She sank into the water with a weary sigh. “The training in the Garden was brutal — fighting at least once and sometimes three times a day. There was hardly any time for rest, but I did not care. I was as happy as I had ever been.”
Emiko looked up at Quinn and smoothed a lock of hair out of her face. Beads of sweat poised on her quivering upper lip. Tears welled in her eyes. Quinn had seen this woman endure all manner of pain, watched her reset her own dislocated finger, but he’d never before seen her cry.
“As I said, the training was intense, so my daughter spent much of her day with her father. She was an incredibly intelligent child but, as I came to learn, also extremely cruel. One evening as I returned from the dojo I saw her attack the little boy of our cleaning woman because he had broken her favorite mirror. When I moved to stop her, Oda sensei held me back, saying the training would benefit both children. Our daughter beat the poor boy until he lay senseless on our floor. Then, before I could stop her, she took a piece of the broken mirror and sliced his face. She was five years old. .”
Emiko swallowed. Tendons knotted along her neck. Other than that, she maintained complete composure. “I watched as she treated the other children in the Garden with utter cruelty and disdain. But I was weak, and even that I overlooked because Oda sensei said she would soon grow to control herself. Then, one night, I returned from the bath earlier than usual. I heard Oda’s voice as I approached and, for some reason, stopped to listen. ‘You are a special girl,’ he told our daughter. ‘You have your mother’s gifts but none of her flaws.’ I heard her tell him she wanted a tattoo like his someday. She said I was weak and had to be destroyed. I stood outside our home, stunned to hear Oda tell our daughter that I would soon be out of the way. ‘Your mother is not like you and your papa,’ he told her, ‘she is imperfect. I assure you, her death will be quick and merciful. ’ And then, my little girl clapped her hands as if her papa had just given her a present.”
Miyagi’s chest heaved in the water as if she’d arrested a violent sob. “I was completely undone. Everything after that has melted into blurs and shadows in my memory.
“Later that night, I swallowed my disgust and made love to Oda, for I knew that he slept deepest after such things. I tried to take our daughter with me, to get her away from this horrible man before he poisoned her against me completely and turned her into a monster. She awoke when we were outside. I will never forget her face when she looked at me in the darkness of the woods beyond our home. It was as if she’d seen something that sickened her. She screamed for the guards to stop me before I could take her, then tore at my flesh with her little teeth like a wild animal. I am certain she hoped to kill me.”
Miyagi pulled back the hair from her neck and leaned forward to reveal the faint white outline of a half-moon scar below her right ear.
“I pushed the child away and she ran, screaming for her papa. For six years I had known nothing but constant battle, allowing me to hack my way through the guards and escape with little trouble — but I was already so wounded inside there was nothing worse they could have done to me with bullet or blade. I had left in my nightgown, thinking to change after we got away so as not to awaken Oda. My clothes were lost during the escape and the gown was torn away during my flight over the wall. I wondered aimlessly through the countryside, naked and covered with blood of the guards I’d killed. Lacking the will to even end my own misery, I sat down and waited to die from exposure.
“I had no idea I was even near a road. When I heard an approaching car, I got up, thinking I would run. Weakened and lost in sorrow, I could do nothing but stand there.” She laughed softly. “My hair was ratted and I was bathed in blood. Certainly, I must have looked like some mountain she-demon as the headlights of the passing car threw me into a blinding light. As it turned out, a young U.S. Army officer named Winfield Palmer was driving the car. Of all the people that could have driven by, I was blessed to have the one man at that time who would be so foolish as to pick up a naked, blood-covered, and crazed Japanese woman and put her in his car.”
She shrugged. “And the rest, as they say, is history. Eventually, Palmer-san thought he would woo me. He was young and full of virility and goodness, so I tried, I really did. But in the end, I knew such a relationship was impossible. He had seen me completely undone, emotionally exposed. There must be some intrigue in every relationship, and after he rescued me I held nothing that he did not already know. There is no possibility of mystery between the two of us. I swore never to marry anyone, especially him, who had seen beneath my skin.”
“But your name?” Quinn said, prodding her for the rest of the story she seemed to want to tell.
“Palmer-san made it possible for me to come to the U.S. He moved up in the military and in political position. I was able to use my martial skills working for him. He allowed me to take the family name of my murdered boyfriend — Kenichi Miyagi — so that everyone would assume that I was married and I would have that memory.”
“You said there was something I needed to hear in all this,” Quinn said, still trying to make the connection.
“Oda-san surely relocated his Garden to some new location after I escaped. Still, I believe the answers to your questions are in Japan,” Miyagi said. “Palmer-san may not condone it, but I will secure you a passport under a cover identity. It will be ready tomorrow along with a credit card and Virginia driver’s license. I have already arranged a contact for you once you arrive.”
“So,” Quinn said as he nodded, working through her logic, “you believe the man who trained you is behind all this?”
“Our daughter — my daughter… her name is Ran,” Miyagi said, rhyming it with the American name Ron, but with a hard R so it sounded closer to Lon. She used the tip of her index finger to trace the lines of a Chinese character on her opposite hand. A drop of bathwater ran down her palm like a tear. “It means orchid.”
“That’s a beautiful name,” Quinn said, still baffled as to where all this was going.
“I wanted her only to have a good and peaceful life, but many times, even as a tiny girl, she told me she wished to have a tattoo identical to that of her father — a komainu.”
Miyagi reached for a small towel on the wooden shelf and covered herself as she rose from the bath. Rivulets of water traced silver lines against the rippling blacks and vibrant greens and pinks on the otherworldly designs of her tattoo.
“Komainu?” Quinn wasn’t familiar with the word.
“A foo dog,” Miyagi explained. “I believe it was my daughter who shot your wife.”
CHAPTER 21
The phone didn’t have a chance to finish the first ring before Doctor Elton snatched it up.
“Kane County Clinic.”
Brandy stood with her back to the door, as if to bar entry to any of the infected patients who crowded the lobby and exam rooms.
Elton talked little and listened much, nodding, then scribbling a few notes. His chest grew tighter with each word spoken by the woman on the other end.