Lee
Where did you go, James?Lee thought.
It had been four days since Lee left New York, and no one had reported James missing. Somehow, he’d done an exceptionally good job at hiding the body.
The problem was, Lee still couldn’t remember how he’d done it.
He had brought his only suitcase with him to Japan, and it was definitely not full of body parts, so he couldn’t have stuffed James into it. He could have shoved him down the garbage chute, but garbagemen tended to notice when entire human corpses were mixed in with the bags, so unless he’d concealed him somehow, James probably wasn’t there. Maybe it was aWeekend at Bernie’ssituation—maybe he’d tucked James back into his bed and no one would notice he was actually a corpse until he started to rot. Which was... Lee paused to google it... four to ten days after death. It was day four, well within the putrefaction zone. If that was what Lee had done, the smell would give it away soon.
He tried to put himself back in the panicked mindset that had accidentally triggered brilliance.How would I hide a bodyright this moment, if I had to?he thought, pushing through the wall of sedatives. There were pigs in town that would probably eat anything, so if Lee could find a hacksaw, he could dismember a body and discreetly feed it to the pigs, a little bit at a time. But there were no pigs at NYU, so that couldn’t be the answer.
Or he could throw the body parts down the well and fill it with water, just like Okiku. The body would dissolve beyond recognition if animals didn’t get to it first. But raccoons could probably find their way down and pull James back up, piece by piece, and that risked somebody finding a severed foot out in the woods. There were no wells at school, though there were water tanks. But no—students would notice the smell in the water when they brushed their teeth and tasted decay.
In high school, Lee had been fascinated by perfect crimes. He’d once read about a woman who was abducted on her way to work. Police had located her car in a nearby neighborhood and even found surveillance tape footage of a stranger parking it, but because of the low resolution and the slats in the fence in front of the camera, the police couldn’t discern the driver’s face or even gender, and the killer had never been caught. There was another news story about a boy who’d been found naked in a chimney in an abandoned house in the woods. It was almost definitely a murder, because there was no reason the boy would have taken his clothes off and crawled inside on his own, but there were no leads, and the family would never know the truth.
And then, of course, there was Lee’s mother.
Now, somehow, Lee himself had committed a perfect crime, but he couldn’t even remember how.
For the first time, Lee started to consider that he might have gotten away with it. The more days that spun by, the easier it became for him to believe. Lee knew that cold cases could always be reopened—he’d read stories about DNA evidence condemning people ten or twenty years down the line—but themore time passed, the less likely it was, and the quieter the fear became.
I’ll wait until he’s reported missing before I relax, Lee thought. Because eventually, James’s family would notice, and there would be an investigation. Police would want to question Lee, even if they didn’t suspect him at first. But by then, how many students would have used the stairwell, adding their fingerprints to the banisters? How much security footage around campus would be routinely deleted? If you didn’t act fast, the truth had a way of glinting away like a fish in a river.
Lee stared up at his ceiling light, feeling half melted from the summer heat. Even though the sun had set, the air felt like a wet blanket. Lee imagined himself as a rotting corpse decaying into his futon. How relaxing it would be to let the world devour you, to return to the dirt.
He was so relaxed that, at first, he thought he was dreaming when light bloomed behind his closet door.
Lee sat up, suddenly wide awake.
All the sedatives had worn off. Now, instead of the dreamy haze he normally stumbled through, the world had sharp edges, rendered in crisp clarity. His mind latched onto details, fed him truths until he was so full he wanted to vomit, but all he could do was drink in the information before him.
Like the truth above his head, where thin lines scarred the low-hanging panels, though he hadn’t noticed that until now. Hina said this was a samurai house, and the cuts were definitely thin enough to be katana marks. Lee conjured an image of a samurai raising a blade above his head, thethunkas it stuck in the ceiling panel, and this time—without the drugs—the image did not dissolve but grew more vivid.
Lee saw the flash of armor against the moonlight, smelled the salt of the man’s sweat. The average Japanese man was five foot seven, probably shorter in the Edo era when the house wasbuilt, so five foot six was a generous estimate. Lee scanned the katana of the imaginary samurai, did a quick estimation against the man’s height and the height of the ceiling, determined that the katana was somewhere between twenty-seven and thirty inches long, which meant he could decapitate Lee if he swung on his knees instead of his feet.
Lee looked toward the far wall, where he now saw that the sliding door leading to the backyard hung unevenly on its rail, listing to the left so it didn’t align with the other panels. Someone had thrown it open quickly and carelessly, many times. Maybe children running out to play? But in a samurai house, it was more likely someone had tried to escape.
Then there was the Sometimes Window.
Under the bright moonlight, Lee could make out the inconsistent coloring of the tatami mats, which grew darker on the side closer to the hall. That side was across from the kitchen, where the doors were probably left open to let out smoke and cooking smells—meaning more sunlight had discolored the mats. But with a window facing south like this one, the direct sunlight should have stained that side of the room as well, yet it was light and smooth. Which meant either the window was new (unlikely because the wood looked old) or the mats were new (also unlikely because his father had bought the house for cheap since it hadn’t been touched in at least fifty years, and his father didn’t even like tatami mats so he wouldn’t have replaced them).
Lee held his breath, closed his eyes, and tried to quiet his thoughts as he exhaled.
This was why the sedatives were important.
He had more beside his bed, and he would have taken them at once if it weren’t for the light coming from the closet. He stared at the light and tried to conjure an explanation for it, but his mind felt like a windmill caught in a storm, spinning and spinning and spinning, and there was no explanation that made sense.
The light was warm and yellow and flickering—candlelight, not the steadiness of a light bulb. The shadow was a blur of clothing and long hair, probably female, very still yet breathing steadily. Her shape had swelled to twice Lee’s height, which meant she was either a giant monster, or was sitting very close to the candle, which had distorted her shape.
Lee leaned to one side, and the shadow shifted toward him.
She can see me, Lee thought.
Strangely, he did not feel fear. That was not something he’d ever felt while in this state. It was like his mind was packed full of information, trying desperately to make the puzzle pieces lie flat, and there was only room for objective facts. If anything, Lee felt calmer than usual, now that the world had pulled back its lips and was baring its crooked teeth. Somehow, everything made more sense this way.
There was a limit, of course, to how much truth he could bear. There would come a point at which all the truths spilled out of his ears and he would do anything to keep his thoughts quiet.
But not here, not now, not yet.
