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On their way back from Rokkenjima, Amakusa stopped to make a phone call. Ange sat in the car and stared at him through the car window, through the phone booth glass, with a sense that she was watching herself through yet another frame from somewhere else. Amakusa slid in and out of her gaze as he hung up the phone, left the phone booth, and went around to the driver’s side of the car. After an unusually long stretch of short time, he climbed into the driver’s seat.
“One of your contacts got in touch,” he said, his whole body turned toward Ange. “She was away until yesterday, looks like. Wanna try another stop on our road trip or is it too late?”
Ange saw and heard herself reply from somewhere outside, not too far away. “Who?”
“Maihime something,” Amakusa said. “Inoue Maihime. She’s apparently pretty keen to meet with you.”
The name surfaced slowly into Ange’s memory. Inoue Maihime was one of the servant’s names that she had gotten through Fukuin house. Inoue spent a year serving the Ushiromiya family before having the money to embark on her own in 1985. Ange didn't need to speak to her, but in the interest of finding all the information she could, Ange reached out to everyone. She'd forgotten all about Inoue since, and might have already been too late to make use of her.
But now Inoue was presenting herself as a loose thread. It was possible that she could provide Ange another piece of the puzzle, spread out in front of her with more pieces missing than present.
Ange found she was seeing from her own eyes again.
Inoue lived in a little apartment outside of Tokyo’s 24 wards, where things were affordable and public transit took a while. The new destination helped to focus Ange’s attention away from the rest of her life which loomed over her, as terrifying as any certainty. She focused on Inoue with the laser-focused intent of an eagle peering for fish below the water’s surface. When Inoue opened her apartment door, eyes wide with surprise as if they hadn’t been expected, the metaphor stayed relevant.
Her hair ran over her shoulders, a warm brown, full of volume and with light waves. She wore a black pencil skirt and a black vest over a frilled blouse, with sheer pantyhose. There was not a hair out of place, a ripple in any fabric, nor a piece of lint to be found. Ange deduced that Inoue was someone who handled stress by overgrooming.
“Come in,” she urged, moving out of the doorway to allow entry. Amakusa sauntered in with a muttered “thanks,” and Ange followed after. The two cast their eyes about to assess danger and absorb information. “Would you like... tea?”
Ange glanced back at her, knowing that Inoue's hesitation was telling, but she couldn't tell for what. “Yes, thank you.”
Amakusa gave a little three-fingered gesture over the brim of his hat indicating that it seemed safe before he returned to the door to take his shoes off, the monster. Ange folded her skirt under before kneeling into seiza at the room's center table. She looked around.
At a glance it was clear that Inoue lived alone. She had no concern whatsoever for keeping her personality out of the shared spaces. An acoustic guitar was propped on a stand in the corner like a pedestal, and the shelves next to her tv were covered in vinyl records and cassette tapes. There were a few signed photos on the walls, framed, featuring Inoue posing with a peace sign next to some musicians in weird clothes.
“You play?” Amakusa asked first, his interest piqued.
“Uh. Yes,” Inoue said after leaning out of the kitchen to see what he was talking about.
“Do you mind?” Amakusa called, picking up the guitar and slinging the strap over his shoulder.
“Maybe later,” said Inoue as she turned the corner, tea tray in hand, spotting Amakusa. "Oh, I thought you meant... Sure, that’s fine.” But he was already strumming.
“I didn't know you played guitar,” Ange observed.
“I don't,” Amakusa said with a grin and strummed tunelessly once more.
“Ah,” said Ange.
“Thank you for coming,” Inoue said as she took a seat at the table, leaping subjects to get to the niceties. “As you already know, my name is Inoue Maihime. I hope you like earl gray. I grew to like it while serving your aunt, the lady of the house,” Inoue poured the tea without looking Ange in the eye.
“And I’m Ushiromiya Ange, as you already know. This is my bodyguard, Juuza Amakusa.”
Amakusa nodded toward Inoue, strumming loudly for effect. “Yo.”
“Yes, it’s lovely to finally meet you, my lady.” Inoue lowered her head in a bow.
“There’s no need for that,” Ange said. “You don’t work for the Ushiromiya family anymore. I don’t need your formalities.”
“Yes,” Inoue corrected, sitting up with a heavy exhalation. “You’re right, though at times it feels as though I never left.”
Ange added sugar cubes to her tea, ignoring Inoue’s emotional turmoil. “You worked at the mansion on Rokkenjima some years before the incident, didn’t you?”
“No,” Inoue replied, choosing her words carefully. “In fact, I finished my term there at the end of the summer in 1986. I missed the incident by weeks.”
“I see,” Ange said, bringing the tea to her nose. “We’re on our way back from Rokkenjima now. There was very little information of value at the site. Is there anything new you can tell me?”
Inoue blinked back at Ange, her eyes wide and dark with too much mascara. She had fine lines about her eyes, probably in her mid-thirties. Not much older than Battler would be. “Probably not,” she replied honestly. “I just wanted to speak to you myself.”
Ange met her gaze, peering over the rim of the teacup.
