Known Associates

by Halfpenny

If Richard had to put his finger on it, it was more like he was a costly experiment Conan was expecting something specific from, and he wasn't delivering very promising results.

11. Chapter 11

Warnings: IMPORTANT, UPDATED TAGS, PLEASE READ: Very graphic depiction of a murder scene and victim. Minor sexually suggestive content between consenting adults. Discussion of panic attacks and self-harm. Themes of suicide and failed suicide prevention. Slight tonal shift from previous chapters as we start getting to the meat of this thing.

Case in this chapter centers on episode 1 of 2 of 'Richard's Class Reunion/Kogoro's Class Reunion Murder Case', concluding with episode 2 of 2 in the next chapter.

---

.

They drew into the station in Birinmon an hour before noon as Richard finished collecting the last drop of the entire Pacific Ocean in his bladder. He elbowed a businessman holding a newspaper and nearly tripped over a carpet bag as he booked it for the door. "Honestly, Dad, why didn't you just go on the train?" Rachel panted, hurriedly dragging his luggage alongside hers. "You had almost two hours to use the bathroom, what were you doing?"

"You ever try to stand up in a swaying bathroom and hit a moving target while also not braining yourself on the hand dryer?"

"Well, of course not, but—" she stumbled in surprise as Conan pushed past her, hauling his own wheeled suitcase at a run. "Conan, not you too."

"I'm little!" Conan dove into the path Richard had cleared. "You ever try to aim up in a swaying bathroom and not splash all over yourself?"

"I'm so sorry," Rachel apologized profusely to the man Richard had elbowed. "Dad, wait. Conan—"

Richard burst out onto the platform and blinked away sunspots. The station was a rural echo of Beika's, trimmed by a deep treeline to the south and bottoming out into a squat brick building where passengers were currently wheeling their luggage. Even under the steam the city smell was noticeably absent, the higher elevation wringing the heat and moisture out of the air. "Richard." Conan yanked at the fabric by his knee. "Richard, the bathroom is closed."

"What?"

"For maintenance! The men's bathroom is closed for cleaning! There's a sign!"

"Hold this," Richard snapped, thrusting Conan's suitcase at Rachel. He made a beeline down the tracks past the train until he could find a place to cross. Conan kept pace, little shoes paddling off the incline and sending gravel tumbling. "Are we out of security camera range?"

"A little further!"

"You idiots!" Rachel demonstrated every ounce of his athleticism and her mother's psychosis by actually managing to stay in bitching range with three people's luggage weighing her down. "Dad, you are a grown man, why didn't you just use the bathroom when the train stopped? What is wrong with you?"

"I can't pee on trains!"

"Conan, stop, we'll use the girl's bathroom at the station, I can just say you're my—"

"I can't pee with girls standing two feet from me, it won't come out!"

"Why!" Rachel screamed at the empty sky. "Why!"

Richard relocated an entire oceanic ecosystem onto the forest floor while a squirrel harassed him from an overhead elm. He emerged from cover in time to get clocked with a travel bottle of hand sanitizer. "I can't believe you." Rachel was still seething. She was already attending to Conan, rinsing his hands in what remained of his thermos. "Conan I could maybe understand, but you are thirty-seven years old, Dad. What if there had been hikers? There are trails all over Birinmon!"

"If they didn't want people peeing in the forest they should clean the bathrooms at night." He was a little winded but a lot lighter on his feet. He rinsed his hands with his own thermos and then slapped on the hand sanitizer, which knifed into every microscopic cut he'd given himself that day. "I forget where we are."

"We're south of the hotel. Conan, wait, you're not done. Dad, hand sanitizer."

Richard tossed it at him and undershot. Conan snagged it up out of the air with a rising heel, bounced it off his knee, and slathered it on his hands until Rachel pronounced herself eternally disappointed but appeased for now. "I don't want to go back to the station," she sighed, screwing the cap back on the bottle. "Dad, do you still have the map we brought ten years ago? It should still have the trails we marked."

"It's in the netting." Richard propped himself against a tree and rewarded two hours of clean living with a cigarette. "The area's not all that big, we could probably just wing it and be fine."

"We're surrounded by dense forest. If we wander off too far there's a good chance we'll get lost and miss dinner. Thank you, Conan." Rachel softened when Conan rooted around Richard's suitcase to hand the rolled-up map to her. "Let's see." She palmed her sweaty hair off her forehead and frowned at the marks. "That's north, that's east. There's the train station. We're here, I think."

"We have to be able to get our suitcases through the underbrush, wherever it is we end up going," Conan said. "If the paths are overgrown it's going to take forever. Are there any parks or campsites?"

"There's a trail up by the base of the mountain that runs by the river. Tour guides take tourists there. We could— Dad, where are you going."

"You losers can tour up your own blisters." Richard yawned around his cigarette as he stooped to catch the handle of his suitcase. "I'm going back through the station. I'll meet you at the hotel."

"Everybody on earth just watched you two run off holding your crotches," Rachel said between gritted teeth. "Can you please leave me some dignity?"

"Hey, no one's stopping you. Eat all the dignity you want out here. Me, I'm grabbing food. See you later."

"You're just going to leave two children out here by themselves?"

"Woods are said to be haunted after dark, so if it makes you feel better, you won't really be alone. Just sacrifice whoever's the slower runner and try to get back to the hotel in time to make the return train."

"He's just trying to scare you, Rachel," Conan said. "Ghosts don't exist. It'll be fine. We have a map. We'll just treat it like an adventure."

"Thank you, Conan." Rachel sighed and fished up her own suitcase. "At least one of you actually cares how I feel."

"I mean, if we're going to be realistic, we're in way more danger from wild boars and mountain leopards and kidnappers out here," Conan said. "But in a way those are better because you can just karate them away, right? I'll use myself as bait while you sneak up on them from behind. Plus I hear if you make yourself really big and scary with the leopards, they'll back off before they get a chance to eat you, so you might not even have to use karate if we scream loud enough."

Richard heard and felt the rumble of the train departing up the tracks as he walked. He was most of the way through his cigarette and was thinking about his next reward for good behavior when a sweeping heel took him off his feet and sent him skidding ass-first down the short gravel incline. "Thank you for wheeling my luggage back to the station you ran away from, Dad," Rachel said softly, terrifyingly. "It's really sweet of you. You're the best dad on the planet. I love you so much."

He followed them meekly back up to the main road. Her suitcase was the tonnage of three transatlantic shipping vessels. "If I remember, it's not that much of a walk from here." Rachel checked the map again. "We just have to follow the main road for a few blocks and turn off by the antique store. It should be just up the hill."

"I can't even imagine what this place is going to look like." Conan's suitcase made rhythmic thumps on the sidewalk as he twisted his neck around to peer at the scenery. "It's really quiet in Birinmon so I never had much reason to travel up here. Not many headlines coming out of here."

"Oh?" Rachel was warm. "Did you do a lot of traveling before you came to stay with us?"

"Yeah, tell us all about your travels, Gulliver," Richard said, sweaty and irritable from the failed campaign to make Rachel ferry her own shit. "Another foot in your mouth, or is it just 'something you watched on TV'?"

"The second one," Conan said too brightly. "Of course I didn't mean travel-travel. That would be silly. I just meant I haven't watched a lot of documentaries on Birinmon. I like to pretend I'm traveling when I watch them because it makes me feel like a cool independent adult like you, Uncle."

"The hotel is up on its own hill, but down the road a little ways past that are some really cute little restaurants and shops," Rachel said. "I don't know how many are still there after ten years, but do you want to come window shop with me after dinner? I think there's an ice-cream place that's open in the evenings. We can scope out what's there and come back tomorrow."

"You'll be busy tonight." Richard grunted as he worked her suitcase's wheels up over a drainage grate. "Everything'll be closed anyway."

"What? Why?"

"The festival."

Rachel looked blank a moment longer. She then sucked in a breath, clapping her very unoccupied goddamn hands in delight. "Oh, that's right! The festival! Oh, Conan, I completely forgot. We'll be at the festival tonight."

"I remember reading about the Birinmon festival." Conan's glasses were slipping a bit in the sweat on his nose. He pushed them up with his free hand and adjusted the grip on his suitcase. "Is it kind of like the Festival of Stars? You said there might be fireworks."

"Not 'might', definitely," Rachel said. "But it's so much more than that. There are games and booths and vendors. There are even people there who sell their homemade crafts. Dad won me a really cute little jellyfish plush the first time I ever came here and Ms. Hummelford bought me the light-up bracelet I'm wearing now. We even got to do one of those 'guess your age and weight' games, but the guy got my age right so I didn't get a prize. Dad got both, though. He was so confident he told the man he'd match the bet if the man got it right."

Conan's expression flooded with subtitles. "What," Richard said. "You think my gambling addiction stops at the track? I can gamble anywhere, anytime, including and especially at a carnival meant for kids."

"He got your age and your weight wrong?"

"What can I say? Man deserves what he gets for trying to outfox Beika's foxiest detective."

"What he conveniently neglects to mention is that the guy got his age and weight way wrong in the bad direction," Rachel said. "Thank god he did it to Dad and not Mom. We would still be mopping up the blood."

"I don't care how old or fat anyone thinks I am as long as they give me free shit." Richard crested the top of the hill with a squeal of wheels. Birinmon lay in jewel-tones beneath them, clusters of squat buildings and mom and pop stores stationed along the rolling hills. Reining at the apex of the drive, their hotel was a throwback to the 1800s in a nest of overstuffed gardens and massive looming elms.

