“My dad?”
“He’s calling from Osaka.”
Kyohei put the phone to his ear. “Hey.”
“Hey, how’s it going, Kyohei? You doing okay out there?” his father asked in a cheery tone.
“Yeah, everything’s fine.”
“Great, great. Hey, I heard from your uncle that some pretty crazy stuff was going on. Why didn’t you tell your mom when she called the other night?”
Kyohei hadn’t told her because he didn’t want to have to explain the whole thing, but he resisted the urge to tell his father that. “I dunno,” he said. “I guess it just didn’t seem like that big of a deal.”
“I’d say someone dying is a pretty big deal. You okay?”
“Yeah, why wouldn’t I be?”
“I was just thinking it must be pretty hard to relax with the police crawling all over the place. You getting outside, doing your homework?”
“Yeah, everything’s fine, really. I’ve been having a good time, and I even got some of my homework done already.”
“Well, that’s good. Just, if you don’t feel comfortable being there, you be sure to tell me, okay?”
“Yeah, sure thing,” Kyohei said, though he wondered what his dad would do if he did say that he was uncomfortable. Would he have him come down to Osaka? Wasn’t he out here with his aunt and uncle because he couldn’t go in the first place?
“Okay, well, I guess you’ll be out there for a little while still, then?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, that’s good. Mind handing me to your uncle? Oh, wait, your mom wants to talk to you.”
“I don’t need to talk to Mom. We just talked yesterday.”
Kyohei handed the phone to his aunt. Setsuko exchanged a few words with his father before hanging up.
“He sound worried?” Shigehiro asked.
“Not too bad. He has a pretty one-track mind, and right now it’s on his work.” Setsuko turned to Kyohei. “You’re welcome to stay here as long as you want, of course, but if you’d rather be with your dad, just let us know. I’ll have your uncle give him a call.”
“Sure,” Kyohei said.
“Right, well, it’s time for me to get into the bath,” Shigehiro said, finally standing.
Setsuko went back into the kitchen, leaving Kyohei alone in the room at last.
He opened the door to make sure no one was out in the hallway, then went back into the room and opened the drawer next to the television. The drawer was empty except for a single key attached to a thin wooden block with a ring at one end. He took it out and put it into his shorts pocket.
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.”