Had she wandered into a place from which she couldn’t return as a result?
Or had she hidden herself away for someone else’s benefit the way the lady of the camellias had withdrawn for Armand’s sake?
Where was Mito’s Raoul, her Armand? Or had he never existed like Kotobuki said?
With an intelligent look in her eyes, Tohko said, “Mito’s story definitely resembles the Phantom of the Opera. The real-life operas Faust and Don Juan appear in the Phantom of the Opera, too.
“But if we’re assuming that this disappearance is like the one in the Phantom of the Opera, then there’s a major hint you guys missed.”
“What do you mean?”
I placed my hands on the table and leaned forward.
“Why hasn’t Mito been dropped from the lead in the recital? If she’s missed ten days of rehearsals without permission, that’s strange. I know people are saying that she’s taking special lessons in secret or that she’s got a powerful backer, but I think there has to be pressure coming from somewhere.
“That person must be confident that she’ll appear in the actual show, right? In Phantom of the Opera, the Phantom threatens the opera’s owner and puts his beloved Christine onstage as the stand-in for the diva Carlotta. In order to do that, the Phantom changes Carlotta’s voice to that of a toad, and he even sabotages a performance.”
“Are you saying Mito’s supporter is the Phantom—her angel?”
Tohko nodded, her face serious.
“There is that possibility. There’s a limited number of people in a position to interfere with the casting. A teacher at the school, someone in the administration…whoever it is, that person might know Mito’s whereabouts.”
My breath caught.
“Well, Konoha?” Tohko asked. “Are you going to look into it?”
Every other time, she had said, “This is a top-priority investigation, Konoha!” and flown off without the least concern for my situation.
Pursing her lips, her gaze bright, she waited for my reply with great patience, like an older sister watching over the disappointment of a younger brother.
Her eyes said, “You decide, Konoha.”
My heart swelled, and my insecurity and hesitation rose up in my throat, competing with my desire to push ahead.
What more could I possibly do? I hadn’t even told Kotobuki yet that Mito might have been an escort.
But…
With Tohko watching me like this, I no longer wanted to turn my back on this. If I did, things would be the same as they had always been.
I got my breathing under control and answered, “Yes.”
Instantly, Tohko’s face broke into a smile.
Her lips curved upward sweetly, gently, as if light were melting out of her.
She popped her index finger against my forehead; then in a bright voice. Tohko said, “Oookay! This is a top-priority investigation, Konoha.”
“Please go home, Tohko.”
“Whaaa—? Why?”
I was heading to the music hall on campus; behind me, Tohko shook her head petulantly and chased after me.
“You’re going to see Maki, right? Then it’s definitely better if I go with you.”
“I can’t let someone studying for their exams pose nude and catch a cold. Please go home and study.”
“So you’re going to get naked, then? You’re going to pose nude?”
“That’s not what I—”
“I can’t let my precious snack writer—I mean, my underclassman—fall into Maki’s grasp.”
“But, Tohko, didn’t you send me as a messenger before because you didn’t want to see Maki yourself?”
“I just so happened to have an engagement I couldn’t get out of that day.”
While still butting heads, we ended up reaching the hall in the central yard.
In her personal workroom on the top floor of the music hall, Maki Himekura, aka the Princess, heard us out with a bemused smile.
“And which of you is going to strip for me? Tohko? Or perhaps Konoha?”
She was wearing a work apron over her school uniform and held a paintbrush in one hand.
Her long brown hair was wavy and encircled her face like a mane, then flowed down her back. Maki, who was also tall and voluptuous with glamorous features befitting the name Princess, was the granddaughter of the school’s director. She knew everything and could get ahold of anything.
However, for any information she gave out, she always required compensation.
And Maki’s premier desire was to draw a nude portrait of Tohko. Apparently she’d been trying to convince Tohko to do it for three years now. Because of that, Tohko was completely on guard against her.
