The rain didn't stop completely until the afternoon.
The dark clouds that had covered the sky since morning gradually cleared, but puddles still remained here and there throughout the alleyways.
A few raindrops clung to the glass door of Garam Bookstore.
Kkami, who was lying by the window, watched one of them slowly trickle downward for a while.
Then he licked his front paw.
“I don't feel like going out today.”
Garam said it while turning the pages of a workbook at the counter.
“Who told you to go out?”
“I'm just giving you a heads-up.”
“No one asked.”
“Important things should be announced in advance.”
Garam stopped his pencil and looked at Kkami.
“You don't like rainy days?”
“I don't like getting wet.”
“Isn't that the same thing?”
“It's different.”
Kkami was firm.
Garam didn't bother arguing further.
Under the counter, Chichi was wrestling with a paper bag.
It was a bag from the bakery next door.
It was empty, but every time its folded handles moved, Chichi's eyes moved with them.
Tap.
Once with her paw.
The bag toppled over.
Chichi lowered her body.
Tap again.
The bag slid away.
“Chichi.”
Garam called her.
Chichi didn't stop.
“What?”
“That was set aside to go in the trash.”
“It hasn't gone in yet.”
“Exactly.”
“So it isn't mine yet?”
“How does that follow?”
Instead of answering, Chichi shoved her head into the bag.
Her body was outside, but her head disappeared inside.
Watching her, Boss said in a low voice,
“You're going to get stuck.”
Chichi's voice echoed from inside the bag.
“I'm not getting stuck.”
The very next moment,
the entire bag started moving.
With a sigh, Garam got up.
“You really will get stuck.”
When he lifted the bag, Chichi's face popped out.
She looked extremely pleased with herself.
“This is fun.”
“Looks that way.”
Garam pulled Chichi out, set her on the floor, and folded the bag.
Just then, a car drove through a puddle outside.
Sploosh!
Chichi jumped and looked toward the glass door.
“What was that?”
Boss only moved his ears.
“A car.”
“I know.”
“Then why ask?”
Chichi clamped her mouth shut for a moment.
Garam laughed and went back to the counter.
There had even been thunder last night.
It had been quite a racket for spring rain.
It must have been around one in the morning.
Garam had woken briefly at the sound of a huge clap of thunder.
There had also been a loud crashing noise from downstairs, and when he came down in the morning, he found evidence that Chichi had hidden under a chair and shoved over a flowerpot while doing so.
She insisted it hadn't been her.
Of course, not a single cat believed her.
“You weren't too scared of the thunder, were you?”
Garam asked.
Chichi answered immediately.
“I wasn't scared.”
Boss said,
“You hid.”
“That was because it suddenly got loud.”
“The sound?”
“Yeah.”
“That means you were scared.”
Chichi glared at Boss.
“I said I wasn't scared.”
Gramps, lying in the armchair, said without even opening his eyes,
“If you're scared, just say you're scared. You're young, but you've got quite the ego.”
“I'm not young.”
Gramps opened one eye.
“You?”
Chichi had no comeback.
Garam suppressed a laugh and lowered his eyes back to his workbook.
Come to think of it, Goro was nowhere to be seen.
He had probably gone outside during the break in the rain.
Garam read one more line of the math problem.
That was when it happened.
Jingle.
The door opened.
Garam looked up.
A girl who looked about middle-school age stood in the doorway.
The ends of her hair were slightly wet.
She held a folded blue umbrella in one hand and a leash in the other.
Garam's gaze stopped on the leash.
A red leash.
Nothing was attached to the end.
The girl was breathing a little heavily.
“Is this….”
She started to speak, then swallowed once.
“Is this the place that finds lost things?”
Garam closed his workbook.
“Yeah.”
The girl tightened her grip on the leash.
“Do you find dogs, too?”
Garam looked at her for a moment.
“Did you lose one?”
The girl nodded.
Only then did Garam take off his glasses and set them on the counter.
“Come in.”
The dog's name was Bori.
Five years old.
Male.
A medium-sized dog with light brown fur.
Garam studied the photo the girl showed him on her phone for a long while.
In the picture, Bori's ears were half-folded, and he looked as if he were smiling with his mouth open.
He was wearing the same red leash the girl was holding now.
“He went missing last night.”
The girl said it.
“Around what time?”
“A little after eleven.”
“From your house?”
“Yes.”
Garam wrote in his notebook.
Bori. Five years old. Male.
“How did he get out?”
The girl bit her lip.
