The Kizuna Coast: A Rei Shimura Mystery (Rei Shimura Mysteries Book 11) (5 page)

“You could go by his shop and look in the windows,” Richard suggested. “I guess you have no way of getting inside.”

I didn’t answer. Back when we worked in the same office, Michael taught me the art of picking locks and unscrambling combinations to safes. I’d spent more than a month learning the skills. And since getting married, we’d developed a private lock-picking game. This one dealt with undoing the other person’s zippers and buttons and clasps using anything except for one’s fingers.

I blushed at the memory of the last afternoon we’d played. In fact, the particulars and outcome of that lock-picking game might have convinced Richard that Michael wasn’t such a bore.

But this married lady wouldn’t talk.

U
sually I awoke too early when I flew into Japan. This time, I could barely open my eyes. What did it was a heavy weight on my chest—Richard’s cat Mutsu. We locked eyes, and she leapt off lightly, as she’d done her job.

It was already eight o’clock, and Richard was ambling around the apartment. I guessed that Enrique had already left for his morning capoeira workout.

“One good sign of life is people are walking to the subway,” Richard said when I stretched and yawned a good morning. “I’ve lit the flame for the water heater—you can shower if it’s not too long.”

“That’s great. I’ve got something for our breakfast.” I dug into my luggage and pulled out a loaf of round, sweet Hawaiian bread.

“Oh, that’s going to be perfect with my Georgia brand instant coffee.” Richard showed me the water kettle he was heating atop his Tokyo City Gas heater. “Were you warm enough last night?”

“Yes, I was quite cozy in my sleeping bag plus your extra blanket. Hey, is there a car rental place around here?” I asked.

“A few blocks away, but even if you could rent a car to drive a few hundred miles out of here, how would you refill it? Most of the filling stations are closed. And you would need a lot of yen. I bet you forgot how expensive gas is here, even in the best of times.”

He had a point. “What I need before anything else is more Japanese money. I have less than a thousand yen to my name, which in today’s exchange is like twelve dollars, right? I only made it to Tokyo because I could charge my bullet train ticket.”

After taking a very short shower, I put on makeup and one of the few “city” outfits I’d brought: gray flannel pants and a cream-white angora turtleneck I found on sale years ago at Mitsutan. This went underneath the spring-green jacket. Around my neck, Richard tied my vintage green-and-gold Hanae Mori scarf into a complex, elegant knot.

“You aren’t the hippest girl on the planet, but you do look properly Tokyo,” Richard said, fussing with my hair as he walked around me.

“Richard, I’m only going to the ATM.” Kissing my friend goodbye, I headed out and soon discovered that every teller machine in the vicinity was out of service. I finally found an open Citibank, where there were long lines of people in need of money. When I came to the teller’s window, I was asked for my passport before the teller ran my ATM card through a handheld machine. Minutes later, the young woman gave me an envelope fat with yen notes. I’d asked for the equivelent of $1,000 because I was doubtful about bank access when I reached Tohoku.

But there was no point in going to Tohoku until I checked out what had happened at Mr. Ishida’s shop in Yanaka.

The subway was in operation with more trains than the day before. I caught the Chiyoda Line to Sendagi Station, the closest stop to the district of Yanaka. Mr. Ishida’s neighborhood was a tucked-away, urban hamlet that had the superb fortune of escaping both American bombs and the Japanese building boom that came in the postwar period. The area was still a patchwork of small streets with tiny gardens, tall trees, and charming wooden buildings: the kind straight out of woodblock prints or children’s picture books about olden times.

Yanaka had been my home for a few years, too, so I was distressed to find several small, familiar buildings had collapsed. But plenty of people were sweeping in front of their houses as usual, or had opened their shops for business. As I drew near Mr. Ishida’s place, I saw the next-door
senbei
shop had its metal grille raised.

As impatient as I was to get into Ishida Antiques, I decided it was worth stopping to say hello to Mr. Okada, since he and Mr. Ishida had shops so close to each other.