Although since Maki was the type of person who said stuff like “It gives me a thrill when Tohko hates me,” she was probably A-OK even if Tohko just glared at her or avoided her.
“This time, Tohko’s not involved. I’ll pay the compensation.”
“No. As your president and as a book girl, I can’t stand silently by and watch in my underclassman’s gravest hour.”
“Being a book girl has nothing to do with anything, though.”
“Underclassmen are supposed to make their seniors look good.”
“Oh, so you’re stripping for me then, Tohko?”
“What?!”
As soon as Maki turned her smarmy smile on her, Tohko began to stutter.
“W-we’re going to…negotiate that later. And, uh, I’ve been eating too many snacks lately and put on weight…If I was to do something like that, I’d need some time to get ready. And hey, aren’t you busy studying for exams, too, Maki?! You don’t have time to be painting.”
“Hmm? I’ve already gotten a recommendation to a school.”
“B…but, I’m getting Fs, s-so I have to study…So, uh, I mean…p-put it on my tab!”
Watching Tohko ball up her fists and yell mightily, Maki burst out laughing, unable to hold back any longer.
“Oh geez, you’re so cute! How can you stand it? All right. I’m drawing a different model right now anyway, so I’ll put it on your tab. You’re going to pay me back tenfold before we graduate.”
“Urk!”
Tohko was speechless. Maki gazed at her with a suspicious glint in her eyes.
“This will be my early Christmas present to you. Oh, oh! Don’t forget my present has interest.”
Even as I felt the deepest sympathy for Tohko, in my heart I secretly whispered, That’s why you shouldn’t have come. There’s no way you were going to be a match for Maki, and now you got what you deserved…
The Princess worked fast.
Saturday night, Tohko and I were in a hotel room.
Tohko had let down her braids and tied her hair back casually below her ears with a pink rubber band, rolled up the waist of her uniform skirt to make it shorter, and she bubbled with excitement.
I was wearing street clothes, a knit shirt and jeans, and had my hand pressed to my head with a distressed visage.
“Wow, this dinette set is so pretty! I think it’s an antique! And the springs in this bed are so bouncy! Look, look!”
Tohko knelt on the luxurious double bed and bounced it up and down to show me. This was the first time in my life I’d been alone in a hotel room with a girl. And for it to be with Tohko!
As she bounced on the bed, Tohko lost her balance and tumbled off.
“Geez, Tohko, please just go home.”
“No way. This ploy isn’t going to work without me,” she declared after fixing her skirt and standing back up.
This ploy…you decided to do this all on your own, Tohko…
“Are you really going to do it?”
“Yup.”
“You should be parked at your desk studying for your exams.”
“I did a bunch of math problems last night, so it’s fine.”
I picked that apart. “Why are you still doing math problems?”
“Because I need it for the National Center Test ob
viously.”
“The National Center Test? You don’t mean you’re taking exams for the national schools! Are you doing it for souvenirs?” I asked her, so shocked that I forgot where we were and what we were doing.
I was sure she would try for the literature department of a private school, but the national schools! With those disastrous math scores, how could she even think about taking national school exams?! She was way out of her league!
Tohko puffed out her perfectly flat chest proudly.
“Heh-heh. I’m gonna sweep the national schools.”
“Cut it out. You’re just throwing the exam fees away. And sweep them?! You’re being way too reckless! You have to switch your sights to a private school right away.”
Geez, and with Fs? No wonder I’d thought it was weird. But she would have been able to get such decent marks in literature…
I was utterly appalled. Hunkered on the bed, Tohko pouted and leaned forward to glower at me.
“You’re AW-ful! You’re sooo not considerate enough to someone studying to get into college!”
“But, Tohko, you need to understand your own limits. Let’s just go home.”
“No. I changed clothes and everything.”
“All you did was take down your braids.”
“I made my skirt three inches shorter, too. That’s a big deal for a girl.”