“Because of the thunder.”
Garam's pencil stopped.
“The thunder?”
“Bori's really scared of loud noises.”
The girl looked down at the leash.
“Yesterday, when it started raining and thundering, he kept whining, so Mom brought him into the living room. But then there was this incredibly loud crash.”
Garam remembered it, too.
There had been one huge clap even earlier than the one in the middle of the night.
It had been loud enough to make the windows tremble for a moment.
“Was the front door open then?”
“Dad had opened it to receive a package, but….”
The girl's voice grew quieter.
“Bori just ran out.”
“You followed him right away?”
“Yes.”
“How far did you see him go?”
“I saw him all the way to the end of the alley.”
She moved her hand as if pointing in a direction.
“But then a car passed, and there was another clap of thunder… I couldn't see him after that.”
“Did your family keep looking after that?”
“Until dawn.”
“And today?”
“Mom and Dad are still looking.”
The girl's eyes reddened.
“We called the police and contacted animal hospitals… We're putting up flyers nearby, too.”
Garam was silent for a moment.
The girl had already done quite a lot of what she could.
Garam asked,
“Where does Bori usually go?”
“The walking trail.”
“Where's that?”
“Toward the stream.”
“Anywhere else?”
“The park.”
“Does he have a favorite person or dog?”
The girl thought for a moment.
“There’s a dog he often meets at the park. A little white one.”
“What’s its name?”
“Dubu.”
Garam wrote it in his notebook.
“Does Bori go up to people easily?”
“He’s wary of anyone outside our family.”
“What if they offer him food?”
“Sometimes he’ll take it, but when he’s scared, he won’t eat anything.”
“What about cars?”
“He’s scared of them.”
Garam nodded.
Bori's behavior when calm and his behavior when terrified were likely to be different.
Especially if he had run away to escape the thunder, it would be difficult to assume he had gone to his familiar walking trail.
Boss, who had been listening from under the counter, said,
“He ran to get away from the noise.”
Garam asked quietly,
“Where?”
“Somewhere quiet.”
The girl tilted her head, apparently thinking Garam was talking to himself.
Garam immediately asked her,
“Is there somewhere near your house where he could hide quietly?”
“Somewhere to hide?”
“Somewhere without much traffic, where he could stay out of the rain.”
The girl thought for a moment.
“Like a parking lot?”
“An underground one?”
“Yes. There’s the underground parking garage at our apartment complex, too….”
Garam wrote it down.
Boss spoke again.
“That’s not the only possibility.”
Garam nodded.
He didn’t know exactly where the dog had gone.
Boss could narrow down the possibilities by reading the situation, and nothing more.
Garam closed his notebook.
“Let’s start by going to the last place Bori was seen.”
The girl’s eyes widened.
“Now?”
“Yeah.”
“But school….”
Garam checked the date on his phone.
“It’s Saturday.”
The girl paused.
“Oh.”
Garam paused, too.
Then he said in the most casual tone,
“Even high school seniors get Saturdays off sometimes.”
From the armchair, Gramps muttered,
“Anyone listening would think you studied every day.”
Garam glared at him.
“Be quiet.”
The girl apparently heard only Gramps meowing and gave a small laugh.
“There are so many cats.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you raise them all?”
Garam looked around at the cats.
Kkami by the window.
Chichi under the counter.
Boss beside the door.
Gramps in the armchair.
Goro still out.
Garam answered,
“We just live together.”
Kkami said,
“Who’s raising whom?”
Garam pretended not to hear him.
The alley where Bori had last been seen was about a fifteen-minute walk from Garam Bookstore.
The girl led the way.
Garam, Boss, and Chichi followed behind her.
Kkami stayed behind, saying he didn’t like walking on wet roads.
Gramps also stayed at the bookstore, agreeing to pass Bori’s description along to the neighborhood cats.
Garam had shown him the photo for quite a while before leaving, but Gramps had grumbled.
“Two ears, four legs, brown fur. They all look alike.”
“He’s wearing a red leash, too.”
“Do I have to memorize the color of a dog’s leash?”
“Please.”
“Fine.”
“The kid’s been listening awfully well lately.”
“You wouldn’t do it if I didn’t listen.”
“Good enough.”
And so Gramps’s information network began to move, too.
When they reached the alley, the girl pointed ahead.
“Here.”
It was a road lined with low houses.
The ground was still damp from last night’s rain.
“Bori ran this far.”
“What happened after that?”
“Over there.”
