The trio watched the rain slowly dissolve footprints and hoof marks in the sand. “The kidnappers had to have left a trail,” Hirata said. “All we have to do is find it.”
He panned his gaze across the towering cedars in the forest and the ancient, layered rock that comprised the cliffs. He pictured a horde of faceless attackers battling soldiers, cutting down servants and women. Splashes of blood and shadows in frantic motion painted his vision. The dark, lingering aura of violence radiated from every leaf, stone, and grain of soil. Hirata smelled death. He could almost hear the clashing blades, the victims’ terrified cries, and Midori calling his name.
“The women must have been tied up and gagged to keep them from running away or making noise,” he said, closing his mind against horror. “The kidnappers wouldn’t have transported prisoners along the road and risked someone noticing. They would have gone through the forest.”
He and the detectives secured their horses to a tree off the roadside, out of sight from passersby. They trudged up and down inside the forest, paralleling the Tokaido and gradually moving beyond the immediate scene of the attack. The rain splashed through the gloom beneath the cedars. Trampled underbrush and broken branches gave clear evidence that people had run and fought here. On fallen leaves shielded by the trees, brownish-red bloodstains marked places where bodies had lain. Hirata found a sandal stuck in the mud, probably lost by a fleeing member of Lady Keisho-in’s entourage. Fukida found a straw hat, and Marume a lone sword with the Tokugawa crest on its hilt, the blade already rusting.
“Whatever relics that the highway officials didn’t remove, the local peasants must have scavenged,” Fukida deduced.
The forest seemed unnaturally still, haunted by the spirits of the dead. A sudden fluttering noise disturbed the quiet. Hirata’s heart jumped; he and his comrades started. Their hands flew to their swords as they looked up. A large black crow rose upward on flapping wings and disappeared into the misty sky. The men expelled a collective breath of relief. They resumed hunting for the kidnappers’ trail. Some fifty paces away from the road, the forest seemed undisturbed. Hirata and his men separated, peering between trees and scrutinizing the ground. The leaves high over them flinched when pelted with raindrops. Longing and dread for Midori burgeoned inside Hirata. A tickle in his nose and a soreness in his throat presaged a cold. He paused to sneeze, and heard a shout from Fukida, invisible within the woods.
“Over here!” the detective called.
Hirata and Marume hurried over to their comrade. Fukida pointed at a strip of trodden underbrush that led away from the Tokaido. Hirata dared not hope too much, but excitation sped his pulse. He and the detectives carefully stepped twenty paces along the crushed weeds and saplings, then saw branches strewn across their path. The thin, leafy shafts were bent and trampled, the ends cleanly severed by a blade. Hirata looked up and saw cut branches on a shrub that had blocked the path. Beyond this point lay more flattened underbrush.
“Someone has broken a trail through here,” he said.
Eyes alert, he hastened forward. The detectives followed. Hirata spied footprints in bare earth and crushed, rotting mushrooms. More cut branches marked places where someone had hacked past low-hanging tree limbs. Then Hirata spotted a small, gleaming object of irregular shape. He picked it up and found himself holding a woman’s sandal with a silk thong and a chunky red-lacquered sole.
“This must belong to Midori, Reiko, Lady Keisho-in, or Lady Yanagisawa,” Hirata said, afire with hope. “One of them must have dropped it while the kidnappers brought them through here.”
On through the forest he and his men plunged. As the trail continued, they found long black hairs caught on a tree trunk, as though the bark had snagged one of the women as she passed. A torn scrap of blue-brocaded silk adorned a prickly shrub. Hirata began to feel feverish, and his sore throat worsened; but exhilaration buoyed him. Every sign convinced him that he was following the route the kidnappers had taken… until the trail abruptly ended at the vertical rocky rise of a cliff.
Hirata and the detectives stared up at the cliff in dumbfounded disbelief. An icy wind blew mist into their faces.
“The kidnappers couldn’t have climbed that, with or without the women,” Marume said.
“The trail doesn’t go anywhere else,” Fukida said as he paced widening arcs in the woods at the bottom of the cliff.