“This kind of ploy is totally pointless. How are we going to ask about Mito by pretending to be an escort?”
“It’s fine. I’m a book girl who’s read Lady Chatterley’s Lover by Lawrence, and Hell in the Bottle by Kyusaku Yumeno, and the Sleeping Beauty trilogy by Rice, including The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, Beauty’s Punishment, and Beauty’s Release cover to cover. Even if I don’t have any experience, I’ve got the knowledge covered.”
“You can’t learn from those! Or actually, just don’t learn from them!”
While we were arguing, we heard the sound of the door opening.
“Konoha, hide!”
Tohko pushed me away, and I hurried to conceal myself behind the curtain.
The very next second, a man in his midforties wearing a suit came into the room, toying with his mustache.
There was no mistaking him. I’d seen him in a photo. It was Kengo Tsutsumi, the assistant director of Shirafuji Music Academy.
Tsutsumi was a regular on the members-only underage escort site that Camellia was on, and he was one of Camellia’s “customers.” He was also the person who had leveraged Mito into the lead role of the recital.
He didn’t look like anything more than an ordinary, greasy, middle-aged man, but could he be Mito’s angel?
Tohko turned around on the bed and hung her head.
“I kept you waiting, didn’t I?”
Tsutsumi sat down on the edge of the bed, too, and peeked up at Tohko’s face indecently.
“Are you nervous? Don’t tell me this is this your first time?”
Tohko answered, her voice soft, “I heard…you can make a lot of money…”
“That’s true. If I like you, I’ll give you money, and I’ll buy you anything you want.”
Twitch…Tohko’s shoulders moved.
“Really? Anything?”
“Yeah. What do you want?”
The next instant, Tohko suddenly threw her whole body against Tsutsumi and began talking, her eyes glinting like stars.
“I’d love to eat the first editions of Ogai Mori’s collected works all at once! And then there’s Sōseki Natsume and Junichiro Tanizaki, and Saisei Muro, and ohhh, it’d be tough to leave out a first edition of Ichiyō Higuchi’s Growing Up! Also the works of Chekhov that have gone out of print and, ooooh, it’s been a dream of mine to get together the whole back catalog of Harlequin Historicals, pile them up in my room, and then devour every one! I thought that if I won the lottery, I’d be able to make it come true for sure!
“It would feel exactly like a huge cream puff stuffed with custard that has a little rum in it, and the dense flavor of a Sacher torte, and drowning in an ocean of fragrant champagne jelly!”
Partway through, the force of her enthusiasm had pushed Tsutsumi over, but Tohko kept on talking despite that, and Tsutsumi looked up at her, his eyes panicked.
Though I could feel a headache coming, I jumped out, pointed my cell phone at Tsutsumi, and took a picture.
“Who are you?!”
I showed the picture I’d just taken to Tsutsumi as he hurriedly crawled out from under Tohko and coldly told him, “Mr. Kengo Tsutsumi, if you don’t want me to send this image to the director of Shirafuji Music Academy, who happens to be your father-in-law, or to your other coworkers, will you tell me about the girl you called Camellia?”
“C-Camellia…?!”
Tsutsumi appeared to take a terrible shock; he paled and fell silent.
What Tsutsumi told us then, his body shaking feebly, was as follows.
Right after Yuka Mito disappeared, he was sent an invitation to the recital in a red envelope with the name Camellia on it.
Typed out in computer characters was a message that Yuka Mito was taking lessons at a certain location and that since she would perform at the recital without fail, she was not to be dropped from the lead. If that was to happen, his honor might risk losing his current position.
“Yuka was so quiet and amateurish, and I was quite fond of her. But despite that, she suddenly started threatening me, saying that if I didn’t make her the lead for the recital, she would reveal what she’d done with me.