He was aware of Rachel sidling up to him. "Brings back memories, huh?" she said softly, following his gaze. "Things have changed a lot since the first time we came here."

"I dunno," he said. "You screamed at the train station both times and I had to carry all your shit back then too, so it's all looking pretty much the same so far."

She pinched the skin of his upper arm to complete the checklist of filial abuses for that afternoon. "Come on, Conan," she laughed. "Let's drop off our stuff and cool off. This place has amazing gardens in the back as you head out to the hot springs. They've even got a shrubbery maze centered around a fountain that lights up at night. It looks like a fairy world."

"Really?" Conan feigned interest as he struggled to lift his suitcase up over the sidewalk. Rachel finally took it off his hands about a half hour too late for actual philanthropy. "Do you think we need to check in individually, or do you think the Judo captain took care of that for everyone already?"

"I'm not sure. Dad? What did Ms. Hummelford say?"

Ivy plants had picked their way up the side of the building and there was a decorative fountain clucking somewhere to their right. Standing at the gate with the same suitcase and aching back and one extra yawp somewhere near his knees, Richard accidentally found himself wedged between dimensions. He'd been the last of their group to arrive ten years ago too. The train had had to stop for suicide on the tracks and ended up being delayed by almost three hours: long enough for Rachel to exhaust her supply of books and her baggie of dry cereal. By the time they'd rolled into the station she'd been cranky and weepy, begging herself into a tantrum over a cherry pastry he couldn't afford and then refusing to eat the cheaper cup of applesauce he'd managed to afford instead. He'd dealt until he hadn't, finally maxing out his loan on patience and yelling at her to shut up, just shut up and eat it. Before the separation he'd been able to count on one hand the number of times he'd truly yelled at her. She'd bawled into the cup as she'd choked the applesauce down and he'd felt like the walking coalescence of every ounce of shit ever shat.

"Dad."

He blinked. "What."

"What did Ms. Hummelford say about check-in?"

"How should I know? Don't look at me."

"This is what happens when I leave the itinerary to you," Rachel sighed. "Conan, come on, let's just go in and figure it out on the way. Someone will be able to help us."

Richard watched them go and thought about moving. He crawled ass-first back up into his own head and smeared himself around in there for a while instead. By the time Craig had bounded out to meet him at the hotel gate, Richard had been wobbling with his threadbare suitcase and massacred marriage and his traumatized child clinging to his hand and wondering why the fuck he tried to do anything. It was both a very short and a very long list of fucks. Craig had gotten one look at the trainwreck and had immediately taken charge. He'd foisted Rachel off on Jamie and had steered Richard into the hotel bar to buy him a meal, then two, then three. He'd stayed silent throughout, supportive and nonjudgmental, until Richard had tried to take out his wallet. Put that fucking thing away. Rachel hadn't held onto it, instead remembering a fun evening spent with Jamie and then with the group as a whole afterwards, but for Richard that first day had been an unpleasant greasy existential blur as he tried to decide if he wanted to keep going or not. Rachel had made the call for him. She'd woken him up the next morning by crashing excitedly onto his stomach and yelling about table tennis, no trace of trauma from his legendarily shitty parenting the day before, and there was something so inspiring about her short memory that it'd got him out of his funk. Eva held onto grudges: Rachel held onto hope. He could fail upwards.

I don't know them anymore. The realization came way too late. Jamie he'd kept up with, but he'd only communicated through sporadic holiday postcards with the rest of them over the past five years. Standing once more at the gate of an expensive hotel he had no business staying in, Richard felt something start to unhook in his head. He could lie to himself in the mirror but seeing them would unravel the illusion. He was a famous detective but he was also still a drunk gambler who was separated from his wife and bad at parenting, and also he had stolen someone else's kid recently. There was little to no common ground and even if there was, it'd been years since he'd been out with any friend save for Meguire. He wasn't even sure how social interaction was supposed to look at this point.

He startled badly when a hand settled on the side of his face. "Wow, you were really far in there," Rachel said, withdrawing. Her eyes flitted across his expression with some alarm. "Are you okay? Should I run in and get you some water?"

"Actually, come to think of it, didn't I hear you mention some of those restaurants down the street?" he said. "What do you say to going a little farther and hitting up some of the local spoons before they close?"

Rachel looked taken aback. "Aren't we supposed to check in by noon?"

"I'm hauling around about fifty more pounds of snot than I was last time, they won't blame me if I'm late. C'mon, let's ditch. My treat. We'll stop by later."

"But won't they worry about us?" Conan leaned against his suitcase and lifted a heel to scratch a mosquito bite on his calf. "Why don't we check in first and drop our bags off if we're going to explore? I don't want to drag our stuff all over town."

"That's part of the adventure. I'll carry your shit. Aren't I great? Let's go."

"But shouldn't we at least check in with—"

He laughed. It was a great joke. He patted Conan's head to tell him what a great joke he'd told. "Race you there. Last one there buys the ice-cream."

"O-o-o-kay." Rachel trapped his arm in the crook of her elbow to arrest his flight. "Conan, here," she said, slipping her purse off her other shoulder. "Take this. I can see a bank of vending machines in that kiosk down the road – the one by the traveler's center. See it? Would you mind getting the three of us something to drink?"

"I mean, I guess, but won't we be getting drinks inside anyway?" Conan looked bewildered. "Am I missing something? Should we really spend your money when there's going to be a bunch of free stuff at the reunion?"

"I just think we maybe could all use a little pick-me-up after that train ride. Go ahead, it's okay. Just nothing alcoholic. And make sure it has a lot of sugar."

Holding the purse at arm's length, Conan walked away with the confusion of a pizza deliveryman tasked with transporting a genetic bioweapon. "Dad, come on." Rachel was quiet. She steered him towards the small fountain on the lip of the property's entrance. "Breathe with me a minute."

"I am breathing."

"Don't talk. Just breathe."

"Quit it. I'm not panicking."

"I know. Great detectives never panic. They're always cool under pressure. I just wanted you to breathe with me because I was nervous."

He was very cool under pressure but it seemed like a very strange request. People usually breathed independently. He tried it out and realized his chest was filled with knives. He dug a fist against it to try to punch them out by force.

Rachel drew it away. "Breathe, Dad."

He tried again, this time without the fist. It was easier without knives and fists. "If you weren't so miserable, I'd say your stage fright is sort of cute," Rachel confessed, but her tone remained gentle as she bracingly massaged a palm over his back. "It's so unlike you. Mom told me about it but I never believed her."

"I don't have stage fright."

"Well, why wouldn't you? It makes sense, doesn't it? You haven't seen them for such a long time. It's like meeting up with strangers in a way. I was so excited to see Ms. Hummelford, but it felt strange too. Writing to people is different from actually seeing them."

"Get out of my head."

"You first." And she held onto his arm until he'd figured out how to operate again, and the role reversal from their first time at the hotel was jarring enough to nearly tailspin him back off his exit ramp. "Which part is it you're so afraid of, anyway?" she asked, steering him down on the lip of the fountain to adjust his skewed tie. "Do you think it's just too hard to relate to them, or are you worried about what they'll think of you?"

"I'm a world-famous detective. If anything, they should be worried about what I think of them."

Rachel had an extraordinary expression on her face. She visibly grappled with the choice of boosting his confidence or performing scheduled rollbacks of his ego. "You realize you don't have to be a detective in there, right? I mean, they knew you as Richard, not 'Detective Moore'. Why can't you just go back to being him?"

"They actually knew me as 'The Judo Kid'. The whole campus did."

Her face crumpled with pain. "Oh god please stop."

"I feel better now," he told her. "You reminded me how great I am and how much they suck. I really shouldn't deprive them of the main event any longer."

"Maybe a little humility wouldn't—"

"I got the drinks," Conan called, jogging into the gardens. He passed the purse back up to Rachel and crouched to divvy up the cans. "They had a few flavors but I know you like peach," Conan said to Richard, handing it up. "If you're feeling faint, you should drink it slowly to give the sugar time to—"

Richard punched a hole in the side of the can with his thumb and shotgunned it in six seconds while Rachel groaned with despair in the background. "Let's get in there," he said decisively, crumpling it in his fist and standing, then frowned. "Did you leave our luggage out front?"

"Nobody's going to steal a suitcase that ratty and I didn't bring anything important in mine anyway." Rachel shouldered her purse and reached out for Conan's hand. Conan took it reluctantly, mid-swallow into his own soda. "I think more than anything I just want to figure out where it is we're sleeping. We're sharing just the one room, right?"

"I'll hang up the sheet between the futons and give you the corner."

"Thanks." Rachel was earnest. "This'll be fun, I promise. Just… don't run away. That's all you have to do. Breathe, and don't run away."

"Hey. I never run away."

"Oh, Dad, god, I can't," she said. "You run away all the time."

"I do not."

"You tried to run away literally ten minutes ago!"

"I don't run away when it counts."

Eva's eyes always looked softer on Rachel's face. She smiled at him without resentment and he wondered if he could maybe at least take credit for that. Ten years of being stationed on the front lines while Eva sat on the sidelines. "No," Rachel said. "You don't."

He stole what remained of Conan's soda halfway back to their luggage and downed that too while Conan screamed. It was easier to stay on solid ground when there weren't any pedestals to fall from.

