“You told Misaki about the tape, right?”
This time, the question came from Mochizuki.
“Most of it, yeah,” I replied, still lying on the bed. “I saw her the day before yesterday and we talked about it. She said she wanted to hear it for herself. That’s why I asked you to bring the tape and a tape player today.”
“…You did say that.”
Mochizuki sat down on the edge of the other bed and propped both hands under his cheeks. The room’s air conditioner wasn’t on, but the window was wide open. That was because the outside air flowing into the room had a coolness to it that was unlike that in the town. It was even less like the air in Tokyo during the summer.
“Anyone else?” Mochizuki asked next.
“What?”
“Did you tell anyone else about the tape?”
“Oh…yeah. I mentioned a little bit about it to Reiko,” I replied without even thinking.
“Reiko?…Oh.” Mochizuki pulled one hand away from his cheek and nodded. “Did you tell her everything?”
“I just checked the facts with her.” Slowly lifting my upper body, I continued, “Since she was on that camping trip fifteen years ago, too. I wanted to verify the part about going to the shrine on the second day and two students dying in accidents on the way back.”
“…And?”
“It seemed like the details were blurry, but she said the part about the two students on the way back down the mountain sounded about right, once I mentioned it to her. Thinking back to it seemed to really bring back the shock she felt at the time, too…”
What am I supposed to do? she’d murmured painfully at the time. What can I possibly do about it?
Faced with that reaction, I…
“You didn’t talk about anything else?”
“I checked whether or not she’d had a classmate named Matsunaga. She said, ‘I think I did.’ But when I asked if there was a student who disappeared, besides the two who’d died, she said ‘I don’t know.’”
“Just like the tape said.”
“…Yeah.”
“That’s all she said?”
“Yeah.”
I just hadn’t been able to summon the willpower to tell her the full story: that the way to stop the “disasters” once they had started was to find the “extra person” / “casualty” and return them to Death—to kill them.
“And you didn’t tell anyone else?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Me neither. I don’t think Teshigawara did, either.”
“There wasn’t any point telling anyone. It would just cause a panic.”
“True.”
Looking at it calmly, I believed the thing we really needed to fear was mounting, overactive paranoia.
If the “extra person” / “casualty” gets killed, then the “disasters” will stop.
If everyone else in the class found out about that, what would happen?
The answer, I knew, was that everyone would start scrambling to out the “extra person.” Despite the fact that there’s no way to figure it out. And if they were to just decide that someone was the “extra person” without any concrete evidence…
Just imagining it made me my skin crawl.
A terrifying premonition had the same effect.
That was why, at least for the moment, we thought it was best to keep this information locked away in our hearts. I had told them, though, that I might tell Mei as an exception.
“Hey, Sakakibara,” Mochizuki said, his eyes roving around the room. “Do you think they’re here on this camping trip? The ‘extra person,’ I mean.”
“…I dunno.”
“I can’t stop thinking about it. When I think about how the ‘extra person’ might be here with us, I…”
“Everyone feels that way,” I answered, then took a deep breath. “It’s no good telling yourself not to think about it. Even Teshigawara’s doing it. I noticed him sneaking glances at everyone today. He was probably wondering if he could tell who the ‘extra person’ was…”
“Is there really no way to figure it out?”
“It sounds like it was pure chance for that guy Matsunaga fifteen years ago.”
“…But really, there’s no way?”
“That’s what I heard.”
I moved to the edge of the bed to face Mochizuki. The cherubic young man with the love of Munch and older women slumped his shoulders and dropped his roving eyes to the floor.
“But suppose there was a way…and that you found out who the ‘extra person’ was. What would you do then?”
“You mean…”
“Would you kill that person?” I asked, half intending the question for myself. “Could you do that?”
Mochizuki didn’t answer, and though he’d lifted his eyes at my question, he dropped them once again. He gave a deep, drawn-out sigh that sounded thoroughly discouraged. I followed with a sigh of my own and lay back down on the bed.
Would you kill that person?
Could you do that?
I repeated the question for myself, not speaking it aloud.
Who would kill that person?
How could they do it?
“You think we’re actually going to go up the mountain tomorrow?” Mochizuki asked, looking toward the window.
“I don’t think the plan’s changed,” I replied.
“But we know there’s no point in visiting the shrine…”
“True enough.”
“If the weather’s bad, it’ll get canceled, right? I hope it does. If it starts raining like it did fifteen years ago, I don’t even…”
“Definitely…You want to hang a charm in the window to make it rain?”
Just then my cell phone started to ring. I knew it was mine from the tune it played.
I jumped up from the bed and rummaged through my bag for my phone, then checked the LCD screen.
“It’s Misaki,” I told Mochizuki before answering the phone. I guess the signal was pretty weak, because through some pretty unpleasant static, Kkssshkkshh, vvvmmvvmm—
“Sakakibara?”
Finally I picked out Mei’s voice.
“Where are you?”
“With Mochizuki, in our room.”
“Where’s your room?”
“On the second floor, toward the end. Left from the front door. The number is, uh…”
“Two-oh-two,” Mochizuki informed me in a whisper.
“Room two-oh-two.”
“Can I come over?” Mei asked. “There’s still a little time before dinner and all.”
✦ ✦ ✦
Before Mei got there, Mochizuki said, “I’m going to take a look around,” then went out on his own. Maybe he was trying to be considerate.
When Mei finally reached the room, she told me why she’d come the moment she opened the door: “I wanted to hear that tape.” I quickly complied. The tape and the tape player were on a small table next to the window. Mochizuki had taken them out of his bag for us.
As I put the tape in the machine and pushed the play button…
I replayed in my mind the conversation Mei and I had had when we’d met two days ago.
That morning, first thing, my grandmother had made an announcement. “I found the photo of Ritsuko.”
I’d asked my grandmother to look for the photo after my phone conversation with my father. That’s what she’d found.
“Where was it?” I’d asked, and she’d replied, “In a closet in the side house.”
The side house was the place Reiko was using as an office/bedroom. Why were things in there that had belonged to my mother fifteen years ago?
“Ritsuko used to use the side house, a long time ago,” my grandmother explained. “When she married Yosuke and went off to Tokyo, we moved most of the things she’d left behind to the main house here, but…When I went in and looked around, I found this box all the way at the back on the top shelf in a closet. Here you are.”
She held out a small box that was flat and old. I could make out a name written in black ink on a corner of the dusky pink lid: “Ritsuko,” written in cursive English letters.
“There are a lot of photos in there. I’m sure one of them will be of her third-year class.”
Just as I’d promised, I called Mei on her cell phone. She was back from her vacation home at the beach that day and my call went through without any trouble.
“Can I come over?”
Right. Mei had said the same thing then. She’d come to Koike after noon.
That was the first time I’d ever had her over to my house. When I introduced her, my grandmother looked pretty surprised at first, but then she switched into full-throttle welcoming mode and offered Mei juice and cookies and ice cream and on and on…Thank you, Grandma.
In the small box my mother had left behind, there were four photos in all. Just as my grandmother had suggested, one of them was the class photo we were looking for…
✦ ✦ ✦
March 16, 1973
All my friends in third-year Class 3