Thanks to my beta and my fandom friends! And everyone who has reviewed and commented, it means so so so so much to know what you think of this story!
The next day was a perfect beach day, but Minako did not regret hiking back up to the Conway house to see Usagi. The beach wasn't going anywhere, but her own ghost story to solve with her new friend was too good to pass up. Plus, Kunzite was super boring when he was at work, watching for drowning victims or whatever; she'd have to visit him later when he could give full attention where it belonged: on her.
"So, I was thinking we should explore this place!" Minako said, with zero care for the dilapidated condition of some areas of the house, or the way Usagi's eyes widened with intimidation and confusion at Minako's sudden enthusiasm.
"Let's start with the attic!" Minako declared, and Usagi visibly paled.
"No way!" she said. "Everyone knows attics are the creepiest places!"
"Exactly! The most likely place for a ghost. The site of evil convergence, as everyone knows, is basements, but attics are where sad lonely spirits relive their last moments until some intrepid ghost hunters - that's us - helps them move on!"
Usagi shuddered. "Well, this place doesn't have a basement, although there is a root cellar off the garden?"
Minako had to admit a root cellar sounded both intriguing and a bit too scary. She didn't want to find, like, a pile of bones or something out of a police novel. That would involve losing her cool around Usagi, after all. The attic was a much better bet; a floating white spectre she could totally handle!
"Well… maybe later," she said. "First, attic!"
Usagi moaned. "Nooo… Minako I really don't wanna…. Attic so scary…" she protested as Minako took her arm and tugged her along the hallway, only stopping dead when she realized she had no idea where the attic actually was.
"Um, how do we get up there?"
It took some cajoling (and promises of playing down on the mini beach later), but Usagi finally agreed to show Minako the small door that lead to the staircase up to the house's expansive attic. The opening in the attic floor was barely big enough for one person, but once they were up there the space was immense.
"Woah…" Minako murmured. Usagi whimpered, clutching at Minako from behind and burying her head in Minako's shoulder.
There were boarded up windows letting in what light they could through rotten edges and age cracks, and the sunlight fell in beams dancing with years and years of dust. In the shadows, it was a fest of creepy: from the clothes mannequin in the corner, to the chest by the window, to the cracked-faced doll leaning against a pile of books, its painted eyes smiling emptily at Minako.
"Let's get some light in here," Minako managed to say, striding confidently across the creaky floor to pull at one of the most pliant-looking window boards. She pulled a few times and the wood gave way, falling with a deafening thud that raised up so much dust the girls coughed for a few moments before recovering.
The window was dirty, rusted closed, but in its day Minako could tell it used to be beautiful, with a view of the ocean. She bent to pick up a fallen bench and it fit perfectly beneath the window ledge… a seat. "I bet this was the best place in the house to come and be alone," she murmured. She peered out the window as best she could. The walkway below was stone and weeds and a chill ran through her. "Do you think this was where Beryl jumped? Out this very window?"
Usagi covered her face with her hands, backing away. "I… I don't like this… I don't wanna be here…." She stumbled a bit on an old chair and caught herself. Minako turned toward her, blinking at the glint of some gold in the sunlight.
"What's that behind you?"
It was a frame, jammed behind an old sofa, and Minako tugged and tugged at it until half was revealed. She gasped. It was a portrait, of a stern looking western man with glinting brown eyes. "That must be Conway!" she said, waving Usagi over. The other girl walked with hesitant steps, peering over Minako's shoulder. "And that's Beryl!" Minako pointed to the girl sitting to Mr. Conway's left, hands in her lap. She had waves of red hair falling down her shoulders and was wearing a European-style gown. Her eyes were bottle green, still, after all these years of moldering in the attic, and seemed to stare out of the painting as if real. "It's only half the painting," she said.
Minako tugged the painting again, pulling with both hands, until it fell out from behind the sofa, falling face first on the floor. She picked the painting up, pushing it back to see the full picture.
And then she screamed.
There was another girl in the painting, on the other side of Mr. Conway. But Minako wouldn't see more than the ends of her long hair, as her entire face had been scratched out.
After a moment, Minako recovered from the shock. "Usagi, what do you make of this?" she asked. Then she looked around, and realized she was all alone in the spooky attic. "Usagi! You wuss!" she said, rolling her eyes. Clearly the girl had gotten scared and ran back down the stairwell.
Minako turned back to the picture, running her fingers over the ruined canvas where the other girl's face used to be. "Who are you?" she murmured.
Just then a strong wind blew through the window - the previously rusted-closed window - and Minako ran to the now-open window and looked through, and for a split second the same figure from the seance night stood on the mini beach, only this time he was pointing up at her. Then the wind was so strong it knocked her right down again, and she couldn't see a thing over her hair blowing into her face.
Then as quickly as it started, it was over. The window was closed. The small beach was empty. And Minako held a bundle of papers the wind had blown into her hand.