“I have a lot I want to say,” Inoue said. “If I speak, will you listen?”
“That’s why I came here,” Ange replied.
“Okay,” Inoue said, her voice airy. She took a breath to steel her nerves and began. “I was an orphan. I grew up in Fukuin house. I know you knew that already. We Fukuin house kids would serve at the Ushiromiya place on Rokkenjima for about a year after school and basically be set for life money-wise. You probably know that, too. I wasn’t sure what to do for university, so I did my year at Rokkenjima after high school, when I was eighteen. I stayed at Fukuin house a bit later than most. I remember things pretty clearly. So...” Inoue sniffed, dabbing at the corner of her eyes. “I thought you could ask me about your family if you wanted to.”
Inoue didn’t remember her biological parents. She was raised from a young age by foster families before finding herself in Fukuin house. She didn’t know the stable love of a home, only the relative stability of caring adults who were paid to look after her, who had a vested interest in having her take care of herself. She was taught not to rely on anyone, or else she would be heartbroken or disappointed. She only understood how lonely she was when she saw loving stories about families. For book reports instead, she would hunt down tales of crime and murder. Some would say this was caused by the radiating sins of her parents.
“She’s such a sweet girl,” some of the girls overheard the nuns speaking at Fukuin house one quiet evening, discussing Inoue’s unsatisfying grades. “Smart, too, but she never applies herself. If only we had more time with her to study. She deserves parents who look after her. But didn’t you say her parents were...?”
“I know what cults are,” one of the Fukuin girls in Inoue’s class raised her hand. “Inoue’s parents were in one!”
“Whaaat? Really?” The class came alive as all the other students turned to look at her. Inoue felt her face go red and there was nothing she could do to stop it. “She’s turning red! It must be true!”
“They were in one of those cults where the mothers have to have a billion children, and she was sick, so they gave her up,” said the girl. Inoue couldn’t even remember her name, but she could remember the wicked smile. The smile of joy in giving up someone else’s secrets for attention and conversation.
The teacher quieted the room, but Inoue couldn’t outrun the impact of that moment for the rest of her school days.
“No wonder you love murder books so much, if your parents were in a cult. I bet they murdered people and did blood sacrifices.”
“When you graduate, are you going to find your parents and join their cult?”
“Maybe Inoue-san will be a baby breeder, too. She’s got the hips for it!”
It could have been true. Many of Inoue’s early memories were in a hospital. She’d had kidney issues and it was all paid for by the foster system. She got a transplant and had hazy memories of the surgery. There had been few issues with her health ever since, but why would a family who already had thirty children want to pay for that?
Her family had provided no love to her, had never been there for her, and yet held her arms in shackles all the same.
So when she graduated, she went to Rokkenjima. She would do the work and be free. Maybe go overseas. Go away, somewhere where no one knew her. She would be clean and unburdened. She would be a seed adrift at sea, looking for land to wash up on and grow into a tree.
She just had to work for twelve months.
Working for a family was unusual, especially a family as strange as the Ushiromiyas. She never once laid eyes on the elderly family patriarch, but she was told he was the one who gave her the name she would use while working there: Maon. No one could explain to her why the tradition existed, it simply seemed to be a tool to alienate the serving staff and make them feel like pawns.
“There was an old nursery rhyme we studied in English class that I thought about when I lived there,” said Inoue. She glanced over her shoulder at where Amakusa was still toying with her guitar. “It has a thing about ‘the king is in his money house, counting out his coins, the queen is in the parlor eating bread and honey.’ If the gold was real, maybe the old man spent all his time counting those bars-- oh, I’m sorry. I mean, the lord of the house.”
“You never saw Grandfather?” Ange repeated to get Inoue back on track.
“Not once,” Inoue said. “But I didn’t mind. I’d heard about his temper.”
Inoue described the property in vivid detail. She talked about the carefully manicured rose garden, the guest house which so rarely kept visitors, the many rooms all carefully locked, the sweeping staircase, the polished railing, the brass doorknobs, the silver cutlery. Ange found herself closing her eyes and letting her hazy memory come into sharper focus.
“The lady of the house could be a terror, but she was so beautiful. She had a lot of pride in the headship and what it represented, so everything had to be just like this or that. She was especially nightmarish when she had her headaches, which was all the time. If she was yelling at one of us, she’d send the other for the medicine. But she could be so kind sometimes, too. She let everyone take their birthday off. Whenever you told her something, she'd remember. Something you liked or where you were from or something like that. She never said anything about my background, if she knew it at all.”
“And the head, I didn’t realize how good he was back then. I’ve had jobs since where men just like him would get handsy with girls the age I was then. Krauss was much kinder, even than Natsuhi. He would give us tips here and there or other little treats. He was almost like a child. Sometimes he would ask our opinions or tell us stories about things that seemed so boring at the time. In a job like that though, it’s good to remember that you're human now and then instead of furniture.”
