Year of the Talking Dog: A Hana Walker Mystery (The Hana Walker Mysteries Book 2) Read Online Free

across the front in red: Hana. He’d painted my name on the book on the day he proposed.
    Tears fall now onto the sketchbook. My tears blending with the H in Hana. How can this be here in the rubbish? I hold it in my hands, clutch it to my chest.
    I pull out a loose sheet. It’s a sketch in pencil. A man sleeps on a bench below a window with bars. On the walls are scribbled the letters “AOI AOI” in different sizes, but they cover the whole wall. The man’s face is turned to the wall, but he looks like Steve, only smaller and more pitiful. There is nothing else in the room but the wall and under the bench has been shaded in with pencil. It looks cold and miserable. The man looks weak and under pressure, weighted down by the strange words on the wall. It’s sad, nothing like Steve’s other pictures. And why is it in the collection with my pictures? I rub the corner of the paper where he had written his name. S. Kemp. It’s heavy watercolour paper, almost the thickness of card, but the paper feels grooved and pitted. I run my fingers over it like Steve used to do in the art department of Joyful Honda. I close my eyes and just feel the paper. I can hear Steve stammering with excitement: “Just feel that. Feel the beauty of the texture, it’s as tough as denim and you can paint or draw on both sides.”  
    Both sides. I open my eyes and turn the paper over. On the back are rougher practice pencil sketches of hands. A girl’s hands. Some reaching out, others in fists, some with fat fingers and others with thin. But on each wrist there are letters. The same letters from different angles. Letters tattooed onto the wrists. In one sketch the hands are holding onto a skyscraper jutting into the sky.  
    Each hand has one of three letters. A or O or I.

CHAPTER FOUR

    I stuff the picture back into the sketchbook and clasp it to my chest. Why is everything that was in the flat out here in the rubbish? Who put it here? Why? Could Steve have done it himself? Why?
    I have to think. I crouch down and sit with my arms wrapped around the sketchbook, pressing it to my knees. I’m surrounded by all the neat piles of everything that was Steve’s. I have to get some answers. I start with the easiest.
    It wasn’t Steve who dumped all this stuff here. Steve isn’t capable of cleaning up his apartment and sorting everything neatly into burnables, unburnables and recyclables, certainly not in neat Japanese bundles. Not even in the 48 hours since I had last seen him. And Steve would never throw out his old pictures. And not the ones of me. I’m sure of that. So, if it wasn’t Steve, then it was someone else. The landlord? He would have had only 12 hours to have chucked everything out since the 11:12 train. And why, in a half-unrented building, would he be so eager to clear out the room and change the lock in the middle of the night? No, that makes no sense.
    I have a feeling eyes are on me. Someone is watching me. I look around, but there is no one on the sliver of street I can see. Behind me lies concrete and a two-foot wide space between manshunbuildings. Above me are black windows each with a little red triangle reaching up into the sky. I shudder. The triangles mean each window has an emergency escape chute in case of earthquake. But nobody is looking at me. That I can see.    
    I know I should move on, but I’m not exactly sure where. I have to think. The thought of lugging that suitcase back to the station lockers fills my burning fingers with dread. I check my purse. My life savings of ¥4,327 make it easy to decide. I will leave my suitcase where it is. It’s not like there’s anything of any value in it. Not even for me. And I might need the ¥200 locker charge for something else. Like food. When did I last eat? It feels like a long time ago.
    I walk back down the hill, under the rail line and past Tower Records onto the main street. If I turn left I’ll come to Shibuya Station, to the Hachiko exit where people who