I closed my eyes and concentrated on the spot. “Nothing. A stitch in my side. Not the baby.” I was pretty sure. The pain reminded me of dealing with my pains from running, and considering I had just run across a muddy field in the beginnings of a typhoon, it was a likely story.
“You need to get changed into something dry. It can’t be good for you to be like this.”
I wanted to remind him that we were being evacuated, and I’d be wet again within the hour, but I was also seriously uncomfortable.
“Fine. Might as well.”
In the tiny bathroom, my wonderful husband peeled the wet clothes from my body and wrapped me in a warm towel. I sat down on the closed toilet and stared up at him, the reality of the situation finally hitting me.
“I saw her.” My lip quivered. “Her long hair and a glimpse of her decayed skin showed through the plastic she was buried in.” A tear slipped down my cheek, and Yasahiro crouched down beside me, taking my cold, clammy hand in his. “Not even a proper funeral. It’s such a shame.”
Yasahiro wrapped my hand in both of his. “It is. No one should die alone like that. She was probably scared out of her mind too.” He tugged on my hand. “But, Mei-chan, you helped find her. Now they can figure out what happened. Akai-san can have her cremated and laid to rest with her parents.”
I sniffed up and dragged my hand across my nose. “I didn’t find her. The boys saw a man in a police uniform down in the hole digging at something. The man yelled at them to go away.”
“Kohei Watanabe?” He nodded his head, and I was sure he had put the facts together like I had. Yasahiro had listened to every last piece of evidence I’d had over the last few days. He knew what I knew.
“And with Goro-chan admitting that he sent Kohei out here to evacuate us, yet he never showed up, I’m pretty sure it was him. Who else would it be? He was missing from all the photos. He’s obviously changed in appearance since he lived here last, probably to throw us off the scent. He was friends with Tama-chan and ran with his crowd. And I don’t trust anyone who would stick up for Tama-chan.”
The whole situation was as clear as day in my head. Like Ria’s manga, she had been dating someone, maybe Itsuki, when she cheated on him with Kohei. Somewhere along the way, Kohei got angry with her, and he killed her.
I rested my head against the bathroom wall. This explanation still didn’t make sense, though. Something was missing, like a good motive. Why did he kill her? I assumed Kohei had killed her because he knew exactly where to find her, and his actions for the past few months had been aggressive and suspicious.
But why?
A puzzle sat in front of me with a big piece absent from the center of it.
Where would I find the missing piece?
I got changed and opened the door, still chewing over this mystery, when I came back to the current situation. Yuna and the boys had packed their bags, and Mom stood at the front door peering across the street.
“Akiko-chan went back home to be with Kirin-chan. The wind almost blew her over. She was on her knees once. Look. The road is flooded up to Senahara-san’s house.” Mom’s brow was creased with worry. “Help me get Mimoji-chan into the cat carrier.”
“Sure.”
With a gust of wind, several roof tiles blew off and flew into the fields, then the power went out. Mom and I stared at each other for a long moment.
“They’re not going to come for us,” she whispered.
I knew she was right.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The wind picked up into a howling, house-shaking and dangerous tempest within an hour. The gusts rattled the walls and plucked tiles off the roof like someone swatting ants off a picnic blanket. Thunder and lightning streaked the skies and scared my nephews. They huddled under blankets on the couch, playing their hand-held game consoles and giving no thought to when electricity might be restored.
No one had arrived to evacuate us, and the cell phone towers must’ve been without power too because I couldn’t get a signal on my phone. We would have to wait it out now.
We, the adults, tried to remain calm. Mom’s house had survived decades worth of typhoons, and we thought this time would be no different. But I was reminded of the several times the NHK weather forecasters said that this was the strongest typhoon to hit our area directly in over fifty years, and with all the rain we’d had this summer, we were already saturated. Also, Mom’s roof was the oldest part of the house. With all the tiles flying off, we’d have leaks soon. Though we had renovated the inside once about twenty years ago, that was it. Getting a new roof had been way outside of the budget.
