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without me.
    I pressed the call button and waited for a while, watching a panel of lights over the door tell me where the elevator was traveling. It went all the way up to the ninth floor and then slowly descended, stopping on each floor before the empty elevator finally arrived. I got in and used the mirrored wall to do a quick lipstick touch-up. Natsumi's perfect looks had made me self-conscious.
    I took the elevator to the fourth floor, where I stepped out into the foyer where I'd picked up my cherry branches for the previous day's class. I did not see Aunt Norie. She might have gone into the classroom. The door was closed, so I knocked on it.
    A soft noise coming from within sounded like a cat's meow, and I recoiled. I associate cats with death because of a bad experience from a year earlier. Since then Richard had tried to get me interested in adopting a kitten, but I'd always refused. Cats scared me. To be on the safe side, I laid down the package of antique plates and opened the classroom door.
    My aunt was at the distant end of the room by the blackboard and teaching table. I heard the mewing again and realized it was her voice. I drew closer and saw she was bent over a long white boulder. A woman was lying on the ground. Somebody had fallen, and Aunt Norie was staying with her until help arrived. I rushed forward to see what had happened.
    Aunt Norie looked up at me, and her face was wet with tears. She croaked, "Stay away, Rei-chan! Don't come near. Don't look, I beg you!"
    But I'd already seen Sakura Sato laid out on her back as if in slumber. Her eyes were closed, but her mouth gaped, revealing a few gold fillings. Blood trickled in a sticky red river down the neck of her white silk blouse. At the source of the river was an instrument: the ikebana scissors. I recognized the oversized black handles and looked to Aunt Norie for confirmation.
    She was gone.

Chapter 3
    I fled into the hall, the door knocking against the package of plates I'd left outside. The row of lights above the elevator showed it was on the ninth floor, so I ducked into the emergency exit staircase and began running downstairs. I heard footsteps a few flights down from me. When I burst out on the second floor near the administrative office, I found my aunt collapsed in the arms of Miss Okada.
    "Sakura," Aunt Norie moaned. "Sakura!"
    When the police came, I was stunned to see among the stern-looking blue-suited men, a young Japanese officer with unruly black hair and warm brown eyes, that I knew well. Lieutenant Hata, of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, had helped me through a series of adventures the year before. I shouldn't have been surprised to see him there, since Roppongi was his territory. He raised one eyebrow slightly as a sign of greeting but didn't say anything more, probably due to the presence of an inspector from the National Police Agency. The inspector was a bossy-looking man in his forties who was loudly asking questions of the doorman, the only male Kayama employee in sight.
    As this inspector started querying Aunt Norie, she broke down sobbing on the shoulder of Miss Okada. Lieutenant Hata urged her to sit down, and the inspector began grilling me. I was going over the sequence of events as carefully as possible, when the school's elevator announced its arrival with an electronic chirp. As the doors parted I saw Natsumi Kayama's bright yellow and orange dress. She had her back to us and was arguing loudly with somebody in the elevator.
    "I cannot stand the way you behave!" she was saying to whoever was with her. As her companion hit the elevator door to keep it from closing and stepped around her, I recognized the cool young man who had been at the previous day's ikebana class. Instead of jeans, he was wearing a loose-fitting linen suit. He looked elegant and intensely annoyed, as he stepped around Natsumi and headed down the hall.
    "You can't do it. Don't try!" Natsumi hustled down the hail after him, but at seeing all of us, she