In Okada Senbei, the wooden shelves that always displayed twenty varieties of crackers were bare, as if a horde of shoppers had bought up every morsel. But Mr. Okada was toasting new crackers with tongs held over a charcoal-filled brazier that had been his grandfather’s. He looked up at me.

“Irasshaimase!”
he said, the standard welcome greeting to customers.

“It’s been a long time, Okada-san.” I bowed, hoping he’d recognize me. “I’m Ishida-san’s former assistant, Shimura Rei.”

“I remember you, Shimura-san. You prefer seaweed-sesame crackers with a dark soy glaze.” Mr. Okada was in his sixties now. He had a friendly, round face with plenty of smile lines, which now creased deeply. “I’m happy to see you again. But didn’t you move to Hawaii?”

“Yes, I’m married now, and we own a little house by the beach. But I’ve come to help Mr. Ishida.”

“He’s away somewhere.” Mr. Okada’s tone was urgent, and his smile lines vanished. “Actually, I’ve been quite worried. I checked the morning after the earthquake to say hello, but except for his dog, Hachiko, nobody was in the shop.”

I had so much to share with Mr. Okada, but I wanted to know the essential details first. “Did Ishida-san call you to ask for help with the dog? Or to say anything else?”

“No, I haven’t had any telephone calls from him. But I’m his neighbor, so of course it was my duty to help the little dog. Unfortunately, city regulations don’t permit animals on premises of a food seller. Because Ishida-san’s apprentice didn’t come around to get Hachiko, I brought her to stay at the neighborhood veterinarian.”

It had been a long recitation, and the cracker Okada-san was roasting started smoking around the edges. Shaking his head, he dropped the burnt circle in a wastebasket.

“Mr. Ishida and I spoke only once on the phone, and that was March twelfth. He said he was in a shelter for injured people in a place called Yamagawa. My husband tried to get the Red Cross to send a message to a shelter in Yamagawa, but they couldn’t locate a place.”

“Yamagawa is one of those little towns hit hard by the tsunami,” Mr. Okada said. “I heard its name mentioned on the news.”

“Ishida-san was at an auction. I don’t know whether he was actually caught up in the water, but he mentioned that he suffered a head injury and couldn’t return to Tokyo without help.”

“That would be a good job for his apprentice. But I haven’t seen her since March tenth.”

“Maybe she’ll be at the shop today,” I said, though I doubted it. “I heard her voice on the phone several times over the last few months, but we’ve never met. What’s her name?”

“Mayumi-chan was what he called her; her full name is Kimura Mayumi. Ishida-san said the Kimuras are a well-known lacquer family originally from the Aizu section of Fukushima. They relocated to a small town in Tohoku Prefecture when Mayumi was very young.”

Kimura meant tree village: a fitting place to come from if one was involved in the lacquer arts. The name carried a more peaceful association than my family name, which meant warriors’ village. The two last names, Shimura and Kimura, sounded very similar. Maybe Ishida-san used Mayumi’s first name to avoid tripping over old memories—or because he considered her a granddaughter.

I stifled this strange, swift flicker of jealousy and thanked Mr. Okada for helping Hachiko. I told him I planned to go into Ishida Antiques to look for more clues to Mr. Ishida and Mayumi’s whereabouts and then stop at the veterinarian to see how Hachiko had fared.

“Won’t you take some freshly roasted crackers as a small welcome back?” Okada-san offered. “I also can lend the key I have to Ishida-san’s front door. It’s quite simple to get into the place, I’m afraid. I think he should have an alarm system, but he doesn’t like wires.”

Mr. Ishida believed that a guard dog was a greater deterrent than any alarm. He had once told me that Hachiko could sense if certain people were trouble. The dog once stalked a customer who turned out to be a shoplifter. Mr. Ishida had said, “When Hachiko put her paws and nose on the fellow, he quickly took a jade figure right out of his pocket and handed it to me!”

Mr. Okada placed three packages of seaweed-sesame crackers in a crisp navy shopping bag with a striped-ribbon handle. I thanked him for the kind gift and wrote my Japanese cell number on my business card and handed it to him. “Just in case I don’t see Mayumi-chan at the shop, and you do happen to see her after I’ve gone to Tohoku.”

