“Yuko doesn’t believe it was stolen,” Ikuko said, having told Soeda the
story. “She says the baby must have picked it up when it was crawling
about in the hall. She says the mother must have put the baby up on her
back without noticing that it had the purse in its hand, and gone off while
the baby was still holding it. And if that was the case, the purse must have
dropped out of the baby’s hand and fallen somewhere along the side of the
road. It’s unlikely that the baby would hold it for very long. She searched
the top of the path and the bottom of the path both, apparently—the whole
length.”
Soeda understood from Ikuko’s manner of speech that the purse had not
been found.
“Someone would almost certainly have picked the purse up if the baby
dropped it on the side of the road. That’s what Yuko says.”
“She doesn’t suspect the woman?”
‘‘I’m sure she did suspect her, but she didn’t want to. She says she can’t
even imagine that a woman like her would do anything wrong—that she
just wasn’t that kind of woman. And there was no question in her mind that
the woman would come to return the purse if she had put it in her bag
without noticing when she was packing. She expected her to come running
back at any moment—apparently she couldn’t settle down until I came
home. And when she saw that the woman wasn’t coming back to return the
purse—that’s when she decided that the baby had carried it off and dropped
it.”
Soeda had been warned not to scold Yuko, so he didn’t say anything too
hastily. It was possible, after all, that everything had happened just as Yuko
said— that it had been an innocent act of the baby’s, rather than a theft. The
idea that the baby had carried the purse off and then dropped it struck
Soeda as being quite nicely conceived. His mood softened.
“How much money was in it?”