“That day, Yuka tapped my cheek with a butcher’s knife and told me: ‘You could let me watch you cut your wrists and commit suicide right here, too. That would be quite a scandal.’ She looked at me and talked like she wasn’t all there. Or so I thought when she suddenly burst out crying or grappling like a wild animal or glowering into space with empty eyes. Anyway, she was a wreck.
“I was relieved when she disappeared, but then she started sending me letters and e-mails. She was an unbelievable slut! That girl is a demon wearing the mask of an angel! I’m a victim!”
We watched Tsutsumi vent his hatred of Yuka, thinking unbearable thoughts.
Camellia was Yuka Mito.
And what’s more, Mito had blackmailed Tsutsumi in order to play the lead role at the recital, and she was still manipulating him from the shadows.
As we walked along a cool, dark road that night, the air seeming to freeze around us, Tohko and I tended toward silence. Tohko’s skirt had returned to its usual length, but we couldn’t erase what we’d heard from our minds.
Bitter thoughts spread through my heart. The Yuka Mito that we’d heard about from Tsutsumi was a far cry from the dear friend that Kotobuki had talked about.
I could never tell Kotobuki that the Phantom’s true identity was Christine herself.
What in the world was Mito trying to accomplish?
Christine’s heart was inscrutable to me.
In front of a gorgeously constructed stage set, Christine tells Raoul, “Look, Raoul, at these walls, this forest, this tunnel of trees, this painted canvas image. They’ve all witnessed a sublime passion like no other. So people with far more poetic spirits than most have produced these pictures in this place.
“Our love is perfect for this place, don’t you think, Raoul? After all, our love is a fabrication, too, and oh! Nothing more than an illusion!”
These words that sounded so innocent cut into Raoul’s—into my—heart.
Perhaps the love, the hope, the dreams, everything that I had once believed in had been nothing more than illusions.
I wonder if Kotobuki was at this moment still worrying about her best friend, if she was praying that Mito would come home safe and they’d be able to go back to their quiet lives, exactly as they had been before.
The air prickled at my skin. Tohko would look over at me in concern every now and again.
As we were parting ways, Tohko suddenly said, “Hey, Konoha. Did you finish reading Phantom of the Opera?”
My listless answer got me this from Tohko: “Oh…you should try reading it to the end. The story overlaps with Mito’s so it might be tough to read, but…even so, I think the truth of the story is at the end.”
She spoke quietly, then watched me with a slightly worried look again.
I hated myself for making her look like that, and deep in my chest I felt a fiery pain, as if it was being scraped.
“Tohko…”
“Hmm?”
“Please…study hard.”
I acted tough, pretending not to be hurt, and Tohko gave me a faint smile.
“I will.”
With a cowardly look, I watched Tohko, her loose hair swaying evanescently, as she disappeared into her neighborhood.
Left on my own, I continued walking, so tired that it felt as if I’d aged considerably. I closed down my heart and tried not to think about anything.
How much time passed while I did that? I wondered.
Suddenly my cell phone vibrated in my coat pocket.
When I pulled it out and checked, it was an unknown number.
I recalled the message I’d been sent before and my body tensed a little. I pressed the talk button and put it to my ear.
“Inoue?”
A girl’s voice I didn’t recognize spoke my name.
A majestic, pretty voice that carried well.
Who was this? It seemed that she knew me.
“Nice to meet you, I suppose. I’m Yuka Mito.”
A cold gust of wind blew into my face.
It was Yuka Mito!
My heart was raging almost painfully, and my brain was burning. I told myself I had to calm down and tightened my grip on the phone with my sweating hand. Earnestly I asked, “You’re Kotobuki’s friend, Mito?”
“That’s right.”
“How do you know about me?”
“I know lots about you, Inoue. Nanase is always talking about you. Nothing but you for a long, long time on the phone or in e-mails.”
She didn’t seem to be mocking me; her tone was more placid and kind. In the same instant that the sound of her voice pierced my heart, I felt confused.
Book Girl and the Corrupted Angel Page 9
