Chapter 6 Chapter Six

In the next two days, I observed very carefully in the school, but I still couldn't find Yuki's figure.In the discussion class on the third day, I didn't see him either.After the seminar was over, I got out the student roll and walked around the street where he lived.I called him from a public phone and he was at home. "Now, I'm at the public phone booth in front of the convenience store in front of the station, next to the post office, and on the other side is a convenience store, you know?" "Ah, yes, I know." "I'm going to your house now, how do I get from here?"

"Come now?" Yuki stuttered, "You are so sudden..." His tone was enough to make me understand that my visit would embarrass him, but I ignored that. "You don't need to prepare cakes or biscuits. If you happen to run out of coffee at home, I'll buy it and bring it. How do I get from here?" "Well, what exactly is going on?" "I have something to tell you. How do I go from here?" I strengthened my tone and said indisputably.After a while, I heard a soft sigh coming from the phone. "Stay there, please. I'll be right there. I'll be there in about ten minutes."

"I'm waiting in the convenience store." I was flipping through women's magazines in the convenience store when Yuuki arrived with a tired look on his upright face. I just wanted to raise my legs and walk forward, but I held back immediately and waited for Yuki to approach me. "Eight minutes and forty-five seconds," I said, looking at my watch and trying to be nonchalant. "It is a good moral not to keep a lady waiting." Yuuki didn't answer anything.I put the women's magazines back on the shelf. "You don't seem to have visited Tachikawa Akemi yet. Although she hasn't regained consciousness, as a classmate in the seminar with her, you should visit her just out of courtesy, right? Even the professor went once."

Yuuki lowered his head and still didn't answer anything.The clerk at the convenience store came over and tidied up the women's magazines I had put back on the shelves. As I said that, I walked out of the convenience store, crossed the road, and walked towards a coffee shop opposite.Just as I stepped into the store, I glanced casually to the side, and found a figure behind the vending machine a little far away, and just before meeting my eyes, the man turned his back.I wanted to look back at Yuuki, but instead of doing so, I walked into the coffee shop silently. The store is very quiet, classical music is playing, and there are no other customers. The music is so soft that if you don't pay attention, you can hardly hear the melody.We sat down across from each other at a table with lace curtains, and a middle-aged woman came up from the counter and asked what we wanted.That woman didn't look like a coffee shop, but more like an aunt in a vegetable shop.Neither of us said a word until my lemon tea and Yuki's iced coffee were delivered; I kept watching Yuki, and Yuki kept drooping her head.

"What's wrong?" I asked as I fished out the lemon in the glass. "Why don't you visit?" "I'm busy with all kinds of things." Yuki lowered his head and said. "Busy?" I asked. My voice echoed strangely through the store, and I lowered my voice a little. "How long does it take to go to the hospital from here? Go there, meet up, and then come back. At most, it will only be an hour and a half? Can't you spare this little time for Akemi Lichuan?" "I'll be there in just two days." "lie." "I'm not lying, I must go."

I still think he's lying.However, I've accused him of lying, which doesn't make any sense.I'd love to just drag him from here to the hospital right now, but that won't work either.I picked up the cup, the refreshing scent of lemon, and the warm and delicious black tea made my angry mood a little calmer. The aunt in the store, like a guest, was sitting on the other seats, reading sports newspapers and drinking Coke.I pricked up my ears and listened for a while, and the background music seemed to be Rachmaninoff's piano music. "Why?" Yuki muttered softly. "What?" I asked, turning my gaze back to Yuki.

"Senior and Tachikawa-san, do you have such a good relationship?" Yuuki lowered his head and looked up at me. "It's not very good. Before that, until the day we went drinking together, I didn't even remember her name clearly." "Then why, why..." Yuuki's words contained some accusations against me.I don't know what it would be like to change someone else, but according to my relationship with Yuuki, he shouldn't be like this.Yuki was blaming me, and I knew what he was blaming me for. "Yes. It's true." I nodded, picked up the glass again, and couldn't help but let out a sigh before bringing it to my mouth.I wanted to relax, so I listened carefully to the melody of the piano piece, but Rachmaninoff's melody made me even more depressed.

