Chapter Three - Asako Kato
CHAPTER THREE
Asako Kato
ASAKO KATO DRAINED the remains of her stale coffee as she sat in her cubicle. Her office was located in the Summit State University campus newsroom, this place had become her second home spending hours researching and writing about campus happenings. Her face was illuminated by the soft glow of her laptop screen. It cast sharp shadows across her cluttered desk. Her fingers flew across the keyboard with percussive precision, the title blasted across the top of the page on the computer monitor read, Halloween Night Horror: Ferris Wheel Malfunction At Campus Carnival.
Was the title a little heavy-handed?
Sure, but her editor wasn’t exactly known for his subtly. She hoped the clickbait title would get him off her back. He had recently become obsessed with the clicks and engagement metrics of the campus newspaper, The Lion’s Ledger, colloquially referred to as “the Ledger” by students, faculty, and alumni. After the switch from print media to an online publication, the editor struggled to make the digital shift forcing by a loss of readership.
Her hands paused briefly, hovering over the keys as she reread the draft. It was solid— fact-based, compelling with just a hint of sensationalism. The article was sure to garner a few clicks by the campus readers. She typed her final paragraph as her thoughts drifted.
Something about this evening felt off. Not only the Ferris wheel, but the energy on campus had a static to it. A kind of buzz her journalist intuition recognized as “there’s more to this story.”
She dismissed the thought.
Satisfied with the piece, she clicked ‘ send’ on the draft and leaned back in the dated office chair. Her eyes shifted to the corkboard that hung above her desk. There was an array of newspaper clippings, handwritten notes, and printed emails chaotically sprawled across it. At the center was a photo of Naomi Halston, smiling stiffly for her university ID. Just beneath the note read, Missing Graduate Student, Psychology Department, no leads.
Asako reached for her leather-bound notepad — a graduation gift from her mother, a stationery enthusiast. While other journalists for the Ledger had gone digital with their tablets and laptop computers, there was something grounding for Asako about paper and pen. She flipped through the pages of handwritten notes, “Missing. Presumed Dead?” she said reviewing her last entry. Naomi had been gone for weeks, with no sign of foul play — or any sigh of her at all, in fact. She had been reported missing by her roommate and the campus police had all but given up. Noting it as a likely runaway case.
Asako was not convinced.
There was something to this story that she couldn’t articulate.
Asako had visited Naomi’s roommate days after she was reported missing. Naomi lived in the graduate housing and shared a two-bedroom apartment with an engineering graduate student from Russia. The roommate was not exactly friendly when Asako showed up unannounced and was quite indifferent about Naomi’s disappearance.
“She hasn’t been home for a whole week and I’m worried she has skipped out on her part of the rent,” the roommate said, taking a deep drag from her cigarette. She had met Asako on the front stoop of the graduate student condo where she had held a glass of clear liquid in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other. The roommate did not strike Asako as the type of person to worry much about anything.
“Was she acting weird? Anything out of the ordinary?” Asako asked.
The roommate frowned and shrugged her shoulders, “Who am I to say what is ‘weird’ or ‘out of the ordinary?’ But she did seem a little, how do you Americans say, ‘frustrated.’” she said with a thick Russian accent.
“How so?”
The roommate took a deep pull from the clear liquid in the glass.“She came home from class one day complaining about her professor. She said he was quite impossible to please. Something with her research wasn’t going according to plan.”
Asako scribbled furiously in her notepad, “Do you know what she was researching?”
The roommate shrugged indifferently, “I am a real scientist. She was studying ‘feelings’ or something. Psychology belongs in the liberal arts. It is not a true science.”
Asako had suspected she had gotten everything she was going to get from her.
Naomi Halston had beaten the odds to be at Summit State University. A child of the foster care system, a dynamic undergraduate student, and a doctoral student in psychological science with a passion for helping children in the foster care system. Naomi had even been short-listed for a prestigious fellowship with the university.Her pen scratched across the notepad as she underlined, No family, no connections.
This is where the story got more interesting.
No parents. No siblings — not officially anyway. Asako dug deep into her background and found very little. A few whispers of an unstable childhood, with some reports of emotional outbursts and behavioral issues. Or, at least, that was what Naomi’s former foster brother said when Asako found him on social media. But he admitted they were both young and his memory wasn’t so reliable after years of substance use.
Aside from things just not adding up, Asako felt a strange kinship with Naomi. Her own sister, Izumi Kato, had been similar to Naomi— volatile, misunderstood, and ultimately forgotten by the system. After one too many fights in school and rows with the system, their parents lost custody of Izumi.
Asako’s family did their best to stay in touch with Izzy as she moved from foster home to foster home. Letters and birthday cards were sent. The occasional phone call was made. For Christmas one year Izzy had requested the hottest toy of the year and their parents scoured the city to find it. She eventually ended up in a residential treatment facility somewhere in California.
Her parents seemingly forgot about Izzy and their lives moved on. Rarely mentioning Izzy at the dinner table, her name strangely missing from their mom’s famed Holiday Family Newsletter. It wasn’t a conscious choice, Asako had realized. But forgetting Izumi just seemed to happen.
Although forgetting Izzy was not an unusual occurrence, In school, she was rarely called on by teachers, even with her hand raised high in the air, nearly brimming with the right answer, she was overlooked. Even her friends seemed to forget her. She was often chosen last by their friends to be on teams at recess, no matter how loudly Asako argued with the other kids on her behalf, Izzy was left out. When Asako’s large extended family of aunts, uncles, and cousins came to visit them they would go for ice cream and Izzy would lag behind unnoticed. Her absence was only realized when someone counted heads.
“It’s like I’m invisible,” Izzi had said once, her tone was light and her face was strategically neutral as if not to convey any of her care one way or the other. They sit on the edge of Asako’s bed, swinging their legs. Asako didn’t know what to say, so she stayed silent. But the comment stayed with her all this time.
Before Izzy left, strange things started to occur. There were times when Izzy would vanish entirely, even when she had been right there. Once, during an argument with their mother, Asako swore she had looked right through her.
The last time Asako had seen Izzy, the family visited her at a group home. Izzy looked thinner, her hair cropped short and uneven. She’d smile brightly, but her eyes seemed to have dulled. She’d talk about dreaming of traveling, of being anywhere but there.
A few months later, her case worker called to tell them she had been transferred to a treatment center in California. A year after that, another call. The final call. Izzy had died, but no details, no service, no closure. Just a gaping void in Asako’s life. Her chest tightened at the thought.
Her eyes darted back to Naomi’s photo. There was something hauntingly familiar in the girl’s eyes. Maybe a distant sadness? Asako couldn’t shake it. Could Naomi have dealt with similar struggles as Izzy?
Asako flipped through her notebook, scanning her notes of the potential leads. A psychology graduate student, Research Assistant in Bellamy’s lab, and roommate reported her missing. All details she had endlessly poured over. What was missing?
She circled psychology and Bellamy and scoffed to herself.
She tapped the pen on her chin. The questions nagged at her. Asako was going to need to work over her source yet again. She grimaced at the thought. The leads had dried up and her editor wasn’t happy about spending resources on an investigation of a story that fizzled nearly a year ago.
Her computer chimed with an email from her editor.
Great title! Can we get a quote from witnesses? -B