“So what?” Freya demanded impatiently. “Stop thinking so much, Nathaniel. Just look at it. See it. Isn’t it beautiful? Haven’t you felt things look that way sometimes, seeing stone in sunlight?”
“Well…“ And, since I am a strictly honest person, if I had said anything at all I would have had to admit that it did have a power about it. It drew the eye; it poured light onto us as surely as the beams of sunlight extending from the gates in the Dawn Wall to the curved side of the clear dome.
“Well?” Freya demanded.
“Well yes,” I said, “yes I see that cathedral front—I feel it. But there must have been quite a heat wave in old Rouen. It’s as if Monet had seen Terminator on Solday, the painting fits so well with this light.”
“No,” Freyn said, bit her left eye was squinted, a sign she is thinking.
Harvey said, “We make the conditions of light in Terminator, and so it is an act of the imagination, like this painting. You shouldn’t be surprised if there are similarities. We value this light because the old masters created it on their canvases.”
I shook my head, and indicated the brassy bedlam around us. “No. I believe we made this one up ourselves.”
Freya and Harvey laughed, with the giddiness that Solday inspires.
Suddenly a loud screech came from inside the villa. Freya hurried across the patio into the music room, and I followed her. Both of us, however, had forgotten the arrangements that Heidi made on Soldays to cast the brilliant light throughout her home, and as we ran past the silenced orchestra into a hallway we were blasted by light from a big mirror carefully placed in the villa’s central atrium. Screams still echoed from somewhere inside, but we could only stumble blindly through bright pulsing afterimages, retinal Monets if you will, while unidentified persons bowled into us, and mirrors crashed to the floor. And the atrium was raised, so that occasional steps up in the hallway tripped us. “Murder!” someone cried. “Murder! There he goes!” And with that a whole group of us were off down the halls like hounds—blind hounds—baying after unknown prey. A figure leaped from behind a mirror glaring white, and Freya and I tackled it just inside the atrium.
When my vision swam back I saw it was George Butler. “What’s going on?” he asked, very politely for a man who had just been jumped on by Freya Grindavik.
“Don’t ask us,” Freya said irritably.
“Murder!” shrieked Lucinda from the hallway that led from the atrium directly back to the patio. We jumped up and crowded into the hallway. Just beyond a mirror shattered into many pieces lay a man’s body; apparently he had been crawling toward the patio when he collapsed, and one arm and finger extended ahead of him, pointing to the patio still.
Freya approached, gingerly turned the body’s head. “It’s that Musgrave fellow,” she said, blinking to clear her sight. “He’s dead all right. Struck on the head with the mirror there, no doubt.”
Heidi Van Seegeren joined us. “What’s going on?”
“That was my question.” George Butler said.
Freya explained the situation in her.
“Call the police,” Heidi said to Lucinda. “And I suppose no one should leave.”
I sighed.
And so crime detection ensnared me once again. I helped Freya by circulating on the patio, calming the shocked and nervous guests. “Urn, excuse me, very sorry to inform you, yes, sorry—hard to believe, yes—somebody had it in for the secretary Musgrave, it appears,” all the while watching to see if anyone would jump, or turn pale, or start to run when I told them. Then, of course. I had to lead gently to the idea that everyone had gone from guest to suspect, soon to be questioned by Freya and the police. “No, no, of course you’re net suspected of anything, furthest thing from our minds, it’s just that Freya wants to know if there’s anything you saw that would help,” and so on. Then I had to do the difficult scheduling of Freya’s interviews, at the same time I was supposed to keep an eye out for anything suspicious. Oh, the watson does the dirty work, all right. No wonder we always look dense when the detective unveils the solutions; we never have the time even to get the facts straight, much less meditate on their meaning. All I got that day were fragments: Lucinda whispered to me that Musgrave had worked for George Butler before Heidi hired him. Harvey Washburn told me that Musgrave had once been an artist, and that he had only recently moved to Mercury from Earth; this was his first Solday. That didn’t give him much time to be hired by Butler, fired, and then hired by Van Seegeren. But was that of significance?
Late in the day I spoke with one of the police officers handling the case. She was relieved to have the help of Freya Grindavik; Terminator’s police force is small, and often relies on the help of the city’s famous detective for the more difficult cases. The officer gave me a general outline of what they had learned: Lucinda had heard a shout for help, had stepped into the atrium and seen a bloodied figure crawling down the hallway toward the patio. She had screamed and run for help, but only in the hallway was clear vision possible, and she had quickly gotten lost. After that, chaos; everyone at the party had a different tale of confusion.
After that conversation I had nothing more to do, so I got all the sequestered guests coffee and helped pick up some of the broken hail mirrors and passed some time prowling Heidi’s villa, getting down on my hands and knees with the police robots to inspect a stain or two.
When Freya was finished with her interrogations, she promised Heidi and the police that she would see the case to its end—at least provisionally: “I only do this for entertainment,” she told them irritably. “I’ll stay with it as long as it entertains me. And I shall entertain myself with it.”
“That’s all right,” said the police, who had heard this before. “Just so long as you’ll take the case.” Freya nodded, and we left.
The Solday celebration was long since over, the Great Gates were closed, and once again through the dome shone the black sky. I said to Freya. “Did you hear about Musgrave working for Butler? And how he came from Earth just recently?” For you see, once on the scent I am committed to seeing a case solved.
“Please. Nathaniel,” Freya said. “l heard all that and more. Musgrave stole the concept of Harvey Washburn’s first series of paintings; he blackmailed both Butler and our host Heidi to obtain his jobs from them—or so I deduce from their protestations and certain facts concerning their recent questionable merger that I am privy to. And he tried to assault Lucinda, who is engaged to the cook Delaurence—” She let out a long sigh. “Motives are everywhere.”
“It seems this Musgrave was a thoroughly despicable sort,” I said.
“Yes. An habitual blackmailer.”
“Nothing suggests itself to you?”
“No. I don’t know why I agree to solve these things. Here I am committed to this headbashing, and my best clue is something that you suggested.”
“I wasn’t aware that I had suggested anything!”
“There is a fresh perspective to ignorance that can be very helpful.”
“So it is important that Musgrave just arrived from Earth?”
She laughed. “Let’s stop in the Plaza Dubrovnik and get something to eat. I’m starving.”
Almost three weeks passed without a word from Freya, and I began to suspect that she was ignoring the case. Freya has no real sense of right and wrong, you see; she regards her cases as games, to be tossed aside if they prove too taxing. More than once she has cheerfully admitted defeat, and blithely forgotten any promises she may have made. She is not a moral person.