Gasa-Gasa Girl (27 page)

chapter fourteen

The wayward bullet, this time, had not landed on the dirt floor of the shed, but in the trunk of one of the cherry blossom trees. It was indeed Mari who had saved him, cracking Miss Waxley’s head with one of the garden rocks and then pushing the old woman four feet down onto the concrete floor. Luckily, the busybody neighbor had seen Mari run into the garden; curiosity had gotten the best of him. He had witnessed Miss Waxley brandishing the gun and spouting out her confession, thereby becoming Mari’s ticket out of jail.

“Howsu you know I’m here?” Mas was resting on the back stairs, his hands still trembling.

“I was worried when you never came back to the hospital with my things,” Mari explained. She had gone to the apartment, found the fax, and promptly called Haruo, who gave her a quick translation of the fax. He was the one who suggested that Mas might be at the garden. “He told me that you would need to be around plants to really think.”

Like always, Haruo was watching his back, more than three thousand miles away.

In minutes the police arrived. If Mari hadn’t saved Mas, the police would have been investigating a murder-suicide. Mas figured that after he was shot, Miss Waxley would have turned the gun on herself. The point wasn’t that she escape prosecution but that her secret end where it started, at the Waxley House.

Paramedics checked out Miss Waxley’s broken body and confirmed that she was indeed dead, her skull cracked, with her sticky blood settling underneath her. She was a tough
baba
—an old woman with a single-minded purpose—to hide the fact that her father had had relations, most likely forced, with an Irish maid. And that union had resulted in her, a woman whose perceived family lineage was so revered and precise. The Waxley family ended with her, but the irony was that the extended family tree would continue on, with the Ouchis.

Mari and Mas took turns sitting in the dining room of the Waxley House, telling their stories to Detective Ghigo, his bald partner, and their attorney, Jeannie. Mari went first, because she was considered the main suspect. After her turn, Mas was called in. He kept his eyes on the attorney as he told them about reading the journal and putting two and two together. Seeing the words on the bottom of the pond had sealed it, and then he had come face-to-face with Miss Waxley and her gun.

“But how did she know that you knew anything?” the bald detective asked. “She could have just let your daughter take the fall and kept out of it.”

Mas said nothing. If you attempted to hide something, you had a sixth sense about who was going to rat you out. Miss Waxley had had that feeling about Mas.

After Mas was released from their interrogation, he joined Mari in the living room. She was on the cell phone, talking to Lloyd, no doubt. “Everything’s okay,” she was saying. “Yeah, Dad’s fine.”

The front door opened, and it was J-E, Miss Waxley’s driver. Instead of a suit and tie, he wore a faded sweatshirt, shiny blue exercise pants, and, of course, the red-soled shoes. Also, another addition—a beanie cap that hid his eel-like hair. “I saw all the cop cars. Is everything okay?” he asked.

Mas pointed his finger at J-E’s head. “Youzu the one in Seabrook. Impala,
desho
?”

J-E turned quickly to leave, but Mari, dropping her cell phone, wrapped her arm around his. “You’re not going anywhere.”

“Okay, okay.” J-E tried to shake Mari off. “I followed you guys. But I wasn’t going to hurt you. ‘Just scare them,’ Miss Waxley said. I didn’t know what the hell this was all about. She told me that she would fire me if I didn’t follow through. She didn’t want you to find something at that museum. That’s all I know. I couldn’t go through with what she wanted. It was bullshit, and I told her so. And then she fired me.”

“When?” Mas asked.

“Four days ago.”

Before Seiko Sumi was thrown off her balcony. Mas didn’t think that the driver would commit such a bloodthirsty crime, but you never knew. Sometimes the most harmless-looking ones were the most dangerous. After J-E was fired, Miss Waxley had to find another henchman. And that most likely came in the form of the sumo wrestler, Larry Pauley.

“You better talk to the police,” Mari said, leading the driver to Detective Ghigo.

M
ari and Mas sat on the back stairs outside the Waxley House. It was like a replay of Kazzy’s death. The coroner’s office arrived, and so did the detectives and police officers. The body was wrapped and carted away. New police tape was affixed onto two pine trees across the concrete pond.

In a matter of hours, the cherry blossoms had finally opened in full force, weighing their branches down with pink flowers. “They would have to open now,” Mari said.

“Thatsu the way it happen,” Mas said. “No control nature.”

“Do you believe in God, Dad?”

Mas paused. Decades, or even months, earlier he would have said no, that he believed only in Mother Nature. But there was something out there working hand in hand with trees and plants, he had to admit. “You
orai
?”

“I feel so terrible.” Mari pressed her wrists against her eye sockets. “I killed someone. Another human being. I mean, I know that it was to prevent her from hurting you—but still. How can I live with that?”

There were no answers. Mas remembered when he abandoned his friends after the Bomb fell. He felt as though he had killed them, too. And that guilt burned in his gut for close to a lifetime. “Day by day,” Mas said. “Just thinksu about Takeo. Thatsu best thing.”

The sides of Mari’s mouth turned upward, but Mas noticed a fluttering in her cheeks, as if it was difficult to keep a smile on her face.

