Transposition

by Gregory Ashe

  “Smells great, doesn’t it?” Somers was stomping the last of the snow from his shoes and turning in a slow circle, head up, examining the place. “God, it’s crazy.”

  Something about Somers’s voice made Hazard look at his partner again. “You’ve been here before.”

  “What? Oh. Yeah.”

  “And you didn’t think that was important?”

  “I’ve been to the conservatory—that’s what they call the greenhouse, by the way. That’s all, though. Not the house, not the stables, not the shooting range.”

  “Why?”

  Somers was wiping snowmelt from his hair. “What?”

  “Why did you come here?”

  For another moment, Somers took his time shaking off droplets and stomping his feet. Then, with a resigned look on his face, he said, “I got married here.”

  Oh, Hazard thought. Shit.

  “Don’t get that look. I’m fine.”

  “I don’t care if you’re fine.”

  “Well, I am. Just for the record. It was years ago, and anyway, Cora and I have been through so much shit by this point, one place doesn’t mean more than anywhere else.”

  “I just told you: I don’t care.” Hazard shoved past his partner, moving deeper into the conservatory.

  Somers loped after him and fell into place beside him. They walked in silence for a few minutes. A paved path led between the trees, taking them away from the glass walls and into the dense growth. In less than a minute, the tropical plants had swallowed them, and Hazard could have believed he was deep in the Amazon and not in rural Missouri. Now that he was out of the cold, the heat and humidity began to work on him, and sweat beaded on his forehead.

  Something sounded in the distance, and Hazard had his .38 out in a flash. He trained it on the treeline, remembering the shadow figures—one ahead of them, one behind—vanishing into the snow. Next to him, Somers had a steady grip on his Glock. At a nod from Somers, Hazard stepped forward, keeping to the edge of the path where it would be easy to take cover if someone fired. He strained his ears, listening for any sound. Who would it be? Benny? Ran? Columbia? Leza? Adaline? Meryl, for God’s sake? The killer, whoever he was, still had the murder weapon, and a small gun was still a gun—and it would kill a stupid cop just as well as a big gun.

  But there was nothing: no movement, no flash of color, no sound. Hazard slowed as the paving stones began to curl to the right, but he still heard nothing.

  Somers, with a toss of his head, indicated something in the trees. Hazard saw nothing. A bank of machines stood on the side of the trail. They looked a little bit like gumball machines, only instead of brightly colored gumballs, they held bird seed. Somers grinned and twisted the handle. Seeds spilled out of the dispenser and rattled against the paving stones. Hazard bit back a swear; before he could tell Somers that he was an idiot, branches shifted. Leaves rustled, and Hazard dropped into a crouch.

  An enormous yellow-and-blue bird burst from the foliage. Hazard’s adrenaline spiked, his whole body tingling with the rush, and then he sagged and let out a breath.

  Somers was laughing as he holstered his gun. “Pretty bird,” he said as he rejoined Hazard. “Parrot?”

  “Macaw.”

  “You thought it was whoever we saw in the snow.”

  “So did you.”

  “Yeah. So who was it?”

  “Nobody. A bird.”

  “No, I mean, who did we see in the snow? My guess is Ran and Benny.”

  Holstering the .38, Hazard sucked in another lungful of the moist, fragrant air. Sweat prickled on his scalp and on the back of his hands now; coming down from a burst of adrenaline wasn’t pleasant, and it left him feeling slightly shaky. “Why those two?”

  “Leza might think she’d be better off if Thomas died—because of the sale, you know. So maybe everyone believed that.”

  “Everyone except Columbia and Adaline. They knew the buyers had already backed out; they knew Thomas’s death wouldn’t change anything.”

  “Right,” Somers said, flashing a brilliant white grin. “Plus, they have each other as an alibi, so unless they killed him together, I think we can clear them.”

  “Provisionally.”

  “Right, provisionally.”

  Moving deeper into the conservatory, Hazard said, “So why Ran and Benny?”

  “Because for them, it’s personal. Even if they didn’t think Thomas’s death would bring immediate profit, they might have been angry about losing the program they had designed. It’s one thing to give up ownership of your creation if you think it will benefit you in the long run. It’s another thing, though, to lose out on your creation and on the profits.”

