Probability and Statistics
Every plug in the wall was crowded with cords from a hair dryer, a curling iron, and a humidifier, all tangled together in a messy knot.
Between the underwear hanging on the laundry rack, the faint scent of lavender fabric softener drifted through the room, and beneath it all, long strands of hair lay scattered across the floor.
“······.”
Grace Fairfax sat on her bed, lost in thought.
The second hand on the wall clock kept circling.
Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick-tock.
The blanket rustled on the bed across from her.
“Mm······.”
Grace’s roommate, Sarah Charlotte, sat up and scratched her tousled hair.
She was wearing black pajamas printed with an inverted pentagram, along with a triangular hat studded with red eyeballs.
When Sarah saw Grace, her downturned eyes widened into circles.
“Grace. You pulled another all-nighter?”
“······Yeah.”
“It’s because of business, isn’t it. That lottery collecting thing. Mmm.”
Sarah climbed out of bed and pulled something from under her pillow.
It was a metal disk that looked like an old compass, with a glass eyeball attached on top.
“I used a Ouija board to tell fortunes last night.”
Sarah said this while polishing the compass with her sleeve.
“The ghosts say you smell like corpses and gold. Looking at you, you’re half-dead already, and the gold smell must be coming from the lottery. So what that means is the results of all this suffering are going to be good.”
“Sarah. There are no ghosts in this world.”
“No, there are. A janitor who died under suspicious circumstances in the dorm basement two months ago told me that himself. Pretty reliable source, I’d say.”
“······Sarah, that man retired and moved to Florida.”
Grace gave a weak laugh.
With a toothbrush in her mouth, Sarah headed for the bathroom and winked.
“Anyway, the ghosts say what they say. So relax.”
Then.
Ding-dong. Ding-dong. Ding-dong. Ding-dong. Ding-dong. Ding-dong. Ding-dong. Ding-dong. Ding-dong.
The little clock on Sarah’s desk chimed nine times.
It was 9 p.m., the time we had promised.
Grace held her breath.
“······.”
One minute passed, then two.
By the time three minutes had gone by, Grace’s shoulders had begun to sag.
“I knew it was too much. Nothing changes in twenty-four hours. I should just abandon the sunk cost and move on to another business······.”
Just as Grace was about to give up,
Ring-ring!
The telephone on the desk rang.
The phone in a dorm room doesn’t connect over long distances.
Which meant this was definitely a call from the men’s dormitory.
“See? I told you it was a ghost!”
I could hear Sarah shouting from the bathroom.
“Answer it! Your gold’s coming in!”
Grace picked up the receiver with trembling hands.
“······Hello?”
A familiar voice came through.
Lee Sanha. It was him.
[Ready?]
“Ready for what······ Don’t tell me······”
[Come out. I’m at the front gate.]
Grace threw the receiver onto the bed and ran outside.
Behind her, Sarah was brushing her teeth and shouting,
“Grace! Put on a coat before you go! If you step outside looking like that, you’ll turn into a rich jiangshi!”
* * *
In front of the dormitory gate.
I had parked the truck and was waiting for Grace.
That was when a familiar face tapped on the window.
Knock, knock, knock.
When I turned my head, I saw a blond girl I knew well.
A short blond cut, a little different from Grace’s.
It was Caroline Channing, whom I’d greeted the last time I rented the conference room.
“Nice truck, Sanha.”
“Thanks.”
“You really do seem a little special. Everybody else shows up in a sleek sports car just to show off, but I actually don’t like that kind of thing. Trucks are so much more masculine and practical, aren’t they?”
“Glad you think so.”
“So who are you waiting for?”
“Grace.”
“······.”
At my answer, Caroline pouted.
“Take me on a date next time.”
“It’s not a date. It’s business.”
“Then do business with me too.”
“If our interests line up.”
At that, Caroline grinned and waved.
“We exchanged addresses last time, right? Is it still that address? Garden Queens?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. I’ll write. My cousin lives in Garden Queens, so I might drop by during vacation. You’ll show me around town then?”
“Sure. If I’ve got time, we’ll work out a schedule.”
After hearing my answer, Caroline gave a little wave and headed back inside the dorm.
Then, a dozen seconds later, Grace opened the truck door.
“What was that just now?”
“The call? I rang up from the pay phone on the dorm’s first floor.”
“No, not that. Wasn’t that Caroline just now? Classes are over, so why is she still in the dorm?”
“She’s heading home now.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I just talked to her?”
“······.”
At my reply, Grace’s eyes narrowed.
“You went to the year-end dance together too, and now you’re this close? Did the two of you make vacation plans or something?”
