The car stopped abruptly, smashing me against the door. I had forgotten about the driver, forgotten we were anything but a man and woman alone in the dark. A street light shone in the car window, revealing us to be in the minshuku parking lot.
“I’d laugh if I weren’t in such a state of physical distress,” Hugh said. “I can’t even get out of the car.”
“Oh, you mean—”
“I like you too much,” Hugh said raggedly.
“It’s just a physical reaction. It was bound to happen, given the way we met.” I straightened my Campbell tartan skirt, which had ridden up to a perilous level, and jumped out.
“Wait.” I looked back to see he had paid the driver and followed me out of the car, wrapping his coat around himself. “What exactly is so offensive about me?”
“I don’t want you—intellectually.” It was painful to spell out that although he was so attractive, he was all wrong. There was the baggage with Setsuko, and a sense of inexplicable danger.
“You little snob! Who are you holding out for, someone who went to Cambridge?” His voice was mocking.
“It’s not that. You’re just—too old, too Scottish, too…” I fumbled for the words.
Too gaijin.” He found the last word.
I didn’t reply, just stood beside the minshuku door, shivering. He walked past without looking and closed the door in my face.
9
“Skiing tomorrow, so early to bed for us tonight, neh? Now that the terrible business is over, we can get a taste of what we came here for.” Yamamoto was talking to Hugh when I came in after waiting a miserable five minutes outside to fake a separate entrance.
“You’ll have a great day tomorrow. The snow is pure powder,” Taro told him.
“Rei-san! Where have you been? You missed dinner.” Yuki was there, with Mrs. Chapman at her side. It was a veritable conference.
“I’ve been, ah, exploring.” As soon as the word was out, I started blushing, although only Hugh would catch the double meaning. “I’m cold. Very cold! I think I’ll take a bath.”
Upstairs, I changed into my nightclothes before going downstairs to the bath, which, in fact, had become free. I didn’t need Hugh after all. I simply hung the FAMILY ONLY sign on the door and went in.
I looked over the dressing room’s neat trio of sinks and the stack of empty bamboo baskets where bathers would leave their clothes. I slipped out of my slippers here and trod barefoot into the bath chamber. A monotonous drip ran from a shower along the wall. I walked across the wet wooden floor to pull it closed, and then turned my attention on the long rectangular bath. As I’d remembered, there was a low, wide window running along one side. I leaned over the side of the bath and slid open the window. There was no screen, just a four-foot drop to the roped off, trampled area where Setsuko had lain.
The bath was covered with heavy lids, just as I’d seen it the first time. I lifted the lids off the tub to peer into its copper-lined depths. The underwater bench ran around all four sides; it looked to be only two and a half feet below the surface. I rolled up the sleeve of my yukata as best as I could and reached in, feeling for anything that might have been left behind. I stopped moving when the outer dressing room door opened.
“Excuse me?” Hugh’s voice was tentative. He didn’t enter the bath chamber until I’d opened the door.
“I didn’t think you’d come.” I squinted at his weird ensemble: the shirt and trousers he’d worn earlier, plus black leather gloves.
“You should be wearing gloves, Rei. Did you touch the window?” he scolded.
The criticism relieved me. Clearly, we were going to pretend the taxi incident never happened. I said, “If you come over here and look outside, you can see how easily she was dropped. Which explains why there were no footprints leading away from the body.”
“I remember you fiddling with the window on New Year’s Eve.” Hugh came up behind me to look. “I closed it when I came back later with Yamamoto.”
“So?” I asked, not seeing what he was getting at.
“So we have your and my prints on the window, while, for all we know, Setsuko’s killer wore gloves.”
“We shouldn’t wipe it clean, I suppose.”
“Certainly not. Can you imagine if we have to explain it to a judge one day?”
I resumed my search of the bathtub, thinking that if I’d been alone, I could have taken off my clothes and gone underwater. I could still do it tomorrow.
“Look at these bath covers.” Hugh held up one of the large plastic pieces I had put to the side. “Lightweight, but stiff as hell. I could crack one over your head, and you’d be out. Then I could have my way with you—say, hold you under water until you drowned.” He chuckled. “Hypothetical, my dear.”