Dreams of Brass I. Prelude

 I. Prelude

“What are you doing with the grandfather clock, Papa?” asked the little boy, his sparkling chocolate eyes glowing with cherubic curiosity.

His father smiled, setting down the heavy grandfather clock for a moment and wiping the sweat from his brow. He leaned down and told his son sweetly, “I’m going to be using this for that super secret experiment I told you about, Asher, so I have to take it down to the basement where I can work with it.”

A huge grin broke out on the boy’s bright face. “You’ll show me when you’re done, Papa?”

“Of course, Asher,” laughed his Papa, ruffling his auburn hair affectionately. “Of course I will.”

~~~~~

“Mama, I’m going now,” Asher Collins called to his mother one fine autumn morning. She turned from her work in the kitchen, curly copper hair swishing as she did, her trademark brilliant smile lighting up her face as she watched her son sling his messenger bag over his shoulder.

“Take care, Asher, and good luck on your test today. Sharon is waiting outside.”

Asher paused awkwardly mid-dash, head tilted up as he realized something. “Mama, where’s Papa? I haven’t seen him the whole morning.”

Veronica Collins sighed a bit melancholically, suddenly deciding to occupy herself with the task of chopping the carrot before her. Without looking, she said, “Papa’s in the basement working on that ‘super secret experiment’ of his, honey. He pulled off an all-nighter and is probably asleep on his workbench right now.”

“Oh.” It was all Asher could say, really. When he was much younger, Asher had been very excited about that particular invention his father claimed to be creating, but the years had drained by with no word on it aside from “I’m still working on it,” or, “It’s almost finished.” Asher, now fourteen, sometimes even doubted his father was doing anything at all. At least sponsors were funding him for the mere notion of it, although Asher was beginning to have the impression that they were growing impatient as well.

His Mama frowned as she delivered the final slice to the vegetable in front of her. “I don’t know, Asher, but somehow I think this little experiment will cause a whole lot of trouble.”

Mother’s intuition was always right.

~~~~~

Asher and Sharon Collins attended a modest public school where they studied hard up to three in the afternoon every weekday. They, like most other children, considered break time the most anticipated period in the entire school day.

Asher, solitary as he was, would spend the short recess sitting under the shade of the large apple tree in the school yard with a sandwich in his hand, focused on a book, the younger children’s laughter echoing in the background. He didn’t have many friends aside from his best, a shy young boy his age named Isaiah Edwards, the son of his father’s closest colleague. Every day, Isaiah would come eat with him under the tree, and usually they never spoke to each other, but that’s what brought them closer anyway—their silent brand of communication.

That day, however, Isaiah did not come.

“Strange,” mused Asher to himself as he flipped the page of his rather thick new read. “Isaiah always comes. Perhaps he’s absent today…”

Just as he began the next chapter, his little sister Sharon skipped up to him, pink ribbons fluttering with her copper curls, inherited from her mother. Unlike her brother, Sharon was quite the social butterfly, and her worried friends dashed after her that afternoon as she approached Asher with tears in her eyes. “Asher, tell them it isn’t true.”

Asher looked up from his book and watched concernedly as the crystalline tears fell from his sister’s indignant face. “What? Tell them what isn’t true?”

“That Uncle Kendrick is dead! He isn’t dead, right? He just visited yesterday!”

“They said he died this morning, Sharon,” squeaked one of her friends, crying as well. In fact, all of them were crying. “They said they found his body in the alley and…and…” She trailed off and buried her face in her tiny hands.

“Well that’s what they said!” argued Sharon in denial. “They’re wrong! Right, Asher? Prove them wrong!”

Asher, however, was quite shocked by this bit of information, himself. He put down his sandwich slowly and inquired as calmly as he could, “Who told you this?”

“The teacher said so herself,” piped in one girl quietly, hiding her face behind her math textbook. “I overheard it from the faculty room. Th-They even said his son w-went missing, too…”

His son. Isaiah.

Asher stared at the girls stupidly, reduced to silence by this knowledge. If Kendrick Edwards was dead and his son was missing, it would account for Isaiah’s sudden disappearance, but why hadn’t Asher discovered this news earlier? Then again, Isaiah’s mother had died long ago giving birth to him, and his house was quite a distance from the Collins house. That meant that the news could not have reached Asher’s ears all that quickly, and that the death rumors could actually be true. But he just could not believe it.

“Asher…” sobbed Sharon, voice becoming high-pitched in her distress. “It’s not true, right?”

“I…We’ll ask Mama, Sharon.” It was the closest he could get. He didn’t want to lie to his sister, yet he didn’t want to upset her, either, and perhaps his hastily conjured answer would suffice. His ploy, however, failed to satisfy his sniveling sister.

“But that means you’re not sure,” she whined. “You only ask Mama when you’re not sure.”

Asher looked away, unable to bear the innocent girls’ grief. It was true—he wasn’t sure.

But they could only hope. Right…?

~~~~~

“Mama, Papa.”

The siblings’ entrance into the house was far less lively than the usual, Sharon still wiping her tears away with her brother’s handkerchief, and Asher himself looking rather pale. They had not quite recovered from their gossip session, and they were not quite finished in denying it.

Their mother was sitting on the living room couch with a deep contemplative look on her face, their father pacing back and forth behind her, muttering to himself darkly. “Oh, what’s with the glum greeting today?” said Veronica, rather glum, herself.

“I suppose you’ve heard the news,” answered her husband for her, halting abruptly in his circuit to glance at his children with a serious expression. Sharon squeaked in reply, burying her face into the handkerchief, and Asher wrapped his arm around her protectively, eyes watching the wooden floor.

“About Uncle?” he rasped.

His mother’s eyes widened, but his father remained calm. He had anticipated their newly acquired information, it seemed. “It was an unfortunate accident,” said the tall man as calmly as he could. “I couldn’t quite believe it myself.”

“So it’s true,” whimpered Sharon, and broke into choked sobs once more.

Veronica stood, ushering her young daughter out of the arms of her son, and shushed her sweetly, cooing, “It’s okay, Sharon, dear. Uncle Kendrick is in a better place now. Come now, don’t cry…”

As the women left the room, Asher turned to his father, watching him eye-to-eye—his expression still hurt and wounded; his father’s stoic, if not far-away. “Who killed him?” whispered the boy when he was sure he was out of his sister’s hearing range.

“That’s what I’d like to know,” replied his father with a sigh, breaking away from his son’s gaze and watching the trees out their window sway with the wind.  “They found his body this morning with no injuries but a single, clean cut to the neck, and no signs of a struggle, either. Whoever killed him was a trained assassin.”

The silence hung like that for a few moments, pushing down on them heavily, before his father murmured, “And he was such a good colleague, too.”

“So what now?” Asher wondered aloud, still overcoming the shock of the sudden murder. For something so big to happen so quickly…It was difficult to take it all in. “What now, Papa?”

When Hudson Collins turned to face his son and the formidable question he posed, his face was determined and certain, dark eyes passionate with the will to protect his work. “Asher, we’re moving out.”