  “So it’s a revenge killing?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe they were hoping the rights for their program would be easier to snatch once Thomas was out of the picture.”

  Hazard nodded slowly. “It’s a possibility. What would they be doing out here? Why have one follow us and one go ahead?”

  “Most likely? So they can trap us and kill us.”

  “You’re pretty blithe about that.”

  “Well, I don’t think we should let them.”

  With a grunt, Hazard nodded. The path had reached a massive wall, with a door set into the middle. The door stood propped open by a sizeable rock, and Hazard peeked through the doorway and saw that it opened into the furnace room, complete with a boiler that was roughly the size of Hazard and Somers’s apartment back in Wahredua.

  “Jesus,” Somers said, “think of all the lobster you could cook in that.”

  “That’s how they keep the place warm, I guess. Propane?”

  “Or natural gas. God damn, that machinery looks old.”

  “Old,” Hazard said, pointing to several spots, “but clean and regularly serviced. I guess it’s pretty important to keep everything looking nice.”

  “They sure charge enough,” Somers said. “My parents paid a fortune to use this place. I guess it costs a lot of money to keep all the tropical flowers from freezing to death.”

  “That’s kind of the whole idea of a greenhouse.”

  “Fuck you,” Somers said with lazy good cheer and another brilliant smile. “What about that?” He tilted his chin at the tangle of pipes overhead. Resting on two of the lengths of metal, a substantial nest had been built among the pipes.

  “The macaw,” Hazard said.

  “Must be why they prop the door open. That damn thing must shoot out of here whenever it hears the seed dispenser.”

  There seemed nothing else to see in the furnace room, and so Hazard led them back towards the entrance, following the path the full length of the greenhouse again. “No sign that anyone’s been staying here, but it’s hard to tell.”

  “This place is pretty big,” Somers said. “It’d be easy to set up camp back among some of those trees. We wouldn’t see it unless we walked right over it.”

  “So there’s a decent chance our mystery guest could be hiding out here.”

  Somers shook his head. “It’s possible, sure, but it seems unlikely. The stables, even the gun range, would offer a better place to stay.”

  “All right. Let’s go see the stables.”

  When they reached the door, though, Hazard stopped and studied the ground.

  “That’s a lot of water,” he said.

  Somers cocked an eyebrow, squatted, and studied the puddle. “It sure is. Especially since we both kicked the snow off our shoes before we came inside.”

  Hazard, hand on the .38, turned in a slow circle. The macaw sat in plain sight, its blue and yellow plumage standing out against the green backdrop like someone had slapped bad eyeshadow on the foliage. Aside from the macaw, though, nothing moved. The trees and ferns were silent and still. The air, heated and fragrant, circulated with perfect regularity.

  “The mysterious stranger in the house?” Somers asked quietly as he rose. “Or our shadows from the snowstorm?”

  “I don’t know, but I’d rather not stay and
find out. Searching this place would be a shit-show unless you had a twenty men. A hundred would be even better. Too many places to hide. Too much ground that’s off the path. Too much of a chance of getting a bullet through the teeth before you saw anyone.”

  “You’re full of all kinds of happiness today.”

  “You can get us to the stables?”

  Somers nodded.

  “Do it without getting us killed.”

  “What’s the magic word?”

  Hazard shoved his partner towards the door. “Now.”

  AFTER ANOTHER BLINDING TREK through the storm—worse, Somers though, it was getting a lot worse—the outline of the stables appeared ahead. Relief and satisfaction mingled inside Somers; he had not been sure, not entirely, that he had taken them in the right direction. Not that he would have admitted that to Hazard, not when Somers finally felt like he had something to offer his partner.

  As Somers drew closer, he began to pick out details on the structure ahead of them. It was old, that much was clear at first glance: paint an inch thick covered the wood, peeling back in places to expose a hundred different shades of red in stratified layers, all the different coats of paint the stables had received over the years. In places where the paint had come away completely, the wood was pitted and black. With its gambrel roof and its white trim, the stables could easily have been mistaken for a barn. Perhaps, Somers thought, they had once been a barn. More distantly, he could see the stumps of the old corral and the exterior stalls. Beyond that, the snow devoured everything.

