8 a.m. was what they had said—and them being Tavetians, Art left his apartment five minutes before that.

Heat was building momentum in his winter clothing, even though he carried his down jacket over his arm.

After having parted with a small fortune at the sports outfitter yesterday, he now felt like a medieval knight in new armor. Black thermal underwear ("the basic base layer"), a turquoise snow bib ("with functional fly and plenty of pockets"), a fleece jacket ("warm polyester fleece meets your favorite sweater"), smartwool socks ("the frost fighters"), and winter boots ("kicking snow's butt")—they all competed to keep him warm and cozy.

At the ground floor, the front door stood open, and Art welcomed the cool air it admitted.

"Hey, neighbor!" Ralph, dressed all in carrot orange—but with contours more reminiscent of a pear than of a carrot—beamed at him from the porch. "Great gear you're wearing."

Ralph's mother wore contrasting pea green. "Good morning, Art."

They shook hands when a taxicab pulled up to the curb in front of the house—a large, black limousine polished to shiny perfection. Rashid emerged, smiling happily, attired in black and red trousers and a red and black jacket.

What a bunch of colorful painted easter eggs.

Rashid bowed, then motioned towards the vehicle. "Fine wintery folks, your transport is waiting."

A woman's laughter made Art turn his head to the door. Adriana emerged, clad in an all-white overall and an apricot scarf, followed by a red and blue Jake.

Greetings were exchanged while Art pondered on Tavetian fashion. In the city, the natives wore blacks or grays, cheered up by the occasional jeans blue. In compensation, they seemed to crave garish colors when venturing into the snow.

"Okay, let's split up into our cars. Mine's over there, the red one." Jake pointed across the street at a sports car—a blood red chassis, all spoilers and mean metal muscle, crouching on bulbous, black tires. A bad-tempered, flat-brained, vicious predator designed to scare the rest of the road's users into hiding.

Ralph whistled. "Cool ride."

"Thanks." Jake nodded. "It only has room for two, though. I suggest that Adriana here comes with me, while you others take the more... comfortable option. If you agree, that is..." He smiled at the white-apricot woman.

"Absolutely." She beamed.

The taxi's interior was roomy enough for the four of them. Agatha Meier's janitorial office and her prerogatives of age and gender, all of them wielded ruthlessly, had earned her the privilege of the front seat. Ralph and Art shared the bench at the rear.

The cityscape passing outside the car's window wore its usual gray, the low-hanging clouds casting doubt on their plans for a sunny day in the mountains.

Art thought of Sven as he had stood on the tower's viewing platform, yesterday, prodding the fog with a finger. He turned to Ralph, who was inspecting his cuticles. "For how long did you know Mrs. Knooch?"

His neighbor looked up at him and raised his eyebrows. "She moved in when I was still a kid. When was that, mom?"

Agatha turned her head to eye the men on the backseats. "You and Chris were in elementary school."

Art remembered Chris—the boy in the photograph in the Meiers' hallway, Ralph's surgeon brother. "That's a long time ago. Was her husband still alive then?"

"No." Agatha moved in her seat as if to make herself more comfortable while watching him. "Her husband died when she was still quite young, in her forties. They lived in Venezuela at that time. After his death, she returned to Tavetia and moved into our house. As you can imagine, she wasn't the happiest person then."

Ralph huffed. "Not the happiest person... That's a nice way of putting it. And she hated me, snapped at me for whatever reason she found. Never at Chris, though."

Agatha reached around her headrest to clasp her son's shoulder. "Forgive her. She had a hard time back then. But her behavior was always impeccable, and no one kept the stairs as clean as she did."

"Impeccable?" Ralph brushed her hand away. "When she slapped me for releasing that toad in the staircase...? it wasn't even me, it was Chris who—"

"Calm down, that was a long time ago." She patted him again. "And you had it coming, full of mischief as you were. And, besides, toads have no business in the house."

"It was Chris..." He huffed and crossed his arms.

"Why do you ask, anyway?" Rashid eyed Art through the rearview mirror.

"I don't know... I've been thinking about Mrs. Knooch, lately. You see, I don't believe Monica killed her."

