I don't want to ghostwrite. I just want to be left alone to write my fanfictions in peace. But, alas, I am poorer than dirt and have a very tall car insurance bill. *sigh* Life. Right?
R&R
Chapter 8
She came to me in my dreams. Rather than showing me something or drawing me into memories, she just stood there, speechless as before, too pale and opaque to stand in place of Gene, but not unwelcomed. There was something about her sad, large eyes and from her touch that told me she was of a kindred soul to me, though how I didn't know. Occasionally I'd slip into the normal nonsense dreams of the subconscious, but every so often I would drop back out to find her waiting for me, just resting besides me, unthreatening. It was almost as though she were there for my sake and not her own, because nothing in the way she looked at me or her mouth-framed words said she was in any dire need, at least not for the time being. That in and of itself comforted me, so when I woke at some odd hour of the morning, I felt more refreshed than I should have after only six hours of sleep.
My next surprise came in the form of Naru, who had breakfast waiting for me in a little paper bag along with a single, red rose. He had come over, handed it to me quietly, left a lingering kiss on my forehead, and then gone back to what he had been doing at the computers. A small note was inside, tucked between two whole wheat honey bagels and a little tub of my favorite strawberry flavored cream cheese.
If you will forgive me for being over defensive and insulting you so coarsely in the stairwell, I'll forget about the detective slapping business. If you don't forgive me, I'll forget about it anyways. I will never stop trying, and I will never allow anything to get between us. Please, I beg that you'll be patient with my imperfections and know I won't ever give up.
There is only one of you in this world, after all. I'll only ever get one chance.
Naru
Ah yes. This was why I had fallen in love with him in the first place. He'd go off being arrogant, insensitive, cold, and just a general asshole, and then he'd turn around and pull off something like this.
Since Lin wasn't in, I took the chance to walk over, pull his head back, and give him one hell of an upside-down/Spider-man kiss.
"So," I said, as I munched on my bagel slathered in delicious strawberry cream cheese. "What's the scoop on last night?"
Naru had dropped his head in his hands after I had released him from my kiss attack. "Don't ask me that just yet."
I snickered. "Remind me to do that more often."
"Please don't."
"You don't like it?"
"That's beside the point, I—can we not talk about this?"
Oh yeah, his ears were red. "Why not? No one's here."
"Just…damn it, you're having fun with me. Yes, I liked it. I liked it a lot—too much, are you happy now? Can we be done?"
"Yes, boss."
"Thank you." He dropped his hands to stare at the screen of his laptop, face still pink. He blinked. "What am I looking at?"
"You're not supposed to let me know that. Naru must be omniscient, collected, and in control at all times. Tut tut."
The corner of his mouth twitched. "What would I do without you?"
"Probably be omniscient, collected, and in control at all times. You know, your general narcissistic, arrogant self."
"And significantly less happy. Ah, yes. There's my spot." He leaned forward and held his chin up on his thumb, finger across his lips and eyebrows furrowing. "There were a few cool spots behind the library, but it's always difficult nailing down temperature changes outside. There are so many variables involved when exposed to the elements. It doesn't help that a cold front passed through a few hours before hand. I hate meteorology."
"How about the halls and Joe's room?"
"Neutral. Lin's collecting temperatures and Yasu now. He should have more material for us to work with."
"What kind of questions was he supposed to be asking anyways? Or did he just, you know, tell the guys to tell him whatever they knew about who would want to kill Joe?"
"Oh, that reminds me of the other thing I had to do." He leaned back, folded his arms, and gave me his business face. "Our greatest suspect right now is Joe's ex-girlfriend. She, after all, is our only other witness to the liar sign."
"And you're telling me this with that look because…?"
"Well, girls have an easier time talking to girls, don't they? Here, I've managed to pull up her picture and the detective has been so kind as to get her schedule for me. Your job for today is getting in contact with her and gleaning as much information from her as you can."