  When they reached the door, Somers hesitated. The door was open—just a crack, not even an inch, but it was open. Light spilled out, and snowmelt clung to the frame. The droplets were full of yellow pinpricks of light. From inside came the blast of old music, a big, swinging piece that had probably set the dance floors on fire eighty years ago.

  Somers glanced back, caught Hazard’s eye, and nodded at the door. Hazard, drawing his .38, nodded in turn. Somers drew his own piece, took a breath, and kicked in the door. A wave of warmth crashed over him, but Somers ignored it. His senses were attuned to any possibility of danger. His eyes took in the small office, which held nothing more than a desk, a row of brown filing cabinets that looked like they’d been dragged up from 1885—and like they’d taken a rocky road—and two chairs. On top of the desk sat a transistor radio that was, compared to the rest of the furnishings, relatively new. Maybe from 1959, Somers guessed.

  Seeing that the office was clear, Somers moved into the building and dialed down the volume on the radio. In the absence of the music, the snow shrieked, pummeling the open door, tiny crystals rattling across the floor before melting. Somers listened for any sound of another person in the building, but he heard nothing.

  Together, he and Hazard went room to room, clearing each one as they went. First the storage closet on the main floor. Then the stables proper, including the loft, where a stack of hay, moldering and stinking even in the cold, was connected to the ceiling by an icicle. They returned to the office and went upstairs.

  The second floor of the stables had at some point been converted into living quarters. That point, Somers guessed, had been sometime after electricity had reached Windsor, but before the Newton family had added indoor plumbing: the living quarters had bare bulbs strung across the ceiling and an electric kitchenette encrusted with thirty years of cooking grease and grime, but it didn’t have a bathroom. A wooden cot stood against one wall, the blankets in disarray, and coals glowed in a Franklin stove. The heat and the smell of the charcoal were oddly comforting; they reminded Somers of winter camping. When Somers and Hazard had finished clearing the second floor, Somers let out a breath. It felt like he hadn’t breathed in hours, and he sucked in a lungful of air as he holstered the gun at the small of his back.

  “Someone’s been living here,” Somers said, kicking at the cot. “Probably our mystery guest.”

  “Looks like it.” Hazard only spared time to glance at the cot before moving towards the kitchenette. He opened the oven, rattled the baking racks, and threw open a cupboard. Rows of canned food sat on the shelves. Dust sifted down into Hazard’s dark hair, and he shook his head in irritation. “This place is a sty.”

  Continuing his own search, Somers nodded. “Beer cans. Beer bottles. Old clothes.” He nudged a pile of clothing with his shoe. “Looks like he’s been here for a while. Longer than the people from Strong, Matley, Gross. What does that mean? He was here in advance? Knew they were coming?”

  “Maybe.”

  Hazard walked the room clockwise, checking the shuttered windows. Two opened onto the storm, and these he shut right away. The third pair, though, opened onto the stables and looked down on a row of empty horse stalls.

  “You think this was a hit? Planned? Someone had an outsider here?”

  “I don’t know,” Hazard said. He stopped and recovered something from the floor, presenting it for Somers’s inspection. “But we know I’m not crazy. Someone else is here.”

  “Beans?”

  Hazard ran a finger inside the empty can and held it up to show Somers the starchy dark liquid. “That can hasn’t been open for more than an hour or two.”

  “When we still had everyone under lockdown at the house.”

  “Right. And after our mystery guest showed up at Windsor and tracked snow through the halls.”

  Somers squinted, trying to visualize the series of events. “So he goes to Windsor this morning, walks upstairs, realizes Thomas Strong is dead—no, that doesn’t make sense. Not if he’s our killer. He goes upstairs, but then he leaves. Why?”

  “Because everyone was awake. Maybe he had hoped to catch them still sleeping.”

  Somers shook his head. “If he’d wanted them dead, he could have killed them last night. He goes to Windsor this morning, goes upstairs, and then—for whatever reason—decides to leave.”