Awful realization struck Hirata. “The kidnappers planted a false trail, to fool anyone who tried to follow them. They came as far as this dead end, then backtracked along the path they’d made.” Breathless from fatigue and outrage, Hirata exclaimed, “It’s the oldest trick in history. And I fell for it!” He cursed the kidnappers and his own gullibility. He kicked the cliff, venting his anger.
“We couldn’t have known it was a trick,” Marume said.
“We had to follow the trail because it might have led to the women,” Fukida said.
Refusing consolation, Hirata stalked off in a direction chosen at random. “What are you waiting for? We have to keep looking!”
The detectives ran after him, caught his arms, and restrained him. “It’s getting too dark,” Fukida said. “Pretty soon we won’t be able to see clues. We should go back to the highway, get our horses, and find someplace to spend the night.”
“Let me go!” Furious, Hirata struggled free of his comrades. “I have to find Midori.”
“If we wander around after dark, we’ll only get lost,” Marume pointed out. “The sosakan-sama will have to send somebody to look for us. Lot of good that will do your wife and her friends. We must wait until morning.”
Hirata couldn’t bear to call off the search for a moment, let alone a whole night, while Midori was somewhere in the vast countryside, at the mercy of killers he believed had been hired by her insane father. Yet he had to admit that Marume and Fukida were right.
Reluctantly, Hirata accompanied the detectives back down the trail toward the Tokaido. “We’ll ride to the Odawara post station and find lodgings at an inn,” he said. “We can ask around town to see if anyone there has seen or heard anything that might help us find the kidnappers.”
The Edo Castle sickroom was isolated in a separate compound, situated low on the hill and far from the palace to protect the court from the spirits of disease and pollution from death. Inside the drab one-story building surrounded by a plank fence and tall pine trees, the Tokugawa physicians treated castle residents who were seriously ill or injured. A shrine beside the door contained a rock that served as a seat for protective Shinto deities. In front of the shrine burned a purifying fire. A sacred straw rope encircled offerings of food and drink, a wand festooned with paper strips, and a lock of woman’s hair to keep away demons.
Police Commissioner Hoshina, accompanied by two personal retainers, strode into the sickroom. At one end, apprentice physicians tended herbal infusions simmering in pots on a hearth. Screens that usually partitioned the building into separate chambers had been pushed against the walls to accommodate the large crowd of palace officials that had gathered. On the crowd’s fringes hovered maids and servants. Anxious conversation mingled with chanting and the rhythmic jangle of bells. The sickroom was hot from the fire and redolent with medicinal steam.
“Let me through,” Hoshina commanded the crowd.
People stepped aside, bowing to Hoshina as he passed through their midst. At the center of the crowd, on the tatami floor, a woman was lying upon a futon. A white sheet covered her body; a white bandage wrapped her head. Her face, with its prominent cheekbones, was deathly pale, the closed eyelids shadowed purple. Near her head, an elderly sorceress clad in white robes banged a tambourine to summon healing spirits, while a priest recited spells and waved a sword to banish evil. At her feet squatted two highway patrol captains. Dr. Kitano, the chief castle physician, knelt beside the prone woman.
“This is Lady Keisho-in’s maid, Suiren, who survived the massacre?” Hoshina asked the doctor.
“Yes, Honorable Police Commissioner,” said Dr. Kitano. He had a creased, intelligent face, and sparse gray hair knotted at his nape. He wore the dark blue coat of his profession.
Hoshina turned to the officials. “Leave us,” he said, annoyed that they’d come to gawk at Suiren, when he himself had important business with her. “You, too,” Hoshina told the maids. He gestured for the sorceress and priest to move away. “Not so loud.”
Soon he was alone with his own men, the highway soldiers and the apprentices, Dr. Kitano and the patient. While the priest and sorceress quietly continued their ritual in a corner, Hoshina crouched by Suiren. She lay still, apparently oblivious to the world. Her breath sighed slowly through her chapped, parted lips. Hoshina frowned in
