†
✦ ✦ ✦
Eventually, the girl and the dog burst out of the gate and ran off, heading away from the corner where I was hiding. They never noticed me there.
When they were gone, I went back to the house. The front door wasn’t locked. Inside lay the man’s body. He was sprawled on his back, and I could clearly see the knife handle sticking out from his heart. There was a trail of blood leading down the hall, and there were red stains all over the entrance. I examined him, being careful not to touch anything. I didn’t know who he was, but I guessed he was the girl’s father. Did she have a mother? I took a photograph and left the scene. I considered taking the knife, but then I decided to leave it there—it seemed like this was where the knife belonged.
As I left, I wiped the door handle with my sleeve, not wanting to leave fingerprints.
I went home, where I found Sakura watching television and doing homework.
“Where’d you go?” she asked.
I told her the convenience store, and then I ate my breakfast.
After, I went back to the girl’s house. As I got closer, I could feel a buzz in the air. When I turned the corner and came in sight of her house, I knew why. Someone had called it in, and the police were there, with a crowd around them, watching.
The red lights on the patrol car shone on the wall of the house. The people in the street were pointing at the girl’s house and whispering; they must’ve been neighbors—housewives in aprons and middle-aged men in pajamas. I stood behind them, looking up at the house, listening to their hushed voices.
It sounded like the woman who lived there had come home to find a man she knew lying in the entrance with a knife in his chest. From this information, I learned that he had not been the girl’s father after all.
Casually, I struck up a conversation with a woman in an apron. I asked about the people who lived there. Even though she didn’t know me, she answered happily, her excitement overcoming her suspicion.
Apparently, a woman lived there with her daughter and a dog. There was no father; there had been a divorce. The girl refused to go to school, instead spending all her time alone in the house with the dog.
According to the woman in the apron, the girl and dog were missing, and nobody knew where they were.
I turned my back on the crowd and walked away. A block away, I passed some kids on bikes, pedaling toward the crime scene like they were on their way to a festival.
✦ ✦ ✦
†
✦ ✦ ✦
A set of concrete stairs led from the bridge down to the bank of the river, which was covered in a sea of grass.
It was a beautiful day, and I could see my shadow clearly as I went down the stairs. The grass shone green in the sunlight, and the wind sent ripples across its surface.
When I reached the bottom of the stairs, all I could see was grass, as tall as me. Looking up, I could see the underside of the massive bridge and the blue, cloudless sky.
I pushed my way through the grass until it suddenly opened up before me, and I came out into the clearing. A golden retriever was sitting in the center of it.
The girl was nowhere to be found.
The dog wasn’t tied up or anything. It just sat like a statue, surrounded by the wall of grass, as if it had known I would come. It had distinguished, wise eyes. A beautiful dog, I thought.
I had thought the girl and her dog might be here, but I had been only half right.
I went over to the dog, putting my hand on its head. The dog didn’t seem scared, and it allowed me to touch it.
There was a piece of paper stuffed in its collar, which I pulled out.
“To the person who gave me the knife,” it said.
Apparently, it was a letter from the girl to me. The girl had noticed me, and she had guessed I might come here.
The letter was torn out of a notebook and written in pencil. It must have been written on the stairs, and the letters were hard to make out.
I read it. It was scattered and incoherent, but I could follow the general idea. She mentioned why they had been kidnapping pets and why they had been doing what they did under the bridge. She explained about the man’s violence and thanked me for giving her the knife. It was a very childish letter, but I could tell she had worked hard on it.
At the end, she asked me to take the dog. It must have taken her a very long time to write that. It had been erased several times, and it must have been hard for her to write. But I knew she had guessed the dog would be put down if she took it with her.
I put the letter in my pocket and looked at the patient retriever. It had a collar but no leash. I wondered how I would get it to come with me or if I should just leave it there.
Yesterday, the girl had beckoned to the dog and it had come, so I tried the same, and the dog obediently followed me.
It followed me all the way home, walking right behind me. I figured I’d forget about it if it turned away, but it never did.
My parents weren’t home, but Sakura was in front of the TV doing homework. When she heard the dog come inside, she turned around and yelped. I told her it was ours now. She was surprised, but she got used to the idea quickly; it was far less shocking than finding corpses. She began thinking up names for the dog, but I stopped her. I had heard the former owner call the dog by name under the bridge, and the same name had been written in the letter. I told her the dog was named Yuka.
I remembered peering in the window of the girl’s house that morning. I had done so just as the girl bit down on the man’s throat. At first, I had no idea what was going on—but now that I’d read the letter, I understood. The dogs the girl had fought and bitten to death under the bridge had all been practice, preparation for killing that man.
I left Yuka with Sakura, sat down on the sofa, and read the letter again. It was written in pencil, and she had pressed very hard, like most children did. I had to puzzle it out one letter at a time. It was clear she worshipped her dog.
I thought back on the night before. That girl had occasionally looked at the golden retriever before acting. Not wanting to get them dirty, she’d removed her clothes before fighting the dog.
She talked about the dog like it was the voice of God. In the letter, she claimed to understand Yuka’s words clearly.
“How did we get this dog?” Sakura asked.
I told her it had belonged to a friend of mine, but the stepfather had hated dogs and had been mean to it, so the friend had asked me to take it in. It wasn’t far from the truth. The girl’s letter had described how her mother’s boyfriend had hurt the dog and how she had been driven to kill him because of it.
“Who could be mean to a dog like this?” Sakura exclaimed, indignant. Yuka tilted her head, looking up at Sakura with deep black eyes. I couldn’t tell if Yuka knew as much as the girl said she did. That girl might simply have been seeing her own reflection in Yuka’s eyes.
My cell phone rang. It was Morino. I left the dog with my sister and went upstairs. Morino told me about a murder that had happened right in our neighborhood.
“We were on that road the other day! It happened right where we were! The wife found the man just inside the entrance.”
“Yeah,” I said. I explained how there had been teeth marks on the man’s neck, a trail of blood from the bedroom to the entrance—and how the knife that had ended the victim’s life had been handed over to the killer by someone else.
“How do you know all that?”
“You see, the girl we passed that day is the killer,” I said, and I hung up.
I liked watching criminals, but I had a rule: I was always a third party, and I never got involved. I had broken that rule this time. I’d seen the girl and dog run toward the door, the man coming after them. And before I'd known it, I’d given the knife to the girl.
I didn’t consider this a bad thing. It didn’t bother my conscience at all—presumably because it hadn’t been my will. I believed the knife had seen the future, and the knife just wanted it to happen.
✦ ✦ ✦
†
✦ ✦ ✦
A few hours later, the missing girl was found wandering aimlessly, and she was taken into protective custody. There was blood on her mouth and clothes, and she’d been found alone, in the middle of nowhere.
I learned of this via a message to my phone from Morino, a message I read in my darkened room. My room was quiet—I never listened to music—and I could hear Sakura happily playing with the dog down below.
I closed my eyes and imagined how the girl must have played with the dog under the bridge, on a hot summer day, with the green grass all around them.