The girl pointed toward the main road.
“I couldn’t see him for a moment because a car passed, but when I looked again, he was gone.”
Garam looked around.
The main road was to the left.
A narrow alley was to the right.
Across from them was the entrance to a small parking lot.
A little farther away, there was also a road leading toward the stream.
Boss walked ahead without a word.
He wasn’t sniffing the ground.
Instead, he slowly surveyed the surroundings.
The width of the alley.
The traffic.
The eaves where he could avoid the rain.
Places people came and went.
Gaps where a dog could hide.
Unlike Boss, Chichi quickly made a wide circuit of the area.
“I’ll look over here, too!”
Garam said,
“Don’t go too far.”
“Okay!”
Chichi ran toward the parking lot.
Watching her, the girl asked,
“Are the cats helping look, too?”
Garam nodded.
“Yeah.”
“For the dog?”
“Yeah.”
“Aren’t dogs and cats supposed to hate each other?”
Garam thought for a moment.
“Not necessarily.”
Boss said beside him,
“There are dogs some cats hate, and dogs they don’t.”
Garam relayed it as he heard it.
“He says it depends on the dog.”
The girl laughed.
“Who says that?”
Garam pointed at Boss.
The girl looked down at Boss.
Boss didn’t look away.
The girl’s expression grew a little amazed.
“He really looks like he’s talking.”
“He is talking.”
“What?”
Garam faltered.
There was no need to explain his ability in detail to a client yet.
“Through his expression.”
“Oh.”
The girl accepted that without question.
Garam quietly breathed a sigh of relief.
Boss glanced at Garam once but said nothing.
Bori wasn’t in the parking lot.
Chichi checked beneath the cars one by one and came back.
“Not here.”
“Did you check all the way inside?”
“Yeah.”
“Anything strange?”
Chichi thought for a moment.
“The sound of dripping water.”
“Other than that.”
“Pigeons.”
“Other than that.”
“A red ball.”
“Chichi.”
“Nothing.”
Garam struggled not to laugh.
Boss went out toward the main road, then came back.
“It might not be this way.”
“Why?”
Garam asked.
“Too many cars.”
In fact, cars kept passing along the main road.
Boss said,
“It’s unlikely he went straight that way while frightened.”
“Unlikely, not impossible.”
“Yeah.”
Garam nodded.
The girl asked cautiously,
“What did he say?”
After a moment’s thought, Garam said,
“He thinks Bori might have been scared of the main road, so we should check the other direction first.”
“Boss said that?”
“Yeah.”
By now, the girl was starting to look a little intrigued.
Her worry hadn’t disappeared, but she wasn’t breathing as hard as when she had first entered the bookstore.
Garam deliberately didn’t point that out.
Just then, they heard a dog barking from the opposite end of the alley.
Woof!
Woof, woof!
The girl jerked her head up.
“Bori?”
She was about to run.
Garam moved after her.
Boss and Chichi exited the alley first.
The sound was coming from a small house beyond a wall.
The girl stopped.
“No….”
A small black dog stood inside the wall.
It kept barking at the strangers approaching.
Woof!
Woof, woof!
Garam looked at the dog, too.
The dog barked again.
“Woof! Woof!”
That was all Garam could hear from it, too.
It wasn’t speech.
Just barking.
Chichi looked at the black dog and said,
“Should I ask him?”
Garam nodded.
“Yeah. Ask if he saw Bori.”
The girl’s eyes widened.
“That dog?”
“Yeah.”
“You want me to ask him?”
Garam paused.
“No.”
The girl looked even more confused.
“Then who?”
Garam looked at Chichi.
“Chichi.”
“…The cat is going to ask the dog?”
“Yeah.”
The girl’s face filled with incomprehension.
Naturally.
Chichi, completely uninterested in such human confusion, approached the wall.
The black dog barked at her.
Woof, woof!
Chichi gave a short cry in return.
“Hey.”
Woof!
“Did you see a big brown dog?”
The black dog barked again.
To Garam, it was still meaningless noise.
But Chichi listened closely for a moment.
Then she asked again,
“He had something red around his neck.”
The dog barked several more times.
Chichi turned back to Garam.
“He says he saw him.”
Garam’s expression changed at once.
“When?”
Chichi exchanged a few more words with the dog.
“Last night.”
“Where did he go?”
Several more barks.
Chichi pointed farther into the alley.
“He says Bori ran that way.”
The girl looked back and forth between Garam and Chichi.