“I will keep your card right by my
reji
,” Mr. Okada said, gesturing toward the old-fashioned cash register. “And when you find Ishida-san, do call in case there’s anything I can do here to make his return.”

The fact that I didn’t have to pick Mr. Ishida’s lock was almost disappointing. Michael’s little black case containing fifteen picks and four tension wrenches designed for narrow Japanese locks would remain inside my jacket pocket.

I walked around the building’s stucco exterior, relieved to see no parts of it had crumbled. Fitting Mr. Okada’s spare key into the old brass lockplate, the knob turned, and I stepped into the shop.

It didn’t smell quite right. I was used to the scent of wax and green tea, but today I smelled some kind of spoiled food. A few more steps until I spotted two moldy oranges lying on the floor. They’d fallen, along with a square porcelain dish, from an ornately carved miniature Buddhist altar.

Unfolding a tissue from a promotional packet somebody had thrust at me by Sendagi Station, I gathered up the oranges and broken pottery and deposited them in a small trash basket near Mr. Ishida’s fifty-year-old desk. Now, as I looked around, I saw more evidence of the earthquake. Several pieces of porcelain had fallen off display tables and lay broken on the shop’s worn pine floor. Several drawers were hanging open on a step
tansu
, and some folders of shop receipts and records were scattered across the floor.

How surprising that Mayumi had not cleaned up. Uneasily, I looked on the desk for a note or other evidence of her last time in the shop. But there was nothing, and the store telephone had no blinking lights promising messages, because the power was off.

Next I moved on to scrutinize the aged plaster walls near the desk. Beside a museum calendar featuring old woodblock prints was a taped-up paper that looked like a printed reproduction of an Internet web page. This was the same picture I’d found online of Mr. Ishida and a teenage girl with hair dyed as brilliantly blue as an anime character’s. Close by this weird picture was another shot of the blue-haired teenager posing with Hachiko. The girl was sticking up a couple of fingers to make rabbit ears over Hachiko’s head: a classic move employed by young Japanese posing in photographs. Belatedly, I realized that the young, punk-looking girl could be Mayumi Kimura.

I felt shocked that Mr. Ishida had hired someone who looked like this to help sell his high-end antiques. I conceded that she was pretty, with sleepy-looking eyes and a full, pouty mouth. But she was about as far from me as he could get. And Mayumi’s juvenile appearance was perhaps the reason he called her “Little Mayumi” and not “Miss Kimura.”

I returned my attention to the Tokyo National Museum calendar. There, written on March 10, was the town name Sendai. On the eleventh was another Japanese word I could guess at, because it was in
kanji
characters that had multiple readings.

The Internet browser was down, so I couldn’t use the
kanji
decoding website. I took out my cell phone and snapped a close-up picture to show my relatives at dinner. Aunt Norie and I had already confirmed via texts that I would arrive by seven.

As I put the phone in my pocket, my gaze fell on a familiar red lacquer box sitting on the desk’s blotter. This cashbox was typically locked and kept in the bottom desk drawer. Touching the edge of the lid, it flipped up.

No money inside: not even a hundred-yen coin. This didn’t make sense, because Mr. Ishida always kept a variety of bills and coins for making change. Perhaps he had deposited everything before his auction trip, although Mayumi would have needed cash on hand to make change if she’d stayed back to keep the shop open for business.

Perhaps a burglary had occurred. But then, more than money should have been missing. I’d not been inside the shop for over a year, so I didn’t know the stock; although I recognized some very expensive pieces that apparently still hadn’t found the right buyer. But then I remembered the shop’s inventory list.

Mr. Ishida listed all his goods by hand inside ordinary lined notebooks. Dozens of these notebooks, going back for decades, filled a shelf above his desk. Inside the notebooks, each item in his inventory was described along with its date of acquisition, original price paid, and if applicable, the buyer, date of purchase, and sales price. He wrote the items’ names in both Japanese and English because he wanted to be able to quickly present a precise description for foreign clients who might telephone or contact him by mail.