"What makes you think so?" Rashid asked.

Should he tell them about his suspicions towards Jake, or him visiting Monica? No, he wanted to keep a low profile.

Just some prodding.

"Do you remember what you said last Friday, about men's powers of intuition? My intuition tells me that she's not the killer. And you also mentioned you don't believe it was her."

"True." Rashid nodded.

"But if it wasn't her, who was it then?" Ralph looked at his mother, not at Art.

She shrugged. "What does your intuition say, Art?"

Art turned his palms toward the vehicle's white, padded ceiling. "My intuition... it hasn't told me anything useful yet, I'm sorry."

At that moment, Rashid accelerated. They had reached the ramp to the highway.

"I've never made such a long trip in a taxi," Ralph said, a child's happy grin appearing on his face. "As a regular passenger, this must cost a fortune."

With that, the conversation focused on the pros and cons of the various means of public transport, with an emphasis on the fares involved.

The trip took them to the other end of the lake where they left the highway and headed into a wide valley flanked on both sides by steep slopes. They gained height, and the clouds turned into a dense fog.

Art leaned back, happy that someone else was driving, having to navigate the murky soup.

They crossed a village. Rashid took a right turn. "We'll be there in a few minutes."

Art looked out of the window. Compact houses hugged the road, standing close to each other as if seeking comfort in the limpid, depressing mist. The place looked disappointingly dreary, but at least the dreaded heaps of snow were nothing more than desolate, little hillocks of grayish waste left by the snow clearing authorities along the roadsides. "Where's the sun... and the snow?"

Rashid laughed. "This isn't Oberippenberg. It's Ippenvale. We'll take the cable car from here." With that, he turned into a parking lot, right beside Jake's red, flat-brained predator car.

The cable car's cabin was crammed.

Art was lucky enough to stand at a window, even though pinned against it by some moron's backpack. Rashid was beside him. Their companions were lost somewhere among the babbling crowd.

Rashid used a hand to deflect a white ski pole trying to stab his eyes out. Then his sight focused on Art. "You really don't think it was Monica, do you?" His voice was hushed.

Searching his mind for an answer, Art leaned against the backpack behind him. It yielded for a few seconds, then resumed its efforts to crush him, with a vengeance.

The impenetrable fog pushed against the glass in front of him.

Crushed to death between fog and a backpack.

What a stark contrast to yesterday, when he was alone with Sven on that wide, still platform, with room to breathe and space to think. This cabin was so crowded, claustrophobic.

The proverbial sardines in a tin can. Only more colorful, and much louder.

A short section of steel cable was visible above the cabin, suspended somewhere in foggy nothingness. Suddenly, his stomach lurched in a sensation of falling—falling towards a messy death on rocks lurking in the gray abyss below them. A pylon passed them, quickly dissolving in the mist as it gained distance. The falling sensation ceased, making room for the reassuring push of the backpack.

Compared to the gondola, the cable was incredibly thin—way too thin to carry the weight. What happened to a can of sardines when you drop it?

But the sardines are dead already.

"Art? Are you okay?"

Rashid's worried tone brought him back to reality.

"Er... yes." He remembered the man's question. "No, I don't think it was Monica. It must have been someone else."

"One of the... other tenants, you mean."

Art nodded.

"Who?" Rashid's face had grown distinctly brighter, almost glowing. Everything had.

Art pondered the man's question and looked out of the window again.

The fog was white now, not gray, and it made him blink.

Suddenly it tore. One second, it was a featureless mass, nearly painful in its white luminescence. The next moment, it became a mess of white, ghostly wisps losing their hold on the cabin. And then it formed a cottony sea below them, an immaculate, brilliant, fluffy expanse stretching towards the northern horizon. Above it, an endless, deep sky glowed in electric blue. And to the south, east and west, snow-clad, crisp-tipped mountains sparkled and loomed in the light of a powerful sun—mute, majestic monuments dwarfing the sardines in their tin can to insignificance.

The sardines' babbling ebbed away.

Art opened his mouth to speak. But he realized that the words had fled him, drained away by the splendor of a perfect scenery.