---

.

For the third time in a row, Jamie's beer saved them all from dying on ice. By the time noon came and went, the club had melted back into a companionable tipsy puddle around the table to pour over Judo memorabilia. Richard kept his parenting mode engaged long enough to get Conan and Rachel settled in the room, then flipped the switch off and joined the noise. He hadn't had a lot to offer on the nostalgia front, but when it was his turn he was able to produce a handful of photos and some of the kitsch he'd picked up during their travel meets. They gushed over everything. Piece by piece, the faded tapestry of half-forgotten memories wove back together over the table.

Three beers in, Richard checked out for a bit to grab himself some air and heard Craig making the same excuses behind him. He slid the glass aside and racked up a win by not tripping over the lip of the terrace too obviously. Midday Birinmon brought in a flood of sun-soaked scents from the garden. The breeze had calmed since that morning, but Richard felt it prickle pleasantly under his collar as he cricked his neck around to steam off some of his buzz.

Craig slid the door shut behind them. His hand clapped down on Richard's shoulder in passing before he leaned against the rail next to him, using the cuff of his sleeve to run a sheen of perspiration off his bald head. "You're looking a lot better," Craig said simply.

"Thanks." There were two more cigarettes in the box when he hunted it up out of his robe. Richard held one in the corner of his mouth and offered out the other.

Craig took it ruefully. "Trying to quit."

"Try tomorrow." Richard was a bad better angel. He lit Craig's cigarette for him and Craig sighed around it, cradling the smoke, directing it out the side of his mouth in a controlled stream.

Richard lit up and thought about nothing. Behind the glass door he could hear Scott roaring with laughter and was surprised he'd adapted so quickly. Social situations tended to be hit or miss on his composure when he drank but this had settled around him like a shelter instead of a prison. "Kind of surprised these meet-ups keep going so well," Craig admitted. "You'd think after fifteen years there wouldn't be much to hold on to, but I'm proven wrong every time."

"You guys don't change," Richard said. "Especially Nancy. She even talks the same as she did back then."

"Did you know they never bothered trying for kids? Her and Scott."

"Yeah, that surprised me. Always pictured her with half a dozen."

"Apparently her body's not strong enough for it. Doctors said it was technically possible, but Scott said he'd rather not risk it. Looks like you're the only one of us who took the plunge, buddy."

"Yeah, well." Richard squinted at nothing. "It wasn't really up to me."

Craig was wry again. "Think you probably had some kind of hand in it."

"Eva said she wanted to have a kid as early as possible so she could still be young after the kid graduated. That and her parents were older – her mother didn't have her until she was closing in on forty. Think it put a bug up her that they might not be around to enjoy grandchildren if she didn't get moving."

"So she put her foot down on just the one? Didn't want to try for a son?"

"I said just the one," Richard said. "She played out every pregnant stereotype like she was paid hourly for it and her floor manager lived up her ass. Rice with peanut butter and pepper. Bawling at commercials. Throwing up on goddamn everything. Hell no that wasn't happening twice. I don't care what equipment my kid has."

Craig was hiding laughter poorly behind smoke. "Worked out, then."

"I guess."

"She looks happy, Moore. You did a good job with her."

Richard again tried to juxtapose the image of weepy snotty Rachel beside the Rachel who had coaxed him out of his panic attack in the garden. Every time he tried they just ended up assimilating into one another. Parenting fucked with the eyes. Rachel would be seventy-three and he'd still be able to look at her and see the kid who'd served him a bowl of cereal in toilet water and shaved a patch of hair off her head with his electric razor. "Gonna tell us anything about the little boy?" Craig said.

"Wasn't planning on it."

"You know they're dying to know, right? They won't leave you alone until you give it up."

Richard inhaled and let the smoke out in a long, unhurried trail for emphasis. "Fine, have it your way," Craig laughed. "I'm patient; I can wait. I've cracked open cases colder than this."

The stars would look incredible this far north. Richard's throat was already itching with the memory of smoke and grass pollen and bug spray and he surprised himself again by looking forward to the festival, maybe. He tried to give some thought to the food and the local craft beer and for some reason all he could think about was whether or not Rachel would still have to cover her ears during the fireworks. The first time they'd gone without Eva she'd tried to be brave, slowly shriveling on the blanket next to him like a sweaty miserable raisin until he'd cut the crap and hauled her into his lap to cover her ears for her.

Craig blew a trail between his teeth. When Richard had made up his mind that this was as good a place as any, he extricated his wallet, thumbed through the tabs, and slid out the folded envelope he'd prepared back at the agency.

Craig didn't move. "I don't even remember if I thanked you for that day," Richard said, holding the money out. "Honestly, it's mostly broad strokes now, but I never forgot what you did for me. I didn't have a lot of people batting for me back then. It meant a lot that you stepped up."

Craig said nothing.

"A lot's changed," Richard said. "But the work's steady enough now that I can afford to get here under my own power and feed us while doing it, and that's more than I could manage a few years ago. Consider this me paying my dues."

Craig breathed around his cigarette for a while. He removed it, joggled it between his second and third finger.

He said, quiet and vicious and gentle, "Put that fucking thing away," and Richard thought this was what friendship looked like with normal people probably. Shared vice and uncollected debts.

---

.

"I knew it," Rachel said calmly, appearing in the middle of the table's conversation out of truly corn-growing rural bumfuck nowhere. Her damp hair was coiled into a knot over the nape of her neck. "So all of those times you boasted about being 'unbeatable' in your Judo matches were complete lies. I should have known."

"You're not allowed to use witchcraft on vacations," Richard reminded her. "And don't listen to what they're saying. They'll do anything to tarnish my sterling until I have as many age spots as they do. Where have you been? I told you to stay in the room away from windows to avoid the snipers."

"Conan and I went down to the outdoor hot springs." Rachel beamed and jogged Conan's hand. Conan swayed a bit with the motion. "Oh, Dad, it was just what I needed. It's been forever since we've gotten to go. My whole body feels like jelly now."

"You went—" Ignoring the chatter behind them, Richard reluctantly engaged the switch and tried to remember she was his genetic responsibility or whatever. "Aren't those mixed baths?"

"Well, yeah, but nobody was around. It's the middle of the day."

"You took him in with you?"

"Dad, of course. What was I supposed to do, just leave him behind in that empty hotel room?"

Richard frowned at him. Conan was avoiding everybody's gaze, rubbing a fist slowly back and forth under his nose. He was in a doll-sized robe that still managed to come down over his toes and looked about as thrilled as a freshly shampooed chihuahua . "Well isn't that special," Richard said. "Sure he got a good eyeful of the local scenery."

"Dad, gross, stop," Rachel snapped. "He's a little kid. Don't make him feel self-conscious about something perfectly natural. We had a really good time, didn't we, Conan? Wasn't it nice when we washed each other's backs?"

Conan's other hand flew to his nose. "Oh my god." Rachel plunged to a knee and fumbled for a tissue to mop up the blood. "Maybe we stayed in too long."

"Or maybe he's worked up because he got a good eyeful," Richard said. "Next time you want him clean just beat the dust off him and rinse him under the faucet. Kids that age don't care about pools unless slides are attached to them."

"Oh, poor thing." Nancy finally noticed the commotion and surged away from Scott. She was reaching for her own pack of tissues. "That happens to me all the time in the baths. They make me feel so light-headed."

Scott craned his neck in her wake. "Should I get him a juice or something?"

"He'll be fine," Richard said boredly, clinking the bottom of his beer bottle against Craig's before washing down his mouthful of pretzel crumbs. "Just let him drip-dry."

"So you're the boy Richard's been taking care of." Nancy reinforced the blockade of tissues under Conan's death spigot. Her smile was warm. "He didn't tell us how cute you were. I'm Nancy, and that's Scott. We went to school with Richard."

"Nice to meet you," Scott said. "Seriously, we're glad you could make it. If Nancy and I'd decided to have them, we would've hauled them along too. Kids always liven things up."

"He's told me about you two," Conan managed, but the timbre was meek and Richard was irritated to once again feel the switch in his head strain against gravity. He palmed his mouth clear and reached over himself to hook the front of Conan's robes, hauling him away from Nancy to attend to the biohazard himself before he had to shell out for anyone's dry-cleaning. "You were the idol and the ace, right?"

"Ace!" Nancy was delighted. "Idol! Scott, did you hear that? Our legend endures!"

"We're also married," Scott said, grinning over Nancy's head as she wrapped him in a hug. "So I guess we qualify as a power couple with those reputations. Mutual aces, you could say."

"Forward, bowtie," Richard said impatiently as Conan tried to crane his neck back. "You really want to chow down on all that blood?"

"I'm Jim." Jim waved sheepishly from the side of the table that wasn't currently bleeding. "I was the anchor, or the 'point-getter', I guess. I had the most consistent performance across the board, so you could probably just say I was the ace and get it over with."

"And of course you know me," Jamie said. "Manager extraordinaire, beauty icon, and in charge of wrangling every single one of these sweaty idiots in college. It's only thanks to me we ever had food and transportation lined up, so really, I'm the ace."

"Except the real ace at the end of the day was me." Craig's grin was wolfish. He tapped his chest. "Craig Newberry, Chiba prefectural police officer, captain and pillar of the team. And the ace."

"The Judo club had a lot of aces," Conan said to Richard from behind the tissue.

