The old dirt road, unused for decades, was warm under the mid-summer sun. A metal barrier stretched across the road, preventing any vehicles from progressing farther. Beyond the barrier, stretching as far as the eye could see, was a beautiful landscape of green. Trees covered the valley and the mountains around it, belying the true nature of the place.
Two figures stood on the road, leaning on the barrier and observing the peaceful valley. One was an elderly man who looked to be nearly in his eighties. He was somewhat obese, though he had lost a lot of weight in recent years, and his gray hair was pale and fading in more than one way. The individual beside him was practically the opposite; a young woman in her mid-twenties, thin and lithe, with long dark hair falling down her back. Her gray eyes were sharp and studious, inspecting the valley laid out before her.
Their connection was simple. She was what he had been twenty-five years earlier. She was a police detective, her current case leading her to this place where she hoped to find the perpetrator of a murder committed over a decade earlier. Somewhere down below, in amongst the trees, she knew he was hiding. Vaguely, they could make out the shapes of old buildings in the overgrown valley. According to the old retired detective, who had worked several cases in this very place when it had been populated, an entire town rested in forgotten abandonment down there.
What secrets were hidden here, she didn't know or care. After more then ten years of not a single hint or trace, a murderer had been located. She had been just a child when it first happened, but she remembered well her dance with death that was intertwined with the victim whose death would soon be avenged. She didn't remember meeting the woman, but it had happened. She had met Reiko Mikami... more than eighteen months after the murder of Reiko Mikami.
Three Weeks Earlier...
Two men walked through the crowded beach. The sun beat down on them, making both quite uncomfortable in their formal clothing. The younger of the two was more bothered, as he was only present to help convince the person they were going to see of how much they were needed. His involvement ended shortly after that. The older man, though only older by five years at most, would be directly involved in helping the investigation.
They spotted the person they had been searching for about the same time as each other. Walking over, the younger of the two men tripped more than once in the soft sand. It had been a long time since he had been to a beach, and the shoes he was wearing were ill-suited for the task. Eventually, they both made their way over to their destination and stood over the young woman.
The older of the two men addressed the woman. "It's been two months and one day since you were taken off duty. The chief wants you back."
The young woman leaned her head back, resting herself further into the chair. She brought a small glass filled with a fruity drink closer to her face. "Of course the chief wants me back. Just when I was getting comfortable out here." She paused to look over the younger of the two men, scanning him from behind her sunglasses. "Who's the new guy?"
The older man laughed and glanced at the man beside him. "Ah, no, sorry. He's not with us. He's the guy with the case that the chief assigned you to."
She groaned and put the glass down. "Well, this is just the perfect first impression, isn't it? Was this your idea, Nishijima, or did the chief suggest you bring this guy out here to meet me like this?"
Nishijima, her immediate superior, shook his head. "He heard that you were one of ours and requested to meet you as soon as possible. His reason, and we checked to verify, is that you two were classmates a while back."
Hearing this, she sat up and pulled her sunglasses down. Her gray eyes looked over him in this new light, and she quickly recognized him. "Sakakibara?"
He reached his hand out to shake, and she accepted. He smiled. "It's been a while. Well, it's been a while since I saw anyone from class three, really." The handshake ended, and he suddenly became conscious of what she was wearing. "Uh... nice swimsuit."
She glanced down at herself. Somehow, she really didn't feel like she was embarrassed to be seen in a two piece swimsuit. It was nothing like how any of the anime she had watched showed the girl getting all red and blushy. "Well..." She had no difficulty determining that it felt absolutely normal. "It's the least you're ever going to see me wearing, so don't get your hopes up."
He shrugged, holding up his hand. "I don't mind. Married already."
She saw the ring, but only spent about a second on it. She shrugged and sat back again, taking her drink with her. "So, Sakakibara... what do you have that you want me to look into?"
Nishijima answered for him. "It's actually the reopening of a case. New information pertaining to a case that was never solved. The nineteen-ninety-six murder of one Reiko Mikami."
Sakakibara finished for him. "That was my aunt, for those wondering. Her death was part of the curse of class three, two years before you and I attended that class."
Nishijima smiled down at her. "The chief wants you back on duty right away." Even as he finished his sentence, she downed the drink in her hand. He sighed, not doubting for a second that it was alcoholic. "Right... How's the injury, San? Healing well?"
Pushing her dark hair back, she then motioned at her body. "Wouldn't be wearing a bikini if it wasn't healing well."
He looked over her for a second before pulling his eyes back up to her face. "Fair enough. I know I wouldn't."
She quickly laughed at him. "Oh, come on. I was already drunk when you got here. I doubt I could walk back to the hotel on my own. Here, help me up."
Nishijima rolled his eyes, reaching down and taking her hand. He pulled her to her feet, and then reached down and picked up her towel. She took it and wrapped it around her waist, tying the corners together to keep it from slipping. Sakakibara watched them walk off. He shrugged and started gathering the rest of her things, ending up carrying a cooler, a lawn chair, and an umbrella.