Mom and Yasahiro played Go at the dining room table while Yuna and I read books by candlelight. It was late afternoon, but the cloud cover was so thick that the house was as dark as night.
“We still have gas,” Yasahiro said, breaking the silence. “So I was thinking about cooking up some soup. Better use up any fresh meat you may have in case it’s a few days before power is restored.”
“That’s a good idea, Yasa-kun.” Mom bit her lip as she contemplated her next move on the Go board. “Would you mind handling the prep work? My eyesight is especially poor in low light.”
I could tell how much it pained Mom to admit she needed help, but Yasahiro handled the situation easily.
“I’d be happy to. I have some ideas of what I could cook. Let’s pause this game for now, and I’ll come back to it in a bit.” He turned to me, so I set my book down. “I bet you could use a snack. Come with me into the kitchen, and you can bring some snacks back for everyone.”
“Sure,” I said, not thinking much of the request. I was hungry, and if I didn’t eat soon, my pregnancy hormones would surge, and I’d be a mess.
I followed him to the kitchen, trying to calm my nerves as the house shook around us. I was worried that the wind would pick us up and throw us into the next prefecture at this point. Creaks and cracks rang through the kitchen as a gust buffeted the house.
Yasahiro didn’t stop at the stove and instead crossed the room to the shuttered windows on the side of the house facing the barn. He cranked open the glass window, and the fury of the wind filled the room. I hugged myself and stayed a meter back.
“What are you doing?” I asked, watching him slide the typhoon shutter to the side and look out at the fields.
“As I suspected.” He shifted to the side and allowed me room to look out the window.
“Oh no,” I breathed out.
The entire outside was an ocean, water as far as I could see.
And it was all the way up to the house.
“What are we going to do?” Panic seized my brain and caused it to race. I imagined us huddled on the collapsing roof, waiting for rescue to come. We had nothing we could use to escape either. We weren’t a boating family. There had been no time or money for that kind of leisure, so floating out of here would be impossible.
Ugh. I couldn’t help but feel I’d been completely irresponsible once again. I’d spent the last week flittering about trying to solve a decade-old mystery instead of paying attention to what was going on with my mom, the farm, the weather. Was digging up all of that information on Ria, Itsuki, and Kohei worth it?
Yasahiro, to his credit, looked unworried. He peered out the window again and shook his head.
“It’s possible the water will rise up into the house before this is over. We haven’t even seen the eye of the typhoon yet, so I think we have a lot more rain coming.” He walked over to the island and pulled out a chair. “Sit. I’ll cook, we’ll eat, and then we’ll plan for the worst.”
I cringed every time the wind gusted, and the house creaked again. Yasahiro didn’t talk while he chopped and cooked. I believed his mind to be elsewhere, planning for our eventual evacuation, and how we would get out. I knew him well enough now to understand his thought process. I was his wife, and I was carrying his child, something he had wanted for years. He wasn’t going to jeopardize our safety if he could help it.
&n
bsp; Still, a typhoon was out of our hands. Yasahiro couldn’t reverse the wind or the water creeping up to the house. He didn’t have the power of gods.
There was only so much that could be done.
The smell of food cooking roused everyone from their spots in the house. The boys came to grab everyone’s chopsticks and pour water for drinks. Mom and Yuna cleaned up the kitchen and brought the rice to the table. Yasahiro had made a big hot pot of soup with chicken and any leftover vegetables in the fridge. We were able to set up the portable hot pot warmer on the dining room table to keep it warm while we ate.
Dinner was a quiet affair as if no one wanted to challenge the voice of the wind. I opened my mouth several times to tell Mom about the water encroaching on the house but stopped each time. I wanted the memory of this meal to be a pleasant one.
But there came a point when we couldn’t hide the trouble we were in anymore.
