A Midsummer's Equation

FIFTY-FIVE

Kyohei woke to the sound of his father talking on the phone. He rubbed his eyes and looked up. Hs father was standing facing the window. The curtain was partway open, and sunlight was streaming through. It was the beginning of another beautiful day in Hari Cove.

“No, we don’t need to tell the clients anything like that,” he was saying. “Yeah, yeah, that’ll work. I’ll probably have to come out here a few more times. Sure, there’ll be a trial. Yeah, you too.” He shut his phone.

“Morning,” Kyohei said to his father’s back.

His father turned around, smiling. “You’re awake?”

“That Mom?”

“Yeah. We’re leaving after lunch. We’ll probably get to eat dinner with Mom tonight.”

“We don’t have to stay here anymore? Won’t the police have more questions?”

His father gave a thin smile and shook his head. “No. I called them while you were still asleep. They said they don’t have any more questions for you. And if something comes up, they can just talk on the phone. I gave them my number.”

Kyohei got out of bed. “Are Uncle Shigehiro and Aunt Setsuko going to jail? Can’t we do something?”

The smile faded from his father’s face. He groaned and scratched his head. “We’ll do everything that we can. I’m going to get them the best lawyer I can find. But I don’t think they’ll get out of going to jail entirely. Especially not your uncle.”

“Is it that bad, what they did?”

His father frowned. “Like I said, if they’d told the police when the accident happened, it wouldn’t have been such a big deal. That’s the way it works. We all make mistakes. What’s important is how we deal with them. What your uncle did—well, that was not the right way. And it’s going to cause all of us a lot of trouble.”

To Kyohei, it sounded like his father was less concerned about the rightness of what Uncle Shigehiro and Aunt Setsuko had done and more concerned about the trouble it would cause him. “But,” Kyohei said after a moment. “He’d be in even more trouble if the accident was on purpose, right?”

Kyohei’s father leaned back and shook his head. “You bet it would! An accident on purpose isn’t an accident: in this case, that would be murder. It’s an entirely different thing. You might not just get prison for that, you could even get the death sentence,” he said, looking down at his watch. “Hey, it’s getting pretty late. I’m not that hungry, but we should get breakfast.”

Kyohei looked at the alarm clock. It was almost 9:00 a.m.

Breakfast was served in the same tea lounge where he’d talked with the detectives the day before. There were a bunch of plates laid out on a large table, and his father told him he could pick what he wanted.

“But only take as much as you can eat. If you’re still hungry, you can always get more,” his father said, but Kyohei didn’t think the advice was necessary. For one, he wasn’t some stupid little kid who grabbed too much food. For another, none of the things on the table really looked that good.

Back at the table, he chewed on some bacon and drank his juice and looked around. The place was pretty empty. Yukawa was nowhere in sight.

After breakfast, they were heading back up to the room, when Kyohei called out to his father, who was walking ahead. “Can I go take a look at the ocean?”

“Sure,” his father said. “Just don’t go too far away from the hotel.”

“Okay.”

Kyohei went back to the lounge and out to the pool. There was a door here that went out to the beach. The beach was ostensibly private, which was apparently a selling point for the hotel, except it really didn’t mean anything with so few people around.

He looked around but didn’t see Yukawa, so he went back to the hotel. At the front desk, he asked the receptionist if she could tell him Yukawa’s room number.

“Did you have something for him?”

“I needed to tell him something,” Kyohei explained.

“One moment,” she said, making a phone call. However, after a few moments, she hung up without saying a word.

“Looks like he’s not in,” she said, typing something into her computer. “Oh,” she said. “He left a message saying that he would be out today. He’ll be back tonight.”

“Tonight?” Kyohei’s shoulders sagged. He’d be gone by then.

“You could leave him a note if you like. I’ll be happy to give it to him when he returns.”

Kyohei shook his head. “That’ll be too late,” he said and walked off toward the elevators.