“But Ukon didn’t give up trying to convince me that you were evil,” Lady Mori said. “She said, ”If someone hurt you and your family, how would you feel? Wouldn’t you want revenge? Wouldn’t you want them to suffer the way they made you suffer? How could you bear to live as long as your enemy was alive?“ ”
Her voice quavered and shrank. “Day after day she talked. I began to believe that her son was innocent, that he’d been wronged by you. And I began to understand how she felt.” A shadow of emotion dimmed her face. “Because I had felt that same way for so many years.”
Sudden comprehension startled Reiko. “Then it’s true. Lord Mori did entertain himself with boys. He did kill some of them. And you knew.”
“Yes. I knew.”
Reiko felt vindicated because Lady Mori had finally admitted she’d lied. “You hated being the wife of a monster. Is that why he had to die?” The murder had clearly not been intended for Ukon’s benefit alone, and the victim hadn’t been her choice alone, either. “You wanted to make him pay for disgracing you?”
“No.” Lady Mori gave Reiko a disdainful look. “You think you’re so clever. You think you have it all figured out, but you don’t. My own relations with my husband were of no importance. Ukon knew that very well. She knew everything else that he had done. Everyone in this house did.”
Reiko frowned, puzzled because she’d thought she’d begun to untangle the reason for the murder, yet now, for a second time, it seemed she had a ways to go. “What else did he do? What did Ukon know?”
“She said, ”You have a son. You love him the way I loved mine. How did you feel when he was hurt? Don’t you hate Lord Mori for what he did to Enju?“”
“Do you mean he used Enju the way he used those other boys?” Reiko was shocked. “His own son?”
Lady Mori’s disdain deepened. “Why are you so surprised? Lord Mori liked boys. When I remarried, Enju was a boy of just the right age for his taste.”
Reiko realized she should have known. Lord Mori, a powerful man accustomed to taking what he wanted, wouldn’t have confined himself to the peasant boys he rented, or hesitated to take advantage of his new stepson. It wasn’t exactly incest; Enju and Lord Mori weren’t related by blood. But Reiko doubted that even a blood tie would have protected Enju.
“Lord Mori wasn’t interested in me at all,” Lady Mori said. “At our first meeting, before we became engaged, he spent the whole time talking to Enju, playing with him. I thought that meant he would be a good stepfather.” She gave a bitter laugh. “I was too naive to understand what it really meant.”
Why, Reiko wondered, hadn’t she thought of Enju being one of Lord Mori’s boys? A mother herself, she didn’t want to believe that such things were done to children by men who were supposed to be their fathers. Maternity had blinded her.
“Then your story about your love for Lord Mori, and your perfect marriage, was a complete lie,” Reiko said.
Tears glittered in Lady Mori’s eyes. “It was the way I wished things were.”
“When did you realize they weren’t?”
“A few months after I married Lord Mori. Enju’s whole nature changed during that time. He had been such a happy, friendly little boy. He turned sullen, withdrawn. He would wake up screaming from nightmares. When I asked him what was wrong, he wouldn’t tell me. I had him treated by a doctor, but it didn’t help.”
Reiko remembered Sano telling her what Hirata had learned from the Mori clan physician. They should have suspected that Enju’s symptoms had resulted from sex forced on him.
“He began walking in his sleep, or so I thought at first. I would go to his room at night to check on him, and he would be gone. I searched for him all over the estate, but I couldn’t find him.”
Because he’d been in Lord Mori’s private chambers, Reiko deduced, a place his mother hadn’t thought to look.
“One night I lay down on his bed to wait for him to come back. I fell asleep. I woke up when I heard him crying. He was curled up beside me. There was blood on his kimono.” Lady Mori’s face showed the fear she must have felt. “I undressed him. The blood was coming from his bottom. I knew then what had happened. Someone had taken him from his bed, and-”
She gulped down the words that were too terrible to speak. “I said, ”Enju, who did this to you?“ He cried and said, ”I can’t tell you. He said he would kill me if I told.“ The next night I hid near Enju’s room. I saw my husband take Enju to his chambers. I followed them.” Her throat muscles contracted, strangling her voice. “And I heard.”
A shiver passed through Lady Mori, a memory like a bad wind that stirred her whole body. Her eyes closed; their lids quivered. “I heard Enju crying while Lord Mori groaned and wrestled him like a wild beast.”
Even as Reiko imagined the horror of it, she observed that part of Lady Mori’s story was true. She
“I was afraid of him. Afraid he would kill us both if I interfered.” Lady Mori hastened to say, “But I did try to stop him. The next day, I asked him to leave Enju alone. But he said he was in charge and he could do whatever he pleased.” She sobbed at her own helplessness. “I went to my brother, who’s a
Reiko noted that another part of Lady Mori’s story was also true. She had sought family support, although not to end an affair between Lord Mori and Reiko, and been refused.
“There was nothing for Enju or me to do except suffer in silence.” The weight of misery and guilt visibly crushed Lady Mori. “We grew apart. He knew that I knew what Lord Mori was doing. He blamed me because I didn’t protect him. He was just a child, he didn’t understand how helpless I was. What could I have done?” She appealed to Reiko, eager to justify her inaction. “Steal him away, and try to bring him up by myself?”
That would have been Reiko’s first thought under the circumstances. But although she was tempted to despise Lady Mori for her weakness, she knew the world was a harsh place for a woman alone and poor. She saw the rationale for staying and enduring. “So you waited for Enju to get older and Lord Mori to lose interest in him.”
“Yes!” The word burst from Lady Mori in a cry of pain. “If only I had known what would come next. Lord Mori did lose interest in Enju when he grew up, but he wasn’t finished with him.” Anger and revulsion contorted her face. “He made Enju find boys for him and arrange for them to be brought to the estate.”
Reiko shook her head, amazed because she’d thought that the tale of the Mori family couldn’t possibly get worse. That Lord Mori had turned his stepson and former sexual object into a procurer!
“But that’s not all,” Lady Mori continued. “When Lord Mori killed the boys…” She put her face in her hands and wept so hard that Reiko could barely understand her as she said, “He made Enju dispose of their bodies.”
That Lord Mori had turned his heir into an accomplice to murder! Yet even while fresh shock hit Reiko, she saw a chance to solve part of the mystery. “What did Enju do with them?”
“He took them to a crematorium in the Z6jo Temple district. He paid the undertakers to burn the bodies and not tell anyone.”
This was what must have happened to the boy that Reiko had seen, and the reason Sano had been unable to find the body. Enju, or someone else, had followed the procedure, and the boy was ashes by now. Reiko had another question she desperately wanted answered. “Was there a boy named Jiro? This spring, in cherry blossom time?”
Lady Mori shook her head woefully. “I don’t know. There were so many boys.”
“Try to remember,” Reiko urged, anxious to learn whether Jiro and Lily existed, and if so, to find out what had happened to the child.
“I didn’t want to see. I looked the other way.”
Torn between pitying her and deploring her for burying her head in the sand, Reiko said, “You were lucky. You still have Enju. Think about the mothers who never saw their sons again after Lord Mori had them.”
Lady Mori covered her ears. “I don’t want to think about them. There was nothing I could do. Besides, he didn’t kill them all. I don’t know what became of the ones he didn’t.”
This raised but didn’t satisfy Reiko’s hopes that Jiro was real and alive. Still, at least Reiko now knew much of Lady Mori’s true story. For years Lady Mori had seethed with anger at her husband; then arrived Ukon, with her own bone to pick. After Reiko had come on the scene, they’d discovered their common interests. Both thought their sons
