“Yes, I’m sure.” Her voice tightened. “What’s the matter? Don’t you believe me?”
“Of course I do,” Sano said, surprised by her defensiveness that made him more uncertain whether he really did.
She wrinkled her brow in a suspicious frown. “Then why are you pressuring me?”
“I’m not,” Sano said. “I just asked-”
Reiko faltered to her feet, away from him. “You think there’s something wrong with my story, don’t you? Because you couldn’t find Jiro or the dead boy, you think I made them up. You don’t trust me!”
“That’s not true,” Sano said, although his instincts denied his words. Years of detective work had taught him that too many protests often signified prevarication.
“Yes, it is!” Reiko obviously saw through him; she’d learned the same lesson while helping him investigate crimes. She was breathing hard, twisting her hands in agitation.
“Don’t get upset,” Sano tried to soothe her. “It’s not good for you or the baby.”
“ ‘Don’t get upset?” “ Incredulous, she exclaimed, ”How can I not get upset when you’re treating me like a criminal?“
The sound of a cough at the door startled them. They turned and saw Hirata poised at the threshold. He said, “Excuse me. I don’t want to interrupt you, but…”
“That’s all right,” Sano said. His conversation with Reiko could only go from bad to worse if it continued. She nodded, agreeing to postpone their disagreement, making a visible effort to calm herself. Come in.
As Hirata entered the room, the look on his face told Reiko he’d brought bad news, the last thing she needed to cap this terrible day.
The harder she’d tried to dismiss her new memories as false, sick delusions, the more real they’d seemed. The more she sought an alternate explanation for them, the less she could resist believing they meant she’d killed Lord Mori. The more she told herself that she’d only wanted to save Jiro, the more she wondered if he and Lily were creatures of her imagination. Her fear that she was not only a murderess but a madwoman scourged her. She shouldn’t have lost her self-control and reacted to Sano’s questions the way she had: If he hadn’t had doubts about her veracity before, he surely did now.
“What is it?” Sano asked Hirata.
Hirata spoke with hesitant reluctance: “I went looking for Lily the dancer.”
Reiko’s nerves tensed even tighter. Her pulse, already racing so fast that she felt shaky, sped faster. “Well? Did she tell you that I went to Lord Mori’s estate to look for her son?” She was anxious for confirmation of her own story.
“No,” Hirata said. “I mean, I couldn’t find her.” He explained how the people at the teahouse and in the neighborhood had acted as though they’d never heard of Lily. “She and her son don’t seem to exist.”
More horror than astonishment struck Reiko. This was what she’d feared yet expected Hirata to say. Her gorge rose; the muscles of her throat clenched against it. She saw Sano watching her. He didn’t speak, yet the suspicion in his eyes demanded a response.
“That’s absurd,” she heard herself say in a voice that didn’t seem to belong to her. Such things as this happened only in nightmares! “Of course Lily and Jiro exist.” If they didn’t, then she must have gone to the Mori estate for some other reason than for their sake. Lady Mori’s allegations came back to mind. Had she gone to make love with Lord Mori? Instead of spying on him, had she quarreled with him, then stabbed and castrated him? “Those people are lying.”
An uncomfortable silence ensued. Hirata looked to Sano, as if expecting him to come to Reiko’s defense. But Sano averted his gaze, frowning. Desolation filled Reiko because Hirata’s news had dealt another cut to her husband’s trust in her.
Sano said, “Why would they all lie?”
Reiko’s hands involuntarily fluttered. She clasped them tight, holding them still. “Maybe they’re afraid to tell the truth. Maybe someone threatened them.”
“Who?” Sano asked.
His challenging tone dismayed her. “I don’t know. Maybe whoever killed Lord Mori and tried to frame me.”
“Maybe. But there’s the question of proving it.” Sano addressed Hirata: “Did you come up with any evidence at all that things happened the way she described?”
“Unfortunately not.” Hirata described how he’d failed to prove that Reiko had spied from the fire-watch tower. “I couldn’t find anybody who got a good look at her. Fire-watchers might as well be invisible.” He hesitated, turned to Reiko, and said carefully, “Lady Reiko, may I ask you if you spoke to anyone else at or around the Persimmon Teahouse besides Lily? Any people who witnessed that you went there and you can call on to testify what your business was?”
Reiko’s heart sank deeper because she realized that Hirata didn’t trust her either. “No. But Lieutenant Asukai and my other escorts can vouch for me.”
“Yes. I know,” Hirata said. “I spoke to them a little while ago. They did vouch for you.” But of course they would, said his tone.
And he distrusted her enough to have double-checked her story. Reiko was devastated to think that both the men she’d thought her mainstays were losing faith in her. Yet how could she blame them?
Sudden excitement filled her. “Wait-I’ve just thought of something.” She hurried to her chamber, rummaged through her writing desk, snatched out a paper, and returned to Sano and Hirata.
“This is the letter that Lily wrote me.” She handed it to Sano. “This is proof that she asked for my help and mat’s why I went to the Mori estate.”
But as the men studied the letter, they didn’t seem at all relieved. Sano said, “I wonder how a dancer was able to write. Most women of that class can’t.”
Reiko’s excitement deflated. Of course she’d known the fact that most female commoners were illiterate, but she hadn’t thought of it in connection with Lily.
“These characters are so rigid and uniform,” Hirata said, “as if the author was trying to disguise his handwriting.”
He and Sano raised their eyes to Reiko. She gaped at them. “I didn’t write that letter myself!”
“No one said you did,” Sano said, but his manner was grave, disturbed.
“It was delivered to me at the house!” Reiko had another thought. “Midori was there when it came. I read it to her. She’ll tell you.”
“We’ll look into that,” Sano said.
Yet Reiko could feel him thinking that Midori, her friend, would lie for her. And the letter had arrived along with many others; probably no one else had noticed it. I could have slipped it in among the rest. Reiko shook her head in denial. She thought back on her trips to the teahouse, her talks with Lily. Although her memories of them were so hazy they seemed like a dream, how could she have not only unwittingly invented such an elaborate fiction, but forged the letter to back it up? She struggled to make sense of the nightmare.
“Reiko-san?”
Sano was looking at her, a strange expression on his face. “What are you doing?”
She realized with a jolt that she’d moved to the far side of the room and opened a cabinet on the wall. But she didn’t know how, or why. It had happened again, another lapse of time and awareness. Concealing her fear and horror from Sano, she waved away his question. She fixed on the last thought she remembered.
Supposing her story were true, what had become of Lily? Now Reiko was afraid not just for herself.
“You have to find Lily,” she entreated Sano and Hirata. “Something bad must have happened to her.”
“We’ll keep looking,” Sano said without much hope or conviction.
Hirata’s face was a picture of distress.
“What?” Sano said.
“I think I’ve found the guns that I saw delivered to Lord Mori’s estate.” Hirata told how he’d traced the anonymous letter to its source and then inspected the warehouse that the writer had shown him.