As Hashiba dozed amid such thoughts, the cell phone in his shirt pocket started to ring. Saeko, too, woke with a start, grabbing Hashiba’s hand in surprise — her sleep must have been deeper than his.
Hashiba answered the phone with his free hand. It was Nakamura, the director, who wanted an update on the situation. Hashiba explained that they were still on their way via a back route and went over a few details: Shigeko Torii’s time of arrival at Atami, their hotel for the night. When he finished up the conversation and returned the phone to his pocket, the cab was coming round to the Atami New Road. Saeko had been right; so far, they had managed to avoid the main crush of the traffic and were making good time towards the garden.
Once they got close to Route 135, the traffic got denser and the cab came to a standstill. Hashiba looked over to Saeko and raised an eyebrow.
“It’s not far from here,” Saeko assured.
Hashiba told the driver, “We’ll get out here.”
When they got out onto the street, as though in welcome a helicopter flew by low over their heads.
The main entrance to the garden was closed and before it crowded a throng of people. Hashiba recognized faces from a few competing stations interspersed in the crowd. He cut a path forward, looking for his colleague Kagayama.
“Hashiba,” a voice called out from behind. Turning, he saw Kagayama, whose bald pate reminded him of a vanquished samurai.
“Hey,” he responded with a raised hand. He gestured to show that Saeko had come with him.
“Nice to see you again,” she said.
“Ms. Kuriyama, what a surprise.”
Saeko had come along simply because they had been in the same room when they heard the news. Not wanting Kagayama to catch on to their relationship, Hashiba nonchalantly explained, “Ms. Kuriyama’s hometown is here in Atami.”
“Really?” Kagayama threw his head back in a slightly exaggerated movement.
“Actually, it’s my father’s hometown,” Saeko corrected. “My grandparents have both long passed away, and the house was sold on.”
Just like her to be honest. It was the first time Hashiba had heard that himself. “She’s pretty good with the local geography,” he emphasized her value to the team. “It’s actually thanks to her knowing all the back streets that we got here so quickly.”
“She was right. If you’d tried to come on the 135, you’d be stuck right now.”
The honking carried across from the main road. Congestion on the artery between Atami and Ito must have been incredibly annoying, and indeed the police had come to manage the traffic. It still didn’t seem to budge, though there were signs of easing.
“By the way, Kagayama, have you eaten?”
“Not yet.”
“How about you fill us in on what’s happened so far over some lunch?”
“Sounds like a plan.”
The park restaurant was full to capacity and queued up, so the three of them decided to make their way across the road to the resort hotel that stood atop a sheer seaside cliff.
After ordering his lunch, Kagayama lit a cigarette and began to explain to Saeko and Hashiba what he had managed to work out so far. “Have you been to the garden before?” he asked.
Hashiba and Saeko shook their heads together. Saeko explained that the area had been part of a public forest preserve when she used to visit her grandparents and that Herb Gardens hadn’t existed yet.
Kagayama continued with the understanding that neither was familiar with the place. “Well, the garden stretches up a hillside slope. Visitors pay at the main gate and then take the facility’s bus up to the top parking area where they’re let off and make their way back down through the garden on foot, taking in the view of the sea, enjoying the flowers, that sort of thing. There’s a place halfway down to stop and take a break with some herbal tea. There’s also a little shop where you can buy handmade soaps, handmade postcards, souvenirs like that. You could kill a lot of time coming down. Anyway, almost all of the people who disappeared yesterday were here as part of a tour group, on those bus tours. I suppose the itinerary for the Izu area includes a stop here. Now, large groups like that don’t use the garden’s bus. Instead, the tour bus just takes them directly to the top parking area. The tourists make their way down on foot while the bus heads back down to the gate first and waits for them.
“Yesterday, there were two tour buses here after lunch. Each had just under forty passengers. There were also four or five smaller independent groups of visitors. In total, there should have been about a hundred people at the top of the gardens yesterday afternoon. The tour buses arrived at one o’clock, and the passengers were scheduled to meet at the bottom at two. The tour guides had gone back to the bottom to wait with the buses and their drivers. They started to wonder what was going on when, even after two o’clock, not a single person had arrived at the meeting place. The two buses were operating for different travel agencies, and not a single passenger from either had returned. So one of the guides started to make her way up to check what was going on. It didn’t take her long to notice that something was odd. ‘Notice’ may not be the word, she couldn’t but. There wasn’t a soul anywhere in sight.”
Kagayama paused. Hashiba and Saeko tried to imagine the atmosphere of the vacant park, recalling the scene at the Fujimura house in Takato. This time the disappearances hadn’t occurred in an enclosed space. The circumstances were closer to the two disappearances they’d learned about from America’s West Coast: here there were no walls or roofs, or even fences, just a wide, open valley stretching out to the sea beyond. It was one thing for people to disappear from a house; now they had to picture people vanishing out in the open.
“The tour guide must have been pretty bewildered,” Kagayama continued. “She went back down to the buses and reported to the other guide and the drivers. No one was sure what to believe. I don’t blame them. It just doesn’t make any sense for a hundred people to vanish all at once. They got the manager of the gardens involved at half-past two. He called around the facility’s staff, trying to get some information. It was at this point that they realized that it wasn’t just the tourists that were missing. The employees of the garbage disposal firm that tended the gardens were gone too, leaving just their van. So the guides began to call the cell phone numbers that they had of the people who had gone missing. No one answered — or rather, what the manager told me was that the phones didn’t even ring.”
“Wouldn’t even ring? So they were out of range?” Hashiba asked.
“I guess that’s what he meant,” Kagayama replied uncertainly. Many of the passengers were probably elderly tourists, and it wasn’t clear what fraction of them owned cell phones. Even so, for not even a single call to be picked up was quite bizarre.
“Go on,” Hashiba urged.
“They called the police at close to four. The Atami Station, well, I guess they had no idea how to respond. How could they, right? Anyway, they sent a car around to confirm the details but found nothing to suggest that a crime had taken place. Come evening, the garden closed its gates, and after that it was just calling people left and right. One of the buses had been headed for Shimoda, the other back to Tokyo. A travel agency can get in deep crap for not getting their customers back home in time. So the guides phoned their bosses, the passengers’ relatives, in a flurry. By nighttime, the news had made its way to all the papers, television stations, and other media outlets in Tokyo.”