28

What did “gone” mean? I had asked the question to try and learn who U’s parents were, what they were doing, and when they would be back, but her answer stumped all of that.

Gone. They went away.

What was that supposed to mean? Did they leave and never return? Or were they the… “dead” kind of gone? No… that had to be my detective novel brain going off again. Death is a big deal in a country like Japan. It doesn’t just happen without anyone knowing. Of course, in that vein, elementary schoolers kidnapping college students was a bit of a new one, too, so I was hardly in a position to generalize.

But even then, “dead” had to be an exaggeration. My first assumption had to be the best one, that they left and never came back.

Which meant that for some reason, the father and mother had left this house… and since then, U had been living alone… and that was that.

But all I could do was guess, and my vague stabs in the dark weren’t getting anywhere. I decided that the next day, while U was at school, I would leave the closet and really search the house, find out what jobs the parents worked, so on and so forth. Of course, it never occurred to me that if I had the time to do that, I had time to get the heck out of there.

Incidentally, there was one other fact that slipped my mind.

The next day was Saturday, so elementary schools would be closed.