Reiko shuddered and continued, “The other vision was even worse. I was in bed with him. He was on top of me. We were-” She clawed her arms as if to tear the flesh that had touched Lord Mori’s, shaking her head violently.

Imagination completed the awful picture in Sano’s mind. His horror multiplied beyond belief. It seemed that his wife had seduced Lord Mori that night, just as Lady Mori had claimed.

“Then I had the dagger in my hands. I lunged at Lord Mori. I stabbed him.” Reiko pantomimed. Sano flinched. “And then-” She retched and emitted strangled gasps. “Then I was kneeling over a puddle of blood. The red chrysanthemum was in it. I was holding Lord Mori’s manhood.” Again Reiko pantomimed. Sano could almost see the severed, bloody organs in her palms. “And then I said-I said, ”Serves you right, you evil bastard!“ ”

She flung herself facedown and wept so hard that her body went into spasms. “So you see, it’s true. There’s no escaping it. I killed him! I deserve to be punished!”

Sano was so aghast that he couldn’t speak. Earlier he’d regretted that he didn’t have solid evidence to prove how the murder had really happened. Now he did. Reiko’s own memories were the strongest evidence against her. Yet he felt a strange sensation of relief because Reiko had finally been honest with him. Now that the air between them was clear, he was more inclined to give her the benefit of doubt than before.

“Maybe those visions don’t mean what they seem to,” he said.

She sat up and regarded him through red, swollen, disbelieving eyes. “What else could they mean?”

“Maybe you only imagined the things you saw in them.”

“I couldn’t have. They felt so real.” Reiko was despairing yet adamant. “They did happen. I know they did, no matter how much I want to believe they didn’t.”

“Maybe they were dreams. Dreams can seem very real. There could have been poison in the wine you drank, that gave you such powerful hallucinations that you thought they were memories of things that really happened.”

“But we don’t know that! How can we be sure that I didn’t do what I remember doing?”

“I know you.” Sano took her damp, cold, frail hands in his. “I know you couldn’t have killed Lord Mori.”

A shadow passed over her face, like clouds dimming a landscape already laid to waste by storms. “It’s not as if I’ve never killed before. Why not this time?”

Sano shied away from the idea that his wife had grown so accustomed to taking lives that there were no moral obstacles to prevent her. “Those other times, you killed to defend yourself or protect other people. That wasn’t murder. And you had no reason to kill Lord Mori. You said so yourself.”

“Maybe I confronted him because he strangled the boy. Maybe I asked him what he did with Lily’s son. Maybe I wanted to punish him for killing them both.” Reiko exhaled a sigh of desolation. “Or maybe there was no boy, no Lily, no Jiro. Those are the parts of my story that don’t seem real to me now. Maybe I killed Lord Mori because we were lovers and he jilted me.”

She regarded Sano with suspicion in her eyes. “Or maybe I did it to punish him because he tried to betray you.”

“No,” Sano said, dismayed that she should think there was truth to the story from the seance in spite of the fact that the medium had confessed to fraud. “That’s not so. And even if you can’t remember everything that happened that night, you surely couldn’t have forgotten everything that led up to it.”

“Couldn’t I?” Reiko’s face was a mask of self-doubt and fear. “I feel as if I’ve gone insane. I don’t know what I’m capable of anymore. All I’m sure of is that I killed Lord Mori.”

“What I’m sure of is that you didn’t,” Sano said with growing, passionate conviction.

But she shook her head. “It’s my duty to die. It’s your duty to do as I asked you.”

“Never!” Sano drew Reiko close. He felt shivers coursing through her as she leaned against him.

“This is worse than all those other times we’ve been in trouble, isn’t it?” she whispered. “We’ve done the things that saved us then, but this time we’ve failed. This time is really going to be the end for us, isn’t it?”

“No, it isn’t,” Sano said, determined to keep up their spirits.

Reiko lifted her face to his. Her eyes, wide with panic, beseeched him. “What can we do?”

He summoned his confidence, tried to infuse it into her. “We trust in ourselves. We don’t give up trying to find out the real truth about the murder.”

“But both our investigations have reached dead ends. What if this is the one crime we can’t solve, when it matters the most?”

He felt their child move inside her body, heard Masahiro’s voice in the distance. “Don’t even think about that.”

They sat silent, drawing comfort from their closeness. Sano wished he could stop time, could preserve this moment while they were still safe together, could shut out the dangerous world. But a manservant came to the door and said, “Excuse the interruption, but Sosakan Hi-rata is here to see you.”

Sano didn’t want to leave Reiko, and this was one instance when he didn’t welcome seeing his friend, but he couldn’t put it off. “I’m coming,” he told the servant.

Reiko clung to him, her face as panicky as if she thought he would never return, and he said, “You’d better put on some dry clothes. I’ll be with you soon.”

She nodded. Sano tore himself away. He found Hirata alone in the audience chamber, looking tired but elated.

“I’ve discovered something that might be important,” Hirata said.

Once more Sano was struck by how Hirata had changed. His image seemed brighter than the single lantern in the room could account for, as if his rigorous training had reduced his flesh so that the energy inside him showed. But although the change might be good for Hirata, it hadn’t been for the investigation.

“What is it?” Sano asked.

Hirata frowned slightly at the coolness in Sano’s manner. “It’s Enju. His alibi has a lot of room for doubt. And there’s reason to think that he and Lord Mori weren’t the most loving father and son in the world.”

He described how Enju could have arranged for someone to impersonate him traveling on the highway. He went on to the doctor who’d said that living at the Mori estate had changed Enju for the worse, and neither the young man nor his mother had attended Lord Mori during his near-fatal illness.

Sano was momentarily distracted from his problems concerning Hirata. “So your discoveries have brought us back to the family.”

He’d been so focused on Hoshina, he had to remind himself that Lady Mori, if not Enju, had been at the estate that night and invited Reiko there herself. Although he still favored Hoshina as the source of his troubles and Reiko’s, he couldn’t dismiss Lord Mori’s closest relations. Especially when incriminating them could exonerate Reiko.

“Lady Mori and Enju should be investigated further,” Sano said.

“I can do that tomorrow,” Hirata offered.

Here was the time to tackle the difficult issue. Sano said, “We’ll discuss that later. We have something else to talk about first.”

“What?” Hirata said, obviously wondering if something disastrous had happened-or if he’d done something wrong.

Sano decided not to tell him about Reiko’s revelations. “I examined the guns from Lord Mori’s warehouse. I found a possible connection between some of them and Police Commissioner Hoshina.” As he explained about the craftsmen’s marks and the weapons missing from the police arsenal, surprise blended with dismay in Hirata’s expression. “I must ask you why you didn’t notice the marks.”

Hirata opened his mouth to speak, closed it, then flopped his hands. “I guess I should have. I don’t know where my mind was.”

But they both knew it had been on esoteric martial arts techniques. Sano mustered the stomach for what he needed to say. This sort of personal exchange was more difficult than a sword-fight. “You missed an important clue. If I hadn’t taken a look at those guns myself, it might have gone undiscovered.”