Goth by Otsuichi Page B

followed, but I hadn’t heard about any such discoveries recently.
    †
    On my way home from school that Wednesday and Thursday, I made inquiries at homes where pets had gone missing, covering one house each day. The homeowners didn’t seem to suspect that I didn’t actually work for the school newspaper, and they were helpful.
    But I found no real new information about the culprit. Both the stolen animals were small, and both were mutts. One of the pet owners had found partially eaten food left behind, the other had not.
    On Friday, I once again got on a bus, heading for a home with a missing pet. According to the information I had managed to gather, this was the earliest disappearance, and the farthest from my home and school. It was one of the houses along the river.
    Comparing my map with the addresses, I found the house I was looking for. It was newly built. I rang the front doorbell, but it seemed nobody was home.
    There was a small garden with a bed of tulips, along with a dog food dish in front of an empty doghouse. The dish was made of plastic; it was a bit dirty, and it had “Marble’s dish” written in marker in a childish scrawl.
    I left the house and got back on the bus, this time getting off at a stop near home.
    It was Friday; another pet might well vanish tonight. As I was thinking about that, someone called out to me. I turned around and saw Sakura, wearing her junior high school uniform and pushing her bike toward me. She jogged a little until she caught up with me.
    She always stopped at cram school on her way home, studying for a few more hours, so I asked her what she was doing there so early.
    “Something came up, and I couldn’t go to cram school today,” she said listlessly. She looked a little pale and downcast, and she could barely keep her bike going in a straight line.
    “You saw something again?” I asked, taking her bicycle.
    She thanked me and nodded.
    Sakura was born under an unusual star, giving her what I called a gift but what she detested and called a curse: Sakura frequently discovered corpses.
    The first time was on an elementary school field trip to the mountains. She had been in the first grade, and she’d become separated from the others. She ended up at the edge of a pond, where she found a human corpse floating in the water.
    The second time was four years later. Sakura had gone to the sea with a friend’s family, and she’d once again been separated from the others. This time, she found a man’s body washed up on the rocks by the shore.
    The third time was three years later, in her second year of junior high, at her volleyball club camp. After taking a wrong turn while out jogging, she’d found herself in a deserted area. Then she’d tripped over something—a human skull.
    Every time she found a body, she came home looking pale. Then she would run a fever and spend the next week in bed.
    “Why is it always me?” she cried.
    The gaps between her discoveries were getting shorter, and a quick estimate suggested she would find her fourth body this year or next. When she got old, she might very well find them every minute or two.
    “So what did you find today?” I asked, as the wheels of her bike squealed at my side.
    “On the way to cram school, I saw something … and then I felt sick and decided to skip.”
    Between the junior high and her cram school, there was a river with wide banks—broad, shallow, and slow moving. Crossing the river was a big concrete bridge, which lots of cars used. There was a separate lane for bikes and pedestrians.
    “I had my bag and a towel in the basket of my bicycle.”
    The towel was a blue and white one she used often. A truck had zipped by, and the wind had sent the towel into the air. Before she could catch it, it had flown over the edge of the bridge, dropping out of sight.
    With cars zipping past behind her, she had leaned over the railing, looking down. Fortunately, the towel had not fallen into the river. Rather, it was