"Aye aye, boss." I glanced at the schedule, then groaned when I saw that her first class would be ending in thirty minutes, after which there would be a good two hour block until her next class. That meant I had thirty minutes to settle myself outside of her classroom and try not to look like a creep ready to pounce an unsuspecting girl.
"Mai?"
I looked at him from over the schedule. He wasn't looking at me, but he shifted a bit.
"I would never suspect that you'd fall in bed with…whoever. Never."
I sighed. Oh. That. "And if I had thought for a moment, I wouldn't have said something stupid like that. I'm just PMSy. Porn shirt aside, though, why does Swii in particular put you off?"
"It's college aged boys in general. One in five women in college are raped, though that is probably more since %63 of all sexual assaults aren't reported. Just to add onto that, they decided to settle us into the men's dorm." He sighed and let his hand holding his chin fall away with a soft slap onto the table. "If anything like that ever happened to you…I don't think I'd…"
His voice was getting quieter and trailing away. He had turned his face away from me so I couldn't see his expression. Hoping he wasn't about to say 'I don't think I could marry you,' like some medieval philistine, I put my hand on his shoulder and gave it a squeeze.
"Think you'd what? Be able to not murder the guy?"
I heard him give a quick breath of a laugh through his nose. "That would be the least of it. I worry enough about your emotional and mental health with all these grim cases we go through without some dick-lead animal hurting you. I'm no psychologist, and even if I was, I couldn't fix you. I'm always…afraid…"
Kind of glad he wasn't looking at me so he couldn't see my smile (really, the man was just too cute), I twined my arms around him and nuzzled into the curve of his neck.
"You worry too much."
"Mai—"
"I'll be safe. I promise. If nothing else, then to protect you from having to go through that."
He made a low noise in his throat and he twisted his head around to press his cheek against the top of my head. "Strange how taking care of someone you love involves taking care of yourself. Keep your cell phone on hand. I'm guessing you're going to try and catch her out of her first class?"
"Yep. Guess I should dress like a super side-kick, right?"
"…yes?"
"I seriously need to educate you." I pecked him on the ear. "Don't let Yasu tease you too much."
I decided to save time by dressing behind Naru using the secret techniques of strategically keeping my Pjs on till the last second or pulling on pants underneath the large shirt. Even though he couldn't see, I had a good laugh as I noticed his ears turning pink again—quietly, of course. I should only trespass on Naru's pride so often.
Outside the sky was once more filled with storm clouds, which gave everything a twilight, shadow-less gloom. Students crossed here and there, interspersed with some on bikes or scooters. Some ran, some walked, and some sat on the steps, eyes to their smartphones doing who knows what. Luckily I had brought the campus map with me and used it as reference to jog my way over to the Humanities building and managed to get there right as I spotted the girl who Naru had shown me a picture of before leaving.
"Nanami Yui?"
She had been texting on her phone as she walked and flinched at the sound of her name. I waved at her and she gave a thin-lipped frown, or rather a strait-lip purse.
"Um…have we met?" she asked.
"Oh, no. I'm with Shibuya Psychic Research. We're on campus investigating the ghost story about the white girl behind the library. I just wanted to ask you some questions."
Her tense little frown didn't leave. She eyed me up and down, as though she could verify the truth from my old flats or flowery blouse and shrugged. I took that as a sign of compliance, so when she looked back to her phone and started walking again, I fell into step besides her, swinging my arms back and forth so my hands clapped in front of me and behind me.
"So...when you went behind the library with Joe—"
"Kami, I didn't kill him," she snapped—more like growled.
"Woa, hold on, I never thought that!" A burst kind of went off in my chest, kind of like a little star coming into being. A small voice echoed from there and up into my mouth. "In fact, I know you didn't kill him."
That gave her pause. I stopped my clapping as she halted in the middle of the sidewalk and instead clenched my hands behind me to hold them still. They sweated with nerves, but I didn't doubt what I had just said. Looking at her, from her messy black ponytail, the circles under her eyes, to the frumpy T-shirt, jeans, and pink flip-flops, I couldn't see whatever certain something would have told me she was a murderer.
