As if they were lovers instead of father and daughter, Reiko thought with a shudder of revulsion.
“And he loved her,” Tama said. “He gave her lots of presents-dolls, sweets, pretty clothes.”
With them he’d paid for Yugao’s cooperation, suffering, and silence.
“If there was anyone Yugao hated, it was her mother,” Tama said.
“Why?”
“She complained about how her mother was always scolding her. She didn’t like anything Yugao did. Once I saw her hit Yugao so hard that her nose started bleeding. I don’t know why she was so mean.”
Reiko deduced that the mother had been jealous of her daughter for stealing her husband’s affections. And since she couldn’t punish the man she depended on for a living, she’d taken out her anger on Yugao. “How long did this go on?”
“Until we were fifteen,” Tama said. “Then I think her father stopped.”
That would have been three years before the family moved to the hinin settlement. Reiko wondered if Yugao had held a grudge for so long. “How do you know? Did she say?”
Tama shook her head. “One day I went to visit Yugao. She was crying. I asked what was wrong. She wouldn’t tell me. But I noticed that her little sister Umeko had a new doll. And Umeko sat on her father’s lap and hugged him the way Yugao used to. He ignored Yugao.”
Amazement stunned Reiko. The man had committed incest with both his daughters, not just one. It seemed he’d grown tired of Yugao, and Umeko had replaced her as his favored pet and victim of his lust.
“Yugao changed,” Tama said. “She hardly ever talked. She was mad all the time. She wasn’t fun anymore.”
Even though her father had stopped violating her, she must have been crushed and angered by his desertion. Reiko asked, “What happened after that?”
“She was at my house all the time. When I worked in my father’s teahouse, she would help me.”
Reiko imagined Yugao had wanted to avoid her own home, where she would see the father who’d rejected her, the mother who’d unjustly punished her, and the sister who must have caused her terrible jealousy. Tama had been her refuge. But when Yugao and her family had moved to the hinin settlement, they’d been cooped up together, and she’d lost her friend; she’d had nowhere to go. The tensions inside the family must have reached a crisis point and exploded into murder.
“The customers at the teahouse liked her.” Tama sighed. “She would go outside with them, and…”
Her pause conjured up visions of Yugao coupling with men in a dark alley. Reiko suspected that Yugao had been seeking love from them that she couldn’t get from her father.
“Some of them fell in love with her,” Tama said. “They wanted to marry her. But she was mean to them. She called them idiots and told them to leave her alone. She would go outside with other men right in front of them.”
Perhaps she’d also craved revenge on her father, which she’d satisfied by hurting her suitors, thought Reiko.
“But later there was one man. A samurai…” Tama sucked her breath through her teeth.
“What’s the matter?” Reiko said.
“He was scary.”
“In what way?”
Puckering her forehead, Tama searched her memory. “It was his eyes. They were so black and-and unfriendly. When he looked at me, I felt like he was thinking about killing me. And his voice. He didn’t talk much, but when he did, he sounded like a cat hissing.”
Tama shivered. Then bewilderment crossed her face. “I don’t know why Yugao wanted anything to do with him. We knew he was dangerous. Once, another customer bumped into him. He threw the man on the floor and held his sword to his neck. I never saw anyone move so fast.” Awe and fright dazed her eves. “The man begged for mercy, and he let him go. But he could have killed him just like that.”
“Maybe Yugao wanted another man who would hurt her,” Reiko mused.
“He acted almost as if she wasn’t there,” Tama said. “He would sit and drink, and she would sit beside him and talk, and he never answered-he just stared into space. But she fell in love with him. She stood in front of the teahouse every day, watching for him to come. When he left, she would run after him. Sometimes I wouldn’t see her for days, because she was off with him.”
Reiko understood that Yugao had transferred her unrequited love for her father to the mysterious samurai. She speculated that Yugao had stayed in contact with him after she’d moved to the hinin settlement. If so, she might have gone to him after she’d escaped from jail.
A thrill of hope tingled inside Reiko as she said, “Who is this man?”
“He called himself Jin,” Tama said. “That’s all I knew.”
Without a clan name, it would be difficult to trace him. “Who is his master?”
“I don’t know.”
Reiko fought disappointment. The mysterious samurai was her only clue to Yugao’s whereabouts. “What did he look like?”
Tama frowned in an effort to recall. “He was handsome, I guess.”
After many attempts to coax a better description from Tama, Reiko gave up. “Do you know where he and Yugao went when they left the teahouse?”
The girl shook her head, then stopped as a thought occurred to her. “I used to work at an inn, before I came here. Sometimes, when there was an empty room, I would let them inside so they could be together.”
If Yugao and her lover had met up, maybe they’d gone back to the place that was familiar to them. “What’s the name of this inn? Where is it?”
Tama gave directions. “It’s called the Jade Pavilion.” She edged toward the door. “Can I go now?” she said timidly. “If I stay away too long, my mistress will be angry.”
Reiko hesitated, then nodded, said, “Thank you for your help,” and let Tama go. As she watched Tama scurry through the gate of her employer’s house, she wondered if she’d heard everything Tama knew about Yugao. She had a feeling that the meek, gentle Tama had managed to hide something from her.
Lieutenant Asukai put his head through the window of the palanquin. “I heard what the girl told you,” he said. “Shall we go to the Jade Pavilion and look for Yugao?”
That had been Reiko’s first thought, but if Yugao was with her mysterious samurai, and he was as dangerous as Tama said, then Reiko should be prepared for trouble. Her guards were good enough fighters to protect her from bandits and the stray rebel soldier, but she didn’t want to pit them against a murderess and an unknown quantity.
“First we’ll fetch reinforcements,” she said.
24
On a dingy street in the Honjo lumber district, Sano and Detectives Marume and Fukida mounted their horses outside a teahouse. Red lanterns hung on its eaves glowed in the misty twilight; their reflections in the puddles left by the rain looked like spilled blood. Sano watched his guards march the elderly proprietor, two maids, and three drunken customers out of the teahouse. They all looked frightened and confused because he’d interrogated and arrested them, which he’d already done with everyone he’d found at five other places on the list that General Isogai had given him.
“I can’t believe any of those people is the Ghost,” said Detective Marume.
“Neither can I,” said Fukida. “They’re not the sort that would know the secrets of dim-mak, or that you’d expect to find on Yanagisawa’s elite squadron.”
Sano had to agree. Frustration gnawed at him because he’d spent an entire day on this hunt, and the people he’d netted during the other raids appeared just as unlikely to be the assassin. But he said, “We figure that the Ghost travels in disguise. I’m not taking any chances that I’ll catch him and he’ll trick me into letting him go.” He told the guards, “Put them in Edo Jail with the people we arrested earlier.”