“You do?” Hachiro asked, surprised.
“I do.”
“Good. So Jiro didn’t kill Akane, and then someone killed him.”
“So do you think Ume could have done it?”
Hachiro gave a curt shake of his head. “No. I can’t imagine it. The police talked to everyone, and they think it was random. Someone walking by the bay that night attacked her.”
“But they never arrested anyone.”
“They never had any suspects that I know of. No witnesses. I don’t think they knew where to start. Anyway, Ume’s not strong enough to have hurt Jiro, and I have to think whoever killed Akane also killed Jiro. Otherwise, there are two killers out there, and that’s pretty hard to believe.”
Kara nodded, but she didn’t know what to think. Ume and her friends might not be haunted by a ghost, but their nightmares wouldn’t let them sleep. Hana had killed herself. And Ume had enough guilt to accuse Sakura of drugging or poisoning her.
Tonight, she would be spending the night at the dorm, in Miho and Sakura’s room. The school allowed boarding students to host day students for sleepovers on the weekends before or after a holiday. This weekend didn’t qualify, but her father had called the dorm director Friday afternoon to ask if, under the circumstances, the rule might be bent. It would be good for the students to be able to share their feelings about the tragedies of the past two weeks, he’d said.
The dorm director had agreed, earning Kara’s father many hugs.
As odd as Sakura had been behaving, Kara had been a little unsure about how much she was looking forward to the overnight. Now her anxiety began to build. She didn’t want to take Ambien tonight, and she knew bad dreams would plague her. Psychology wasn’t the culprit here, she felt sure. How long would it be, she wondered, before someone else fell apart to the extent that Hana had?
“Is this why you asked me to come out with you today?” Hachiro asked, a look of badly disguised disappointment on his face.
“No,” Kara assured him. “It isn’t. I just thought it would be nice to take a walk. We both needed to clear our heads. I’m sorry I got us onto such unpleasant topics.”
“That’s all right,” Hachiro said. “It would be impossible to pretend we’re not thinking about them.”
“Exactly. Anyway, on to happier thoughts. You mentioned lunch?”
His eyes lit up. Hachiro was still a growing boy, and he needed to be fed. And Kara found that she was getting pretty hungry as well.
They walked along the shore of Ama-no-Hashidate, headed back to the Turning Bridge. Several times, Kara thought Hachiro would take her hand, but he never did.
“There is one other thing that’s kind of troubling me,” Hachiro said.
“What’s that?”
“Earlier, you mentioned the nightmares that everyone’s having, how you can’t sleep?”
“Yeah?”
Hachiro didn’t look at her. “Jiro was having them, too. He talked about his nightmares all the time. Akane was in some of them. He said she had no face.”
10
B lue light washed over Kara’s face. She breathed deeply, feeling the rise and fall of her own chest, vaguely aware of her surroundings. Then some tiny internal alarm sounded and she opened her eyes wide.
Sakura had a small book light on, and she lay in her bed reading a manga. Miho stood by the DVD player, putting a disc back in its case. The movie had ended.
“How much did I miss?” Kara murmured, pushing herself up to a sitting position on the futon the girls had set out for her.
Sakura looked up from her manga, her short blade of hair a kind of curtain obscuring one eye. “Most of Kiki’s Delivery Service and all of Nausicaa.”
Kara scowled at her. “No way. I saw most of Kiki. And you didn’t
…” She looked around for a clock and instead stared at Miho. “Tell me you didn’t really watch Nausicaa.”
Miho tried to keep a serious face, which must have been difficult enough in her flannel Hello Kitty pajamas. But the girl was a terrible liar. She smirked.
“No. Kiki just ended. So much for our Miyazaki marathon.”
“We got through two movies,” Sakura said. “Tonight, that’s a marathon.”
They’d wanted to watch movies tonight, just to clear their minds, and had agreed on nothing violent. All three of them loved the films of Miyazaki, who had become perhaps the most successful director in Japan while making only animated films. Kara had vetoed Howl’s Moving Castle because she’d seen it too recently, and they had all seen My Neighbor Totoro far too many times, so they had started with Spirited Away.
In truth, Kara had exaggerated for how much of Kiki’s Delivery Service she’d been awake. She had to have missed at least the last half hour. But the upside was that in that time, nothing unpleasant had visited her dreams.
“We are such party girls,” she said.
Miho nodded in mock seriousness. “We are troublesome. All the drugs and sex. We’re bound to end up in jail.”
“Or dead by eighteen,” Sakura muttered with her usual sarcasm.
Kara and Miho blinked at each other. Another time, that might have been funny. But not now.
“Oh, shit, I’m sorry,” Sakura said, looking up. She set the manga on her bed, a stricken expression on her face. “I can’t believe I just said that.”
“You didn’t mean it like that,” Kara said.
Sakura smiled, grateful for the instant forgiveness. Laughter came through the walls from the room next door. Kara returned the smile.
“Thanks for letting me sleep over.”
Miho slid the DVD onto a shelf. “Thanks for coming. We’ll do it again, too. Sometime when there aren’t clouds hanging over our heads.”
That made all of their smiles falter.
“Time for lights out, you think?” Sakura asked. “Or should we put something else on? Maybe something with cute American boys to send Miho off to dreamland.”
“I think I’m too tired,” Miho said. “But I can sleep through anything, so I don’t mind if you two want to put on something else.”
Kara looked at Sakura. There were dark circles under her eyes and a wildness in them that seemed different from the rebellious nature she’d recognized the first time they’d met. Sakura smiled thinly, and an understanding passed between her and Kara-neither of them expected to sleep well tonight. Yet Sakura almost seemed eager.
“It’s all right. We’ll have all day tomorrow,” Sakura said. “Let’s go to sleep.”
“Should I turn out the lights, then?” Miho asked.
Kara looked at Sakura again, and then nodded. “Sure.”
And then they lay in the dark. The girls slept with a window open, and the night air crept across the floor, making Kara nestle under the blanket they’d given her.
She’d fallen asleep during the movie, but now she couldn’t even close her eyes. In the darkness, she stared up at the ceiling. She had told the girls about her walk with Hachiro but had been waiting for the right moment to broach the subject of their conversation. The moment had never come, unfortunately, and now-even though Sakura and Miho had both avoided talking about Hana or Jiro or Akane or even Ume- Kara couldn’t go to sleep with her questions unanswered.
“Jiro was having the dreams, too.”
“What?” Miho asked, turning on her side.
Sakura raised her head from the pillow, her brass-colored eyes gleaming in the dark, hair spikier and wilder than ever. “What dreams?”
Kara searched for her eyes in the dark. “Hachiro told me Jiro had nightmares about Akane, but in them, Akane had no face.”
Sakura flinched and glanced at Miho.
“I’ve had dreams like that, too,” Kara went on. “Girls with no faces. And Akane coming up out of the bay,” she said, relieved to be speaking the words aloud. “And one night, I was down at the water, near the… the shrine people made for her, and I saw this cat.”
As she told the story of watching the cat walk over the shrine and drop dead, only to stand up again a moment later like nothing had happened, she watched both girls’ eyes widen.