"Hairstyle changed." As a result, I didn't drink for a day, so I put down the glass and said. "Hairstyle?" Yuuki asked back. "Akemi Tachikawa. The costumes were changed, and the makeup was changed. It's too insecure to do that. I would never do it. But she did it because she thought it was very important." Yuuki inserted the straw into the glass, stirred the coffee, and the ice cubes in the cup made a crackling sound.I think it sounds very nice. "I'm sorry." Yuuki said. "Why are you apologizing to me?" There seemed to be a figure shaking in the corner of my sight.I looked out of the window through the lace curtains and saw the man preparing to cross the road.The outside is bright and the store is dark, so the store cannot be seen clearly from the outside, but if you look out from the store, you can see the appearance of the people outside at a glance.The man seemed to be observing the movement in the store just now.

I looked at Yuuki who was sitting opposite, and wanted to tell him about that man, but I dismissed the idea.Maybe there is something secretly surging behind a certain fact that Yuuki and I don't understand, and curiosity suddenly arose in my heart. "Forget it, let's go." "what?" "Looking at your face makes me feel irritable, so you'd better go." Yuuki stood up a little at a loss, took out a 1,000-yen note from his purse, put it on the table, and walked out of the store.I drank the rest of the black tea, counted slowly from one to ten, then paid the bill and left the shop.I saw Yuuki's back at the intersection, ready to turn.So I trotted to the intersection and turned a corner. It was a shopping street with a pachinko shop at the front.Yuuki walked at a certain speed on this shopping street with a vaulted roof, with his head down, thinking about something.He never looked back, so he didn't notice either me or the person who was walking in front of me and following him.

I rushed up in one breath and patted the man on the back. He looked at me, then at Yuuki's back, showing a embarrassed look, and then he laughed helplessly. "It was still discovered by you." "You are, Mr. Gibbon?" I said as quietly as I could. "I remember you went to visit Tachikawa Akemi, but now you are following Yuuki again, what are you doing?" "Is she better? Woke up?" Instead of answering my question, Gibbon asked me.I don't think Gibbon asked casually out of courtesy, as if he really cared. "Still in a coma." I said, "Although I've been in a coma for a while, the doctor said it doesn't matter."

