Toshihiko walked along the street, looking at his notes.
On the first night, she told him to cross the road by Aoba Lake and look inside the church there.
That church had to be Pádraig Aoba.
On the second night, she told him to climb the jungle gym in Northside Park and look there.
The park was probably the playground on Tetsubozu Street. It was the only park in the neighborhood that had a large jungle gym with a roof that could be climbed on. Local kids and parents called it Northside Park because you got there via the north side of the elementary school.
On the third night, she told him to go to the pedestrian footbridge and search the third stairway from the right.
That had to be the bridge where Toshihiko had fallen down the stairs, the one next to the bus stop closest to the cram school. The stairs on it had eight lanes in all.
On the fourth night, she told him to go behind the citizens’ center and search the big parking lot there.
That probably meant the building next to the police station where he’d first reported the incident. Technically speaking, it wasn’t a citizens’ center so much as a government branch office that dealt with lots of different processes all under one roof.
On the fifth night, she told him to search outside the convenience store on Taisho Street.
There was such a store about a fifteen minutes’ walk from Aoba South Elementary, almost exactly halfway between the elementary school and the cram school.
On the sixth night, she told him to go around the back of the Ciel Candy Store and search the drain there.
The Ciel Candy Store had closed some three months ago. The property was vacant now, although it had been a sandwich shop before. It seemed to have changed hands pretty quickly and was due to open as a burger restaurant soon. And it was right next to the cram school.
These were all places where he’d encountered the black-haired woman. Toshihiko had suggested that maybe he’d be safe from running into her again if he just avoided those areas, but Rumi hadn’t agreed.
“Your situation does have some remarkable commonalities with Nanaka’s story. But we shouldn’t assume we can base our movements on that alone. Your encounter on the train and your coworker going crazy show that it’s possible for things that weren’t mentioned in the story to happen to you. We can’t be too careful. Think of avoiding those places as a good precaution, not a surefire solution.”
As usual, Rumi’s advice made a lot of sense. He could be letting the fact that Nanaka had been so frightened and the way the places had matched mislead him. Even those similarities might be nothing more than a misconception. It was like someone noticing that they always seemed to check their watch at the same time every day and assuming that particular time held some kind of special significance.
This was a manifestation of the Barnum effect. You saw it in fortune-telling all the time—fraudsters would give general statements that could apply to anyone, and their customers would assume they were talking about them specifically. In the same way, Toshihiko might just be noticing these similarities and assuming there was a common cause behind them.
Taking his current case into account, he’d met the tall woman in every place described in the Haruko story, but they were all locations he tended to visit or pass as part of his daily routine. Maybe those six places just so happened to match up, and there was no pattern, no deeper meaning. And as Rumi had pointed out, he’d also encountered the apparition in areas not mentioned in the story.
More than anything, the grieving mother searching for her poor dead son and the deranged stalker in the flashy makeup didn’t seem to have that much in common.
He decided to leave the paranormal side of the investigation to Rumi and focus on the material world. The six places in the story were part of his everyday life, so avoiding them all wasn’t really an option. Even now, he was headed toward the police station to show them the data that Miyoshi had put together.
Toshihiko had seen the apparition here a few days ago. A woman had been standing there, her head down and her back to him. He’d tried to hurry past her, but she’d turned around and given chase. He couldn’t make out her face in the dark, but he had no doubt it was the stalker.
Up until now, his encounters with the tall woman had been distressing, but he’d never felt his life was in danger. Perhaps that was because of the talisman Rumi had given him. Now that it had been reduced to useless scraps of paper, things might be different. He’d asked Rumi about that, too, and she’d tossed him a rosary—something Aoyama had left at the office.
“He’s a Protestant, so he doesn’t actually use them himself. They’re a devotional tool mostly used in Catholicism. He treats this one with more care than you might expect. Apparently, his grandfather bought it at the Vatican, so it has sentimental value. That said, I believe he has several of them, and he’s always leaving them lying around. Go ahead and take it—he’ll never find out.”
She shouldn’t throw around something so precious so causally. She shouldn’t lend out other people’s possessions without their permission. But telling her any of that wouldn’t do any good. Toshihiko doubted this rosary would have the same curse reversing properties as the talisman. The fact that it belonged to Aoyama only made it less convincing.
Aoyama was a good person. Anybody who knew him would agree. Toshihiko had certainly never met someone as kind and considerate as him. Spending time with him seemed to calm the heart and even refresh the body. But that didn’t mean Aoyama could be relied upon in matters of spiritual protection. Rumi, who was considerably less virtuous, was much more trustworthy when it came to that kind of thing.
She’d given Nanaka her own bracelet and had fobbed Toshihiko off with some random string of beads that didn’t even belong to her. It hardly seemed fair. Especially considering Rumi wasn’t usually very nice to children. Sulking about it wouldn’t get him anywhere, though, so he’d thanked her and slipped the rosary around his neck. He wasn’t a Christian, but he would just have to believe in the spiritual potency of the Vatican this time.