With a sulky expression for reasons I couldn’t quite pin down, she climbed into the passenger seat.
“But that’s not important right now. So? What happened? The lottery?”
“You’ll see when we get there.”
I put the truck in gear at once.
Our destination was the neighborhood where I had once opened Sanha’s Antique Shop.
Vroom.
The truck left Harvard’s campus behind and headed for the industrial district on the outskirts of Cambridge.
All the while, Grace kept firing off anxious questions.
“I know there are a lot of truckers who stop at gas stations, but how much could they possibly collect in twenty-four hours?”
“Seeing is believing. It’s better to see it for yourself.”
Before long, the truck came to a stop in front of a building with a wall of glass.
I took the key from my pocket and unlocked the padlocks, one after another.
Rattle-rattle-rattle—bang!
The shutter rolled up.
We headed for the corner on the first floor.
I opened the door that served as the storage room and yanked away the blue tarp covering the floor.
When Grace looked inside, her eyes went wide with shock.
Spread across the broad floor in dense rows was the thirty-sixth run of Power Jackpot Scratch tickets.
As many as 400,000 tickets, their silver coating glittering in the morning light like the scales of fish.
“My God······”
Grace picked up one of the tickets.
They were all crumpled or stained with oil, but they were unmistakably the thirty-sixth run of Power Jackpot Scratch.
She staggered and leaned back against me.
“H-how did you collect all this? In just twenty-four hours? Did you use magic or something?”
“······.”
I answered with only a faint smile.
These were the twenty percent of the tickets Grace would have missed if she had tried to do this alone before my regression.
To be more precise, they were the remaining 22.4 percent of the stock across four counties in western Massachusetts, a total of roughly 448,000 tickets.
The last of the stock, scattered across every godforsaken stretch of backcountry where the roads were rough and the weather so bad that even a passenger car couldn’t get in.
That was what I had gathered.
Of course, I didn’t collect them all in twenty-four hours.
When Grace told me she was running this lottery business, I had already asked my parents and my uncle for help.
The arrangement was simple: in exchange for giving the truckers who hauled freight into those regions a small discount on fuel, I asked them to look for the thirty-sixth run of Power Jackpot Scratch tickets.
To the truckers, these tickets were no different from gas-station discount coupons, and they used their own networks to gather them up.
They were like red blood cells moving through America’s veins, which meant there wasn’t a road they couldn’t reach.
When the part-timers Grace had hired were grumbling and giving up, the truckers kept quietly and steadily bringing me these thirty-sixth-run Power Jackpot Scratch tickets, and by the end the volume had reached this level.
The reason I hadn’t told Grace beforehand was simple.
It was better to stage things dramatically at the end like this, because it raised the value of my contribution.
Later, when we negotiated our share in the club, this incident would weigh heavily in my favor.
Of course, I could have scratched all these tickets by myself. That would have been one way to do it.
But I had three reasons for not doing so.
First, there was no guarantee that these tickets even contained the first- or second-prize winners.
Second, it would be more profitable to build a cooperative relationship with Grace and go after a much larger piece of the pie than to win a single first-prize ticket here.
Third, this part was a little sentimental, but I believed that only Grace, the one who had conceived the business in the first place, had the right to scratch the first-prize ticket.
So for this one business venture, I decided to stay one step behind Grace.
“I didn’t do it alone, though. I borrowed a little from my parents’ and uncle’s network too. They’ve got long-haul truckers coming and going through my parents’ gas station and my uncle’s junkyard, and there are plenty of drivers who run long routes from Texas all the way to New England.”
“No, even so, how could you do this in just twenty-four hours······? Just how many regular truckers do you have······?”
“There are plenty of magicians in the East.”
I shrugged.
Grace stared at me in disbelief, opening and closing her mouth without a sound.
It wasn’t until a long moment had passed that she finally nodded.
“I think I’ll need to meet your parents during the vacation.”
“Huh? Why?”
“No! Not for the reason you’re thinking! For another reason!”
“And what reason do I think it is?”
“No, no! It’s just······ just······ in a pure sense. I want to thank them.”
Grace quickly turned her head away.
Her eyes measured the number of lottery tickets spread across the floor.
“There are really a lot. It looks exactly like the amount I couldn’t gather.”
“Right? That’s why you have to work hard.”
“?”
At my words, Grace tilted her head.
I flicked a five-cent coin toward her.
Clink.
Grace hurriedly caught the coin I’d tossed.
I looked at her and said, “Scratch it.”
Now it was time to see for ourselves.
What result Grace Fairfax’s probability-and-statistics game would bring about.
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