The wind picked up, at least five times stronger than it had before. The boys were napping on the couch, and we were in the dining room, as usual, when the house shrieked in pain. Nails torn from wood screeched and echoed through the house, and everyone’s eyes widened as we looked up at the ceiling.
“What was that?” Mom asked a moment before Yasahiro popped up and ran toward the back of the house. He swore loudly, something I hardly ever heard him do.
My body cooled and slowed down as I forced myself after him. I didn’t want to see what had happened. Yasahiro was closing the door to my room as I rounded the corner of the hallway. Water spit from under the door, and the door rattled in the wind.
“We need to get any valuables out of these rooms now!” Yasahiro stood at Hirata’s old room, my nephews’ current room, wind and rain buffeting him.
Yuna gasped behind me, her hand at her mouth.
“Trash bags! In the kitchen!” Mom hustled away, and Yuna went to grab Korota, the older of the two boys.
“Come help,” she insisted. Korota drew himself up and got right in the mix. He was pretty brave for a nine-year-old.
Yasahiro tossed anything he found out into the hallway, and Korota ran it all to safety inside the house. Yuna opened her room, and the wind nearly knocked us over, slamming us into the other wall of the hallway. My heart skipped as I saw what used to be my room totally open to the sky. Wind and rain filled the room, but Yuna ran in. She grabbed a bag from the closet, swept everything still on top of the dresser into the bag, snatched a few more pieces of clothing from the drawers, and ran back out. We slid the door closed, but it rattled fiercely, and I wasn’t sure if it would hold.
Out in the main room, we paused to take stock. My hair was curled around my head, and my heart beat at twice its normal pace, and Yuna looked to be in the same state. Mom threw everything Yasahiro and Korota had salvaged into trash bags and tied them up.
“How bad is it, Yasa-kun?” she asked as he appeared out of the hallway. His face was pale, and he was wet from the top of his head to his waist.
“Bad. We should figure out some way to keep the rain from coming into the rest of the house through these two rooms.”
“If only we had sandbags,” I lamented.
Mom blinked a few times before perking up. “We have about forty kilos of rice. There’s no way I’m evacuating it out of here, so we might as well use it for this.”
“Right. Good idea,” Yuna interrupted. “Let’s fill some garbage bags with rice and put them on the floor in front of the door.”
Yasahiro grimaced. “I don’t know if it’s necessary.”
“What do you mean?” Mom asked.
We all paused as the wind picked up even more, and a low groaning moan echoed through the house followed by a smash and a car alarm going off outside.
“Uh oh.” Yasahiro sighed as we turned to face the front of the house.
Those sounds combined only meant one thing.
I followed Yasahiro to the front door, and he looked out the side window facing the driveway. One of the many pine trees outside that framed the driveway was no longer standing and instead had flattened Yasahiro’s car.
“Looks like we’re going to need a new one of those.” He grabbed his keys from the pocket of his raincoat hanging next to the door and silenced the alarm.
I looked out the window and panicked again at the sight of the cars in half a meter deep water. It’s not like we could’ve driven them out of here anyway, and their engines were probably waterlogged.
“Mom, you have to come see this,” I said, my voice monotone and grave. I stepped away from the door so she could look out. Her hand gripped the doorjamb, her knuckles turning white as she took in the view.
The flooding was up around the top step of the porch which meant that the entire underbelly of the house was in the water as well.
“I give it an hour before the house floods,” I whispered to Yasahiro, Mom, and Yuna. “I think we’re about to hit the eye of the storm, what with the wind picking up and the rain increasing. Then we still have the other side of the storm to consider if it doesn’t weaken or turn.”
I’d have given anything for internet access or a generator right then. Mom didn’t even have a radio with batteries. Her last one died when it fell off the kitchen counter during a small earthquake. She never replaced it.
Yuna twisted her hands. “We need options.”
