Кэйго Хигасино - A Midsummer’s Equation

Turning off the TV, Kyohei left the room and ran down the hallway, leaving his slippers behind to avoid making too much noise. Dashing through the lobby, he pressed the button for the elevator and the door opened right away. Kyohei jumped inside, his heart racing.

Up on the third floor, he knocked on the door to the Sea of Clouds Room. He heard someone undo the latch on the door, and then he was face to face with Yukawa.

“Got it,” Kyohei said, showing him the master key.

“Good work. How much time do I have?”

“I should try to get it back before my uncle gets out of the bath, so about twenty minutes.”

“That should be more than enough. Let’s go,” Yukawa said, stepping out of his room in his socks.

Yukawa walked past the elevator and took the stairs up one story to the fourth floor. But then he turned and went in the opposite direction Kyohei had expected him to go.

“Where are you going, Professor?” Kyohei asked. “The Rainbow Room is down that way.”

Yukawa stopped. “The Rainbow Room?”

“Didn’t you want to see the room that belonged to the guy who died?”

Yukawa had said he wanted the master key because there was a room he wanted to see. Kyohei had assumed it was the room where the guy who had fallen on the rocks had been staying. He had wanted to see it himself, especially after the police put up a line of “do not cross” yellow tape across the door.

Yukawa shook his head. “We don’t need to see that room.”

“So what room do we need to see, then?”

“Come with me and find out.”

Yukawa walked a little bit further, stopping in front of a room with a sign that read “The Ocean.”

“This room?”

Yukawa nodded and pulled something out of his pocket. “Put these on,” he said.

They were white gloves, a bit baggy on Kyohei’s hands.

“Sorry I didn’t bring any smaller ones. Try not to touch anything — actually, let me rephrase that. Under no condition should you touch anything in the room.”

“What the heck are you planning to do in there?”

A thoughtful look came to Yukawa’s face and he said, “A little investigation.”

“An investigation? Of what?”

“Call it a physics investigation. This building has an extremely fascinating structure, one that might yield valuable insights in my research.”

“So why didn’t you just ask my uncle to let you see it?”

“So he could tell the police, and have them waste my time questioning me about every single little detail? No thank you. The key, please.”

“Being a scientist must be tough,” Kyohei said, handing him the key.

“There’s no easy path to the truth,” Yukawa said, unlocking the door and opening it. He groped for the light switch, turned it on, and stepped inside. Kyohei followed. The air conditioner hadn’t been running, and the room was hot and stuffy.

Yukawa stood by the entrance, scanning the room with his eyes, before kneeling. He ran his gloved hand over the tatami mats on the floor, then turned his hand over to examine his fingers.

“What are you doing?” Kyohei asked.

“Nothing. I was thinking the mats might be a little dusty since the room hasn’t been used for a while, but it looks like they do a good job keeping the place clean.”

Yukawa walked in toward the back of the room and opened the curtain. Kyohei looked through the window from behind him. He could see the backyard from here.

“You set off some fireworks with your uncle, you said?”

“Yeah, some rockets.”

“How many?”

“I dunno. About five?”

“Do you remember if these windows were closed?”

“Yeah, they were closed.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, totally sure. My uncle and I checked before we set them off, just in case one of the rockets flew into a room by accident.”

Yukawa nodded. “How about the lights?”

“Huh?”

“When you were checking to make sure that the windows were closed, were the lights in this room turned on?”

“Oh.” Kyohei scratched his head. “I don’t know.”

“This room was empty that night, which means that if you looked up at it from the backyard, the windows should have all been dark.”

That made sense to Kyohei, too, but he hadn’t thought about it at the time, and now he couldn’t remember. “I got a feeling some of the lights might’ve been on, but I’m not sure which room,” he told the professor.

Yukawa nodded and closed the curtains. He began to circle the room, examining the walls. Occasionally, he knocked on the wall with his knuckles. He appeared to be checking the sound.

“It’s quite an old building. I wonder when it was built.”

“I’m not exactly sure, but more than thirty years ago,” Kyohei said. “It was my uncle’s father who built it, and my uncle took it over about fifteen years ago.”

“Fifteen years? How old is your uncle?”

“His late sixties, I guess?”

“Your aunt looks much younger than that.”

“She said that in a couple years she’d be sixty if you rounded to the nearest decade.”

“I suppose that would make her fifty-three or fifty-four, then. She doesn’t look it,” Yukawa said, then turned to Kyohei as though he had just thought of something. “How old is your father?”

“Forty-five.”

“That’s quite a gap between siblings.”

“That’s because my aunt’s mother died when she was really little. My dad’s mother was my grandpa’s second wife.”

“Half-siblings. I see,” Yukawa said, adjusting his glasses.

“Also, my aunt left the house when she was still pretty young, and went to live by herself in Tokyo. That’s why my dad said he never really felt like he had a sister when he was growing up. She was more like an old cousin or something.”

“Your dad isn’t one to pull punches, I gather. At any rate, that means that your uncle was already into his fifties when he took over the inn. Any idea what he did before that?”

“He worked at some engine company.”

“Engines?”

“Yeah, he kept getting transferred all over the place, too, and leaving my aunt behind. When they were in Tokyo, it was pretty much just my aunt and Narumi in the house.”

“So they were based in Tokyo before coming here?”

“Why do you want to know that?”

Yukawa shrugged. “No particular reason.” He turned and opened up the closet, revealing a stack of white futons. After staring at them for several seconds, he pulled the futons out and climbed into the closet, where he began rapping on the wall with his knuckles and rubbing it with his fingers.

“Professor?” Kyohei said, suddenly growing uneasy.

Yukawa stepped out of the closet. He replaced the futons and shut the door. “Right, let’s go.”

“You’re all done?”

“I saw what I came to see, and everything was exactly as I expected.” Yukawa reached for the switch, but the second before the room plunged into darkness, Kyohei caught the look on the professor’s face. He looked more grim than Kyohei had ever seen him before.

Kusanagi stopped his car by the side of the road in Asagaya to take the call from Utsumi. It was creeping up on ten o’clock at night.

“You could’ve called a bit earlier,” he said by way of a greeting. “It’s been hours since I dropped you off.”

“Sorry, I lost track of time with all the walking around.”

“What, you’ve been beating the street this entire time?”

“Pretty much,” she answered, sounding chipper nonetheless. Seemingly boundless energy was one of Utsumi’s strong points. “I think it’s safe to say I hit pretty much every budget hotel in Sanya.”

Kusanagi was impressed. “Well, I hope you found something with all that.”