Lonely Hearts Killer by Tomoyuki Hoshino

Author:Tomoyuki Hoshino
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: FIC043000
ISBN: 9781604860849
Publisher: PM Press
Published: 2009-11-01T04:00:00+00:00

THREE: SUBIDA AL CIELO

I got back from my business trip to Shanghai, and Iroha wasn’t here. According to Udzuki, she uploaded Inoue’s document and her additional file and then turned herself in at the gate police-box. I can imagine how dazed and confused Officer Murai must have been. His strong sense of duty to protect the lodge is so cute and sincere. When Iroha suddenly showed up saying she’d committed a crime, asking to be arrested, and handing over the evidence, he must have had no clue what to do. He probably went along with it more because she was so eager than because he was focused on carrying out his duties. That’s how good-natured he is. The poor guy.

That woman! She really took advantage of my absence. She did it all without sharing or discussing anything with me. She better not have been trying to make fun of my self-righteousness. And she better have known she’d get chewed out if she told me.

I was bitching like that as Udzuki gave me the lowdown. Then he said, “The document part is nothing,” and he took me to her room.

On the other side of the door was a fake room. Directly in front of us, the afternoon sun was shining through the sliding glass door to the terrace (it was, by the way, evening at the time), and beyond the terrace was the mountain range. You could see the trees in the garden from the western window. But there was nothing on the eastern wall, or to be more precise, there was just a white sheet hanging there.

“That projector is kaput. Iroha didn’t catch that one,” Udzuki explained.

Sure enough, the southern terrace and western window were just movies Iroha made that were being projected on the walls. If you took away the screens hung there, you’d see the identical real things, the terrace or the window.

A human figure appeared at the far end of the terrace. It was Iroha. She walked towards the glass door with a cup and saucer in her hand, looking off and occasionally back this way, and she was saying something. She’d start laughing and stagger off balance too. But there was no sound.

A figure crossed the western window too. Then it came back. Somehow it was me.

Udzuki said, “I’m not in this. I feel so unwanted.”

Iroha faced us and walked into the room from the terrace. You couldn’t read her expression because of the backlighting. There was something a little menacing and powerful in her movements. Just when I unconsciously backed away, Iroha disappeared. She must have stepped out of the camera’s range.

“Don’t get mad in this next part and just keep watching,” Udzuki warned.

No one was left on the terrace, and everything was bathed in orange like time had passed or maybe the sun suddenly sunk. That scene was frozen for a minute and then the orange tone that was spreading out in thin rays of light from the edges of the landscape shattered into particles that fell like sand in an hourglass.

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