Another, Vol. 1 (18 page)

“My mom graduated from this middle school that year. And my mom, she, uh, she died young and I don’t have many photos of her, so I, um…”

“Your mother?”

The look in the librarian’s eyes seemed to soften very slightly.

“I see. All right. But seventy-two, of all things.” The last part he murmured to himself. “You should find it pretty quickly. But it’s not available for lending. When you’re done looking at it, put it back where you found it. Understand?”

“I will.”

It took maybe two or three minutes before I located the yearbook I wanted and pulled it down from the shelf. I set it down on the large reading desk and pulled up a chair. Then, as I got my somewhat ragged breathing under control, I turned back the cover embossed with “North Yomiyama Middle School” in silver foil.

First of all, I looked for the page with third-year Class 3. I soon found the two-page spread, laid out with the left page showing a group photo in color and the right page showing black-and-white photos of the students split into several groups.

There were more students than now. More than forty students in the class.

The background of the group photo was somewhere outside the school. The bank of the Yomiyama River or somewhere like that. Everyone was wearing their winter uniforms. They were smiling, but I could tell that there was some kind of tension in it.

My mom—where was she?

It didn’t seem as if I was going to be able to find her so easily just by looking at the faces. I had to consult the names written under the picture…

…There she was. That one.

“Mom…”

The word slipped out of me unintentionally.

Second row, fifth from the right.

She wore a navy blue blazer exactly like the current uniform. Her hair was put up with a white barrette or something…and she was smiling, too. With some sort of tension in her face.

This was the first time I’d seen a picture of my mom from middle school. It struck me how young she was—how childish, in fact. Adjusting for age, I could see that she really did resemble her younger sister, Reiko.

“Did you find her?” the librarian asked me.

Without turning around, I simply replied, “Yes,” and returned my eyes to the list of names under the group photo. I wanted to check if the name “Misaki” was there. But…

There was no reason it would be.

Misaki had died in the spring of that year, long before they started preparing the yearbook. So there was no reason the name would be there.

“What class was your mother in?”

The librarian asked me another question. His voice was much closer than the last time. I turned around, surprised, and found that he had left the counter and come over to stand right next to me.

“Um, well, I heard that when she was a third-year, she was in Class 3.”

The librarian’s eyebrows dove sharply again. “Hm?” Then he rested a hand on the edge of the table and peered at the yearbook. “Which one is your mother?”

“This one.”

I pointed her out in the group photo. “Let’s see.” The librarian pushed his glasses up and brought his face closer to the book. “Ah, Ritsuko, is it?”

“Huh? You knew her?”

“Oh…well, you know.”

The librarian evaded my question and moved away from the desk. He realized that I was following his movement with my eyes and ruffled his straw-like hair. “Ritsuko’s son. I didn’t know…”

“My mom died fifteen years ago, right after I was born.”

“I see. Which means…Ah. Yes, I see.”

I fought back the urge to ask what it was that he saw, and dropped my eyes back to the yearbook on the table.

Second row, fifth from the right.

I looked at my mom’s face, smiling there with an air of tension, then looked at the group of classmates pictured with her, and then…

…Huh?

I realized
something
and blinked. I had half stood from my chair, so I sat back down, then looked more closely at the yearbook. Which is when—

“So here you are, Sakakibara.”

The door banged open and a student came in just as the bell ending fifth period began to ring. It was Tomohiko Kazami.

“Mr. Kubodera is looking for you. He wants you to go to the teachers’ office right away.”

“You’re Koichi Sakakibara, correct?”

There were two men I’d never seen before, one of whom—the middle-aged man with the round face—spoke to me. His voice was more placating than it needed to be, intended to soothe the tension of its listener, but he questioned me without hesitation.

“You know about what happened to Ms. Mizuno, who used to work at the municipal hospital?”

“…Yes.”

“Were you close with her?”

“She was nice to me when I was hospitalized in April, so…”

“You talked on the phone?”