Her mascara-smudged eyes looked from her phone to mine. Her chin dimpled a bit. "You mean that?"
I kept eye contact as I gave her the most reassuring smile I could manage. "I really mean it. I know you didn't kill him."
Then, to my alarm, her bottom lip curled, wrinkling her chin even more, and she started to cry.
"Th-that detective," she choked. "He…he said the most—I thought for sure I—and everyone's been looking at me all morning."
My own nerves melted, and even though we were surrounded by passing kids from her class and others, I hugged her. The poor girl just needed one.
"I know you didn't," I said, as they were the most soothing words that fit the moment. "It's okay, I'm not looking at you like that."
"But how—how do you know?"
"Well, it's going to sound weird, but I'm sort of…clairvoyant."
She flinched back, but not alarmingly so, and I let her go. She was watching me, sniffing, but didn't look as though she might smack me for saying that. "Clairvoyant?"
"Yeah, I don't spread it around, though, so…but, anyways, I've used it on cases before when we've had to find culprits to curses and stuff like that."
Her eyes widened. "Curses?"
"The company I work for considers themselves to be a sort of ghost hunters. We do exorcisms or disprove ghosts entirely. My boss, he's really technical. He has to rule out all possibilities of human interference before he will even allow himself to think that there are spirits involved."
She sniffed, and nodded. I took comfort from the fact that she didn't look as mean as before. Now she just looked a little like a tired raccoon. I considered asking her if she'd let me clean off a bit of her eye-make up that she clearly had slept and cried on and thought better of it.
"So you're here to…"
"To see if the story of the white lady is true, and, um," I had to look a bit apologetic at this point, because I knew how crazy it sounded. "And whether or not she killed Joe. That's why I wanted to ask some questions about what you saw that night with him, when that kanji appeared on his head."
Nanami Yui nodded and we started walking again. I handed her a handkerchief I'd started to keep on hand since Naru kept handing me one (he's British and posh like that and I wanted to show him up), and she thanked me while wiping at her eyes.
"I had suspected he had been with someone for a while, but it was this classmate friend of mine who really pushed for me to take him back there, as a distraction if nothing else. She said that she knew a girl who took her boyfriend back there and he got this red 'liar' on his forehead. When he died three days later from…I think it was a drowning out by the lake, but at his funeral she met the girl he had been sleeping with behind her back." She sniffed. "But, anyways…she told me she'd heard it was more potent on a Friday night because that was the night she died, and, well, I was really hurting. I didn't want him dead, I swear I didn't!"
"I know you didn't!" I hushed her as she started to sob again and thought I'd steer her towards the food court again. "How about some tea on me? I swear, I know you didn't want him dead. I've felt that feeling before—that burning icky, gut wrenching ache when you think your guy is cheating on you. I understand. Besides, you thought it was just a ghost story, didn't you?"
She wobbled a bit as we left the sidewalk to grass, as though her knees had gone a bit weak. "Is it just a ghost story?"
I shrugged. "We don't have enough evidence yet to say either way. But tell me what you saw. Everything, okay? It will help."
She nodded fervently. "Well, he…um, he wanted to, you know…and I said I wouldn't give him anything unless he took the walk with me behind the library. We'd been fighting a lot too and I told him I'd stop asking about who he was with and all that if he just took the walk with me. So, when it was dark—"
"What time would you say it was?"
"I think it was about ten—ten thirty. I remember looking at the time when my roommate texted me. We went down, and as we went beneath that big tree they say she hung herself from, this bright red 'liar' appeared on his forehead. It hurt my eyes, it was all shakey."
"How did Joe take this?"
"Well…I think he took it better than me. I started screaming all sorts of stuff, I was so mad, so—but the moment it went away he started saying I better not come trying to kill him in three days or nothing stupid like that and…well, he said all sorts of stuff. He even accused me of pulling a trick on him, of maybe sticking a friend of mine in a window to shine a laser on his head, but that's ridiculous. I mean, who would even own a laser pointer like that? Could they even make one of those?"
