Bill Pronzini - Quicksilver

“Did he ever speak of a woman he knew at Tule Lake named Chiyoko Wakasa?”

“Who? No. Chiyoko… that’s Haruko’s middle name…”

“Does your father also know that?”

“I guess so. I think I told him once, but-”

“All right, Edgar,” I said. “Go on over to the house. Wait for your uncle there.”

“Why should I? Say, what’re you doing here, anyway? I don’t-”

“Now, Edgar!”

I caught hold of his arm and turned him and gave him a push toward the house. I did not like getting rough with him, but there was no time for explanations; I’d wasted enough time already. And I wanted him out of the way when I went after his father.

I leaned into the car and shut off the engine and the headlamps and then got my flashlight. When I came out with it Edgar was standing twenty feet away in the rain, staring at me. But he wasn’t making any moves in my direction. I quit looking at him, pivoted away from the car, and hurried across toward the lighted greenhouse.

If anything, the rain was coming down harder now, chill against my bare skin. Ahead, diagonally in front of the greenhouse door and some distance away from it, I could see Mr. Ogada’s pickup truck. Crumpled fender, broken headlight-some of the hard evidence the police would need, because the damage had to have happened when he ran down and killed Kazuo Hama.

I had enough facts now to make reasonable guesses at the rest. Tamura and Masaoka and Hama had been the three boys who’d raped Chiyoko Wakasa at Tule Lake. Mr. Ogada had been the boy who’d heard her cries and chased the others off-Chiyoko’s friend, and probably in love with her. He hadn’t done anything about the three rapists at the time; maybe he hadn’t had a good look at them either in the dark, maybe he only suspected who they were. Or maybe he was afraid.

After the war he’d lost touch with Chiyoko. It was probable he hadn’t even known of her death; or that it had taken place in the same town where Kazuo Hama lived, and that Hama had realized he was partly to blame and had tried to salve his guilty conscience by erecting a mausoleum for her remains. “There the wicked cease from troubling and the weary be at rest.” I thought I understood that now, too. It hadn’t just been meant for Chiyoko Wakasa; Hama had meant it for himself as well. She had been the weary-he had been the wicked whose troubling would also one day cease. And now, all these years later, it had.

So Mr. Ogada had met someone else and gotten married and had a son named Edgar and started a wholesale nursery business. And Hama and Tamura and Masaoka had gone on with their lives over the next thirty-five years. And Chiyoko Wakasa might have remained a fading memory for all of them if a number of things hadn’t happened to freshen it, to slowly turn it into an obsession in Mr. Ogada’s mind.

If Edgar hadn’t met and started dating Haruko, who looked enough like Chiyoko to be her sister. If Mr. Ogada’s wife hadn’t died suddenly and left him lonely and depressed. If he hadn’t somehow found out about Chiyoko’s suicide, and why she had commited the act, and where she was buried. If he hadn’t made up his mind to belatedly avenge her rape and her death. If he had not begun to confuse Chiyoko and Haruko in his mind, to believe that Haruko was some sort of reincarnation of the dead woman he had once loved.

Three murders. The presents to Haruko, the last three taken off the victims and offered not just as tokens of his love but as symbols of his vengeance. And now the kidnapping, because he must believe with all his heart that she really was Chiyoko, and he loved her, and he wanted her with him…

I passed between the pickup and the outer corner of the greenhouse, on my way to the door. The wind-hurled rain had begun to sting harder, and I realized that it was turning into hail. The pellets rattled like gravel against the fiberglass roof and walls of the greenhouse. With that sound and the shriek of the wind, there was no way I could hear anything that might be going on inside.

I paused at the door anyway, to find out if it was still locked. It was. Then I moved on to the adjoining greenhouse, stopped at that door and tried it. Also locked. But it was set into a wooden frame, which in turn was set into the sheet-metal front of the shed, and when I tugged on the knob the door moved loosely against its latch.

The hail kept rattling down; I could feel it smacking off my head, some of the pellets sliding inside the collar of my coat and cold along my neck. If I couldn’t hear anything from out here, I thought, neither could Mr. Ogada hear anything from inside. I stepped back, set myself, and kicked the door hard and flat-footed next to the latch.

It was not much of a lock and it gave immediately and the door went slapping inward. I went in after it a couple of paces-and it was like entering Chiyoko Wakasa’s mausoleum all over again. The smell was the same, only magnified: hundreds of flower blossoms sending out their cloyingly sweet fragrances, roses dominating. Funeral smell, death smell. Bile pumped into my throat. I had to swallow two or three times to keep from gagging.

I stood motionless, straining to see in the darkness. The fiberglass walls on my right showed some of the light in the adjoining greenhouse; but the panels were opaque, and the light made them gleam dully like a wall constructed of iridescent squares. I could make out the door over there, just barely, enough to tell that it was shut. But I could not see much between it and where I was-faint shapes and shadows, some of them bulky against the deeper black. I was going to have to use the flashlight if I wanted to get over there without breaking my neck or making enough noise to override the sound of the hail and alert Mr. Ogada.

I got out my handkerchief, used it first to wipe the wetness off my face, then covered the flash lens with it. When I switched the thing on, the diffused beam let me see some of the flowers: rose bushes in long rows, narcissus and daisies in clay pots, beds planted with a white-blooming bush I didn’t recognize. The beam also showed me that the way to the connecting door was like an obstacle course; most of the available ground space was occupied with flowers, tools, hoses like coiled green snakes.

It took me three or four minutes to cover a distance of no more than forty yards. When I neared the connecting door I shut the flash off and eased up the rest of the way in darkness. The constant drum of hail had slackened now. I pressed my ear against the door, but I still couldn’t hear anything. What was going on in there?

I got my hand around the door knob and rotated it slowly. It turned all the way, made a faint click; this one wasn’t locked. All right. I held it that way for a few seconds, still listening, still hearing nothing. Then I took a breath and inched the door open until I could look past the edge of it.

At first all I could see was the back wall of that greenhouse, where the sprinkler valves were; benches close by strewn with potting soil in sacks and trays, benches farther away jammed with already potted plants. I opened the door wider, moving with it, looking the opposite way around its edge. And I saw them then, both of them, down along the same wall beyond a wheeled cart loaded with more plants.

He’d made a kind of bed for her, or maybe it was an altar: blankets draped over fifty-pound sacks of the potting soil. She was lying on it, supine but half on one side, dressed in a dirt-smudged white pullover and a dark skirt, one shoe off and one shoe on like My Son John in the nursery rhyme. Not moving, just lying there. From this distance I couldn’t tell if she was alive or not.

Mr. Ogada was sitting on a rickety wooden chair near her, his head bowed as if in prayer, his eyes squeezed shut. He seemed shrunken, much older than he was. The naked roof lights made the skin of his face look waxy, like that of a corpse.