“Yes, a few times.”

“Yesterday afternoon—around one o’clock, you spoke with her on her cell phone?”

“…I did.”

I’d been summoned by Mr. Kubodera, and waiting for me when I reached the teachers’ office in Building A had been plainclothes cops from the criminal affairs bureau of the Yomiyama police force—detectives, in other words. Two of them, just like the formula goes. In contrast to the jolly-looking middle-aged man with the round face, the younger one had a narrow face with a jutting chin and large glasses with navy blue frames, which seriously made him look like a dragonfly. Their names were Oba and Takenouchi.

“We want to ask you some questions. Your teacher told us that was fine. Do you mind?”

Takenouchi had been the one to say that, cutting to the chase a few moments ago as soon as we’d met. It wasn’t bad enough to come off as brusque, but his tone smacked of the idea that he was only talking to “a half-man middle schooler.”

“We’re having the extended homeroom next,” Mr. Kubodera had added. “But that’s fine if you need to come late so you can talk to them.”

Almost immediately, the bell rang to start sixth period, and Mr. Kubodera handed the matter off to another male teacher and hurried out of the room.

There were sofas set in one corner of the room, where I sat facing the detectives. The teacher who’d been asked to handle things introduced himself as “Yashiro, a guidance counselor,” then sat down beside me. I suppose there was no way the school was going to leave a student on his own in a situation like this.

“You’re aware that Sanae Mizuno passed away yesterday,” Oba continued in his more-soothing-than-necessary voice.

“…Yes.”

“And the manner of her death?”

“No, I didn’t get any details. Just that there was an accident at the hospital.”

“I see.”

“You didn’t read the paper this morning?” Takenouchi cut in to ask. I shook my head silently. In fact, I realized, my grandparents didn’t have a newspaper delivered to their house. And no one turned the TV on at night, either…

“There was a problem with the elevator,” Takenouchi informed me.

I had pretty much guessed that. There had been a few whispers along those lines sprinkled through the voices filling the classroom. But the instant I heard it said officially, from the mouth of a detective, I felt a dull shock that numbed my entire body.

“An elevator in the inpatient ward fell. She was the only one in it. She hit the floor with the full force of the fall, and then the shock of the impact also caused an iron beam to come free in the ceiling and fall on her,” the young detective explained with a slight air of triumph. “And, unfortunately for her, it smashed into her head.”

There was no answer to that.

“The cause of death was a cerebral contusion. When they recovered her from the scene of the accident, she was completely unconscious. They did everything they could at the hospital, but in the end they weren’t able to save her.”

“U-um…” I began timidly. “Was there, um, anything suspicious about the accident?”

Maybe that’s why there are detectives investigating it, I thought.

“Oh, no, it was just an accident,” the middle-aged detective replied. “An extremely sad, unfortunate accident. But when an elevator falls at a hospital, certain issues arise such as determining the cause and investigating any administrative responsibility. That’s what we’re working on.”

“…Ah.”

“Ms. Mizuno’s cell phone fell to the floor of the elevator in question. Its call history showed your name and number, Sakakibara. Moreover, we saw that the call was placed around one o’clock, exactly when the accident occurred. So we believe that you may be the last person she spoke with.”

Ah. Once they said it aloud, it was completely obvious.

The one person in the world most likely to know what had gone on right before and after the accident yesterday. They’d realized that person was the middle schooler she’d been on the phone with, Koichi Sakakibara. And it was true, I had indeed heard
it happen
yesterday.

But wasn’t it a little late for them to come see me? That thought occurred to me, too. I could pretty much imagine the chaos at the scene after the accident yesterday, but still…

At their urging, I recounted what I had experienced.

How I had received a call from Ms. Mizuno yesterday at lunchtime. How we had talked normally at first, then how things had changed suddenly when she left the roof and went into the elevator. How I’d heard some kind of horrible sound almost immediately, then a sound like the phone had been tossed away, and then an instant later the sound of her pained moaning before the call was cut off. Each of them seemed to match up with an aspect of the accident.

