Chapter One
The Floor of Room Four
The snow began on the third of February, as it always did, give or take a tide.
Mari Sato stood in the doorway of Room Four with a crowbar in one hand and a cup of cooling tea in the other, and regarded the floor that had defeated her for a week. Somewhere under the tatami, one board had been creaking. Not the honest creak of old wood, which the Yukitsuru Inn produced in chorus, but a hollow note, a knock with air behind it, directly beneath the spot where, for reasons no one had ever explained to her, the room's low table had always stood slightly off centre.
Eight rooms, and only this one gave her that feeling between the shoulder blades. She had put it down to the cold. Room Four faced the sea.
Outside the window the water was the colour of an unpolished kettle, and the snow came across it sideways, in long horizontal sentences. The sea wall took the waves with its usual patience. Ninety years the inn had sat above that wall, shoulder to shoulder with the pine that leaned like a bowing guest, and for eighty nine of those years, by Mari's arithmetic, nobody had lifted this floor.
She set down the tea, rolled the tatami mat aside, and put the crowbar to the boards.
The first two came up honestly, nails complaining, dust beneath. The third board, the hollow one, came up too easily. It had no nails at all. It had been sitting loose, fitted and refitted, and in the cavity beneath it, between two joists, wrapped in oilcloth and tied with kitchen string, was a parcel the size of a ledger.
