The bedroom door opened, and Juri came in.
Chapter 21
Juri, I muttered, then shook my head.
“Chiharu, I should say? I’m glad to see you, it’s been a while.”
“Turn off the TV.” She sat down in the armchair.
I took the remote, turned off the TV. In the quiet room, silence reigned for some time. It became oppressive. Juri’s, no, Chiharu’s face was also stiff. She was trying not to look at me straight.
“You emailed Papa, didn’t you?”
“I’ve been waiting for his answer. But I never thought you’d come,” I said, then addressed a glaring issue. “How did you get in here?”
She brought out a key from her small bag. It looked like mine.
“The pitch was that it can’t be duplicated,” I noted.
“It’s not a duplicate. It’s the spare key you lent me.”
I stretched my arm and opened my desk’s drawer. I looked into the corner where I kept the spare key. “But it’s here.”
Chiharu grinned. “That’s a fake.”
“A fake?”
I took the key in the drawer and compared it to mine. The maker and the shape were the same, but when I looked closely, there were subtle differences in the pattern of the cuts.
“So you switched it out.”
“You can get keys from the same maker anywhere.”
“When did you obtain one?”
“All I did was receive it. Papa brought it close by.”
“Your papa, huh?” I sighed. My whole body was going limp. “So every bit of it was your side’s doing.”
“Not every bit. Didn’t you come up with the kidnapping game?”
“And it served you well.”
“We seized our precious opportunity. My last chance to escape dire straits.”
“Dire straits.” I forced a smile. I wasn’t actually so calm. “May I take a guess?”
She glared. With the same eyes as when she’d done it, I imagined.
Staring back into them, I said, “You killed Juri, didn’t you?”
Chiharu didn’t fret. She must have seen my answer coming. After the email I’d sent to Katsutoshi Katsuragi, father and daughter alike would have accepted that I grasped most of the truth.
“It wasn’t deliberate,” she said, terribly casually, like when you’ve caused a minor hassle for someone.
“I already get that. It wasn’t premeditated. You either killed her impulsively or didn’t mean to kill her, but she ended up dying. Otherwise…” I licked my lips. “You wouldn’t have run away from home that night.”
“Right.” Chiharu raised both her arms and stretched. “Ah, this does me good. I wanted to hurry up and tell you. Even the whole time I was here pretending to be Juri, I was just itching to talk. I wanted to see the surprise on your face.”
“That bit was true, then.”
“Which bit?”
“You said you ran away because you had an argument with Chiharu about some cosmetic cream. You probably did get into a fight. What was different was how it played out. Chiharu, who always hated Juri, stabbed her—isn’t that right?”
With a sulky look, Chiharu turned her face away. I noticed how similar the shape of her nose looked to Katsutoshi Katsuragi’s. Juri’s nose in the photo was less flat and better shaped.
“What did you stab her with?”
“Scissors.”
“Scissors?”
She swept up her hair. “I’m good at doing haircuts. Occasionally I even cut my friends’ hair. So I had a beautician I know give me a pair.”
“I see, and those scissors were in the washroom. When she used your cosmetic cream without asking, you had an argument, and you ended up stabbing and killing her with them.”
“That cream,” Chiharu said with a distant look, “is something I bought when I went to France with Mama. You can’t buy it in Japan, and I was so careful in using it. But without even asking me, that bitch—” She looked straight at me. “She was the one who got physical first, though. She slapped my cheek.”
“But it was certainly excessive self-defense. So, you stabbed and killed her, and scared, you ran.”
Chiharu shot a glare at me then stood up. “I’m thirsty. Can I have something?”
Before I could reply, Go ahead, she had gone into the kitchen. When she came out, she was holding a bottle of white wine. Muscadet Sur Lie. It went well with light hors d’oeuvres.
“Can I drink it?”
“As you like.”
“You’ll have some, too, won’t you?”
Before I could respond, she placed two wine glasses on the center table. She held out the corkscrew and the bottle to me.
“What were you going to do, running away? At that point, you were looking for a hotel room. After staying a night, what were you going to do?”
“Stop jabbering and focus on opening the wine, please.”
I pulled the cork and poured wine into the two glasses. With only a gestured toast, we held the Muscadet in our mouths. It had a pleasant acidity and the signature sur lie fragrance of young grapes.
“I hadn’t decided,” she said.
“Huh?”
“I said I hadn’t decided what to do. But I didn’t want to be in that house. It was going to get crazy for sure, and they’d find out soon enough that I’d done it, and getting asked all sorts of questions by all sorts of people would be so annoying. And I hoped Papa or Mama would do something once they realized the culprit was me. I thought I’d go home after they’d cleaned up the mess.”
“So you thought they’d secretly dispose of the body and see to it that you weren’t arrested for murder.” I drained the remaining wine in my glass and poured out more. “How selfish.”
“I knew it was selfish. Even Papa wouldn’t be able to squash a murder—I thought that, too. Didn’t I just tell you that I was in dire straits?”
“And that’s when I showed up.”
“It’s not like I asked you to. You’re the one who approached me.”
I had no reply to that. I had accosted her, indeed, hoping to get the dirt on Katsutoshi Katsuragi. “Why did you choose to follow me, though? I can use this guy—is that what you thought?”
Wine glass in hand, she shook her head. “Honestly, at that point, I didn’t give a damn about anything. Including you. My head was filled with what I’d done, and I needed somewhere to stay for the time being, but I didn’t want to go home. In other words, I didn’t have any options then.”
“Fine, you’ve convinced me.” I drank my wine again. “Why did you pretend to be Juri?”
“The reason was simple. I didn’t want to offer up my name. I didn’t want a stranger knowing that Chiharu Katsuragi was wandering around being weird. It was just a lie I came up with on the spot.”
I swayed my head from side to side. “It may have been a quick lie, but from then on, whenever you talked about yourself, you did so flawlessly as Juri. You know, you’re quite an actress.”
“It’s probably sarcasm, but thanks.”
“So then.” I put my glass on the table. “When did you plan all this? Naturally, it must have been after I proposed the game, but it couldn’t have been right then.”
“It wasn’t spontaneous or anything.” She took the wine bottle in hand and tried to fill my glass.
“Hey, pouring wine is the man’s job.” I took it over and did it myself.
“Your game was a hint. ‘He thinks I’m Juri. He wants to act like he kidnapped her.’ I wondered if I could use that somehow. I believed I could. So for the time being I went along with it.”
“And as you heard my plan, that conviction deepened?”
“I was convinced,” Chiharu replied with a grin, “when Papa praised me.”