“A masquerade.” Keishin smirked. “Of course. Thanks, Ramesh.”
“Good luck with your puzzle.”
“Thanks.”
“And the woman you’re pretending very hard not to be intrigued by.”
—
Keishin looked up from the hand-painted playing card and gold-rimmed eyeglasses Hana held out. The pawnshop morphed around him. It was no longer the space he had walked into, even if everything looked exactly as it did when he had first arrived. Like the neutrinos, the changes were intangible and invisible, but a masquerade just the same. Desks were still overturned, glass was still shattered, papers were still strewn every which way, but now Keishin began to see the design disguising itself as disarray. Chairs had not simply been haphazardly flung, and shelves had not been carelessly toppled. The scattered furniture was scratch- and dent-free, carefully laid on their sides, almost artfully arranged. As with the universe, this chaos had an author. “I think that you might be right about this beingstaged,” Keishin said. “But what makes you think that it was your father who set this up?”
“My father left that very same card as a clue for me once,” Hana said. “It cannot be a coincidence that I found it in the vault.”
“But what about the glasses? Why do you think they’re a clue? The intruder may just have dropped them at the door on his way out.”
“Then that would make them the luckiest pair of glasses in the world.” Hana shook her head. “They were placed by the door, in the exact place where they could be noticed, but conveniently out of harm’s way.”
“That still doesn’t mean your father is behind all of this.”
“You are right. It does not,” Hana said. “But the missing bottle from the medicine kit makes me believe otherwise. It contained my father’s sleeping medicine. It has been bothering me how I could have possibly slept through all of this. Now I know why. My father must have slipped his medicine into my sake last night.”
“You think that hedruggedyou? Why would he do that?”
“That is not important now. I just need to find him before—” Hana bit her lip.
“Before what?”
“Nothing.” Hana shook her head. “Nothing. All that matters is finding him soon.”
“Then call the police. They’ll be able to comb the city faster than anyone.”
“My father is not in Tokyo.”
Keishin frowned. “How do you know that?”
“Because that is what the glasses were supposed to makeanyone who saw them by the door think. They were placed there to create the impression that my father had chased an intruder into the city’s streets.” She held up the moon card. “But this card told me the truth, the same way it did in that treasure hunt when I was a little girl. It told me to go left when I thought I was meant to go right.”
“So…” Keishin rubbed his jaw. A ransacked pawnshop, its missing owner, and a woman determined to follow a trail of strange clues were not things he had expected to encounter on his first morning in Tokyo. But somewhere between walking into the pawnshop and seeing the conviction in Hana’s eyes, Hana’s questions had become his. Those questions now clung to him just as fiercely as he refused to let them go. “Where is ‘left’?”
“That is a question for the god on the shelf.”
—
The kamidana altar was set against the hallway wall across from Hana’s bedroom. Keishin’s father had kept a similar one in the spare room in the attic, at the highest point of their home. When he was a boy and his friends asked him about the kamidana, he simply told them what it was. A god shelf. They didn’t ask him any questions after that. The wooden household altar looked like a miniature Shinto shrine and was built to house a chosen deity. His father would light two tiny candles on either side of the altar, make offerings of rice and salt, and pray to their god on a shelf each day. Keishin went through the motions of bowing and clapping thrice, but he could never think of anything to say. “Are you…um…going to pray?”
“My prayers would be useless,” Hana said.
“Then why are we here?”
“Because my father’s may not be. He always visited thekamidana before going to bed. He might have mentioned something in his prayers that could explain what he did to the pawnshop and why he disappeared.”
“Did he write down his prayers somewhere? Did he keep a journal?”
“No.”
“Did he make recordings on his phone?”
Hana shook her head. “Not on his phone.”