"Nobody goes around thinking they're a two of clubs." Richard squinted at his nose and was satisfied it'd crusted over into surrender. He stood to throw out the tissues. "Throw yourself into a life or death situation and then you get to see who the real aces are."

"Real rich coming from a guy who quit the force with his tail between his legs," Craig said. "What was it you said they used to call you on campus? The 'Judo Kid'? Still have yet to hear evidence of that, and I'm as much of a detective as you are."

"All I wished during college was that he could detect a clock," Jamie muttered. "I could move heaven and earth to bus us to tournaments, but god forbid I manage to get him to practice on time. Always trying to sneak around with Eva or con some stranger into buying him lunch. You were incorrigible, Richard, honestly."

"Hey, I'm a famous detective," Richard bristled. "I'll have you know that I've shown up on time plenty of times where it counts, including and especially with the bank robber I apprehended just yesterday while the rest of you were eating lunch. And what's up with this gang-up? Leave me alone. Pick on Jim."

"Jim was always on time, thank you very much," Jamie said. "Not only were you chronically late, you were the only one who routinely passed out from nerves before every single competitive bout. I had to stockpile extra cans of soda and juice for you just to keep you on your feet."

"I'm learning so much," Rachel told Richard sweetly. "It's like opening a window to a clear sunny day after a lifetime of very smothering fog."

"Okay, you know what? Screw this," Richard said. "I got better things to do than be dogpiled on. I'm gonna go grab a nap. I'll meet you all later for the fireworks."

"Oh, don't be so sensitive," Nancy begged, smothering a laugh as she lunged up to capture his arm. "We're just having a little fun. You're so easy to tease. We'll stop, we promise. Come on, look at pictures with us."

"There it is!" Rachel gasped with delight as she finally spotted the binder on the table. "Isn't this the college photo album we looked at last time? It's gotten so much bigger!"

"It's become an anthology of sorts." Nancy was gentle but firm as she towed Richard back towards an inhospitable shore across the sea of all their drunken dickery. "Years ago Scott and I asked everyone to start sending pictures of their lives, so at this point it's grown beyond a Judo album and has become a shared diary. It helps us reconnect better once we all get together – actually seeing each other's lives instead of just talking about them."

"Yeah, that reminds me, people are really starting to slack on that." Scott's mouth was full. He propped himself up behind Rachel to peruse the collection over her shoulder. "Make sure to keep them coming so there aren't any gaps. I want this thing to be breaking its own spine by the time we're sixty."

"Oh, Conan, look." Rachel was rifling through the first pages. "Just look at how young Dad was. The older I get the more amazing it is to me."

"Yeah, this is just a few years older than you are now." Conan's usual armor-piercing eyeballing was neutered a bit by his crusty nostrils as he cased Richard up and down. "You really haven't changed all that much, Uncle. You look the same except for the mustache."

"Yeah, and damn him for that," Craig laughed. "The rest of us busy piling on the pounds and losing our night vision, and here he is still without a single grey hair. Talk about sorcery."

"I mean, it's not like you're all ancient," Conan said. "Thirty-seven is still really young. I don't think any of you look much different from the picture, honestly."

"He's delightful," Jamie said to Richard. "A treasure. A gift. Please tell me you're renting to own."

"He's the trial version. If I want the upgraded version I'll owe the government more pains in my ass." Richard thumped his finger down on the page Rachel was about to turn, stilling it so he could get a better look at what had caught his attention. "You were dating, weren't you," he remembered, motioning between Jamie and Craig. "This is when we got second place at the city finals. You two were a hot item back then."

He felt Jamie stiffen a little at his side, but it was Scott who spoke first. "Oh yeah, we all cried when that happened. Especially Jim. Fess up."

"Don't." Jim's face immediately found his palm. "Please don't do this here."

"She was the Madonna of the campus," Scott told Rachel wickedly. "Every guy wanted her. And I mean every guy. She'd get confessions every week. Flowers in the mail, chocolate delivered to the Judo room – just miles and miles of brokenhearted pilgrimage. And of course Craig nabs her because he always had to have the best of everything. And even then he couldn't relax because it didn't matter that she was taken – everybody was still after a date with her."

Rachel paused her perusal of the book to blink bulbous velociraptor eyes up at him. "What? Don't look at me," Richard said. "Your mother would've hid my body so far under the earth the planet would've crapped me out the other side."

"And let's maybe not wax poetic over 'Madonna' with your wife right here," Nancy said, yanking Scott's ear until he stumbled into her with a laugh. "Jamie was always prettiest, though, no contest. It's a good thing I didn't have a complex."

"So are you two still a thing?" Richard asked them.

Jamie's smile was frayed on the edges. She clocked a fist off the back of Craig's head hard enough to make him stumble. "Like I'd ever waste the prime of my life on this idiot," she laughed. "We split up eons ago. Besides, Craig has another girlfriend lined up now. Don't you, Craig."

"A fiance, actually." Craig massaged the spot and straightened. He braced his neck with his palm and looked up at them with a reluctant grin. "I was planning to announce it later, but I guess since the cat's sprung the bag – we get married before the end of the year. It's my boss's daughter."

"Congratulations," Nancy beamed. "I know working on the force made it hard to meet people sometimes, but I just knew you'd settle down with someone eventually. Oh, I'm so happy for you."

Scott was a little more blunt. "Who'd you coerce and how did you do it?"

"If anything, the coerced party was me," Craig chuckled. "It was kind of an arranged marriage sort of deal, but I do love her. She's good for me. Makes me a better person, if I'm telling the truth."

"At least something on this planet could." Jamie was brushing past Richard, rummaging a yawn between her teeth. "Everybody's getting married, and then there's the former 'Madonna'. Washed up at thirty-seven – just an old maid now. Who'd want to buy a single party girl this long after her expiration date?"

"Oh, Ms. Hummelford, please don't say things like that," Rachel blurted. "Conan's right – thirty-seven is still really young. I mean, we joke, but I really don't know why you guys keep insisting you're old all the time. And you're so beautiful and funny. You just haven't found the right person to appreciate you yet."

"You'll understand more when you start closing in on your thirties," Jamie said. "The higher you climb, the less men want to invest in you. No matter how pretty and funny you are, your value is dependent on your age, not your personality. I'm expired goods."

"You are not," Rachel said fiercely. "And if anyone says that and actually means it, they're not worth your time anyway. They're just making it easier for you to weed out the bad ones and find the good ones. And who says you even have to marry anyway? I think you're great just the way you are."

"She's a treasure," Jamie told Richard. "A gift. Please tell me you've voided the warranty on her so the manufacturer won't take her back."

"I lost the receipt a long time ago so the point is moot," Richard said. "What's got you in such a funk, anyway. At least the club had nice things to say about you. Me, I just get crapped on all the time because all of you are too drunk to find the bathroom."

Jamie was halfway across the room. She stopped at this, abruptly enough and close enough to Jim to make him flinch when she spun back on a heel to face him. "You want to know funk? I'll tell you 'funk'. Seeing all your friends pair up and be happy without you. The economy tanking around you to the point where you're getting daily threats about being laid off in your new job. But mysteriously, your pretty, much younger colleagues seem to suddenly have 'vital' positions in the company and are safe from dismissal. How about your former boyfriend ditching you for a much younger model? Any of that ringing a bell?"

Richard was acutely fucking cognizant of children nearby and the trail of empty beer bottles in Jamie's wake. "Look, maybe let's all just take a second to—"

"I feel like I could just die," Jamie said. "That's my funk, 'Detective'. Does that answer your question? Are you satisfied? I feel like I could just die. And all of you are too pleased with yourselves to care."

Rachel's hands flew over her mouth.

Richard was preparing to either evacuate her or volcanically fart to diffuse the tension when Jamie just as suddenly pushed herself away from them, bubbling over with laughter. "Your faces," she gasped. "I'm just kidding. I'm kidding! I'm just getting into character. I just wanted to say it."

"Jamie, don't ever do that again." Nancy's face was colorless. "Not even as a joke. Please don't scare us like that."

"Oh, Richard, for god's sake, tell them I was acting. You know how you and I clown around. It was a joke."

"Yep," Richard said. "How about we all dial it down before things get weird. We've got the rest of the weekend to chew on the heavy things. Let's keep tonight drunk and stupid."

"How about this for drunk and stupid," Craig said. "I've had a hankering for some table tennis for a while now. Anybody up for getting squashed in the rec room? We can reserve it at the front desk."

"Bring it," Scott said immediately. "I've been teaching the basics to my class for too many years now not to clean up. We just have to keep our eye on the clock for the 6:30 fireworks."

"I'll set my alarm." Nancy was already fussing with her wristwatch. "We should be fine, we have almost three hours. It only takes fifteen minutes by foot."

"Ms. Hummelford?" Rachel was gentle. She rose out of her seat and crossed the room to tentatively touch Jamie's elbow. "Do you want to have a match? We can play together just like old times."

"Oh," Jamie sighed. She swept the still-drying hair from Rachel's temple and braced her cheeks. "You impossibly sweet thing. I'll pass for now, but thank you."

"Are you sure? We can always just sit and talk too, we don't have to play."

"I'm going to sleep for a while. I think the week's just catching up with me. I'll feel better on the other side."

"Okay." Rachel reluctantly let her go. "Come down if you change your mind, Ms. Hummelford. It'll be a lot more fun with you there."

