Chapter 80 THE NOTE

Chapter 80 THE NOTE
Mei POV

The vase sits on the table in base exactly as we left it.

I crouch down in front of it and look at it properly for the first time, the way you look at things when you have decided they are evidence rather than decoration. The lilies are fresh, which means they were placed here recently, within the last day certainly, possibly this morning while the theater was empty and the whole of TFP was occupied with the festival chaos.

Someone had access to this building while we were all otherwise engaged.

That is not a comfortable thought.

I lean closer.

The arrangement is not random. Someone took care with this, the blooms positioned deliberately, the stems trimmed to the same length, the whole thing assembled with the attention of someone who is used to sending flowers and knows how to make them say what words cannot. There is intention in it the same way there was intention in the lily bouquet sent to Naomi on the first night of the festival, the same deliberateness, the same refusal to be mistaken for something casual.

The same handwriting is my first thought before I realize I have not seen any handwriting.

I frown and look more closely.

There.

Tucked between two stems near the back of the arrangement, almost hidden by a large bloom, is a small card. I reach in carefully and extract it, the lily petals whispering against the back of my hand.

Declan appears at my shoulder.

I hold the card up in the light coming through the base room window.

The writing on it is small and precise, the specific careful hand of someone who has learned to write with awareness of how much space they have available, a hand shaped by forms and documents rather than letters. Not Sachi's handwriting. His is theatrical, large, the loops of it taking up twice the space they need to. Not Naomi's. I have seen her script on the cast call sheets pinned to the backstage board and it is rounded and practical.

I have not seen this hand before.

But I know who sent them.

There is only one person in Hollow Crest who would send lilies to a place where Naomi Stiles works, knowing about her allergy, knowing about the theater's significance, doing it not as an attack but as a message. The same person who sent the bouquet on the first festival night. The same person whose name is carved into the second nameplate on the archive hall wall. The same person whose photograph sits on my nightstand with a child's smile too big for her face.

I read the card.

Five words.

I know you are here.

Declan reads it over my shoulder. I hear his breath come out slowly.

"Toki Miyuki," he says.

"Yes," I say.

We are quiet for a moment. The base room hums with the sound of the equipment Ren left running, the cameras on their screens showing empty rooms and empty halls and the foyer with its chandelier and its cherry floors.

"She knows her father is in this building," Declan says. It is not a question.

"She has known since the first night I think," I say. "Maybe longer."

"Then why is she trying to close it?"

This is the question that has been sitting under everything since the first morning, and I look at the card in my hand and I think about a father in a chair by a cold fire weeping, and I think about a name hidden beneath a name, and I think about the old women in the square who would not say a certain name out loud.

"Because," I say slowly, the shape of it coming clearer as I say it, "she is angry with him."

Declan is quiet.

"She is angry with him," I say again, and the more I say it the more it settles into certainty, "and she cannot tell him that because he is dead. And so she is doing the thing she knows will hurt whatever is left of him."

The weight of this sits in the room for a moment.

I think about the ghost's eyes.

Oh my dear Kioko, what has happened to you?

He did not come back to fight her.

He is not haunting this building because he is confused or malicious or clinging to something he cannot release.

He came back because his daughter is here and she is hurting and he does not know how to reach her and the not knowing is doing things to the energy of this building that have been escalating since the moment she walked through the door.

He is not haunting the theater.

He is haunting her.

"Declan," I say, looking at the card in my hands.

"Yeah," he says.

"We need to figure out what happened between them."

He is quiet for a moment.

"Sachi knows," he says.

"Yes," I say.

We look at each other.

"Tonight," I say. "We get it out of him tonight."

Declan nods slowly, his eyes on the vase.

I tuck the card carefully into my pocket, next to the photograph on my nightstand in my mind, next to the name Kioko, next to the ghost's tired eyes and his finger to his lips and the word go delivered at enormous cost through the silence of someone who has not had a voice in a very long time.

I know you are here.

She left lilies for her father's ghost in the building he loved most.

Whatever she is angry about, she came back anyway.

She came back and she is here and something about that matters more than anything else on this case.

I just do not know yet what to do with it.