Chapter 2.3

"Oh my, welcome."

As Seishin stepped into the book shop, Tashiro Rumi was standing at the register. The window facing the outside was flooded with the sun's rays but inside the shop the air conditioner was running. Seishin wiped his sweat with relief.

"Good day. I'd gotten a call from Masa-san that the book I'd requested had come in?"

"Just a min, if you please." Rumi said to Seishin, as she searched the depths of the register's shelves. On the shelves he could see several volumes with medical titles. They must have been Toshio's order.

The only book shop in the village was this, the Tashiro Bookstore, managed by Mr. and Mrs. Tashiro. While it wasn't hard to find a store with newspapers or magazines in the corner, there were no other shops that specialized in books. Formerly, when it was in Monzen or Gate Front, it was literally in front of the mountain gate and handled the sutra texts and drawings but when the predecessor moved to the outskirts of the shopping district, he opened shop as a book store. It was once a very small home used as a shopfront but, the household portion was demolished and the shop expanded to add more shelves about ten years ago, when the predecessor's son Masaki's time came. Tashioro Masaki was two grades ahead of Seishin, and had gone to the same school as him from primary through highschool.

"Is this it I wonder? I'm sorry, Papa went out to warm the seats at the cafe." Rumi took out a pack of books bound by a single rubber band. She eyed the memo note stuck to the bundle and nodded once.  "This is it. ---It looks like two volumes haven't come in yet. There is no literary agent for them, so we'll try contacting the publisher."

"Sorry for the trouble."

Rumi smiled and gathered the books into a paper bag. As she was passing by back to the register either looking over or seeking something on the shelves, there was the sound of the door opening and a cheerful voice wafting in a "Hello!" along with the hot air.

"Boy, sure is hot out there." It was neighborhood resident Takami. His house was catty corner from the Tashiro Bookstore. "I thought I saw the Junior Monk come in here."

"It really is hot, yes."

Rumi bowed her head to Takami. Takami returned the bow while saying: "Junior Monk, have you heard?"

"About what?"

"Well, there's more talk about the Benz, but."

"My," Rumi said, her hands stopping. "Is this about Maeda-san, that car that threw her Shigeki-kun off of his bike? Come to think of it, the Junior Monk just happened to have been there!"

Tashiro Rumi's own home was currently in the same neighborhood as the Maeda household, Kami Sotoba.

"Yes."

"The missus of the Maeda house is neurotic. Ever since that she's just been so tense. She even goes to radio exercises with him."

"Oh boy," Takami said, shocked. Rumi gave a smile mixed with a sigh. 

"It's not that I can't understand how she feels. The highway is nearby. I tell my children not to go near the highway too but, children want to go where you tell them not to. What's worse, across the highway is the Horie Auto lot, yes? They've been told it's dangerous over there but I've spied kids over there countless times."

Horie Auto was an automobile repair shop. Behind the garage was a rather spacious lot for decommissioned vehicles. It was a source of many of the village's parental headaches. To the kids, there was no other place to play. But that 'playground' was dangerous, and there was no way to get to it other than to cross the highway. 

"There's a crosswalk and a stop light there, though. Why do those folks from out of town always overlook that."

"Really. The PTA had just met and someone brought up, how about a pedestrian bridge? But I wonder if they'd even use it if there were."

"Exactly. And a pedestrian bridge would be hard on the elderly too."

The ones to meet with misfortune on the highway were primarily children and the elderly. Takami gave a grieving sigh, then as if remembering, looked to Seishin. "Right, so, about that car again, there was a big debacle." 

"What happened?"

"Yeah, that night someone said that they saw it. The Ohtsuka Sawmill's son."

"At night, you say?"

"Yes. It was at a pretty late hour, when it seems he met with a dark Benz driving down the village road, leaving the village. Seems he was still up to his usual dangerous driving habits. That was around eleven at night, he said. That guy, I wonder just where in the village he was up 'till then." Takami said with an exaggerated sigh. "On our end, we were sure that he was a hit and run with that child, so we were thinking he had left town and was hiding out out there somewhere. We think that, then he hides himself somewhere in the village and then brazenly leaves by the main village road. Just think, we really should have stationed a watch at the entrance to the village and looked around here and there a little more, huh?"