Some life had gotten back into her as we arrived at the coffee shop. The girl at the register gave her and me sympathetic nods and did her best to rush the order of warm chamomile milk tea our way. With our cups in our hands, we made our way past the various tables outside the shop and to a bit of shade underneath a tree nearby. It was still morning, but the summer heat was already growing. I wondered if tea was the right choice to get.
She seemed to enjoy it, though, and the taste also appeared to calm her considerably.
"Did you feel any changes in temperature? Maybe, I don't know, like something was wrong?"
She shook her head. "I don't think I could with how caught up I was in worrying. I was so afraid…but I told the detective I didn't have anything to do with him after that. I just avoided him."
Something tickled at the back of my mind, and even though I was concerned that it may be too personal, I followed the hunch, just in case. "I know this is off topic, but why did you think he had cheated on you?"
She sniffed, blew her nose on my handkerchief, then gingerly handed it back before answering. "When I was sick a few weeks ago, he went to this party with his friends, even though I didn't want to. He knew the people hosting it or something. Look, I'm not one of those girlfriends that gets all suspicious if their boy heads off to a party without her, but…"
When her hesitance grew longer into silence, I took a sip of tea and decided to wait. A string thin tension had been held up in the air, one that I could almost feel her balancing on, considering whether to jump off of.
"…you can keep a secret, right?"
I blinked at her. "If I think it might help in the investigation—"
"But you won't tell, like, the news or anything, right?"
I shook my head. "Of course not. My boss actually avoids the media like the plague."
She grimaced, but her heels started to bounce. A bit of tea jumped out of the small hole on the lid and onto her hand, milky gold against her pale skin. "There's this sort of…blog on campus. It was set up by someone a few years ago, I think by someone in the psychology department, but it's open to anyone who has a student account. There people can go and, you know…sort of confess I guess, though that sounds bad. Scratch that, that's not right, because it's a sort of safe place of where girls who were raped or molested or something can go and say something about it—anonymously. I think the staff on campus ignores it, or maybe they don't know about it, because sometimes the girls give names of guys and…" She hugged her tea down from her now bouncing knees and took a reassuring swig.
"His name was on there?"
"My roommate, she's really into it—something about girl's rights and awareness or…she said his name was there. That he had drugged a girl at that party, and…" She finally put her tea down on the grass. "Look at me, I'm shaking like an old washer machine! Ugh, and I'm sweating. This is awful, what's wrong with me? Why am I…" she hiccupped. Tears had peeked out from her eyes again.
But I knew why. Talking about it always made you relive the experience. She was admitting reading those words herself, that she had faced the reality that the guy she had loved had raped someone. She was facing the reality that he most likely cheated on her. And, maybe, it was dawning on her that he was now dead.
I gave her hand a squeeze. "I understand. You're being very strong."
She gave a dry laugh. "Strong! That's funny. That's hilarious."
"Do you think you could tell me where to find this blog?"
She nodded, attempting to pick up her tea again but changing her mind as she couldn't get her legs or hands to hold still. "You need a student ID to get in, though. You…you don't think that other girl killed him, did you?"
I shrugged. "My business is ghosts. I couldn't say. What do you think?"
She seemed a bit shocked by this question, but considered it with a deep frown. Her shaking calmed a bit.
"I don't think so," she said quietly. "That kanji on his head, I don't think they could fake that. And it was so bright—it was like fire. It was really, really freaky." She paused. "Is there a such thing as ghosts?"
I laughed. "You really want to ask me that? Man, do I have stories."
She smiled a bit at this, but quieted. "Would you like my number? I—if there's anything I can do to help…I mean, Joe was a dick for what he did, but no one has the right to kill anyone."
I said that would be wonderful and got it down. We talked for a bit more, me asking a few more questions about the situation as well as getting the name of the classmate who supposedly knew so much before she checked the time and said she had to get going to her next class.