"yes." Yoshimoto still looked at Yuki who had gone away, and soon Yuki's back disappeared from the shopping street. "You and Tsutomu Yuuki," Yuuki's back disappeared, he seemed to feel sorry, and turned around and said, "What did you talk about?" "Just talk." "Just talk about it, what was it talking about?" Gibbon didn't seem to think he was being impolite, which annoyed me a lot. "Your sophistication is all about..." I tried to sound as blunt as possible. "Sophistication?" Gibbon asked, tilting his neck. "And you?" "what?" "I mean, what are you doing?" Gibbon's eyes hesitated for a while, he stared at his toes, looking as if he was looking for a proper reason, but also seemed to refuse to answer my words.Before Gibbon made it clear which kind of attitude I belonged to, I first said: "There is a suspicious person who often follows you, you'd better be more careful. Should I give Yuki such a piece of advice?" Gibbon looked down at me, sighed as if he had made up his mind, then raised his head and nodded in the direction he came from with his chin. "Go back there." Gibbon returned to the coffee shop we visited just now. The aunt in the shop saw me sitting on the same seat with different men, with a look of disgust on her face.I thought it would be too boring to order the same thing as before, so I ordered milk coffee.And Gibbon ordered a blended coffee.The background music in the store has become a Brahms tune. "what you want to say?" After the aunt left with the list, I asked.Gibbon took a cigarette from his pocket sullenly, smoked one, and looked at me as if to assent. "Please. I smoke too." As I said, I took out a cigarette from my handbag and lit it.Gibbon also lit a cigarette, and the strong smell of his French cigarettes wafted towards me immediately.While exhaling a puff of smoke, Gibbon said a word, I couldn't catch it, because there was a word "street", I think he said a place name, but I have never heard of it. "You know that?" "I don't know, it's the first time I've heard of it." “That’s where I was born. It’s called a street, but it’s actually a village. There’s only one very old supermarket in the central area. There’s no convenience store. It’s an hour’s tram ride to the nearest McDonald’s. The local wine produced there is still famous. , but it is not well-known all over the country. There are no sightseeing places, no hot springs, and it is just a village in the northeast. I grew up there since I was a child, and Yuki Tsutomu was born there.” "Ah." I nodded. "You and Yuki are from the same town?" "We were childhood partners. Three families away from my house is Yuuki's home." The relationship between him and Yuki is clear, but the reason for his stalking is not clear, I wait for him to continue talking. "Yuki has an older sister named Yoko, Yang of the sun, Miss Yoko. Yoko is 2 years older than Mian and 4 years younger than me. I am the only child in the family, so I, Yoko and Mian, They really often play together like brothers and sisters." Gibbon leaned his body on the back of the chair, crossed one of his long legs, then turned his face slightly, and exhaled a puff of smoke to avoid spraying the smoke on my face.Gibbon maintained this posture, his eyes stayed in the empty space. "A very quiet man." "what?" "Miss Yangzi." "what." "As long as you approach her, it's like being immersed in silence, which is different from being heavy. She always has a gentle smile on her face, and she doesn't have many friends. She often looks at the distant place alone. Where is it, no, it seems to be looking at a scenery that no one else can see, which belongs to her alone. It is such a person." Where he was going to lead the conversation, I couldn't figure out, but I saw something like happiness on his face, so I smiled. "You like her?" I said, Gibbon's eyes shifted from the space to me, and he smiled too. "If you say it's admiration, the age difference is too big. When I entered high school, she was still a primary school student. But, yeah, maybe it's similar to that feeling." The aunt brought milk coffee and coffee.Gibbon added a lump of sugar to the coffee, stirred it, but did not drink it, put down his spoon, and went on. "I came to Tokyo after I was admitted to university, and I could only see them when I went back for vacation. She moved when she was about to graduate from junior high school. At that time, her parents died, and she died on the plane. Listen It is said that relatives of his family adopted her and Mian, and I have never seen her since then. I will work here from then on.” "Oh." "That was last week. I saw Tsutomu on the road by chance, and that's when I realized that he and his sister had both arrived in Tokyo. I thought it was time to meet after so many years, so I went to their home. It’s a single-family house in a residential area near here. When I went there, neither of them was there. I went again the next day, and it was Mian who came out to open the door. He said that my sister was not at home. On the third day, I came again. Mian came out alone, and he said that my sister said she didn’t want to see you, and hoped you wouldn’t come again. That’s what he said. I don’t know why.” "That's because she has always hated you." "However, that cannot be the case." Gibbon said with some displeasure, and I avoided his words: "Yeah, that's what most paranoid suitors say." "Am I a paranoid courtist?" Gibbon said with a wry smile. "But I couldn't think of any reason why I was hated. I thought about all kinds of reasons, such as when their parents died, I didn't help anything, so they hated me. But at that time I just I'm just a college student, and I can't do anything for them at all. If there is anything else, I really can't think of any other reason." "They just want to forget the past? Some people do." "Well, maybe that's the case. But I still couldn't understand it. Especially Mian's attitude also made me feel suspicious, so I asked people near their house. This question made things even more strange. Living in their house No one in the neighborhood is sure that Yoko exists. When they moved in, it was Muto who greeted each house, and it was Muto who came to deliver the receipt of the resident notice, and it was Muto who went out to take out the garbage. Almost everyone I always thought that Mian was the only person living in that house. Some people also said they had seen Yangzi, but after further inquiry, they just saw a woman in the house from a distance, so it is not certain that it must be Yangzi.” Gibbon wiped his palms together, and continued. "So, I thought, does Yoko really live