Desperate because he wouldn’t cooperate, Reiko cried, “Unless you do as I ask, I’ll commit seppuku right now, never mind the baby.” She whipped out the dagger from under her sleeve. “I’ll save two out of four of us while I can!”
She clutched the hilt in both hands. Her whole body and spirit recoiled from her intent to kill not only herself but this child that she’d loved with intense maternal passion since the day she’d known she’d conceived it. She pointed the blade at her belly.
A shout of horror burst from Sano: “No!”
He grabbed the dagger. His hands crushed and wrenched hers, trying to pry the weapon out of them.
“Give it to me!” Reiko screamed. “Leave me alone!”
“This is madness!” Frantic, Sano grappled with her. “You’re going to stop it right now!”
He wrested the dagger away from her, leaped up, and held it out of her reach. “Why are you doing this?” he demanded.
“I already told you!” Reiko was distraught, breathless, falling apart.
“Never mind the excuses. Tell me the truth!”
His love shone through the fury in his eyes. Her resolve abruptly shattered. Reiko plunged into a storm of uncontrollable weeping. She gave in to her urge to unburden herself.
“I killed Lord Mori,” she cried. “I deserve to die.”
Shock hit Sano; he opened his mouth and sucked in his breath so hard he almost choked on it. Yet as he watched Reiko sob, he felt less surprise at her confession than a sense that the inevitable had finally come to pass. He realized that he’d been dreading this moment. All his doubts about Reiko’s story, all the warnings signaled by his detective instincts, had prophesied it. All his efforts to believe in Reiko, to excuse evidence against her, had failed. Now he knew what she’d been trying to hide from him.
She was a murderess.
Sano felt none of the satisfaction that he’d felt upon solving other crimes. Dazed by horror, he walked to the cabinet and put the dagger inside so it couldn’t hurt anyone. Then he knelt beside Reiko, who buried her face in her hands and wept.
Those slim, delicate-looking hands had stabbed and castrated Lord Mori.
Yet Sano’s heart balked at accepting what his mind had deduced and his ears had just heard. Reiko looked up at him, her face awash in tears, her eyes filled with dread as she waited for him to speak.
“No. It can’t be,” he said, as vehement in his denial as unconvinced by it.
She fell toward him, head down, hands pressed against the floor. “”I’m sorry,“ she moaned. ”I’m so sorry!“
This was the nightmare of all nightmares. “Why did you do it?” he said, marveling that he should ask her the question that he would ask any other criminal who confessed, as if tying up loose ends were the only thing on his mind.
“I don’t know,” Reiko wailed. “I can’t remember!”
This struck Sano as bizarre, unfathomable. “How could you forget something like that?”
Reiko sat up, clutching her head. The kerchief came loose; her hair tumbled down. “There’s something wrong with my mind. I’ve been having spells.”
Sano was more mystified than enlightened. Even though he felt revolted by the prospect of learning the details of Reiko’s crime and exactly what had driven her to it, he had to know the worst. “Suppose you tell me the whole story.”
She wiped her eyes, smoothed her hair, and swallowed sobs. “I’ve been doing meditation, recovering lost memories from that night at Lord Mori’s estate. I’ve had two visions of things that happened. In the first, I was in his room while he was asleep. He woke up and looked at me. He asked me who I was and what I was doing there. Then he was crawling on the floor, dripping blood from cuts all over his body. He begged me for mercy.”
Sano listened in horror that grew with every word she spoke. It sounded as if Reiko had entered the chamber of her own volition, surprised and attacked the helpless Lord Mori.
Reiko shuddered and continued, “The other vision was even worse. I was in bed with him. He was on top of me. We were-” She clawed her arms as if to tear the flesh that had touched Lord Mori’s, shaking her head violently.
Imagination completed the awful picture in Sano’s mind. His horror multiplied beyond belief. It seemed that his wife had seduced Lord Mori that night, just as Lady Mori had claimed.
“Then I had the dagger in my hands. I lunged at Lord Mori. I stabbed him.” Reiko pantomimed. Sano flinched. “And then-” She retched and emitted strangled gasps. “Then I was kneeling over a puddle of blood. The red chrysanthemum was in it. I was holding Lord Mori’s manhood.” Again Reiko pantomimed. Sano could almost see the severed, bloody organs in her palms. “And then I said-I said, ”Serves you right, you evil bastard!“ ”
She flung herself facedown and wept so hard that her body went into spasms. “So you see, it’s true. There’s no escaping it. I killed him! I deserve to be punished!”
Sano was so aghast that he couldn’t speak. Earlier he’d regretted that he didn’t have solid evidence to prove how the murder had really happened. Now he did. Reiko’s own memories were the strongest evidence against her. Yet he felt a strange sensation of relief because Reiko had finally been honest with him. Now that the air between them was clear, he was more inclined to give her the benefit of doubt than before.
“Maybe those visions don’t mean what they seem to,” he said.
She sat up and regarded him through red, swollen, disbelieving eyes. “What else could they mean?”
“Maybe you only imagined the things you saw in them.”
“I couldn’t have. They felt so real.” Reiko was despairing yet adamant. “They did happen. I know they did, no matter how much I want to believe they didn’t.”
“Maybe they were dreams. Dreams can seem very real. There could have been poison in the wine you drank, that gave you such powerful hallucinations that you thought they were memories of things that really happened.”
“But we don’t know that! How can we be sure that I didn’t do what I remember doing?”
“I know you.” Sano took her damp, cold, frail hands in his. “I know you couldn’t have killed Lord Mori.”
A shadow passed over her face, like clouds dimming a landscape already laid to waste by storms. “It’s not as if I’ve never killed before. Why not this time?”
Sano shied away from the idea that his wife had grown so accustomed to taking lives that there were no moral obstacles to prevent her. “Those other times, you killed to defend yourself or protect other people. That wasn’t murder. And you had no reason to kill Lord Mori. You said so yourself.”
“Maybe I confronted him because he strangled the boy. Maybe I asked him what he did with Lily’s son. Maybe I wanted to punish him for killing them both.” Reiko exhaled a sigh of desolation. “Or maybe there was no boy, no Lily, no Jiro. Those are the parts of my story that don’t seem real to me now. Maybe I killed Lord Mori because we were lovers and he jilted me.”
She regarded Sano with suspicion in her eyes. “Or maybe I did it to punish him because he tried to betray you.”
“No,” Sano said, dismayed that she should think there was truth to the story from the seance in spite of the fact that the medium had confessed to fraud. “That’s not so. And even if you can’t remember everything that happened that night, you surely couldn’t have forgotten everything that led up to it.”
“Couldn’t I?” Reiko’s face was a mask of self-doubt and fear. “I feel as if I’ve gone insane. I don’t know what I’m capable of anymore. All I’m sure of is that I killed Lord Mori.”
“What I’m sure of is that you didn’t,” Sano said with growing, passionate conviction.