No less than an hour later, after she had changed into a light shirt and a decent pair of pants, the two men were packing her car for travel. She wouldn't be able to drive, so they agreed that Sakakibara would drive her car back to the city. Nishijima would be in his own car, in which he had brought Sakakibara. As soon as the two vehicles started off, San fell asleep in the seat next to Sakakibara.
It was several hours later when she woke up. The sky was dark overhead, and streetlights went by in an eerie parade of yellowy-white glows. She covered her face with her hands, groaning in pain at the headache now plaguing her. After a few minutes of waiting, he finally spoke to her.
"So... San Watanabe. An officer of the law. Never would have seen it myself."
Eventually, after around ten seconds of not responding, she sat up and placed her hands in her lap. She kept her eyes closed, the light still hurting. "Aw... shit. My head hurts..." She finally blinked her eyes open slowly, then looked over at him. "Why? What do you do?"
He laughed. "Ah, yeah, about that... I'm sort of like... you've heard of stay-at-home mothers?" She grunted in response. He laughed again. "Well, I'm sorta like that except I'm a father... uh, except I'm not really that either. A stay-at-home husband, I guess. My wife is a news reporter in Hokkaido."
She shook her head, realizing how much she hated hangovers. "Dammit, I'm never drinking again. Uh... not... what you thought you'd be doing?"
He sighed, looking straight ahead at the road. "I doubt any of us from that class are doing now what we thought we'd be doing ten years ago. I know, uh, Matsuko Arita moved to the United States and she's become an actress. Teshigawara, I don't know how he did it, got into stand-up comedy. Mei Misaki still lives in Yomiyama with her mother. Have you ever been in that doll shop?"
San rubbed her forehead, trying to massage her headache away. "Um... no. I never really was into dolls. No, in ninety-eight, I was more concerned with my Nintendo 64 than with what... other girls were into." She started laughing in spite of her headache. "Well, okay, that started a few years earlier. I'm not sure when the girls I stuck around stopped talking about dolls and started talking about... other stuff. I actually had minimal or superficial interaction with them, usually."
"Wow..." He shook his head. "I think, at that age, most people only pretend to be interested in what their peers are talking about. I mean, there wasn't much that people talked to me about that wasn't something about the curse. I wouldn't have minded talking about video games, in retrospect. I didn't really play much back then, but..."
San glared over at him. "This case isn't about solving the curse, is it?"
He laughed again, but stopped and put on a straight face when he saw how serious she was. "No. No, this is about finding the man who murdered my aunt and seeing him come to justice. Nothing more. It wasn't any sort of embodiment of the curse or anything like that, so there has to be a real person out there responsible. I have reason to believe someone might know something."
She nodded. "Okay, that's a pretty vague lead. Any clue who?"
He smirked over at her. "The same guy who helped me figure out how to stop the curse for the year."
San bolted upright at that. "You were the one who stopped it?" He just nodded. She bit back the urge to swear. "That's why it stopped in the middle of the year. You figured it out and stopped it. Who is this guy, and how did he know?"
Sakakibara shrugged. "He was in class three, twenty-five years ago, at the same time as my aunt. He managed to stop the curse that year, and he left a recorded tape explaining how he did it. That tape was accidentally irreversibly messed up, but I put one of my own back in the same spot. I don't remember how I did it, and I know he didn't remember when we asked him, but he did remember where he put it. I remember that too, and I remember that the tape says how to stop the curse."
She waved her hands to get him to stop. "Okay, so run it by me one more time. You made a connection earlier between the curse and your aunt's death, but she was in class three a whopping thirteen years before she died. And you're saying she died from the curse?"
He nodded. "She was the homeroom teacher for class three."
"Okay... so she did die from the curse." San's mind raced. "She died from the curse, and she also survived it years earlier. Both of us survived it, and our evidence and source, as well as any witnesses we might have later, are all related to the curse. Everything here revolves around the curse. Yet, we're not trying to solve the curse. We're trying to solve her murder."
"Exactly." He took a deep breath. "Well, except it's not 'we'. As soon as I get that tape to you and get you in contact with the guy, I'm taking a bus or something back to Hokkaido. Nishijima said he would keep in contact with both of us throughout your investigation. If any of us gets hold of anything new, the rest of us hear about it within a day."
She deflated, groaning. "I knew I recognized this road. You're taking me to Yomiyama."
"Yeah... sorry."
"It's okay. I left that place seven years ago, hoping never to see it again. Maybe it'll be different..."
His face turned sad. "No... the curse still comes back every year. It's amazing how people still refuse to believe what's happening there."
"Damn." She opened the window an inch, letting in some air that blew her hair back and cooled her down. The fresh air was exactly what she needed right now, for more than one reason. However long it took, the foreseeable future was going to be hard for her to deal with. "Well, you can't run forever. It's time to go home."
Author's Notes: This is the start of a brand new journey. Where will it take our new heroine?