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“That dog really told you?”
Garam thought for a moment.
It was a little too late to keep dodging the question.
“I can only understand cat speech.”
The girl blinked.
“…What?”
“I can’t understand dogs.”
“But just now—”
“Chichi can understand him.”
Garam said it very matter-of-factly.
“So I told her to ask him.”
The girl said nothing.
Garam didn’t bother explaining further.
A few seconds later,
the girl very slowly looked down at Chichi.
Chichi had raised her tail and was asking the black dog something else.
The girl’s mouth fell slightly open.
“Seriously….”
Garam said,
“You don’t have to believe me if you don’t want to.”
“No.”
The girl shook her head emphatically.
“I want to believe you.”
“Why believe it so quickly?”
“As long as we can find Bori, right?”
Garam looked at her for a moment after hearing that.
Then he smiled faintly.
“That’s true.”
The direction the black dog gave them wasn’t toward the stream.
It was in the opposite direction.
A narrow road lined with old houses and small shops.
If Bori had been running to escape the thunder, it was a direction he could easily have chosen.
Boss led the way.
Chichi followed beside him.
The girl walked behind them with Garam.
“Miss.”
“Yeah?”
“Can you really only hear cats?”
“Yeah.”
“What about birds?”
“I can’t hear them.”
“Dogs?”
“You just saw.”
“What about rabbits?”
“I can’t hear them.”
“Hamsters?”
“I can’t hear them.”
The girl thought for a long time before asking,
“Why only cats?”
Garam’s steps slowed for the briefest moment.
“I don’t know.”
That was the truth.
Why cats?
Why had he suddenly begun hearing them one day?
Garam didn’t know exactly, either.
He had simply lived with it for quite a long time after that.
The girl asked again,
“When did you start hearing them?”
This time, Garam didn’t answer right away.
Boss glanced back slightly from ahead.
Garam met his gaze once, then said,
“A long time ago.”
That was enough.
The girl didn’t ask anything else.
A little while later, Chichi suddenly stopped.
Garam stopped, too.
“What is it?”
Chichi’s gaze was fixed on one side of the alley.
A small red fragment lay beneath a wall.
Chichi approached it.
“This.”
Garam crouched down.
It wasn’t a piece of fabric.
It was thin plastic.
Garam picked it up and examined it.
A small bone-shaped tag.
The girl’s face went rigid.
“This….”
She turned the red leash over in her hand.
A metal ring remained on the leash.
Beside it was a mark where something had been torn away.
With trembling hands, the girl accepted the plastic tag.
“It’s Bori’s.”
Garam asked,
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
Small letters were printed on one side of the tag.
BORI.
The girl swallowed.
“He came this far.”
Boss examined the area beneath the wall and the alley in turn.
Then he looked farther ahead.
The road split in two.
The left side was an old shopping alley.
The right was a narrow path climbing up a hill.
Chichi asked,
“Which way did he go?”
Boss didn’t answer right away.
Garam didn’t rush him.
They only had one clue so far.
Boss could read the situation, but he couldn’t invent an answer where there wasn’t one.
After a moment, he said,
“We need to look more.”
Garam nodded.
“Yeah.”
Just then, a cat appeared in the distance.
It was a gray cat walking slowly along a wet wall.
Chichi pricked up her ears.
“I know him.”
“From Gramps?”
“Yeah.”
When the gray cat came closer, he gave a short cry.
Garam clearly heard what he said.
“If you mean a big brown dog, I saw him.”
Garam’s eyes sharpened.
“When?”
“Last night.”
“Where?”
The gray cat looked toward the hill.
Then he added,
“He kept running.”
Garam looked in the same direction.
Rainwater was still trickling along the edges of the steps.
An old residential neighborhood stretched up the hill.
The girl gripped the red tag tightly.
“Did Bori go that way?”
Garam didn’t immediately say that he had.
Instead, he said,
“Last night, he did.”
Then he looked at Boss.
Boss was already turning toward the hill.
“Let’s go up.”
Garam nodded, too.
“Yeah.”
Chichi ran up the stairs first.
“I’ll check ahead!”
Garam called out immediately,
“Don’t go too far!”
“Got it!”
The girl climbed the stairs beside Garam.
In one hand, she held the empty leash.
In the other, the small name tag they had just found.
They still hadn’t found Bori.
But little by little, they were beginning to see where he had run the night before.
And this time,
there were cats who would follow that path with them.
Episode 6: Bori Who Didn't Come Home — End.