Find Me Under the Cherry Blossom Tree

The television lit the room and went dark and lit it again.

Claire was half asleep on the couch when the screen went white, and in the glass she saw the man standing behind her.

The knife took her ear.

Heat. Her hand went up, and came down red to the wrist.

She ran.

Behind her the boots came on, unhurried. One step. Another. Down the length of the hall, in no particular rush, the way a man walks toward a door he knows is locked.

The bedroom. Her hands slipped on the lock and then it turned.

She backed away from the door and stopped when the bed touched the back of her legs.

The room was small and dark and full of the sound of her breathing, which was too loud, and which would not go quiet no matter what she did with her hands.

Her heart had moved into the side of her head. Hitting the wound. Once, twice. Pushing the blood out a little more with every beat, warm across her knuckles, cold by the time it reached her elbow.

The rain. The building.

Then the handle turned, all the way to the stop, and held there, and came back.

Fifty cents of brass in the middle of it. The kind of lock that comes on a bathroom door.

The first hit moved the wall.

The second split the wood, white through the paint.

She went down and under the bed.

Third hit. The door hit the wall.

Boots.

They came in and stopped and the water ran off them. Four inches of floor. The boots took up most of it.

They turned once, slowly, taking the room.

They went to the closet. The rail sang. They came back.

They came to the bed and stopped a foot from her face.

Both her hands over her mouth. Her blood came off her jaw and hit the boards. One drop. Another. Too loud in the small space. There was nothing to do but listen to it fall.

He crouched.

The knee came down on the boards. Then the hand, flat beside it, fingers spread, close enough to touch. A white scar across two knuckles. Dirt in the lines of the palm.

The hand stayed.

The water off his boot spread across the wood in a slow dark shape and reached her fingers. She let it. Her tears went sideways across the bridge of her nose and fell into it.

He did not reach under.

He stood. The boots went out. The front door opened and shut.

She did not move.

Under the floor the heat came on and the pipes started ticking. Slow. Even. She counted them, and lost the number, and started again.

She came out.

Standing took both hands.

She went down the hall along the wall, leaving her palm on the paint every few feet. The couch. The slit in the back of it. The television, still going, with the sound off.

She reached the front door.

Lightning.

Six feet behind her, between the couch and the wall, the man. The knife down at his side. Blood coming off the point, one drop at a time, onto her floor.

Dark.

She did not turn around.

Her hand slid off the handle. Her eyes filled and went over, both at once. Her shoulders went. She stood in her own hallway and cried without a sound, and the rain kept on outside, and her hand did not go back to the door.

She turned around.

He drew the knife back over his shoulder, all the way, like a man at a carnival.

It left his hand—

* * *

Sunlight on chrome, and the Mustang came around the corner with the engine open and stopped hard at the tape, sideways across two parking spaces.

“HAWK!”

“Hawk, over here!”

The driver’s door opened and a boot came down on the asphalt.

Brown leather, worn at the toe. Dark jeans. A shoulder holster over a white shirt with the sleeves rolled twice, and over that a tan trench coat, unbuttoned, the belt never used, hanging in the loops on both sides. Aviators. Two days of beard.

Hawk Spartan came around the front of the car, and three steps from the barricade he dropped his shoulder, turned on his heel, and did eight bars of something with his feet.

The crowd went up. Applause, a whistle that carried, two girls screaming his name over the rest of it.

He signed a poster. He signed a cast. He put an arm around two women in matching shirts and held up one finger while a third took the picture, and both of them kissed him on the cheek at the same time, and the flashes went off.

Then he ducked under the tape.

A man in a gray suit came at him from the other side.

“This isn’t your jurisdiction.”

“Hawk Spartan doesn’t obey the rules,” Hawk said, and kept walking.

“You need a warrant to be on this scene.”

“Watson. Show him the warrant.”

The chauffeur came out from behind the car. Black cap, black gloves, a domino mask over his eyes. He took the first officer’s wrist and the officer went over the hood. He took the second one at the elbow and the elbow bent a way it does not bend. The third got his hand to his holster and Robin Watson kicked him in the chest and the man went through the tape and landed in the street.

Robin Watson straightened his cap.

The man in the gray suit stepped out of the way.

Hawk came up the stairs and into the apartment and pulled the aviators down his nose.

The couch with the slit in the back of it. The palm prints along the hallway wall. The bedroom door, in pieces.

And Claire, on the floor by the front door.

“Homicide. What have we got.”

A woman was kneeling by the body with a notebook. She stood up fast and her face went red to the ears.

“Detective Spartan, I— I’m such a huge—”

She held out the notebook.

Hawk took it. He signed it.

Behind her, the refrigerator hummed.

He handed the notebook back and walked past her, into the kitchen, and stopped in front of the refrigerator door.

