612
happened to simultaneously shake Sakigake to the core. Two story lines at work, with
different starting points but running parallel to each other.
The question was, would the Sakigake twosome accept such a convenient
hypothesis?
No way
, Ushikawa concluded. Instead, they would jump at the conspiracy
theory, for they loved anything that hinted of sinister plots. Before he handed over
any raw
information, he needed solid proof. Otherwise they would be misled and it
might wind up hurting him.
As Ushikawa rode the train from Ichikawa to Tsudanuma, he pondered all this.
Without realizing it, he must have been frowning, sighing, and glaring into space,
because an elementary-school girl in the seat across from him was looking at him
oddly. To cover his embarrassment, he relaxed his expression and rubbed his balding
head. But this gesture only ended up making the little girl frightened, and just before
Nishi-Funabashi Station, she leapt to her feet and rushed away.
He spoke with Toshie Ota in her classroom after school.
She looked to be in her mid-
fifties. Her appearance was the polar opposite of the refined vice principal back at the
Ichikawa elementary school. Miss Ota was short and stocky and, from behind, had a
weird sort of gait, like a crustacean. She wore tiny metal-framed glasses, but the space
between her eyebrows was flat and broad and you could clearly see the downy hair
growing there. She had on a wool suit of indeterminate age, though no doubt it was
already out of fashion by the
time it was manufactured, and it carried with it a faint
odor of mothballs. The suit was pink, but an odd sort of pink, like some other color
had been accidentally mixed in. They had probably been aiming for a classy, subdued
sort of hue, but because they didn’t get it right, the pink of her suit sank deeply back
into diffidence, concealment, and resignation. Thanks to this, the brand-new white
blouse peeking out of the collar looked like some indiscreet person who had wandered
into a wake.
Her dry hair, with some white strands mixed in, was pinned back with a
plastic clip, probably the nearest thing she had had on hand. Her limbs were on the
beefy side, and she wore no rings on her stubby fingers. There were three thin
wrinkles at her neckline, sharply etched, like notches on the road of life. Or maybe
they were marks to commemorate when three wishes had come true—though
Ushikawa had serious doubts that this had ever happened.
The woman had been Tengo Kawana’s homeroom teacher from third grade until
he graduated from elementary school. Teachers changed
classes every two years, but
in this case she had happened to be in charge of his class for all four. Aomame was in
her class in only third and fourth grades.
“I remember Mr. Kawana very well,” she said.
In contrast to her gentle-looking exterior, her voice was strikingly clear and
youthful. It was the kind of voice that would pierce the farthest reaches of a noisy
classroom.
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