“Did you tell anyone about it?”

“Right after it happened, I had no idea what was going on. I tried calling her back, but I couldn’t get through.”

Struggling to calm myself, I described my actions of the day before.

“But I still thought something bad might have happened, so I went to find Mizuno.”

“Who?”

“Takeru Mizuno. Ms. Mizuno’s little brother. He’s in my class. I told him about what I heard on the phone, but I guess he couldn’t figure out what I was saying, so he didn’t take me very seriously…”

What are you talking about? You’re not making sense.

That had been Mizuno/Little Brother’s reaction. Angry, but also incredibly confused.

You need to quit feeding my sister crazy stories. You’re causing a lot of problems for me.

The only thing I could think to do after that was contact the hospital.

The nurses’ station in the inpatient ward had answered and I’d asked for Ms. Mizuno. But that hadn’t reached her, either, like I pretty much thought, and soon things had gotten incredibly frantic on the other end of the phone…Then, no matter how many times I’d tried to call, all I’d gotten was a busy signal, and there was nothing left for me to do.

“She was on the roof, correct?” Oba confirmed. “Then she got on the elevator, and immediately…I see.”

The middle-aged detective nodded, taking notes.

“What do you think caused the accident?” I asked him.

“That’s still under investigation,” the young detective answered. “What we do know is that the elevator fell because a wire snapped. There are safety measures in place, so typically something like this shouldn’t happen. That hospital building is decades old, though, and apparently they’ve made a lot of unnecessary improvements in that time. The elevator in question was in the back of the building and they even called it ‘the back elevator.’ Patients never use it, of course, and even employees normally didn’t bother with it.”

“Did you know about this elevator, Sakakibara?”

“No, I never heard of it.”

“In any case, on top of the elevator being antiquated, there are some questions about whether proper maintenance had been conducted.”

“I see.”

“It really was an accident that happened here. And given that this is a public building, this raises major concerns, naturally. Still, a fatality in an elevator crash is unusual nowadays. All we can say is that she had terrible luck.”

We’ll both be careful.

The words Ms. Mizuno had spoken the last time I’d seen her echoed in my ears again.

Especially for any accidents that would never usually happen.

Sixth period had begun and was more than thirty minutes gone when I was released from the “voluntary questioning” by the detectives.

I left the office and dutifully hurried to my classroom, but when I arrived I got a surprise. Not a single student of third-year Class 3 was in the room.

Looking around, I saw their bags and stuff were still there. So they hadn’t finished early and gone home—which meant…

They’d all gone to some other place together? That was all I could think of…

Izumi Akazawa

Her name was written in large letters in the center of the blackboard.

Izumi Akazawa.

She had a slightly grown-up, forceful, glamorous persona. She had a feminine figure, was always surrounded by friends, at the center of a group.

…Pretty much the opposite of Mei, huh?

Despite the thought, I recalled a few things about this student named Akazawa that nagged at me.

The day I’d first come to this school in May, I was pretty sure Izumi Akazawa had been absent. And then in gym class that other day…The time Yukari Sakuragi, who was sitting out gym class with a twisted leg, came over to talk to me…

I have to do this right, or Akazawa’s going to get mad at me…

I thought I could hear the words, spoken to herself, in my ears. What had that been about?

And that phone call I’d gotten from Teshigawara after that, out of the blue.

I’m calling ’cause I thought you might be in trouble.

He’d said that, then continued:

Akazawa’s pretty wound up. She might start having some kind of hysterical episode.

“Oh, Sakakibara.”

I turned around at the sound, and there was Mr. Kubodera. He came into the classroom through the door at the back of the room, as if tailing me.

“Have you finished talking with the police?”

“Yes.”

“I see. Then you can go home now, if you’d like.”