wholesale nursery business. And Hama and Tamura and Masaoka had gone on with their lives over the next thirty- five years. And Chiyoko Wakasa might have remained a fading memory for all of them if a number of things hadn’t happened to freshen it, to slowly turn it into an obsession in Mr. Ogada’s mind.
If Edgar hadn’t met and started dating Haruko, who looked enough like Chiyoko to be her sister. If Mr. Ogada’s wife hadn’t died suddenly and left him lonely and depressed. If he hadn’t somehow found out about Chiyoko’s suicide, and why she had commited the act, and where she was buried. If he hadn’t made up his mind to belatedly avenge her rape and her death. If he had not begun to confuse Chiyoko and Haruko in his mind, to believe that Haruko was some sort of reincarnation of the dead woman he had once loved.
Three murders. The presents to Haruko, the last three taken off the victims and offered not just as tokens of his love but as symbols of his vengeance. And now the kidnapping, because he must believe with all his heart that she really was Chiyoko, and he loved her, and he wanted her with him…
I passed between the pickup and the outer corner of the greenhouse, on my way to the door. The wind- hurled rain had begun to sting harder, and I realized that it was turning into hail. The pellets rattled like gravel against the fiberglass roof and walls of the greenhouse. With that sound and the shriek of the wind, there was no way I could hear anything that might be going on inside.
I paused at the door anyway, to find out if it was still locked. It was. Then I moved on to the adjoining greenhouse, stopped at that door and tried it. Also locked. But it was set into a wooden frame, which in turn was set into the sheet-metal front of the shed, and when I tugged on the knob the door moved loosely against its latch.
The hail kept rattling down; I could feel it smacking off my head, some of the pellets sliding inside the collar of my coat and cold along my neck. If I couldn’t hear anything from out here, I thought, neither could Mr. Ogada hear anything from inside. I stepped back, set myself, and kicked the door hard and flat-footed next to the latch.
It was not much of a lock and it gave immediately and the door went slapping inward. I went in after it a couple of paces-and it was like entering Chiyoko Wakasa’s mausoleum all over again. The smell was the same, only magnified: hundreds of flower blossoms sending out their cloyingly sweet fragrances, roses dominating. Funeral smell, death smell. Bile pumped into my throat. I had to swallow two or three times to keep from gagging.
I stood motionless, straining to see in the darkness. The fiberglass walls on my right showed some of the light in the adjoining greenhouse; but the panels were opaque, and the light made them gleam dully like a wall constructed of iridescent squares. I could make out the door over there, just barely, enough to tell that it was shut. But I could not see much between it and where I was-faint shapes and shadows, some of them bulky against the deeper black. I was going to have to use the flashlight if I wanted to get over there without breaking my neck or making enough noise to override the sound of the hail and alert Mr. Ogada.
I got out my handkerchief, used it first to wipe the wetness off my face, then covered the flash lens with it. When I switched the thing on, the diffused beam let me see some of the flowers: rose bushes in long rows, narcissus and daisies in clay pots, beds planted with a white-blooming bush I didn’t recognize. The beam also showed me that the way to the connecting door was like an obstacle course; most of the available ground space was occupied with flowers, tools, hoses like coiled green snakes.
It took me three or four minutes to cover a distance of no more than forty yards. When I neared the connecting door I shut the flash off and eased up the rest of the way in darkness. The constant drum of hail had slackened now. I pressed my ear against the door, but I still couldn’t hear anything. What was going on in there?
I got my hand around the door knob and rotated it slowly. It turned all the way, made a faint click; this one wasn’t locked. All right. I held it that way for a few seconds, still listening, still hearing nothing. Then I took a breath and inched the door open until I could look past the edge of it.
At first all I could see was the back wall of that greenhouse, where the sprinkler valves were; benches close by strewn with potting soil in sacks and trays, benches farther away jammed with already potted plants. I opened the door wider, moving with it, looking the opposite way around its edge. And I saw them then, both of them, down along the same wall beyond a wheeled cart loaded with more plants.
He’d made a kind of bed for her, or maybe it was an altar: blankets draped over fifty-pound sacks of the potting soil. She was lying on it, supine but half on one side, dressed in a dirt-smudged white pullover and a dark skirt, one shoe off and one shoe on like My Son John in the nursery rhyme. Not moving, just lying there. From this distance I couldn’t tell if she was alive or not.
Mr. Ogada was sitting on a rickety wooden chair near her, his head bowed as if in prayer, his eyes squeezed shut. He seemed shrunken, much older than he was. The naked roof lights made the skin of his face look waxy, like that of a corpse.
I stepped out around the door and started toward him, moving silently on the balls of my feet. But I’d only gone five feet when some sense or other warned him. His head jerked up, he saw me, and a single convulsive moment brought him onto his feet.
I stopped walking. He stared at me without recognition, said something in Japanese. Then he realized who I was, or maybe just that I was a Caucasian, and he said in English, “Why are you here? I don’t want you here. Go away.”
“No, Mr. Ogada,” I said. “I’ve come for Haruko.”
“There is no one here by that name.”
“Her name is Haruko.”
“No. She is Chiyoku.”
“I know Chiyoko,” I said.
“How do you know her?”
“I know she’s dead, Mr. Ogada.”
“No,” he said, and shook his head. “No.”
“Is Haruko dead too? Did you hurt her?”
“Hurt her?” he said. “How could I harm such beauty? They harmed her, not I.” A string of words in Japanese. Then, “Chiyoko, Chiyoko.” His face was scrunched up now, as if he were about to weep.
I took a tentative step; he didn’t move. “Her name is Haruko Gage,” I said. “You kidnapped her, you brought her here against her will. I have to take her back to her husband.”
“No,” and there was more force behind the word this time. “She has no husband. She has only me.”
“Chiyoko Wakasa is dead; she has no husband. Haruko Gage is alive and married.”
“No!”
Another step. And another. I was almost to the wheeled cart now, less than thirty feet from where he stood blocking my way to Haruko.
“Stop,” he said. “You must not come any closer.”
I had no choice. Step. Step.
“You must not go near her!” And he darted away to his left, caught up a pair of shears propped against the inner wall, and came toward me.
There was not going to be any reasoning with him; his eyes had turned strange, feverish, with too much of the whites showing, and he moved with a kind of plodding implacability. I moved, too, but not to meet him; laterally to the nearest of the benches and slightly behind it. Only ten feet separated us now. He held the shears in both hands and cocked back under his right ear, so that the blades pointed straight at my face.
He was less than five feet away when he made his lunge. But I was ready, my hands down on the bench, touching one of the soil trays, and as soon as he slashed at me with the shears I swept the tray up and hurled it at him.
It hit him on the collarbone and the soil showered upward over his face, blinding him momentarily, throwing him off-stride. Leaving him vulnerable. I was already around the bench, and I swung a forearm at the exposed side of his head, like a football player taking a cheap shot at an opponent. It caught him solidly on the cheekbone, knocked him off his feet and bounced him sideways into the wheeled cart. The cart buckled, spilling plants and more dirt; one of the clay pots struck him a glancing blow and opened a gash on the back of his skull. He thrashed a little, flopped over onto his side, then quit moving altogether. But he was alive; I could see a vein throbbing in his neck when I moved over to stand above him.
I stayed there for a few seconds, not liking myself much, even though I’d had to do what I’d done. I had not
