Sano shook his head pityingly. “Who found her, and when?” he asked Ota, who stood in the doorway behind him.

“One of the maids. Around noon,” Ota said.

Sano turned. “No one missed her until then?” Now he understood Minami’s impatience to remove Peony, before the stench permanently tainted the house.

Ota shrugged. “Minami said she must have sneaked away from the party last night, come up here, and killed herself. There was a disturbance—some guests got in a fight and had to be expelled from the quarter. No one noticed that Peony was gone. Her chambermates were entertaining clients in the guest rooms. The maids didn’t like Peony—she was a mean girl and a sloppy worker—so when she didn’t show up for her chores this morning, they didn’t bother looking for her. Then the cook noticed blood leaking through the pantry ceiling. We kept her just the way she was found because we thought you’d want to see.”

The explanation sounded reasonable, yet a sense of wrongness nagged at Sano’s mind when he recalled Peony serving the other courtesans, and the meeting at Governor Nagai’s office. He walked around the corpse to the table. It held a mirror, comb, lamp, and a lacquer box containing a sheet of thin paper covered with inked characters.

“Her suicide letter,” Ota said as Sano picked it up.

Sano noted that while the table and other articles all bore spatters of dried blood, the letter was clean. It read:

I must die to pay for killing the man I loved. It was an accident, but I blame myself.

During our love games, Spaen-san often brought out a gun he’d hidden in his room. He would lie on the bed, and I would mount him and point the gun at him while we coupled. We both enjoyed this. But last time, I got too excited. My finger pulled the trigger. The gun went off: boom! Spaen-san screamed. And through the smoke, I saw him lying dead, with a bloody hole in his chest.

I was so scared I didn’t know what to do. I took Spaen-san’s knife and tried to cut out the bullet, thinking I could bring him back to life. My hands shook so much that I stabbed his chest many times.