It hadn’t been a major accident, so there weren’t any other articles detailing what exactly happened.
After he finished reading, Higano pulled up a photo of Reina’s mother, Yumi, that he had found earlier.
He looked at it, opened his eyes wide, and then heaved a sigh.
He set down the completed cube puzzle.
The puzzle, once jumbled, was now connected. The picture he didn’t want to see had emerged.
Again, the truth was grotesque and unseemly.
“This is merely my theory, but it’s the truth.”
“You sound like you know what you’re talking about, I guess.”
Higano didn’t flinch at the woman’s intense sarcasm.
“Reina was sexually attracted to her father from a young age. Why she fell in love with him, I have no idea. Even if she herself had a reason in mind, she didn’t know the real cause. The truth was clearly just that she had been in love with her father from a young age.”
“Yes, that’s right. However, love isn’t something that happens without a reason, is it?”
“I’m not criticizing the form their love took. I agree that even the slightest thing can cause someone to fall in love…However, while Reina held onto a love that was forbidden love for a daughter, Koichiro was a normal father. He loved her as a daughter, not as a woman, and he wasn’t going to budge. So naturally her feelings would be unrequited.”
Higano could see fear in the outlines of the woman’s face.
“But she didn’t give up,” Higano said. “Reina was determined one way or another to get her father to see her as a woman. She made several failed attempts. Finally, she came to believe: ‘If he’s so normal, then I’ll have to make him go crazy.’”
The woman gasped.
“Reina knew someone close to her who had the ideal love she wanted. She wanted to become her, to replace her. She was obsessed with this. And she knew that she could do it if she managed one thing. She waited for that chance for a long time. Then came the family vacation in Portugal. Reina brought Yumi to the tourist spot Cabo da Roca to get her alone.”
The woman was shaking.
“Wait,” she said. “Don’t say anything else.”
It was a plea.
The woman hadn’t begged for her life or even lost her composure despite knowing Higano might kill her. But now, for the first time, she showed signs of being upset. Unable to take any more, she wriggled her hands bound behind her back and shook her head. Her back trembled when she breathed.
Thrusting the secret before her might just break this beautiful woman. She was as elusive as a cloud because she herself had looked away from reality. She had fooled herself more than anyone with her own misdirection.
And once the deception was peeled away, like a dust-covered piece of tape, it wouldn’t stick to anything ever again.
Musing on this, Higano thought, Why am I holding back something so insignificant?
Seiren Higano was a serial killer, after all.
So without any hesitation, he continued, “This is the secret that Reina wanted to hide. The thing she hid her whole life until she became Miss Direction. The reason she created the Reinas and ran away. She—” He let out a breath and said, “—she killed her mother.”
The woman was dripping with sweat and her breath was ragged. Given the revelation, her reaction was no surprise. But she was bound by the rope and powerless to do anything. All she could do was sit there and accept the truth Higano was laying out.
Once a serial killer caught his prey, there was already no chance of escape.
“It seems like Reina Myoko herself was much more human than I thought. She loved her father and took revenge on the people who hurt him. She killed her mother so she could have all of his love to herself. This is no ordinary behavior, but her motivation, at least, is within the realm of understanding. But she was unable to live with what she did. Miss Direction was the result of her averting her gaze from the truth. That’s human, in a certain sense.”
The woman was trying to get her breath under control.
“A girl who loved her father like that wouldn’t just hand him over to the other Reinas, isn’t that so? If you think about it, the idea that you all could fool your blood relatives too is unthinkable, right? I was completely—no, excuse me. You didn’t mean to deceive anyone.”
He looked at Yumi Myoko’s face on the tablet again.
She and the woman in front of him resembled each other.
The two women weren’t biologically related. Yet they looked incredibly similar. The shapes of their faces were remarkably close—but the rest of them, not at all. Yet the impressions both women cast were nearly identical.
This wasn’t resemblance—it was imitation.
In order to mimic the woman her father loved.
“You said it from the beginning—you aren’t Asami Ino.” He exhaled softly. “You’re the real Reina Myoko.”
Now that the truth about her killing her mother had been revealed, Reina’s will to live, already weak, had completely disappeared.
Her spirit died before the knife could kill her.
Higano removed Reina’s blindfold. It no longer mattered if she saw what he looked like.
With her vision back, she grimaced in the bright light, glanced at Higano, and instinctually flashed a polite smile before large tears began rolling down her face. She said nothing and was wracked with tears.
Higano took out a white handkerchief and wiped away the tears.
Once she’d taken a moment to recover, Reina looked at Higano and said, “Would you give me a little more coffee?”
“Unfortunately, it’s all cold now.”
“I don’t mind.”
He considered making a new cup, but in the end only picked up the cup in front of her. Perhaps it was this cold coffee that she wanted instead of a fresh brew.
He poured the coffee into her mouth. She didn’t spill any, perhaps because her vision had been restored to her.
He watched her delicate throat pulse as she finished the cup.
“It’s sad,” she mused. “No matter how perfect the technique, even delicious coffee gets cold with time, loses all its flavor, and ends up tasting worse than a cup from any old coffee shop.”
Higano nodded.
“It’s just as you put it.” Reina looked off into the distance, as though remembering something, and repeated, “Reina’s secret was that she killed her mother.”
Then she laughed, tacking on to her previous statement:
“That’s a much more ordinary secret than you’d imagined, I bet.” Reina Myoko reflected on her life.
“I killed my mother Yumi at Cabo da Roca and was able to take the love my dad had for her. I mimicked her looks, her expressions, and her character. That’s how I managed to entice my father. He was conflicted, but in the end he couldn’t bear his grief at losing his wife. So he lost to my seduction. He was a decent guy. He always felt guilty about sleeping with me, but I was able to manipulate those emotions to spice things up. I made him jealous, too. That’s why I was dating so many different guys. As expected, my dad lost it. My love turned him into a puppet.”