Photographs. A wedding invitation. A takeout menu.

And a card from a dental office, under a magnet, with the date written in by hand.

DR. MARIO — CLEANING — TUES 4:30

Hawk looked at it.

He looked at Claire, on the floor, at the side of her head.

He looked at the card.

He put the aviators back on.

“I know who killed her.”

* * *

“SHE’S INSANE.”

Arthur was standing in the middle of his living room with his phone in both hands.

“She is out of her mind. Rui is a side character. Rui plays the trumpet. Ren Saionji is the best member of the Gorgeous Four, he is the reason the story exists, and Tsubame belongs with him, it’s the whole point of the book, it’s—”

He started typing.

On the television across the room, Hawk Spartan put his aviators back on.

I know who killed her.

His manager was on the couch with his shoes off, leaning forward.

“Oh, here we go.”

“—and she has the nerve to call herself a fan—”

“Why don’t you ever watch your own show.”

“It’s the dentist,” Arthur said, without looking up.

His manager put his hands over his ears.

“He’s been obsessed with her teeth since high school. He kept a mold. They find the mold in episode three seventy-four. It’s always the same. Every episode is the same.” Arthur kept typing. “Sixteen. Sixteen people at that crime scene and none of them thought about the guy who owns a room full of drills.”

“Why do you do that.”

“Because it’s the same every week.”

“It’s good every week.”

“A man throws a knife across an apartment and the clue is a dental appointment on the fridge.”

His manager sat back and looked at the ceiling for a moment, and then at Arthur, and then at the phone in Arthur’s hands.

“Are you still fighting on that forum.”

“It’s a discussion.”

“For a comic nobody read.”

Arthur lowered the phone.

“Watch your mouth. Find Me Under the Cherry Blossom Tree is the greatest work ever written.”

“It’s another overdramatic romance.”

“It’s the summit.”

“Sure.”

“How’s the thing I asked you about.”

His manager exhaled through his nose.

“Nobody wants Hawk Spartan in a romantic comedy.”

“You said you’d ask.”

“I asked. I’ve been asking. Do you know what I do have? Action. I have a lot of action waiting for you, and after that movie you did, the one with the kid and the magic movie ticket—”

"The Magic Pass is a misunderstood gem.”

“—after The Magic Pass, what you need is a big comeback. A real one.”

Arthur was typing again, his glasses down at the end of his nose.

“Are you listening to me.”

“She says the trumpet scene proves Rui loved her more.”

“Arthur.”

“The trumpet scene proves nothing. I wrote a forty-thousand-word fic about where Ren was during the trumpet scene.”

* * *

The music started at eleven.

It came through the wall behind the television, low end first, and then the rest of it, and the glasses in Arthur’s kitchen began to tick against each other.

He waited.

He waited four songs.

Then he put down his phone, put on the first thing by the door, went out into the hallway in his slippers and knocked on 4C.

Nothing.

He knocked again, harder, with the side of his fist.

The door moved.

It had not been closed. It swung about a foot on its own and stopped, and the music came out of the gap at full volume.

There was a petal on the hallway carpet, just outside the door. Pink. He looked at it for a moment without understanding what it was doing on the fourth floor of a building in October.

“Hello?”

He put his hand flat on the door and pushed.

The lamp inside was on the floor, on its side, pointing at the ceiling, and the light went up and came back down again, so that everything in the room was lit from underneath.

Petals on the carpet.

Not a few. Hundreds. Spread out from the center of the room in every direction, thinning as they went, still settling at the edges where the air from the door moved them.

The coffee table had been pushed against the wall. The chairs had been pushed against the wall. The middle of the room had been cleared, carefully, the way you clear a space for something to happen in it.

A woman lay in the middle of the carpet.

Her hands were folded over her chest. Her hair had been combed out around her head and arranged, strand by strand, in a wide dark halo, and it had taken time, because every strand of it lay exactly where it had been put.

Her face was turned slightly toward the door. Her eyes were closed. Someone had closed them.

There were petals on her eyelids.

The music went into a chorus.

Arthur did not move. The light came up off the floor and lit the underside of everything, the underside of the chairs, the underside of the table, the underside of her jaw, and out past all of it, in the corner of the room where the lamp did not reach, something had gone dark across the wall in a long arc, from the height of a standing person down to the baseboard.

The petals near that wall were not pink.

His phone hit the floor.

Then his shoulder found the doorframe, and he went down it, slowly, the frame taking his weight and giving it back, until he was sitting in the doorway with the petals coming past his slippers into the hallway.

He was screaming before he reached the ground.

One long sound with nothing in it. It went out into the hallway and up the stairwell, and it went on, and the music went on underneath it, and neither of them stopped.