"Jamie. You're almost an adult now – let's get rid of the formalities." Jamie gave her cheek a final companionable jostle before lifting her hand over her head at the group in farewell.

Conan was silent by Richard's knee as he watched Jamie disappear up the stairs. Richard's train of thought was somewhere between needing to address this problem maybe but also a craving for medicinal cancer. He patted himself down. "You're out," Conan murmured, not moving.

"The hell do you know."

"Your spare pack fell out and got trampled underfoot during your freakout in the garden."

Richard promptly hoisted him up by the scruff of his robe. Conan eyeballed him back with the repentance of a fat woodchuck. "And that was not mentioned much earlier why," Richard said.

"My blood sugar was low and it affected my short term memory," Conan said. "If only I'd had a soda or something to prop it back up, I'm sure I would've been in a better state to notice things."

Richard strongly considered turning him inside out for science but there were witnesses. He settled for tangling Conan's robe around his legs like a fluffy sarcophagus and then leaving him to flail and die on his back. "I'm gonna change, I got blood and beer on this one," he told the group in passing, fanning out a lapel to clarify. "Be right down."

"You and me." Scott pointed a V at his own eyeballs and then firmly towards Richard's. "I owe you for the BS you pulled last time. Craig can school Jim first – you and I've got a score to settle."

Rachel was still hovering at the base of the stairs. Her eyes flickered to him a beat too late as he approached. She tried on a smile for him. "Quit worrying about her," Richard said, cranking her bodily away from the shadows. "She's stubborn. It's just her way. Don't feed it."

"She played it off as a joke, but I think she was serious, Dad," Rachel said. "I don't know if it's a good idea for her to be alone right now. Didn't she say she was having issues at work too? It's probably been building up for a long time."

"We'll check up on her in a bit. Not much trouble she can get into in a hotel, hon. Just leave her be for a while."

"So you're saying that if it'd been me, you'd have been okay with me saying those terrible things about myself?"

"I mean, considering I'm not allowing you to date until you're forty-five, the age stuff is probably going to go more or less according to plan," Richard said. "Don't worry about it. If she needs help, she knows how to call for it. Go down with Craig and the others and I'll meet up with you in a minute."

The velociraptor eyes were back on Rachel's face. Richard escaped by bundling her arms up in her robe the same way he'd captured Conan's legs and then propelling her out of his food chain with a directional knee. "I hate you," she sighed.

"Go play. I'll be down in a second." The stairs were narrow and rattled under his weight as he lugged himself up them. Two spare robes still hung in the closet; he unpeeled himself and took his time tying the next one, taking a break from the strenuous activity of giving a shit to rifle through the local stations in search of yoga boobs.

A knock came at his door. "Told you to go downstairs," he called boredly, searching for the guide button on the remote.

"It's me."

Richard tossed it aside and heaved himself up again. Jamie was on the other side of the door, still robed, hair damp as though she'd combed it out at the sink. Her smile was tired but impish. "Did you sweep the area for bugs?"

"Yep. No witnesses."

"Can I come in then?"

Richard stood aside and shut the door behind her. A yawn forcibly reminded him of how many beers and carbohydrates were fermenting on his teeth, so he detoured to his suitcase to grab his toothbrush.

Jamie was sitting on the end of his futon by the time he reemerged from the bathroom. He secured his robe around his ribs and unblushingly propelled himself down next to her, scratching his stomach through the thick fabric. He renewed his search for the guide button. "Literally no one else," Jamie said. "Not a single other soul here would do everything that you just did. You're an absolute marvel of modern convention."

"If you don't like what I'm doing, my room has a door." He was too sleepy for propriety. He wanted to play table tennis but he also wanted to kick back and flop around in the soft blankets like a doped-up labrador. Only the fact that his daughter was waiting for him kept him upright, but it was a close call. He'd slept soundly with worse guilt.

"I'm sorry I scared her," Jamie said. "I didn't mean to."

He was on vacation and not being paid to put up with horseshit. "Yeah you did."

"Not her."

"Any reason you thought the rest of us wanted to be scared? Because I could've done without it."

"I don't know," she said. "I didn't mean to say it, but once I did, it felt like something just… escaped out of a cage inside me. Like it was just waiting to be let loose. It felt good. I didn't regret it. I wanted to see your faces when I said it."

"Look, I'm really not exactly the right person to help you here," Richard said. "I've got some contacts who could hook you up with somebody to talk to."

Jamie's chin angled a little. "And who says you're not the right person?"

"Me. I've got luggage up here too. Best I can do is enable you and worst I can do is enable you more. You're better off going to a professional for this."

"I think you know that's not the best you can do," Jamie Hummelford said.

He'd sensed something along these lines had been coming. "I can't," he admitted, maybe quieter than he'd intended. Maybe because her hand had found his and it'd already felt like another life had been knocking on his door for the past week. She smelled like hotel soap and the sample perfume packets she got as a perk at the terrible new job she hated.

"Is that really true? Are you separated, or actually divorced at this point?"

"Just separated."

"It's been ten years," Jamie said. "How long does she expect to keep you on a tether like this?"

"We're tethering each other. I don't like her getting cute over there any more than she likes me getting cute."

"Don't you think it's time to move on? What is it you're waiting for?"

"I don't know." There really wasn't a word to describe what either of them were waiting for. They'd had a ferocious mostly-clothed hook-up on her office desk about four years ago when he'd stopped by to deliver the paperwork for Rachel's high school applications, but it'd been drought since and midday yoga boobs didn't always address thirst the way he needed thirst to be addressed. She was probably waiting for an apology. Even if he could dig down deep to rip up that ancient crusty bandage preventing the last of his pride from bleeding out of his body, the punishment she'd levvied at him long ago exceeded the crime. She'd missed out on ten years of her own daughter's life and no amount of mutual apology from either of them could fix that. "For one of us to bend, I guess."

Jamie's posture wasn't seductive because it didn't need to be. She continued to case him at close range and he could picture just fine what was under the robes, and that was the problem: Jamie wasn't an impersonal set of yoga boobs. Richard's libido worked better with abstracts. The instant they became flesh and blood and accessible was when his brain started to malfunction. Jamie was boobs and also the only friend who regularly impersonated a mafia don over the phone just to make him laugh. This past year she'd sent a handful of postcards from her travels and always capped them off with stupid random facts she copied off the backs of cereal boxes. For the trip Rachel had worn the light-up bracelet Jamie had bought her ten years ago despite the fact the battery for it had worn out after the first few months.

He remembered the lilac in the alley and the way Eva's fingertips had traced the mark Maya's wire had left on his neck with something like hate. I need a favor. Rachel's shrieks of laughter as Jack played with her in the park an hour away from his new home in the valley.

"It's no, isn't it," Jamie said.

"Yeah." It hurt more than he thought it would. "I'm sorry."

Her smile was melancholy. She didn't seem to be surprised. Richard wondered how much of it had been a test and how much of it had been actual interest. She answered the question with a, "May I?" and because he did in fact have problems with addiction, he allowed himself the pleasure of a kiss on his cheek. "Eva's lucky," Jamie announced, pushing herself off the futon. "I could hate her for it if I had the energy. It should've been you in college, not Craig, but even then she'd already lassoed you. I never stood a chance."

"Most people don't against Eva, if it makes you feel better," Richard said. "She neuters the competition before they even realize she's a threat. Add Judo to the mix and she's basically a walking bear trap with glasses."

"I'm going to my room if anyone asks. I really do need sleep. I got here last night and allergies had me up for half of it."

He snagged her wrist before she could move out of reach. "I mean what I said about the help."

"Oh ho, which help," Jamie said. "The help that reverses the clock for me, or the help that brings back my ex so I don't have to face my forties alone?"

"I don't know. Both. Either. Meguire's been trying to push me into it for years, I'm sure he's got a dozen different offices lined up 24/7 to take that call."

"I can't afford the stigma while I'm trying to hold onto the job I just moved across the country for." But Jamie reversed their grips and gave his wrist a squeeze before lightly slapping the side of his head and continuing to the door. "And stop teasing me unless you plan to close the deal. Haven't you ever heard 'take what you touch'?"

"I'll see you at fireworks."

Jamie paused at the threshold. She anchored herself on the wall and then leaned against it slowly, gauging him without guile. "Just answer me one thing," she said abruptly. "If you could do it all over again – press a button, go back in time, knowing all you do now, fresh start – what would you do?"

He wished he were even close to drunk enough to doggie paddle through metaphysics with her. As it was this answer didn't require a lot of thought. "Whatever it took to get Rachel back."

"And then?"

He shrugged.

"Think about it," Jamie said. She hesitated a final time, clucked her knuckles a bit against the door frame, and pushed off it. "Let me know when you figure it out."

He spaced out for a while between a crack in the wall and the buttons on the television remote. By the time he'd successfully located Birinmon yoga boobs, Jamie was long gone and Rachel was storming up the stairs with homicide in her eyes to fetch him, and that was the extent of his foray into metaphysics. A full cornucopia of alternate universes in which every one still found a nice-smelling way to fuck with him.

---

.

He lost every shred of family honor to Scott and continued to bleed out in his match with Jim while Craig fed Rachel a steady diet of lies in the corner. "Quit it," Richard said, unable to stand it when he saw Rachel stifle another shriek of laughter. "Whatever he's telling you isn't true. Stop being so gullible."