"While you say it hid, that car would stand out anywhere it stopped."

The rumor that a car had hit a child should have spread through the village in a flash. With that said, even if it was called a village, in all reality it covered a rather large area. So while surely not all of the people would know about it after all, it was certain that a large number of them did, and they would have been looking out for an unfamiliar car.

"That's exactly right," said Takami, his voice going low. "That's why, you know, there's been talk that it must have been the Kanemasa's car."

"It couldn't be."

"Yeah, but really can you think of anything else? Until it left the village, nobody had laid eyes on her! The electronics shop's Katou-san--Yukie-san from there saw it fleeing up the village road but, after that, nothing. And the electronics shop's right at the Ichino bridge."

Ah, Seishin nodded. Ichino bridge was quite far north, so the problem car was going either towards Kami Sotoba and if not that then towards Monzen. ---But, once it had gone north, it could drive around from there, so it wasn't necessarily limited to those places, not really.

(No) thought Seishin. (Kami Sotoba or Monzen--if neither, possibly Yamairi.)

North of the village, on another side of the northern mountain was that community of sparse plots of land. 

"Kanemasa is in Monzen, isn't it. So we were thinking it might have gone to the Kanemasa mansion. If it went in behind the wall and closed the gates, they wouldn't catch the village folk's sights, would they? And then they hid out there until all signs of life had petered out."

"Is there not also Yamairi?"

Impossible, Takami waved off. "There's nothing but three old folks up there. If he went there, he'd definitely stand out."

"But Kanemasa is set out to the west of Monzen. If you're saying he went to Kanemasa, he would have to cross through Monzen but in doing that, don't you think he would be sure to be seen by somebody?"

"Ah, that's right. There's that too," Takami tilted his head. "Just in case, it'd be better to ask the old folks in Yamairi about it, then."

"Mightn't it have been Kanemasa?" The one who added such to the conversation was Rumi. "It's just so creepy, that house. It's, how to put it, suspicious."

"Right." Takami nodded in agreement. "Yeah, Katou-san's squirt---Yuusuke-kun, was it? That kid, he was tending to the shop with his grandma and saw the car, he's saying it went to Kanemasa. Now, he wasn't saying he saw it go to Kanemasa of course, but he said that's definitely where it went."

Takami forced a smile. 

"Somehow Yuusuke-kun seems to think of that house on Kanemasa to be a haunted mansion or a villain's hide-out. So, if it's a car driven by a bad guy, of course he'll say it was Kanemasa, but that's a child's thinking."

"I see," Seishin and Rumi smiled. 

"But among the kids, there seems to be a strange story. That they've seen people near Kanemasa or heard strange voices or something."

"Ah," Rumi rose her voice. "That's right. Our child had been talking about it, about that. About seeing a person going up the Kanemasa hill at night or about a person seen through the window even though there shouldn't be anyone there."

"Right," Takami nodded. "I'm not sure what I think of taking kid's gossip too seriously, though. But adults are saying it too, like--they've seen light through the storm shutters or there are people saying they've heard sounds from within the walls."

"Wasn't it their imagination, or some sort of mistake?" Seishin asked, causing Takami to tilt his head.

"I wonder, huh?"

"At any rate, it's been built a long time and left uninhabited, and on top of that, having the strange style that building does, it can't help becoming the topic of ghost stories. If someone were really coming and going, there wouldn't be such vague stories, there would be more specific ones going around."

Takami tilted his head, deep in thought. Seishin went on.

"Perhaps from the outside it appears finished but inside there's still some construction that needs to be done, so people are coming and going. If it were the owner, they probably wouldn't come and go so stealthily."

"About that, since they hit a kid like that, maybe there's no choice but to be stealthy like that?"

"In that case, I'd imagine they wouldn't come by at all until things had cooled off. I do think it's just a ghost story, myself, but."

"Maybe so," Takami said, but he didn't seem satisfied with that explanation. 

Rumi breathed a sigh.

"Either way, if they would just hurry up and move on in for us, it'd be a weight off of everyone's shoulders, already."