in that house? Maybe there is no such person as Yoko there. Could it be that she deliberately pretended that there was another person in the family? Someone saw it from a distance. Yoko is at home, maybe that's Mian in disguise." I was just dumbfounded. "What's going on?" "Speaking of the Yuki family, they are one of the most famous families in our area. Their family has a large area of ​​land and forests, so when their parents passed away, they both inherited a huge inheritance. And if Yoko died, then All property belongs to Mian alone.” It took me some time to understand Gibbon's words. "That means," I said, putting out the cigarette butt on the ashtray, "Tsuto Yuuki, killed his sister?" "Ok." Gibbon nodded. "Ah, no, please wait a moment." Unexpectedly, what he said was such a thing, I was a little flustered, and said: "The two of them have a lot of property in their family. In order to monopolize this property, Yuki killed his sister, right? It sounds absurd, but it is still logical. But why? Why Yuki To pretend that his dead sister is still alive?" "I also thought about this, so I went to visit the relative who adopted the two of them. After investigation, I found out that it was their uncle who adopted them, who was running a small real estate in Osaka at the time. That was the essence Not a bad person, he told me the whole thing about his idea of ​​the inheritance of the two of them without a care." Gibbon looked at the cigarette butt in his hand with a feeling of agitation, and extinguished it carefully while talking. "Oh?" "Both of them were minors when their parents died. According to civil law, minors have no right to handle their own estate, so their uncle became their guardian and managed their property while adopting them. At that time, due to business reasons, he urgently needed a sum of money. His uncle was a carefree man who just needed money right now, and he had such a disposable property at hand. It would be fine to borrow it for a short time, he said. What he thought at the time was that simple, and he really did something sorry for the two of them. He said that because of this, the two of them could not live there anymore. " Gibbon picked up the coffee, took the first sip, and sighed "ho". "Shortly after that, the two came to Tokyo, and at this time, Yoko reached the age of legal adulthood. In this way, Mian's guardian should also become Yoko, right?" "That is to say, if the fact that my sister is dead is made public at this time, I have to find a guardian as a minor. This is unbearable, so he pretends that his sister is still alive in front of others. That's it. Bar?" "Yes. And in two months, Mien will be of adult age. I put all my vacations together and did these surveys. After that, I used my rest days and after-get off work time, and like today, Secretly used the time when he was away from work, followed Mian like a detective. But I didn't find any clues. I went to their house several times, and I wanted to see Yoko, but I was kicked out by Mian. And when Mian was out There is always no one to answer the door at intervals. No matter how you think about it, it makes people feel unnatural, right?" "Well, it's a little strange." "I'm basically convinced that Yoko was not in that house, she was killed by Mian. And in two months, Mian will use some form to make Yoko's death public." Pretty paranoid delusions.If he is a psychologist, he may be able to analyze Gibbon's delusions to find out whether he suffers from inferiority complex, mental illness, or whether he suffered spiritual damage in childhood, etc.But I can't analyze it, I can only listen to it. "If this is the case, why can't Yuki wait another two months? Wait until I reach the age of adulthood before doing it, so I don't have to play these little tricks anymore?" "This, it must be, yes, there must be some accidental situation that made him kill people in advance." Gibbon said.His words sounded slightly slurred.But I'm not interested in asking more, anyway, this is just a delusion of a man with some problems in his mind. "That day, after get off work, I went to check at the door of his house, and I happened to see a girl coming out of his house. This was the first time I saw someone coming in and out of his house. I haven't seen that person, but I'm sure she was in his house just now. She stayed at home, so she should know if Yoko is there, no, even if she doesn't see Yoko herself, she should be able to tell if there are signs of someone other than Mian living at home. I followed her, who is she What is the relationship between her and Mian? I have been thinking about how to ask her these questions. If I get in touch with her casually, and she tells Mian about me, making Mian wary of me, it will be difficult. She walked straight towards the station, got on a tram, and got off at one of the stops. I think she lives here and is going home now, so just follow her. She was at the red light I was standing behind her, and when the light turned green, she just stepped out when she got into a car accident." Gibbon shook his head as if unable to bear the memory. "You were not at the scene by accident, but followed all the way there." I say.When delusions exist only in the mind, they are just delusions, but if they are put into action, they become so-called abnormalities. "There is something I want to ask you. You can tell Mian about my matter, but before that, I want to ask you to confirm whether Yoko lives in that house, or if there is any sign of living there. Can you help me?" His eyes are very serious. "I'm sorry." I also pretended to be serious, and replied, "I don't have the courage to approach the vicious criminal who killed my sister." Gibbon looked me in the eyes without moving, and smiled.I made a joke, and he believed it. "You still don't believe me." "Do you really want me to believe it?" "Is what I said unreasonable?" After Gibbon finished speaking, he nodded and took out a business card from his wallet. There were two phone numbers on the back of the business card. "The number of the home phone and mobile phone. At least, after your friend wakes up, can you please contact me?" Seeing me take the business card, Gibbon smiled. "I called the ambulance. In a sense, I am her savior, so I don't think it's too much to accept my gratitude." I reluctantly took the business card.On the business card was the name of a famous chemical company that even I knew. Goodbye then. Gibbon stood up and walked out of the coffee shop.Seeing that the two men stood up and left me first, the aunt in the store had a very happy expression on her face.