“Did he know Chiyoko before the attack?”
“Yes. They were friends.”
“Was she hurt? Physically, I mean.”
“They… she could not have children.”
“Is that part of the reason she killed herself?”
“Yes. She wanted children very badly.”
“After she died, a man Kazuo Hama built a mausoleum for her to be buried in. Did you know that?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know why he did it?”
“My husband’s father had no money and Mr. Hama did.”
“He was a friend of Chiyoko’s, then?”
“He knew her in the camp, he said.”
“But Mr. Hama wasn’t the one who chased away the three rapists?”
“No.”
That was all she had to tell me. But she also had one thing to show me-the last little quicksilver bead that put the whole thing together. I asked her if the family had kept any photographs of Chiyoko, and she said yes, she had one among other family photos in her purse, of her husband and Chiyoko taken just after they were released from Tule Lake, and she got her purse and showed it to me.
Chiyoko Wakasa and Haruko Gage looked enough alike to have been sisters.
Outside in the car, with the office workers and the rush-hour traffic streaming wetly around me, I sat remembering things.
I remembered a pickup truck with a bashed-in fender and a busted headlight. I remembered eyes that had the dull sheen of someone who had been burning a lot of midnight oil-or so I’d thought at the time. I remembered a son asking his father what had happened to some live seafoam and shooting-star miniatures, and thought that both those things could be types of roses. I remembered that same son telling me his mother had died this past summer and how rough her death had been on his father. I remembered that the Feast of the Lanterns had also taken place this past summer, and that it was a festival to commemorate the dead, and the names of those I’d been told were there.
And when I got done remembering these things, I was pretty sure I knew who had murdered Simon Tamura and Sanjiro Masaoka and Kazuo Hama, and who had sent those presents to Haruko Gage, and who had almost surely abducted her this afternoon.
The nursery man-Edgar Ogada’s father.
Chapter Twenty
It was dark and raining heavily when I got to the Ogada Nursery. My headlights made a silver curtain of the rain as I came bouncing in on the boggy access road; they shone in thin bright spatters off the fiberglass walls of the greenhouses ahead. They also picked up somebody at the door of the nearest greenhouse, the only lighted one — somebody in a yellow slicker and rain hat.
The figure stood looking in my direction for a moment; then it moved away from the greenhouse door and broke into a run. I took the car over next to the potting shed, where its roof gave some shelter from the driving rain. When I stepped out, the running figure was only twenty yards away and slowing. Enough sidespill from the headlights let me recognize him: Edgar Ogada.
He had slowed to a walk by the time he got to me. He stopped and said, “Oh, it’s you,” and he sounded troubled. He looked troubled, too; his face was set in tight lines under the rain hat. “I thought you were my uncle; I called him a while ago and he said he’d be right over.”
“Something wrong at the greenhouse?”
Edgar hesitated. Then, “I’m not sure. My father’s got himself locked inside. He won’t let me in.”
“Is he alone?”
“I don’t know, I didn’t hear anybody else. But with the rain, it’s hard to tell. He was in there when I got home a half hour ago.”
“What’s he doing?”
“Who knows? Whatever it is, he keeps talking to himself while he’s doing it. In Japanese.”
“What is it he’s saying?”
“Mixed-up stuff; I couldn’t make out half of it. He… well, he’s been acting weird lately. He works too hard.”
“Weird in what way?”
“Talking to himself, running around until two or three in the morning, not filling orders, selling stuff that’s already been sold. Or doing something with it; a lot of flowers have just disappeared.”
“What kind of flowers?”
“Mostly roses-bushes and cut pieces.”
“Edgar, was your father at the Tule Lake camp during World War II?”
“Tule Lake? Why do you want to know that?”
“Was he there?”
“Yeah. He was there.”
“Was he married to your mother at the time?”
“No, he was only fourteen when they put him in that place-eighteen when the war ended. He met my mother in 1948.”
“Did he ever speak of a woman he knew at Tule Lake named Chiyoko Wakasa?”
“Who? No. Chiyoko… that’s Haruko’s middle name…”
“Does your father also know that?”
“I guess so. I think I told him once, but-”
“All right, Edgar,” I said. “Go on over to the house. Wait for your uncle there.”
“Why should I? Say, what’re you doing here, anyway? I don’t-”
“Now, Edgar!”
I caught hold of his arm and turned him and gave him a push toward the house. I did not like getting rough with him, but there was no time for explanations; I’d wasted enough time already. And I wanted him out of the way when I went after his father.
I leaned into the car and shut off the engine and the headlamps and then got my flashlight. When I came out with it Edgar was standing twenty feet away in the rain, staring at me. But he wasn’t making any moves in my direction. I quit looking at him, pivoted away from the car, and hurried across toward the lighted greenhouse.
If anything, the rain was coming down harder now, chill against my bare skin. Ahead, diagonally in front of the greenhouse door and some distance away from it, I could see Mr. Ogada’s pickup truck. Crumpled fender, broken headlight-some of the hard evidence the police would need, because the damage had to have happened when he ran down and killed Kazuo Hama.
I had enough facts now to make reasonable guesses at the rest. Tamura and Masaoka and Hama had been the three boys who’d raped Chiyoko Wakasa at Tule Lake. Mr. Ogada had been the boy who’d heard her cries and chased the others off-Chiyoko’s friend, and probably in love with her. He hadn’t done anything about the three rapists at the time; maybe he hadn’t had a good look at them either in the dark, maybe he only suspected who they were. Or maybe he was afraid.
After the war he’d lost touch with Chiyoko. It was probable he hadn’t even known of her death; or that it had taken place in the same town where Kazuo Hama lived, and that Hama had realized he was partly to blame and had tried to salve his guilty conscience by erecting a mausoleum for her remains. “There the wicked cease from troubling and the weary be at rest.” I thought I understood that now, too. It hadn’t just been meant for Chiyoko Wakasa; Hama had meant it for himself as well. She had been the weary-he had been the wicked whose troubling would also one day cease. And now, all these years later, it had.
So Mr. Ogada had met someone else and gotten married and had a son named Edgar and started a