  “Maybe he realized he wasn’t going to get breakfast,” Hazard said.

  Somers laughed. “That was almost a joke.”

  From under a furrowed brow, Hazard glared at Somers for a moment before turning his attention to the can. “I was serious. He wanted food. Realized he wasn’t going to get any. Came back here and ate a can of beans.” Hazard’s gaze swung around the room again. “Cold, I’m guessing, since there’s no pot and I wouldn’t trust that kitchenette to do anything but the burn the whole place down.”

  “Cold beans.” Somers made a face. “What the hell is going on?”

  “We’ll have to add some questions to our list.” Hazard scanned the room again, and his eyes fell on the pile of clothing that Somers had stirred with his foot. “Whose are those?”

  “I’m assuming they belong to our mystery guest.”

  “No,” Hazard said, shaking his head. “I’ve seen those clothes.”

  Dropping into a squat, Somers sorted through the pile: a ratty cardigan, a sweater with a hole in the armpit, two oversized thermal-knit cotton shirts, a gray beanie. It looked like the gleanings from a Goodwill clearance rack.

  With a smirk, Somers said, “Nico.”

  “What?”

  “This is what Nico wears.”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “Hey, I’m just saying.” Somers poked a finger through the sweater’s armpit hole and held it up. “Remember, last Friday, you just about ripped this off of him when you thought I was still in the bathroom, and then you saw me, and your face turned red, kind of like it is now—”

  Through gritted teeth, Hazard managed two words. “Shut. Up.”

  And that, Somers thought with the smirk still plastered on his face, was for calling me stupid.

  Hazard was trying to regain his composure; under his blue-black scruff, his high, brutish cheekbones still flamed with color. “I’ve seen somebody wearing clothing like that recently, and I don’t mean Nico.”

  “Somebody at the house?” Somers gave the pile another experimental toss. “Maybe these are pajamas?”

  “Pajamas?”r />
  “Yeah, you know, like those boxers that Nico bought you, and they have the bears printed all over them, and—”

  Hazard didn’t quite run down the stairs, but it was close enough for government work.

  Somers’s grin faded as he gave the room one last look. Whoever was staying here, he was familiar with Windsor and had been prepared to stay for a long time. He wasn’t gone, either—and perhaps most worrisome of all, he didn’t seem to feel the need to hide. Why else would he leave the place warm and lighted and with the radio blaring?

  Still no sign, either, of the gun that had killed Thomas Strong. And that worried Somers most of all.

  SOMERS TOOK THE LEAD AGAIN, and he hated how proud he felt—ridiculous, like he was sixteen and had just scored a touchdown and was scanning the crowd for Glennworth Somerset’s face. Not that his father had ever been troubled to come to a game. Not when there was Rotary Club, and the regional chess circuit, and business trips, and if all else failed, his stamp collection that was desperately in need of just a few spare hours. It was like that all over again, Somers thought, that mixture of the desire to please and the need for praise. It curdled in his stomach like yogurt in the sun. But he still kept glancing back at Hazard, flashing smiles, waiting for a nod, a thank you, a fucking pat on the back.

  The snow came down harder if that was possible. The wind had died, and instead of the whipping veils of snow, the flakes now fell in a torrent, thick as a summer thunderstorm, turning the world into trailing lines of black and white. Somers plunged into the drifts, wincing as powder worked its way up his trousers and froze his legs. The thing about it, Somers thought as he stomped through the snow, the really stupid thing about it, was that Somers couldn’t even legitimately be angry at Hazard about the confusing feelings. It wasn’t Hazard’s fault that Glennworth Somerset had been a withholding bastard who had alienated his son while, at the same time, working a strange black magic that demanded Somers’s loyalty and obedience and best efforts that were never good enough. It wasn’t even Hazard’s fault that, in some way Somers couldn’t explain, Hazard exerted the same kind of voodoo over Somers. Maybe it was the brooding silence. Maybe it was the tangled mixture of penitence and desire and shame. Maybe, Somers thought as he stuck out his tongue to catch a snowflake, it was just that John-Henry Somerset was about as fucked up as they came. None of it changed how he felt.