Of course! That way he’d have the ransom money to start a new life on the run. If he didn’t reappear after the ransom was paid, everybody would assume the kidnappers had killed him and gotten rid of the body—and after a while everybody would give up looking for him, and he could live happily ever after, someplace faraway where nobody knew him. And if he got tired of happily ever after, he could always go home and say it had taken him all that time to escape from the kidnappers. It was foolproof!—for a really good liar anyway. So this was a much cooler plot: kill somebody and fake a kidnapping to cover it up! The whole movie scenario was writing itself in my head…
But hold on a minute, Aiko. Calm down. That’s the first hypothesis. What about number two? Which was just like what happened in The Big Lebowski. Sano suddenly disappears, and somebody else decides to make it look like a kidnapping in order to collect the ransom. But who was that somebody?
Who knew?
I didn’t know much about Sano’s friends, but it had to be somebody who knew him well enough to hear right away that he hadn’t come home that night.
Sano’s friends? He had lots, boys and girls, so there were plenty of suspects. It made my brain hurt to think about it.
And the toe was still a problem. I decided to think about that again for a while. If someone else was involved, where’d he get a toe?
It was the same deal: no one was going to smile sweetly while you cut off his toe, so there was still a major battle with whoever wanted to fake the kidnapping. And maybe he got killed and it turned into murder again. But it still didn’t make sense to commit murder just to fake a kidnapping, so you had to turn it around again and figure someone else besides Sano had committed murder and then staged the kidnapping to get ransom money in order to disappear. Could be. Or maybe not.
Or there was still another possibility: one of Sano’s friends had killed somebody and then Sano had agreed to help that kid by faking the kidnapping. You couldn’t put it past Sano to come up with the idea of trying to get ransom money out of his own parents.
No, maybe not. That seemed like a stretch.
Okay, then suppose Sano did it all himself, and once he had the money he gave it to his friend to run away with. That way he could later show up at home spouting crap about how the kidnappers had let him go. That was possible too, wasn’t it?
But now I had a bunch of maybes and no way to figure out which theory made the most sense. Maybe it was better that way—allow for all the possibilities to be true at once. Or something like that. Anyway, I was pretty sure it was a case of Lebowski—the kidnapping was a fake. But then didn’t it also make sense that the murder had come first?…
Probably.
All of that assumes, though, that it’s impossible to cut off your own toe. But is it? If you were getting ten million yen, couldn’t you part with one little toe?
Maybe. I bet I could, under the right circumstances. Ten million yen for one toe. Pretty decent trade. All you had to do, aside from cutting it off, was write a scary note, send it with the toe, collect the ransom—and go home. Mission accomplished.
Even better: if your mom and dad put the toe in the freezer and you got home real quick, you might even be able to get to the hospital and have it sewn back on.
In that case, for that one second of pain, you’d have the ransom money and your toe.
Nice! Who couldn’t stand a little pain for that? You’d be singing all the way to the bank. Given the chance, anybody would do it. Shit, I could do it right now!
Ten million yen. You could buy a whole lot of stuff with that.
For the next half hour I flipped through Olive and Spring and some of the other magazines I had on my shelf, thinking about what I could buy with that kind of money.
That’s when Yoji showed up.
5
“Not much going on, I see!” he said. And then, “What did you think you were doing, messing up Maki like that? How could you screw up the prettiest face in the class?” Then he laughed. I suppose it did bother him a little that I’d hurt Maki, but I doubted he was really blaming me. He had figured out right away in the bathroom that they intended to crucify me. So he had rescued me, then went back to help Maki, and now was able to laugh about it and make the whole thing into a joke—mostly to make me feel better. Pretty sweet. And shy too. When he’d left me at the nurse’s office, pretending to be worried about Maki, it wasn’t really her he was thinking of. He knew what hell my school life would be if everybody found out that I had taken on a popular girl like Maki, even to avoid crucifixion. He felt sorry for me, but he was too embarrassed to tell me straight out, and so he’d run off to help her and now was laughing about it to hide how he really felt…Or at least that’s how I saw it. Anyway, asking me why I’d “messed her up” was soooo much cooler than just telling me to cheer up or something—the kind of thing other people would have said. And it