"So you neeever got so nervous before a match that you threw up red soda and fried tofu on the referee?" Rachel asked. "Or that time you wanted to see what would happen if you pulled the emergency handle on the back of the bus you rented, and the alarm went off just as Jamie was trying to merge onto the highway?"

"Craig, god damn it," Richard said.

"Come on, she's your kid. She's gonna still love you no matter how much you suck," Craig said. "Nobody else here has kids so we never get to tell any of these juicy stories to anyone but each other. Now that she's older we finally have a fresh set of ears."

"I will pay you three slices of pie on the way home if you stop listening," Richard told her.

"Oh no, Dad, no. No. No pie is worth this," Rachel said. "Do you have any idea how long I've waited for this ammunition? No blueberry or cherry in the world compares."

"Relax, I'm not just talking about all the stupid stuff you did," Craig said. "I also set up a tantalizing mystery for her. She's been sitting here trying to figure out who was the one person I was never able to beat at the club. Let's lay down a bet on how long it takes her to get it."

"A full pie to go away," Richard told her desperately. "An entire pie to yourself to just get up and walk out the door."

"Hey, sorry, not to break up the fun, but it's getting pretty close to six," Conan said. He'd spent most of the past hour slowly mouldering in a chair, eyes glazing over as Scott and Nancy lovingly patted serves to each other on the table in front of him. "Shouldn't we get going pretty soon? We don't want to be too late or we'll never get a spot."

Nancy immediately dove for her watch. "Why didn't the alarm go off?" she wailed. She shouldered Craig frantically as she passed, directing him to help her collect the equipment. "I still have to go back to my room to change. I don't want to go to the festival soaked with sweat."

"I could use a change too," Rachel admitted. "We might not have time to bathe but it'd at least be nice to get into a clean robe."

"All right, let's break here for a while," Craig said. "Whoever gets done first, take the blankets and find us a good spot. We'll hunt you down in the crowd."

"It just doesn't get better than this," Rachel sighed blissfully on the way back to their shared room, clonking up the stairs behind Richard in her wooden sandals. "The train, the hot springs, getting to see Jamie, playing table tennis with everyone… it's so much more fun now that I'm older. I'm sorry you weren't tall enough yet to reach the tables, Conan. Maybe next time."

"It's okay, I'm not really all that interested in playing anyway." Conan had been uncharacteristically quiet since the lobby. He examined his feet as Rachel ducked into the bathroom to change into a clean robe, then lifted his head once the door was closed to study the room with a sharper eye.

Richard shucked his sweat-soaked robe and grabbed the last one on the rack. "Was someone else in here earlier?" Conan said. "It kinda smells like perfume."

"If you're not gonna change, hurry up and get your crap so we'll be ready to head out the door. I want to be the one who picks the spot."

Conan's mouth slowly firmed into a line.

Richard tied the sash and tried combing out his sweaty hair in the mirror on the vanity. Conan drifted to the futon and hesitated a second time when he saw the rumpled sheets. He lowered himself to the floor beside it instead and dragged his backpack over onto his lap to rummage through it. Out came a packet of tissues, the little wallet Rachel had bought him while clothes shopping with Eva, and his oversized wristwatch from Dr. Agasa.

It took the visual reminder for Richard to finally reconnect the dots. Watching Conan fumble now to latch it as though its mechanics had become unfamiliar, Richard realized it'd been weeks since he'd actually seen it on Conan's wrist. When Conan's thumb slipped again on the new latch and he was muttering a frustrated curse, Richard said, "I didn't realize Agasa had already fixed that."

"What?"

"The watch. You'd told me it was in for repairs. He get it fixed?"

"Oh, right." Conan looked up from it with a surprisingly bleak smile. "Not really."

"What do you mean not really."

"All the modifications we've been trying to make just sort of… haven't happened yet. It can do lots of other things, though. Just not what I need it to do."

"What else does a watch need to do but tell time?" Richard said, an exasperated out-of-touch stegosaurus apparently. "You trying to plug climate control into that thing? What does he even power a watch that size with?"

"Just a normal battery and a solar panel to charge it. And the watch can do really fun stuff," Conan said. "It can make weather predictions by measuring air pressure, which can be useful when planning outdoor trips. There's a calculator function for schoolwork, a compass, a few little tools to open packages and bottles and stuff, that sort of thing. I don't know, it just makes me feel better to have it. I don't like to be away from home without it, so I took it out of the lab early for the trip."

"I mean, if it can already do all that, what the hell else are you looking for it to do? Transform into a car?"

"I just want a few more functions on it, that's all. Just for fun. I think it'd be a cool challenge to try to load it up with as much stuff as it can hold, you know? Like an all-in-one survival kit. I don't know. Never mind."

Richard watched him in the mirror. "What's wrong with you."

Conan didn't bother to obfuscate. He finally managed to strap the watch on and now drew his knees up to his chest to rest his chin on them. "Tired."

"Why."

"Just been a long day I guess. The hotel was fun though. I like the theme of it. These robes and sandals and stuff. It's really different. I guess I'm just not all that good with strangers. I always seem to say the wrong thing."

Rachel continued to clatter around the bathroom like she was personally constructing a department store instead of changing exactly one item of clothing. "You did fine."

"I liked the pictures," Conan said. "It was fun to see Rachel back when we – back when she was my age. There's so much I don't know. She seems to fit right in with all the adults and has a great time talking to them, so I guess that was fun to watch too."

"Nothing was stopping you from doing the same."

"Craig's really loud," Conan said. "He talks over you a lot. I don't know if you noticed."

He peeled off the hair matted down behind his ears and then wished he hadn't when the tuft refused to smooth back down. He went to get his nail scissors to shear it off because permanent overkill was how real men solved temporary annoyances. "He's a cop, I'm a PI. There are always going to be pissing contents between the two. I was the same way when I was on the force."

Conan rubbed his fist under his nose for a while. "You want to ditch the fireworks?" Richard said.

"Huh?"

"It's a trek to get down there, especially hauling blankets. If you're tired, you want to just stay here and watch TV?"

Conan's eyes flickered with honest surprise. "You'd do that for me?"

"Hell no, I'm going to the fireworks," Richard said. "You can stay here if you want to sleep. I'll bar the door with something to make sure you can't get out. For safety."

"Nobody's staying behind and nobody's imprisoning Conan, thanks." Rachel breezed out of the bathroom she'd been occupying since the early Mesozoic Era. "I'll carry him on my back if he's too sleepy to walk. Are you ready, Dad?"

"About five minutes ago." He bounced impatiently as Conan hastily gathered his things, shoveled them both out ahead of him before locking the door, and ran back down to the communal area in time to see Jim soundly busting his chops anyway with the earlier arrival. "I blame you," Richard snapped at Rachel. "You're fired. You had one job."

"It's okay, you can still be the one to pick the spot," Jim laughed it off. "You're taller than I am anyway, so you'll have the better vantage point. Lead the way."

"Are you sure we shouldn't wait?" Conan asked. "Isn't it going to be really hard to find everybody in the crowd?"

"If we waited for Nancy we'd be here all night. Better to get a spot early and sent out a scout if we need to." Richard motioned the three of them ahead and slid the door shut behind them. Birinmon had transformed in the hours they'd been inside, trading earthen-tones for pockets of technicolor as the festival lights gradually replaced sunlight. The scents already floating up to their hill were pretty maddening and he wondered if he could chisel Rachel into greenlighting a more frivolous food budget for the night. Spectacles always looked prettier on a full belly and he'd been mostly subsisting on pretzels and vice since reaching the hotel.

The crowd had thickened by the time they'd reached the turnoff, filtering slowly onto the slope leading down to the lake. "Conan," he heard Rachel say tersely, and this time Conan surrendered his pride and took her hand. Richard felt her huddle against his back on the way down exactly as though she couldn't bulldoze her own way through an entire crime syndicate with her wrecking-ball elbows. "Finally," she sighed as the tree line broadened outward, trading canopy for stars. "I don't remember it being nearly this bad last time."

"You were smaller and you pitched a fit when you lost sight of me for three seconds," Richard said. "Crowds part real fast when you've got a little girl screaming like she's been stabbed."

"I feel like I'm learning you did a lot of screaming as a kid," Conan said to Rachel.

"If I did scream all the time – which I didn't – it was probably because someone didn't bother to listen to me when I used my inside voice," Rachel said tartly. "Dad, wait, can't we just cool the pace for a second? My feet hurt and I can't even see a way down from here that's not completely cluttered with blankets and picnic baskets."

"I see the vendors." Conan hung onto her hand for counter-weight as he leaned to point. "Are we going to visit them?"

"After. We're already late. They'll be set up for a few hours after the show is done, we'll have a chance then."

"Come on." Richard nearly bit it when his sandal caught a rut in the grass and saved himself by mercilessly pinballing into Jim instead, who absorbed the blow to his back with a sigh. "Rest later. We don't snag a spot by the lake we might as well go home."

"It's a lot darker than I thought it'd be." Conan adjusted his grip on Rachel's hand and quickened his pace to a near-run. "I thought there'd be more festival lighting down here, but I guess it wouldn't make sense to do that so near the fireworks show. It's going to make finding us really hard."

"Jamie." Rachel suddenly skidded to a halt to suck in a horrified gasp. "Dad, we forgot to wake Jamie."

"Leave it." They were close enough now to see the opposite shore of the lake in the gloom. Telltale glints of preparation flitted like fireflies between the trees. "It's too late. You leave now and you'll miss the show. She's just gonna have to live with it."

