Free Death at the Crossroads by Dale Furutani Page A

opened the shoji screen door of the room. A few feet away the serving girl was cowering on the floor, backing away from a bow-legged man dressed in a blue kimono. The man raised his hand to hit her again, and Kaze quickly crossed over to him before he could bring his hand down. Kaze grabbed the man’s wrist.
    Almost automatically, the man tried to jerk his hand away from Kaze’s grip. Kaze tightened his fingers around the man’s wrist andheld the hand immobile. Surprised, the man looked around to meet Kaze’s glare.
    “I’m very hungry,” Kaze said evenly to the innkeeper. “Please bring me another bowl of oden. You can add the price of the broken bowl to my bill.”
    The innkeeper opened his mouth to speak, then shut it. The anger drained from him as Kaze continued to glare at him. He stopped pulling at Kaze’s grip and said, “Of course, samurai-sama. I was just upset with the clumsiness of the girl. She broke a dish yesterday, and with business the way it is I can’t afford to pay for such clumsiness.”
    Kaze released the innkeeper’s wrist and walked back to his room, closing the shoji screen after him. After a pause, he heard the innkeeper say, “Well, don’t just sit there crying. Clean things up, then go get another bowl of oden.”
    Kaze picked up his teacup and took another sip. He was halfway done with the cup when the shoji screen opened and the serving girl came in with a tray containing another bowl of oden. Her face was still red where she had been slapped, but her tears were wiped dry. Kaze took the chopsticks off the tray and picked up the bowl. Holding it close to his mouth, he took a piece of steaming
daikon
radish and sucked it in.
    The girl sat watching Kaze eat. With a second piece of vegetable in his mouth, Kaze said, “Well?”
    The girl gave a clumsy bow. “Thank you, samurai-sama.”
    Kaze brushed aside the remark. “The punishment was out of proportion to the crime, but you were clumsy.”
    “I know, samurai-sama. It’s just that we’re all on edge here. Even the master is scared. That’s why he hit me. He’s not normally a mean man. He’s just upset like the rest of us.”
    “Why is everyone upset?”
    The girl looked over her shoulder and almost whispered, “The master doesn’t want us to talk about it. He says it will hurt business.”
    “There is no business, except for me, so why don’t you tell me?”
    Once again, the girl looked around. Then she said, “Two nights ago we saw a terrible sight. A demon rode through the village.”
    Kaze believed in demons, just as he believed in other spirits and ghosts. Everyone did. But he had never actually seen a demon, and he found it strange that this girl said she had. “What kind of demon?”
    “It was horrible. It had a red face with two horns, like this.” She put her hands to her forehead and made little horns with her fingers. “It had long white hair and wide shoulders. It was riding a black horse and carrying off a poor soul to hell.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “A man was strapped across the horse!”
    “This demon rode a horse?”
    “Yes, it was awful! It came thundering through the village and rode off down the road. We all saw it, and we’ve been scared ever since. No one knows when it will come back—maybe this time for one of us!”
    Kaze put down his teacup and studied the face of the girl before him. She was perhaps eighteen or nineteen, with a coarse peasant’s face. She had a strip of cloth wrapped around her forehead as a sweatband, and her kimono was old but clean. The fear in her eyes was palpable, and it was plain she believed what she was saying.
    “Is that so …” Kaze said, letting the last word trail off to indicate he was a bit skeptical.
    “
Honto desu!
It’s true!”
    “And the demon came riding through this village?”
    “Yes.”
    “And several people saw it?”
    “That’s right, samurai-sama. I’m not making it up. Almost everyone in the village saw it. We heard this horse in