Fading Fast

Unusual Tastes

Misaki scrambles out of the taxi, her feet hitting the ground with a solid pat! at the same moment. Her hair, even less neat than it was before she got in, has been pulled at and tugged on in the heat of sketching rough lists of questions.

Who, what, where, when, why, how? She’d used the six vital questions as bases for her questions time and time again, but somehow they’d seemed too mundane this time.

How do you report something like this? She wonders as she pays the taxi driver, a grumbling, middle-aged woman, and the black car speeds away.

She stands in the middle of the only exit and entrance for Nakajima International Senior High School, taking a deep breath. Her phone in one hand, notepad in the other, and pen stuck awkwardly in her hair, she begins the long march to the front of the school.

When she enters the parking lot, the dark blue car that had been shielded from her view by trees comes to a screeching halt inches away from her. Misaki jumps, looking at the passengers and bowing in a very panicked, apologetic fashion, rushing away from the car.

But as she watches it pull away, even with the pressure of time and other reporters closing in on her story, she can’t help but think about the driver and the man sitting next to him.

One had black hair, the other’s was white; one was obviously Japanese, while the other was foreign; one was subtly handsome, and the other was blindingly gorgeous.

“You’ve got an uncanny knack for noticing small details in split seconds,” Satsuki had told her not too long after she’d first started writing for the paper. “That ability is rare, and well sought after. Apply it to your job well.”

And so she learned to. She worked hard—and is still working hard—at noticing what everyone missed, things that seemed insignificant at the moment, but then became bigger later on in a story. And the other reporters that chanced upon her articles ask, How did you know? She always shook her head and replied honestly.

I didn’t. She never has, and will probably never know.

When Misaki reaches the school entrance, the place is swamped with police officers, and someone familiar stands nearby. They have a blanket around their shoulders that had obviously been placed there, shoulder-length blonde, silky hair in a loose ponytail, tucked beneath the cloth, and they look more put-together in their very wrinkled suit than she does right then.

“Marta!” Misaki calls, and the man turns to raise his eyebrows at her. “How did you get here so fast?”

“I’ve been here all along.” Marta, the star photographer of Tokyo Echo, is someone Misaki has known for years. “Did Satsuki not tell you?”

No, he didn’t. When does he ever tell me? “What is it?”

“I’m the sole witness.”

Misaki’s jaw drops. “You have got to be kidding. Our photographer, the only witness to something like this? They’re going to think something’s fishy, like we staged the whole thing and then had a guy fall and pulled some tricks—”

“Or they’ll see it as it is; hitting the jackpot by pure luck.” Marta shrugs. “You do realize we have a real scoop on our hands, right?”

“You’re an idiot.” Misaki glares at him and the coffee he’s holding in his hands. “Of course I do!”

He offers the cup to her, but she shakes her head ferociously. “Suit yourself. So, are you going to interview me or what?”

“Of course I am! Be ashamed at yourself for even asking that silly question; banish the very doubts of my journalistic skills from your mind!”

“‘Of course’ this, ‘of course’ that…when will you actually do the da—”

“Name?” Misaki pulls her notepad out, listening intently.

She knows his name, he knows. He also knows that she will follow through with her questions even if she kills her. Realizing she is in her zone already, Marta just sighs and answers, “Marta Tenit.”

“Age? Occupation?”

“Twenty-eight…”

They go back and forth like this for a while until Marta has exhausted his memory of all details regarding the event; Misaki moves on to the chief of police, and then Inspector Matsumoto. At the end of his interview, just as she is turning away, Matsumoto asks an interesting question.

“Are you going to interview them?”

He is, of course, referring to the two names he had given her early on in his interview: Hitomi Kato and Lysander Morel. The names of the two people running the business “Sumi-e Detective Agency”.

“Of course,” she responds curtly, tucking her notepad, her means of looking up their address later, safely into her coat pocket. “I take it they’re not here any longer?”

“No. They left just as you came, actually. They were in a—”

“—dark blue car, yes?” Misaki nods. “Yes, I saw them.”

“You did? How come you didn’t stop them?”

She grins. “Well, I would’ve apart from the fact that they nearly ran me over.”

Misaki doesn’t add on that she’s been nearly run over several times before—sometimes intentionally, usually by accident; the life of a reporter—and that would have hardly stopped her from trying to get an interview with the mysterious pair she’d seen exiting the school lot. No, what did halt her in her tracks was not the odd looks of the two, nor the possibility that, for a fleeting second, she may have thought that they could not be involved in the mystery.

She bids the inspector good-bye, as she sees that he is thoroughly fed up with her ceaseless questioning, and walks with Marta to his still-parked car. He pulls out of the spot, and drives past rows and rows of marked, white lines on the cement, none like the human one she’d seen.

They stop at the entrance of the lot, and as Marta is checking to make sure the coast is clear, she recalls what she saw standing just a few feet from where she is sitting, then, in his car. They move onto the road, and she wonders. And wonders.

And wonders some more about the ghost in the backseat of the detectives’ car.