"We can't exclude her, she'll be devastated!"

"She knows how to set an alarm. If she misses it at this point it's on her."

"Why are you always like this?" she exploded. "Like you've never overslept a day in your life? If you're not going to look after your friend, I am. I'll be right back."

"Wait," Richard blurted, startled, but she'd already burst like a one-horse stampede towards the paved path. Conan shot Richard a guilty look before racing after her, probably to collect witness statements.

Jim said, "I can see why Nancy and Scott decided to sit parenthood out."

"If they run back even half as fast as they run their mouths they won't have anything to worry about." He lifted his elbow to scratch a mosquito off his temple and decided nihilism was the better part of valor. "Let's just get a spot and enjoy the show. Whoever shows up shows up."

They ended up nabbing a spot by pure chance as another family vacated early for their toddler's upset stomach. Richard spread the blankets out and had a moment to soak up the ambiance, wrangling in a sneeze as the smoke from nearby sparklers drifted over to them. Despite his hardassing he could admit to being disappointed Rachel wasn't here to share the pre-show anticipation with him. She always had fun people-watching festival crowds.

Jim finished applying the bug spray on his ankles and tossed the bottle over. "So what do you think of Craig?"

"What, and the fiance? I say good for him. It's about time."

"It's kind of sudden," Jim said. "I was just talking to him last year and it seemed like maybe he and Jamie were still trying to keep things going. I was surprised when he turned around and said he was getting married to someone else."

"Seventeen years is a long time for nothing to happen."

"Yeah, but you know Jamie isn't really the marrying type. I just figured he'd accepted that and they were going to live together without the paperwork. Come to find out I was completely wrong about all of it."

"Couldn't figure out how Jamie really felt about it." Richard's mind was mostly on other things as he thumbed spray behind his ears, but he could cul-de-sac for this. "She acted like she didn't care, but then she made that big deal about being single before ducking out, so it was probably further up her craw than she wanted it to be."

Jim drew his legs up and didn't reply. The way he adjusted his glasses was so reminiscent of Conan that Richard had to check his silhouette twice before mopping up the conversation. "You might as well shoot your shot while you're here. Scott's right, you've been pining for her since college. Seems like as good a time as any to air it."

Jim was short. "She already rejected me."

"She give a reason?"

"Just laughed it off. I figured it was because of… you know. The weight. And the looks, I guess. I think she's always thought I was a little boring."

"All that's probably too fine a point to put on it," Richard said. "I think she just likes to have things she's not supposed to have. Worked out all right when she was in college, but now that most people around her have settled down, it's harder to play the game. Nothing wrong with you. I say hit her up later and see if her mind changes."

Jim again said nothing.

Richard leaned heavily back on his palms to scan the crowd, jerking his shoulders and waist until he'd successfully wrangled a series of pops up his spine. "Do you think…" Jim blurted suddenly, then stopped and adjusted his glasses again. The rest came out in a rush. "Do you think I would've ever had a chance with her? In a different life I mean?"

"What's this 'had' business? I just told you to shoot your shot. What do you have to lose?"

"I can't."

"Look, just listen to me, okay? The great Richard Moore's an expert in love. Girls like a little initiative. You just need to—"

"No," Jim snapped. "That's not how it works. Not when you look like me. Maybe you can act like however you want and get whoever you want, and maybe women are fine with you being forward, but that doesn't work for me. It never worked on Jamie. She doesn't want me. She never has and now she never will."

Richard watched two mosquitoes jocky for the meatiest smorgasbord between his toes.

"She doesn't want me." Jim swiped his glasses off his face, cleaned them viciously on his robes, and didn't say anything else to him for the rest of the outing.

---

.

"Dad, sorry, I can't, could you," Rachel was red-faced and laughing as she tried to cover her ears and organize Conan at the same time. "Sorry, could you just—"

He yanked her down into a sitting position on the blanket and closed his hands over her ears for her as she finished rearranging Conan in her lap. "Thanks," she said breathlessly, displacing his hands with her own once she was settled. "I hope we didn't miss too much."

"Where's Jamie?"

"She was sleeping and Mr. Newberry told me not to wake her up. Scott and Nancy were still there too – they'd taken a bath to wash off the sweat from the tournament. Why did Jim leave? We passed him on the way back here."

"I don't know." Colorful clusterfucks of fireworks were making it hard to hear her and even harder to care about what she was saying. He gave up and resigned himself to another evening of sweaty mediocrity. "Did you at least buy me a snack on the way?"

A fountain of white light erupted from the opposite shore and crackled all the way down. Hands still over her ears, Rachel turned her beaming face and yelled what at him and again he gave up, waving her attention skyward. He leaned back on his palms slowly, ignoring the mosquito that was ignoring the mosquito spray on his neck, and half-closed his eyes to concentrate on the shudder of the earth under each point of contact. Birinmon narrowed into light blooming into daisies, into smiley faces, into starbursts, into motes that rained over the lake's surface and sizzled apart on contact.

Halfway through he peeled his attention away from the show as he always did to see Rachel's reaction. Conan was still in Rachel's lap, head leaning back into the hollow of her shoulder. He'd lifted his hands up behind him in an echo of Richard's earlier gesture, covering Rachel's ears for her as she watched the display. Her arms were wrapped around him, chin resting on the top of his head as she absently rocked them both back and forth. Both of them were fixated on the sky.

Richard couldn't drag himself away. Sensing the scrutiny, Rachel turned her head just enough to meet it. Her smile was a little melancholy and a little warm. She mouthed thanks Dad.

The spot on the other side of them stayed empty.

---

.

"Cheer up, Dad," Rachel begged for the fifth time. "You still had fun, didn't you? It wasn't that bad."

"Are you drunk? It was a complete bust." He bundled the blankets together with vicious jerks. "What the hell happened to everyone? What was the point of bathing before hiking out and slapping on all that bug spray?"

"I'm sorry." She was still flushed with delight. She managed to school her expression into something resembling sorrow when he turned a gimlet eye on her. "I know how much you wanted to see it with your friends. I hope you weren't too disappointed with just us."

"I've done nothing but hang out with you nasal spelunkers for the past two months. Every once in a while a guy likes to diversify."

"Yes, Dad, I know. Really. And I'm sorry."

He tucked the blankets under his arm and made a move towards the summit. He wasn't surprised when she lunged to tow him in a different direction because that was apparently the trend of that evening. "Though just for the record it was really really fun to see it with just you two and if we're being honest I was just pretending to be sad that no one showed up," Rachel added in a rush.

"Yeah, I got that without your help, asshole," Richard said. "Let's just go already, the crowd's thinned out enough to make our way up there without having to swim for it."

"Let's at least hit the vendors first," she coaxed, tightening her grip until his shoulder creaked. "Conan's never been here before and I think it'll be a really fun experience for him. Please?"

"No. I'm tired. I want to wash this shit off."

"Aaaand we can do that, just as soon as we make some teeny tiny stops that'll hardly take any time or money at all, I promise."

"I already said no. I'm the man of this family and the head of the house and what I say goes. That's final."

"I will go boneless, Dad," Rachel said.

He changed course. He did acquiesce to lifting his captured arm enough for her to squiggle underneath it and seize his ribs in a hug, because all in all she was an asshole infrequently. "Keep up," he called to Conan, who was still craning on tiptoe to try to catch a glimpse of the engineers on the other shore. "Maybe if you're not a complete pain I'll reconsider my plans to trade you in to a food cart for a street waffle."

"I have been to this sort of thing before, you know." But Conan also surrendered to Rachel, who was happily paddling out for his hand in the darkness. "You don't have to spend any money on me or anything. Just get what Rachel wants to get."

"Thanks for your permission," Richard said. "You're so good to me. Rachel, let's get this over with. You lead the way."

To her credit Rachel tempered her enthusiasm with some situational awareness. She towed them quickly through a dart game, visited a crochet vendor to shell out for a bottle cozy in the shape of an octopus, and made seven year-old wobbly eyeballs at him at the goldfish area before Richard reminded her it wouldn't survive in its bag for the three days it'd take them to get it back home and kill it domestically.

He was half-asleep by the time they hit the age and weight station. After winning his bonus third voucher for a fellow gambler's bad judgment, he thumbed through the slips and stepped down only to spot Conan staring at the readout with horror. "What," he said, reflexively looking over his shoulder. "No one better be bleeding or dead."

"You—" Conan's throat worked a moment. "Are you sure that's accurate?"

"Huh?"

"That number. Are you sure the scale is accurate?"

"Probably. I dunno. I don't really care as long as I get free booze out of it."

"It says drink, Dad," Rachel sighed, holding her own voucher up towards the city's glow to squint at the price tag on it. Her triumph had come with mixed feelings and Richard suspected there'd be a lot of face pummeling in the bathroom tonight as she tried to figure out which angle of her looked like it could be twenty-three. "You do realize that could extend to bottled water or juice at that convenience store, right? Even soda? Like it doesn't have to always be beer."

"You said you hadn't weighed yourself in a while, right?" Conan was still zeroed in on Richard. "Are we sure that's right?"

"I already said I don't know. Ask the guy if you're so hung up over it. It's about the same I weighed last time, so it can't be that off."

"It's under what you weighed five years ago, actually." Rachel stooped to the bundle to take her turn carrying their supplies. "Maybe I need to cook with butter a little more often for a while. If you lose much more I'm going to have to start taking in your seams."