"Minako!" It wasn't Usagi's voice calling her. It was Kunzite's. Quickly, she shoved the papers in her bag (wasn't sure how the rule-abiding lifeguard would feel about technically stealing from the Conway attic) and hurried down the rickety steps.
"Hey!" she breezed at him, brushing the dust out of her hair. "I thought you'd be working today."
"Day off," he grunted, blue eyes looking up over her shoulder with a disapproving stare. "Were you snooping around in here?"
"Usagi let me in!" Minako insisted. "Then ran away when I found something kinda scary. Chicken."
"I saw her out in the garden, but I don't think she heard me when I called her," Kunzite said.
"Ah, so YOU are the one breaking and entering!" She punched him lightly in the arm and he rolled his eyes.
"I was… checking up on you, is all. I knew you'd do something stupid like walk around the rickety attic of a nearly condemned structure."
Minako put her hands to her heart. "Awww, you were worried about me."
"Don't read too much into it," he groused, heading out with Minako bubbling at his arm.
"You came all the way up here to look for me, what a good lifeguard, caring so deeply about a random tourist on your day off…"
"So do you want to hear what I found out, or not?" Kunzite said, later that evening over dinner on their romantic date.
Well, okay, it was takoyaki on a stand by the beach but Minako was counting it because it was technically dinner, and it was technically a date.
"Yes!"
"So while you were snooping around an attic like an impulsive idiot, I went to the main ward office to look at records."
"And?" She bit into the little ball of fried dough and octopus, not taking her eyes of Kunzite. And not only because he was extremely easy on the eyes.
"Richard Conway made a fortune in shipping from Japanese ports, but that's not why he came to live in Japan. Turns out, after his first wife died back in Europe, he married a Japanese woman who lived nearby this town. Misako. He built that whole house for her."
"Woah… I wonder if she was the woman with her face scratched out in the portrait?!"
"She died before the house was even finished."
"Well. Dang," Minako said. Maybe that was the ghost? Wandering the house she never got to enjoy?
"She had a daughter, too."
Minako snapped to attention. "Who did? The Japanese woman he married?"
Kunzite nodded. "Her name is obscured on the form, but she would've been in her teens when her mother died."
"Holy crap!" Minako said. "This keeps getting more and more complicated! Beryl had a stepsister. I wonder how things went for her after Beryl died…" She fished her cell phone out of her purse. "I wanna tell Usagi all this."
She dialed the number but the line just clicked, moaned, and went dead.
"Huh," Minako said, shaking her phone a bit.
"She did say phone service was spotty up there," Kunzite said, biting into his takoyaki.
"Yeah…." Minako let her eyes drift up to the mansion, obscured by the trees now.
That night, in her hotel room, Minako finally was able to examine the yellowed papers the mysterious wind had blown into her hand. They were all letters, addressed at the front to Miss Conway with the return address of Tokyo. She ran her fingers over the fancy, slightly archaic lettering.
Sitting cross legged, television on mute, she opened the first letter and began to read.
The letters started fairly straightforward; clearly they were from a man to the woman he was seeing (juicy! Minako thought) about how he was doing in Tokyo, setting up as a student at the newly minted western-style university there, filled with flowery words about how much he missed the recipient of the letters, and how she had his unending loyalty and love.
Here, Minako rolled her eyes. If this was, as she suspected, the fiancé who sent the jilted lover to suicide, he certainly wasn't nearly as loyal to Beryl as these letters made it seem.
She flipped past boring comments on the weather or descriptions of his living quarters, bit her cheek at the declarations of love, and watched as the letters got less conversational and more desperate.
"I miss you more and more each day, and wonder if you've found something (or someone? I dare not even think this blasphemous thought, to wonder at your devotion) else to take your attention while I am gone. Not a single letter as come from you, although your sister assures me you are doing fine. Her letters are frequent but not nearly as desired as yours…"
"Sister?" Minako sat up straighter, skimming the past letters for anything she might have missed. But no other letters mentioned the word until the last:
"I received a letter from your sister, Beryl, again today, and every time I see the return address I think it's from you until I open it and despair. She says you say I'm not welcome at Conway House anymore, that you've decided I'm no longer worthy of your affections. It's a strange sort of feeling to almost believe her… but when I remember our times in the garden I know this cannot be. I'm deeply worried for you. From now on, I'm saving every penny for a ticket home to see you in person. If you will no longer have me, I wish to hear it from your sweet lips, to be in your presence one last time."
And it ended.
"Your sister, Beryl?"
Well. Shit.
So these letters were to Conway's stepdaughter! Minako realized she'd been so focused on the meat of the letter she hadn't bothered to even check the salutation, and half the time it'd been to "my darling" or "my dearest" or something equally as purple, but when he did write her name he wrote "Usako."
"Usako," Minako said out loud. The other sister. She pulled the letters closer and read the man's return address at the school in Tokyo. The kanji of his surname, she guessed, would be pronounced 'Chiba'. He signed his letters in kana script - Mamoru.
Okay it was probably time to admit to Kunzite she stole those letters, and get Mr. History Major at Kyoto University to help her out with some digging.