Once upon a time, Mrs. Onigawa was a good neighbor. Everyone thought so.
It was a golden age for neighborhoods, a long time ago, when everyone would share fruit from their trees and food they made on special occasions such as Christmas or New Year’s Day.
Mrs. Onigawa went above and beyond in these kindnesses. She would bake cookies all the time. The smell would waft around the neighborhood, and you knew, salivating at the thought, that soon the little old Japanese widow would be stopping by with a paper plate full of peanut butter or chocolate chip cookies.
She made terrific mochi, not only at New Years, but any time she was in the mood. My parents liked the ones filled with red or white beans, but I always preferred the purity of chi chi dango.
Her trees were cared for like the children she never had, and they bore fruit in abundance. She’d appear on your doorstep with brown paper grocery bag sacks of mangos or avocados or any other fruit that was in season.
That’s when she was a good neighbor. But time and age change all of us. Mrs. Onigawa’s transformation was of the slower variety, spreading out slowly like urban sprawl. First, she stopped baking. There were no more goodies delivered to our door.
Then you saw her trees, her entire yard, begin to fall into a picture of decline from neglect. Weeds sprung up to replace her manicured lawn and picturesque flower beds. And her beautiful trees began to look haggard and worn, the dead branches gradually outnumbering the living.
When you saw Mrs. Onigawa then, if you saw her at all, there was no cheerful greeting, not even a wave. Like her garden, she began to age, to look rundown, and to wear away.
But the worst was yet to come. It was the notes. At first, I couldn’t figure out why they would show up, either folded under my windshield wipers or placed in my mailbox.
The notes said things like, Why don’t you sweep your driveway? You make too much noise when you have parties. Your dog barks too much. And there was never a signature.
I would never have guessed that Mrs. Onigawa had written these. Finally, after I’d received five or six of them, I checked with a couple of neighbors and found that none of them had received any notes like this. Apparently, I was the only victim.
And then one day the mystery was solved. I went out much earlier than usual to drive to work. When I stepped out my front door in the morning darkness, I saw someone standing near my car.
Walking closer, I could see that it was Mrs. Onigawa, and she was in the act of placing a note under my windshield wiper.
“Mrs. Onigawa,” I said, “is that note for me?”
By now I was close enough to see her face, and the snarling glare she gave me frightened me a bit. She said nothing, but I was momentarily of the mind that she might spring at me, attack me like some kind of vicious wild animal.
Turning back to my car, she ripped the note from the wiper blade and stormed off, chugging down the street as if she meant to pound holes in the ground with each stomping footfall.
“What is it?” I called after her. “What is it you want to tell me now?”
But she turned into her driveway, disappearing without a word.
I’d intended to get to work extra early, but now it was more important to find out what exactly it was that had made my one-time most friendly of neighbors turn on me.
I ran down to her house and knocked on the door.
“Mrs. Onigawa,” I called to her, “it’s me, Chris Lee. Please come talk to me.”
There was no answer. I knocked again. This time the door opened a crack. Because there was no light on in the house, I couldn’t see anything, but Mrs. Onigawa was there. I could hear her breathing.
And then she hissed, “Get away from my house. Go or I’m going to call the cops.”
“Call the police,” I said, dismayed. “Why would you do that, Mrs. Onigawa? Have I done something to make you angry with me? Why are you writing all these notes?”
My questions went unanswered. “Get away from me!” she shouted, and the door closed.
Confused, I returned to my car and drove off to work. All day the vision of the old woman placing the note on my car and the subsequent meeting at her house plagued me. I could get little work done, and at 5:00 I left having accomplished nothing near what I’d hoped.
Driving home, I contemplated going back to her home to try to talk to Mrs. Onigawa. But I abandoned that idea as I approached my house. There was a firetruck, an ambulance, and two police cars outside the old woman’s house.
After I parked, I walked down to her driveway. One of the police officers was working on some paperwork.
“Excuse me,” I said, “I live up the street. Is Mrs. Onigawa okay?”
“No,” he said, “she’s not. One of the neighbors heard a scream. He came over to check on her. When she didn’t answer him, he called 911.”
“What happened?”
“I was first on the scene,” he said. “When I went in, I found her lying on the floor. It looks like someone hit her in the head with something. A lot of blood. It’s a mess.”
I pictured Mrs. Onigawa lying on the floor in a pool of blood.
“Thank you,” I said.
“What’s your name?” asked the officer.
“Christopher Lee.”
“Christopher Lee,” he said, sounding as if he was about to scream ‘Eureka!’ “Where were you this afternoon at 3:30?”
“Ah, at 3:30? Well, I was at work. Why do you ask?”
“It’s routine,” he said. “We’re going to have to canvas the neighborhood. That’s the way it works when we’re looking at murder. But it just so happens that when I looked around in the house, I saw she wrote your name on the erasable board in her kitchen. Why do you think she did that, Mr. Lee.”
“What? I, well, ah, I don’t know. But she was leaving notes for me about things like my dog barking. I don’t know why she picked on me like that. There are people with barking dogs all over this neighborhood, but no one except me has been getting these anonymous notes.”
The officer looked me up, down, and sideways. It creeped me out. “Anonymous? Then how do you know it’s her?”
“I found out this morning. When I came out of my house to go to work, she was putting a note under my windshield wiper.”
“So you were angry with her then?”
“Well no, not angry. I asked her why she was doing it, but she wouldn’t tell me. I wasn’t angry. I wanted to discuss whatever it was that was bothering her.”
And your workplace, there are people there who can verify you were at work around 3:30?”
“Of course, there are.”
He gave me a stare like a sharp steel probe sizzling into my gray matter. I could smell the smoke.
“Okay, Mr. Lee, I’ll be checking that out.”
And with that, he went back to his paperwork.
My legs were shaking a bit as I walked home. I hate to admit it, but someone having killed Mrs. Onigawa took a back seat of concern compared to knowing that my name had been emblazoned on her erasable kitchen board.
Furthermore, that I was a suspect in her murder seemed beyond the pale. I was no murderer of old women or anybody else. I couldn’t do it. It’s just not in me. I know myself.
I sat down with a beer and tried to clear my head. The alcohol helped numb me a little, but I jumped when my phone rang.
“Yes?”
There was heavy breathing on the other end.
“Hello?” I said.
“I took care of her for you,” came a muffled voice. “That old lady is not going to bother you anymore.”
And then the person hung up. I thought it might be a male voice, but I couldn’t be sure.
There was, however, one thing of which I could be sure. Whoever it was who called had solved the problem of Mrs. Onigawa’s for good.
Lanning Lee 