“And Miss Jessica,” Inoue was weeping. “She always treated us like we were her friends. I wonder now if it was because she was lonely. She never treated us like servants. She would take us along to do some silly thing on work time if we could spare it, just so she could have company. The lady would scold her for it but she kept doing it anyway. It was impossible not to like her.”
“They were the first family I really knew,” Inoue said, wiping her eyes with her palms. “They weren’t mine, but I couldn’t help watching them. Sometimes Natsuhi would help Jessica study. And Krauss would bring home souvenirs from his trips, extra special this or that for his beloved wife and daughter. Seeing that every day, I can’t express to you how painful it was for me,” she sniffed, “but not nearly as painful as hearing what happened and learning they were gone.”
Inoue moved to the outskirts of Tokyo after her year serving the Ushiromiyas. She had the money to take some time off to decide her next course of action. With her contacts and experience in Rokkenjima, she could easily get a job at a hotel, or even with a private, elite service staff group. But for September she bought furniture, hiked Mount Fuji, and took guitar lessons. By October, the Ushiromiyas were dead.
“I saw Eva on the news and heard everything they said about her. I don’t know if she had it in her to do those things or not. But the few times I saw her, I could see how much she treasured her family. I knew I couldn’t reach out to her, as she always made clear to the servants that she didn’t want anything to do with us. She had this real sense of superiority. So I didn’t get in touch. I had no one at all who could understand how I felt.”
Inoue took a deep and steadying breath. Amakusa had put away the guitar and was staring through the window silently.
“You don't think Eva could have killed them?” Ange asked.
“I don't know,” Inoue sniffed. “I didn’t know her that well, but it’s hard for me to imagine anyone being capable of doing those things, no matter how much money was at stake. I know a lot of people spend a lot of time making theories, but I can’t read them. They can say whatever they want but they didn’t know your family like I did. They talk and write stories about human lives like they’re playing with toys, but these were real human beings. It disgusts me.”
Ange gaped at the woman in front of her. For the first time, it seemed she was coming face-to-face with someone who actually felt similar pain about what Ange lost.
“They were basically strangers to you,” Ange said. “How can you shed tears for them?”
Inoue nods. “I didn't know them well, I admit. But sometimes I think that’s why their deaths hurt me so much. I knew them just enough that they were real people to me, and still had so much to them that I never saw. I’ll never be able to know them anymore. I didn’t even matter enough to go to their funeral.” Inoue’s grief seemed to taper from tears into a receding wave of calm. “I just got back from a trip to Jeju Island with my boyfriend yesterday, but just before we left I saw the news that Eva passed away. It was too late to cancel the trip, so I spent the whole time there in a funk. I couldn’t stop thinking about Rokkenjima, and you.” Inoue glanced up, meeting Ange’s eyes. She smiled. “That boyfriend gave me the cold shoulder for half the trip and hasn’t spoken to me since. I guess I’ve been dumped.” She sighed. “But if he can be jealous and not supportive while I grieve some dead people, he can go fuck himself.” Inoue jerks upright. “Sorry, I mean--”
“He can go fuck himself,” Ange echoed.
“Yeah.” Inoue visibly relaxed. “My grief is probably nothing like your grief, but it means a lot that you came to talk to me. I always wanted to be able to give something back to your family after what happened. We met once, you know. You must have been five years old,” Inoue’s smile is gentle and fond. “Everyone was just obsessed with you. ‘Let’s show this to Ange-chan,’ ‘Where’s Ange-chan?’ ‘Come sit with me, Ange-chan.’ They kept you far too busy to play with me.”
Ange closed her eyes, her memory showing her the crowd of adults on Rokkenjima, but the old memories of twelve years ago were hard to snatch from the blur of time.
“I thought it must be nice, to have so many people who cared about you,” said Inoue. “And then you lost it all. I’m so sorry, Ushiromiya-san.”
“Thank you,” said Ange.
The woman across the table from Ange was about the same age as Battler would have been. She struggled to be polite in honorable company, to turn into the quiet and polite young servant she was a very long time ago for the Ushiromiya family head, hiding her personality and passions for the sake of handing Ange the most precious gift she had. The most precious gift Ange could ever receive: a memory; a true, honest memento from the past. And also, someone who could understand her pain.
“Inoue-san, can you please call me Ange?”
Inoue’s eyes widened in surprise before softening into fondness and gratitude. “If you like, Ange-chan. You can call me Maimai. All my friends do.”
“Maimai-san,” said Ange. The cute nickname sounded a little strange with the polite honorific. “How about Mai-san, for now.”
“I like it,” Inoue Maihime’s smile was painfully sentimental. Ange could tell they had just exchanged something special, just based on the look on her face.
Ange pointed toward the photos on Mai’s wall. “I heard that Jessica played in a band. Did you know that?”
“I did know! I’m surprised someone told you that. She tried very hard to keep it a secret from her parents. We talked about music a few times.” Mai leaned away from the table and ran her finger along the spines of the cassette tapes on the shelf below the TV. “Do you want to hear some of the music she liked?”
“I would love to, thank you.”
Mai slid a cassette from the lineup and flipped open the hard plastic container.
They talked late into that night, and for many years after.