“Let’s try to save any valuables in garbage bags, plus any food or water in the plastic bins Mom uses throughout the house.” I point to a few in the main room. “Unless they’re already keeping something expensive, we empty them out and fill them up with the things we’ll need in case it’s a few days before we’re rescued, or the water recedes so we can walk out of here. There’s no way these cars are going to drive again.”
We scuttled through the house, using the flashlights to light our way and gather up anything valuable. Mom emptied her plastic bins she kept bed linens in, and we used them for food, important documents, and the computer. The linens went into garbage bags, and anything else we thought to pack away, like clothing, got bagged up and piled on the beds.
Mimoji-chan meowed from his cat carrier, both wanting to be out and curious about all our activity. Since I was sure everyone would evacuate to our apartment, I packed his wet and dry food plus a small bag of litter into a garbage bag as well. As soon as we were done packing, we let him use his litter box in the bathroom and then back into the cat carrier. The last thing we needed was a loose cat when we were in this situation.
Finally, it was only a matter of time before the bathroom stopped working, so we all washed up and used it, tiptoeing past the shaking bedroom doors.
Sitting around listening to the storm, my imagination ran at racing speed. I pictured the house, picked up and thrown into the sky Wizard of Oz style, twirling around and landing in the next town over. The walls shook enough for me to believe this was possible. Then my next daydream was more of a day nightmare as I envisioned all of us on the failing roof, scrambling to stay out of epic floodwaters with helicopters hovering overhead. I tried to banish these thoughts from my head, but then all I saw was Ria, dead and buried in Akiko’s backfields. How did she die? I didn’t want to know right then when it was possible this typhoon would kill us all.
As the sun began to set, water seeped up through the floors of the living room and the kitchen. We took the cushions from the couch and put them on the dining room table, draping dry linens over the table and cushions. The table was the most stable piece of furniture and the highest point in the house now since the dining room was raised up one step for the footwell.
Mom reached over and held my hand for a long moment. “You were right, and I was wrong. This is my punishment for trying to convince you to work on the farm when you didn’t want to,” she whispered.
I hushed her. “Mom, don’t be dramatic. It’s a typhoon. It’s not some divine influence come to do you harm. Besides, I wanted to work on the farm. I just didn’t want to give up the tea shop.”
Yasahiro peeked ove
r the top of Mom, and I popped a short smile to him.
“Don’t worry about it. We’ll stick together, and everything will be fine.” Our roles were reversed. These were things Mom used to say to me, and now I was saying them to her.
Yuna curled up with the boys, and Mom, Yasahiro, and I drifted in and out of sleep, listening to the howling winds and hoping for rescue as soon as the storm ended.
We couldn’t do anything else.
Chapter Thirty
“Mei-chan! Tsukiko-san!”
My body ached liked someone had kicked me in every available soft spot, and I groaned as I came back to consciousness. I’d spent much of the night awake, the baby fluttering around inside of me, wanting attention… or snacks. It was hard to say. But no one was going anywhere as the water seeped up through the floor and covered most of the house.
“What?” I asked out loud, neither asleep nor awake. Who was calling for me?
A bright light cut through the slats of the typhoon shutters, and the low rumbling of an engine, the first man-made sound we’d heard in twelve hours, purred outside.
Yasahiro stirred beside me, and Yushin, the younger of my two nephews, was already awake.
“There’s someone outside,” he said, pointing at the window.
I rubbed my eyes as I took in the dining room around me. About twenty centimeters of water covered the floor. Bits of paper and other random objects floated along past the open door to the rest of the house. Weak light illuminated the living room and all the water in there.
What an absolute mess.
In all my years growing up in this house, this had never happened. We’d experienced earthquakes that knocked over bookcases and snows that once collapsed the roof over the kitchen. But this was an extraordinary amount of damage.
“Mei-chan!”
I breathed a huge sigh of relief when I realized Goro was on the other side of the wall. Yasahiro sat up next to me and rubbed his eyes as well.
The Daydreamer Detective Returns a Favor Page 18
