The Complete Ring Trilogy: Ring, Spiral, Loop. Koji Suzuki

depending on the interplay of light and darkness. Asakawa was bringing his face nearer the glass, as if drawn there, when his wife tapped him on the back. Just at that moment, they heard Yoko crying upstairs. She was awake.

      “Yoko’s up.” Shizu wiped her wet hands on a towel. Their daughter usually didn’t cry so hard upon waking up. Shizu rushed up to the second floor.

      As she was going out, Yoshimi came in. Asakawa handed her the card he’d found. “This had fallen under the piano.” He spoke casually and waited for a reaction.

      Yoshimi took the card and turned it over. “This is strange. What was this doing there?” She cocked her head, puzzled.

      “Could Tomoko have borrowed it from a friend, do you suppose?”

      “But I’ve never heard of this person. I don’t think she had a friend by that name.” Yoshimi looked at Asakawa with exaggerated worry. “Darn it. This looks important. I swear, that girl …” Her voice choked up. Even the slightest thing would set the wheels of grief in motion for her. Asakawa hesitated to ask, but did.

      “Did, ah … did Tomoko and her friends by any chance go to this resort during summer vacation?”

      Yoshimi shook her head. She trusted her daughter. Tomoko hadn’t been the kind of child to lie about staying over at her friends’. Plus, she had been studying for exams. Asakawa could understand how Yoshimi felt. He decided not to ask about Tomoko any further. No high school student with exams looming in front of her was going to tell her parents that she was renting a cottage with her boyfriend. She would have lied and said she was studying at a friend’s house. Her parents would never know.

      “I’ll find the owner and return it.”

      Yoshimi bowed her head in silence, and then her husband called from the living room and she hurried out of the kitchen. The bereaved father was seated in front of a newly-installed Buddhist altar, speaking to his daughter’s photograph. His voice was shockingly cheerful, and Asakawa became depressed. He was obviously living in denial. Asakawa could only pray that he’d be able to get through.

      Asakawa had found out one thing. If this Nonoyama had in fact lent Tomoko the membership card, he or she would have contacted Tomoko’s parents to ask for the card back upon learning of her death. But Tomoko’s mother knew nothing about the card. Nonoyama couldn’t have forgotten about the card. Even if it were part of a family membership deal, dues were expensive enough that Nonoyama wouldn’t just allow the card to stay lost. So what did this mean? This was how Asakawa figured it: Nonoyama had lent the card to one of the other three, either Iwata, Tsuji, or Nomi. Somehow it passed into Tomoko’s possession, and that’s how things had ended. Nonoyama would have contacted the parents of the person he or she had lent it to. The parents would have searched their child’s belongings. They wouldn’t have found the card. The card was here. If Asakawa contacted the families of the other three victims, he might be able to unearth Nonoyama’s address. He should call right away, tonight. If he couldn’t dig up a clue this way, then it would be unlikely that the card would provide a means for finding when and where the four had been together. At any rate, he wanted to meet Nonoyama and hear what he or she had to say. If he had to, he could always find some way to track down Nonoyama’s address based on the membership number. Asking Pacific Resorts directly probably wouldn’t get him anywhere, but he was sure that his newspaper connections could come up with something.

      Someone was calling him. A distant voice. “Dear … dear …” His wife’s flustered voice mingled with the baby’s crying.

      “Dear, could you come here for a minute?”

      Asakawa came to himself again. Suddenly he wasn’t even sure what he’d been thinking about all this time. There was something strange about the way his daughter was crying. That feeling became stronger as he mounted the stairs.

      “What’s wrong?” he asked his wife, accusingly.

      “Something’s not right with Yoko. I think something’s happened to her. The way she’s crying—it’s different from how it usually sounds. Do you think she’s sick?”

      Asakawa placed his hand on Yoko’s forehead. She didn’t have a fever. But her little hands were trembling. The trembling spread to her whole body, and sometimes her back shook. Her face was beet red, her eyes clenched shut.

      “How long has she been like this?”

      “It’s because she woke up and there was no one here with her.”

      The baby often cried if her mother wasn’t there when she woke up. But she always calmed down when her mother ran to her and held her. When a baby cried it was trying to ask for something, but what …? The baby was trying to tell them something. She wasn’t just being bratty. Her two tiny hands were clasped tightly over her face … cowering. That was it. The child was wailing out of fear. Yoko turned her face away, and then opened her fists slightly: she seemed to be trying to point forward. Asakawa looked in that direction. There was a pillar. He raised his eyes. Hanging about thirty centimeters from the ceiling was a fist-sized mask, of a hannya—a female demon. Was the child afraid of the mask?

      “Hey, look,” said Asakawa, pointing with his chin. They looked at the mask simultaneously, then slowly turned their gazes to each other.

      “No way … she’s frightened of a demon?”

      Asakawa got to his feet. He took down the demon mask from where it hung on the beam and laid it face down on top of the dresser. Yoko couldn’t see it there. She abruptly stopped crying.

      “What’s the matter, Yoko? Did that nasty demon scare you?” Shizu seemed relieved now that she understood, and she happily rubbed her cheek against the child’s. Asakawa wasn’t so easily satisfied; for some reason, he didn’t want to be in this room any longer.

      “Hey. Let’s go home,” he urged his wife.

      That evening, as soon as he got home from the Oishis’, he called the Tsujis, the Nomis, and the Iwatas, in that order. He asked each family whether they hadn’t been contacted by one of their child’s acquaintances regarding a membership card for a resort club. The last person he spoke to, Iwata’s mother, gave him a long, rambling answer: “There was a call, from someone who said he’d gone to the same high school as my son, an older boy, saying he’d lent my son his resort membership card, and could he get it back … But I searched every corner of my son’s room and never could find it. I’ve been worried about it ever since.” He quickly asked for Nonoyama’s phone number, and immediately called it.

      Nonoyama had run into Iwata in Shibuya on the last Sunday in August, and lent him his card, just as Asakawa had suspected. Iwata had told him he was going away with this high school girl he’d been hitting on. Summer vacation’s almost over, y’know. I want to really live it up once before it’s over, or else I won’t be able to buckle down and study for the exams.

      Nonoyama had laughed when he heard this. You idiot, prep school students aren’t supposed to have summer vacations.

      The last Sunday in August had been the 26th: if they’d gone anywhere for the night, it would have to have been the 27th, 28th, 29th, or 30th. Asakawa didn’t know about the college prep school, but for the high school girls at least, fall semester began on the first of September.

      Maybe it was because she was tired from being so long in unfamiliar surroundings: Yoko soon fell asleep right next to her mother. When he put his ear to the bedroom door, he could hear both of them breathing regularly, fast asleep. Nine in the evening … this was Asakawa’s time to relax. Until his wife and child were asleep, there was no room in this tiny condo for him to settle down to work.

      Asakawa got a beer from the fridge and poured it into a glass. It tasted special tonight. He’d made definite progress, finding that membership card. There was a good chance that sometime between the 27th and the 30th of August, Shuichi Iwata and the other three had stayed at facilities belonging to Pacific Resorts. The most likely place was Villa Log Cabin at Pacific Land in South Hakone. South Hakone was the only Pacific Resorts property close enough