CHAPTER 59
CHAPTER
NASH BENT DOWN IN FRONT of Hiroko. He looked at the foam on her lips and next observed the cherry-red color of her face. Then he glanced at the cup of tea on the table beside her. He lifted it and sniffed the contents. He detected an odor that should not have been there.
He stood and turned to Steers, who was still looking down in disbelief at the dead woman.
“I think. . .I suspect she was poisoned.”
Steers glanced at him, and then at the cup and then at Hiroko’s face. “I do not suspect that.”
“But—”
She held up a hand to stop him. “I do not suspect. I know it to be true.”
“Then you know who. . .?”
Steers’s hands curled to fists and her chest heaved with emotion. She closed her eyes and the tears drained out from them. She shook her head sharply once, and then again, fiercely, as though to throw something repulsive off her.
“We have to call the police,” said Nash.
She opened her watery eyes and stared up at him. “No police.”
“But—”
“Dillon-san, I will say this only one more time. And though my respect for you is great, in my current state of mind I am capable of anything. No police. Do you understand me?”
He started to say something, but then stepped back and nodded. “I understand.”
Steers knelt next to Hiroko’s body and gently took the woman’s hand in one of hers. With her other hand Steers stroked the lovely white hair, moving it out of the woman’s face.
“Hiroko-san, you have served me faithfully and well. You deserved many, many more years of spirit and living and goodness. I am deeply ashamed to have failed you in allowing this to happen. You, above all others that I know, did not deserve this fate.”
She then reached up and closed the woman’s eyes.
“What do we do with. . .her?” asked Nash.
Steers rose. “I am not Buddhist as my upbringing in Japan would normally dictate, or a Shinto. Nor am I Protestant as was my father. And my mother is an atheist, so I am not bound by any of these traditions. But we must give her a proper pathway to eternity.”
“I understand, but I meant, what do we do with the body?”
“I own land not far from here. It is completely undeveloped and will remain that way. I. . .I had intended to make it into a private park where I could walk. . .and think. We will bury Hiroko there. We will return her body and her spirit to the earth where they will reunite and form something truly special.”
“Hiroko told me she was Chinese.”
“She was. But while the government there preaches atheism, many Chinese practice an assortment of religions, Buddhism, Taoism, and even Catholicism. I learned that Hiroko-san became a Buddhist while living in Japan. And Hiroko-san believed, as Buddhists do, in reincarnation. The cycle of rebirth and death. But the ultimate goal is nirvana, where this cycle is broken and eternal peace is achieved.”
“You certainly sound like a person knowledgeable about religion even though you don’t practice one,” noted Nash.
“One can have faith without a church attached,” she replied tersely.
“So we do this now?”
She nodded. “We need to ensure that no one sees, not even Thura, and certainly not the other guards.”
“The staff are all in their quarters, outside the main house. I can carry her to the garage and put her in the Suburban. And get some. . .shovels. But how will we explain her being gone?”
“Besides the attendants no one sees her except you, me, and my mother. I will explain to the attendants. Now go and get what you need and then come back here. I want to spend a few minutes alone with my Hiroko-san and I also need to. . .prepare her.”
Nash hurried off to get the materials he needed. When he came back, Steers had positioned Hiroko on the floor, naked, with a sheet beneath her.
He averted his gaze, but Steers, observing this, said sharply, “Hiroko-san cannot see you, so she cannot be embarrassed. And I need your help.”
They washed the body, including the hair, and then Steers carefully combed it.
“The nokanshi normally performs the preparation of the body, but that is not possible here. And in Japan everyone is cremated because there is no space for cemeteries. But that is also not possible for my Hiroko-san.”
Steers left and came back with a white kimono.
“The kyokatabira,” she explained. “It was what Japanese people wore when they went on their final pilgrimages. It will clothe Hiroko-san on her journey.”
“Why do you have one of those?”
“We all die,” said Steers. “It is best to be prepared, is it not?”
They dressed her in the kimono, and Nash then watched Steers carefully apply makeup to Hiroko-san’s face. “This must be done precisely to ensure her onward journey,” she noted.
“Where’d you learn to do that?”
“When I was a child a friend’s grandmother died in Kobe. I learned then.” She sat on her haunches and looked at Hiroko. “Death has always. . .fascinated me. I am not sure why.”
“Because you can’t control it,” he said promptly. “When it comes for you and how,” he added.
She glanced up at him. “You are wrong, Dillon-san. There is one way to control when it comes. And how.”
“I don’t think Hiroko-san would like to hear you say that.”
She dropped her gaze and went back to work on the woman.
Nash remembered the night she had threatened to kill herself, which was clearly what Steers had been referring to with her statement.
And who’s to say a control person like herself will not make the decision of choosing when and how her death will occur?
After Steers was finished, Nash gently picked up the dead woman, carried her to the garage, and placed her in plastic that he had put in the rear of the Suburban.
He had already loaded in shovels and some other tools.
He had texted the security detail that he and Steers were taking a late-night drive.
Steers had rushed back to her room and hurriedly changed out of her nightdress and into jeans and a sweater. She rode not in the passenger seat but in the back of the Suburban with Hiroko.
She directed Nash to an isolated spot about three miles away.
He had told Steers that he would dig the hole but she insisted on helping.
“It is the very least I can do for her,” she explained.
They shoveled until Nash’s head was about level with the top of the hole. Nash was impressed with Steers’s strength, stamina, and precise movements—no wasted motion, steady breaths, intently focused on the mission at hand. She had matched him shovel for shovel.
They laid Hiroko in her grave and placed the dirt over her.
Nash then tamped the mound down to a level surface.
He and Steers placed the grass that Nash had cut out in precise squares back on top of the leveled dirt.
One would be hard pressed to tell that a hole had been dug here.
In a few weeks’ time all traces of disturbance would be gone.
A sweaty Steers stood by the grave, her hands clasped in front of her and her eyes closed. She was speaking words that sounded solemn and also Japanese to Nash. He just stood next to her and stared down at the last resting place of a good woman.
Steers found a large and unusually shaped stone nearby. Nash carried it over for her and placed it on top of the grave, at the exact spot Steers indicated.
“This way I will always be able to find my way back to Hirokosan, you see,” she said.
“Yes, I see,” replied Nash.
They walked back to the Suburban and climbed in. Before Nash could start the engine she said, “Can we just sit here in the quiet for a bit, Dillon-san?”
“For as long as you want.”
For the next thirty minutes Steers sat in her seat and stared at her hands and made not a sound, while Nash shot her glances and tried to surmise what was going on in her mind.
“I am ready now. We can go.”
They drove back and Steers went to her room while Nash tidied things up in Hiroko’s room.
He put the contents of the suspect tea into a plastic container and closed the damaged door as best he could and then secured it.
He carried the container to his room in the guesthouse and placed it in a locked drawer.
He stood by the window and stared out into what was now the early dawn.
It was calm and peaceful and rejuvenating.
But he knew Victoria Steers was feeling none of these things. The woman was undoubtedly all misery and sadness and, probably, regret for failing her beloved Hiroko-san.
And now mother and daughter had just lost the only buffer they would ever have. And Nash knew that Steers believed her mother had murdered Hiroko, the only true friend Steers had.
I have every reason in the world to hate Victoria Steers. And yet now I don’t. And I hate myself for that.
Nash kept standing at the window and thought that no life should be as complicated as his.
And Victoria Steers’s.