Conan's complexion was salt. "What," Richard said, finally clued into the weird behavior. "Agasa hasn't programmed a scale function into that watch yet? Why do you even care about this?"

"I don't." Conan shook his head, then shook it again harder as if jarring himself out of dodge. He shoved his glasses up with his knuckle. "I don't. You just… weigh a lot less than I thought you did, that's all. It just surprised me."

"Mom says he's mostly made up of cigarette smoke and vice," Rachel said helpfully. "It's why he's able to float so well when he swims."

"In the meantime she's filled up with dehydrated snake venom and battery acid, so they have to measure her weight by molarity," Richard said. "Quit listening to her crap. Last I checked it was 'cigarette smoke and vice' still buying food to throw into your yawping abyss."

"Well?" Rachel ducked her head playfully to take in Conan's expression. "You seemed pretty shocked about Dad. How about my height and weight, Conan? Any surprises there?"

"I always think my big sister looks pretty no matter how high her weight is," Conan chirped, and the atomic failure was so well-meaning that Richard choked on his spit and died before the radiation could kill him. "Ouch," Conan hissed suddenly, stumbling, reaching down to peel off his sandal. "Not again."

"Did the fastening break?" Rachel juggled the blankets in her arms and looked up the remainder of the hill with a parent's long-suffering expression. "We've got a long ways to go. I guess this is as good a point as any to call it quits."

"I got him." Richard swept him up around the midsection without breaking stride and towed him the rest of the way up to the sidewalk, ignoring the gusty sigh against his forearm. The crowd had congealed again as late-night lines formed around the food carts. Richard made casual distance, navigating them further up the road towards the hotel before plopping Conan down on the sidewalk to examine the frayed twine. The wound was probably mortal but a patch job would at least see them back to their room. He cranked Conan around to a better angle and used the spill of the street light to attend to a makeshift new knot.

"You know, it is kind of weird how this all happened," Rachel said. She'd leaned against the light post to watch him work. "I mean, I'll admit I didn't really mind, but isn't it strange we haven't seen any of them on the way back? I know we stayed later for the vendors, but I can't believe none of them managed to spot us once the crowd had thinned out."

"Come to think of it, Jim looked pretty upset when we passed by him at the lake," Conan said. "Did something happen? Did you two fight?"

"Just everybody cranked off after a long day," Richard dismissed. "He had a bone to pick and I just happened to be near his doghouse."

"Wasn't there supposed to be one last meet-up before we all turned in?" Rachel asked. "We can probably ask everybody what happened there. I'm sure it was probably just some crossed wires."

The ends briefly got lost in the shadow. Richard remorselessly dug around between Conan's first and second toe to fish the frayed twine back out while Conan squirmed and bleated with horrified laughter. "Thanks again, Dad," Rachel said. "This was really fun. I know I gave you a hard time, but you didn't really have to agree to go with me. It was nice that you did."

"Sure." He could leverage it later but for now he was busy. He shouldered a bead of sweat off his face before it could run into his eyes and managed to fit the two ends of twine together just as mosquitoes started harassing the back of his neck. "The great Richard Moore to the rescue!" he cheered, heroically using the support of Conan's head and spine to stand upright and face the cruel dark night with fresh courage. "Is there anything this miracle of a man can't do? He's just been rolling out all the hits lately. Sort of makes you wonder why you keep insisting on going to the witch when you can just get all your magic from the wizard."

"His best virtue is his humility," Rachel agreed. She helped Conan stand and dusted him off. "Let's go into town and spend our drink vouchers tomorrow. It'd be really nice if maybe little Conan could have one of the great Richard Moore's many, many vouchers, Dad."

"What the hell, three isn't many."

"Three is many when you have a documented drinking problem," Rachel said brightly, and goddamn. Richard didn't bleed tuition money into an expensive high school for her future just so she could moonlight as an assassin. "Either way, it'll be a lot of fun to explore the shops together. Any plans for what the group is going to do?"

"I don't know. Not that worried about it right now."

"I think you and I might be out of luck in the exploration department." Conan had been examining his watch throughout Richard's repair work. He dug a thumb against the tiny buttons lining the side and something inside the mechanism blooped. "Air pressure's plummeting. I think we're in for a storm tonight. We're probably looking at another bust tomorrow."

"That's okay," Rachel said determinedly. "There's always chess and table tennis, and we can watch movies too. As long as it's relaxing, I'm willing to try it."

There was matted fluff from the blankets trapped in Conan's cowlick. Unfiltered muscle memory had Richard combing it up as he passed, and he felt Conan's surprised gaze follow him. "Hey Dad?" Rachel was quiet again. "Let's make sure Jamie gets woken up for dinner, okay? I think it'll be really good for everyone to end the first day together so the rest of the weekend isn't awkward."

"Sounds good."

"So?" Her smile was tired but triumphant. "What do you say? Are you happy you didn't run away?"

"Yeah."

She worked her hand away from the bundle of blankets long enough to give his elbow a bracing squeeze. "Me too."

---

.

There were flecks of brain matter and skull fragments peppering the spill of congealed blood on the wall. Jamie neck sat at an unnatural angle. Her blanched hand was frozen on the pistol, the tiny feet she'd used to playfully kick him with sticking out from the hem of her robe. The muscles on one side of her face had been partially severed by the bullet's trajectory, skewing her eyelid enough to reveal a strip of white under her lashes. The corner of her mouth drooped.

Craig said, "If the police can't get here, we'll need to be the ones to determine time of death."

Rachel was huddled in a heap against the wall in the hallway. She hadn't screamed this time.

---

.

Jamie said, Let me know when you figure it out.

Her skinny ankle was heavy in his palm. He palpated it and tried to rotate it with the buzz of fireworks still in his ears. She'd used to paint her toenails offensively electric shades and then wear sandals in the dead of winter to class just to hear the uproar. The rigid muscle in her calves told him she'd kept up on her promise to work out more even though she hated running even more than she hated being single.

He parted her robes to check for lividity and discovered a naked torso. He took her hand just to take it and her fingers didn't reverse their grip and squeeze back because this was how being dead worked. There was nothing left to hold on to. The white strip of her eye didn't watch him as he rotated her wrist, her elbow, rubbed an unnecessary thumb across her frigid knuckles.

Craig was quoting numbers at him. Jim fled and came back reeking of vomit.

Jamie said, let me know when you—

---

.

"— thing that's odd. Her finger should be on the trigger if it was a suicide, shouldn't it? And this robe looks way too big. But the biggest mystery is her head right here. If you look—"

He realized he was standing and forgotten how he'd gotten there. He reached down and seized the scruff of Conan's robes, and the violent hatred he felt ricocheting inside him like a snapped wire frightened the shit out of him. He threw Conan out the door and out of his own reach forcefully enough to make Nancy's tearful eyes dart to him in horror. "Dad." Rachel was quiet down by his feet. She didn't move from her huddle against the wall. "Did you find out anything?"

"Seven hours ago. I couldn't even move her toes. She's been dead a long time."

"That would've meant three o'clock." Jim's lips had a bluish tinge to them. If Richard were in a different headspace he'd have thought to sit him down and drink something hot to ward off shock. "Right after the t-table tennis tournament."

"So she wasn't lying," Scott said. "It wasn't a joke. It was a cry for help after all."

"No." Nancy gave up. She crashed into Scott's chest and clawed up fistfuls of his robe as she sobbed. "No no no, that's not fair, Jamie."

"I can't believe this." Jim swayed and had to brace his hand against the wall. "I can't fucking believe this."

Conan picked himself up on the other side of the hallway. "She was depressed," Scott said tonelessly. He looked dazed, barely seeming to register Nancy's weight against him. "She must have wanted to die surrounded by friends. That's why she bought all the beer and went all out on the bill. She wanted to go out with a party."

On the floor in the hallway, Rachel rotated Jamie's bracelet around her wrist with dull flicks of her thumb.

"She planned it this way," Scott said.

Craig covered Jamie's body with his outer robe.

Conan watched him.

Richard—

---

.

"The police can't get here any earlier," the receptionist said. Her bitten thumbnail slipped back between her teeth as her professionalism finally dissolved into helpless tears. "Between the flash flooding and all of the festival preparations, the hill is basically impassable to motor vehicles. I'm so sorry. I just don't know what else to do."

"I think we should call Inspector Meguire," Rachel murmured to him as they climbed back to their floor. She was clinging to his sleeve. "He told you to call him when you came across a crime scene."

"Not his jurisdiction, hon."

"You're his jurisdiction. He made you promise partner to partner. Remember? He told you to call him when you got in trouble and you said that you would."

Jamie's knuckles had rummaged like gravel under his touch.

Think about it, Jamie said.

---

.

Craig at last handed him the camera with a sigh. "We should take another set of close-ups on the wound with the reels we have left. It's pretty clear it's a suicide, but let's make sure we document this right so the police have less to do when they get here."

Richard knelt. It was accidentally too close and he felt the chill of congealed blood on his knee. He moved it and it smeared, and the stench of it resurged as a flood into the room.

Jim ran next door. The retching began again.

Rachel thumbed her bracelet around her wrist again and again. The little plastic starfish clicked together in the silence.

---

.

Jamie said—

---

.

Camera in hand, knee in blood, for the first time in nearly a decade, Richard Moore switched back on.