve the supernatural. At least, Kara didn’t think it did.
And then there was Sakura.
Despite Ume’s confession to murder and Sakura’s tale about the girl ruining her sister’s memorial shrine, the police had wanted to press charges against her for assaulting Ume that night. But Sakura’s parents were influential people. Their eldest daughter had been murdered and the police had not had a single suspect, and now the murderess had confessed and their younger daughter—defending her sister’s memory—was to be charged with assaulting the girl who had killed Akane?
Embarrassment and fear of public humiliation had taken their toll. After days of hesitation, the police had dropped the charges.
Incredibly, it was over.
“So, you’re leaving, then?” Kara asked.
Sakura took a long drag on her cigarette, blew a smoke ring, and smiled. “Well,
they
are. Tomorrow.”
Kara gaped at her. “They’re letting you stay? How did that happen?”
“Easy. I told them I wanted to come home, that the teachers at Monju-no-Chie School expect too much and are too strict. They decided that I would be too free in a public school, that I would get into even more trouble. It really wasn’t that difficult. It isn’t as though they wanted me to come home with them.”
Despite the smile on Sakura’s face when she said this, it gave both girls pause. Kara started to play something soft and slow, not paying any attention to the music or even aware of what song it might be.
This was her moment to say something encouraging or reassuring—something like
I wish I could stay with you
. But she didn’t want to lie and feared that those words might not be the truth. How could Sakura want to stay? Yes, this was her school, and Miho would be back tomorrow, and in a few days classes would start again. And from Kara’s perspective, leaving would probably mean never seeing Hachiro again. But still . . .
“Aren’t you afraid?” Kara asked, looking down at the guitar, watching her fingers move along the neck as though she needed to focus in order to play, when really she just did not want to see Sakura’s eyes when she asked the question.
“Of what?” Sakura said. “The curse?”
Kara nodded without looking up.
“A little. But it’s been six days and nothing has happened. The world Kyuketsuki came from is dust now, Kara. You heard what it . . . she . . . said. The old darkness, the things people in Japan used to believe in, are nearly all gone. They’re weak things. We don’t know if Kyuketsuki’s curse will really affect us, or if other dark things still exist to do anything about it. You know that story about how these guys caught this giant prehistoric fish that everyone thought had been extinct for thousands of years? Maybe Kyuketsuki’s like that fish, out there alone.”
Sakura paused to puff on her cigarette.
Kara looked up at her. “Maybe. But maybe not.”
Sakura nodded solemnly. “All right. I admit I was scared at first. But nothing’s happened yet. Nothing may ever happen. I’m afraid to be out after dark alone, and I’ll probably be jumping at shadows for my whole life. But I can’t run away when there might not be anything to run from. And all of my friends are here. I don’t have anywhere else I’d rather be.”
Kara played a few more chords, and then her hands went still. She stared out at Miyazu Bay and at the black pines that lined Ama-no-Hashidate. This was truly one of the most beautiful places she had ever seen.
“How have you been sleeping?” Sakura asked.
Kara turned to her, studied her face. “Fine. Really well, actually. No more bad dreams.”