The back gate opened and the two Ouchi siblings walked in. Becca was wearing a T-shirt at least a couple sizes too tight and a torn-up pair of jeans, while Phillip was in a tailored knit jacket. “Is it true?” asked Becca. “It was Miss Waxley?”

“Yes,” Mari said. “She killed your father, and she tried to kill mine.”

Phillip was a walking, talking skeleton. “I can’t believe it,” he murmured. “I can’t believe it. Why?”

“Sheezu gotta secret,” Mas said. “Secret she don’t want nobody to know. Dat her mama is not Mrs. Waxley but Kazzy’s mama.”

Phillip took a few steps back. “What are you saying?”

“That Miss Waxley was K-
san
’s half sister.” For once, Becca was quick in connecting the dots. The realization hit hard, though, because afterward she didn’t speak for some time.

“Kazzy must have found out recently when he read Asa Sumi’s journal. She was a housekeeper who helped Emily at the Waxley House,” Mari explained. “I guess he wanted to tie up all the loose ends in his life before he died. He probably wanted to let you both know the truth.”

Mas pointed to the
kanji
on the side of the pond. “Kazzy’s daddy try to leave message. ‘Child lives.’ Asa Sumi wrote dat they tole him the baby died, but he knew the baby was alive.”

“What he probably didn’t know was that the baby’s father was Mr. Waxley,” Mari added.

They all remained quiet for minute, deeply affected by how family members could wound and sometimes even destroy each other.

“I knew that this damn garden was cursed, Becca,” Phillip finally said. He ran his hand through his graying hair and paced the length of the pond. “We should cover it over, like it was before.”

For once, Mas felt sorry for Phillip. Maybe he had misjudged him. Mas knew what it was like to be ignored, your work not fully appreciated. He probably had been struggling to keep Ouchi Silk, Inc., the family business, alive. It was on its last legs, and while his father was the one who had built it up, Phillip would be the one to watch it fall down.

Mas knew that it was his time to step in. He went back into the house and brought a plastic bucket from the laundry room.

“What are you doing, Mr. Arai?” Becca’s black makeup was smeared underneath her eyes.

Mas filled the bucket with water from an outside faucet and motioned for Becca, Phillip, and Mari to come to the far northern side of the pond, by the stone
tsukubai
.

Phillip knelt by the stone water basin. “What’s that? I never noticed that before.”

“
Tsukubai,
” Mas said. “Makes your hands clean.”

“I think they use it for the tea ceremony, right?” Becca said, wiping tears away on the back of her hand.

“It’s part of a purification rite,” Mari said. “That much I’ve learned from my husband.”

Mas didn’t know much about purification, but he knew that somehow the pond, with all its bloodstains and bad memories, needed to be made clean again. Although the police tape warded them off from disturbing any evidence, they at least could wash themselves of its curse.

Mas poured the water over the hands of Phillip, Becca, and finally his daughter. Mari took the remaining water from the bottom of the bucket and shook it off on Mas’s hands. The bandage had fallen off of Mas’s cut a day earlier, and Mas was surprised to see that the skin was already starting to fuse together again.

The back door opened and there emerged the neighbor, Howard Foster, who had completed his interview with the police. His hands on his hips, he made a strange noise with his tongue and teeth, as if he were calling chickens for their next feed. “I told you. I told you that this would end up a disaster,” he said, shaking his head. “You should have never unearthed this pond.” He walked up to Phillip. “I’ve been talking to my bank. I think that I can make you and your sister a fair offer. Once you’re ready, give me a call.”

Phillip stood above the
tsukubai
and folded his arms. “I won’t be making that call, Mr. Foster, because we are keeping the house.”

“And the garden,” Becca added with finality.

B
efore Becca and Phillip left the garden, Mas pulled Becca aside. “Youzu chase Anna Grady away,” he said.

“What?” Becca’s right eyelid fluttered like a butterfly trying to make its escape.

“Youzu don’t want her to marry your daddy.”

Becca swallowed and looked away. “I finally got K-
san
to myself, you know. After all these years. We shared the same passion for gardens, plants. I can’t tell you how many times we visited the Brooklyn Botanic Garden together. We even had pet names for each one of the bonsai in their collection. Do you know some are hundreds of years old?”

This woman has too much time on her hands, Mas thought.

“And then he tells me that he’s met someone. And it’s serious. He was talking about marriage, Mr. Arai, after only two months. I had to put a stop to it.” Becca explained that she had hired a private investigator to look into the background of Anna Grady, formerly Anna Miller, both in the U.S. and in Estonia. “She had been married once before, but that wasn’t a big deal, with K-
san
married three times. But what the investigator found out overseas was highly damaging: Anna’s family had aided the Nazis during World War Two. What if that news got out? K-
san
’s reputation would be at stake.”

Mas wasn’t that sure of that. “Ova fifty years ago. Nobody care.”

“That’s what Phillip said. But K-
san
would have cared. I know it. He prided himself on helping teach military intelligence officers to help end the war. What if people found out his new wife was a Nazi? What kind of PR mess would that be?”