Free The Floating Girl: A Rei Shimura Mystery (Rei Shimura Mystery #4) by Sujata Massey Page B

the weekend, so I opened the windows to let in the night air. I had bars on the exterior of the windows, a protection that was probably unnecessary given the extremely low crime rate in my old-fashioned neighborhood, which abutted Yanaka Cemetery. An unchained bicycle had been leaning against the back of the house for the longest time, because nobody knew who had left it there, and to throw it away seemed unkind.
    I hadn’t found the beach to be very tranquil, and my time with Takeo had certainly been limited. It was good to be home. I looked around the familiar persimmon-colored room filled with Japanese antiques that I had rescued from the flea market and refinished. An antique child’s kimono hung on one wall, and antique wood-block prints decorated the other. My futon took just a few minutes to roll out of the bedroom closet. I sank into its softness and wondered one last time about why Takeo had not been waiting for me.
    I found out the very next morning at eight  o’clock. The telephone by my bed shrilled, and when I picked up the receiver, Takeo’s voice was almost as loud.
    “So you’re alive! I was wondering, given the bag of clothes you left on the doorstep. The note said you’d come back, but you did not, so I thought you might have gone for a suicidal night swim.”
    “No. I left the bag there because I didn’t want to carry it to the beach.”
    “The beach?”
    “Your house was locked, so I went to the beach to use the latrine, and then I waited”—I decided to use that verb, instead of ‘passed the time drinking’—”at the bar. I called you twice. Because you still weren’t back by eleven, I took the last train home.”
    “We weren’t supposed to meet at the house.”
    “Oh?” I asked.
    “I wasn’t at the house because I was expecting you to get off at the bus stop near the manga shop. Isn’t that what we agreed?”
    “I didn’t know that!” I could just picture what had happened. I must have sailed right past him, not looking out the window because I was so consumed with reading Showa Story.
    “After the last bus passed the bus stop at eleven-thirty, I walked home.”
    I was positive that neither of us had said anything about meeting there. But now I remembered that as I’d waved at Takeo and run across the street to catch the bus, his mouth had been moving. I hadn’t heard what he’d said. I’d made an awful mistake.
    “Did you call out that you’d meet me at the bus stop when I was running to catch the bus?” I asked.
    “Yes. Did you forget?”
    “I never heard you. I’m so sorry. I did leave a message on your answering machine when I was coming in from Tokyo, but I guess you don’t check your answering machine when you’re out of the house.”
    “There’s probably a code that would let me check away from the house, but I don’t know it.”
    “Actually, I thought of breaking into your house,” I confessed. “I decided not to because I didn’t want to be the source of any more repairs to that place. You have enough to do.”
    Takeo still sounded grumpy. “Yes, I’ll be up on the roof today, and I’ll probably start repainting the interior the day after tomorrow.”
    “So I guess you won’t be spending much time in Tokyo this week?” I asked.
    “No. I’m just too busy,” he said, and hung up.
    All that morning I thought about what had happened. People fell out over misunderstandings all the time. I was beginning to realize that I’d had a lot of such experiences in my life, which could mean only one thing: many of the misunderstandings were my fault.
    There didn’t seem much that I could do to mend this particular broken fence, so I crawled out of bed, had my usual pre-breakfast run, and got on with the day. I was planning to take a walk to 1-2-8 Nezu, the location in Kunio’s comic book, to see whether the old school really existed.
    The area in question was on the other side of Shinobazu-dori, the main artery running through the neighborhood, along